Your blood, my tracks.
I request and require your input. If I were to burn a cd for a potential party, for background-foreground-drinking-dancing-whatever else, what track would you contribute? You can give me more than 1 selection but not more than 3.
Don't obsess simply choose.
All contributors will get a copy.
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Originally uploaded by mactechwitch.
I liked reading about the discipline (in the Unwellness home) of removing a certain number of books from the shelves to make room for new. In my house, we are undisciplined book buyers who seem to have time to read only on vacations. Our books are piled here and there as the shelves are at their limits.
The summer reading lists of my blog-pals are quite interesting to me. It's fun to see the patterns developing in the choices. I seem to have been on an extended Nazi trip the past several weeks.
After finishing The Lost Legends of New Jersey, Frederick Reiken, a sweet treat of a book and a gift from a favorite friend, which was not about Nazis but was about the Rubins and the Berkowitzes and the Jersey Shore so you know Nazis were not too far back in the collective consciences of the characters, I read Hour of The Cat, Peter Quinn, Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer, then Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski, Robin Hirsch and now I've picked up The Plot Against America, Philip Roth.
I also use the summer to catch up on New Yorker fiction and articles. There is one that I want to share with my lunchtime crossword pals. It's a classic David Sedaris called Turbulence
This week I received my "summer mail envelope." For those of you unfamiliar with this rite, it is a large, thick, pile of letters, schedules, calendars, fliers and directives – everything you need to know before coming back to school. It is filled with equal parts excitement and dread. My envelope was completely empty and stamped by the USPS as having been received that way.
It was perhaps the best summer mail envelope I have received in 20 something years.
A new school year presents new opportunities. It always has. When you're a kid it's the excitement of seeing your friends again after a long separation dressed in spiffy new duds a size bigger than before, the new notebooks with their promise of soon being filled with something important in a new adaptation of one's old handwriting, the new teacher "...I'm going to show her (him) my real stuff." When you're a teacher it's the resolve that this year you will figure out a system that really works for everyone in the class, and it will be a system that doesn't require late nights and weekends. This will be the year that you will have fun with your students. This will be the year you will iron out the kinks and overcome your weaknesses as a teacher.
Take this empty envelope as a sign. We can create something new this year.
Who is with me on this? What will it take to make it happen? If those questions can be answered we are well on our way. It will come out of the best that is already in place.
