Car trouble

Long story short, my car won't start for love or money. This evening, after much trial and tribulation, it was towed. Sigh. And now I'm a pinioned bird - a dead electrical system pulled out my flight feathers.

Long story long? Let's not go there. Even I don't want to hear the whole thing.

Thank you, God for my car not working anymore. Like Betsie ten Boom thanking you for the fleas, I don't much like this, but I have faith that, somehow, it will glorify you.

Peace.
PP

Texting

Dear Jojo,
Thanks for signing your texts. This way, there is absolutely no chance of mistaking who they're from. To be honest, I sorta wish you had just stuck to calling me on the phone. On the other hand, I'm proud of you for wanting to master the new technology. That makes you pretty BA - and you most definitely get an A+ for effort.
love,
your granddaughter.

The Epics 3

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
This week I read Jane Eyre. It has been a long time since I could not put a book down. What engrossing language, vivid descriptions, real characters! It was full of words I didn't know, passages in French, antique phrasings, and lovely imagery. The ring of truth was a thread that wound its way through every page, leaving no paragraph untinged by its radiance.
Lol. The accent of the writing has got into my head.
Seriously though. One of the things I loved about this book was how it a) stretched my powers of text-comprehension as I read it, b) portrayed real human beings, who lived in accordance with truth and justice as they saw them.
Next up, The Eyre Affair (which is an old favorite, if not an epic).

Talkers

I have a lot of friends who like to talk.

That is good, because I like to listen.

What my talkative friends may forget is that I sometimes like to talk, too.

Often the mark of a close friend in my life is that that person knows how and when to give me space to say my piece.

**************************
In other news...
Why do I even bother cooking? I'm SO much better at baking!
Oh, right, 'cause I have to eat human food, not pure carbs. Riiiight.
Tonight's recipes: Cheesy potatoes (we'll see if they're any good. I mean... can you really go wrong with potatoes and cheese?) and Banana bread (which is AMAZING, if I do say so myself).
Next exciting summer recipe: empanadas. (I have no idea how to make these, I just thought of it just now b/c it combines baking and cooking... kinda) Right after the orange sorbet and mounds of pasta. Ahem.
NEXT exciting summer recipe: orange sorbet, followed by mounds of bowtie pasta with at least 3 different, fascinating sauces. w00t.

The Epics 2

In my list of epics...

Third: Anna and the King
An English woman moves to Siam with her son, Louis, to be schoolteacher to the King's son. In the events that ensue, she makes a school for the King's 68 children, liberates a slave, teaches the King's son about justice and slavery, saves the royal family from certain death (a traitor in the King's court attempts a coup), saving the King's life and enabling him to kill the traitor, falls in love with the King and causes him to fall in love with her. She always speaks her mind, does not depart from her values and standards, and remains upright under pressure. The future of the country is changed because of her presence at the heart of the royal family.

I absolutely loved this movie for its intricacy, complexity, and the verisimilitude of its characters. Also for the way evil and moral decay/decline were bested and defeated at every turn. It reminds me of a quote by C. S. Lewis:
"Real things are sharp and knobbly and complicated and different."

