Letters from Lisa

Did some trip shopping this weekend… first and foremost, I got shoes! They are a hybrid - designed to act as sandals but with foot protection and support like sneakers or boots. They will be perfect for the Galapagos Islands, where I’ll probably be hiking over rocks and across trails but also getting my feet wet getting in and out of the boat.

This picture doesn’t exactly express how huge my feet are, so I took some better ones:

You know the equipment you’re buying is serious business when it has a “new car” smell.

Seriously, I could have really used these last year when I was living on Ingram Island. I would have gotten about 1/10 the number of nicks, cuts, burrs embedded in my feet, and stubbed toes. And I probably would not have been nearly as fearful of having a shoe fall off while walking through the water or diving after turtles. Ah well, live and learn.

Other purchases: binoculars, a swiss army knife, pair of pants, and replacement snorkel tube for the one that got sacrificed to the Reef Gods in Australia.

Don’t I look the part of a happy future traveler?

For the record, I am laughing at the way my feet look. So go on. I can take it. I’m 5′9, so yes, my feet are big. Size 10 to be exact. But that’s good. Can you imagine how clumsy I’d be if I had little teeny feet? I wouldn’t be able to stand up. I’d take a step forward and then just tip right over.

Oh, and big kudos to Ramsey Outdoor for actually having display shoes that were close to my size. I have never seen a store put out a 9 and a half shoe as the display model before. Definitely think I’ll be shopping there again.

Just came across this post by an autistic person explaining how her ability to communicate verbally is affected by different circumstances and results in observable differences in the quality of her speech. Interesting reading for me, because I often wished that I could figure out when, how, and why the kids I worked with seemed to respond to and produce speech differently at different times. Sometimes it seemed that they were regressing or not making any progress, when in fact there were probably distinct reasons for what I was seeing at the time.

I really wish that there were more blogs and books by autistic people when I was working with my autistic students. I had Temple Grandin’s books, which were helpful, but of course every person is different, and her experience wasn’t necessarily the same as every single child’s that I worked with. I especially wished I could get the perspective of someone whose primary method of communication was something other than spoken language, since so many of the kids had huge problems verbally. Now I find there is a whole world of perspectives out there, and advice/insight that could have been really useful. Another time I’ll have to do a post on some of the websites I’ve found.

I like to have my reading and viewing material subtly and respectfully suggested to me, not crammed down my throat. This is why I tend to avoid the huge book-blockbusters-turned-blockbuster-films such as Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code. It feels like overkill when the publisher is in cahoots with the bookstores, the movie industry, the toy companies and the print and online media to splash their pet project across every single countertop and screen that a potential consumer might encounter. Aside from straight reviews and articles about its overwhelming popularity (i.e. claiming that there is “buzz” in order to generate “buzz”) you are now also treated to articles that tie in the product in a more obscure way, such as travel stories about doing a “Da Vinci code trip” to Europe. Right, because there’s no other reason to go to the Louvre. I blame this phenomenon, sadly enough, on Lord of the Rings, with its huge impact on New Zealand tourism. Which, if you can get people to fly thousands of miles over ocean to visit a country that they saw in a movie, understandably gives hope to other more accessible tourist destinations.

For me, the hype gets to be counterproductive. I start to feel sorry for all the other books that don’t get the star treatment, with the huge marketing dollars and corporate tie-ins. (I have the same reaction to celebrity authors whose books are sold solely on account of their celebrity… looking at you, Madonna) While I am sure the marketing ploy is successful with many people - I mean someone is spending money on these things, otherwise the blockbuster-making machine would creak to a quick halt - I personally avoid books that I feel are marketed in an overly aggressive manner. And the single biggest offender of this has been the Da Vinci Code.

Now here comes the dilemma. Is my prejudice against heavily marketed material actually just another way of listening to the hype? Because it’s the hype that I’m really against, not the actual content of the Da Vinci Code. And there’s another phenomenon at work here - the growing protestations of people who want me to NOT read the Da Vinci Code, or go to see the Da Vinci Code, because of its “anti-Christianity”. The anti-hype is beginning to cancel out the hype for me. I don’t like being told what not to read.

Maybe the solution is to get a big cup of coffee and a comfortable chair in the bookstore cafe, and just read the Da Vinci Code. I’m a fast reader. I have been known to read long books in a single sitting - books that are probably much better and more complex than the Da Vinci Code. I wouldn’t be funneling any money to fuel the hype any further. And who knows, I might come to the conclusion that it’s all overblown anyhow, as I suspect that it is. But at least I’ll make the decision based on the actual book, not on its marketed aura.

Update: I walked into the bookstore this afternoon and was immediately walloped with a huge table of Da Vinci books, puzzles, blank books, illustrated screenplays, and other assorted crap. I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up the book under those circumstances. I ended up reading something else entirely. I may have to wait until the movie goes away.

