30 Days to Fix My Life

I’m barely squeezing this out before the end of the month–and it’s way unfinished–but here’s the link to my new blog, 30 Days to Fix My Life.  I’ll keep Rookie Mistakes going because I can write whatever I want here; 30 Days will be my gimmicky focused blog. 

I love that you all stop by here, and I hope you’ll swing by there too, at least to check it out in the very beginning to see if it interests you.  Thanks so much for all of your support!

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Hey friends!  I haven’t seen many of you since school let out, so I thought I’d give you a little update on my life.  In the comments, please share yours.  Or we can hang out in person.  That would be cool too.

The Good

[This is the longest list because life is good right now.  Hip hip hooray.]

1. I (finally) sold my first article.  It was to SEED, this Beta AOL thing that isn’t set up very well (there’s no search option so you have to look through pages and pages of stuff before you find what you want), but it pays way better than most of the other freelance sites I’ve looked into.   I focused my efforts here at the beginning of the summer because of the better pay, and it didn’t start off well.  They had a bunch of “homework help” jobs, and I was like, “sweet, that’ll be easy for me.”  So I wrote articles about punctuation, synonyms and antonyms, homonyms and homophones, and onomatopoeia.  And then I got struck down for being overconfident when every single one of them got rejected (or “not selected” as they put it).  Eff.  So I looked at other sites, some of which pay like $3.37 for articles and I was really feeling sucky.  Oh, but before I got rejected and ran away with my tail between my legs, I submitted two other articles for AOL’s travel site, one about a day in DC with tweens and one about local lingo in Charlottesville.  Imagine my surprise when, earlier this week, I got a an email saying they’d purchased my article about DC to the tune of 50 smackaroos.  $50 isn’t much in the real world, but it’s good for just starting out freelancing on the internet.  If you don’t believe me, try to motivate yourself to write 300 words for $2.24.  It hasn’t been published yet, but be forewarned that I will post a link as soon as it is, and I expect you to click through and marvel at my glory.
2. Uhh.  Dan Pink commented on my blog.  That made me very, very excited.
3. There’s so much inspiration on the interwebs!  I know I haven’t been posting anything much on decor for a while, but design blogs still make up the majority of my pleasure reading.  I just discovered Decor Demon (through I Suwannee) and he’s my newest internet crush because he’s so incredibly awesome.  Shininess!  Bright colors!  Graphic wallpaper!  Love.  Anyways, everything he does/posts about floats my boat, but since I’ve been wanting to redo chairs for my dining room, this project made me weak in the knees.  He took flee market finds like this:
   And turned them into this:

   
   Swoon.  One more fun thing you need to check out:  Catalog Living.  You’ll laugh so hard.  She makes fun of catalog styling and posts gems like this everyday:

   

   Elaine was not amused by Gary’s passive-aggressive response to her request to “garnish the cocktails.”

4. I’m working on an exciting new project.  I’ll share by the end of the month.  That’s all I’ll say now, but I wanted to give you a heads up.  Be excited.

The Bad

1. Why does it cost so much to get women’s clothes dry cleaned?  That pisses me off.  I brought a ton of stuff to the dry cleaner’s the other day, and Eric’s NINE shirts cost something like $20 and change, and my two dresses each cost over $11.  One of them, swear to God, had less fabric to clean than any of Eric’s shirts.  (It’s sleeveless and fairly short.)  Seriously, where do they get off?
2. That’s all I’ve got.

The Ugly

1. Last night I had my first school dream nightmare since we got out.  I guess I hadn’t really quit because I was teaching next year, but they’d still given my room away, and I had to travel between rooms on opposite ends of the building.  I was late to my second block, which was standard English 11 (what???), and it had 38 students.  And some of them were like my former smartest students, so that was confusing.  We didn’t have enough books.  Or seats.  I couldn’t get them to settle down.  I woke up in a cold sweat.  (not really)  What could it mean?
2. I told you, my life is good; I got nothin else.

So, friends, what’s going on in your lives?  Please share.  I seriously love it when you comment.  (almost as much as when Dan Pink comments.  almost.)

3 Books that Changed the Way I Think

I read a lot.  Not an unbelievable amount or anything, but certainly more than the average bear, I think.  Like many people, though, most of what I pick up reinforces my beliefs.  Sure, plenty of books have a subtle impact on my way of thinking, but very few truly change what I believe.  This post is dedicated to those books, that are not necessarily my favorites, but that have changed me in a major way.

