over the cliff

I taught for 8 hours today. Noon until 8 PM. And being me, I neither ate breakfast nor lunch before heading over to the divestore. After two hours of lecturing and getting equipment, we headed over to the pool where we spent the next six hours in the water. I am… exhausted. On the bright side, I’m in love with my class. It’s absolutely the best group of students I’ve ever had. Well, the Courts Plus group I taught a couple of summers ago was good, but they were people who already knew eachother.

I actually like this class so much that I’m considering doing their first check out dives instead of passing them off to my father. And I hate checkout dives. It takes a pretty special group of people to make me forget my hatred of salt water. I was especially proud of this girl Nicole. She’s the one I was most worried about because she’s not taking the class because she wants to, but because her mother wants a dive buddy. She has some fears about open water, and yet she was the most comfortable today in the pool. That made me happy.

It was still exhausting. And draining. And by the time I got home I was so hungry I couldn’t even taste dinner. But it was a good day.

You hear that universe? If you could send something fabulous and wonderful my way… I’d really appreciate it. I think you owe it to me personally.

First I was in the worst writing mood ever. You know when you feel like writing something but you can’t tell what? Well my mood was a mixture of not wanting to write, but knowing what I wanted to write about… and not knowing what I didn’t want to write about. Or… something.

Then I got a rejection from the Pedestal. I assume it was for both poems although since it was just a form rejection… there was nothing other than ‘we read your work and it sucks so please leave us alone or we’ll fill out a restaining order’. Well, the ‘we read your work’ part was accurate.

Then I got my ‘Kthx but no’ letter from UNC Wilmington. Does it really matter that UNCW doesn’t want me since I’m already committed to SIU? Not really. Does it still hurt? Yeah a little. It’s nice to be loved, and it sucks to be told ‘Uhh… we don’t want you.’

It just hasn’t been a good day. And these rejections exacerbated my overwhelming feelings of self-pity and loathing.

Excuse me while I go find my tequila…

I’ve turned into an obsessive psycho. To sum up: I subbed “Rational Fear of Cockroaches” to Ideomancer on April 3. Some people on RM got some rejections and so I started wondering why I hadn’t heard back. Then Oliver, sweetie that he is, subbed a poem to Ideomancer saying that if he heard back before I did… then we’d know for sure that they were holding on to mine for further consideration. He heard back a few days ago, as did a whole bunch of other people.

I still haven’t! A normal person would breathe deeply and relax because it means that there are several editors who read the submissions, and mine is being passed along. But I am not a normal person. I’m just freaking out because I think the submission has been lost, or my rejection got lost, or it was so awful that the editor didn’t even think I needed to be sent a rejection. If I were smart, I would quickly submit a whole bunch of other poems to other markets because the more poems I have to worry about… the less I obsess about individual markets. But the only poems I have to submit are those that have been rejected a couple of times already and so now I’m freaked out that the poems just aren’t good and I’ll never publish them unless I do some serious revising and let’s face it… I’m in no state of mind to revise anything while I’m freaking out about Cockroaches. The poem, not the insect. Although I freak out about the insect too.

Breathe, Hel, breathe.

On Monday, I got a 6 day rejection from F&SF. A “didn’t grab my attention” one. Which means he didn’t get past 5 pages. I suck.

I also want to write a story about Cave Diving. I’ve come up with a situation… but I don’t have a character. Which means I don’t have a character motivation. Which means I don’t have a story. I also have another story about SCUBA Diving in which I do have a character but I don’t know what she really wants and so I don’t have a story.

I do have a SCUBA student though who is so diligent that he looked up all the handouts I had on my website and called me to make sure there wasn’t anything else he should be doing. That just made my day.

And now I think I’ll go check my e-mail. Again. And again… and again…

I need a new hobby.

Last night I decided to try to organize some of the papers piling up beside my desk and I came across my travel journal. Here are some things that I thought were so fascinating as to recount in those pages:

When I arrived at the airport to check in and fly across the ocean to Stavanger, Norway… the ticket person discovered that my flight plans included a 10 day, 2 hour layover in New Jersey. I’m sure New Jersey is lovely to people who live there but I really had my heart set on more exotice places like Berlin, Krakow and Prague. So my mother called the travel agent who made the error and she (the agent) drove two and a half hours to Raleigh to give me new tickets that had me leaving the next day sans 10 day layover.

