It’s December and my list of things to do is longer than my arm:
- prepare and pack for trip to Cinque Terre on Wednesday with 9 students in grades 8 and 9
- create a new School Profile, write letters of recommendation, create transcripts and complete applications for 18 college-bound seniors
- help a group of struggling grade 9 students NOT flunk out of school
- do much-neglected laundry
- wash dishes (every plate in our apartment is stacked in two neat piles in the kitchen)
- decorate apartment for Christmas (okay… I just did that one)

The truth is that none of it matters. Oh, it’s making me crazy-anxious and irritable all right but, as always, it will get done.

Our Barcelona routine (such as it is) was disrupted during the month of November when I threw caution to the wind (along with some of my other good habits such as high regard for the cleanliness of our dishes and apartment)and decided to pursue the INSANE goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Less than a month, actually, as I didn’t learn about the NaNo WriMo (National Novel Writing Month) competition until a week into the month. (I have made it clear that I blame this entire crazy endeavor on April).

And I did it! I AM a NaNo WriMo winner… I reached 50,058 words on November 27th. I copied my manuscript into what the site calls its “Word Validator” and the little blue line on my profile turned purple and it now says WINNER!

It was, I must admit, somewhat easier than I thought it would be (without actually being easy) given that I leave the house for school at 7:05 a.m. and am rarely home before 7:00 p.m. As I started the competition late, I needed to produce 2,000 words (not spectacular words, mind you… just regular words) a day in order to hit 50,000 words by November 30th. My routine was to take a wee break after I got home from school/tutoring and then to write for two solid hours. I wrote on my laptop. In bed. It did occur to me, from time to time, that perhaps serious novelists don’t write in bed. No matter. D. made, or fetched, dinner which makes those weeks pretty much the same as normal. On the weekends, we would see a double bill at our favourite cinema by the sea and then I would write, write, write. Sundays were my big catch up day; on the final Sunday, I wrote more than 8,000 words. Close to the end, I was really suffering from a lack of sleep but I knew that I would get it done. 50,000 words. The round little train that could. Choo choo.

And DP believed that I could do it. He was wildly supportive, and has been established, he did my share of all non-school tasks for three weeks. (Novelists must have very understanding or very FRUSTRATED partners). Then, when I WON, he took me to see “The Bee Movie” (at my request) and treated me for a fabulous Italian meal at “Il Corsero Nero” which translates to “The Pirate Nero”. Huzzah!

One day, close to the end of November, while I was still headed towards 50,000, I covered one of DPs classes for him. He had told the kids about how many words I had written and, as they are in grade 7, they were very impressed. The had tons of questions (a classic filibuster tactic for the substitute teacher) and one student asked what the story was about. I hadn’t discussed my story with anyone but DP so I had to take a moment to think about the question. I explained that it was a story about a woman with a nice life – a life that seemed okay from the outside – but she wasn’t really happy. When her father died and left her the family’s farm, she moved home and that act changed everything. She changed. The girl leaned towards me and asked, “Are you happy?” Great question, right? “Yes. I am pretty happy.” She let it go at that.

My story is about a woman whose father dies and leaves her the family farm. She gives up her city life and moves back to the country where she begins learning about living a rural life — all of the things she was taught but did not learn as a young woman itching to grow up and move closer to the bright lights. That’s it in a nutshell. It includes recipes and the plight of a local library and some romance. A wholesome story. Really!

I’m not quite finished; I still need to write the ending. Perhaps the verb “record” is a more accurate description of what is most likely to happen. The thing is that although I have an ending in mind, I’ve discovered that my characters (especially the main character) are willful and do not always play by the rules established in my chapter outline. These characters clearly have plans of their own, like rebellious high school students but, you know, um… fictional. I have heard writers make this very claim and thought “What malarkey!”… but it turns out to be absolutely true. My characters very rarely say or do things that are inconsistent with their personalities, no matter how cute or clever the line I have in mind, or how nicely the proposed action might wrap up a scene. Stubborn stubborn stubborn!

After (the characters and) I finish the ending, I will go back and write some scenes for which I need to do a bit more research; my parents have been my primary sources of information on this project. This stage will take another month of after-school writing from the time I begin.

