The Orchid Journal

I am grieving. No, no one has died. Nothing tangibly tragic has occured to cause me to grieve, no, I am grieving the loss of a sense of place in my life. It is strange to grieve the loss of a place, and not the loss of a person or thing. In America, we seem to have grown out of a need for a sense of place. Because of the ease of travel and instant communication over long distances, families disperse like chaff in the wind as soon as they're old enough to leave the nest. There is also an emphasis on non-traditionalism, newness, the excellencies of change. We want a change of scenery, a change of situation. We are quick to separate from the past, assert ourselves over history. We are different! We will move on! My family had moving down to a science. I am grieving the years we spent wandering the country. I bottled up my anger and hatred of moving and I stuffed it down inside. Every time we moved, I put on a strong and happy face, but inwardly, I cringed and whithered ins...

I feel so sad right now. It is not the kind of sadness that is gut-wrenching in its intensity, nor is it one of those, "Oh man, I just got a papercut" fleeting sadnesses. This kind of sadness sneaks up on me, little by little. One circumstance or internal struggle is met and I face it, or ignore it, thinking it can be bested. Then a new one surfaces unrelated or related to the first, and I am slightly bemused by it, but I trudge on unvanquished. Unfortunately, there are only so many of those urchins that I can fend off by myself. Lately they have been coming in droves, weakening my resolve. No sooner do I fight a few hundred off, but the next come crawling up my pant leg. I am trying to pray, but one of the little sadness buggers made its way to my ear, disguised itself as an awfully convincing truth and is whispering, "You may ask God for help, but He sure ain't hearing you." I know it is a lie, but at the same time, it feels so true right now. I coul...

Some people should not be teachers. My "Structure and Meaning of Words" professor is one of those people. She is not actually a professor, she is a Russian born graduate student, named Tatyana. I like her name, I like her voice and her proper, precise speech. She is pleasant and has long blonde hair. Tatyana, who asks us to call her by her first name because she is not a professor, knows a lot about the rules of English and the root structure of various languages, but she cannot teach. My mom, who has been a teacher for about thirty years for good reason, says that a teacher's job is to excite the students about learning. The teacher's job is to present the material in a way that those who do not naturally care about the material will take an interest in learning for themselves. The inverse of this equation would be that a bad teacher is someone that makes you hate a subject you normally find interesting. This is the case with Tatyana. I signed up for this c...