speling!

National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through

I just finished reading this article in the Wall Street Journal regarding spelling reform, and I am flabbergasted! However, not for the reasons you may expect. My shock is not due to the fact that there are people in the world trying to change spelling, but because I have been well-acquainted with the spelling reform movement nearly all of my life, but never expected its efforts to make the front page of a national newspaper!

Let me explain. My dad is a member of The Spelling Society (formerly the Simplified Spelling Society). I remember one time he brought home a prototype version of The Wizard Of Oz written in simplified spelling for me to read. Though I understand the intentions behind it, to ask an 11-year-old bookworm to unlearn her understanding of her native language is quite a challenge. The Tin Woodman became the "Tin Wuudman" and the yellow brick road was a "yelo brik rode" instead. It was near impossible to remember to connect these foreign phrases to the meanings I knew they were supposed to represent. I read it stubbornly and judged it rather harshly, but the truth was that I got the story all the same.

Simplified spelling has been in my life for such a long time that it is difficult for me to take a stance on it. I love studying etymology, doing crossword puzzles, and writing or reading poetry that is as visually interesting as it is aurally. But plenty of intelligent people simply have a block against spelling rules. This doesn't make their thoughts any less valid, yet their intelligence is often questioned unfairly as a result.

I intended to make a post of substance regarding the issue of spelling, but if I'm going to be honest here, the real reason I got excited about this article is because it describes a world that I am a part of. My dad has been a protester at the national spelling bee, which I find hilarious and awesome. The article has a section (and a cool trademark Wall Street Journal ink pen face) about 102-year-old Ed Rondthaler and his house in New York State. Well, kids, call this my brush with fame, because I have eaten lunch at the Rondthaler house on a drive back from New York City with my dad. Mr. Rondthaler showed me a flashcard show about the inanity of English spelling--how "comb" should rhyme with "tomb" but "tomb" rhymes with "boom" and "comb" rhymes with "roam" and "home" instead. Other names mentioned in the print version of the article--Alan Mole, Joe Little are names that have appeared in our mailbox for years.

Maybe the reason I'm excited is because this little constant of my life that has always seemed pretty hopeless is at least being recognized. Spelling reformers face the fact that they are not likely to achieve the success they want, but stay determined in spite of it all.
Next up: my life with Esperanto, worm compost, carnivorous plants and historic canals. Ok, not really.

i may have a dream obsession

Seriously, I can't get over my dreams sometimes. Nights I don't dream I think are wasted. Last night had all the best elements of the subconscious all together. I dreamed I had a brother named Joseph who was either 7 or 10 years younger than me, but for some reason I always just forgot about his existence. Then all of a sudden I would remember and say something like, "Oh yeah! Joseph. Does he still live with us? When was he born again?" and then they'd have to remind me where his bedroom was.

So that was part one, which was far surpassed in awesome wish-it-was-realness by part two. In part two, I believe I was aimlessly wandering around some town with my good friend Katie, looking for kicks and then realizing we were standing in front of the Tom Waits mansion/estate. So of course, we decide to go in...never really figured out if it was just a big home or a museum tour type thing. At any rate, Katie goes first but doesn't have much to say; I just build up butterflies waiting to meet the man. When I get in, I'm not sure what to say, but ol' Tom is waiting in a wooden chair and everything is old and rusty-silky like him. I maybe call him "Mr. Waits." When we get to conversing, the talk moves to recipes for things and Mr. Waits decides that he'd like to give me some old recipe cards that I might like. He looks around in some closets and cupboards but all he can scrounge up are some old family photos, not necessarily his family, but all sepia and solemn. I scoop them up in a big pile and thank him and go out to meet Katie again.