A little girl named Katherine McCarron was allegedly murdered by her mother on Mother’s Day weekend by being smothered with a plastic bag. The reason given was that the mother wanted to “end her pain”. She was autistic.

I believe that all beings suffer and can experience pain, but there is no pain worse than being betrayed and murdered by your own parent. This woman, through her actions, was saying that it is better to be dead than to be autistic. That an autistic life would just be too painful to live.

I am not autistic, and I can’t say what it feels like to be autistic. But the autistic children I have worked with have happy times and sad times, just like any child. Sometimes it’s hard to tell why they are happy or sad, not being able to communicate effectively with them, but theirs is NOT a life of unmitigated pain and suffering. I have never seen any evidence that typical children, as a group, experience more happiness and satisfaction in life than children with developmental issues or neurological differences such as autism.

Happiness in life, in my opinion, has very little to do with any external measure of success or achievement. Some people are naturally happy, while others seem to be temperamentally sad. As a baby, I was irritable and fussy. Some people might say I am still irritable and fussy. Sometimes I have to remind myself to be happy. And I am, as far as I know, neurotypical. I’m not “suffering” with autism or any disability.

Studies have shown that people grossly overestimate how happy a positive event or circumstance will make them, as well as overestimate how traumatic a negative event would be and how long those negative effects will last. Thus people are often disappointed when that new car, great job, or even winning lottery ticket doesn’t make them permanently happy. And some people also find that despite a serious illness or accident or job setback or divorce, they are able to move on and be happy with their lives. I suspect that people with autism and other diagnoses, and their families, have a similar array of reactions. Some people accept it and try to adapt and learn, and others think that they can just get rid of it by curing it, or if that fails, perhaps by getting rid of the person who is causing all of the “trouble”.

Is autism a lifelong trauma, destined to doom an individual to misery and suffering and unhappiness? In my experience with autistic people, it isn’t. I won’t say that it makes life terribly easy - in fact, there are lots of circumstances in life that can make things quite difficult, and autism is one of them — but that isn’t the same thing as saying that an autistic child would be better off dead or not being born. By what standard is a successful, worthy life to be judged? How do you know when the person’s pain is too great? Isn’t that impossible for an outsider to know, anyway?

Any attempt to classify human lives as “less worthy of living” and “more worthy of living” is destined to end in moral bankruptcy and tragedy. It ends up devaluing all people. In the end, all of us die, regardless of our “worthiness”. It’s sad to me that this mother couldn’t appreciate and love her daughter, enjoying the years that they could have together.

Currently reading Charles’ Darwin’s accounts of his experiences in the Galapagos Islands, and disturbed by two things:

1. The image of Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution and one of the greatest scientists, climbing onto the back of a giant tortoise and slapping its back in an attempt to ride it like a horse, but falling off when it actually gets up and starts to move

2. The fact that Darwin ate several tortoises during his time there (!) He found the meat “indifferent”.

I am officially done with empires. In the span of less than a month, I’ve read about Mongol hordes, Spanish conquistadores, the Inca conquerors before them, Roman generals, Chinese communists - and now I am declaring a moratorium. The reasons are simple, really:

1. Empires are all very much alike. The Romans mined gold in Spain, the Spanish mined gold in Peru. The Incas forcibly split up tribal groups to perform labor in various parts of their territory so that they wouldn’t band together and start an uprising. So did the Chinese. If you took the descriptions of policies and behavior, removing specific names of places and people, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one imperial group and another. Even the juicy personal details start to sound alike after a while. Atahualpa’s civil war with his brother Huascar might as well be Julius Caesar vs. Pompey. Or Genghis Khan vs. his “blood brother” Jamuka.

2. Violent content. How much assassination, torture, massacre, and death by forced labor can one read about without beginning to feel absolutely ill? I guess history books aren’t written about people peacefully loving and respecting each other and avoiding atrocities even in “times of war”. The people who do that, I suppose, don’t form empires. Reading about Spain and Rome, in particular, was extremely scary, because both cultures basically provided outlets for their power-hungry, greedy, dissolute young men by turning them into soldiers and unleashing their destructive force to the point where it could no longer be controlled or even serve the home country’s purposes. The Spanish fought civil wars with one another in Peru over the King’s attempts to curtail abuse of the native tribes by its conquistadores, who felt absolutely justified in milking every last bit of benefit out of their slaves and the land, even though it was clear that they were ruining the resources their country had sent them there to conquer in the first place.

