I have the worst cough I've ever had in my life. It starts like a normal cough, but it works itself up ( it has a mind of its own) to the point when strangers on the street are saying "Oh my gosh, are you alright?" It's horrible.

Today I got to one of my favorite things, exploring an ethnic neighborhood in a city. It's always like a treasure hunt. It was really special today, though, because I went to Hamtramck, MI, which is the largest Polish community in the United States... my own ethnicity. Being in Detroit, it's pretty rundown, but the Polish Arts Center was amazing. I found absolutely delicious tea, a Russian-Jewish-immigrant children's book, a recipe book, soup mix, marshamallow candy, a "If you're Polish, smile" pin, and a frame painting of Christmas in Krakow. I'm lethal with a credit card in any store like that- as if I didn't already go crazy at the Arab-American museum:) But I'd never seen a doll with a turban before! It was an impulse buy, regardless of the fact that all children should see toys that represent their culture.

I wish I was more closely connected to a distinct culture; American society is so diverse that customs seemed more diluted, and less sacred. I was friends with such a diverse group during high school, and I loved learning about the foods and traditions they had to pass down, but I really didn't have much to share (except maybe to explain Episcopalianism, which most people don't know that they already understand). I think that was the reason that I wanted to study languages; I can't imagine living in close proximity with a population of people and not being able to communicate with them. And I wanted to escape this American bubble, which, even though it's huge and diverse within itself, can feel claustrophobic and possessing unfair limitations.

Whew.
The past three days went by so quickly!

Friday: We arrived in Marshall and moved into my grandparents' house. There were 17 of us, which is smaller than usual. John and I worked all evening on our big present for our parents. He taught me so much about imovie- I am in love with it! Fading out the sound, freezing the picture, and the double fades are sweet:) That evening, in the typical independent style of my family, we stayed home while everyone went to the early church service...when I was little, we always went to midnight church. I just did my best to stay awake. There was something mystical and kind of medieval about being up that late to celebrate Christmas, and everyone in my immediate family agreed, so we went later. My sequenced, midnight blue top was a little too nightclub for a small-town church, though. Everyone was in jeans and festive sweaters! We all had fun, though, especially my mom, who likes to sing Bass, alto, soprano, and the descant, and she alternates between those at any given time during the hymns. It's really hard to stay on key standing next to her!

All of the kids got to open one present on Christmas Eve, which is something brand new, but which I suggested, Minnesota wisdom apparently, to dissipate the melee that usually is Christmas Day with 17 people. I got pink fleece gloves, but none of the bedlam was averted. So much for that sage advice.

Saturday: I woke up at 6am, after about four hours of sleep, to open my stocking with everyone else. My brother got the best, um, loot: Che Guevara lip balm, sock-monkey bandaids, and Napoleon Dynamite chapstick. We opened presents for another 6 hours, with two breaks, until the end of my cousin Eli's presents, when he started screaming and we had to stop. My parents, who are way too generous, got me a digital camera that I can use at school. I can record their presentations now, and show them at conferences! Later in the afternoon, everyone cooked or watched the Pistons. I made a list of Spanish verbs I can use at school. My favorite is subrayar, because I must sound so gringo-ish saying "draw a line under the word, like this" over and over. In the evening, everyone tried to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" over the twins yelling. My attention span has gotten so small after working with 8-year-olds, so I made Hootycreek cookies.

Sunday: All of us got dressed up to have our family portrait taken, which was my grandma's anniversary present. Somehow it only took 30 minutes to finish. After lunch, we drove to my great aunt and uncle's house, which is an amazing, half-finished house in the woods near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They delighted us with stories of their travels to Rome and Ecuador, and my uncle thought it was so funny that I thought that the pictures of them eating guinea pig were disgusting, and so we got to see those a lot. My cousin, who's 29, lives in Rome, and is an incredibly bad influence, promised to show my brother around when he gets there. Oh well. He can't get in much more trouble than a party when he needs to take someone to the ER with a stab wound, and that already happened. Whew.

ps-listen to Emmanuel played by Chris Botti. It's the most beautiful trumpet playing I've ever heard. I'll probably never do anything that well in my life!

I missed the holiday fun.
I missed my favorite part of Christmas, which isn't actually the day or the presents, but the anticipation and corresponding activities. Those include: cookie-frosting, snowman-building, movie-watching, fire-building, sledding, and gingerbread-house-decorating. Since we didn't arrive at my grandparents' house until yesterday, all of those things were already done.

John and I still need to finish editing our parents' present, which is a kind of "This is your life" movie, with clips of us talking about them all over Ann Arbor (where we lived when we both were born and where they live now). With all of the takes we did, the blooper reel will probably be the best part.

Happy Hannukkah Eve, Merry Christmas Eve, Kickin' two days until Kwanzaa, um...or just have a good weekend!

This clip, The Chronic of Narnia, from SNL, is funny...those cupcakes look delicious!

Highlights from my grandparents' anniversary party in Chicago:

*Going to the Mexican Fine Arts Center again. It's one of my favorite museums. I found color-your-own Diego Rivera murals postcards! Including one portrait of Edsel Ford, which might be the most random thing ever. I'm going to give them to my students so that they can write me letters over vacation.