Then comes the damned editing. My bitchy suit-wearing tight-bunned inner-editor has been locked in the closet with our little blue vacuum cleaner for a month now. If you were to look at my story and/or my apartment, it would be apparent that neither the editor nor the vacuum cleaner was able to escape on their own. When a first draft is complete, I will ask DP to be my first reader. God bless the first reader.

A friend at school asked, “Then what?” I didn’t understand what he meant. Then he explained that a friend of his, back in the U.S., had written a novel which she self-published but it wasn’t very good. Ah! As a Pisces, I come by my idealism naturally… of course, I intend to publish it. Perhaps it won’t be the best thing I ever write. Maybe it won’t get published until after my brilliant second novel is published. Who knows? But I believe that if you are going to take on something this BIG, put this much of your life into it, you need to be both serious and optimistic.

I am.

I wrote 50,000 words in November. Writer performs happy dance here!

The End.

I must be out of my cotton-picking mind. It’s November… I am juggling one zillion things with college applications, letters of recommendation still to be written, baby blog still waiting to be named (thanks CJ, April, Jay and Megan for your feedback), a relationship with my sweet one, cooking sometimes (warming up at the very least) and the systematic location and destruction of dust-bunnies.

And yet…

April has recommended this fantastic site called 43 things… it is a site where you can keep an ongoing list of short term and long term goals. You can write entries about your (however feeble) attempt to meet your goals and other users can send you a “cheer” to cheer you on. I dig the way the site is set up as it allows you to see how many people share your goals and you can access their lists to see what else they are working on. Some people are way new-agey about the whole thing: I myself have goals such as give up diet coke (yes, it’s been two weeks now) and pay off my credit card. So much research shows that we are more likely to meet goals that we have recorded. I am a fan of “SMART” goals; goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. So I have been looking at other people’s goals (it is, admittedly, a little like snooping through someone’s bathroom cupboard… but with their permission) and today I found a reference to completing something called NaNoWriMo. Wouldn’t you want to know more? (I thought so!)

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it is, of course, November. NaNoWriMo is a contest to get regular (procrastinating) people writing novels or, at the very least, 50,000 words of a novel, during the month of November. The idea is not to have a polished novel by November 30th but to get the words down. Mountains of words. December (and the months that follow it) are for editing. So I think that this is the most fantastic thing I have heard in a while. A contest (no big prize… just the satisfaction of finishing) that forces you to write more than a thousand words a day. Tremendous! So I go out to the dining room where DP is marking and I tell him about this contest and isn’t this just the worst time for me to contemplate writing a novel and he says, “hmmmm?” because, as I said, he is marking! So I go back to the computer, register, and start typing. After the first weekend, I copied and pasted all of my shiny new words into the NaNo WriMo website.. and the word count validator (I think that’s what it is called) told me that I had already written about 8000 words. Ha!

As of 8:20 this evening, I am up to 11,394 words. They aren’t all perfect words… nor are they perfectly placed yet but there is a very cool rhythm driven by the terror of the November 30th deadline.

People, all over the world, have been writing novels for the NaNoWriMo contest since 1999. Last year 79,000 people entered the contest and 13,000 of those finished. How cool is that? I was curious to learn if any novels I might have heard of started out as NaNoWriMo novels; it turns out that Sara Gruen has written two NaNoWriMo novels: Flying Changes (HarperCollins, 2005) and Water for Elephants (Algonquin, 2007).

The site recommends that you tell everyone you know that you are writing a novel. I am telling you.

50,000 words by the end of the month? No problem. And if it doesn’t work out, I am blaming it on April!

In response to issues raised in my last blog entry, Jay suggested that I start a new blog as opposed to changing this one.

I thought, “Cool. How hard can that be?” Ha!

a story about blanca
I have spent two full days “storming my brain” for ideas. Let’s pause, actually, for a story about Blanca, this adorable grade 5 student that I tutor. She and I were discussing a writing assignment she had begun working on and she told me, with enormous pride, that she had finished the pre-writing stage of the project.

“I don’t know if I am saying it exactly right… but I stormed my brain.”