3. All empires end the same way - collapsing from the inside out, often victims of stretching themselves too thin and losing sight of what made them successful in the first place. The Romans were fighting wars on all fronts, leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks at their own gates and from internal dissolution and miliary coup. The Incas extended their territory so rapidly that the emperor decided to establish a second capital up in Ecuador - and when he died, the two capitals became the launching pad for armies that would fight each other and wreck the stability of the entire empire, just in time for the arriving Spanish. The Mongol empire stretched itself as far as it could and then broke up into pieces, too large to be administered by a single khan and too full of wealth and goods for people to divide up peacefully. As much as there’s hoopla about China achieving world domination in the coming years, that will only happen if it doesn’t collapse in a civil war against itself or go to war with too many of its neighbors at the same time.

So there you have it. I am officially looking for a new subject to read about. Preferably not anything having to do with extreme violence, thanks. I am feeling very sensitized to it these days. I was in the gym the other night while someone had the tv on, and a 30 second ad for ER came on. Gunmen had just burst into the room and people were being shot, scrambling for cover, a woman was grabbed as a hostage, someone was on the floor in a pool of blood… I almost had to get off the treadmill and walk out. I couldn’t get the images out of my mind for hours. Obviously, given that I’m writing about it a week later, I still can’t. I don’t watch TV often enough to get desensitized, I guess. But reading about murder and genocide doesn’t help either.

• a beautiful unexpected sunny morning
• getting free chocolate from Borders because it took the lady a while to successfully ring up my returns
• a random hole in the wall food place on Christopher Street with THE BEST cappuccino I have had in a long time
• meeting someone new and interesting
• noticing that my “theater plant” was flowering for the first time in years
• knowing that I’ll be going in to work tomorrow all caught up and with no show to rehearse

So, Niagara Falls… or Does It? went up on Friday morning, and what a relief that was to me. I would say it took me a few days to fully unclench. I first noticed my new and improved relaxed feeling early this morning. Maybe the fact that I finally turned in all my reports, a week late, also contributed to that. But still, I’d say the show accounted for about 85% of my nerves.

The kids did a truly fabulous job. Overall, they were confident, focused, and delighted to be up on stage. I have told some of my coworkers, and it really is true, that this is the happiest group I’ve ever worked with. They were excited to come to rehearsals, to be onstage, to have a costume, and to be in front of an audience. There were a few jitters backstage, but nothing serious. As I was watching the video of the performance, especially the crowd scenes, it just looked like a bunch of kids having a really fun time, which is exactly the experience we’re going for. The only time kids really complained or seemed unhappy was when they were first cast, and some of the actresses thought that their parts were too small - and I think that may have been because they hadn’t yet seen the script and didn’t know the extent of what they were going to do. I think it was also hard to put on a show that was based on a book, rather than a movie or play that they had seen or heard the music from before.

That’ll probably be what we do from now on, since it is very hard to find suitable plays for children to perform that are not under some kind of copyright or that don’t have extremely complicated music that I would have to simplify and adapt anyway. Once I have to start changing things around drastically, I’d rather just write it myself. I took some pretty substantial liberties with this one - adding and subtracting characters and scenes - justifying what I was doing by calling it “the stage version”. Next year we won’t have that issue, since we’re just writing the whole thing from scratch.

The reaction I’ve gotten has been very positive, too. Of course no one is going to tell me they thought it stunk, or that we did a terrible job, but I have received some pretty specific feedback about what people liked that reassured me that people did appreciate what we were doing. When I was first writing the show, I had a lot of jitters about whether people would think it was a “real musical” since I had written the music. The only person who asked if these were “real songs” was one of our high school kids, who had passed through the auditorium a few times while we were practicing. He liked the title number, saying it showcased the singer’s voice the best. And that was true, actually - I really wrote the music so that it’d be easy for me to play on the piano. I didn’t really think about whether it would adequately showcase the vocal talent. Something to work on for next year.

I unfortunately can’t post the pictures we took from the show, since most of them show kids’ faces and I wouldn’t want to post any of that without their parents’ permission. I also didn’t get many photos of the scenery, not in the least because the scenery was finished extremely last minute - in fact, I saw some of the backdrops for the first time as I was watching the video of the performance, since they were unveiled for the first time during the show and I was too busy playing piano and cueing the kids to get a decent look. Was really happy with the way they turned out, however.

So the only picture I have right now is this one of me goofing around with Principal Love’s costume:

If I were teaching a homeroom class next year, I’d totally post that on my door on the first day to let them know what they were in for, should they misbehave.

This plant sitting on the window in the den has an interesting history behind it. I received it as a gift from a coworker who had helped me with my first elementary school musical theater production, Oklahoma! That show, which we put together between February and June, was very stressful for me, not in the least because I wasn’t particularly fond of the musical and had no experience directing. Technically I was part of a directorial team, all of whom had equal responsibilities, but in practice I was running the thing. Obviously that pattern has stuck, since I’ve run the group ever since.