*Our amazing head waiter, Seymour, who took care of my cousin Weezer after she spilled a huge bowl of ravioli all over her white shirt. She even got to meet the chef. It was really sweet.

*Millenium Park. The cloud sculpture is beautiful.

ps- I love this cold! I sound like a cabaret singer. Does anyone remember the episode of Friends when Phoebe tries to keep her nasal voice by catching more colds? With the bugs passing around my students, I could probably keep this up for the rest of winter...if I started shaking each of their hands at the end of the day.

I have a bad day once every other month, when I feel like the amalgamation of disappointments, stresses, and seeming failures of the previous weeks compound into a helplessness that almost clouds my vision of reality. Depression runs in my family, and by now I've learned how to cope with it, usually by thinking of how blessed I am in light of the struggles going on every day throughout the world. Some small hope always wakes me up from the horrible, downtrodden feelings, and my outlook is immediately shaken back into a pleasant reality.

Tonight I turned on "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and I was filled again with childlike enthusiasm and anticipation for Christmas. It's amazing how something like Linus's retelling of the the Christmas story can restore that hope...

While I was cramming to finish reading an article about the correlations between reading comprehension and reading speed and accuracy (for our grant seminar), I realized that I am still using the exact same strategies that I reiterate to my students every day: rereading, context clues, predictions, self-questioning. They are all strategies that we do unconsciously, so it's interesting to see my students struggle with them for the first time. I hope someday, when one of my students is reading Shakespeare, he or she will remember (fondly?) the days when Miss Walters made them reread Lon Po Po (the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood) multiple times to make sure that every word was understood through the text.

I loved reading such a hard article for our seminar! I actually miss the hours and hours of reading that I did for education classes; it's so abstract that you sometimes want to rip it up, but I long for the subtle thrill of mastering a difficult article (like L1-L2 acquisition based on phonemic awareness and interlanguage). Those days seem so manageable compared to trying to teach a student who only speaks Arabic how to read English. Today, she got really mad at me and wrote "no no no no" on her entire paper before I realized she was upset.

This week seems hazy. I am in such a coasting slide towards vacation, and yet so many different things happened this week that time feels like it's standing still. Today I told my students a general outline for how we would be applying the vocabulary for the rest of the week, like "tomorrow, we will share our new words, the paragraphs that they are in in our story, and the context clues we used to understand their meaning. Then, the next day we will compare and contrast the story with our own lives, using the vocabulary to write meaningful sentences that show that we understand the story. Then, on Friday, we will produce a class summary of the story, using the vocabulary and text-to-self stories, which will demonstrate our understanding as a class and show to everyone that teamwork helps us all to learn." They all looked at me for a stunned few seconds and then one persnickity boy called out, "Haha! Tomorrow's Friday!" Oops. I was feeling enthusiastic about those plans, too ;)

As I was leaving school, one of my second-grade students, who I work with in his regular classroom, yelled my name in the hall. He wanted to give me one of his birthday pencils that he had brought to share with his class. I asked him if he was sure -fancy pencils are a luxury for many of my students- but he said "Oh, Miss Walters, I have too many anyway," in his cute, Spanish-accented voice. So he gave me a "Student of the Week" pencil and eraser. That kind of kindness makes up for parts of my job like 90-minute meetings about entering assessment data when I don't even give standarized reading assessments. And listening to my principal sing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" as a morale booster.

*Congratulations to my Dad! He now has 10 people working under him at Pfizer (6 more than before). Some of those people actually report to other people, who report to him: so he's a third-tier research fellow. And his birthday is tomorrow... *

The War on Christmas...
is pretty much the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard! If you really need to get your spiritual fulfillment from a stranger at the mall, a clerk at city hall, or a card from the President, maybe you have other faith or diversity issues to work through. You can always go to church and knock yourself out saying "Merry Christmas." I feel kind of uncomfortable when sales clerks say it to me...and I celebrate Christmas! I prefer separation of church and commercialism.

This is a interesting article from the New York Times. Some of the people working for Fox News are crazy...especially Bill O'Reilly.

Three things:
1. I've christened my bathroom the "fiesta" room. Not because I plan to throw parties in there, which actually now sounds like a potentially fun idea:) but because I put up my Mexican holiday flags, my sun mask from San Antonio, and my lava lamp. It's so much more fun now to brush my teeth. I just hope everything doesn't fall down from the steam when I take a shower. That's a risk I have to take when adding a little spice to any room.

2. I completely disagree with the PG rating of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." In terms of how much it could scare a child, I think it should have been rated R...I was scared, and granted that I scare very easily, it was still something I could have imagined making me cry and have nightmares when I was little. The symbolic sacrifice scene (I won't say of whom) was brutal and almost maniacal, with many soldiers looking like something from a horror movie. And I felt, when I was little, that seeing an animal die in a movie was ten times worse than a human (which is still true and why I walked out of March of the Penguins). There were even more deaths in the movie as well, probably hundreds in the battle scene, as well as multiple wolf maulings. Otherwise, I thought it was a really sweet movie. Just not at all for children, who don't have the developmental skills to separate fantasy from reality.

