First Person Limited

Happily Ever After

“The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.”

                                                ~ Anna Garlin Spencer

Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. Brian and Alison Simon.

I always have and always will love you.

The Better

Students take on leadership (published in the Michigan City News Dispatch on 3 May 2006)

Marly Tristano - La Lumiere

Leadership is a quality many of us exhibit, whether it's taking control in an emergency or leading a group project.

This year at La Lumiere, a new leadership program was implemented as a requirement for all sophomores and juniors. The class focuses on building bonds, teamwork and exploring individual ability.

When I sat down with teacher Rachael Bork to discuss the importance of teaching a leadership class to high school students, she said she believes the main focus is exploration.

"Leadership is about taking responsibility in the community," she said.

Bork went on to describe how many teenagers are natural leaders, but become afraid of their own abilities. The class is supposed to bring out the limitations of our abilities, and to teach us to work with the strengths each of us possesses.

One of the key aspects to the leadership curriculum is a class project. The leadership seminar at La Lumiere is in two sections - one for sophomores and one for juniors. Each has been working on a project for the past semester that can be beneficial to the community. Classes went through the dirty work of logistics, announced it to the school and then implemented their ideas.

The junior leadership project took place two weeks ago on Earth Day. The junior class issued a plea to the campus to take the gorgeous Saturday to help with campus beautification. This meant planting flowers, raking, cleaning the campus and implementing a classroom recycling program.

Mary Ruble, a member of the leadership class, was a part of every step of the process.

"We're landscaping, cleaning and starting a recycling program. We're trying to improve the campus physically and environmentally."

The sophomore leadership project takes La Lumiere way off campus and into cancer awareness. The class decided to dedicate themselves to Relay for Life, a charity walk meant to raise money for cancer research.

Margaux Freidman, a member of the project, is deeply committed to the cause. "We're doing a cancer walk this fall that is going to have not only people from our school, but people from our community."

To raise money, the class held a cancer spirit week last week. Each day students were allowed, for a small fee, to dress in the color of a certain cancer. Colors included, brown, gray, black, blue, red, purple and pink, highlighting awareness in everything from breast cancer to colon cancer. Not only did it help out the leadership project, but it offered students a nice break from uniforms.

"Leadership is doing the right things for our campus," said Victoria Wedzina. "It's helping not only us, but the community."

Marly Tristano, a junior at La Lumiere, is a student columnist for The News-Dispatch. Views expressed are the writer's, not the school's or the newspaper's.

The Good

http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2006/05/10/columns/la_lumiere/lls11.txt

It's worth it.

D-

I just had a formal teaching evaluation last hour and I taught--almost, but not quite--the worst class ever. That's right it was a personal low. I felt like I was one of those bafoons auditioning for American Idol that everyone laughs at because they have no idea how bad they really are.

Clearly, I need to get out of here and go back to school and be smarter and maybe in 10 years I'll be better at this.

For now, I want to crawl under a rock.

Poet, Lost

There are few things in life more distressing than a lost book.

I am not exaggerating.

Tonight, taking the advice of cousin Jef, I scoured my bookshelves looking for Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Jef suggested that it might give solace to my loneliness and resolve to my doubting and weary heart--also not exaggerating--so, I went in search of it, to no avail.

The longer I looked, the more the text came back to me, lines that I love, wisdom that I savor, strings of words that I like to hold in my hands and turn in the light looking for all the new ways that my life is reflected in them. This lost book  is like a lost friend, a dearly anticipated  and much treasured companion who refused to show in a crucial moment of need.

I feel deserted.

I feel aimless.

I looked for a substitution among my stacks, another well-loved text whose prose could anchor me to this earth and soothe my anxieties. Finding, none, I sat down to write. I hoped in vain that my own words could satisfy the need I have for this one particular work. In literature and in life sometimes you have to be your own muse and your own dearest companion.

Tonight, I need Rilke.

Bookstores

Bookstores make me believe that anything and everything is possible.

Bookstores make me want to fall in love.

If approximately3/5 of the books ever written are written on the subject of love, it must be true and it must be real.

Love must be possible.

Maybe the writing of it makes it so.

FYI

I did not give up everything and everyone who makes me happy  and move to the middle of nowhere just so that  someone could tell me I'm worthless.

( over and over and over again).

This is how I feel today

Well that was a disaster.

Through the Looking Glass

Last weekend, I was in NYC, visiting my dear friend Ashley. We took the train in from Long Island--where she lives--got of the Subway at Columbus Circle  (Central Park South) and started walking away from the trees and into the endless maze of behemoth buildings--glistening castles of steel, marble and glass--when it happened.

The ache began.

It started, as it always does, deep in my chest. It caused me to stop for a second, to catch my breath and then to walk faster, my head held high, boot heels clicking powerfully on the pavement as though, if I pounded hard enough or walked fast enough I could escape my life.

I know this ache well. It startled me once in Paris, more than once in DC and now it  found me again, it New York.  Every time it happens, it calls me home. The ache pulses like a radar blip at the start and becomes more and more frenetic as my desire for a place--and the chance to run away from my life--grows. While in New York, my heart was racing,  my eyes wide and happy, face aglow. I was free. And now that I am back in Indiana, doing everything in my power to avoid my lesson plans, the ache is pulsing again, incessantly, like a wound that can't be salved and a want that cannot be satiated. The ache calls me back to the city, to a life I have tasted but not yet discovered, to a piece of myself that is eagerly lying in wait to be found.

I have got to get out of here.

The problem with this ache, more than its incessant throb is the veil of disenchantment that it casts on my life. Sitting here, I am like Alice, having seen the other side of the Looking Glass; I've glimpsed at the possibility of imagination and  been swiftly, violently returned to the reality of life: a needy kitty, a book to read and not enough time for tea.

I tell myself to snap out of it, to dive into work, but slowly I am pulled away--I spent the afternoon NOT grading papers but instead researching Grad schools, nursing my ache for freedom and carefully, cautiously furthering a dream. I have to let go at night, let my self drift back to the street corner where the ache began, let my Internet research take me to places where it might be soothed. Because by day, I have to harden myself to it, to fill my minutes and hours with the delicious distraction of work. I have to be happy in the here and now and not long for the places I've left or can't get to . I have to know that it will come, that I will escape in due time.

Alas, that knowing doesn't soothe the ache for New York, DC or Paris.

Someday is never close enough to today or to tomorrow.

I have books to read, a needy kitty and no time to write.