Ah, Grasshopper

Another Country - Tift Merritt (mp3)
Tell Me True - Sarah Jarosz (mp3)

Dorm duty.

Every night of the week, in every dorm, an adult is responsible for shepherding the little lambs from dinnertime to bedtime. Most advisors live in the dorm. A few, like me, don't. For nine years, I've spent one night each week walking dormitory halls, sitting at a hallway desk for 4-5 hours, striking up the occasional random conversation with adolescent males.

Friday night was the second-to-last night of dormitory obligation. Tonight will be my last. Fitting that my tenure concluded with an encounter that reminded me how full the teenage years are of awkward, uncertain, personality-altering conflicts and experiences.

One of the boys in my dorm -- let's call him Billy -- is a solid student and fairly unassuming guy. Bookish, but not homely or too introverted. In the last month or so, he has become increasingly dismissive of dorm life rules, and his personality in our interactions has shifted in a negative way. Little things here and there, which all speak to a passive-aggressive attitude towards authority.

My last two nights of duty, his behavior has reflected the typical red flags of drug use. Dilated pupils. Locked doors at random times (their doors are supposed to remain unlocked unless they're gone). Goofy or spacey or plain ol' odd responses to standard conversation. So, late on Friday night, I pulled him into a vacant room and offered my theory that he might be making, what we like to call on our campus, "bad decisions."

I hit the barn but missed the target.

Billy has a girlfriend. His first ever. They've been dating almost five weeks. Which, for Billy, is four weeks and six days longer than any other gal-pal he's ever had. The hope of this relationship, of escaping his bubble of dorm life and homework and XBox, rinse and repeat, inspired him to stop taking two very important drugs. He's all but ceased taking both his anti-depressant prescription as well as the meds he takes for ADD.

"The ADD stuff... it really does help me focus and stay on an even keel and avoid distractions, but it makes me feel like a fucking --"

I tilted my head. "Oh. Sorry."

"Thanks. Go on." I'm no prude, but I don't particularly think we're preparing them for life if they feel comfortable hurling naughty words willy-nilly in the presence of adults.

"Adderall makes me feel like a robot. Does that make sense?" (He asked that a lot over the course of our 45-minute conversation.) "I know I need it for my grades, but it feels like it's killing the rest of me. I get this girlfriend, and I wonder if the grades are even worth it anymore."

"You feel more social without the meds?"

"When I take them... I feel removed. Like I'm watching everyone on TV."

What happens often, when adults dive into an intense conversation with a teenager, is that you get more than you had expected, and in entirely unexpected ways. I confronted him expecting a conversation about his own drug use; I was getting a flashback into my own awkward miserable adolescent soul. Except thank God I never had to deal with all those damn meds.

Billy said the girlfriend was negatively affecting all his other relationships. His parents, with whom he often talked several times a week, felt him growing distant. His friends were annoyed with his goo-goo eyed attitude. His teachers were frustrated with his lost focus on school. I was annoyed with his personality change.

"All because of a girl," he said. "Does that make sense?"

Christ almighty, I wish it didn't. "Unfortunately, yes," I said.

His reply: "Well it doesn't make sense to me."

Billy went on to explain that his step-brother was 30 and barely getting by because he'd spent his adolescent life experimenting with drugs. Watching this older brother screw up and witnessing the havoc it wreaked on his life helped Billy know that drugs weren't a particularly wise option. [The irony: he's expected to take two "acceptable" mood-altering medications daily.] Because that so closely mirrored my own reasons for staying away from "bad decisions" in high school, I instantly believed his sincerity. (Sometimes we determine others' honesty by nothing more than how much their statements reflect our own reality... which is rarely the best way to judge it. But I digress.)

Then he offered up the Big Kicker: his new girlfriend was a serious pothead who frequently dabbled in other drugs. LSD. Cocaine. Significant amounts of alcohol.

She just turned 17.

"I know she's bad for me. I know this can't last."

I didn't say anything.