As is probably evident from the photo, the plant has grown very oddly over the past few years. At one point all of its stems were extremely long and all facing towards a single point, the result of being perched on a classroom windowsill with minimal care. It got quite lopsided, the stems became contorted and twisted, and it stopped flowering. Eventually I had to take it home over summer break, and it was so precarious that I decided not to bring it back to school.

I just noticed that it’s flowering again.

I really like that. Just as I am sitting back feeling relaxed after a stressful few weeks getting ready for the latest show, the plant from my very first attempt is apparently feeling healthy and relaxed too.

Or maybe it just senses that there’s competition, since I just got a huge new plant as a gift after Niagara Falls or Does It:

At this rate I am going to have to get a greenhouse!

Show’s over - went great. I’ll do a proper entry about it some other time.

Salient point being: A coworker said to me, “You’ll definitely sleep well tonight.”

OK, but I have been trying to go to sleep for the past two hours. So what gives?

Five most irritating things about my commute:
-Having subway doors slammed in my face, and occasionally right on me - which I could almost understand if I were trying to squeeze on a train that was trying to leave, but it always seems to happen when I’m trying to get off at a crowded stop
-People with bullhorns screaming about Jesus at 6:45 am
-When people lay out pirated CDs and DVDs on large blankets and block up half the hallway during rush hour, and boneheaded people stop short in the middle of walking to go look at them
-Mean people on buses who make you climb over them because they can’t bear the thought of sitting in a window seat
-The amount of garbage people throw on the tracks - but I guess you can’t fault them for wanting to take excellent care of their prized pets, the SUBWAY RATS… sheesh, use a can, people!

Five best rooms at the Museum of Natural History:
-the ocean hall - which was recently redone and is really quite amazing
-the reptile room, where they have a diorama of very realistic looking leatherback turtles
-the Hall of Diversity (rainforests, and more turtles, and the graphic simulation of population growth)
-the Butterfly Conservatory (yes, I know this is a temporary exhibit, but it comes back every year - and really, what could be cooler than butterflies fluttering around loose around your head? I mean, people get malaria shots and go to distant jungles for that)
-the Hall of Peoples exhibit about Central America

Five awesome books I’ve read recently I have either read recently or am almost finished with:
-Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
-Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
-The Conquest of the Incas
-China Wakes (does this count if I’m on the last chapter?)
-The White Rock (also in progress)

Five things that I want for my next birthday:
-a portable CD player that doesn’t eat batteries for breakfast
-Paul McCartney concert tickets
-the new DVD release of the un-altered Star Wars (Han shoots first!)
-good coffee beans
-a gift certificate to a yarn store

Five totally overrated TV shows:
-American Idol (blech… seriously)
-Deal or No Deal (no deal, please)
-24 - which I hate when my parents watch because with all the screaming and gunfire, it sounds like someone is being murdered in our apartment
-Desperate Housewives - which I never saw the appeal of
-Honestly, I don’t know enough about what’s even on TV to have a fifth item. Is that pathetic? Oh well, I don’t feel particularly sad about it.

Five languages I have studied or am currently studying:
-French (high school and college)
-Hebrew (college)
-American Sign Language (graduate school)
-Old English
-Spanish (current)

Five places (after this summer’s tour of Costa Rica, Peru and Ecuador) that I most want to visit:
-Easter Island
-China and Tibet
-Antarctica
-New Zealand
-Hawai’i

On the second-to-last day of my student teaching job, I said goodbye to “my kids” by playing tag with them. We rode the elevator to the roof playground, then exploded onto the rubber-cushioned pavement with shrieks and whoops at breakneck speed. My nine year olds scattered like a bag of marbles, spilling across the playground in all directions. Some headed for the strategic vantage point at the top of the jungle gym, while others pounded the ground with their sneakers, attempting to outrun me. (Being the departing teacher, I was of course It.) I powered up to my fastest sprint and started chasing down my astonished students, picking them off from around corners and vaulting up the ladders of the playground equipment to swat at them as they attempted to flee down the slides. One kid remembered, too late, who his opponent really was: “I told you she used to be a runner!” he cried, perhaps consoling himself about having been tagged out by not only a girl, but a girl more than twice his age.

But my glory, though hard-earned, was short lived. By the time I snagged the last of my prey (a lightning-fast future track star) I was sweaty and dehydrated from the 90 degree heat, gasping for air and stumbling ungracefully towards the safety of the sidelines. I slid down to a sitting position and sprawled out next to my bemused coworkers, who were fanning themselves with their hands and occasionally stooping to tie a shoelace. My boys, jazzed at the ferocity of the pursuit and eager to make their teacher sweat, begged and pleaded with me to rejoin the game (as It, naturally). Just one more round. I reluctantly turned them down. I had worn myself down with my over-enthusiastic sprinting. I just didn’t have the stamina to continue.

