retirement

Now that they're both retired and none of us live nearby anyway, my parents are toying with the idea of moving somewhere far away.  So this afternoon I went through all the shit in my room from grammar school, high school, and college.  Hilarious/touching/still kinda embarrassing.

Greatest Hits:

From Elizabeth's and my "Historical Getaway" sophomore (?) year.  We stayed with my Uncle Bob. Honestly, of all the stuff I found today, this is my favorite.  It's as funny to me now as it was then.

Rough draft of the itinerary for our Historical Getaway.

Final draft of the Historical Getaway itinerary.

Dude's still smelly, which I did not add to the list but should have put on the list.

Favorite/only doll.  Named Ralph.

I love this grammar school stuff.  Especially Red Ribbon Week.  They brought in these two guys every year.  One had a moose puppet that would fake lick the microphone, and the other could play the drums with glow sticks super cool -- because he's drug free.

My mom sent a peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread every day for twelve years.  And I broke my wrist by pushing my brother's friend's butt.

"Ellen is cool!" "Laura is deadly!" Ellen is a dumie!" "Not"  

Just a few of the so much Virgin Mary regalia.

Mr. (Greg) Syler was the new Theology teacher and hot, so we used to use Yahoo! to search for pictures of him.

Diary entry on a trip to Ohio for a feis:

"Got up at 7:00 and drove Mom nuts.  Finally left at 10:00.  Picked up Kate.  Drove for a while.  I had to go pee.  Said it out loud.  Katie had to go pee we stopped at Hardees & went pee"

The caption kills me.

Evidence of bossiness blossoming in high school.  Items 4 and 7 are my favorite.

Wall calendar from 8th grade.  Things I love about this:

Noted WWF programs every Sunday and Monday... as if I would have forgotten.  AS IF.

Hot lunch days! 

Show Show Show Show Show (March, so we danced at lots of St. Patrick's day events.)

Noted Terra Nova testing

Confessions

I remember being so excited for this field trip because "Moliere really pumps my nads." ("I love his work.")

... Thank GOODNESS for that Gender and Women Studies class I took my first semester at Illinois.

Would you get with Tag if you had to get with fat Chandler?

Every month, without fail, when the school newspaper came out, Moe would rip this section out and make fun of me.

From the first time I ever got drunk!

We're (Moe and I) soulmates.

the soul felt its worth

"Long lay the world / in sin and error pining / 'til he appeared / and the soul felt its worth."

Still my favorite.  I cannot get enough of this song.  I even listen to the Christmas song radio session, suffering through the likes of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” in case they play “O Holy Night” next.

“The soul felt its worth”

I’m writing this from 30,000 feet, on my way home for Christmas.  As we took off, I noticed that I was terrified.  That’s typical for me except that last year, I remember feeling that if the plane crashed, I would really be okay with that.  No fear.  Whatever.

“Appeared” and “Felt”

Past tense.  I love that.  Jesus has already appeared, has already helped us to make sense of the worth of our souls.  Reminds me of the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer upon learning of her pregnancy.  She praises a God who has already brought justice to our world – an audacious and almost praise given the continuing injustices in her world and in ours.  Her past tense praise claims an absolute faith in God’s intention to keep God’s promise to us – that we are Good and that God wants to be with us and wants to work with us to bring us in to closer relationship with God.

Mary’s prayer reflects and moves beyond Hannah’s prayer on the occasion of her own conception of Samuel, centuries before Mary lived.  Hannah finishes her own past-tense praise with a reiteration of her faith in God’s promise to the people of Israel; Mary finishes her prayer with the assertion that God’s promise extends to all people.  I went on and on about this here.

And Mary’s and Hannah’s past-tense prayers are reflected in “O Holy Night,” written in 1847.  And Mariah Carey killed it in 1994.  I mean am I right or am I right.

“Long lay the world / in sin and error pining”

Laying versus pining.  One passive, the other more active.  Both demonstrations of hopelessness.

