7:37 AM

I drift through cycles of where I am either a night owl or an early bird. Even when I am in night owl mode, my favorite time of the day are those early morning hours where the world is still asleep, but there’s a vibrant electricity in the air that’s fueled by the hope of whatever the new day is going to bring.

This week, I’m on early bird status. Probably because I have so much to do. I teach my full course load of 8th grade language arts during the day and then at night, I’m lecturing college freshman. Interspersed within this is me trying to keep my sanity while getting into my own professors the last few weeks of coursework for heavily law-laden classes for my PhD.

My breath of sanity on these kinds of days are the early mornings. I get to school about an hour before the kids come in and I set up my room for the day. Today went pretty quickly, they’re using this block to write their essays on their Holocaust topic. It’s the longest unit I do with them in 8th grade and the hardest. I stood at the gates of the Dachau camp in Munich only 3 years ago, but I will never forgot the silence that encompassed the grounds and the eerily feeling that creeped up your spine when you entered the gates and the temperature dropped by several degrees. That same year, I visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. I was balling my eyes out by the end. What I find so hard about teaching this is how for so many students they are just largely so not emphatic towards what occurred.

It’s a tough unit, one that is nearly 2 months long and is so emotionally draining. I’m glad to see it ending for this year. By being an easier day, it also gave me time to sit in the quiet of my room before the kids came, before my co-teacher got here, before noise invaded and for a good hour, I just got to get myself together for the day. Sometimes, you just have to do that for yourself.

I do the same thing at the end of the day, when I’m driving home. There are days like today where I will drive the hour home in silence, not ever touching the radio. It’s like my little break from the chaos of the day.

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The Reality that is Under Eye Bags

I was fairly young when OJ Simpson killed his wife. Though, he was found not guilt of that crime, there really is no doubt in my mind that in a jealous rage, he sliced her and her friend up. There was never any other evidence that it wasn’t him and then, when he wrote that book? Yeah, that guy is guilty as they come! I’m glad that karma finally caught up with him and that though, not in jail for murder, he is in jail for 33 years and hopefully when he is up for parole this October, that he is not awarded it.

I have vivid memories of the famous low-speed Bronco chase on TV. Followed by little snippets and bits of his trial, but that was really it. My family wasn’t big sports people either, so I didn’t even know who OJ was until that trial.

When The People v. OJ Simpson came out last year, I really had no interest in watching it. I felt that a show that potentially glorified a murdering, wife-abusing asshole wasn’t worth the time I would lose to watch it. That was, up until a few days ago when at lunch, a teacher friend was telling us all how good this show was and how it really did the case justice.

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I stayed up until 5:30 this morning watching most of the series. It just sucked me in, part because of nostalgia for that time– it was cool to see the cars and the outfits that I remember from when I was young. However, it was also really interesting to re-visit this case as an adult and getting to see all the little pieces that led up to the very infamous, “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.” I fell asleep, so don’t ruin anything for me beyond episode 6! I plan to go right home after work and finish watching.

That is, after I scrap off the layers of makeup I put on today to you know, NOT look like I had stayed up all night. As you can see, no matter how many layers of foundation and under eye brightener I use, covers up these earned bags. It feel like ever since I turned 30, and even about halfway through my 29th year, there has just been absolutely no way to hide these babies. Is it an age thing? Should I just accept them as a fact and wear them as a badge of honor to the fact that I can still stay up all night and go to work the next day? Not going to lie, I am a little proud that I inadvertently pulled an all-nighter and was able to still get up to teach. I haven;t done that probably since student teaching when I had a 100-page teacher work sample to finish and was still expected to student intern full-time. I got through it, and I got advanced proficient on that stupid work sample that I think is somewhere in the closet of my childhood bedroom still.

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Exquisite Corpse

It had been some years since I had read Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse. I spent any down time I had yesterday finishing it. It took me maybe 12 hours of on again off again reading to finish it. I forgot how engrossing the novel is.

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You know that it’s a really good read when it’s so shocking and well-written that it stays with you even after you’re done. It’s been a very long time since a book has left me feeling raw and anxious. I’ve read a lot over the years, and I think the last book that really did this to me was Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. Though I do have IT on my to-read list so I have a feeling that this list of books that chew you up and spit you out may grow in time. I just can’t get out of my head the ending of Exquisite Corpse, and the very true reality that that is probably occurring somewhere in the world right now, a seemingly perfect ideal for a mad man who feasts on human flesh. Ugh, the chills!

Can anyone recommend more horror novels that I have to check out? I’m taking a break today and started Sirens by Janet Fox even though that too takes you into the dark side of the gilded 1920’s and the world of jazz and gangsters.

If I could have picked when I could I have been born, it definitely would have been more towards the earlier 1900’s. Jazz-age Paris must have been a sight to behold.

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Late Night Books

I can’t remember the last time that I was so into a book that I stayed up all night reading it. I had a lot of work to do last night, I had a syllabus to write and a course to finish putting together, but the temptation for a fun read was just too great last night.

In high school and college, I was just like a plethora of other teens and kept, religiously, a LiveJournal. I loved it. It opened up to me an entire world where I was able to “meet” people from all over the world and read about their lives. In fact, I met many writers, artists and other creative through LJ. I loved that community.

Of one of the people that I “met,” was New Orleans based author, Poppy Z. Brite. I fell in love. I loved her books and her wit. I was very sad when she stopped updating her blog.

