I have questions, I have answers.

What would I do without the internet? It's such an integral part of my life. I have so many questions. It has so many answers. Like this morning, in the midst of my preparations for a 3-week cleanse and my course planning for my tutoring job (one of the 4 jobs I've got now), my curiosity and work bring me these directions:

How do I make Turkish coffee? Why, by boiling water in an ibrik and following these simple directions, naturally. (Coffee with cardamom and a little brown sugar is so much nicer than plain when you're drinking it without any cream or milk, and I prefer to keep the spices out of my Moka [where I usually make my coffee] to avoid always having to drink flavored coffee.)*

What are The Chronicles of Prydain about, and would it be appropriate reading for my challenging literature & ESL class of 11-year-old Korean girls, once we've finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

How can I teach that same class about the Vietnam War in a way they'll understand and get something out of it? They had many questions about it as I tried to explain "hippies" and the context for The Bridge to Terabithia. I'm sure Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried would be too sexually sophisticated, Michael Herr's Dispatches too full of vulgarities for this group, who titter at the word "damn" or the word "sex," even in the sense of the distinction between male and female. Yet they're SO BORED by almost everything I bring in, except Harry Potter. I came upon this wonderful article by Peter Filene from 1999 about teaching Vietnam to children of Vietnam war vets & protestors (unfortunately, available in full only through institutional access through JSTOR). But for 11-year-old girls raised with a foot in Korea and a foot in the United States, Filene's observation that for his students, "the war has very different meanings: it is both further away and closer" is true in rather a different sense. Maybe I can take a look at Wanda Miller's book, Teaching U.S. History Through Children's Literature: Post-World War II (Through Children's Literature) to find some more ideas. And maybe the book Teaching U.S. history as mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin may help, too, since it sounds good and sounds like it's got a case-study on Vietnam. Of course, since I'm not paid for prep and this is far from being my primary job, the question remains too exactly how much I can put into this . . .

Could I teach Hesse's The Journey to the East to my group of soon-to-be 6th graders? Am I reaching too far in wanting to teach them Hesse and Thoreau in my anthropologically driven English literature course on nature and survival narratives? (So far we've read Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", and Athabaskan (Alaska native) writer Velma Wallis's Two Old Women, and next up is Jon Krakauer's article "Death of an Innocent" [a shorter version of the story on which his book, and the recently released film "Into the Wild" is based] Maori writer Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider.)

Would a nectarine tree grow in my yard? Hmm, probably not to be hardy or fruiting from a stone of fruit from COSTCO grown who-knows-where. If I spent a bit on a tree, a special cultivar called "Flamin' Fury", probably so.

What should I do with my cabbage from the Howell farmer's market? Why, make raw sauerkraut and linguine with sauteed bacon, onion, cabbage, coarse sea salt, fresh-ground pepper and nutmeg, and garden-fresh tarragon and thyme, inspired by Katrina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking, of course. This is cheating a bit, because I actually found these recipes in the past and have been meaning to make them for some time. Now if only I had a 50-gallon barrel for sauerkraut, instead of the modest brown ceramic crock I found at a garage sale and bought for this purpose (but instead have been using for a year to hold my alliums and potatoes)!

Just when am I going to stop playing and start working on my archaeology paper? Oops, that's one the internet can't answer for me. Perhaps I should go explore the question off-line.

*By the way, though, that recipe above doesn't call for NEARLY enough coffee. Very weak for a Turkish coffee, and I don't think there was even a full cup of water in my pot, since my ibrik is very small, like this one. I think THIS RECIPE looks better; I'm going to try it now, since the food coma is setting in since I ate all the pasta. Mmmm. What a lovely lazy day at home.