Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning

Curiously, it didn’t hurt.  It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup.  I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.

Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.

It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.

It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers.  That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.

I didn’t do that in my twenties.  I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead.  Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing  on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole.  Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.

For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week.   I wrote short stories, poems and songs.  He composed his music.  We performed together.  I had vivid dreams.  I felt newly born, innocent.

We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs.  I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner.  My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life.  Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.

I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness.  It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse.  It was enough to be content.

I used to be ambitious.  It had all vanished.

This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life.  Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back.  People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.”  I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.”  That was what she’s been like all her life.  Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father.  She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.

We had our troubles too.  I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.

Over the years, my husband and I grew in music.  We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe).  We performed Hindustani classical vocal together.  I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity).  I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room.  Drank a lot of black coffee.  Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.

I continued to work at the company.  Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily.  Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality.  The urge to become a teacher had become paramount.  I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.

Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all.  Then, came our daughter.  Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling.  I love it all.

And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.

Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life.  I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.

I want to write, just write.  I don’t want to do much else, sometimes.  However, I also love to teach.  I love singing and playing music.  I love bringing up my daughter.

So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.

And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing

Mar 3, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning

Saturday is My Day of Rest

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 2nd 2013

It’s Saturday, March 2nd, and I am in a foggy, unspecified place in my body and mind.

Having (as usual) slept only a few hours every day of this week, while beaming out energy and enthusiasm at school in a tightly focused way every single day of this past whole week, which had come hot on the heels of a semi-lazy, semi-busy vacation week, I am now a hollow shell.

I dealt with curriculum.

Gave a test.

Assigned a complicated and (I think) interesting project based on John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl, facilitated class discussion, finished up that book (begun well before vacation week), then taught verbs, participles and perfect verb tenses, and began to teach the Holocaust unit.  Assigned and began teaching Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter.

Teaching the Holocaust Unit is the hardest thing I do every year.  I use the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum and ideas as some of my resources.  I have read an enormous amount on this subject and immersed myself in it for over fifteen years.  Yet, I cannot bring myself to remember every single detail.  I have to re-read some of it.  It’s too much for me.  I know all the numbers, and have read the books of several of the famous writers.  I know all about the different concentration camps, the infamous Nazis who conducted their horrible experiments, the leaders of the Third Reich, the euphemisms adopted by the Nazis for their terrible practices.  I know all about the Nuremberg Trials, the huge disaster that was WWII and the burden of collective guilt, not only in Germany, but several other European nations.  And I know about the brave souls who individually (Schindler, Irena Sendler, the Bielski brothers, Miep Gies, others) and collectively saved several thousand Jews (the village of Le Chambon in France, and an entire country — Denmark).  It’s all too much to comprehend or internalize.  So, I map out the unit into perpetrators, bystanders, victims, resisters, rescuers and survivors.  Because we read about it, and discuss it all from this perspective, it helps me and my students deal with the enormity and mindless nature of a whole era as revealed in Friedrich and Night.  I show clips of interviews with survivors and rescuers/resisters.  I show non R-rated movies and several scenes from the less-horrifying but eye-opening parts from R-rated movies.  We read moving excerpts from Primo Levi’s books.  We read poems.  We discuss weighty matters of morality and philosophy as well.  We inquire into the nature of evil.  We look into Hannah Arendt’s statement about “the banality of evil.”

And each teenager in my class comes away from this experience a “sadder and wiser” person, arising the “morrow morn.”

But all that hasn’t happened for the classes yet.  The students are still at the beginning of the unit.

So, where was I?  Ah yes, I was still dwelling on this past week of work which assailed my senses and my soul.

I facilitated a meeting with Green Team members at my school on Monday, and with the Executive Director of a local organic farm, as well as with the Recycling Co-ordinator for the town in which I teach.  We discussed how we would begin composting wasted cafeteria food in our  school (and transport it to the local farm for the soil and chickens).  It was a good meeting, despite all the difficulties we were sure to experience when we did begin to follow through on this idea.

After the meeting, the kids, the other teacher and I did our usual, mad, panting, breathless, crazy-whirly recycling for the whole school — dragging the huge, blue recycle bins down the hallways of all five floors to the South Parking Lot, where the giant Casella recycling dumpster stood, and emptying out all those bins, for the Casella people to deal with on Wednesday.

Note:  We are all of us girls (well, two women teachers and the rest of them were girls.  Our one boy was absent)!