I talked with Theon recently about a sermon on waiting that he was working on.  So difficult, he said, because it doesn’t seem like a time to wait.  I know what he means.  Each time I hear about another atrocity committed against Black folks by the state.  They executed Mario Woods.  He raped thirteen Black women. I want the world to change right now.  I so identify with the compulsion to break some fucking windows.  But the way that change happens is so much more annoyingly slow than that.  And I don’t just mean generation-by-generation.  I mean that right now, organizing a protest means sending out emails ahead of time, making phone calls, strategizing about where and when – all activities that matter to be sure but don’t exactly quench the urge for intense emotional release.  Even attending the protest, shouting and marching.  It matters, but nothing changes in the moment of the marching.  We gotta wait. 

We gotta lay there in our “sin and error.”  Sin is such a blaaaaaghhh word.  Ron always asks us to understand “sin” as“missing the mark,” as inadequately demonstrating the Goodness that God created in us.  So yeah, I sin.  Sometimes intentionally – and sometimes accidentally, in “error.”  We just lay there.  I just go to bed and sleep for hours and hours because I don’t have the energy, physical or mental, to face the world.  The afternoon that I learned of my banishment from the prison, I left work early, went to bed, and didn’t get up until two days later.

But we also pine.  We do organize those protests.  I did meet with the warden and get myself back in.  Waiting is not essentially passive.  We can actively wait.

Theon used Romans’ acknowledgment of our groaning in his sermon.  When we groan, we lay there and we try to pine, but we can’t find the words, the energy, the effective strategies.  We try and yet sometimes all we can manage is to groan, and God hears our groaning.

“O Holy Night.” 

The darkness, it’s still holy.

Donna told me a couple of weeks ago, as I feared aloud that I could feel the lowness setting back in, that it could take over again: Use the hopelessness.  Write about it.  Let it teach you.

At Bible study this week, a year from my first time at Bible study, we read again the story that we read and I wrote about last year.  This year, what struck me was the genocide caused by Jesus’ entry into our world.  He appeared, and the soul felt its worth, and Herod had all of the Jewish baby boys slaughtered, and the mothers weeped.

We got a genocide, and we got a baby.  And we’re supposed to accept that the baby is it.  That’s so hard.  They keep killing Black people.  They keep raping women.  They keep demonizing immigrants.  They keep refusing refugees.  And we get a baby.

Sara from Bible study collected money last week so that we could send baby toys and some cards to women incarcerated in the private prison up the street.  They’re there because they’re either in the last months of their pregnancy or somewhere in the first three months of their babies’ lives.  I can’t imagine.  We get a baby, and we get an incarcerated mother.  I’m not okay with that.

But we gotta wait.  And he’s already appeared.

shit I don't love

A couple of months ago, this guy came to our Bible study and talked about a project he and some friends did where they tried to see what it would be like if they took seriously the Gospel call to give away half of what you have to the poor.  The first month, they started with clothes.  Then books the next.  And so on.  (NOT MY BOOKS.)  They got together each month to talk about it, and they found that when they tried to sell their stuff to give the money away, they weren't able to get much for it.  And they didn't miss it.  They thought a lot about the value of their stuff -- and the value of the liberation they felt without it.

When I talked to Donna about it, she told me that when she moved away from the city, she decided to only take with her things from her home that she loved.  It was really hard, she told me, but such a relief when it was over.

I've been going through my clothes over the last week, getting rid of the stuff that I don't love.  I'm finding that it's sometimes so easy, sometimes so difficult to figure out whether or not I love something.  I make the two piles, and then I have to weed out the "things I love" pile again.

I did decide to keep one dress I don't love anymore.  A brown paisley wrap dress that I wore so many times  when I taught at Urbana.

Audre Lorde

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence.  It is self-protection, and that is an act of political warfare."

Tomorrow, it has been one year since I was a teacher.

Yesterday at work, I found out that the dress that came in for one of my customers was too short.  I was telling Carol how difficult she had been and how nervous I'd been about everything being perfect for her -- so that I wouldn't have to deal with her wrath (and have to pretend like I think that wedding dresses matter all that much).

Carol screamed with laughter and said, "You're like Chinese saying... I don't know how you say it in English," and she asked Natalie in Cantonese.  Natalie said, "Dog poo?"  "Yes!" Carol said, "You always afraid you'll step in dog poo, so you do."  And she laughed some more.

THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT.