So cute.

the storming of my brain for blog titles
So I have been “storming my brain” for blog titles. The new blog will be about travel, writing, learning and teaching and how these things can transform ones life. As it will be public, the new bog will be less personal than “Barcelona Moments” and I will probably use a fun pen name.

Please find, below, the tentative titles that D. and I like the most and that are available as domain names. (This has been an important, time-consuming, and slightly crazy-making part of the research phase.)

my request for you
My request for you is that you comment (below) OR e-mail me with your three to five favourites blog titles.

If you have a suggestion of your own, please send it. Thanks, lovelies!

the short list
(A) home in the world
6000 km of separation
All the roads taken
Anthropology café
Anthropology girl
Blogging by memory
Blue sky (wherever you go)
Cultural amendment
Faraway café
Fourth culture girl
Give one, get one
Happenstance by design
Happenstance café
Her sweet life
In a blur
In a café faraway
In between worlds
Madly Spinning World
Mirror world adventures
Monna meets world
Never the same world twice
Notes from a café
Notes from a small planet
Notes from Happenstance Cafe
Notes from my moleskin
Notes from the corner of Happenstance & Planet
Push the stars
Small world but i wouldn’t want to paint it
Stories, not atoms
Storming my brain
Sweet life café
Teach, Travel, Write, Learn
Teaching on three continents: Stories from Spain, Mexico and Colombia
The art of cultural change
The art of world-watching
The culture girl
The Home Away
The reciprocity of travel
The teachable moment
The/an idea of home
This/the (sometimes) sweet life
View from a moving window
Ways of being wise
What’s needed for the voyage

We are supposed to be in Granada, Spain tonight. If all had gone according to plan, we would already be tucked into a lumpy little bed with terribly flat pillows at our back-packers hostel near Plaza Nueva. Our Friday night dreams would be punctuated by dances of sugar plumb fairies and the dizzy-dazzling view from the Alhambra.

We have been derailed by a severe case of the scoots. Two cases, actually. First me and then D. No more details are called for.

So now I have all of this “extra” time that was supposed to be Granada time. Wandering around time, looking at cathedrals time, drinking cafe con leche time. Weirdly, it’s sort of a gift to be here, snug in our own apartment as fall descends on Barcelona and the pleasant task that has occupied much of my day has been researching blogs-writing and creativity.

Honestly, I had no idea that there were so many sites dedicated to the topic of blogging. Blogs about blogging. Particularly great is a site called skelliewag.
I found their article “110+ Resources For Creative Minds” inspirational. Now, if I were a master blogger, that would be a link. We build up to these things.

The reason that I have been surfing through oceans of blog-advice is that, although I have long said that I would like to publish some fiction or creative non-fiction, I have done nothing big or concrete about it.

Wow… let’s contemplate exactly how Canadian that last sentence is: “I *said* that I would *like* to publish.” This is why Canadians are not known as great conquerors; you have to be seriously assertive to gain power over others. Some might say aggressive, even! (This reminds me how much we have been LOVING “Corner Gas” for those of you who are familiar with this wacked-out, Saskatchewan-based television phenomenon. So hee-hee-hee and ha-ha-ha.)

Back to berating myself… I know that it is not enough to want to write. One must write. One must fill up moleskin journals and cafeteria napkins and all the white space left in the newspaper. One must fill the blank spaces up with words about what has happened and what’s going to happen and what might well happen. Ideas and dreams and declarations. I believe that. The only way to get to the book is through the first word and then the second. We have a friend who has published two novels (thus far) and the only way he got there was by laying down the words, one after the other. And he has a wife and two kids and a really big garden. This is a man knows how to get the words down.

So I have been wondering what’s up with me. Why don’t I make a regular practice of this writing practice that I say is so important to me? While I acknowledge that starting a new job (again) is certainly a factor, I am constantly starting new jobs, so that excuse is only going to serve me for so long.

But here’s the thing. I realized that I have been writing (and I am not counting letters of recommendation, policies and procedures or late slips for tardy high school kids)! This blog is just over a year old now and I am passionately in love with it. I actually think about my blog on the bus on the way to school; when gazing out the window I’ll see something so uniquely (sometimes so annoyingly) Barcelonan and I will think, “There’s a blog moment.” When I am in work over-drive mode, I find myself longing for some quiet blogging time. In fact, for the last couple of months, DP and I have been keeping creative dates with ourselves (not each other) on Saturdays and this is always one seriously blissed-out blog-fest for me.