When I arrived in Stavanger, I was majorly sleep deprived and had a miniature bottle of wine in my hands when I greeted Katie, Josh and Katherine. I fared better than Katherine though, who was dragged to a party the night she arrived and was pestered constantly by people asking her if she had a boyfriend. She finally exclaimed, “I’m a lesbian” and tried to crawl under a glass table to take a nap.

When we were trying to get to the ferry, we had to climb a fence because we couldn’t find the entrance… and I fell. P.S. Oliver, stop laughing at me.

The hostel in Berlin lost our reservation so we had to stay at a pension. Katie was disappointed that we weren’t going to be staying in the gay district.

Our first night in Berlin we went to a restuarant where some drunk German kept coming to our table and talking to us. The only German words we knew well were ‘Yes’ and ‘Thank you’ so we kept repeating them. When the waiter finally shooed him away, he told us that the man had been asking for Katherine’s hand in marriage.

Firetruck ladder interpretive dance!

We didn’t figure out until the last day how to pay for the public transportation… so basically we had been travelling illegally for the past 3 days on the buses and subway.

Katie got smited by a steel door when she tried to sneak into the restroom at the Berlin train station without paying.

On the overnight train to Krakow, we were woken up several times by armed guards. Customs agents. And when I say armed, I mean like AK 47 armed. You try waking up to that two inches from your face and see what it does to you. Well, actually we were so friggin tired we didn’t pay much attention.

Feet. Pain. Ow. Duct tape. There are a lot of comments in my journal about that.

The second day in Prague we went to the train station to get tickets to Budapest and a policeman stopped me and asked me for my passport. Fortunately I had it on me… but normally I left it in my room. After that, I kept it with me.

We saw ‘The Mummy Returns’ our last day in Prague. Czech, Russian, and German subtitles. That was only a problem when the characters spoke ancient Egyptian because we didn’t get the English translation. Although that didn’t really detract from our understanding of the plot.

One night in Venice, Katherine, BB and I decided we wanted to see the sun set over the water. So we kept heading west trying to find well… the end of Venice. What the HELL were we thinking?

The train ride from Venice to Munich sucked. Really sucked. It was so insanely crowded. Basically if you have a Eurorail pass, you can get on the train. Doesn’t mean you can get a seat though. Katherine, BB, and I were in a compartment with 3 Equadorians who kept hitting each other in the groin with water bottles. On one of the stops, Katie got off the train and came to our window yelling ‘Our train is going to NICE! Where is your train going!’ It turned out that somewhere along the way, the train would split and one part (the part with Katie and Josh) was going to France whereas the part Katherine, BB, and I were on was going to Germany. So Katie and Josh got on our part of the train but had to stay out in the Hall with the rest of the 2 million backpackers. I’ve always wondered what would happen if Katie hadn’t discovered that when she did.

Apparently in Munich, there are clothing optional sections of the city parks.

In Amsterdam we stayed in a Christian Youth Hostel in the middle of the red light district. They gave us a little bible pamphlet on check in. I wonder if I still have it…

One of our travelling companions, wanted to go to one of the Coffeeshops. He came out all excited saying “It’s like a grocery store in there!” Then he proceeded to list a whole bunch of different types of weed. Stupid, innocent, naive me thought there was only one. Learn something new every day I guess.

So that was Europe. Guess you had to be there.

The other day my mother and I got into a discussion about the various charging horse scenes in Lord of the Rings. She and I have the same problem with them: The horses used were so not war horses. They should’ve been using cold bloods. Or at least ones with some obvious draft horse in the line.

Of course it wasn’t really Jackson’s fault. When you watch the documentaries on the Return of the King DVD it explains how they put out an open call for anyone with a horse to come be an extra. Finding that many Belgians would’ve been impossible.

It’s really not that big of a deal I guess. I mean I never questioned the gigantic flaming eyeball so why should the fact that regular horses would’ve had trouble carrying the weight of an armored soldier bother me?