I had always loved the thrill of sprinting - bursting out of the starting gate with maximum speed and energy, slamming forward past any and all opponents, and hurtling across the finish line to collapse in satisfied exhaustion. There’s plenty of time to catch your breath after the race is over - no need to worry about tiring out too soon. In the brief time that I trained as an athlete, my preferred event was the 50 yard dash. Anything longer (such as a second round of tag with hyper nine year olds) and I would have to strategically slow down.

I didn’t want to be told to slow down. It seemed to be the story of my life as a kid. According to my elementary school, I was “gifted”, which was school code for “too fast”. For years I sat in the corner and flipped through book after book while the other kids had reading class with the teacher, with the understanding that I was supposed to let them “catch up”. I turned in my paragraphs of loopy cursive scrawl for the teachers to mark A+ in their red pens and for my parents to display on the fridge, then went home and scribbled out my real stories and plays into private notebooks that piled up in my desk for me to chuckle over or rip up in a paranoid frenzy that they would be discovered and used as evidence of my weirdness. In fourth grade, a particularly difficult year that started off on the wrong foot when I corrected my teacher in front of the class, I hunched over my small red notebook for hours, drawing cartoons of children laden down with chains.

I wanted to go fast, push hard, so that I could shatter the artificial limits that were placed on me. I wanted the full thrill of victory. As I got older, I joined dozens of performance groups and teams and volunteer squads, chasing the ever-elusive satisfaction of pushing myself to the limit. I would blow out my vocal cords in theater rehearsal, run down the hallway to slip into my plastic chair for band practice, then race home in my parents’ car to do my essays and studying, to skip the class for a chorus sectional the next day. The only activity I decided I didn’t have time for, ironically, was the track team.

I found that I could sustain my progress just long enough to dash to a finish line, and then I would collapse. When we tested for the high jump in gym class, I kept going until I broke the school record, then found I had lost the motivation once there was no record to beat but my own. When my band director in high school gave me simplified flute music, saying that it was “for beginners”, I screeched and huffed on that hunk of metal until I sat triumphantly in first chair, but I suddenly lost interest and stopped practicing once concert season was over. I researched articles and quotations for the debate team until I made captain, then put in respectful but uninspired performances that earned me high enough marks to win a few speaker awards, but nothing more. I began to accumulate little victories here and there, always looking ahead to when the exertion would be completed and I could again feel like I had accomplished something. I became a specialist in spotting a beginner’s challenge, revving up into a powerful sprint until I caught up with the pack, achieving an early milestone, and just as quickly falling apart from fatigue.

In each instance, I told myself that I had done it. The race was over, and I had won (or at least performed respectably) and now I could relax and recover. The truth was, I had no stamina. I could sustain the initial burst, but not the follow-through. This was perfect for academia - courses that ran a semester, school plays that rehearsed for two months and then went up for three nights, books that ended with neat conclusions about their topics - and terrible for things that were supposed to go on indefinitely, like friendships and happiness. I didn’t know how to take my natural speed and talent and sustain it over the long haul. I had no idea what would happen if I passed by the first “finish line” I encountered, and kept going. Would I be good enough to compete with real experts? How would I find the time to stay committed, to push myself to greater heights? Would I find that I had reached the limits of my ability, and was destined to fail if I attempted anything further?

I didn’t want to find out. I didn’t want to give up the natural exuberant high that I got from my initial bursts of speed, even though it meant staggering off to the sidelines once I crossed the finish line. All through college I experimented with one career choice after another, sprinting through courses and books with Olympic form and then losing interest as soon as I hit the first curve on the track. I couldn’t see myself rounding the corner and continuing on down the path, settling into a steady jog, getting a glimpse of the pack of experts and long-time practitioners well ahead of me. It was a huge shock to realize that no matter what field I chose, there were going to be champions leading the way, crowding out the rest of the field, and that even the most impressive running start wouldn’t make up the distance. I took the first job that drifted my way - a teaching position at a school for severely autistic students - and I left college feeling very slow indeed.

At first, I treated my new teaching job like a 50 yard dash, powering through the first months as though I were sprinting towards a finish line. I pored over books about autism and teaching methods, convinced I was going to discover the holes in the old approaches that were preventing my new charges from steamrolling ahead. I sat for hours concocting new arts and crafts projects to do with the kids. I went shopping for new puzzles and games. I went through the kids’ paperwork and started making changes, rearranging schedules, revamping old and tired routines. I even spent a long afternoon tossing out old and broken toys. Staying late was good. I felt like I was DOING something.