Wrong Answer

My grandparents, my sister and I sat in the restaurant-booth. As we waited for the food to arrive, we conversed with a comparative ease and fluency that surprised me. My sister and I had put off setting a specific date and time for this particular dinner for weeks and weeks, both of us dreading it. You see, the great danger with my mother's parents, is that my grandmother is a monologuer - which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the fact that her favorite subjects tend to be either too boring or too controversial for comfortable conversation. Dinner with her, we expected, would consist of her talking volubly while my grandfather sat sullenly, eating his meal, and we attempted to listen as politely as we could, dutifully returning the love our grandparents were attempting to lavish on us. But that was not how the evening went at all. As I said before, we conversed with comparative ease and fluency, telling stories and teasing one another. And naturally, one of the things my grandfather asked, in a joking sort of way, was what I intended to do after college. After all, he said, college, he'd been told, was the time a person is given to decide what they want to do. So I told him. I said, "Well, I'm going to teach English as a second language." and then, laughingly, "...but I only decided that two weeks ago, so don't ask too many questions yet!" To which my grandmother replied by asking where I would go to work, meaning where in the world. And I, high on having successfully both made my grandfather laugh and avoided an in-depth analysis of my Next Step in Life, replied, with another laugh in my voice, "That's the wrong question." - and immediately thought to myself, "and that was the wrong answer," because my grandmother turned from me, as if I had struck her a blow to the face. We didn't talk about my Future any more.
That wasn't the end of the night, by any means, and I hope I behaved more respectfully for the rest of it. But it made me think. This being equal with adults thing is an extremely hard balance to strike. How do you honor your father and mother, while being autonomous and an adult? What do you do with loving inquiries into matters on which you feel you're coming along just fine, thank-you-very-much? What is the best way to show your family, as an emerging adult, that you love and appreciate them? Despite my grandparents not being the funnest people to be around, I do love them dearly, and I know the feeling is mutual (if not stronger on their part). I was truly privileged tonight to hear many new and different stories from their lives that I had never heard before, and to hear the echoes of the years they have spent together; years spent with my mother and her sisters, my family. I was touched, once again, by their generosity, and how they crave the affection of their grandchildren, and how they want to take care of us, and make sure we will be provided for. They showered us in demonstrations of love. They made great effort to get us to agree to go to dinner with them, to take us out to a nice restaurant, to clean their kitchen; my grandmother even tried making a new kind of cake! They were so kind and generous, and of all the emotions I find within myself after this amazing blessing of a meeting, I am surprised and upset to find shame. Have I loved them well? I don't know that I can satisfactorily answer yes. But I don't want to be that grandchild. You know. The thankless one. I am thankful. But those words are not enough. What to do? Sigh. With this mash of mixed emotions (though mostly grateful ones), I shall go to sleep. Because you can't decide anything properly at one in the morning.
TBC.
PP.

List of...

Things I ought to do in the near future, by urgency:
-Finish/mail my letter to C. (done)
-Finish/mail my letter to A. (done)
-Talk to/catch up with Ashley.
-Ditto for Angelica.
-Go help Ashley and Angelica pack/prep for moving.
-Ask to hang out with Joni & Sarah & Joanna for serious-talk time.
-Find a time to actually hang out with Michelle A. and Melissa.
-Take a "vacation" and see/spend time with my family before they all move away in the fall and I have to roadtrip to see them.
-Make sure I continue to hang out semi-consistently with: Bethaney, Stacey, Rachel, Amber, Michelle, Melissa, Joni, Sarah, Joanna, Lindsey, Ashley, and Angelica.
-Make sure I talk to: Hana, Annalisa, Ann-Phyllis.
-Answer Preston's e-mail
-Determine, once-and-for-all, how I want to overhaul my wardrobe, and what I want to be in it when I'm done.

Things I would like to do:
-To see Amber J's baby.
-Spend a weekend with D&J and little Elijah! That should probably be toward the end of the summer though... plans!
-What about Ellen & co? Could I spend time with them somehow this summer?
Etc. Oh, having a social life. xD

It's official.

There's a small wasp-nest in my doorway.
Know what else is official?
It's coming down. Mission Nest-Removal begins tonight, 2200 hours.
---------
So I bought the wasp-killer. Sadly there was a gigantic thunder-storm tonight, so no wasp-spraying yet. But soon. Soon.
-------------
The mission was delayed another night, due to extreme lateness of the hour of my return home compounded by complete ignorance of how to use the wasp spray.
The next day, I asked someone (a random dude who was working on the neighborhood pool) how best to plan my attack. He had some very valuable insight into the strategy of the thing.
Then, I did it.
I got home, tested the spray (to see how far it could go, hehehe. and to practice aiming it).
I suited up with:
1 pair jeans
1 pair sweatpants
1 pair thick, fuzzy slippers
1 long sleeve shirt
1 thick hoodie (with the hood up)
1 scarf (around my face)
1 beanie
Then I opened the door, sprayed the shit out of the wasps' nest, watched them fall to the ground, and slammed the door shut, all in under a minute. ...of course, it took me about five, plus a quote from The Princess Diaries to psych myself up for those 30 seconds or so, but w/e. The job is done.
What was the quote, you wonder?
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
which, by the way, (according to the internet) was originally said by Ambrose Redmoon.
So yeah. All's well that (almost) ends well. Now I just have to knock the stupid thing down in a day or so. Yippee.
I have to say though, seeing those wasps lying dead on my porch was sweet, sweet victory.
Cheers.
PP.