So this is me getting the words down. These are the words, the Hansel and Gretel pebbles, dropped on the way to my book. Good!

Perhaps because my undergraduate degree was in English Literature and because I have taught English seven years, I sometimes overlook what is happening on the internet as real publishing. I am a lover of words that I can hold, in book-form, in my hands. (I can hold my laptop in my hands too but the battery is so hot that it makes me sweat). What has become clear, however, is that there is a very real connection between a great blog and a book deal. Over the last couple of days, I have read about two bloggers who have turned their blogs into books. You can check them out for yourself:
Chocolate and Zucchini
Indexed

Why not me, then? If I had a dime for every time my friends and I have picked up a new book in a bookstore and said, “I had that idea years ago. Shoot.” I would be able to quit my day job right now.

I have decided to blog my way to a book. It’s what David Risher calls a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”. This is conquering talk here.

So what does that mean for my blog? It means that I have decided to make my blog public. The terms blog and public are probably synonymous in the minds of most people but if you were an international teacher with a higher-than-average need for privacy, you might think twice. I have thought twice… three times, even.

Going public with the blog will mean making some minor changes: removing references to specific Barcelona street and school names, revising some posts in which I refer to friends, family members and colleagues by name, and losing that cute black and white photo of me taken in Lisbon. (“The name is Bond, James Bond.”) All photos will be mine and, when that is not possible, the photographer will be credited. I will learn how to create links. That’s about it. Maybe I’ll get a new tag line. Who knows.

I’m kind of buzzy right now (and warm… it could be the flu or the laptop battery or both)! I am giddy with delight and anticipation. It will take me a couple of weeks to open the blog up WIDE but you 15 will be the first to know.

Thanks to one dear friend and my littlest sister for saying that my blog makes you happy and that I should write every day. That’s probably not going to happen but one post a week is a good goal.

Once a week… a post about life in Barcelona and kids and teachers and culture and tapas and what it means to be a Canadian who hasn’t lived there for ten years. And, ultimately, blogging.

Cool!

This is from a recent e-mail from my mom…
“The green table that you referred to in your blog was Aunt Adelaide’s kitchen table, and the marble was from the Chateau. Uncle Ben had two pieces cut – one for the table and one for the top of a dresser. I do not know how he got it though. We helped Ben and Lois when they moved into their condo, from their house, and he gave us a lot of stuff, the table included.”

So it seems that I did not fabricate the story about the marble from the Chateau Laurier although there does seem to be some mystery surrounding how our ancestors came by the marble. I can assure you that this slab would be much too heavy to hide under your tuxedo jacket on your way out of the hotel after a fancy dinner. Thievery, then, is out of the question.

View of roof-top Vernazza (Cinque Terre) and the Mediterranean from our room.

I am aware that I often blog about cultural difference. Since I am making confessions this bright-blue-sky Sunday morning, I will also admit that I talk, at considerable length, about this theme when my mind ought to be on other things, like my work or the US Primary race. (Political systems are also anthropological constructs but I am “primaried” right out even though the election is still more than a year away.) The thing is that I am endlessly, irrationally fascinated by the ways in which people are different from each other, and the ways in which we are same, and how we have developed as “peoples” which is to say in communities, cultures and civilizations. DP commented recently that I am an anthropologist and I believe he is right.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines anthropology as “the science of human beings; especially: the study of human beings and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture.”

Actually, my field is applied anthropology and the whole world is my classroom.

One of our favourite travel destinations, thus far (and I am not going to say San Miguel de Allende although I adore that precious little Mexican town) is called Cinque Terre (pronounced CHINK-weh TAY-reh) comprised of five small, medieval towns hanging off the cliffs of the Italian Riviera, directly across the Mediterranean from Barcelona.

