And Finally, a Real and Meaty Post About Volunteering, Writing, Revision, My Dad, and Butter

There are about 17 million things that I would like to be doing during That Sprout's nap time today, not the least of which is reading a George Carlin book while watching SVU and masturbating. Yes, all three at once. That's how I roll.

However, since I am trying to be more responsible and "structured", and I updating my blog, and then I hope to clear out a space for the FishForest Family Christmas Tree, as I will be erecting it this evening. December 4 is the traditional Tree Trimming date in my family, as it was my dad's birthday. He would have turned 92 today, if he were still alive. The thought occurs to me that I should head over to the Kroger a little later and see about buying a Butter Pecan cake mix. I'm not sure if that was actually his favorite, but that's what we always made for him. I will not be lighting 92 symbolic candles. One big one will suffice. After dinner, we will trim the tree, eat cake, and have a beautiful family moment. I promise to share pictures tomorrow, providing that I can find one of my three cameras.

I suppose you are all wondering what became of my students during their revision time . . . and even if you aren't, I'm going to share anyway. By the time 3:30 rolled around, I was a bundle of nerves with a tick in my upper lip to prove it. I had no reading for the lesson, and the activity was middling at best, and two of the boys in the workshop were not there. One left because I was running a little later than normal, but still on time, and the other I later learned, had been injured playing basketball.

Despite these set backs though, it all seemed to work out. After one of the kids had a breakdown upon being informed that she had to submit 1000 words or less, and another seemed to completely freeze up when we told her that she had to clarify her metaphor, things went rather smoothly.

There was a group of girls who got done early and insisted on talking and singing gospel music, which had there not been another group struggling to finish would have been totally cool. I would love to sing "God's Trying to Tell You Something" with a group of middle school girls! But, I had to try and keep their antics to a dull roar while the others pushed to the very end of editing time. I have not read the final pieces, but I am confident that they will be great. I'll type them up and submit them for publication, and then the work of the semester will be over, leaving only the party to plan. Can we say "ice cream cake and pizza"? Yes we can, and we will, and it will be divine.

And this was the best case scenario. Source

What I shall now refer to as "The Deep Revision Debacle of 2012" began Sunday afternoon after I attended a lecture on revision presented by the founder of our NPO, Catherine. The lecture was invaluable, although it highlighted the glaring flaws in my lesson plan less than 24 hours before I had to teach said lesson. Hence the debacle and the tick and the nerves.

We all know that revision sucks. A lot. No one likes to do it, so really, getting a group of headstrong middle schoolers to rise to the challenge is a point of pride for me. Aside from all that though, I learned some neat things about writing that I hope to apply to my own work. Did you know that Vladimir Nabokov (one of my all time, end all, be all, favorite writers) wrote his novels by hand . . . on notecards . . . one paragraph at a time? You just think about that for a minute. I'll wait.

Everyone who has read Nabokov knows that the man had a command of the English language that most of us could only aspire to. All this time, I just thought it kind of came out of his brain that way. Nay, nay. He revised the hell out of everything he wrote, and he constructed his drafts in such a way as to make revision less daunting. Revising a book is intimidating. Hell, revising a chapter is intimidating. But a paragraph? That's not so bad. And the notecard bit is pure genius  Before computers, how was a writer supposed to rearrange the placement of paragraphs and chapters? Without notecards, you would have been doing a whole lot of copying and rewriting. It would have been tedious.

The other thing that I've been considering with regard to writing is something I learned in Deep training back in September, but promptly pushed to the back of my mind and forgot about. If a student does not feel safe, they are not going to produce their best work. Writing must feel safe and writing has not felt like a safe endeavor for me in a really long time. I have allowed myself to become far too concerned with what people think, and it has done nothing but stunt my development in this area.

I blame social media. LiveJournal, then MySpace and Facebook. Even though no one much seems to comment on my writing, it's still nerve wracking to think that "the wrong people" might see it. How am I supposed to be honest if I am afraid to tell the truth? Being a hoarder, I don't throw anything away, and I've been looking at my work over the years. Things really began to taper off when I started using LiveJournal. Logic would dictate that's because what I would have written on paper is now archived online. Logic would be wrong in that assumption.

So, what's the solution? I'm not entirely sure. I don't do a whole lot with FB, LJ, or MySpace these days, but I do blog here with varying degrees of frequency. Do I commit to honesty in my online life? Censorship has gotten me nowhere. Someone suggested that I get a journal, and I rather like that notion. I have not had a paper journal in a long time. I have more legal pads than Johnny Cochran did, but nothing that I have committed to writing in on a regular basis. I need to reclaim the safety and the sanctity. Perhaps most importantly, I need to exchange approval for self satisfaction. Growing as a writer has to be infinitely more gratifying than getting comments on my blog, and while publication is a form of approval, it's a pithy one, and worth more than a hundred thousand "like"s.

Enough of this for now, though. I've got some Christmas joy to spread, and then chores to do. Today being my dad's birthday, I'd like to share a song that is kind of in remembrance of him, but I don't know what Christmas songs he might have liked. Instead, I am going to share a little recipe and a short anecdote:

My dad always went to bed fairly early, usually around 8 pm in the winter, but sometimes he wouldn't be able to sleep. He would get up and have a glass of milk and some sleeping pills, or maybe fix himself a little snack. I often regret not having the wherewithal to have taken notes when my dad was cooking or fixing one of his concoctions. I remember him making a lot of things that tasted good, but I have no idea what they were, or how to recreate them. One of this concoctions had something to do with butter and syrup. I seem to remember him mixing butter (or margarine, rather) on a plate with pancake syrup, and then eating it on a cracker as one of his midnight snacks. I even remember eating it with him. What I don't remember is whether or not that was all there was to it. Surely butter and syrup don't make a suitable cracker spread, do they? There must have been some peanut butter in it. Peanut butter and crackers go together, after all. Or, was it honey and butter on the cracker? Honey butter is a thing. I have pored over this in my mind for years. What was his cracker spread? I've finally decided that it must have been as I originally thought: butter and syrup. I think the idea was to replicate the flavor of a pancake without having to fire up the griddle. The pancake is, after all, nothing more than a vessel for the butter and the syrup. This way, you just cut out all the work. I remember eating this syrup butter on both Ritz and Saltine crackers, so, I don't suppose it matters which one you use. We was po', we used what we had.

So, if you are at all interested in trying this (I just did), go grab some butter or margarine, your syrup, and a fork. Cream the butter and syrup together until it is blended, then spread it on a cracker. You can enjoy your little snack as you watch today's FPN Extended Play Advent Calendar Song Selection: "Silent Night Medley" by Hanson. I remember watching the Hanson Christmas Special with my dad the last Christmas he was alive, so I suppose this song is as close as I can come right now to a Dad-centric Holiday Favorite. I should have liked to have found the actual footage of them singing this on the Christmas Special, but alas, it was not to be. I hope you all enjoy this anyway. It might just be my favorite Christmas song, by anyone, ever. It's in the top 3, for sure.

P.S. When Taylor breaks it down at the end, I tear up. I'm crying now. If you don't think this is beautiful and perfect, then you might not have a soul.