My Memoir Writing class is causing me to have to think about the past and causing me to write new ways. Sometimes you can’t teach an old dog (me) new tricks… but… I’m having to learn.
Recently I’ve been having to write poetry. I don’t care for poetry. I really don’t like looking for hidden meanings. I’d rather something be spelled out for me because I may take it one way while you take it a different way and it was intended to be a completely different way.
So this week I was challenged to write one of my essays into a free verse poem. I took that as a challenge and made a 7 page Memoir essay into a Haiku. If you don’t know what a Haiku is, it’s a Japanese poem form that has 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.
Why is it so hard as individuals to admit defeat? Have I been defeated? Well, the answer is technically no, not yet.
Growing up I’ve always had a fighting spirit. I always knew I could do better and I was always willing to strive for better. I didn’t have to be the best at everything, I always wanted to outdo myself from the previous experience.
In 1998 I joined FFA. My mom thought I’d use horses as my FFA Project but I wanted a challenge. I had shown horses my whole life, I wanted to learn something new. That’s when we decided as a family on sheep. That first year I knew absolutely NOTHING about sheep. And every time I showed, county fair, district fair and a couple local fairs, I was last. I didn’t know how to properly groom and/or show a sheep to save my life.
County Fair 1998 – First show ever.
I wanted a learning curve, boy did I ever get one. It was funny, I was bottom. I couldn’t get any worse. The only direction I could go was up. A lot of people stood behind me and saw my determination. I had a start, stumble, and fall, more often than not… but in the end, my persistence led me to win Grand Champion Dorset Market Lamb, Grand Champion Dorset Ram, Grand Champion Dorset Ewe at my last Missouri State Fair as an FFA Member.
Hi, my name is Nicole and I absolutely LOVE to dance. No joke!
I was in Ballet for 10 years and tap for 5 as a kid. Loved it. Stupid reason I quit. Don’t ask.
My parents also took Country dance lessons so I learned how to 2-step, West Coast Swing, Waltz, etc.
In high school I actually used to teach my guy friends how to 2-step.
Later in life I learned how to line dance and then whatever you call club dancing to that type of music….
Moral of the story, I like to dance and this white girl has some rhythm… even if I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. (joking… kind of.)
So just last week I was talking to Deb about how some day I need to be famous so that I can be on Dancing with the Stars. She kind of laughed at me. If only they had cameras on at the shop, they’d probably see me dancing around on more than one occasion… haha. (Don’t worry, it’s all G rated, promise!)
Anyway… to be on Dancing with the Stars… you have to be famous. And well…. In case you didn’t know, I’ll let you in on a little secret… I’m not.
Sunday my family went to the FarmFest held up in Springfield and we were walking around.
All the sudden I turned around (don’t know why) and a gal came up and said, “This may sound funny, but do you have a blog?”
Me: “Yes.”
“Is this Abug or Tbug?”
Me: “Yes.”
“I follow your blog. I’m Robbin, I blog at Down on the Farm.”
(Very exciting! I read her blog too!!)
I was soooooo giddy, someone that actually reads my blog and doesn’t know me personally recognized me out in public. How awesome is that?
I was so giddy that I asked if I could take my picture with her. Yup, that’s me… I’m that cool. Hey, at least I wasn’t trying to walk and chew gum at the same time :).
And that is how I know I’m one step closer to being famous so I can be on Dancing with the Stars.
Here it is 9:45pm on a Friday night. Is it sad that I’m home and sitting in bed? Wow, that’s so not how life was even a few years ago… some Friday nights I was getting Mike & Ike’s bounced off my head (lol love you Earl). I had other plans for a post for today, then last night hit and I had an allergic reaction to something. I don’t know what but my lip swelled up huge! It was CRAZY! This is the second time in 2 weeks this has happened. But nothing seems to be the same to cause the reaction. Anyway so I came home and took 2 Benadryl and well…. I fell asleep. I woke up this morning groggy, my lip was still swollen, I took another Benadryl and I was out again. (and no, there are no pictures… well there are but I’m too self conscious to post those on the internet!)
So since this post was written and waiting to be published sometime the beginning of this month, now seems like as good of time as any, especially since I now have 27, almost 26 days until Comps. Maybe… just maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to all the stress from studying for Comps while still taking classes…. Just a thought.
The other day I was camped out in the library between my morning class and waiting for study group. I sat for so long that when I stood up I felt a vibration in my legs. I’m pretty sure it was the blood pumping through my veins again.
Okay so this is the month of doom. I have comps the end of this month. Yes, I know I mention it a lot but I’m kind of freaking out! I have 3 chances to pass and then I don’t know what happens. No pressure or anything.
