Thu Sep 17 11:48:41 2015 I can't be a good (meaning real; meaning able to navigate the beach between the cliffs of it-ain't-about-you and the mysterious sea of artistic and spiritual identity; and why bother setting up camp on such shifting sands? because the sense of duty, the compulsion to "serve someone" as the man said you gotta, is strong in me) teacher without taking the time & attention to absorb and genuinely engage with the materials I'm supposed to be teaching with. That's why I'm reading *The Crucible* and making this journal entry, instead of just jumping into the grading that I'm so behind on. That's why I'm going to have to tweak my self-imposed schedule a little bit if I want to keep doing this even for the two years I *know* (to, hahah, the extent of course one *can* know something like that; ah the beautiful and hysterical illusions we drive around in!) I have left. 091815 ON STUDENT "FICTION" A lot of these so-called stories by the lit ex students are these same old renditions of the boy meets girl and they're the only ones for each other because he/she is the only one who can make it all right for him/her; the only one who can redeem the horrible past or ease the gruesome melodramatic pain; it's all about that ONE person who SAVES the other person. A lot of them read like an autohagiography: the subtext is "I'm special because I'm the only one who can see the special thing in this otherwise rejected fucked up human being." See? What they're really saying is THEY'RE the special one. They need to hear it I suppose, and so they're finding what seems like an acceptable (even heroic) way to say it? Often it seems like the motifs, the emotional connotation of life narrative, the tropes, what have you—it's reduced to a kind of archetypal ideagram. It's as though the introspection were mapped onto a Disney storyboard or something: "Their love was strong and people would always say how 'they were too young to know what love is' but love knows no time or age. They truly loved each other, but they didn’t know there would be a limit to their love. He didn’t tell her he was going into the Army to fight for his country. He didn’t tell her how soon he was leaving because he felt it would be too painful." Lots of assumptions made about the other person's motivations, as if to make them match up with the "bright and selfish hopes" of the narrator's?