schools out for summer

Tags

Alice Cooper, education, entertainment, miscellaneous, music, random, school, Schools out for summer, summer, summer holidays, The Muppets

For me today is the last day of term, so school is out for summer. And I have to admit I do feel a little like my school-girl self, all excited about what the long (hopefully a  few hot) days of summer hold in store for me.

However while today may be my last day of educating I still have a whole pile of corrections, gradings and paperwork left to fill in, out and type up. But once that’s done I’ll have lots of time to play.

Of course not teaching means not earning, but I have been frugal over the winter and, like a reverse squirrel, have collected my spoils and stored them away for hard times.

So for now I will do my little “schools out for Summer” dance, boogie along with Alice Cooper and the Muppets and hope that nothing goes wrong today.

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contemplating companionship

Tags

friends, friendship, love, miscellaneous, quotes, random, relationships, thoughts

On the search for a hot cup of coffee and distraction from my teaching duties I found myself in a busy coffee-shop. As I sat with a mug of cappuccino and the Irish Times in in bubble away from the world, something caught my eye and distracted me.

A stressed looking mum and two little girls had entered the shop. Laden down with bags and obviously needing a break just as much as I did, the mother ushered the two girl into a booth. The six or seven-year-olds were having a great time, giggling, heads close together, one brown one blond, pink sparkly nail-polish flashing as they excitedly moved their hands. And as I watched the display of friendship I couldn’t help but overhear the mum give out : “If you don’t calm down there’ll be no sleepover tonight!”

This shocking statement sent the two girls into a flurry of promises and pleading. However it’d didn’t escape me that they also held hands, grabbing on to one another in an attempt to stop the forced separation.

As I watched the little scene unfold before me I couldn’t help but wonder about friendship, and why it is so important. Why do we hold on to some and others flit in and out of our lives, how do we even pick them?

I have some very good friends, some I have know for years others not so long. But I have also had friends that were really important, close, for a  time but who then have disappeared from my life. No fights, no arguments, just life drifting us apart.

With Facebook poking, liking and reminding us of all the people we know, or knew,  it’s sometimes seems friendship has lost it’s value. We have hundreds of people waiting to answer our questions online, only a few finger clicks away. But the time you actually spend with someone, heads close, thoughts shared, secrets whispered has become more rare in our hectic day-to-day lives.

What makes a friendship work and last  seems to be a bit of a mystery, Greek philosophers and even Freud have written essays and letters on the topic. It seems to be a combination of proximity, time, commonality and differences, a mix of experiences and affection all stirred up into one big friendship cocktail.

Luckily for me this week is filled with three such cocktails, catch-ups over coffee and chat, sparkling moments in an otherwise busy, slightly frantic week.

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same

chasing deadlines

Tags

deadlines, magazine, media, miscellaneous, students, writing

If I talked about growing-up yesterday it should be about gray hair today. My students are running me into an early grave.

My third years have are producing a magazine and today I have to send the finished product off to the printers, the deadline has come. Sadly I am still chasing after work, I am four images, two captions and an edited piece short of completion.

So while my students are probably still in bed, turning over and dreaming the dreams of the young I am tearing out my hair and have spent countless hours fixing up their work.

But I must say it is shaping up nicely, if only the deadline wasn’t here. With no time left and my email-bombardments left unanswered, I am left still chasing deadlines hoping for a miracle.

 

growing-up

Tags

clidren, growing-up, miscellaneous, quotes, random, thoughts

As a little girl I remember thinking twenty was old and in my Cindy make-believe world my dolls would all be married with children, living a fully grown up life. Later in my teens I’d look at the mid-twenty-year-olds and think how exciting their lives where,living away from home, studying, traveling and ever changing boyfriends. In my early twenties I’d be in awe of the thirty-year-olds and wonder in awe about their lives filled with houses, kids and spouses.

Looking upward at people older than me I always though how grown-up, adult they were and always thoughts that one day I too would grow up and be an adult.  But somehow that didn’t just “happen”, well it hasn’t yet anyway.

