"Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland. Got a head-on collision, smashin' in my guts, man. I'm caught in a crossfire that I dont understand. But there's one thing I know for sure, girl: I dont give a damn for the same old played out scenes. I dont give a damn for just the in-betweens. Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul, I want control right now. You better listen to me baby: Talk about a dream, try to make it real. You wake up in the night with a fear so real. You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come. Well, don't waste your time waiting. Badlands, you gotta live it every day. Let the broken hearts stand as the price you've gotta pay. Well, keep pushin' till its understood and these badlands start treating us good. Workin' in the field 'til you get your back burned. Workin' `neath the wheels 'til you get your facts learned. Baby, I got my facts learned real good right now. You better get it straight darling: Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings, and a king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything. I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got. Now I believe in the love that you gave me. I believe in the faith that could save me. I believe in the hope and I pray that some day it will raise me above these Badlands...For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive. I wanna find one face that ain't lookin' through me. I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these Badlands..." ~bruce springsteen

I tried to pick a short quote out of that song but I couldn't, so I had to post the whole thing. I've had the same Bruce Springsteen CD playing in my car for the past 4 weeks. I'm still not sick of it. As I was driving home from school today I listened to that song 3 times because I just couldn't move on to the next track. I do that a lot, listen to the same song over and over again. The lyrics don't fully convey that song's addictiveness. You have to hear him sing, "Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul, I want control right now" to get it. I love the rhythm of that line. It's pure poetry.

Speaking of poetry, I get to start teaching it tomorrow. I taught all the classes today because my cooperating teacher was absent, but she planned the lessons that I taught. Tomorrow I start teaching my own lessons. I'm nervous about it. I'm afraid I'll finish my lesson and look at the clock and see that I still have 30 minutes left until the period is over. Or I'm afraid that they won't listen to me or they won't understand. I have no real experience with this. I'm sure I'll manage, though.

I finished reading Frank McCourt's Teacher Man today. It was very good. I have a few complaints about the book, but they're minor. McCourt writes about some hilarious incidents and I couldn't stop laughing while reading those sections. I was in stitches. Even if you're not a teacher you'll probably enjoy the book. McCourt taught high school English in New York City public schools for 30 years. I hope to be half as good at that job as he was.

"I walked the avenue 'til my legs felt like stone. I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone. At night I could hear the blood in my veins, black and whispering as the rain on the streets of Philadelphia." ~bruce springsteen

Today has been an emotional day. So this won't be a fun post to read. But I feel like writing it.

In school the kids read an article on teens and alcohol and then had to write a response to it. Luckily I read the responses when I had the classroom to myself, because one of them made me cry. The girl who wrote it seems like a sweet girl in class, and she's pretty quiet. In her response she wrote about certain events in her life, and she has been through so much. I don't really feel comfortable sharing the details here, even if I'm not naming her name, so I'll just say that she seems to have recovered spectacularly well considering what has happened to her. You'd never know what secrets she's got buried inside her just by looking at her. Reading her response made me so sad and made my heart break for her, and yet it made me hopeful because the fact that she was able to write about it made me think that she's coping well and has been working on coming to terms with her feelings. I want to do my best to reach out to her now.

Then my cooperating teacher got a phone call and learned that a three-year-old boy who is very close to her family was just diagnosed with cancer (stage 4, which I think is bad). She cried and I didn't know what to do. I'm not good at comforting people. I'll be praying for him. The two of us were just a mess today.

That made me start thinking about Liz. I miss her. She died of Leukemia when she was a sophomore in high school (I was a junior). Her dad died of cancer a few years before she did. His funeral was on my birthday. It was not a happy birthday for me. Liz lived on my street and I knew her since I was about 5 years old. Her house was right in front of the bus stop and I remember huddling inside her garage waiting for the bus when it rained. I remember she had great birthday parties when she was little. I remember her huge, deep, beautiful dark brown eyes and the way they looked when she smiled. I remember her dark, silky hair before it all fell out. She looked beautiful without her hair, though. Her eyes stood out even more. She was sick for awhile before she died. One time Jen and I went to her house and made friendship bracelets with her. At one point I said something like, "I would rather die than..." or some sentence making light of death. Jen glared at me and I couldn't believe I had just said that to my dying friend. A teenager shouldn't have to worry about what to say or what not to say to a dying friend. Teenagers shouldn't have dying friends. Teenagers shouldn't be allowed to die. Teenagers especially shouldn't know that they're going to die. Jen and I live on one end of the street and Liz lived on the other, so Jen and I walked back to our houses together that night and we talked about how we hadn't known what to say to Liz. I remember the day she died. It was a Saturday morning, and she never woke up. My mom told me that morning. She said Liz had told her mom the night before that she was nearly ready to go. It was so hard for me to grasp the fact that my 16-year-old friend was so calm about dying. Jen and I had swim practice that morning, so I drove us there and we didn't talk during the drive. During practice Jen had to get out of the water because she was crying too hard. I drove her home and then drove back to swim practice and got back in the pool, trying not to cry myself. At the funeral I sat with my friend Amanda. Jen sat up front because she spoke. I admire her so much for that; I don't know how she managed it. Amanda and I sobbed the entire time. I think we used up a box of tissues. Life isn't fair. But I know she's up in Heaven with her dad, and her mom and her brother are doing great now, so I have to believe that God knows what he's doing.

"You've gone a million miles. How far'd you get? To that place where you cant remember, and you can't forget." ~bruce springsteen

In 6th grade my friend and I memorized all the words to that song (Secret Garden). We would actually study them. Yeah, we were that cool.