Some years later, she began to update again and I once again was reminded of why I loved her writing as much as I did. She had since begun to identify as a he, officially, even though so much of his writing had been about his gender dysphoria. He was also creating really cool art and had retired from publishing. Recently, he started posting dibs books, which are books from his personal collection that he signs and ships out. I was lucky and grabbed two, one of which is the extremely dark Exquisite Corpse.

I had read the first 100 pages in an hour, I had forgotten how dark and immersive the book was. I stayed up until nearly 2am laying on my couch reading a book that I wanted to read. It was amazing! I haven’t been able to read a book for fun since Phil and I went to Wildwood for a long weekend last year. I’ve just been so busy with my teaching courses and with my PhD that hobbies have sort of fallen to the side. I plan to finish it tonight and move onto the stack of books that I have sitting in the shelf of my headboard.

I really need to start making some more time for myself.

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Molly Bags

Back in the tumult of my 20’s, I remember looking at happy couples and thinking, how do those people get like that? How, in this crazy world do you possibly find someone that compliments you so completely that it almost becomes like you exist in your own world with them? It really was something that was so foreign to me. In my 20’s, my relationships were often drama-fueled and with men that I never felt comfortable with. They didn’t get me and largely, I didn’t get them. I actually really hated dating and I went through large spans of time where I just didn’t.

I met Phil 3 years ago on a blind date, and pretty much ever since, we have been together. It was almost like that date was only a formality too as we had been talking continuously for days before we actually met. It was an effortless click.

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Since then, we have become the sort of people I used to people watch in my 20’s. The sort of couples that would move around the world in their own time, in sync with one another. I hadn’t realized that we had in fact become those people over time.

It started out innocently enough. We came up with silly names for one another, and then pretty soon, names for other things. Before we realized it, there was the voice. Do you the voice? If you don’t, I firmly believe you have not found the right person yet. What is the voice? It is quite simply, the voice you use only with your person. It’s probably softer, more high-pitched and your person will usually respond back to you in the same voice. It’s the beginning of the language used only between the two of you.

From there you begin to name other things. Of course, these things already have common names like phone, remote, bag, etc. However, the two of you will begin to rename them and again, these things will only really make sense in the world that you are currently in.

For us, I realized we had reached this point when Phil had come home from his mom’s house. He was so excited, she had given him all of these plastic shopping bags. Now, in our house these are all “Molly Bags.” So, when she had given them to him, he exclaimed something like, “Oh thank god, there are SO MANY Molly bags now,” without so much as a thought as to the fact that his mom would have no idea what a Molly Bag was. I imagine there followed the confused face from his mom along with a “what the heck are you talking about?” Phil then explaining that we call them Molly Bags because we use them to pick up her giant poops when we walk her.

I would put money on the fact, that now, whenever Phil’s mom sees plastic shopping bags, MOLLY BAGS will forever be popping into her head. Phil was a little embarrassed after this exchange, when he came home, he told me “I forgot. I was just so excited that we have so many know! I forgot that not everyone speaks us. My mom probably thinks we’re nuts now.”

I smiled to myself, I think everyone should speak “us.”

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273

In just 273 days, I’m going to be getting married. This sound so crazy to me. As much as I wanted to get married and have a family, there has always been such a large part of me that felt it was never going to happen. Yet, here we are planning a fairly small wedding at the most beautiful, artsy French-style venue I could find in New Jersey. It’s going to be so beautiful.

I’ll have just turned 31 when we walk down the aisle. I will have one full year under my belt of this totally new decade in my life. How crazy is that?

I remember thinking that 30 was just so old and so far off, but then it sneaked up on me and suddenly, I was 30. I remember my 28th birthday, we were just outside of Monaco, on our way to Florence. We had just left the Beaujolais where we stayed in a very haunted Chateau. It was the most amazing birthday that year. We had only been together for about seven months when we went on that month long adventure across 20-something countries. By the end, I knew that this was who I was going to marry.

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That was the capstone to one of the more turbulent decades of my life. My teens weren’t that much better, but that had revolved around drama created by people with me stuck in the middle. The chaos of my 20’s were mostly self-made and structured around poor decisions, bad advice and listening to other people instead of following what I really wanted to do.

That same year I moved an hour away from home. I also bought my house that year too. I became the newest resident to the Jersey shore and then the new decade began. So far, it’s been a much more calmer decade. I don’t feel the constant emotional upheaval that drove most of my 20’s and early teens. I feel more in control and I think the most important thing I have learned so far is that it is not only totally okay to say “no,” but there comes times where you simply just have to. That took a very long time for me to learn.

And now in just 273 days, I’ll be walking down the aisle to the man I have shared the last 3 years with. A house, two dogs, three cats, countless adventures, Disney World, Europe– so much in such a short time and yet, so much more yet to come.

All in just 273 days.

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Thank You for Leaving Me

I forgot to share with you that a few months ago I published again with Thought Catalog. I think getting engaged has made me soft these days and the emotions over the past couple of months have been strange and weird! Has this happened to anyone else?

I think I have cried, like really cried during any emotional movie I have watched. Everything seems to affect me lately, it’s so strange. It also made me go into my box of journals and unearth some gems from over the years. I got very wrapped up into the transient period of my life from 2008-2010 where I was teaching, but it wasn’t the dream yet. Where I was between New York and art and New Jersey and everything else. I was also in the midst of the fall out of the end of my first really big love. This was also when I wrote the first draft of An August Morning.

Anyway. It’s strange now to look back at that period of my life and no longer feel the same way about it. I wrote this free form thinking piece: Thank You for Leaving Me.

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