I call this the “OMG I KNOW THAT!” Syndrome. Whenever there’s an attempt to include technical details in a book or movie, people who actually know all those technical details poise themselves to pounce on any mistakes. The worst case of this is the movie ‘The Abyss’. One day when I actually read Card’s novelization, prepare yourself for a gigantic ‘Oh dear god this is so wrong and let me tell you why’ post.

I also theorize that people who actually know all the technical junk, are sometimes the worst people to write the stories. You can’t write ‘The Abyss’ correctly because there is no gas mixture you can use that would not produce seriously garbled voices. And I’m sorry, there is nothing the aliens could do to make all that DCS go away. Personally, I’ve avoided writing a short story about cave diving for a long time because I know that I would get lost in the explanation of all the gear.

So maybe I should face my fears and write ‘The Horse who went Cave Diving’. Or not.

Good movies I have seen recently: Whale Rider, Mystic River

Bad movies I have seen recently: Van Helsing, Lost in Translation

By the way, Lost in Translation is the worst movie ever. It has become a method of punishment for my mother. “If you don’t do well on your exams, I’m making you watch Lost in Translation.” “If your brother doesn’t e-mail us within the next 24 hours, I’m making him watch Lost in Translation on repeat.”

There was no plot, it wasn’t funny, the dialogue was lame, and I kept willing the characters (more Scarlet Johnnasen’s character than Billy Murray’s) to spontaneously combust. And I think I just misspelled their names, but I don’t care. It was just so… dull.

It may have even been worse than Gigli, which I’ve never seen but the synopsis is enough to keep me away.

I went to the divestore this afternoon to pick up some notebooks and someone was teaching in my classroom! I know we don’t own the store anymore, but that classroom is mine damnit. Actually I guess I’m not that upset about it because it means that I’m not responsible for teaching everyone who comes in the door, which was pretty much the case for the past 5 summers.

It’s still weird though. I kept so much… stuff in the classroom. Notebooks, random pieces of equipment, and the file cabinet is filled with my folders. My handouts. My student records.

Wow, I’m a wee bit possessive, aren’t I.

My first SCUBA class of the year starts next Friday. I keep telling myself that one day I’ll write a series of essays exploring some of the more fascinating anecdotes in my teaching career in order to impart wisdom to future divers and Instructors.

Then I remember that I don’t have any amusing anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t even really had that many close calls. And the William Near Drowning incident doesn’t count because that was a swimming accident and had nothing to do with diving.

I did have one student who drove a pimp-mobile because it was the only way her drug dealer client could pay her.

I had one student who nearly knocked me unconscious in his attempt to perform an Emergency Swimming Ascent.

I had two students run out of air and so the three of us breathed off one cylinder on the ascent. That wasn’t as much fun as it sounds.

I’ve had a bunch of students sing my praises about how brilliant I am and how I’m such a fabulous diver. I liked them.

I know of one story where an Instructor took his class to Blue Grotto for a checkout dive. There’s a bell at about 45 feet with air pumped in from the surface so divers can stick there heads in, take out their regulators and talk. When it came time for everyone to put their regulators back in their mouths and resume the dive, one woman decided that no, she was perfectly happy staying where she was. A bunch of people tried talking to her, coaxing her to put her regulator back in her mouth and swim to the surface but she just wouldn’t budge. She said she was sorry she was causing so much trouble but she just couldn’t put her regulator back in her mouth. So what did they do?

Well they cut off the air from the surface, called an ambulance, and someone swam up behind her, pulled her underwater to drown her, then took her to the surface where she was revived.

There’s a diving magazine published by Rodale’s that has a section devoted to stupid things divers do. I give them to my students all the time because they’re really great lessons. It also helps reinforce the idea that diving accidents caused by panicked divers far outnumber the diving deaths caused by rabid sea life.

I tell my students, “The only thing that will kill you underwater is yourself.”

Well, and maybe me if they don’t listen to my instructions and I have to drown them.

Interviewer: Alex Wilson

1. Name three writers whose work or careers you’d like to emulate.

Isabel Allende - whose prose is exquisite and she has the uncanny ability to create characters who are despicable yet lovable. Patricia McKillip because she also has the tightest prose I’ve ever read and she managed to take the classic, clichГ© hero quest and turn it into something incredible. And J.K.Rowling because… well… her books are just plain fun.