"So... why can't I give her up?" Billy asked, fighting back tears. He managed, the entire time, to be always on the verge of breaking down without ever actually losing composure. It was quite moving. "It's so stupid. I feel so stupid."

It sounds absurd because adolescence is absurd. The cruelest part of learning is the lessons from which no adults can save you, no textbook can prepare you, no test prep can adjust you, no ADD medication can fix you.

Billy spent most of his adolescent years trying desperately to catch a girlfriend. Finally, at long last, he caught one, and instantly everyone is telling him to throw her back and keep fishing. But how long will he have to go fishing to catch another one? A month? Five years? Never? And who's to say the next one he catches won't be equally fucked up? There's plenty of fish in the sea, sure, but that's hardly comforting if you suck at fishing for them.

Billy waited and waited to have someone whose hand he could hold, someone to kiss, someone to sit across from him at a downtown restaurant or with whom to dance at a school dance. He was patient most of the time. Occasionally he probably resigned himself to having no shot. But then... then he found one! And he's supposed to give her up immediately because she's bad for him? Yeah right.

Ironic that all of his problems surround the gaining of a girlfriend, yet acquiring one makes him feel more isolated than ever. His life, previously routine and robotic and boring, has been electrified by this blessed chance at a coveted relationship, and his Frankenstein-esque cadaver has come alive and finally fits into the social puzzle... yet it's all wrong. And there's no clear path towards a happy ending. All roads lead to (temporary) downfall.

As if being 16 and 17 wasn't miserable and frustrating enough, but to throw in the drugs and the alcohol... I dunno. Maybe there's some reward in numbing your adolescent brain from all of it. Diving into a psychadelic distraction from the angst and loneliness until you can emerge older and more capable of handling it. But I don't buy it. Attempting to dodge the misery by postponing it seems to only give the hydra more heads and make them more venomous.

It feels like small concession that he shared all of this with me. Maybe just getting it all out to an adult helps. Maybe.

But being miserable and unsure and (maybe) in love and lonely and desperate to experience a better, cooler life beyond textbooks and classrooms... not all the talk in the world with an adult is going to change or numb those desires.

As adults on the periphery of their lives, the absolute best we can hope to be is a temporary balm.

Maybe that's enough.

That Summer Frame of Mind, Part 1

Crooked Fingers--"Sleep All Summer" (mp3)
Crooked Fingers--"Gentle On My Mind" (mp3)

If you had to drag into work this morning like me (and unless you're one of the 12 of our 15,ooo readers who works here at the same school with me, it's highly unlikely), you know what I mean when I say that the "summer frame of mind" really kicked in this past weeked.

It was a weekend of flowers, staking plants, yard clean-up, a summer movie, a cookout (okay, a cook-in because of the rain), staying up until 1:30 in front of a fire drinking too much beer, canning salsa, listening to music outdoors, roasting marshmallows. In short, it was the summer. But not quite.

So you know it's a rough transition back to work on a day like today, Memorial Day, that day of barbecues and family gatherings, flags and memories. But not for us working stiffs. For us, it's a day of business as usual. By the time we get home and ponder the big cookout, we realize that work again tomorrow looms and, therefore, undercuts our initiative.

But, undeniably, it is also almost summer.

Right now, the Platonic Conception Of The Summer hangs before us like a perfect, homegrown tomato. Everything is planted and growing beautifully; none of it has begun to wither and rot. It will be the best crop ever. Those trips, those destinations, those walks on sandy beaches--all pristine, all perfectly executed. No thoughts of oil or hurricanes. That money? Who needs to worry. There will be plenty of it to indulge any spontaneous excursion, any summer fancy. Work? Who cares! Each day will fly by and we will rush home to our grills and our sandals, a cold beer and a warm friend, a comfortable evening with no humidity or mosquitoes or firecrackers that send the dog under the couch.

Some of us, no doubt, have other favorite seasons, but the summer offers so many more hours, and so many more hours of light, to live instead of work, so that sheer vitality is perhaps the greatest of its many charms.