Part three: there was this cat, a small hairy tabby that was just ALL OVER ME. I used a lint brush after.

night thinks about morning

I’m up at two thirty in the morning simply because I can. I have no obligations early tomorrow, but the internet and lukewarm pop cans are the food of insomniac boredom, even as I realize that I will miss the enjoyment of my favorite part of the day—morning. I inhabit a curious niche as a college-age morning person, but it’s not without reason. Morning is sort of the braided part of the day that is elegantly routine before it gets unraveled down through the hours into night where everything is spread out and wanton like Eve’s hair, beautiful in its way as well but more heartbreaking. In the morning, I know a pleasant song will play on my alarm clock, I will lower the volume but hear the song through unless my eyes are too weighty to process it. I put my feet on the floor quickly, the same how my body aches when it is vertical too long, I can only stay lying down for certain hours before my organs need to shift and situate inside me. So I step out and reacquaint myself with the feeling of my soles on the floor, cold winter wood or summer clutter I stumble over on my way to the shower/kitchen, which one comes first is a coin toss of impulse.

Say today it is the shower, I explore the perspective of barely waking and thought before language and language without interpretation, strings of words follow each other aimlessly until concrete thoughts formulate and remember the history of my brain and body. Showering is the other side of nakedness, the private soaps and shampoos, permission to touch oneself everywhere and breathe warm fragrant awakening. Sometimes it involves music, sometimes just the clicks of bottles and beating water. After the process is done, there is the stepping out into soft towels and steam clouds and examining my dark wet hair and white-green eyeballs against flushed skin. Combing, or not, the lowest layers of clothing, bathmats, planning how to decorate my canvas, pressing my stomach in and rubbing my scars, feeling gratefully hungry.

Next, the kitchen, home of breakfast, grandest meal of meditation. A book or the comics page, and so many tastes to tempt me—cold cereal and banana slices, poached egg on toast with black pepper, coffee black or tan sweet and strong, juices, maybe mom is around with a bowl of blueberries that are really too tart for my first meal but I try to be earnest. The spoon sounds tinkling on the bowl and I moosh milky banana around my mouth as I read the old lame comics or the new clever ones, animals in people-world or animal-worlds or boys with imagination, moms that have wrier souls than their cornflake husbands and what will those darn kids do next? It’s most funny when I actually laugh and then laugh because I laughed at the comics page and then I grin at my sister because my face wakes up much, much faster and she squints groggy when she tries to return the smile. Away from home, the routine is quieter but I still make plans or fend off worries until after coffee or a short post-shower nap that leaves my pillow wet but fresh.

But for all the effort spent enjoying sunrise slowly, it ends hastily when I realize time has a place on a clock that is growing slimmer. Earrings go on if I remember, chapstick, the rapid mental checklist phonekeysIDbagbooksmoneyshoesnecklace and I end up stumbling out the door at the last minute.

shoot the lights out

Clearly we both knew it wasn't a forever deal, or even an all-year deal, maybe a coupla-months deal, if that. He was too cool, in the deliberate scrutinizing indifferent way, while I was bouncing around the kitchen offering him jello and telling him to pick out my clothes for the party. At first he was amused because I seemed so married to the idea of fun and I guess it brought him down from the mountain he was looking at everyone from, for a little while he was kissing and dancing with an ant. When he was through with me, I cried about two tears and then listened to Nina Simone and laughed a bit. At the Halloween party, I stood outside carelessly smoking cigarettes in my bright red wig with the new girls and had the girly, "I don't need him anyway," conversation and the new girls said, "I don't get him," "You don't need him anyway," "He's really weird," and yeah, they were right but not quite.

The only pang is remembering how taken aback I was when he laughed because I thought I wasn't pretty, as if it was a given, how he kissed me on the street outside the doctor's, where anyone could see and I told him that was the first time anyone had kissed me out-of-doors (those words, also made him laugh). Being so delighted and feeling so undeserving when he brought me a dry sweater when I was shivering and wet and realizing that people who go through boyfriends like tissues actually expect this kind of stuff from them. Other times he rolled me careful little filtered joints that I smoked down 3rd avenue or browsed the pulp noir section of the library with me, cooked black olive omlets and I considered myself a happy lucky girl.

