I've Arrived!

I am now (mostly) settled in my apartment in Buffalo. I don't have much time to update, because real life out on your own is shockingly busy and time-consuming, but here are some pictures of my new habitat.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

This is my final night at home. I'm sitting on a mattress on the floor of my bedroom. It's strange that, even though all of the stuff I'm taking with me is packed and out of the house, this room is still very much mine. My dresser, my TV, my pictures, my high school diploma, some paintings I did years ago, bunny slippers, and GRE books are all still here. An elementary school name tag is still thumbtacked to the wall.

I guess I'll be haunting this house for a while.

My last posts have all been about looking back and reflecting on my life here in this small town with pizza shop owners who have known me since I was a toddler and quirky points of pride including a stolen bell from the Civil War. But I haven't adequately expressed just how excited I am to do this. I really can't wait to arrive at my new place and arrange all of our things. This is an adventure, and I'm so happy to be doing it with Jarrod, because we will grow, explore, learn, struggle, laugh, sing, wash dishes, discover, run, study, and love.

But I've been correct in looking back, because this is a big step and my excitement for the future does not discount just how dear this time has been.

Mom and Dad, I'm not leaving you and I'll continue to need you, not in the same ways, but I'll need you nonetheless, just like when I could tie my shoes by myself, there were still other things that I needed and wanted you for-- I'll always need your ears, your words, your support and encouragement. But now I can give more to you too. This isn't easy, but it's good; I'm leaving home because you've been such incredible parents. You have raised me to be an adult, and I am one.

Now I can look forward, and move forward, and construct my life. This is a great responsibility, but I'm equal to it, and I'll do so with zeal and joy.

Plus, you know, Buffalo isn't all that far away and I'll always come back to this place, and it will always be my home. It will change and so will I, but it's still home.

Sweet New England

My worldly possessions are ready to be loaded into a truck tomorrow morning, including a lot of my pictures. I still have them all on my computer, however, so here are some images of my final summer in New England.

The first few images are from a walk around my neighborhood

Love

Strawberry-picking in New Hampshire

And baseball in Rhode Island

Boston on Independence Day

A garden in Harvard

One last trip to my alma mater

My friend's mad tea party birthday

And a goodbye cake

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.

Life Update

I haven't written on here in a few weeks. First, I want to note that I'm not nearly as sad as I was when I wrote that last entry on the day that my dog died. I'll always miss Sasha, but I know that it was her time and I had to let her go.

This month has been insane because I'm preparing for my big move. In two weeks, I'll be packing up my life and [cliche alert!!] shuffle off the Buffalo, where I will earn my Masters in English. I'm packing, planning, making phone calls, reminiscing, painting, and writing and moving in a million different directions at once (emotionally, that is; physically, I just get on one highway and head west until I hit my first Great Lake). The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and emotion, and it's only going to intensify from here on out. Despite all the turbulence that necessarily surrounds this kind of life change, I can't contain how excited I am to embark on this adventure with my boyfriend, my best friend, Jarrod.

So this blog will undergo some changes in this process; I won't have as much time to write here, because I'll be writing papers for classes, studying, exploring my new city, and living. But, when I do post, I am certain that the quality of these scribblings will be much improved, because I want to keep this as a sort of portfolio of my work; after I hand in my papers for school and get them back with grades and comments, I'm going to make some edits to them and post them here.

In the meantime, I'll post a few things about this preparation period and my move (expect pictures!), and try to keep sane.

Sasha

I was twelve years old when we first said goodbye, me and Sasha. I vividly remember that first dinner without my fuzzy friend sitting next to me with her chin in my lap, begging for whatever was on my plate. I sat at the table, sobbing over my untouched macaroni. That dog, who had been my companion for six months, was on her way to Kansas with my sister and brother-in-law, and I missed her so much already. I knew that Sasha belonged to Laurie and Brian, and that they loved her as much as I did and would take good care of her, but that did little to console me. I couldn't stop my lip from quivering as I found smudges on the windows from when she would press her nose against the glass, intently watching a squirrel in the yard. I missed that happy face waiting for me in the window when I came home from school.