Which is why I really hate working in the summer. It just feels like I could be doing so many other things. And working at a school and being on a "school schedule" for most of the past 50 years and having that mindset ingrained within, that only makes it worse. I know I could be elsewhere, doing...I don't know, working on the farm, maybe to helping to bring the crops in, or whatever the hell created the idea of summer vacation in the first place.

But, we all trooper on through, and I will be doing the same. With no students around, I'll probably play music here in the office, head home for lunch and walk out in the sun to look at the tomatoes, plan a few late afternoon matinees to see summer blockbusters, plan a strategy for Riverbend and the Strut.

Plus, I've got a couple of good "summer reads" here in the office, Shogun and 1984, so maybe I'll get in one chair, prop my legs up in the other, and pretend I'm sitting by a pool somewhere with a fancy cocktail and a warm breeze. Maybe I'll even fall asleep, and in this energy-efficient office, if you don't move often enough, the lights turn off themselves, and then I'll be slumbering here in the dark and maybe no one will even notice that I'm here.

And I'll be dreaming away about summer.

Coming Wednesday: In Part 2 of this series, I'll be bringing my "Summer Cruisin' 2010" mix to the party. Get your ears on!

27

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band--"If I Should Fall Behind (live)" (mp3)

Today is 27 years. It is not easy to believe.

Twenty-seven years ago, we exchanged vows in a country church in rural Kentucky (redundant for emphasis), a church where every seat was taken, a church where every seat taken we had cleaned ourselves two days before the wedding. It was that kind of church.

My parents ended up left behind the mass exodus back to my wife's house for the reception. They got lost. They stopped to ask directions. They were told, "All roads lead to Dixon." It was that kind of wedding.

By the time we got to the reception, all of the champagne was gone. It was a dry county. My father-in-law thought one case would be enough. He was wrong. The moment we walked into the house, a receiving line formed, and we spend the entire reception in that receiving line, greeting and exchanging pleasantries with everyone who had come all the way up until it was time to leave and my wife's mother stood at the front door, weeping and basically begging her not to go. It was that kind of reception.

We got into a car and headed off to our honeymoon. North. Mackinaw Island, Michigan. We made it as far as Evansville that first night. We had had nothing to eat. We didn't get anything that night either. The next morning, my wife wanted coffee and remembered a place nearby and I walked around the hotel three times looking for it, but it turned out to be a place outside a different hotel in a different place. It was that kind of honeymoon.

There is nothing harder that anyone will do in their lives than be married for 27 years or less or more. That is not a comentary on my marriage or anyone else's. It's just a fact.

Marriage involves not quitting when every other part of your life involves quitting. Don't like your job? Quit and find a new one. Don't like your church? Same thing. And it holds true for your grocery store, your health club, your magazine subscriptions, your lawn service, your cell phone provider, your dog, you name it. Don't like them? Quit them. Get rid of them. Find new ones.

Don't like your house? Build an addition. Paint over it. Put siding on it. Or sell it.

You can't do that to marriage. Marriage runs counter to every other aspect of our disposable lives. And if you make it to 50 years with your spouse, it's an absolute miracle. It means that you have probably been blessed with both understanding and long life. Few people get both; many hope to get either.

And so, 27 years feels like a special day, even though it's an odd number and doesn't fit the media definition of recognizing key benchmarks that come in fives.

It's a special day because it was to be celebrated with Neil Young tickets in Knoxville, something that didn't happen because my daughter lost a close college friend to an unexpected medical condition and my wife accompanied her up to the services somewhere in Central Michigan and I sold the tickets and now whatever happens today will be low-keyed and perhaps unworthy of marking such a milestone, except that whatever happens today will mark the day (it can't help but not) and, in doing so, will nudge the journey forward, ever so uneventfully, toward 28.

Springsteen's "If I Should Fall Behind" is, arguably, one of the finest songs about a long-term relationship ever written. It was originally available on Human Touch (or Lucky Town, I can't remember). Unfortunately for listeners here, the recorded version is far superior to this live version.

Slick

Dark Water - Galactic (mp3)

I am not an environmentalist. I am not Green. I am not someone who values animal rights or plant rights over those of humans who scratched and clawed our way to the top of the food chain.

