Stuff

By the way, I squeaked out a B- somehow in that Creative Writing class. Makes me think that I could have done almost nothing and still passed. My last two final projects were a joke, from my expectations of myself anyway. So I will take the D in Film Theory, attribute it to the move to Nome, and move on. I will ace Whitman. I hereby prophesy.

Other than that, the kids are out playing, enjoying a sunny day. I can see Sledge Island out our back windows, and that is thirty miles away. I am staying in and rereading The Lord of the Rings. It is even better the second time. I have a copy of Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia by David Day by my side to look up references to really fit it all in together. Having some history already from reading it once, the movies, and The Hobbit, really helps. I feel more enmeshed in the world. I read over 90 pages today, and that's a lot for me.

It's weird, I'm an English teacher yet an awfully slow reader. I take too much time reading the words and sounding them in my own head as if someone were actually reading them aloud. That's how I read--as if it were aloud to someone. I even took a College Reading class at Waubonsee years ago, that didn't count toward any program, to get the speed reading techniques to possibly read faster. Never worked. I know how to do it, but concentrating on it for a long time is another matter. I can speed read for quick bursts, like when I had to search for the word Gilthoniel in the Encyclopedia today, to understand the reference. Hard work. My mind works differently. I honestly SEE words, punctuation and all, in the air, like dialogue balloons in a comic book. I honestly do. When someone says a new word, especially a name or foreign word that is new to me, I have to ask the spelling. I have to see the word. It's bizarre. I am a terrific speller and grammarian. In college, I took too late classes on linguistics. I really got into them. I was absolutley fascinated by phonemes and morphemes and the way the tongue rested differently on "th" sound than it did on "t." Unfortunately, changing my major to linguistics would have required additional years of schooling, and I was already planning on four and a half years with my one semester of student teaching. I was hoping that my Masters would have some linguistics classes, but alas, no.

Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed comic books. I understand thought balloons. Sometimes I can't grasp when another person has difficulties reading and writing because I see it so much differently. I am wired differently.