More Blast From the Past

When I taught at UCAS I used to do writing circles where we picked a topic and then wrote on it. I picked a different group to work with each time. When I was finally down to organizing the last of my filing, I found several of these pieces that I apparently never saved in a digital form -- here is one of them.

Gifting from the Comfort of Your Home

There are two things in life that I truly hate: calling people on the phone and shopping in the mall at Christmas time. Some people find it exhilarating and exciting to shop at malls when they are wall-to-wall people--I am not one them. I don't like being jostled, I don't like noise, and I most definitely don't like waiting in lines.

Because of this, I have become a dedicated internet shopper. There is something intrinsically exciting about getting packages in the mail. Someone has to do something to keep the postal service in business, right? 

Of course there are a few downsides to internet shopping--the shipping can be expensive, the clothes occasionally don't fit, and you have to do something with all those boxes. Speaking of boxes, I like to break mine down and get them into the recycle bin before anyone notices that I just got another eleven boxes in the mail. Heck, internet shopping is the reason I HAVE a recycle bin.

However, once you have destroyed the evidence, you are still faced with the dilemma of where to store the contents of said eleven boxes. If you follow my concept of complete anti-surprise, you will just leave the contents out on the counter, and the recipients have to pretend to be surprised when the items show up in their birthday/Christmas package a week later.

The real problem surfaces when the items you just ordered from the internet don't fit, or even worse but occasionally true, are rejected out of hand by the giftees. You are then faced with two choices: stand in a long line at the post office to mail them back, usually on your dime, or take them back to the mall/store where you will have to deal with crowds, lines, and noise.

Really, when it comes to shopping for gifts, it's a lose-lose world.

Blue Haired Lady

With today being a new term, I had the students scribble on the question: What does my ____________ reveal about me? This is what I wrote.

One thing that people often notice about me is my hair. I’ve had a blue streak in my hair for about three years. All I’m going to say about it is this: My hair is more of a decoy than a clue to my personality. Most of my students this year assumed that I was a different person than I really am just because of the blue streak – for example, they assumed I wasn’t a member of the dominant religion. Having blue hair makes you seem like a rebel – but at the end of the day, I’m pretty laid back. I would definitely NOT call myself a conservative though – I’m pretty liberal these days – liberal in my love for my fellowman, to quote my husband’s mother. As for my hairstyle, it’s more a function of ease of care than anything else. For the past 15 or so years, I’ve had my hair pretty short – as a matter of fact, for the past few years it’s continued to get shorter and shorter all the time. This is entirely a matter of ease of care rather than fashion. My hair is fine and curly, and it tends to look better if it’s short – when it is long it just starts to go crazy. Literally.

How to Give the Ultimate Gift

This is a quickwrite I did with my class after reading the chapter "Crushes" from the book How to Talk to Girls by Alec Greven.

How to Give the Ultimate Gift
1. Give her something she wants. Just because you want it doesn’t mean that she will. How do you find out what she wants? Ask.
2. Give her something she needs. I don’t need any more earrings. Or clothes. Or anything that needs to be kept in a drawer or a closet.
3. Give her something unexpected. Flowers and cards are very nice. But – getting that electric guitar was something that I wasn’t looking for – and that made it all more awesome when it happened.
4. Give her something she’ll remember. Experiences are always better than material things. She’ll never forget your trips to see plays, parks, and people, whereas material gifts often end in the trash or Goodwill after a few years.
5. Give her something personal. Write her a letter. Sing her an original song.
6. Give her a piece of you. She’s really looking for you to spend time with her and give her your complete attention while you’re together. Put down the cellphone and turn off the TV and talk to her. 

Giving can enrich the giver as much as the receiver, and if you’re being a thoughtful giver, you’ll be all the better for it.

And if you want to give her a new car for her birthday, go for it.

The Decapitation of a Carrot

I found this old writing from a CUWP advanced institute. We were shown this funny picture and had to tell what was going on from the point of view of something in it. It will be obvious what I picked.

Mine is a lonely life. I spend most of my days in a dark and crowded drawer. On this particular day, I was pulled from my reverie and slapped ruthlessly on a table. I wondered what was coming next – soft warm bread, a juicy steak, at the very least a ripe red tomato? But, no. It was a puny little carrot with a most alarmed look on its face. How ignoble. Me, once the very heart of a mighty maple, reduced to bearing an mere insignificant root vegetable. It was almost a relief to feel the snick of the knife and know that my humiliation was over.

On Technology

This is my scribble from the CUWP advanced institute on digital writing:

One technology memory is associated with Word Perfect. Word Perfect came into being when I was a BYU student. I worked in the Business Office of the Wilkinson Center, and we used a rudimentary, beta version of Word Perfect in our office. As someone who was majoring in English and writing very long papers on a manual typewriter, Word Perfect seemed like such an amazing thing. I really, really liked it. I graduated, and we moved to Palo Alto where my husband got his masters in computer science. While we were there I went to a technology conference with him, and who did I see there? Young enthusiastic presenters from BYU pushing Word Perfect. Wow. I was excited. Word Perfect was going to be big. Over the next few years I didn’t do much with computers, but then my husband and I bought our first computer--333 MG of storage--if I remember correctly. It was a windows computer, but it came with Word Perfect. Of course we quickly ran out of space on that computer, and the next one we bought came with MS Word. Oh my. I did not like Word, and I talked my husband into putting Word Perfect on in. Two or three years later, we got another new computer, once again carrying Word. I asked my husband to put Word Perfect on it, and he said, "Honey, I think you’d better just learn to use Word, as I think Word Perfect’s days are numbered." I fought the idea, but eventually I gave in, and within two or three years, Word had completely taken over, and my beloved WP was no more. Thus I feel I lived through the whole lifespan of that company.

The Secret Knowledge of Grownups

I bought this book at CUWP, and I've been meaning to use it all year as a Scribble. I finally found a time when I thought it would work well, since my students were learning about Romanticism. Romanticism privileged children and childhood, right? So--what better time to write from a child's perspective.

In the book, the author takes those basic nagging rules that all parents have: don't pick your nose, eat your vegetables, etc., and comes up with a wacky secret reason behind them. For example, you shouldn't pick your nose because you might accidentally deflate your brain.

My students took the ball and ran with it. They came up with some great secrets--about everything from aiming urine to talking to strangers. I gave them a 17 x 11 piece of paper and had them fold it like a book. They put their rule and the supposed reason (Eat Your Vegetables - Because they are good for you.) on the outside and then they put the real secret reason and optional illustrations on the inside. As a culminating activity, I had the students pass their completed booklets around the class. That way everyone got to see what their peers had come up with, and we all got to have a few laughs.