Sometimes my efforts paid off. A few students started to make gains, learning to speak and read and - most astonishing of all - interact with one another. Others, though, stayed put. I stayed late making new communication books and symbols, engaged in long strategy sessions with my coworkers, went shopping again for newer toys and materials, but for all of my dashing about desperate for solutions, fundamentally nothing changed. I couldn’t make them suddenly wake up with typical perceptions and responses and early life experiences - all I could do was attempt to work with them as they were, and accept whatever atypical developmental timetable they were on. When one of my students began to babble, and eventually say his first word, it was a source of joy and relief, but also of profound sadness because he was already five years old. What was going to become of a child who didn’t even know how to make sounds until he was five years old? And what did it say about me as a teacher to have this child in my care?

No matter how hard I pushed, how fast I sprinted, how frantic my efforts, these kids stayed exactly who they were. Sometimes they made impressive gains in seeming response to my interactions with them, only to forget the skills later. Or they would demonstrate a skill for me and then fail to do so when someone else tried to elicit the exact same response. Or, more often, I would try to get them to do something that they just couldn’t do, or didn’t see the point of, and I would expend increasing amounts of energy until I hit a wall. Eventually, I began to get headaches. I’d start crying for no reason. I even fell in love with someone who lived 3,000 miles away, demonstrating to what lengths my escapism could reach. I just couldn’t run the race the same way anymore.

I quit my job, got a replacement position to finish off the school year, and then went to graduate school full time. I lost the desire to barge out of the gate in a full sprint. I became less reckless, almost timid, as I sat in the back of classrooms penning dutiful notes on legal pads. I waited for my coworkers to invite me to contribute, then put forward ideas hesitantly, not wanting to seem too pushy or speedy. And I made it a policy never to mention my “resume items” unless specifically asked. I felt comfortable and safe, immersed in this simpler world of dry erase boards and Unifix cubes and tempera paint. I was settling down to a career, just like I was supposed to. Instead of sprinting towards an end result, I was jogging along with no particular destination.

Although I often felt that I was running in place, I have come to see these early years of my career as my stamina building years. I logged many slow miles of kneeling next to kids’ desks, negotiating for just one more sentence or supplying a missing vowel sound or simply asking, “What’s going on with you today? How can I help?” I fretted about kids who needed to hear a new word literally dozens of times before committing it to memory, then cheered and hugged them when they finally did it - well aware that I would probably have to reteach it the next week. I even worked with super-sprinters whose brains raced so fast that they were brilliantly funny and insightful, but often completely missed the point of what was going on. They were like me, anxious to burst out of the starting gate, but with the added tendency to run in the wrong direction and leave their sneakers untied, leading to injury and frustration while the walkers and joggers coasted past them to success. Theirs was a race with high stakes indeed. And it wasn’t a sprint. It was a marathon.

In a marathon, anyone who participates has accomplished some form of greatness. People run, jog, walk, push their wheelchairs, and simply stumble across the finish line. Along the way, they stop to drink water, tie their shoes, stretch out their tired legs, and then continue on. It’s not who leaps first out of the gate with natural ease, but who has the stamina to keep going when they hit the wall. This is the race I really want to run. I want to get out onto the track and last for hours, conserving enough energy to keep going beyond the first turn in the road. I want to see the people in front of me and admire them for their skill and training, not envy them for their greater talent or push myself to pass them, depleting my reserves in some artificial and irrelevant competition. I want to slow down enough to watch the scenery go by, have conversations along the route, catch the individual faces cheering for me in the crowd. Most of all, I want to stick with it until I finish.

And then I want to round up my expert tag opponents and really show ‘em what I’ve got.

• write personal essay for class tomorrow
• Mother’s Day Gift
• Write four reports to hand in on Monday (really I should have all 11 done, but I’m being realistic
• Buy blue streamers/tissue paper for the Niagara Falls scene in the show
• Practice piano
• Run
• Take a bath
• Deposit 2 checks
• RELAX

I desperately needed to sleep last night, and yet as I lay in bed in my darkened room, I ended up thrashing and yanking at the covers and flipping and flopping into different positions, instead of just snuggling in and drifting off. I do this a lot. I practically jump into bed, mind swirling from all the day’s problems and events, and I think, “Okay! I really need to sleep now! Here we go! Sleep! Anytime now! 1, 2, 3, NOW!!” My mind does the neurological equivalent of my students having a Quiet Contest, in which they go, “1, 2, 3!” and then dance around the room anxiously eyeing each other and giggling and deliberately thumping on the desks and sucking in their breath so that they WILL NOT TALK. And because they’re not allowed to talk, they naturally have twice as much to say, so they start jumping around to contain the frustrated energy, often tripping on things (and suppressing the urge to go “Ouch!” since that would lose them the contest). When the ban on speaking is released, usually when a kid asks to go to the bathroom, their energy is released in a upswelling of exuberant shouting and arm-waving, which makes such a racket that someone inevitably proposes to have another Quiet Contest.

