Much needed update

Here is how Middle Ground stands:

-After much ado and discouragement, I am logging HURA hours. There is the matter of back-pay. Should I contact M. Bowling or the English Departments.

-I am really hoping to incorporate Navajo into all my pieces. I want to purchase this book:

Diné Bizaad Bínáhoóaah or Rediscovering the Navajo Language by Dr. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie.

Perhaps an interview can be gleamed.

-Have signed up for a (free) writing workshop on children's books on October 10. While I am not writing a piece aimed at children for Middle Ground, I am writing at least one story from the perspective of a 9-year-old. I am curious to see how this workshop will help this piece. Perhaps, it will keep my grown-up voice in check.

-Found out today that Neil Gaiman started as "a journalist with dreams of one day writing novels." I do not feel so soulless. 

-I am heading up to Kayenta this weekend, come hell or high water. I believe both will come. I have yet to reimburse my drivers (ie, my father) with HURA funds. I need to figure that it out. 

My biggest concern is that i will not be able to get into the classrooms. I will be sending out e-mails.

-I cannot figure out how to upload interviews from my digital recorder to my interviews. Which means they are taking up space on my recorders. Ew.

These are the logistics. Expect me emoting all over this place some time tomorrow.

fur, straw, metal

I am continuing to work on Middle Ground without being funded. This does not bother me because my current work load with regards to Middle Ground is so light. I do feel, however, that I am not able to do as much as I would like because of my lack of funding. For example, I cannot properly travel unil I find out how to get compensation.

I feel I am forever stuck in the land of the brainstorm. Great things I would like to start doing that I can't because of logistics.

What have I brainstormed this week.

1. Disregarding my feeling towards feminism, I am taking an introduction to woman writers course. Exciting news! There is a whole section of the course devoted to Native American woman writers. Selections for the course include works by Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Linda Hogan. Very, very easy research. This also reminded me: I need to come up with a very specific reading list for the semester. Look for that in the next week.

2. The first essay we are reading is by Virginia Woolf. I haven't read her since I was 15 or 16 and am interested in seeing how my own identity as a "woman writer" has changed. Who am I now? At 15, or was it 16, I felt like V.W. failed somewhat in her asserations, although I cannot presently remember just what those assertions were.
I learned today that VW held her own salons as a young woman in London. Bohemians talking loosely about everyone. I would like to have my a couple of my own salons to use as a research method. I would invite various mixtures of poeple over, provide eats and then let them cut loose on some of the topics I hope to address with this project.

In other news, I am more tired then tired. I go and go, I am a as fuel as efficent as a Yaris. My biggest fear is that I am losing myself under my work load. Who will I be come December? Where is my courage, my heart, and my brain? I am straw, I am metal, I am fur. I really cling to any taste of my former lackidasical self. I find myself in moments of eating sushi, in a kiss on my stomach from a boyfriend, or a good scarf. I find myself in my laughter. The kind that doesn't come from my increasingly forced jokes.

Dust

Going back to the source.

Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.

Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.

Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.

In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.

Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.

I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.


*

Life feels a bit like camping with my father.

When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.

We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.

If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.

But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.

I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.

First Posting

Finally got the blog up and running. This week has been plagued with logisical failures, big and small, personal and whatever is the opposite of that.

Failures of Importance:
Payroll for this project
My laptop is dead. (I have been doing work at Klein)
The internet at my apartment is down as my older sister neglected to pay our cable bill for two months.

Basically, my essays and stories in transit are, as of now, stranded on my uncharged laptop. I am wondering if it would be possible to order a new charging cord using the HURA Funding, or if that would be ill advised.

Met with Beverly Cleland at the English Department about an hour ago in order to order equipment. I'll hopefully be putting an order for a voice recorder of some kind. To digital or not to digital?

Otherwise, I am pleased with the formatting of this blog thus far. The Newsreel is particualr snazzy. It should be noted that the picture that is heading this blog was found on a website that featured photogrpahs of global poverty. I believe the picture was taken somewhere out near Mounument Valley.

I will try to update this a couple times a day, if only to keep myself up to date. I'll add some relevant links this afternoon.