So basically they pass it out, we answer short answer and essay. Then there is an odd number of American professors and an odd number of British professors (specialty not where they’re from….) who grade it. It’s pass or fail. You have to have majority pass or else… you fail. Again, no pressure.
So anyway I’m doing an update on my list and where I stand… well because if nothing else it helps keep me on track, it gets my cheerleaders screaming for me and whatever…. 4 weeks baby, 4 weeks (or something like that)
My Wednesday night class is called British Comic Novel. The first night of class we were asked “What makes you laugh.” Seems like a very straight forward question, but try to put it in words. Then we had to give examples of our words.
The second night of class the professor summed up what we said:
We laugh……. At the Irregularand at the unexpected
The erroneous (deviation from familiar the Cathartic (psychological reaction)
patterns and norms)
Physical release of nervous tension
Verbal expression of surprise
psychological exlamation
intellectual (logical)
moral/ethical
The IncongruousThe Coincident
(juxtaposition of unlike things) (sudden discovery/achievement of order)
tone congruity
appearance (features) connection
situation reconcilliation
action resolution
Since that first and second night of class we’ve been discussing different books that we’ve been required to read. The first was Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, the second was Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and the third was The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse. (by the way we’re reading 10 books in 16 weeks… plus I have books I’m reading for comps, wish me luck!)
Last night we finished up The Code of the Woosters, being a seminar class, we’re all required to talk. That’s part of our class participation, we have to ask a question, state a comment, or feed off someone else’s comment twice.
But one of the guys offered up this… Is The Code of the Woosters masculine comedy. Whoa, that opened a whole discussion for like 20 minutes on what is masculine and what is feminine comedy. Did you know there was a difference? I didn’t. I mean once we sat and talked about it, maybe there is… but I’m not 100% sure I totally buy that either.
Some of the characteristics described for masculine comedy is slapstick/physical (think America’s Funniest Home Video’s and all the people who constantly get racked over and over) and rude/crude. And they described feminine comedy as more predicaments we could find ourselves in. It was more compared to romantic comedies.
My Cinco de Mayo celebration after class. Yes I’m using a clothes basket as a table.
Are you thinking… Well Duh? I would be but I know why I titled that that way… neener neener neener. Oh fine I’ll share…
Last night was my last night of classes for the semester. Booyah! Now technically I have a final to turn in and a final project to turn in due by 10am on Friday but otherwise… no more classes for the spring semester. I’m doing a happy dance if you can’t tell.
But my summer isn’t going to be all butterflies and kittens. Nope Nope Nope. Instead I get to read 50+ish books. So I’m going to show you my reading list so you can keep me accountable, deal?
First round of comps come this fall. I’m scared!
American:
COLONIAL (Beginnings to 1820)
Non-Fiction
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part 1
Poetry
Anne Bradstreet: “The Prologue,” “The Author to Her Book,” “Contemplations,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” “Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House”
ROMANTIC (1820-1865)
Fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birth-Mark”
Non-Fiction
Henry David Thoreau: Walden, “Resistance to Civil Government”
Poetry
Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “The Wound-Dresser”
REALISTIC (1865-1914)
Fiction
Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Non-Fiction
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Poetry
Emily Dickinson (grouped by theme)
Nature:
#207 (#214): I taste a liquor never brewed –
#320 (#258): There’s a certain Slant of Light
#359 (#328): A Bird came down the Walk –
#905 (#861): Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music
Death, Immortality, Religion:
#124 (#216): Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
#236 (#324): Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
#202 (#185): “Faith” is a fine invention
Mind, Soul, and Self:
#620 (#435): Much Madness is divinest Sense –
#339 (#241): I like a look of Agony,
#598 (#632): The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
#312 (#252): I can wade Grief –
MODERN (1914-1950)
Fiction
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Poetry
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “Dream Boogie,” “Cross,” “Mulatto,” “Christ in Alabama,” “Mother to Son,” “Homecoming,” “Green Memory,” “Silhouette,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Harlem [Dream Deferred],” “Theme for English B,” “Song for a Dark Girl”
Robert Frost: “Design,” “Out, Out―,” “Birches,” “After Apple-Picking,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Desert Places,” “Mending Wall,” “Home-Burial,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Directive”
Drama
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
POST WW II (1950-Present)
Fiction
Toni Morrison: Beloved
Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Revelation.”