I don't hunt, but I have no beef with dudes who get off shooting Bambi. I don't fish, but hoorah for dudes who sit out all night, drunk, on a small motorboat, to catch a few bass.

So why is it that someone like me, someone entirely non-leftist about our environment, finds myself beginning to boil with rage about The BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010?

I'm mad that it took me so goddamn long to get upset about it. I'm mad that I'm in a very large majority of equally-apathetic people.

It's been five years since Katrina, when all of us discovered the ineptitude of the Bush Administration.

Five years later, our entire country has turned into the Bush Administration, where we're all slow to give a shit and even slower to react and do anything about it. It's like we were all out on our verandas, sipping mint juleps and wearing critter pants, our sweaters tied around our shoulders, when our butler walks out and informs us that our son is strung out on heroin in the pool house. And our collective response, as the citizens of the Greatest Country In The World is: "Meh." And then we go back to checking on our 401k mutual funds and scheduling our next pedicures. Our son will be fine. He's just going through a phase.

What the hell's the matter with us? And why does it feel like our collective lack of vitriol -- or anything beyond a symbolic grimace and flashing look of concern, really -- might well be the real beginnings of our own Fall of Rome?

Raise taxes, and by God you'll get the wrath of every red-blooded red state redneck this side of the Canadian border. Show pictures of a Mexican-looking man getting treated in an ER at cost to taxpayers, and you'll enrage more than a fifth of our national population. Say the word "evolution" or "abortion," and you'll have self-righteous people marching all over your ass until it's jello.

But say "bigger environmental disaster than Exxon Valdez," and people kinda shrug and say "tsk tsk that's a shame" and then go back to working on that bugger of a Sudoku puzzle.

On the larger scale of politics and news, I totally get why no one is stoking this fire.

A Democratic "Socialist" President attempted to mollify Republicans by announcing an expansion of drilling in the Gulf. Republicans love oil, and they love drilling, so the absolute last thing they want is to spend energy making Obama look too bad. Hell, it's easier to find a politician beyond Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana to criticize Obama on his choice of shampoo than it is to find one who will go on record questioning this crisis.

The left, meanwhile, is scared to complain too much, because the mood of their voting bloc is already dubious enough, and scaring away too many voters by excoriating their leader could lead to more talk about crap like "Tea Party mandates."

So no politicians want to complain. And BP is so intertwined up our government's ass, that we can't really be too mean to BP without causing serious problems for the fuel needs and costs of our beloved Pentagon. There aren't many other big corporations out there dying to throw stones at BP, either, because those skyscraper headquarters are still mostly made of glass.

And the six large news corporations remaining only seem capable of doing compelling stories on Jesse James or the Salahis. Anything that gets us too worked up risks motivating us to get our asses off the couch. Which kills ratings. Which kills ad revenue. Which is dying fast enough as it is, thank you very much. They need to keep us on that couch.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's a collective, shared, desperate desire to keep us from giving too much of a shit. And it's working because we're complicit in it. We the citizens of the United States in the 21st Century are desperate to do as little as possible. Sure, we'll give some money. Just make it easy for us.

We'll happily text five little numbers to give $10 to Red Cross, and then we'll congratulate ourselves like we're the next Nelson Rockefeller 'cuz we're so damned charitable. But if you ask us to get off our couches and kick in to the effort? If you ask us for any kind of personal sacrifice for the betterment of our environment or our children or our country's fiscal health? Bugger off already. The NBA playoffs are on!

Here's my peeps on Morning Joe talking about it. And, even though Mika and Joe sound like they don't really know what they're talking about towards the end, it's just nice to see 'em getting worked up about it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Random jewelry storage ideas that I love.....