Oh, and I remember being so mad the first time I ate Turkish Delight, after reading about it in "The Chronicles of Narnia." It's just gelatin covered in powdered sugar! I had pictured them at least made of chocolate, because why would Edmund betray his siblings for gumdrops?

3. Please call or email me if you're not busy anytime this week or next (and you live in Minnesota). I want to see everyone before I leave for 10 days on the 21st. I'll be in Chicago for my grandparents 50th Anniversary party all next weekend, which I'm overly excited about! I love that all the silly family traditions sneak out when we're all together.

December 8th, La vie en froit
Have you ever gone into the Gap, just looking for a cute pair of mittens, and they're all over $40? Sometimes, a small part of me wants to do this...

I was listening to "La Vie en Rose" by Edith Piaf at school today and it made me miss Paris. I know that it's a cliche to love Paris, but what I love about Paris is the dissonance of French culture...there is little cookie-cutter suburban culture, dismal, mass-produced, boring and bland Americaness there. McDonalds has fruit-filled brioche breakfast muffins and shrimp in the salads. The ice tea is bitter, the waiters are often unapologetically arrogant, and they don't even sell prom dresses in their department stores (it was that time of high school and I checked). And then when I did buy a dress, I tried it on behind a curtain in the corner of a small store, with a tiny bichon-frise in the dressing room with me:) Old men in berets hit on you and it doesn't seem creepy...it's whimsical.

Here is a my favorite quote from Adam Gopnik, in Paris to the Moon:
The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York and Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken, confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river- only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still...you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't see before, either.
It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: You can run away. (270).

After feeling suffocated in suburbia all through high school, I'm afraid of the tedium and sterilization of a routine and slowly stiffling life. While I'm too busy to feel that way now, I see glimpses of it at school and it scares me. Part of me wants to abandon this next year and run away. I almost want to try something new...if only to avoid being in a rut, which I know is a horrible reason to do anything. Part of me wants to go to law school, though or get an architecture degree. Maybe then I wouldn't be working in the math supply room and bus entry room, which is either freeeeezing cold or like a sauna, so I'm always either stripping (which always involves a still-teacheresque bottom layer) or piling on the layers so I look like a marshmellow. I know it's the whole paying-your-dues thing. Grr. I kind of hoped that the five years of higher education were somewhat factored into my dues. I feel like I paid quite a pretty penny during my 100's of hours at Starbucks on Forsyth and Handley.

Life in the Frozen Tundra
So I've been talking to people in other states about the level of cold there, and I've heard them complain...well, there is really no reason to complain about anything until you've lived here ;) When I walked to my car this morning, I was reminded of my issues with Minnesota last year: why would people choose to settle somewhere and establish a city in a place where they couldn't even go outside for three months of the year? It's actually inhabitable! My fingers were shocked by the temperature (about 3 degrees) and didn't stop throbbing for five minutes in my car. Grr. I think Minnesotans have some amount of necessary amnesia that sets in in June, when it is absolutely beautiful and perfect in this state: "Oh, I can last the winter...it's not that bad." But then you risk frostbite running (really fast) to a post box and then you remember that this is what actual cold feels like and it won't end until March.

My weekend was so busy! I went to the staff holiday party with my dad, which was actually so much fun. It was at Benchwarmer Bob's, which made me laugh all night. We played fun, steal-other-people's-prizes kinds of games and my dad had the nerve (as an outsider) to steal from the principal! Some of my co-workers seemed annoyed to realize that they were old enough to be my parent, but oh well.

Then I ran in the reindeer run on Saturday morning. It was freezing, but so beautiful with the snow on the lake. So many people make costumes to run in...my favorites were the Pac-Man (with about 10 characters), Mary and Joseph runners, and the cowbell chorus ("...the only prescription is more cowbell!") My aunt and I tried to jog and sing carols, but it didn't really work...until we found someone running with a karaoke machine who let us sing along. My dad froze in the coffee tent, and my calves are still quite tight, but I got a cute t-shirt, so I'll write it off as fine holiday fun.

Then we drove down to St. Olaf's so see my brother, meet his girlfriend's extended family, and watch their holiday choir concert. It was fun...my brother is the funniest singer of the whole 300-something member choir, which is saying a lot.

Yesterday I watched a lot of movies, decorated my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, and finally bought more huge post-its. I love them so much! They're really useful in all situations:)

Other updates, summarized:
*my computer died. I feel completely cut off from the world! I won't get in back for 9 days:( But that gives me a lot more to do at work:)
*I've been feeling the need to recapture my youth...eat multiple candy canes, drink Kool-aid, and play old school games. I wonder if there's someone who wants to play video games with me.
*I'm going to buy a big new bed this weekend and finally move back into my bedroom. Apparently all the huge bugs have died, or maybe just realized it's too dangerous to come out of the radiator since the vacuum cleaner is always right there.
*Blogulator (I thought you might like a shout-out;)- "Murder by Death" is showing at the Uptown in a few weeks...do you want to go with?
Have a good week! And try not to freeze.