I still skip and dance around my home, I still giggle over immature jokes and oddities, I still believe in miracles and the unexpected. I get excited about Christmas and squeal with enthusiasm over gifts (both given and received), can’t contain myself when I find a promise of an adventure. I love reading fairy-tales and hope to find my prince one day. And  I still catch myself thinking about what I want to do “when I grow up”, wondering what I’ll do when I am an adult, dreaming about far-away future.

The odd thing is I am turning forty (yes 40) this year, a fully respectable and adult age. But I don’t feel much different from when I was six, fifteen, twenty or thirty, maybe a little wiser (only marginally) and definitely a lot heavier, but otherwise I am still me, curly hair and all. I do have a few more wrinkles around my eyes and have  a few white hairs sprouting amongst my dark locks, but I am still undeniably me.

So maybe this growing-up business is all just a big conspiracy, something that doesn’t really exist. We age but don’t really change, we learn how to behave and what is expected, but we flip the switch once we are alone. As country singer Bryan White so aptly but it”

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public

me at two-and-a-half, waiting to be all grown-up

d-day of words

Tags

drugs, miscellaneous, random, thoughts, words, writing

As I sat on the bus the other day I watched as a doddering old gentleman boarded and made his way painfully slowly to a seat.  A stop later a gentleman of similar age got on and as he strode with long steps and in a neatly pressed trench-coat down the aisle, his grey hair slicked backed and shining in the sun the word that came to mind was ‘dapper’.

As I watched them, demurely peaking from behind my book, I couldn’t help but wonder about how a single word can change an image in our heads. If a place is  ‘dusky’ or ‘dusty’ may not only affect my hay-fever but the time I had there. If a date is ‘dreamy’ or ‘dreary’ changes not only the outcome but the story I tell about it. If a  person is described as ‘deviant’ or ‘devote’ will decide how I approach them when being introduced. Being called ‘darling’ or ‘dreadful’ may affect how I see myself and present who I am afterwards.

Words and their meaning create a filter through which we see the world and the people within it. But even though words are so powerful, very often we don’t take the time to consider which one we choose, we forget that we have thousands at our disposal. In the full Oxford English Dictionary there are more than 175,000 words, most we use, some we don’t and many have more than just one meaning. Interestingly enough while only a seventh of these words are verbs, a quarter are adjectives, this shows that we tend to describe more than we do.

As I debated  and deliberated over words and what they mean and I decided to indulge, deviate from the words I always use and consider using ones that lie dormant in my vocabulary.  As  Rudyard Kipling so eloquently said:

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind

 

counting down the days

Tags

dreams, inner child, miscellaneous, plans, sandcastles, summer

In two weeks the semester is over and my summer will officially begin. And somehow the anticipation of this summer makes me feel like  a little school girl again. The excited feeling in the pit of your stomach that makes me smile for no reason at all, the need to draw big red crosses on the days that are passing and all those plans and dreams bouncing around in my head.

There are so many things I want to do and so many projects I have planned that I fear the summer may not be long enough. But  with the promise of warmer weather and a city adventure on the horizon I am sure this will be a summer I will remember.

However as I yearn for tomorrow I must not forget today nor should I neglect my duties that I still have. My students are busy finishing up their projects and deserve my full attention, then there is grading and paperwork that needs to be done.

So I am trying to put my dreaming on hold, anchor myself in today and be right in the now. Hard when your inner child has already packed her brightly coloured  bucket and spade and is impatiently waiting to go down to the beach and play. But she will have have to wait for a little while longer count down the days until it’s time to build sandcastles out dreams.

castles, dreams built of sand

holiday dreaming

Tags

atlas mountains, holiday, miscellaneous, photos, random, travel

After my convalescing weekend I have been playing catchup with myself today. Sadly I seem to be running on the spot. So as I look out at the gray skies I dream of holidays and since I can’t go away now I can only let my memories  take over and dream of past trips.

