got this friendly little reminder from a friend today.  it's a picture of the front lapel of her coat.  election eve is more exciting than christmas eve because tomorrow will truly be a surprise!

no picture today.  well, no physical picture because i'd like to paint one for you.  picture the afternoon sun hitting the manicured lawn of a prefabricated suburban development.  an elderly indian couple is walking on the slab-gray concrete sidewalks.  her bright pink sari is covered in a dull gray coat, and his suit jacket hangs loosely over his white salwar kameeze.  he is wearing a white hat as well.  she is facing the sun with a crumpled expression on her face, but it's difficult to tell if this is because of the sun or because her elderly husband can't seem to turn the baby carriage he is driving around on the narrow sidewalk.

this is the image i saw when i was driving home today.  i often see older indian couples walking in the neighborhood behind my house.  it always strikes me because they are always vested in such bright and flowing garments, and on a windy day like today, they still wear their traditional outfits under seemingly uninspiring outerwear.  i always wonder what they might be thinking about.  how the streets of edison must be so different than those in india.  as cars whiz by, i wonder if they ever think about the strange juxtaposition of worlds they represent.

today's image struck me the most because of the woman's expression.  i couldn't quite read her, but i did get the sense that she was a bit baffled by the newfangled baby carriage.  her husband struggled unendlessly with trying to turn it around, and by the time i passed them, he was still trying to get the wheels to follow his lead.  i wondered what the woman might have meant by her pained expression.  did she wish her daughter would simply use a tight cloth to bundle the baby around her body instead of this fancy contraption?  was she thinking about how far baby "technology" had come since she was a young mother?  or was she just annoyed that her husband couldn't command this vehicle in his old age?  whatever the case may be, it made me thinking of the word, "arriving." 

in one small way, was the woman glad because she had "arrived"?  here she was, in america, with a fancy stroller fitted for a royal grandchild of the west.  while both the baby's mother and father work to gain riches she could have only imagined at their age, she is now the regal grandparent of an american-born desi.  i'm probably taking this a bit too far, but these are almost the exact thoughts i had in the four seconds it took me to drive by the elderly couple and their grandchild of the american dream.
 

R and I went to watch this movie yesterday on our "play hooky" day. Actually, it was the Jewish new year, but we felt like kids skipping school amidst the suited people of NYC. The theatre was quite small and spotted with white-haired viewers, but the movie was...beautiful.

One of the reasons I loved the film was the precious innocence of its main character - the Chinese grandfather, though M corrected me in saying that he wasn't actually a grandfather.  Touché.  R said his accent was northern Chinese, with its R inflections and soft muted cadences.  It was the story of a father who comes to visit her adult daughter in America.  One of the first scenes is at a gas station called "Kum & Go."  He whips out his pocket notebook, and writes down "kum" and when his daughter returns to the car, he asks her what it means.  She says it's the same as c-o-m-e, but not to use it because the latter version sounds better.  He duly notes it and looks off in bewilderment.  Part of the charm of this movie is watching a man explore a new environment so akin to the experiences of many immigrants in America.  Seeing America through his eyes is new, thought-provoking and sometimes sad.

He later has conversations with an Iranian woman who also knows very little English.  Their conversations are often stilted and filled with Mandarin and Farsi, but it's amazing to watch these complex life conversations boiled down to four-word sentences that leave no room for ambiguity.  "Me no good father."  But in that strange connection they find in a land of isolation, they come together week after week despite their difficulties in understanding one another.

The movie is often slow, not so much to belabor the point, but to be deliberate in the solitude he feels.  The grays of the Pacific Northwest reverberate off empty train platforms and buses peopled with wordless figures.  His interactions with Americans are often comical without meaning to be - not being able to make eye-contact with a bikini-clad "sunny" girl, being spoken to like a child by a security officer, and the interesting conversation he manages with a fellow parent who laments that raising children is basically a process of waiting for them to poke you in the back.

The most touching aspect of course is a father trying to reconnect with the daughter he knew so little about.  The daughter's ambivalence about his presence punctuates the long silences that hang in the air between their staccato sentences.  In a moment of frustration, the daughter asks her father, "How long were you planning to stay?" and without missing a beat or feeling the punch of her words, he replies, "Until you are restored."  And that was the genius of this film - without much actually happening in the film, we delve into the depths of human relationships and the restoration of things that are broken.