You know, as much as some people resent Martha Stewart for what she did, you've got to give the woman MAJOR credit for her ability to build such a massive creative brand! And, to be honest, I can only hope to be half as successful as her because come to think of it... I would love to create a design empire like hers! In the past I don't think I've flipped through her magazine more than twice, maybe (I'm more of an Elle Decor and Metropolitan Home gal)... but on the way to Europe my mom and I bought a few design magazines at the airport for the plane ride and let me tell you, Martha Stewart Living has beautiful images, ideas and recipes! Anyway, I perused her website for a while when I got back from my trip and I stumbled upon some ideas for creatively storing and displaying your jewelery - the images are beyond inspiring!

Over time, my jewelry starts to pile up and get wildly messy on my dresser. Currently I try to keep the majority of it in this awesome wooden box that is actually for Spinneybeck leather samples, but it always trickles out onto my dresser. When I worked for Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Design Department as the Design Librarian I got to keep the box when we moved because they were going to throw it out, it's a great box, it has three drawers with magnetic closures and red leather pulls, removable wooden dividers and a red leather carrying handle on top... But as perfect as it is, I still have the issue of "out of sight out of mind," therefore I really like displaying as much of my jewelry as possible in creative ways OUTSIDE the box - so I can see it, all thus not forget about it and actually wear it! With that said, I like these ideas..... more projects for my list of projects... what else is new!? :)

Funny thing is, I have oodles of little ceramic bowls and dishes from Turkey, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy and all of the other fifteen or so European countries that I've been to so far! Now, if only I had one large drawer to do this and display them all neatly in.... hrmmmm...

This hanging shadow box display for jewelry is a DIY project using decorative wallpaper, hooks and a wooden wine/liquor crate, the instructions can be found under Stylish Jewelry Storage at Martha Stewart's website. I have two wine crates at home that I use to stack my DVD's and the boyfriend's PS3 games in, but lately I've been considering changing their purpose to this.... hehehehehe....

And last, this is not really a new concept to me, but I it's still one I love and have yet to replicate! So simple and so organic.... :)

Images via Stylish Jewelry Storage at Martha Stewart's website

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I want to show you ideas from other sources so I did a quick Google image search on creative jewelry displays and found these......

According to the blog All Things Austin Design, this was made from some random sticks found after a storm by artist Gadora Wilder, who reinvents old furniture and objects. Check out her blog Gadora Wilder: Refashioning Life's Furnishings.

This is a picture from Flickr ... the frame contains a piece of knitted fabric which acts as the base for which to hang earrings on.


From Red and Black's How to Make Creative Holiday Gifts here is framed chicken wire... voila, instant jewelry hanger!



From Design*Sponge comes this clever DIY idea to conceal your jewelry... I think it's so cool (with a nicer piece of art of course, harhar). Check out the full how-to instructions here.


Also from Design*Sponge is a DIY how-to guide on making a jewelry display bust... so if you don't have a real one like the one pictured in the Martha Stewart ideas above (first image in blog) then have at this project ladies!!!


This beautiful DIY jewelry display is from Lost Button Studio, it's so so pretty.... and how I wish I had an entire table to dedicate to my jewelry display!!
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And last but not least, for those of you that want something funky like the ideas above but don't want to make it yourself... I found a store on Etsy called Nishka's Niche that sells these and they look pretty cool:

Update: My Garden Gang

Without any lengthy explanations, here are images of my plants taken this past weekend, they're all doing pretty good! The Echeveria succulent above (I call it my bloomin' onion, hehe) is becoming my absolute favorite!!! The picture below is what it looked like before I left for my trip to Europe, as you can see the flower stalks were just babies at that time and now they have grown super tall and are starting to bloom - pink and yellow! SO LOVELY!

This was almost three weeks ago...

And here it is now....(again... because it's so pretty..hehe)...

Here are my sunflowers and flower bulbs, I have decided I am going to hand them over to my mother because they need more room to grow and she can plant them in her yard......

My cactus sprouted a new baby from its side!!!..... how cute....

My grandmother gave me this ground orchid and it finally bloomed!....

The succulents in this big planter are doing wonderful, the purple one on the left has really plumped up and taken on a wonderful rich hue since I transplanted it....

I finally transplanted my Mexican Love plants, one pink and one purple (Julie - hopefully mine will maintain their colors!!)...