Paper

Admittedly, I've had a preoccupation with paper my whole life... my grandmother used to buy rolls of cheap paper, 100 metres long for Kelsie and me to unspool across her floor and fill with epic herds of horses on the prairie. My sister Greta, always sticks in a few sheets of huge, patterned, $1-a-pieces into my care packages. These are the same sheets my roomate Bergen and I used to buy by the drove at Target and sit and admire for hours and hang them on our walls, or leave them on our table or floor....

I have boxes of the stuff, sitting around everywhere: begged, coverless magazines from bookstores, clippings of newsprint and said magazines. Little clippings in little boxes, bigger clippings in bigger boxes, a few folders of full leaves.

Currently I have a box in my room full of scrap paper.. Anything that screws up, or becomes obsolete, becomes soba fodder and is stored in this box with corn cobs and a tin mug of lighter fluid.

But my hoarding techniques have little to compare to the flotilla I am currently producing for school.

Having readjusted all my lesson plans to the new ministry's new demands for dictated "competencies" and "sub-competencies" and their corresponding layout, and given each plan a title page proclaiming these and other qualities of the plan... Then sticking all of them in chronological to-be-taught order in a single document (that is one document per grade) ...

I now have 12, complete or half complete, 100 + page documents that need printing and putting into clear plastic sheets, and clamped into two ring binders. One binder per grade. One set of plans per teacher. Three partners, 12 grades. If you do the math, it comes out to so much paper I could set up an installation piece at the Guggenheim.

Not to mention the scraps on which are green markered adjectives with matching pink markered nouns to stick on the board for students to match and make short sentences with, or the pictures of queens around which to brainstorm, or the scrambled sentences, tests, quizzes, grammar exercises, homework schemes, verb charts...

Oh, and those cute girls with their glitter markers... I need to buy them a couple reams too. That is, if the mayor and town council has the power to decide to stop paying my partners salary, they are decidedly not going to fund my extra curricular activities.