Where are the schoolboys in any worthwhile effort, like saving the planet?  The girls informed me that some of the boys laugh at the school’s recycling efforts (although our bins are full!).

Makes one despair.

Mothers and Fathers:  Please teach your sons (and daughters) that the planet is not for pillaging and plundering, despoiling and tossing away.  There’s only one planet.

I guess it’s time for me to give another rousing speech at lunchtime over the mike.  Every time I did that in the fall, I got a few more volunteers, some of them boys, but then they faded away.

What else?

Went to a Baby Shower for a friend/colleague at school on Thursday, and that was beautiful — such events are always moving, especially for those who are already mothers, but for everyone else too,  because one sees a different side of all these harassed and harried school-teachers, who take the time to be together.  Everyone brings something good to eat.  There are all these lovely platters of (mostly) healthy, nutritious food, veggie platters, the healthier variety of chips and yummy dips, fruit, and of course the obligatory dreadfully frosted carb-heavy cakes and cookies.  There are piled-up presents, streamers and pretty tassels.  We clear up a space in the school library, set out the food on pretty table-cloths, put up streamers, and shower the star of the afternoon, the new mother-to-be with love.  And she is always tender, radiant and full of hope and beauty.  I wrote a poem, after being urged to do so by some of the teachers there.  And I posted it on this blog-site on Thursday, which eased my sense of guilt with not writing something the previous day (at least, I think I didn’t write something.  Perhaps I did).

On Friday, after the regular, exhausting, unending round of classes which I taught (I teach one hundred and seven students a DAY, and that’s nothing!  It was one hundred and twenty-five a day last year, which nearly killed me and the other English teachers on the other two teams — math, science and history teachers don’t have it so bad, although everyone reported being exhausted last year!), I ran my Poetry Club, put out food for the kids, made hot chocolate for them, and we wrote.  Well, they wrote.  I usually do, but yesterday, I was busy facilitating.  I didn’t have time.  So, that was a wasted chance.

Then, dinner at The Punjab in Arlington with my family.  That’s always very nice, and we three are VERY goofy and silly together.  Then, there was music at night with daughter and husband, after which, I fell, exhausted, into a species of sleep.

All of today was spent in a strange, cocooned state.  Tired beyond imagining, feeling the weight of the ages press down upon my shoulder-blades, and with feet that alternately felt numb and tingling with tiredness, I did nothing at all, not even fun things.

I didn’t write anything yesterday, and nothing much today.  At least I wrote a poem on Thursday, I console myself.  Yes, it made me happy, but it doesn’t satisfy me.  I want the high that comes with writing stories every day, writing poems every day, having interesting and inspired thoughts.

I’ve been reading Alexander McCall Smith books.  When mindlessness strikes, I turn to mental comfort food, and McCall Smith’s books and P.G. Wodehouse’s books are for good vibes and good prose.  Dick Francis books, and occasionally the less grisly Robert Parker, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky books are for a sense of life lived in danger (compared to my tame and happy existence).  Of course, there are the usual J.K. Rowling books, some grab-me sci-fi for sheer pleasure, or an Oliver Sacks book at hand for sheer pleasure or familiar, but in-depth, moving humanistic science .  Mind you, I’m not talking about my other literary loves.  This is the daily fare for someone who can read unfamiliar or weightier books only during school breaks, and during the summer.

Watched a TED video showcasing Amanda Fucking Palmer, which was very moving in a strange way, especially because I don’t actually like her music or her face, although it is extremely compelling.  I am able to separate my personal likes and dislikes from my respect for artists (musical artists or artists who do performance art) who do what they are compelled to do.  I like John Cage, for example, but am not moved in the least by his music (or lack thereof).  I LOVE Yoko Ono, but her actual art does nothing for me.  We need such artists.  They challenge our preconceived notions and push us to think beyond our “comfort zone.”

And of course, I love, love, love Neil Gaiman (and have done so well before his rise to fame and fortune, since the early 90s, when his Sandman books came out), so if he loves Amanda Palmer, I am prepared to love her too.

So, this was my past week.

Right now, while I type all this,  my husband is making fritters.  I hear my daughter singing upstairs, and I need to help her with her guitar practice.

On that note, I bid you all adieu.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Recycling, Alexander McCall Smith, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Baby Showers, Elie Wiesel, English Teachers, Facing History and Ourselves, Green initiatives in school, John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, P.G. Wodehouse, Poetry Club, Primo Levi, Teaching the Holocaust, Yoko Ono