I'm really grateful for this opportunity to learn more -- by listening and chatting -- about the rhythms of Chinese English.  I haven't even read that much about it, so I really geek out on it.

Aunt Crappy

I love getting to know my brothers' kids personalities.

I was texting with my niece this morning about an art project I'm doing where I scaled up a photo, and she said, "Cool I love math and art good combo."

And I was FaceTiming with her brother who was teaching me about Minecraft, telling me that his favorite part is getting to play with other people on the server.  There's one friend he has, he told me, who gets bullied at school but has friends on Minecraft.

I bought a book for the little one the other night that is right in tune with his kind of twisted sense of humor.

U-C

The White Guy's in town.  We got pizza and beer the other night.  Such a relief to spend time with someone who knows me.

It seems like people here, with the exception of my therapist, either think I'm some kind of saint because of the prison work -- or they know nothing about me at all.  Exhausting.

I know that the WG cares about me and thinks I'm a generally good person, but it's also kinda nice that he's seen me be stubborn, selfish, pissed off, arrogant, etc.

He moved to Chicago around the time that I moved to SF.  He asked me what I think about Champaign when I visit now.  Good question.

When I visit Champaign, it's fucking awesome.  Sooo many people that know me.  Major relief.  Restorative.  Lunch and beers and dinners and church and coffees and couch-sitting.

But it's easy for me to remember how lonely I was the last couple of years that I lived there.  And I'm really sure that I can't go back.  Even though I'm not sure where I'm going. (Or even where the hockey-puck I am right now.)

better homes and gardens

One of these days I will get the above printed and framed beautifully and put it in a prominent place in my life.  Not because it's pretty.  It is, fine.  But because the wave is fully enveloping the corner of the stairs.  I don't have OCD, and I really don't like when people jokingly diagnose themselves with real mental illnesses, but I have something with symptoms in that direction, because when the waves gets up high enough to fully envelop the corner of the stairs, something in my whole self -- both spiritually and physically -- feels deeply good.  My fingers tingle.

And another one of these days,  I'll have a home with a room in it that is somehow the pinky-brown-y color of the sand when the sun starts to shine on it at about 6:20am.  But it won't be pastel nasty-nasty.

Patience.

I'm still banned from going inside.  Still waiting for an explanation.

And worse, because I'm waiting, our students and teachers are waiting.

--

When my mom was here, she came down to the beach with me each morning.  The first morning, on the way down, I pointed out at which house you can start to hear the waves coming in.  The second day she pointed out the arrival of that sound, and on the last day, I said, "there they are." And Mom said, "They're always there."

I thought about that this morning as I sat in my spot and watched.

Kimo has been there practicing tai chi each morning for the last thirty-eight years.  Hasn't missed a day in THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS.  He'll be there.

Because it's the way my English major brain works, I started to construct a narrative, some kind of meaning analogous to what's been going on in my life.

It's dark when I get there every morning, and even though I know the sun will come up -- that soon it will be 7:00, and it will be daytime, and I will have to leave -- most mornings I still feel a half-second of panic about the darkness.  Just a half a second, but I always notice it and wonder about myself.

Blah blah blah the Biblical platitude about darkness and light.  Referenced probably too much, I still find solace:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The Word was with God in the beginning.  Through the Word all things were made; without the Word nothing was made that has been made.  In the Word was life, and that life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

I used to write the above on the inside cover of every notebook I ever used for my lesson planning.  Public schools are pretty fucking "dark" places, and I wanted to have abiding faith that "the darkness does not overcome it."  The school-to-prison pipeline, in the end, does not win.

Then again, the whole thing should be complicated (, as we say in grad school.  "Let's complicate that. Let's unpack it.  Let's problematize that.").  (I know I link a lot here, but click on that one and watch.  Teaser: some Malcolm X!)

Point of all this: the dang sun comes and is going to come (and has always come) every morning.  Just wait.  It's going to happen.  Shitty shit can't last forever.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.  Wait.  Be steadfast.

I haaaaaaate waiting.

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.

I wanted to come home and write about it, so I left early.  As I was going I noticed that the first step, from the sand to the concrete stairs, seemed a lot taller than I remembered.  I dismissed the thought as another instance of my general failure to notice details, but then I noticed a whole bunch of really rounded, big-ass boulders up at the top of the beach that I know were not there before.

