Tag: friends

Thoughts on Childhood, Walks to School, and Gum

On By VickieIn family, WritingLeave a comment
The house I lived in through 5th grade

*this was written in 2010 (but never published – until today!)

I go for a walk most mornings while my kids are at school. I usually walk to the school, around its perimeter, and back home as I listen to a tape in my “World of Philosophy” series. One day, as I turned the corner around the school’s parking lot, I noticed a tree up ahead with multicolored spots all over the trunk. I squinted as I moved closer, trying to figure out what those spots could be. I soon realized that each spot was a wad of gum. Apparently kids have been leaving their gum here for quite some time.

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The Zipper

On By VickieIn Writing1 Comment

For a moment, all I wanted was to be a kid again. To have no fear. To live in the moment. To scream out loud. To ride…the Zipper.

Every year, the local parish where my children attended preschool throws a fall festival, complete with carnival rides, a silent auction, and goofy games. One year, winding our way through the crowds, I saw towering above the horizon, a ride I recognized from my own teenaged years: the Zipper. Lost for a moment in the past, I am desperate to ride it!

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Thoughts on What We Say to Young Adults about the Future

On By VickieIn Current Events, Education, politics, Self DevelopmentLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2019-01-23 at 3.19.17 PMYou can accomplish great things in this life.

That’s it. Now you just have to believe it. Unfortunately, it seems that our media and our educational system is hell bent on convincing you otherwise. And so many of you are taking that to heart. I want to say “Stop that.”

I’d been a college professor (with a brief stint of teaching middle school thrown in for fun) for 25 years when I quit last year. I am not sure if I will ever go back. I’m not sure I want to. But I know academia. It’s my niche. I lived it, and I follow academic news stories in the media somewhat obsessively. One of the reasons I am so interested is that much of what is occurring on a national scale at colleges and universities today are things that already happened at a small community college in Los Angeles, where I was a tenured English professor. I taught there for a total of 16 years, back in the nineties and in the first decade of the 2000s. So what I am witnessing is not all that surprising.

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Lessons from Orange County and The Real Housewives

On By VickieIn Current Events, Self Development, Writing1 Comment

Screen Shot 2018-12-11 at 3.35.36 PM
It’s all worth it. All of it.

One of my guilty pleasures is the Real Housewives franchise. And the Real Housewives of Orange County Reunion wrapped up this week. Yes, the show is filled with ridiculousness and drama, some of which is certainly played up for TV through strategic editing and forced confrontations. But it has actually been very educational for me, which might sound strange coming from a college professor. But it has been educational in regards to interpersonal relationships and to understanding personality types.

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Meeting Challenges Head-On

On By VickieIn WritingLeave a comment

IMG_3373One of the decisions I made for 2017 was to do things that are difficult. One night I was thinking that it had been too long since I did something that was really hard for me, where I really challenged myself.

I felt this was especially important because I have finished one major writing project (my screenplay) and have not started another yet. Well, the screenplay is not “finished,” exactly. But I like the draft I have, and I am taking a break from continuously nitpicking at it. I figured I could use some distance from it while I wait to hear from people who are looking at funding it.
Any decisions in that regard have been put on hold for a few months to wait and see what this Trump presidency will do to investments in entertainment, if anything. That’s fine. I get it.

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The Necessity of Feedback

On By VickieIn WritingLeave a comment

csun
First day of the semester

I’ve neglected this blog, but I am back! A large reason I have disappeared for a minute is because I teach part time at a local university, and the new semester began. I am teaching more classes than I usually do, and so I have been busy getting into a groove.

But as I grade papers, I have been thinking a lot about feedback and it’s importance. I tell a story at the beginning of each semester about a poetry class I took in graduate school. As I paged through the first essay returned to us, I noted periodic checkmarks, which I assumed meant that I was hitting a point the professor was looking for. On the last page, he wrote “Good” and gave me a B. Hmmmmm. That made no sense to me. I must have uttered my confusion out loud because a student next to me assured me that the problem was probably that I had a lot of grammar errors – hence the B.

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Reminder: Don’t Do This Ever Again!

On By VickieIn Writing2 Comments

screenplayHuge lesson today. And I should have known better.

Here it is: Don’t let friends or family read your screenplay.

There. And don’t forget it.

I have been very private with this screenplay. Actually, I am private with all my writing, now that I think about it. I guess the difference is that with all of my other writing, I KNEW when I had something good. I didn’t need to go to anyone for their opinion or feedback. I was pretty good at giving myself my own feedback.

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