Help!

I have a problem and need advice. My students are doing biography book reports. They all get to choose who they do, but they have to be dead (this is my attempt to get them not to do a Detroit Pistons player, American Idol contestant, or George W. Bush; Reagan is now fair game, though. Damn!). One of my students really wants to do hers on a famous Asian or Asian American. I'm all for it, of course, BUT - I cannot find a single kids' biography book about a non-living person from any part of Asia! I've scoured online resources and my library's catalogue. Anyone have an idea or know something I don't? I hate that I have to tell her no, sorry, there is NO ONE from Asian history who is important enough for someone to have written a book about... I may just lift the "has to be dead" requirement and suggest Maya Lin, because there's a book about her...

Maybe this suggests a writing project for me!

cass corridor crash pad

People in my world often seem to have second homes of some sort. No one in my family does, but school-related people do, in numbers I find shocking. Usually these second homes are on a lake or an ocean, or near a lake or an ocean. For some reason they are not generally in cities. Tonight I thought about how I need a second home - or, a second rental - in Detroit, for use on the weekends. I have always wondered about this grandiose, abandoned castle on Cass. Here's what I found on the Metro Times website:

"Known by locals as “the castle,” the grandiose, turreted GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) Building is still there at 1942 Grand River on the corner of Cass, still boarded up, still owned by the city and still occupied solely by pigeons. Built at the end of the 19th century, the castle has been vacant since 1973."

Maybe I could just have one turret as my weekend crash pad? Hmm... Pigeons. Gross! Forget it.

See, I am trying to go out more, with Pam as my role model. I'm not really interested in going out around where I live. I drive to Ferndale or Detroit. Tonight Alice and I went to two places in Detroit I'd been wanting to go to. Both were great fun. Before tonight, I had never had a dude try to pick me up by telling me about the awesome new walk he tried out at his fashion show today. He is a model, you see. He told me about how he innocently took off his shirt one day at some fashion event, and within minutes was handed a different shirt to model and whisked onto a runway. Ever since then, he's been in high demand as a model.

He must have said "model" at least twenty times in less than ten minutes. I don't think I said it at all.

all-night garage sale of the mind

I just lost a big long entry. I think it's because my pinkie nail is too long. Something got pressed. I don't know.

Do you know the song "Billy Boy?" It's totally haunting me right now. In the constant loop it's playing in my mind, it starts as a chorus of cheery hay-riding children, then slows to a macabre horror movie high-pitched refrain. That's maybe just what happens when one of your job requirements is to dress up like a pioneer schoolmistress two days out of every year and teach readin', writin', and 'rithmetic to a bunch of kids dressed in knickers and bonnets at a one-room schoolhouse. Two. Whole. Days. Including fake beating them with fake hickory sticks. While wearing calico. Things go funny in your head. Trust me. Especially when you have a fever. Like me.

I'm feeling better, though, and I'd like to catch you up on what I have and have not been doing.

Recently, I have not been doing these things:
- having insomnia
- settling on a new master plan for my hair
- maintaining an interest in the small bit of gentle online stalking I normally do
- having planned or surprise thrillz
- the splits (but I just checked, and I still can)
- seeing Hot Fuzz
- cutting my pinkie nail
- maintaining communication effectively

I have been doing these things:
- admitting that I should do something about my hair
- eating frozen black cherries
- switching out the summer and winter clothes
- buying nail polish (next step: apply nail polish)
- dragging myself by the elbows through a desert towards my oasis, Friday, 3:10, which has now come and gone, leaving me much refreshed
- drank outside at mollie's a la summertime fun
- signing up for Lynda Barry class in Madison
- listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (at least right now I am)
- deciding that I want the summer to be all about people hosting and inviting me to barbecues of skewered vegetables and soy protein shapes, and beer.
- fondly reminscing about the crush i used to have at whole foods. anything seemed possible back then, in late summer of 2006, when any shortage of cereal or kale would get me all excitable...
- counting down the wake-up days until summer vacation.
- finding a list chris and i made called "A List of Things to Do on the Eve of the Summer Solstice: 1992 Edition." There are 27 options listed. Some highlights include: Flint Expo; home body piercing; visit pam; fix washing machine; balance eggs; shoot: guns, pool, and heroin; and all-night garage sale.

misfit girl doll

Tonight was my school's Family Fun Night. Or, as I call it, Family Freakin' Fun Night. Not that any freakiness really occurs. It's a school carnival, basically, with a cakewalk and games and stuff. Promises of fun be damned; we are always pressured to go, and it always leaves me a little depressed and misfit-toy feeling. It's actually held at my old high school. Around these families in a social situation, I feel just as misfitesque as I did back in the day.

Looking for this picture, I read some guy's opinion that the misfit toy girl, above, was a misfit more for psychological than physical reasons. Touche! (Sorry - I don't know how to do the accented e on my mac and am too tired to look it up).