I'm twenty three now, but I found myself tearing up over lunch at work and sobbing on my way home because there would be no gentle face in the window.

Sasha and I had our last goodbye this morning.

I've said goodbye to this dog a lot of times over the past twelve years; she was a dog with two families. My brother-in-law is in the Army, so Sasha couldn't always go with them when he and my sister relocated; and when she couldn't make the journey, wherever it may be, she came here. That first time, Brian was training in California and Laurie was in New Hampshire finishing her undergraduate degree and Sasha, alone in Kansas in need of rescue from a negligent dog sitter. She came back again a year later when they were stationed in Texas with an apartment too small (and an inhospitable climate) for a Siberian husky. In the months since Sasha had left, we missed having a dog so much that we got our golden retriever Heidi. We were a little anxious over whether the two dogs would accept each other, especially since my Heidi has a lot of attitude and audacity. But that qualm was quickly dispelled, and over the years, the dogs have bonded, to the point that Heidi searched the yard with perplexed sadness for weeks after Sasha had left us. To the point that Heidi stayed with her all last night.

Sasha was only supposed to be here for three years this time, while my sister and her family were stationed in Germany; but a year ago, it became evident that this visit would last the rest of her life. In October, we found out that Sasha had Cushing's disease, an illness caused by malignant tumors on her adrenal gland. An illness that would weaken her muscles, make her lose her fur, sap her energy, and eventually destroy her kidneys. The usual life span is a year or two.

When I first met Sasha, she bounded onto my front porch and greeted me by leaping up and throwing her paws onto my shoulders. She was almost year old then, but still had a lot of puppy in her, and I still had a lot of little girl in me. I formed an attachment to the dog like a young child has to a favorite toy endued with a vivid personality and internal life, a life which is a reflection of one's own inner world. Sasha was the keeper of the secrets of my twelve-year-old soul. I talked to her like she was a person, certain that, in the gaze of those intelligent blue eyes, she understood me. A precious feeling for the pains and sensitivity of that awkward age, which made it hard to let her go.

When I came home from Quincy on Monday afternoon, I knew that I had to let her go for good this time. She lay quietly on her side, her tongue lolling out. She couldn't stand up on her own anymore, and this morning, she was too weak to pick up her head. Her labored breathing was painful to watch. I sat down on the floor next to her, a cup of coffee in-hand to compensate for the five and a half hours of sleep I managed last night. She looked up at me with those still evocative blue eyes, now stained with tears from an eye infection, dimmed by illness and pain. I stroked her soft ears, still the only part of her that had turned silver with age, and said, "Soon, Sasha." It would be over soon.

I was sad to see her in such a state, so different from the strong, energetic, magnificent animal I had known. The dog who could walk for miles without the slightest sign of fatigue. The dog who took running leaps onto the couch. The one who got so excited about snow that she buried her whole face in it and stayed outside virtually all winter. But she was my Sasha still, so sweet, so calm and quiet to the last.

For her final two days, she didn't want to be alone. She yipped whenever someone left her field of vision. Her bark was always a surprisingly little sound from so large and powerful a dog, though it was less incongruous now in her weakness. I remembered Sasha the puppy with terrible separation anxiety. She once destroyed every magazine in the house when she was left alone for only an hour, and she whined indignantly whenever she was kept out on the porch for too long after dinner, impatient to rejoin the pack inside.

That's how I thought I wanted to remember her. But this morning, I was compelled to take a picture of her, knowing that it would be the last. Perhaps that was reason enough to take it. to have a punctuation mark on her life, a final image that, while so different from the young, healthy Sasha, was essential. I couldn't discount her final year, her sickness. Even dying, she was ever graceful, loving and sweet.