NYTimes clips and trailers

i became a voracious reader after college because i realized, 'this is it.  no one's ever going to teach me anything again.'  so i read to keep learning, and now i love it.

these have been really good.

• Big Me Dan Chaon - An imaginative little boy meets his future self, and works furiously to avoid becoming him
• That Winter Fred G. Leebron - On death and dying
• The Love of My Life T. Coraghessan Boyle - heavy
• The Girl with the Blackened Eye Joyce Carol Oates - also heavy
• The Smoker David Schickler - surprising and fascinating, school girl romance(?)

still reading...

© je m'appelle liz

it's been a little quiet here because school has started, and my life has ended.  just kidding.  but not really.  one of my draws to the corporate world is that you get to leave your job at the office.  once school starts for me, it follows me everywhere.  from 5:55, when i wake up in the morning, to whatever hour i'm graced to let my head hit the pillow, my mind is running in some form or another in "school mode."  on an unlucky day, i even dream about school.  it's not so much that i am a workaholic as it is that "teacher" is an amorphous job description.  you do a little of everything and then some.  at the beginning of the school year, you hear teachers talking about their preps.  what tends to happen a lot is that you get a new prep when the school year starts.  that basically means you have a new class to prepare for that you've never taught before.  while this is usually exciting for me, it also takes a lot of work.  all summer, i was jumping up and down thinking of this french cinema class i was going to get to teach in the fall, but once fall came, i realized that i had no materials, no support, and no money from the district to supply this course.  so i did what most teachers do.  i went into my own pockets and started searching the internet for movies and materials to buy.

i love teaching, but i hate all the other stuff.  the politicking.  the administrative duties.  basically, anything that keeps me from teaching.  and unfortunately, this other stuff is making up a lot more of teaching these days than the actual teaching itself.  this year, i have the equivalent of six classes, stuffed into four.  when the kids kept coming, i had to put them next to the closet or in front of the file cabinet.  i also have to travel between the high school and the junior high which means that i need to be 179% prepared because if i forget something at either school, the show must go on.  we used to have a language lab for the students this year with a smart board and computers for the students to use.  this was vital because a lot of the language teachers don't use textbooks since they are so outdated.  we have to find authentic materials online.  when we got back to school this year, we found out that they had turned our language lab into a math classroom.  two teachers and 120 students have displaced fifteen teachers and over 700 students because world languages aren't as "fundamental" as mathematics.  sigh. 

all of this got me a little down this september.  it's sad because i see a lot of teachers, including me, shutting down when things like this happen.  they have tied our hands behind our backs and pushed us into the arena with a nudge and a jab.  "Teach!"  ha...if it were only like that.  i guess the worst part of the teacher job description is the one that reads "miracle maker."  give a teacher a classroom of thirty kids, and ask him or her to create a vibrant school lesson, in the absence of adequate materials of course, which will then be observed and used as a marker of his acumen as a teacher.  yes, it's enough to make veteran teachers relive their first year over and over again.

so i'm trying to stay positive.  i'm trying to focus on the good.  when i got my class lists this year, i felt so incredibly overwhelmed, but i got some good advice.  i don't have to reach everyone.  even if i can just reach one, it's worth it.  so while i was throwing myself a pity party today, i decided to focus on just one.  and the one that came to mind is félix.  that's his french name.  i had him last year.  he wasn't my strongest student, but he worked hard and managed to pull himself into my honors class this year.  i had the students presenting about their summers this week.  he was one of the last students to go, and in his best french yet, he told the class that he worked for his dad this summer.  his dad is a vendor of sorts, and félix spent much of his summer selling drinks and snacks in a traveling carnival.  in the midst of all his classmates who talked about the three trips they took to bermuda, florida and las vegas, after they finished sleepaway camp, i found his presentation to be incredibly bold.  it actually kind of breaks my heart to think that he was working so hard over the summer while his classmates were bouncing from one summer activity to the next.  but i was really proud of him, at the same time, because he presented himself with flawless dignity and pride.

a lot of kids got As on their presentations, but somehow félix earned the golden A.  in the grade books, it looks just like any other A, but in valor, it's, as they say, worth its weight in gold.  if i get front row seats to something like that, then i guess it's truly worth it...