This week: I got tenure in my district. I also got 1% retroactive pay on what I've made this school year so far - because we finally settled our contract. One percent didn't come to that much, but it's enough to buy a nice new piece of art... and I think that's a good way to celebrate a milestone... but I shouldn't... but I want to... and I have just spent hours looking at art online and pondering... but I probably won't... will I?

I saw a lovely $10,000 Japanese print and had to laugh. People don't really spend that, do they? I am agonizing over whether or not to spend less than two hundred dollars!

There's nothing funny or fun to report! I ate sushi tonight. That was fun. I had work obligations 4 out of the past 5 nights. Neither funny nor fun. Perhaps writing in the ol' di isn't the thing to do after that kind of week. I'll try to build up something to say before I write again.

Back in the day (junior high?) - Smiths "Meat is Murder" t-shirt and a magazine - Star Hits, maybe? My red folder has a Far Side comic taped to it. How zany! And there is a radio/tape player in my bed, just visible behind the blankets. I look really mad. My eyes look weird. Twenty years later, I still don't make my bed. I still have that t-shirt. My hair is not asymmetrical (which it was in those days). Maybe it should be. Also, I still sit on the floor with stuff around me. Sometimes in the midst of a project, I box myself in.

My glamorous friend, Lisa

Lisa apparently has a higher tolerance for pinchy sensations than I do.

Letter Proposition

Do they make pasta sauces in small, single-person sized jars? Or must one be coupley to enjoy waste-free pasta eating? I am tired of throwing away old uneaten pasta sauce. I remember for awhile one could find small cans of black and garbanzo beans, but I haven't seen those in awhile. Could this niche be the answer to my "summertime extra income stream" challenge?

Not wasting pasta sauce now joins "free rides to the airport" as reasons to be part of a couple.

Can you tell I'm on spring break? All kinds of time to think, in conjunction with ample fridge-cleaning opportunities.

This has been the craziest spring break EVAH!!! MTV should totally have a camera rolling in my apartment. Unlike every other break in recent memory, I have been crazy... PRODUCTIVE. Dudes, I am never productive. This is huge. The room with the monster has finally been exorcised, and it now can function as a proper office. What did I discover in this process? Well, I discovered that I have a completely inappropriate amount of stationery. I have a bunch of weird Japanese stationery; I have arty paper; I have homemade "Fuck White Supremacy" stationery; I have weird old travel postcards; I have too-bumpy-to-write-on stationery; I have more stationery than is in any way reasonable, especially considering that I don't write letters.

So here's the deal. Would you like a letter from me, Imaginary Reader? Just leave me a comment to that effect. You will have to give me your email address. Then via email, you will have to give me your real address. I know. It's weird. But if we go through all that, I will send you a letter on carefully selected stationery. Or, most likely I already know you and your address. Still, if you want a damn letter, you have to sign. No sending me a text message. That's just the way it is. Don't even TRY it, bucko.

digging deep

My eating life has been all about noodle soup lately. I'm on a "I spend too much money on food" kick, wherein I'm trying to go deep into the cupboards, eating what I have before breaking down and going grocery shopping. It turns out I have quite a lot of noodles (soba and udon), plus a bunch of soy-ginger broth, plus a ton of frozen edamame and other vegetables, and seaweed. Hence, noodle soup.

It brings back to mind my old idea for a cooking show called "Poorly Stocked Kitchen." The contestants try to make do with the slim pickins in a, well, poorly stocked kitchen. Chris would definitely win, no matter who she took on. She always could whip up some good shit from some mighty incongruent ingredients. That's how I remember our roommate-hood, at least. I would look in the cupboards and see a few blobs of mustard, half a can of beans, soy sauce, and old packets of yeast. Chris would see a delightful Pan-Asian feast, somehow, and it would be really good to boot.

I went to two movies on Saturday night at the DFT. I saw the Thai cowboy movie "Tears of the Black Tiger," and the Jonestown documentary. Both were good. I don't really like writing about movies, or books, even though I love movies and books more than I love most other things. I chalk it up to the art snob dude who exerted terrible control over my opinions for a few years. Yeah, it's still his fault, somehow. Why not? Anyway, I enjoyed a glass of wine before each film and did a lot of people watching. People kept smelling a certain way that reminded me of student co-op parties at U of M. Not really a pleasant smell - in the patchouli family, but different. I hadn't smelled it in years, and oddly, I smelled it all throughout that night. Then in my car, driving home, lo! I smelled it again. Only I was alone now. Which could mean only one thing.

I was the student co-op party smelling girl!

Damn Lush products! You know, I like the idea so much, and they are all so pretty, but this is the second thing I've bought from them that has left an unexpected lingering hippie odor!

I have been watching season 7 of Buffy again (thanks, Jen). As they talk about the impending apocalypse, and how something is coming, I keep getting it mixed up in my mind with April in general. I will have a spring break, then when I return to school I will be slammed with a near-apocalyptic maelstrom of events and stress-inducing obligations, all involving intense preparation and task-mistressing. I am not looking forward to it.

I look ahead in my calendar, feel a chill pass through me, and brace for it - from below, it will devour me. Or from above, or the sides. Someway, April is probably going to devour me.

See you in May?