My synchro meet went really well yesterday. It lasted forever, though; we left campus at 6:30am and didn't get back until around 8:00pm. I got 5th in figures (out of 31 people) so I was pretty happy about that. My trio swam well, and overall our team got 2nd place (out of 5 teams), which is what we were hoping for.

After I got back I went to see The Departed, which was fabulous. I loved it. Martin Scorsese better get his Oscar this year. Seriously. If Clint steals it from him, you will be able to hear me screaming from across the country. The acting was great. I love Leonardo DiCaprio. I've loved him since What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1994). I loved him when it was uncool to love him. And in The Departed, he is in top form. Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Walhberg, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen all give good performances as well. There is a LOT of blood and a LOT of violence, so if you get squeamish this definitely isn't the movie for you. I'm not bothered by stuff like that, though, so I had no problems with it. It's a suspenseful, dramatic, violent movie, but there are some great humorous moments interjected throughout (most of them courteous of Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen), and overall it was a very enjoyable film.

"In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream. At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines. Sprung from cages out on highway 9, chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin' out over the line. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, its a death trap, its a suicide rap. We gotta get out while were young, `cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run." ~bruce springsteen

I think I remember "Born to Run" being voted the best rock song ever written in an XPN poll a few years ago. Not that I usually give XPN much credit for their lists/polls/etc., but I wasn't too disappointed with that result (I was thrilled to see something besides "Bohemian Rhapsody" on one of those lists). I'd definitely put "Born to Run" somewhere in the top five of my own list of the greatest rock songs ever written (U2 has to have #1 of course).

I had an interesting dream the other night. I dreamed that I went to a Jeanne D'Arc reunion. It was at a huge restaurant (with multiple floors, bigger than any restaurant that I've ever seen) that had been rented out just for us. It was beautiful, with candles and chandeliers everywhere. My mom dropped me off and I felt awkward when I went inside because all the other girls had brought their parents and I was alone. I saw someone who had been in a cabin with me one year (not in real life but in the dream), and I felt better because she was wearing jeans and everyone else was dressed up, which made me feel like I stood out less. The girl was a younger Kate Winslet, and at first she didn't remember me. I kept waiting for Kelly (my roommate) to show up, which is strange because she didn't go to JDA. I guess it's also strange that I was in a cabin with Kate Winslet (who, by the way, received her 5th Oscar nomination earlier this week). But dreams aren't supposed to make sense. I don't remember the rest of it, but the details of what I do remember are so vivid in my memory.

The dream made me start thinking about JDA. I miss it. I miss campfire most of all. Campfire took place every night before bed, at it wasn't outside around a campfire but was instead inside the Hearth in front of the fireplace, with the lights turned off. We sang songs together for about half an hour. We sang "The House at Pooh Corner" (Cat Stevens), "Father and Son" (Cat Stevens), "Wide Open Spaces" (the Dixie Chicks), and other songs like those. We didn't have the words to the songs from which to read, but we didn't need them. If you didn't know the songs at the beginning of the summer, you knew them by the end. I still have all the words memorized to the songs we sang. I know it sounds like an unbearably corny activity, but it was so...soothing. We all took it seriously and it brought us together.

I've thought about going back to JDA as a counselor before, but it never worked with my schedule (college has always started right before camp would be over for the summer). Maybe next summer. I wonder how it's changed. The pictures on the website make it appear exactly as I remember it.

We have a synchro meet tomorrow at William and Mary, and we're leaving campus at 6:30am. Ugh. At least I'm somewhat accustomed to getting up pretty early. Tonight the team is going out to Pasta Luna for dinner, and that'll be fun.

"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City." ~bruce springsteen

I love that song. Counting Crows do a good cover of it. I may have to make this a Springsteen week. Although the week is almost over and I don't know when I'll update again, so maybe it'll be Springsteen time until I decide to move on. There are just so many good lyrics of his that I can use. I'll stick to the classics, though. Like Atlantic City. And because I try to talk about Bono as much as possible, I'll bring him in now. I haven't posted a Bono picture for a long time. So here he is with The Boss at U2's induction to the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. Springsteen gave the speech to introduce the band, calling them "a band that wanted to lay claim to this world and the next one, too." Bono's hair was getting dangerously long at this point. U2 gives a lot of credit to Springsteen for influencing their music.


School has been going well. I've only been student teaching for 2 weeks, and I haven't done any actual teaching yet because this week is exam week and last week they were reviewing, but what I have experienced so far has solidified my desire to be a teacher. I love it. I love being around the students. I love hearing them say my name (they call me by my last name, of course). I love the way they look at me when they ask me a question; it's as if they're certain that I'll have an answer for them. I love how a few girls come into the classroom every day during lunch and eat with me and my cooperating teacher. I love how there are always students in the room, complaining or whining about grades, making up work, or just hanging out. I'm fully aware of the probability that my feelings towards the job will change slightly after I start teaching; I don't know that the kids will be as friendly to me after I start giving them assignments and grading them. I graded the essays they wrote on their exams, and most of them probably won't be too pleased with me when they receive their scores. I always used to think I would love grading papers, but I'm already sick of it. It's not a fun job. It's very difficult to be objective. I have gotten to read some pretty interesting things, though. It's a miracle that some of these kids have made it to 12th grade. They had to write essays on what they see as three important values evident in the English literature that they've read so far. Despite the teacher's explanation of what 'values' are, including examples such as honesty, courage, etc., some of them still don't get it. I've read essays on "values" ranging from "money" to "this is my deer, go hunt your own." Oy.