I like Rick Steves’ description:
“The rugged villages of the Cinque Terre, founded by Dark Age locals hiding out from marauding pirates, were long cut off from the modern world. Today the villages, linked by a milk-run train, a ferry, and a spectacular trail, draw hordes of hikers. To preserve the character of the towns and the area’s natural beauty, the government declared the Cinque Terre a national park a few years ago. Visitors pay a small entrance fee, which stokes a park maintenance fund and helps to maintain the trails.” From:http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/cinqueterre.htm

Last Christmas, a trip to the Cinque Terre formed the second leg of our “Wow! I LOVE Italy!” Italian vacation. We took the train up from Florence and spent five cold but deliciously starry nights falling in love with Vernazza, the smallest of the towns, and our home base in the Cinque Terre. From the main street of town – which starts up at the post office, dips under the train station and ends in the sea – the mythic journey to our rented room took us 119 precarious steps up into the sky. I was literally shaking the first time we did the walk to our room and DP probably had my bag. By the end of our stay, however, my legs were no longer trembling and the muscles in my bottom were harder than they have ever been in my life; still, we made no unnecessary trips up to the room. Forgot your camera in the room? No worries! Just use the other person’s!

One of my favourite things about the Cinque Terre is the train route that connects the five towns. For much of the two-minute trip from one town to another, the train travels inside a tunnel but, periodically, the train shoots out into the dazzling sunlight and the sunlight is reflected by the sea and the dizzy train passengers declare, “Ahhhh” as in the sound that is made every year by a million people, their heads tilted back, watching the Canada Day fireworks in Ottawa. Then, without warning, the train plunges back into the darkness of the mountain.

Riomaggiore, Manarola and Monterosso del Mar were, as Rick promised, beautiful variations on a theme and, within two days of our arrival, I was able to identify Monterosso as the town with the greatest ceramic bowl buying potential. We never did reach Corniglia (pronounced Cornelia), the Cinque Terre town nestled in a ridiculously high-home, 370 steps above the train station. I am fairly certain that the pirates never made it to Corniglia either! (To put this journey in perspective, it has three times as many steps as the pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico and is probably not much safer.) We will take the little shuttle bus next time.

It was late December. I wore, as always, my MEC shell and my heavy MEC fleece and was was toasty-warm (especially by step 100). There were no “throngs” of tourists in late December… there may have been a grand total of 15 foreign travelers staying in the little town of 600 residents. The food was amazing; the seafood was beyond fresh and we learned that the Cinque Terre is the home of pesto. We slept late in the mornings and took photographs and wrote in our journals and explored the little towns and their harbours. We were especially tickled by a town in which the people living on the main street had parked their boats (not cars) in front of their houses. We ate the most incredible take-out pizza – the real Italian “Margherita” deal – out of the box in our ramshackle room and licked our fingers clean. I forgot that I was a teacher and became, instead, a private citizen of the universe.

The great news is that we are returning to the Cinque Terre in early December but this time, to make things really interesting, we are taking nine students from our school: four 8th grade girls, one 8th grade boy and four 9th grade boys. No… this is not a punishment of some kind. It was my idea! I am running the “Travel Club” as an after-school activity this year and D. is chaperoning with me. We all meet on Monday afternoons after school and plan the trip: the destination, the flight, the food/restaurants, our itinerary… all of it. We are also learning together and our topics include a digital photography workshop, basic Italian words and phrases and tips for traveling in Italy. It’s such a cool idea that we have had other teachers and parents say, “Can I come too?” (We are pretty sure they are kidding).

Last Monday, we were talking about food that is indigenous to the Italian region of Liguria: wine, olives, pesto and anchovies. The kids were brainstorming lists of the kind of meals that might be served at local restaurants and sharing their ideas. I was amazed by the kids’ response to this activity; it felt just like Christmas morning as the students read off their lists of anticipated meals. A hand shot up – a hand belonging to a girl who had really REALLY wanted to go to Milan for the shopping. We are, in fact, flying into Milan on a late-night flight but will be leaving on a (very) early morning train to the Cinque Terre the following day.

Is this going to be a shopping question, I wondered. “Yes?”

“Miss, is it okay if we buy a REALLY big cheese?” Her arms flew up into the air where they formed an enormous lop-sided circle.

“Sure. If you can find one.”

“Cool.” Four Spanish girls nodded their heads in unison and dreamed of the really big cheese.

This is a cultural difference to love.

Our Green Table!
Image 1 (Left): Our new table adorned with DP’s photos of Venice in October, 2007.
Image 2 (Centre): Green Table Update…here’s our table in February of 2008. It’s true! We are shape-shifting style gurus!

In William Gibson’s novel “Pattern Recognition” (a sci-fi pick from DP) the main character, Cayce, travels from her home in New York City to London, England which she refers to as the “mirror world”.

I totally get that concept… a place that seems the same as “home” but isn’t quite…

In Barcelona, people put perfectly good furniture out on the street when they are done with it. Really! Some people make a point of dragging the unwanted item all the way down to a spot right beside the garbage dumpster so that there will be no question, whatsoever, that this piece is officially up-for-grabs. Other (lazier, more practical, more efficient) Barcelonans simply prop the item up against the outside wall of their building knowing that it will disappear into someone else’s flat in nano-seconds. (This makes the actual act of moving extremely stressful as one must operate with the understanding that passers-by may mistake your stuff as fair-game and take it home with them. This leads to a hyper vigilant state of awareness on moving day and, in some Canadians, a deep sense of paranoia).

The array and quality of stuff that gets thrown out is fascinating! As many Barcelonans are living in flats that have been in the family for generations, there is a lot of old furniture floating around. Beautiful antiques polished with care by mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers. The city’s younger residents, however, are IN LOVE with Ikea and so it is out with the old and in with the new!

This is the mirror world part… what sane person replaces antiques with Ikea furniture? This illustrates that one person’s treasure is another person’s medium-density fibreboard. It also shows that not all developed nations have developed taste in the same way.

**This is DP, interrupting with supporting evidence…Last year, we bought a small red table from Ikea for our apartment and it was perfect there, but in the new apartment, there is no place for it, no corner where its bold redness seems quite right. With a value of a whole 10 euros, we decided we could let it go, so this afternoon, I went to buy some water at the grocery, three blocks away. On the way, I took out our little red table and left it on the street (lazily, nowhere near a dumpster) across from the door to our building. By the time I came back from the grocery with the water, the table was gone. It’s true. Life moves pretty fast. So do small red tables from Ikea. And now, back to your regularly scheduled program…**

You really could furnish an entire apartment with the goodies you find beside the dumpster; we have seen kitchen tables and chairs (not matching), couches in need of some stuffing, old mirrors with gilded frames, dressers, coffee tables, beds (I don’t think I would claim a bed from beside the dumpster but perhaps that’s just me)… and everything else INCLUDING the kitchen sink.

On our little street, there is a piso (apartment) that is being (loudly) gutted and restored and a lot of great stuff has been coming out of that apartment. About a week ago, we returned from school to find a gigantic heap of furniture right outside our building. At first we thought that someone must be moving. No… not a truck or a mover in sight! Perhaps this stuff belongs to the furniture store across the street. Nope… no price tags. Someone is throwing these jewels out? Incredible! As we moved closer to the pile, a neighbour was approaching from the opposite direction. It’s an intricate but civilized little dance, this sniffing around at the pile of cast-off furniture. We made eye contact but, as we had arrived first, the man waited for us to make our selections. Our eyes, at first, were bigger than our apartment; in the end, we selected just one item, an old table, and brought it up to the apartment.

The previously-loved table is old and beat-up and painted dark brown and dark green and light green as if the owner kept getting inspired to paint the table a new colour and lost momentum part-way through the job. It actually reminds me of a light green table that mom and dad have in their basement; I think it used to have a marble top on it and there is a story about the marble coming from the Chateau Laurier. (I don’t think I am making that up). This Barcelona table came sans marble but it has a whole lot of character and we love it. We placed it against the far wall of our living room and everything seemed perfect….

But, with time, we realized that it just doesn’t match our cheap blonde (almost) wood MDF Ikea coffee table and that the Ikea will just have to go! We are thinking about replacing it with a dark brown coffee table and maybe a dark brown furry rug to go under it.

Who knows… perhaps we will find something amazing at the dumpster.