Science or God or whatever: my whole theory got effed up.  I did not expect that.  Never seen those there before.  Kimo had told me earlier that it had been really windy yesterday (when I was at home, sleeping in.)  I wonder what the ocean was doing at my beach.  It was doing something because the whole level of it was a foot lower, and there were all these beautiful rocks that had either washed up or been uncovered when the sand was washed away.

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.  Be humble: don't rule out the possibility that things will get better than imagined -- or differently than imagined.  Know that you don't know.



--

And in my life and my stupid banned-ness:

Wait.  Be steadfast.  It's plainly predictable that things will get better.  Be humble: don't rule out the possibility that things will get better than imagined -- or differently than imagined.  Know that you don't know. Quit being such an arrogant asshole.

What in T F

Stop making phone books!  

(Make me wonder about the saturation level of the Internet.  If there are still so many folks in the States that don't have Internet access, fine, print them.  But I wonder.)

Stop watering your lawn in a drought!

And definitely stop when IT'S RAINING.

(There's something juicy in the fact that the sprinkler is on an automatic system.  Being able to keep one's hands clean of this entitled shittiness while still tangibly benefitting from it.  But who cares about having a green lawn?  Not that serious.)  

(Trying to not too be judgey-judgey but clearly failing.)

waking

I'm in the midst of a meds change, and it's been difficult, but I'm hopeful.

Before, I was sleeping about twelve hours a night, and taking a one or two hour nap every day.  That's a lot of sleep, and that's no way to live.  It's just that it's hard to figure out whether I'm sleeping because I'm depressed or sleeping because I'm being sedated.  The two possibilities don't feel exactly the same, obviously, but the element they share is that the only thing that I want to do is go to bed and stay there.

So far, three weeks into the transition now, I am feeling a change.  The last three mornings, I've woken up way before my alarm at 5:30 feeling not tired.  (I'd forgotten what not tired feels like.)

I've taken a cup of coffee and walked down to the beach.  I'm the only one there except for Kimo, an older (than me) Black guy who does tai chi on the upper deck of the beach house from 5:30 to 8 every morning.

Margaret and Scott brought this back for me from their honeymoon.  Kind and thoughtful people.
I love that I can wrap my hand into the mug.  Stay warm that way.

I haven't brought anything to do -- no music or podcasts or reading or writing.  I'm liking that I just get to sit there, being awake.  

prayer

I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.
I am not God.
I am Good.

gaslighting

One of my best/worst qualities is that I always give everyone the benefit of the doubt that they're good and that they're telling their truth.

I'm having an experience with someone I used to really admire who is making me feel like I don't know what's happened in my own life.  He's making me doubt myself even though I know I'm telling the truth.

I have such a terrible time coming to terms with someone being a jerk.  I don't even believe in people being 100% jerk.

So this person being a jerk, despite my best attempts to graciously explain my story, is so confusing.  

style, God, and grace

A little more on Adam and Eve.  I saved my favorite part (about clothes, duh) for a separate post.

So they eat from the Tree of Knowledge and "realize" that they should feel shame about who they were created to be, even though they were pronounced Good.  

They sewed fig leaves together as makeshift clothes for themselves.  When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God. 

 God called to the Man: “Where are you?” 

 He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”
  

God said, “Who told you you were naked?

 That "Who told you you were naked?" line gets me every time.  I hear it said with such compassion.  Chicken, who told you you had anything to be ashamed of?  Oh, baby, who told you you're not Good? 

But God understands that despite our Goodness, we have trouble confronting the reality of our not-Godness.  And so, though God did not see us as needing to cover up ourselves, since God loves us even though we are not God, God met us where we were.

 God made leather clothing for Adam and his wife and dressed them.

Just before their expulsion from Eden -- not a punishment but as the inevitable consequence of this new knowledge -- God makes for them more durable clothing than the clothing they made for themselves.  God meets us where we are.  That's grace.

Ron always says, God doesn't have to bless a situation to be in it.  God didn't have to believe them that they needed clothing to provide for them.  God doesn't have to bless violence to be present with those experiencing it.  God doesn't have to bless male supremacy in order to work with people of all genders, wherever we are in our understandings of the Goodness present in all of us -- transgendered, cisgendered, gender non-conforming, etc.