So it was in my brain. As soon as I lay down to sleep, I started replaying the day’s movies - flashes from conversations and events and to-do lists that I apparently hadn’t fully processed before. If I tried to shut them out and say to myself, “No more thinking about that, it’s time to sleep now,” then I would get rid of one scene and two more would pop up. I was playing Whack-A-Mole with my own thoughts. “Go away, musical theater!” WHACK! “You too, random conversation with X’s mom!” WHACK! “Yes, I know I have to buy a Mother’s Day gift, now beat it!” WHACK!

In the process, of course, I was not falling asleep, but becoming increasingly awake and, more to the point, irritated. I ended up pulling out a book to read, thinking that at least if all the thoughts were about one thing that I was not currently worried or revved up about, I could eventually settle down. I’ve tried versions of this strategy in which I deliberately read a dry or technical book, thinking I would bore myself to sleep, but of course that was only an invitation to my brain to engage in a Championship Quiet Contest, and it didn’t work. Instead I decided to read about a modern day explorer’s attempt to find a lost city of the Incas (this is about my tenth book on this subject, and I’m still not tired of it) and eventually that did the trick. I fell asleep thinking about South America.

Eventually, of course, when my actual trip to South America gets closer, I’ll need a new book. Otherwise my brain will kick right back up into anxious mode. “I hope I packed enough mosquito repellent!” WHACK!

Okay. I am genuinely exhausted right now. I have no voice whatsoever and I am very glad I did a workout yesterday, because now I can barely stand up, much less run.

Early night, for sure.

This is really more of a to do list than an actual entry, so pardon the interruption:

• Rehearsals Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - run through the entire show. Wednesday - introduce props, scenery, and CD-music cues. Friday - everyone should bring their costumes in.
• Get things we need: Darth Vader mask, large container with wheels to use as rolling hat, bowling set, magic show props.
• Teach Frankie Townshend her magic tricks!
• Create an updated set of diagrams for the set - start getting things painted and assembled (particularly the Niagara Falls machine, which has to be big enough for a kid to stand it and throw “water” out of)< /li>
• Schedule an additional rehearsal for early next week - before the dress rehearsal on the 18th. (Holy God. This is really fast approaching.)
• Finish writing the reports that are due tomorrow (yeah, OK)
• Send home parent note about bringing in costumes - doubling as an RSVP note

And most importantly, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy advises:

DON’T PANIC!!

Five things I now love as an adult that I hated as a kid:

1. Olives. I thought they were bitter and disgusting growing up, but two things in early adulthood changed my mind. One was my roommate during senior year of college, Lourdes, and her grandmother’s fantastic Cuban chicken recipe that used green olives. She used to bring back that chicken every time she visited home, and I was thrilled when we shared an apartment and she could cook it herself. One day I would like to get my hands on that recipe.

But the other thing that changed my mind about olives was visiting Italy. Specifically, the south of Italy, where the olives grow huge and delicious. At our hotel in Sorrento, they served plates of olives as appetizers or snacks, and once I started eating them, I couldn’t stop. Now I love to snack on olives.

2. Black licorice. Another thing too bitter for me in childhood. Now I like it better than the red kind.

3. Fish. I always tolerated it as a kid, but if we went to a restaurant, I would never be like, “Ooh, they have char! I’m definitely getting that!” I think being dragged to Legal Sea Foods is what changed my mind about that - also eating fresh fish in the Caribbean. (But no, the stingray we ate on Ingram Island doesn’t count.)

4. History and science books. I loved to read stories and magazines growing up, but they didn’t have the range and quality of books that are out there now. There were no Eyewitness books or kid-friendly history texts, nothing that had any entertainment value. I feel that people who claim we are getting less literate and book-friendly as a culture ought to visit bookstores - you will be impressed at the quality of the product. And I also think the non-fiction book market has exploded, bringing entertainment and interesting subjects together. The last three books I’ve really liked have been basically informational texts, but with a storytelling bent. This is the story of how Manco Capac fought against the Pizarro brothers for control of the Inca homeland. This is the story of Pompey the Great versus Julius Caesar for the city of Rome. The book I just started is about the life of Genghis Khan, and I’m reading another about the science of life on a suburban lawn. This is not what I would have pictured reading as a kid.