I ran today, I ran for a long time along routes that I used to walk with Sasha in her youth, before she started to struggle to make it to the end of the street, then to three houses down, then to the next door neighbors' house, then beyond the driveway. My parents had to carry her into the vet (we couldn't take her walking, we couldn't euthanize her until death was certain; she would have died tomorrow, but perhaps only after having seizures and suffering terribly). I wished that I could be there with her as the life left her body. One moment, she would be breathing so heavily, still struggling to sustain the last painful breaths of life. The next, gone.

She's gone now. We'll retrieve her ashes and bury them in the yard, in the place on the hill where she always sat and watched the world with bright, happy eyes. She'll return to the earth, but remain buried in my heart too.

Teach and Learn

I may have mentioned before that I am about to start graduate school this fall, to get an MA in English literature. I'm still not entirely certain what my academic focus is going to be (since I have an array of disjointed interests like postmodernism, madness, theater, work and identity), but my game plan for what to do with that degree is to teach English at the high school level, preferably in a private school or prep school. With that goal in mind, I've been thinking about how to approach teaching; true, I need to re-learn how to be a student this semester, but I think it's best to consider the two in conjunction, teaching and learning. My goal is to be both a teacher and a learner.

One of my enduring interests in literature is the construction of identity through narrative, and I think that this is one of the most important things that I have to teach adolescents; they are responsible for constructing their own identities, and facility with language is essential in doing that effectively and resisting the narratives that others will attempt to impose on them. I want to start the school year with a creative nonfiction writing exercise in which the students think of themselves as narrators and characters. There are undoubtedly dangers and limitations in viewing one's own life in terms of narrative, but this exercise of actually constructing a narrative is one way to open the discussion about those limitations, the inability to capture reality and the self in words. I want my students to realize that narratives are everywhere, and to be thoughtful and critical of every narrative they encounter.

I don't think that it's unreasonable to introduce high schoolers to literary theory; many of the theories are rather easily explained, like Marxist criticism or feminist theory, for one thing. But more important is that I want to approach my students in the same way as Zarathustra regarded the Higher Men in the second half of the book: with an expectation that they are self-sufficient and capable.

A few weeks ago, I read an article on Zarathustra and Socrates as teachers of virtue; both initially made the same mistake of assuming a position of privilege and descending to their students. In Nietzsche's reading of the Apology, Socrates chose death because he realized the inherent failure of his work and was committed to the idea of being the fool who would be taken seriously. The teacher of virtue must certainly take his work seriously, because virtue is of the utmost importance, but not himself; he must maintain a sense of irony about himself, and Socrates would not do that, so he chose death. Initially, Zarathustra insisted on being taken seriously as well, and he also failed to reach his students when he descended to them from a point of privilege. Zarathustra, however, succeeds as a teacher when he chooses to be a squanderer and a fisher of men from a mountain top:

"What to sacrifice! I squander what is given me, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that-- sacrificing? And when I desired honey I only desired bait, and sweet mucus and mucilage, for which even the mouths of growling bears, and strange, sulky, evil birds, water:
-The best bait, as huntsmen and fishermen require it. For if the world be as a gloomy forest of animals, and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather--and preferably-- a fathomless, rich sea;
--A sea of many-hued fishes and crabs, for which even the gods might long, and might be tempted to become fishers in it, and casters of nets, --so rich is the world in wonderful things, great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: --towards it do I now throw out my golden angle-rod and say: Open up, thou human abyss!"

Zarathustra approaches teaching as an overflowing of his own joy and wisdom, and the way to attract students is to throw out that excessive happiness, to lure them up to his height instead of him descending down to them. I want to teach in a similar manner, by imploring my students to "climb mountains" with me. I should not view them as deficient, but as capable and striving. I should challenge them to raise themselves, and show them how to do that by challenging myself constantly; I will also be a learner and model the life of a learner and striver for them. This is one way of avoiding the stagnation and complacency that has made me wary of teaching in the past; I have a responsibility to constantly improve myself, for myself and for my students too.

I want my students to view themselves as self-sufficient and to foster their independence. I know that they will not all love literature, and I might fail in reaching any of the goals I set for them, but it's important that I do it anyway.