2. In your bio and in your poetry, you write about your car accident with humor. Do you think you were amused at all at the time, or was that a perspective that you gained in the years since? How did writing (before and/or after the accident) help shape that perspective?

Once I figured out that I wasn’t dead, or that I wasn’t going to bleed to death, I immediately started looking at the experience as ‘Ooooh I have a new story to tell!’ The day of the accident, and especially the moment I actually got a glimpse of what my head looked like in the reflection of the x-ray machine, I was more intrigued by the physicality than the possible emotional trauma of ‘Oh dear god I almost died…’ I was fascinated by what the laceration looked like, what parts of my head had lost feeling, etc. Over the next few days when I was faced with relaying the story of the accident to friends and family members, my brother and I started looking for the humorous stories so as to distract everyone. My brother liked to tell people that I actually went through the accident fine, but when the car caught on fire, he pushed my head through the window to make our escape. It was just easier to make jokes than to let our aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother sit there and look at my head with an ‘Awwww…’ expression. And I knew that I was going to have a nasty scar for a while, so rather than worrying about what people would think… I embraced it. It actually progressed to the point that I was disappointed when people didn’t notice my scar. I guess I’m just a freak like that.

In terms of writing, even though I already had developed a distanced perspective from the incident… writing helped solidify it. The biggest thing writing did was it gave credance to what I was telling my brother in that the accident was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. He wishes he could go back in time and not have the accident. I don’t. Again, I guess I’m just a freak like that.

3. Tell one of the stories you didn’t tell in your bio: cave diving, coming
out to society, or the Hungarian bath houses.

Well I actually came out to society twice. I made my debut in North Carolina my sophomore year, and then in New Olreans my junior year. In NC there were about 200 girls since it was state-wide, and at the end of the presentation we did a gigantic may pole dance. And no I’m not kidding, though I wish I were. After that there was a dance at the country club and my father was nice enough to provide my date and me with a bottle of Scotch. That was the night that I learned that empty stomach + Johnny Walker red = Too Happy Hel. There was a photographer taking everyone’s picture as they went into the country club and so there’s this picture of me with my date on one side and my brother on the other basically holding me up. I didn’t do anything too terribly embarassing, thank god.

The next year I had the same escort and this time it was his turn to get completely trashed. I don’t think he’d ever seen an open bar before… My mother asked him what he was drinking and he said ‘Whiskey sours’ and she told him that was an old lady’s drink. He didn’t think that was as funny as I did…

Now for the Debutante Club presentation in New Orleans, the men have to wear tails. My father actually owned a pair but my mother had to rent a pair for my brother. When she went to Pearlis to pick them up, the man told her a story that I thought was pretty funny so I’ll share it here.

There was a girl who went to an out of state school who was asked to be presented by the Debutante Club and she asked a boy from her school to be her escort. She told him the dress was ‘White tie and tails’ and so he went out and rented such. The day before the presentation the girl’s mother decided to check to make sure he had what he needed and discovered, to her horror, that he had gotten exactly what he had been told, “White tie and white tails.” She called up the man at Pearlis nearly in tears exclaiming, “He’ll look like Fred Astaire!”

4. What’s your life five years from now?

I’m praying it involves teaching Creative Writing at either a college or private high school. Some place either close to home or somewhere I have family would be nice.

And it’d be cool to have published at least one volume of poetry and a bunch of really fantastic short stories.

Being ridiculously rich and famous would also be great.

5. (Interviewee’s choice–answer one or two or all three of the following:)
So Are y’all a daisy now?
OR
Did you end up getting honors credit for your feminism major?
OR
How did you find out about my site?

As far as I know St. Catherine’s is still using ‘Saints sans image’ as the mascot

Haha, no I didn’t

Rumormill at Speculations

Taken from Alex Wilson’s Blog:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your blog/xanga/livejournal with the answers to the questions and leave the answers as comments here (or at least provide a link).

4. You will include this explanation/ruleset and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

(If by chance a bunch of people want to be interviewed, I reserve the right to only ask questions of the first two or three.)