Once, after the hundredth time I begged him to speak Chinese to me, he said in a jokey-serious voice, "I'm not a novelty!" and I felt bad, but he sort of was, and I was a novelty to him, too. I remember one time being drowsy and half-napped, asking him what he saw in me (I really didn't, don't know) and he thought a moment and said my innocence, which was sweet but really no different, but fine. So when we were together, I only played music that I liked, never music that I loved because I knew that I couldn't reserve those songs in my heart for a coupla-months kind of guy, knowing that any sanctity of my body is worth less than the sanctity of a song.

I let him keep one song, even though he wasn't around to hear it with me. He went outside for a cigarette and I put on thin white clothes and my headphones until he came back up. The lyrics ran: "i'm not the mystery that you hope to find, but i'm here now and i'm willing to play the part anyway," and I was aware and resigned to the bittersweet, even at the sweetest part of it all. I expect self-fooling romance and low expectations, indifference and novelty, never trying to hold on too hard to anything I don't want for keeps.

fictionnonfiction

I'm falling in love with ink on bound paper, as usual. Print is proof and I believe every word even when I frown my disagreement. Hungrily, I read and believe myself to know; I come to bed at night and gather the books I'm reading and toss them on my bed because I never know what mood will hit when I am under the covers and sliding my eyelids up and down. As I step off the floor and into my sea of books I feel loved, what a lucky girl to lay down with Kerouac and Julio Cortazar and Toni Morrison at night. They ache their love through their words and show me how their eyes are special and they see to their characters' cores, so maybe they will see to mine.

My dictionary is a constant part of the pile, filled with post-its and highlighting of no importance except to myself. The tiny pen line illustrations are amusing and entrancing, I contemplate a tattoo of the radius picture, complete with definition and pronunciation guide. The bookbed has been part of my life since I can remember. I pretended to be afraid of the dark so I could leave the hall light on and my bedroom door open and sneak read in bed, other kids used flashlights but reading takes both hands. Now, if I can't sleep, I pull any old thin paperback off a shelf and hold it in my hand with my fingers between the pages, as if to mark my spot, but the book falls out of my hand anyway and in the morning I do book searches under the covers and around the bed until I find them and open the pages again.

When these writers write, I read and yearn for them and wish to hold their words in a form more tangible than text, as if I could. I want Jack Kerouac in the flesh, telling me I am an angel, not like some pickup line but that he can see the wings I never realized I had. I want this passage to be for me:
"she says, 'You don't look like you need a haircut' and appraises me, and I know she loves me, and I love her, and I know tonight I can walk hand in hand with her to the starlit banks of the Skagit and she wont care what I do, sweet--she'll let me violate her everywhichway, that's what she wants, the women of America need mates and lovers, they stand in marble banks all day and deal with paper and paper they're served at the Drive-In after Paper Movies, they want kissing lips and rivers and grass, as of old--"

I am selfish and I know, but so are they all and you all, we want things and convince ourselves we don't deserve them and so give them to other people. I give, but I take, too, and tonight I will fall gratefully asleep again with stories all around, alone for all intensive purposes, and roll around on the pages and make small contented sounds until the sun rises.