5. Running. When I was a kid, I did like to sprint - I had a short stint on the track team in camp, and considered joining the team in high school but was loaded down with band, chorus, theater, debate team, orchestra, and so on. But what I really hated was the long slog of the dreaded Mile. We would have to run the mile every year in gym class, and what you would see are a few track team luminaries jetting effortlessly around the track, followed by panting and stumbling and limping pseudoathletes like myself, followed by a few walkers hanging their heads and shuffling their feet in the dust. The smokers would collapse gasping on the ground after one lap, and you almost envied them for having a convenient way out. After the dreaded Mile, you would stagger back to class with newly minted shin splints and sweaty hair, and if you had gym period first thing in the morning like I did, you’d spend the whole day worrying about what you looked and smelled like.

I never would have guessed that I would voluntarily run “The Mile” again. Especially not for fun, and especially not more than once in the same day. But although I do several miles during each workout, I always feel relieved when I finish the first one. A remnant of the old gym class days.

And now, five things that I loved as a kid that I do not like now:

1. Disney things. Just… ick.

2. Huge jewelry. As a kid I loved anything that sparkled, so I used to have these huge chandelier clip on earrings (clip ons!!) and big rings and necklaces. It was like perpetual Halloween. As I got older, I started learning not to wear those things in public. Then for a long time my taste veered over into the extremely simple. Nothing could have buckles, zippers, buttons, clips, tassels, beads, or sequins. If it was monochromatic and a dark neutral color, so much the better. Now I think I have a bit more of a balance, but I still have an aversion to wearing enormous jewelry. It’s gone in and out of style a number of times over the past few years, and I’ve never really participated in those trends (not that I participate in trends, generally) I still have the pink plastic heart necklace with the tiny rhinestone that I wore as a first grader, and I will even admit to having worn it in public a number of times out of childhood - now even that’s been put away. Maybe as an older lady I’ll suddenly start wearing chandelier earrings again - who knows!

3. Lollipops. I really think this is a kid’s candy. I’ve graduated to other forms of sugary goodness.

4. Performing in public. OK, one could argue that I am a teacher and thus perform for a living. And to be honest, if I had the opportunity to sing in a choir or act in a show, I’m sure I’d take it. (Stay tuned…) But I’ll use the school concert as a perfect example. At rehearsal on Monday, as my kids were walking up onto the stage to sing their two little songs, the music teacher suddenly said, “Oh by the way, you can play piano if you want.” I had a momentary brain freeze: “The concert is Thursday. I’ve never practiced with them. It’s going to sound bad. I can’t do that! I don’t even know what key they’re singing in!” I sat and listened while they sang, then went home and started to teach myself the songs. I was irritated at the last-minuteness of this (so why didn’t I just say that they didn’t need the piano? because I still like to perform, even if it causes brain freezes) Even after I knew the songs well, I was still timid about playing them with the kids singing in front of an audience - I was worried about overshadowing the kids, making a mistake, throwing things off, etc. and in the end I don’t think I played as well as I could have, because I was too timid. Young Lisa never would have had a brain freeze like that. She would have just DONE it. And she never would have been shy about other people hearing her sing. I’ve gotten really shy about that as an adult. This all has to change, obviously.

5. Writing things purely for my own enjoyment. Now it seems like I “need” an audience. As a kid, I used to write stories and plays that I actually hid from people because they were just for me and I didn’t want anyone else to see them. Amazing, isn’t it? As an adult, you sometimes feel that your writing doesn’t really exist unless it’s intended for an audience to read. Maybe this is the secret to why I was so prolific as a kid. Hmm…

When I think about my job and what can be tiring about it, I generally focus on all of the brainwork I have to do. For any given child in my own room, I’m keeping track of so many different things. I often find myself calling parents and repeating conversations verbatim that their children have had with other kids, myself, my assistant, therapists, other teachers, kids in the afterschool club, etc. I notice the words they tend to stumble over or not know the meanings of. I know which parts of the lunch got eaten and which got thrown in the trash unopened. I know who they sit next to at lunch and who they’re not sitting next to, and why. I generally know what they’re drawing and writing in their notebooks, and sometimes what they’re whispering about when they think I can’t hear. (One current favorite in my classroom is how to say “shut up” in various languages.) When I think about everything I am keeping track of (and I haven’t mentioned any of my own teaching materials, curriculum, or paperwork) it’s not surprising that I would be mentally tired after a day of work.

But now that I’ve picked up running again, with an eye towards training for longer distances, I am noticing how physically tired I am at the end of the day. (Unfortunately I can’t run in the morning on weekdays because I leave for work quite early.) On weekends I can easily go for lap after lap and only stop because I don’t want to overdo it, but on weeknights I’ve done maybe one lap and my legs are hurting and I want to go inside. The contrast is so striking. The later in the week, too, the worse it gets. I don’t think I’ll be running on Fridays anymore.

It doesn’t help that I have the temperament of a sprinter and always am tempted to go faster and harder than would be really wise. My entire adult life has been about developing greater patience and persistence. And better sleeping habits too. Speaking of which…