Chateu Raysse in France a magical week in the Dordogne

Or a trip down the Nile on the Stephanie, lots of temples and markets along the way

A hike high up into the Atlas mountains

A week in Finland

rejuvenating shower

Tags

miscellaneous, Mitzi Gaynor, music, musicals, random, shower, South Pacific, thoughts

After two and a half days of lounging around in my pj’s, only moving from bed to sofa to lazy chair in front of the fire and back I’ve had enough of this cold. So at 2pm I decided to stop being sick and took a shower.

Now there is something intrinsically rejuvenating about a shower, it washes away all the old allowing the new to shine through. So I stood and let the hot water envelope my body, scrubbed, shaved and exfoliated, washed and conditioned my hair and stepped out of the shower feeling like a new person.

As I wrapped myself up in my bid blue dressing gown Ia song I hadn’t heard in years popped into my head. And as I toweled my hair and slathered copious amounts of cocoa butter lotion onto my body I started singing the old tune until I got stuck on the lyrics.

So here is the song for all of you enjoying a new beginning today, Mitzi Gaynor in South Pacific showing us all how rejuvenating a shower can be:

stop-loss … behind the times

Tags

back door draft, Channing Tatum, film stop-loss, Joseph Gordon Levitt, miscellaneous, Ryan Phillippe, secretary of defense robert gates, stop-loss, us military

I cuddled down to watch a film last night and ended up watching the 2008 film Stop-Loss. Although it’s a film staring Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt it was one that passed me by  when it originally came out. And somehow I never read anything or heard much about it.

The story line is quite simple, after a tour of duty in Iraq a group of veteran soldiers return back to their home town in Texas. For  best friends Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) it is a return for good. As each of the friends try to find a way to settle back into normal life it becomes clear how the war has affect each of them.  On Kings last day of military duty his life is turned upside down when he is told he has been stop-lossed, basically his active duty of service has been involuntary extended.

I had never heard the term stop-loss before and as the film ended I sat down to research what the term meant and how it came about. I was appalled to learn that EVERY person who signs up for the military in the US signs an agreement that allows the military to extend their service involuntarily until “six months after the war ends unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States”.

This basically means that after the eight year of duty a solider signs up for the military can just prolong their service on a whim. And they do, the figures I cam across where astonishing. Between 2001 and 2009 there where more than 145,000 soldiers said to be stop-lossed. They main reason for this was that the Bush administration evoke the stop-loss rule as they struggled to maintain troop strengths for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course there has been much controversial about the stop-law order since it’s inception after the Vietnam war. In 2004 the presidential candidate John Kerry called stop-loss a “back-door draft” and in 2009 Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates acknowledged that the practice of stop-loss was “breaking the faith” with the soldiers who volunteered to serve.  However Gates had already said in 2007 that he was going to reduce the use of the stop-loss order, but didn’t as it actually climbed by 40%. Thankfully Obama did keep his promise and on June 15th 2011, Gates told a Senate subcommittee that stop-loss had indeed ended.

I know I am behind the times in this matter but it still shocked me to learn that so many had been forced to serve longer than they signed up for. And as far as I can tell although the stop-loss order has been suspended it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still exist, just that it isn’t being invoked. So forgive me for writing “behind the times”.

Stopping stop-loss, The New York Times 2009

Stop-Loss article from 2011

convalescing cold

Tags

cold, flu, George Bernard Shaw, health, miscellaneous, random, sick

When I woke up this morning my snotty nose had moved down and turned into a scratchy cough so I decided to finally give in to my cold and stay in bed for the day.

I called off all my appointments and have been convalescing on my sofa catching up on TV and staying warm. The only thing that I have been changing up is whether I make myself a boiling cup of tea or a hot mug of lemon and honey.

Until my nose is back to it’s normal size, shape and colour and I don’t sound like a chain smoker on a respirator I bid ye all farewell and will convalesce in style. With the words of George Bernard Shaw:

I enjoy the convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.