Revising History

I was a Navy brat, so growing up we bounced around between Rhode Island, California, and (northern) Virginia.  I got a good education, but suffice it to say my knowledge of the Civil War was spotty at best.  Why?  Californians don’t give a hoot about it.  Neither do Rhode Islanders, despite having been part of the country (and the winning side) at the time of the War between the States.  Northern Virginia, on the other hand, is obsessed.  Not with the Civil War exactly, but with distancing itself from the rest of Virginia, which is obsessed with the Civil War.  (You’ll have to forgive my pathetic generalizations, people.  Sorry!)  Thus, Northern VA comes down hard on the Confederates.  Robert E. Lee might be a hero to the rest of the state, but not in NOVA.  As far as I understood it, the Civil War was about slavery, and only slavery; anyone in the Confederacy was a bad man (or at least a misinformed one); and anyone who said otherwise must obviously be racist.

Then in 12th grade AP lit, we were assigned The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  I devoured it, of course.  I devoured everything Mr. Welsh assigned.  And talk about throwing me for a loop.  My whole perception of the Civil War was turned on its head.  There were–amazingly–lots of good men in the Confederacy.  General Lee was pretty darn admirable.  Not that Shaara’s novel glorified the South or anything.  The Union was treated with just as much respect, and General Grant was as good a leader as Lee.

The point is, The Killer Angels made me question some firmly held beliefs and prejudices.  It, along with a couple other experiences, made me stop being an elitist brat who told people I was from “just outside DC” so as to separate myself from the rest of the state.  I started looking at southern pride with more of an open mind, and didn’t automatically assume that everyone with a Dixie Pride t-shirt was a racist prick.

This is not to say I’ve moved my allegiance to the South, or anything as drastic as that.  I’m not a Civil War or Lee enthusiast, and I certainly don’t wear Confederate flags on my t-shirts.  But since 12th grade, I approach the subject in a very different way, and I thank Mr. Welsh and Mr. Shaara for that.

Redefining Literature

I’m guessing that most people–the non-English majory types in the world–have the opposite experience as me.  At some point (I hope) you read a classic piece of literature that was actually accessible and interesting and you thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad!”  The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, or Fahrenheit 451 might have made you dread English class just a little less.

Well I was an eager beaver in English, so I never had that experience.  I loved the vast majority of what was assigned to me.  When I was in my tween years, I wasn’t reading classics yet, but I never jumped into the YA bandwagon either.  I’m pretty sure I assumed that reading “adult books” (no, not that kind of adult book.  gross.) made me look smarter–the longer the better.  So that’s mostly what I read, much of which was forgettable (I adored Mary Higgins Clark, for example).

Some of my ed classes required that I read a couple of YA novels, but none of them stuck with me.  And they definitely didn’t make me suddenly think that YA was good literature.  But when I started teaching, I wanted to build up my classroom library, and I knew it was good practice to have an idea what was actually going into it, so I began reading some of the Young Adult novels that went onto my bookshelf.  They were, mostly, really quick reads.  Not unpleasant, but in no way earth shattering.  I was reading them because I thought I should, not because I really cared to.

And then I stumbled on An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.  A totally new experience.  Green’s characters are were so much more real than the standard YA drivel, and his plot was seriously engaging.  I grabbed up Looking for Alaska, devoured that (wasn’t sure if I liked it at first.  turns out it was awesome.), and waited until Paper Towns was released so I could gobble that up too.  Now I’m not embarrassed (okay, maybe I’m a tiny bit embarrassed, but only a tiny bit) to admit that John Green is among my favorite authors.  Another YA novelist entered the ranks too: Markus Zuzak.  So YA lit can be real literature.  Who knew?

Rethinking Thinking

This next one is supposed to change the way you think, so I feel like it’s a little bit of a cop-out to include it here, but I’m going to anyway.

I’m one of those people that excelled in a left-brain world.  School wasn’t easy per se, but only because I really pushed myself to a crazy level of perfectionism.  I could have skated through if I wanted to.  I knew what was expected of me, and did it.  I liked the affirmation.  I never considered myself artistic or creative.  I couldn’t draw something to save my life, and creative writing so terrified me I only took it for a semester in 11th grade (technically it was  semester class, but almost everyone took it for the whole year).  My left-brained way of life got me through college just fine, and into the world of teaching.

A couple years ago my dad recommended A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink.  By this point, I had accepted that I’m actually a little creative (though still definitely not artistically inclined), and was interested in the premise.  I read a good number of these self-help/guidance books, so Pink’s wasn’t too far off my standard path in the nonfiction world.  Long story short, I became obsessed with the ideas espoused in A Whole New Mind.  It’s one of the things that most made me question our educational system and my merit as a teacher.  I’m still not confident we do enough to encourage right-brain creative thinking, even if we claim to honor it in the classroom.  It’s certainly harder to evaluate, and thus, much easier to lower our standards for (another plague of education, in my opinion).  But if you read Pink’s book, you too will be convinced of its importance for America’s young people. This is a changing world we live in.

(All links to books are affiliate links.)

Please share, what books have most changed your thinking?  Did you ever do a complete 180 because of something you read?  Or do you constantly feel yourself more subtly influenced by the things you read?