God's not waiting for us to be perfect before God will be with us.  God has always known that we are not God and that we are Good.

That's a relief.

I took down almost everything I've written about the prison work.

Adam / Eve / Steve / Stevette

Last night in Bible study we hosted Pastor Yee from the Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church.  Who knew Baptists could be so rad?

We read Genesis 2 (starting at verse 5) and 3 -- basically the Garden of Eden story.  That's a well-trod one and one I usually just dismiss as yeah-yeah-every-culture-has-creation-stories.  If anything, when I think about it, I just get annoyed at modern Christians who read into the "woman came from man's rib" and "Eve fucked up" things and find justification for male supremacy.  Also shit like this.  Puke.

She suggested a reading though, that looked at the Garden story not as prescriptive transgression and punishment story (i.e. Listen to God or else...), but as a descriptive story that can help us think about the nature of humanity in relation to God.  She explained that most Biblical scholars believe that this part of Genesis comes from the Jahwist source which is characterized by an emphasis on relationship.

We didn't get all into the from-the-rib thing, but we did talk about the names Adam and Eve, prompted by T, a transwoman who told us that she was mostly of the mind to just throw out all this Adam and Eve bullshit because it has nothing to do with the loving God she knows.  "What about Steve?" she asked, "And Stevette?"  She insisted that the trans community has always existed and that the gender binary in this story is a bunch of bullshit.  Boom.

Adam, PY agreed, is the Hebrew word for human.  (Flashback to the first year of college, when we learned to push back on the idea that the man is the universal and that then woman is a variation; that White is universal, and that People of Color are variations from that norm.)

I was still tripping on the part that went, "And he called her Eve because she would be the mother of all the living."  That cause and effect relationship made no sense to me.  Sounded a little like "because I said so."  So when I asked, PY told us that "Eve" is a lot like the Hebrew word for "living," which is kind of interesting.  God created humans, and then so that humans could have companionship, God created living.  I'm gonna keep thinking on that one.

So eventually the two major tensions that we got to in this story are:
(1) That we are not God.  That's what we came to know when we decided to do things our way instead of God's way.  Reading it this way, the silliness of the don't-eat-that-tree rule can fall away as just one arbitrary instantiation of God's order:  When we follow God's rules, participate in God's order, we experience Eden.  Eden: all creation living harmoniously. When our free will leads us away from God's just order, we eventually experience the humiliating pain of relative powerlessness before God -- a pain that can translate into the trampled end of oppression, but also the trampling.  Those with "power" (in the human sense) deceive themselves as somehow deserving of it, as somehow godlike.

We are not God.  We are not eternal. We know death -- not because we are being punished with it as a result of Eve's disobedience, but because death is fundamental the experience of humanity.  There was death in the Garden before they fucked up.  It takes a lot of death to make living possible. Plants and animals die for our consumption, and for consumption by innumerous other species.  But in right relationship with God, trusting absolutely in God's provision, we could live without the overwhelming desire to put off death.  We wouldn't scramble to create ways for us to have power over death.  We'd know we're not God and be cool with that.

(2) That we are image-bearers of God.  When after they hide from God and are found, God asks them, "Who told you you were naked?"  God made us Good, but then when, as a result of our free will, the world came out of God's order, we came to "know" that we are not good enough as we are, that we have reason for shame.

I thought of the question that's been hanging around me over the past few months.  I was telling my therapist a story that I was thought was fairly inane about a dude whose attention I'd wanted so badly in college.  My tone was amused, self-deprecating; it's not an issue for me anymore -- over it.  I was smiling, but she wasn't.  She does that.  Makes me take myself more seriously than I'm wont to do.  My storytelling ended abruptly when she interrupted me saying, "I wanted to be important enough to him that..." to ask me, "Ellen, who taught you that you're not important?"

"Who told you that you were naked?  I made you Good."

When we thought about it that way, it made sense to us why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, from absolute harmony.  If we'd followed God's plan, lived under God's justice, we would be unconcerned with our not-Godness and we would be in touch with our Goodness.  We wouldn't know power struggles -- on interpersonal and international levels.  We wouldn't know war, rape, the use of imprisoned bodies for profit.  We wouldn't have to know.

