to her dad and me, in the car on the way home from taekwondo: “The first fifty years of marriage are the hardest.”

randomly, daily: “I’m, like, what the cuss?”

after school today: “Everyone at my school is named Hannah, Emma, Chris or Zach.”

and this one remains my favorite, from Wacky Girl to her dad: “You will never understand the life of a woman.”

no, he never will, baby.

“You must live for something higher, bigger and better than you.”

listening to 2Pac, “Me Against the World,” and doing my LifeMap homework. My life, as illustrated by books. i don’t want to go too deep, but i want to go wide. after five-plus years of blogging, i’m not so into the self-assessments. too much navel-gazing. I’ll do it anyway.

“i got nothing to lose/
it’s just me against the world, baby…”

— Tupac Shakur

lie. he had everything to lose. talk about self-reflective, my Lord, this album — so brilliant. You know the poet Nikki Giovanni has a THUG LIFE tattoo on her arm? she does.

i have everything to lose, too (cuz me and 2Pac, so much in common, right?) — i want to get books to as many students as possible as I can before my time is up, and sometimes, that altruistic mission, which sounds like a cakewalk, right?, becomes such a struggle. wish me luck. have a great week.

— wm

And then there’s this oldie-but-goodie. You know I have to put this on auto-replay whenever I’m writing. I esp. love when she punches him in the nose.

Edited at 10:14 p.m. to say… Homework is done, three days ahead of time! Now I need some sleep. have a really superfine week, y’all. See ya when I see ya. Leave me some comments!

“Now is the time to understand / That all your ideas of right and wrong / Were just a child’s training wheels / To be laid aside / When you finally live / With veracity / And love.” — Hafez, poet (1315-1390)

this was the poem for yesterday, September 11th:

Dance

— Rumi

Steve sent me this clip along with a note that said, At least I’m not this bad!

He’s wrong, he is. Cuz when our girl was waiting for the bus, for her first day of middle school, with a bunch of kids she has never seen before in her life, Daddy wanted to check on her. So he dropped off her brother, buzzed back home, then, uh… yelled out to her…

“HI HONEY, I, UH, FORGOT SOMETHING! HAVE A GOOD FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!”

She loves him so.

“it’s the first day of school/
and the boys are watching…”

putting myself to bed after Wednesday night class (four hours, all scintillating.) (no, i’m not being “sarcastic,” i mean it.) is going to be really really tough.

so it’s now 11:16 p.m. and i have to go to bed! OK??? OKAY!

ps Steve’s blog post about Dylan got hijacked by a Japanese blog today and for some reason that just made my day. yeah, i’m easy to please.

… and if you know the Wacky Family well, you know that means one thing:

Pound Cake.

and a whole lot of fried potatoes.

bon appetit!!!

wm

private note to steve: still love you. xoxoxoxoxo me.

“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated.” — Edith Hamilton, educator and writer (1867-1963)

Yeah, you’re going to be getting a lot of these ;) Even if you’re not a education student, it’s interesting reading. I have class one night a week, plus weekend classes, too, plus about two hours of homework for every one hour of class. Last week, when we had orientation and our first class, they loaded us up with a tote of about a dozen books — reading for the semester. (Books are included with tuition, I was pretty thrilled about that. Charge me the extra, I do not care, but please don’t make me try to track down stuff that’s sold out, or that I can’t find anywhere, and please don’t give me the wrong edition on the book-buy list, and then say, Whoops! when the next class meets.) (Bad memories of undergrad school. This is a whole different deal.)

I’m really psyched about the titles, and I thought that keeping track of them on the blog would be a good way to remember everything I’ll be reading over the next couple of years.

Plus, plus, plus… Students at the school where I work are back next week. Had orientations at their schools for both of my own kids this week and…

We are settling into fall!

love,

wm

ps — The S.E. Hinton I’m reading just for fun. It’s been forty-three years since “The Outsiders” was first printed — it came out in 1967 — and you know what? My students still love that book, as do I. So it was a real treat to pick this one up. “Some of Tim’s Stories” really is some of her best yet. Susan Eloise, always my hero. Which reminds me, I need to send my former high school fifteen bucks to pay for that copy of “The Outsiders” that I swiped when I was a senior. That would be the right thing to do, don’t you think?

Have a lovely weekend.

Traveling with me everywhere I go: