Spring Break Plans

Well, this absence wasn't quite as long as the last one, but I'm back!  I had student conferences all week (they have a paper due after the break) and those took up most of the past few days.  My sister came to visit last night, too, with her three kids (and I tip my hat to all you mothers out there--especially those who have young ones--I'm exhausted and I only spent five hours with them, haha).  It was fun, though, and I'm glad that even though we live a few states away, we still see each other enough, so the kids recognize me and my nieces and I can be little buddies :)

On the reading front, I did finish Willa Cather's O Pioneers.  Though enjoyable, it was probably my least favorite of the books I read of hers, behind My Antonia and A Lost Lady.  I then picked up Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, but was just loaned Mockingjay (the third book of the Hunger Games series) by a friend, so I'll set it aside, so that I can read finish out the trilogy before Hunger Games comes out in theaters.

I have high hopes for this movie!

I'm really glad that Spring Break is next week, because it means I can really write again.  I'll knock out my dissertation prospectus and I have some new ideas for some stories/poems I'm playing around with that I am looking forward to getting down on paper.  One of them was sparked by a picture I saw on Jen Michalski's blog of a visible body (see the link to know what I'm talking about).

Aspiring early on to be a doctor (a brain surgeon, in fact, after Mom had me read the kid version of Ben Carson's biography), I had gotten the visible body one year for Christmas.  Unlike the picture on Jen's blog, the body wasn't a man or a woman, but rather, unisex.  There were no defining outer features--the body had short hair, the body flat, smooth, and see-though, so that you could see the organs inside.

I was small--I remember having this body when we lived in Georgia--so I must have been five, but the parts were tiny and hard to put together, so my dad put it all together with superglue, so that none of the pieces got lost.  I remember watching him at the kitchen table starting from the body's head and working his way down to the body's heart, lungs, liver, the intestines, gluing each piece, his hands fumbling, larger than the doll itself.

When he was done, the body was complete, except for the reproductive organs.  He never put those in.  I don't know why.  I never asked him about it, but I remember as a kid, thinking that an important piece was left out.  I don't know if there were male parts, but I remember there being a small pink piece, slightly curved, that he was going to throw away and I took it when he left the body out to dry, put the tiny pink uterus in my Cinderella jewelry box where I kept it for years.

For a long time, it lay there beside toy rings my grandmother had given me, a little playdough figurine a family friend had made for us with our names on them, a purple and black cloth my cousin made at summer camp.  I didn't know what the piece was.  Health classes were reserved for the other bodily systems (reproductive chapters in textbooks were always stapled closed) and I remember cleaning out my attic after I was married and seeing the piece and finally recognizing what it was.

I'm not sure how this would all go about in a poem or story, but I may be working on figuring that out in the next few days.  Part of me wants to make it a politically charged poem that references the whole debate going on now about women's healthcare and the fact that men are making decisions for what women can and cannot do with their bodies, but I've never tried a poem like that and can see it being a disaster, so I'll see what happens.

Of course, if any of you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them!