Epilogue
So now I know that the reason the spray can tells you to wait 24h or more before removing the nest is because in that time the larvae drop out of it! Can you say EW? I also may or may not have screamed "Augh! It's ALIVE!!" when one of them started moving.
But now the wasps are all removed, including wiggly larvae (which I sprayed with some more spray, for good measure). Mission wasp-removal has been successfully accomplished.
w00t!
I am exceedingly proud of my accomplishment.

Dreaming Reality?

After the literal explosion of tutoring this week, it has invaded my dreams.
Faceless Asian boys have invaded my dreams, and they brought their schoolwork.
Most. Boring. Dream. Ever.

On a more realistic note, I tutor a lot of Korean guys. That is my biggest demographic. I don't talk to guys much, and certainly not easily. But in this case, all we have to talk about is what they write - which is so easy! 'Cause nothing about them matters in that conversation except getting their thoughts to come out in English. =)

Phones

I am here to whine about phones. Specifically, about the "advances" of technology. The first two I feel very strongly about - the others I could see how they'd be just a matter of personal preference.

a) I like number pads on a phone. It just makes sense. My phone is not a mini-laptop, I don't need a full keyboard. Just sayin'.

b) What is the big deal with touch screens? Can we please get over them? They're not that cool. You're not actually manipulating real objects, fyi. Also, they get grimy very quickly. What happened to all those years when grown ups around you were shouting "DON'T TOUCH THE SCREEN!" or "DON'T SMUDGE THE PHOTOS!" or "DON'T TOUCH THE WINDOW, YOU'LL GET FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT". It's like all these admonitions just vanished overnight, or as if technology had been taken over by vindictive eight-year-olds.

c) Wi-fi. While I can see how it might be useful to have google maps on your phone (I get lost WAY too often for my own good), there's a reason they started calling Blackberries "crackberries". It's just not healthy to be living with the internet in my pocket - sorry, in my hand, 'cause if I DID have internet on my phone, I'd never leave it for the real world.

d) Why are phones so BIG? I thought we were over that! I thought we figured out how to make them as small as playing cards and as thin as pencils. That was awesome! What happened? (redirect: QWERTY keyboards).

And with that, I'm done for the moment. But seriously y'all. Think about the touch screen ridiculousness.
...
My dad likes to say that technology is shifting to a new paradigm, and that those of us who like to push buttons are going to be out of luck pretty soon. *sigh*

And now for something completely different:

"We need to restore the honor of the cucumber!"
- Francesco Sosa-Wagner

Grammar-check

When you think about it, it's really pretty funny when students ask me to give their paper "just a grammar-check". What do they think they're asking for?

Because - dear student - when I find a sentence like "Those arguments create the misbelieves over the networks of neighbors and even lovers," how do I even begin to tell you what is wrong with your "grammar" in a way that won't make both of us cringe? How can I tell you that, yes, I can read this and know that you probably mean "Such arguments caused mistrust among social networks and even lovers," but your professor will callously mark it "unclear," because he's not trying as hard as I am to hear the voice behind your words.
I do my best, when I read your paper, to understand how and why you have misused a word, whether you know its meaning or have ascribed another to it. I know that you say "betwixt" in part because you were bewitched by the word's spunk, and how much more fun it is than "between," even though you really meant the latter. I understand that you don't know, yet, that although betwixt sounds spunky, and although between runs around town without her, she is actually a shy old word, and won't be seen without her escorts, "and" and "between". I get that you can never tell where those pesky articles go, and I'll forgive you for it and move on. I know that prepositions are impossible- "against" must always follow "discriminate," and "endows" is always accompanied by "with," but your immediate guesses are "in," "to," "of," and "for" - if you realize that a preposition belongs there at all.
I understand all of these things and a myriad more. Intricacies and nuances of expression you'd never even considered pour into my mind as I read your paper. I look through your words as a person looking through coarse, wave-filled glass, trying to guess which bits on the other side are trees, which bits other houses or mailboxes or clouds or people. Is this what you want when you ask me for a "grammar-check"? Or do you just want me to put your commas in place and tell you when you've mixed up your prepositions?
I don't know, but really, it's never as simple as checking your grammar. There are also the words you choose - verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs - what they mean, and the order you put them in, and whether you've even thought about a sentence or just put it there in a hurry (among other things). I do my best to clarify it all for you, and I'm sorry for the blank face that I give you when you ask me if the paper is good and the ideas clear. I'm generally so busy trying to see through your sentences that I miss the bigger picture. After all, you just wanted a grammar-check, right?
with love,
an ESL tutor

p.s.: I really do love this job.