Kyle

Kyle worked at a toll booth on the Ohio Turnpike in the far outskirts of Toledo. Most other kids did toll work as a summer job, older high school kids or college kids home for the summer. Kyle worked all year though, and since he really had no other major commitments, they liked to put him on the night shift, which wasn't really so bad except that he didn't get much time to see Megan, his girlfriend. She worked down the road at the Cinnabon in the service station, usually weekend shifts, as she was also going to school for nursing at the University of Toldeo. Kyle had decided not to go to college. He had done fine in high school, played on the hockey team, had a weekly column in the school paper, his counselors considered him a promising case. Something about the idea of college didn't suit Kyle, though. He was more content than most people thought to just sit alone all night, taking tolls, making jokes on the walkie-talkie to the other toll takers and writing stories.
Kyle was in the middle of one of these stories, around 2:15 in the morning, when Megan called. Strictly speaking, he wasn't supposed to spend a lot of time on the phone when he was on the job, but the liklihood of the authorities checking up on him at this hour was slim, and either way, he had mastered the art of swiveling his chair away from the security camera to make it look like he was just resting his hand on his temple and muttering to himself. Kyle turned away and answered the phone.
"Hiiiiiii, baaaby," Megan said loudly.
"Are you drunk or something?" Kyle said teasingly.
"Wellllll," she said, "Maybe a little. But I just wanted to call and see how you are, y'know....I love you sweeeeeetie! What are you up to?"
Kyle twiddled his pen thoughtfully. "Just writing a love poem for--"
"OhmyGod, Jessie! Sorry, my friend Jessie just showed up, hang on one second--okay, sorry, what?" Megan said absentmindedly.
"Just writing a love poem for you. Hey, I think someone is coming up the road, so I'm going to let you go. Take care babe, I'll call you tomorrow."
Kyle turned back toward the window. He hadn't been lying, a car was coming. After two years of toll booth work, Kyle could start to recognize some types of people driving out from Toledo in the middle of the night. The car revealed itself to be a Fiat driven by a frazzled-looking woman in a navy power suit. She rolled down the window.
"Hi...how much is the toll again?" she asked, her eyes darting around for the fare poster.
"Three dollars, ma'am," he said before she could find it.
"Oh, right. I see now." She fumbled in her pocketbook for singles. “Do you have change for a five?”
Kyle handed two dollars through the window in exchange for her five, and she drove off again.
Kyle decided she couldn’t have been a native Ohioan, or she would have known the toll. But she was in a power suit, so she was there for business. He couldn’t make himself curious enough to wonder more, so he turned back to the page he was writing.
He had been lying about the love poem, however. The story he was writing now had love in it, it was true, but the handsome lead was a Colombian drug lord who was usually more concerned about whose heads were flying in his backyard than about the dainty flamenco dancer who begged for his cold heart. Kyle knew it was ridiculous. He had spent the first year writing careful observations and drawing meaningful conclusions from the drivers who passed robotically along his window. He had a whole wealth of notes and dialogues and poems about the crying girl in the scarf, the teenagers with pot smoke rolling out their open windows, the man with the american flag tattoo and the rottweiler in the passenger seat, and the woman playing sexy in designer sunglasses. He’d seen so many, and now he knew that they could only be caricatures, no matter how important their lives seemed to them. So he tucked away his thoughts and notebooks and starting writing lurid, awful stories about characters who knew they were characters and stories where everybody dies for love.
Kyle’s walkie talkie fuzzed on and he heard Fiona’s voice from the one other open toll booth.
“Some lady just asked to borrow my chapstick. Do you think that’s weird?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s kind of weird,” Kyle replied after a pause. “Did you let her?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Kind of weird,” Kyle said. “I’d throw it out if I were you.”
Fiona sighed. “You’re probably right. Damn.” The walkie talkie clicked off.
Fiona was all right, Kyle thought, as another car pulled up, an old gray Volvo in need of a new muffler. The driver cranked down the window by hand and extended a handful of coins and one dollar bill.
As Kyle counted out the coins, the man in the car smoothed back a head of grizzled, greasy hair.
“I bet you see a lot of strange people driving through here around this time, huh?” he said, chuckling.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Kyle said, as though he hadn’t heard it before.
“If I had your job, I bet I could write a book about all the characters you must run in to. Must be fascinating work,” he mused.
“It’s alright.”
The man seemed put off by Kyle’s lack of enthusiasm for the subject and started cranking his window back up, but stopped midway for one last comment.
“You know, you’re young though. You still have time to go and make something of yourself. You should think about going back to school.”
Kyle clenched his teeth briefly, then relaxed.
“Actually, I think I’m fine. Thanks though.”
The man drove off, and Kyle picked up his walkie talkie.
“Hey Fiona, some guy just told me I should make something of myself.”
“Fuckin’ asshole,” said Fiona.
“Yeah. Damn.”