The word ignorance was tossed around the table.

I thought about the afternoon a few years ago when I was driving home by myself, up 57, and I got a call from my principal.  I love driving up and down 57 between Champaign and Chicago, but that's because I generally run melancholy.  For most of the year, it's not not a bleak landscape.  Definitely bleak in late November, which is what I'm pretty sure it was.

This, but waaaaaaay grayer.

She told me that the school-wide antiracist project that R and I had been working our asses off to launch had failed to meet a hurdle it had to meet in order to move forward.  All our efforts were essentially for naught.  It'd be dishonest to withhold the truth that the humiliation of such a public failure didn't sting.

But when I got to thinking about it, I got viscerally overwhelmed by the realities of the what it looks like for racism to keep sneakily and slowly but steadily pushing our babies out of our classrooms and into prisons.  Most of the way up, I earnestly wished (as embarrassing as it is to admit) that I'd never learned what I have about racism.  I tried to understand why so many of our colleagues refused to get on board with our project, and I thought back to high school, when I had no idea I was White and that it mattered.  I could have had the English teacher life I'd imagined for myself when I sent in my college applications: drinking tea before a sea of adoring students who behaved just like I wanted them to and who loved literature like I did.  My own book club.  That possibility seemed so fucking blissful as I drove up, my shitty driving worsened by the sobbing that was puffing up my eyes.

But I do know, and I know that it's better that I do.  What I didn't want to know, but was having to confront, was not just that racism is ubiquitous, but that I am almost powerless before it.  "Ignorance is bliss," but not really because the more life-giving, sustainable thought is, "I am not God."

My soul feels tired.

sympathy

I saw a stunningly gorgeous (in a conventional way -- White, blonde, thin, probably a symmetrical face or something) woman the other day, and my first thought was, "Oh hell, it must be horrible for walking down the street.  So many men looking her up and down and yelling at her."

No doubt there are privileges, too.  

Mrs. Ellen Riggins

I made a note to myself at the top of my Gmail tasks list about this time last year ago: racketball.

About all I was doing at that time was rewatching West Wing and Friday Night Lights. 

In the first episode of the third season of FNL, everything is going to hell.  For Smash, who had been a star player during his senior year (and during the whole first and second season), shit’s bleak.  He’s recoverning from an injury, but he;s told that he’ll never be back to the condition he was in before he got hurt.  He’s freaking out in the steaming rage under the surface way that’s the only method of grief that hypermasculinity allows for.

Coach Taylor (dreamy Coach Taylor) picks him up one night without notice, and in the next scene, they’re in a racketball court, both still in their work clothes.  There’s lots of grunting and sweat, etc., and Smash is like, “Coach, my life is over, and also why are we playing racketball, ‘the Whitest sport ever’?”

They’re playing racketball because running football drills ad nauseum would not do the trick.  Smash needs to restore his speed and agility, and racketball demands plenty of both.  (Coach Taylor doesn’t say as much, but that’s the unspoken reason.)

---

There’s sometimes wisdom, I think, in not taking a challenge head on.  In coming around instead with creativity.  

---

I never knew that selling wedding dresses and volunteering in a prison was gonna work as a method for feeling purposed.  But it’s turned out to be way more effective than the linear path I took because I thought I was supposed to – good grades, then degree, then job, then you win.  That shit did not work.

months in the making

Friday morning, B and I stepped away from the meeting in the math room to finish up the pages going into the reader.  C was there, and Ms. G was leaving, so we had to (got to) have him copy it all for us right then.  While C was running our second copy through, and while I was working on the Table of Contents of his computer, B fidgeted and paced.  We both kept glancing over to Ms. G’s office where C stood at the copier.  B said, “I feel like I’m waiting for my child to be born,” and I totally agreed.  My giddy fingers kept hitting the wrong keys, and I kept frantically backspacing.

I let B take care of hole-punching because it has to be exact, and I don’t have the patience for that shit.  Needed an artist’s handling.

When it was time to press the lever that would curl the plastic spine through the  holes, B called me over to press it with him.

A whole lot of high fives were exchanged.