Poetry
Gwendolyn Brooks: “The Bean Eaters,” “We Real Cool,” “The Near-Johannesburg Boy,” “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire: La Bohem Brown,” “the mother,” “kitchenette,” “the children of the poor” (1-5), “A Lovely Love,” “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,” “The Chicago Picasso, 1986”
Allen Ginsberg: “Howl,” “America,” “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra”
Drama
David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly
British Literature: Core List
1.Beowulf, “Deor,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Wanderer”
2.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
3.Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: “The General Prologue,” “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Prologue & Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (may be read in translation)
4.Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
5.Shakespeare, Hamlet
6.Shakespeare, MacBeth
7.Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
8.Milton, Paradise Lost (Books 1, 2, 4, & 9)
9.Pope, The Rape of the Lock
10.Fielding, Joseph Andrews
11.Austen, Pride and Prejudice
12.Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” “Intimations of Immortality,” The Prelude (Books 1, 9, 10, 13, & 14)
13.Brontë, Wuthering Heights
14.Dickens, Little Dorrit
15.Tennyson, In Memoriam
16.Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
17.Woolf, To the Lighthouse
18.Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
19.WWI, Yeats, and Auden bundle: Brooke, “The Soldier”; Owen, “Dulce et decorum est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth”; Sassoon, “Glory of Women,” “Repression of War Experience,” “They”; Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”; “; Graves, “The Next War”; Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “Easter 1916,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “Under Ben Bulben,” ; Auden, “In Memory of WB Yeats,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “Musee des beaux arts,” “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” “Ode to Terminus”
Hubby and I were finally able to carve our pumpkins on Friday night. Now Thursday night I started carving on hubby’s, I gutted it so that it would have time to dry up a bit since we were also going to use it for Baby Girl’s photo shoot. Friday night he was able to cut some leg holes for her.
And then baby girl screamed. I wasn’t able to get a smile, but I at least lucked out and got one where she wasn’t screaming. Note to self: warm pumpkin up next time!
Then we went back in the house, put her onesie back on her and she sat in the Bumbo on the table with us while mommy and daddy carved pumpkins.
We chose to use patterns out of a book. Poor Tbug didn’t have that option because we had to buy a new book, we lost the other one :(.
This one cracked me up. It was either a level 3 or 4 and I must admit that the first time I remember carving pumpkins was when I was a senior in high school. I might have with my parents when I was a little kid, I’m not sure. I should ask sometime. But the first time I remember, I was a senior in high school.
Someone decided that they were tired and it was nap time…
Hubby’s is the one on the left, mine is the one on the right.
We’ve tried to keep it a tradition since we’ve been married to carve pumpkins. So how did we do?
So one year ago today my life changed… more so than I realized. First I realized I don’t know how to pee on a stick… How hard can it be? Oh, I messed it up…
So hubby went and got the kind that I couldn’t screw up, then read the directions and told me how to do it just so I didn’t screw it up the second time… I didn’t screw it up this time. We also knew I was pregnant way early! It might have had something to do with cussing and screaming in a cabbed tractor at full throttle with the baler running and hubby heard me outside the tractor about 15 feet behind me… maybe… (more…)
This blog is for a lot of things and one thing is to document our life together. My husband and I have experienced a lot of things together and it is so much fun to sit down and take a gander back. Now obviously not everything is on here because with every blog, there is a certain part of your life you don’t share… But here’s a sharing moment.
Monday night was hubby and my first night away from Baby Squirrel (or baby girl, whichever). Here’s how it started:
A week ago Tuesday I turned in a rough draft on one of my papers for Research Methods. It’s about The Rape of the Lock, a poem by Alexander Pope, but that’s beside the point (one last point… I’m not crazy about that poem.. okay done now). I had to go into the school early on Tuesday, earlier than normal for a conference on my paper so I made arrangements for my mom to take baby girl a bit earlier so that I could make it to the school on time.
So Monday when I picked baby girl up from my grandma (her great grandma) hubby and I had plans to meet up at my parents when he got off work. We had discussed it the night before about seeing if mom and dad wanted a sleep over with baby girl, so that I could have Tuesday to work on some homework. He didn’t think I could do it…
So I walked into my parent’s house on Monday and asked my mom to tell me if she didn’t want to, but would she be able to have a sleep over with baby girl and hubby would pick her up on Tuesday night like normal.
You’d have thought I gave my mom a million dollars. She told me she thought wouldn’t get the option until baby girl was in high school and could make her own decisions.
Before hubby and I left my parents house I hugged and kissed and hugged and kissed baby girl. Mom said she felt like she was prying baby girl away from me. Then I handed her to my mom, one last kiss and left for the evening. Told my parents if they needed anything to holler, I’d be over in a heart beat and I don’t speed. lol. Then I left.
Don’t worry, I cried pretty much all the way home and even once I got home.
