![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My ESL instructor is a rather adorable redhead named (I kid you not) Lois Lane who joined the Marines as soon as she graduated from high school so that she wouldn’t end up drug-addicted, homeless, and wandering from Dutchess County shelter to homeless shelter, as many of her relatives do today.
She describes boot camp as one long pushup punctuated by sneers: Where’s Superman now, huh, grunt?
She’s pretty funny. I wouldn’t mind being her Bestest Friend.
She had a pretty successful military career that culminated with administrative oversight of a California base that I know well thanks to my circus ties. This was surprising to me: She doesn’t have what I would describe as either a military or an administrative personality. Eventually, she left.
Had a checkered career trajectory after she decided she didn’t want to be a lawyer (which is what the military trained her to do) and eventually ended up back in the Hudson River Valley when the father who kicked her out at age 13 was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and needed someone to take care of him.
Karma likes full circle best out of all those dances out there…
Anyway, ESL training is complete, and I will probably start tutoring after Thanksgiving – which is also when the intensive VITA classes start. In the Hudson Valley, they make you pass the “Advanced” tax preparation certification. I found the “Beginning” tax preparation certification difficult, so I’m not all that optimistic about this one. Math, as Barbie continually reminds us, is hard. Accounting is even harder.
I’m also working with Seraphina and Ayana on the 2015 Breaking Barriers festival, so my little volunteer dance card is very full. I worry that it’s too full. But the fact is that I’m most creative when I’m creating in the interstices. There’s just something that really gets the juices going when I start writing and I feel guilty because I should be doing something else.
###
On the train ride into the Big City where I’m spending the weekend at BB’s wonderful apartment – really, if I had to design the perfect living space, this would be it – I read this article, which reminded me how hopelessly out of it I really am.
The kids who play these games are science fiction characters, straight out of some fusion of Ender’s Game and Childhood’s End. Never mind the strange right brain/left brain synergies that arise when your left hand is performing a completely different set of movements from your right hand, and your brain is actively inputting both. (You could argue that pianists do the exact same thing, but I would say there’s sense memory involved in piano playing that bypasses the frontal lobe to a large degree.) It’s really a sense that these kids are shaping a future that’s quite outside the 24/7 news cycle’s eye.
I suppose kind of like what going to Grateful Dead concerts used to be like for me.
These kids will not be interested in reading my diary 50 years after I'm dead. There go my legacy fantasies!
She describes boot camp as one long pushup punctuated by sneers: Where’s Superman now, huh, grunt?
She’s pretty funny. I wouldn’t mind being her Bestest Friend.
She had a pretty successful military career that culminated with administrative oversight of a California base that I know well thanks to my circus ties. This was surprising to me: She doesn’t have what I would describe as either a military or an administrative personality. Eventually, she left.
Had a checkered career trajectory after she decided she didn’t want to be a lawyer (which is what the military trained her to do) and eventually ended up back in the Hudson River Valley when the father who kicked her out at age 13 was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and needed someone to take care of him.
Karma likes full circle best out of all those dances out there…
Anyway, ESL training is complete, and I will probably start tutoring after Thanksgiving – which is also when the intensive VITA classes start. In the Hudson Valley, they make you pass the “Advanced” tax preparation certification. I found the “Beginning” tax preparation certification difficult, so I’m not all that optimistic about this one. Math, as Barbie continually reminds us, is hard. Accounting is even harder.
I’m also working with Seraphina and Ayana on the 2015 Breaking Barriers festival, so my little volunteer dance card is very full. I worry that it’s too full. But the fact is that I’m most creative when I’m creating in the interstices. There’s just something that really gets the juices going when I start writing and I feel guilty because I should be doing something else.
###
On the train ride into the Big City where I’m spending the weekend at BB’s wonderful apartment – really, if I had to design the perfect living space, this would be it – I read this article, which reminded me how hopelessly out of it I really am.
The kids who play these games are science fiction characters, straight out of some fusion of Ender’s Game and Childhood’s End. Never mind the strange right brain/left brain synergies that arise when your left hand is performing a completely different set of movements from your right hand, and your brain is actively inputting both. (You could argue that pianists do the exact same thing, but I would say there’s sense memory involved in piano playing that bypasses the frontal lobe to a large degree.) It’s really a sense that these kids are shaping a future that’s quite outside the 24/7 news cycle’s eye.
I suppose kind of like what going to Grateful Dead concerts used to be like for me.
These kids will not be interested in reading my diary 50 years after I'm dead. There go my legacy fantasies!
