bemused in the bluegrass

Angry Letters

2011-03-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

I've recently written some angry letters to companies that disappointed me in one way or another. Today I was motivated to write one on someone else's behalf. She told me her story and I was just so ticked off I had to compose the following...I think I've found my new passion...

Dear Sir or Ma’am at Under Armour:

I am writing to you to express my complete dissatisfaction with your product. I have watched your commercials over the years and have been led to believe that your products are designed for the most intensive athletic experiences. Alas, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

First, I must establish context for you so that you may understand the degree to which your product’s failure impacted my life. In the past two years, I have lost over 30 pounds and I have maintained a vigorous exercise program which includes, but is not limited to, daily gym visits before work. That’s right - I have been getting up at 5 a.m. each day to go to the gym. Further, I have been working two jobs and have just finished graduate school. Due to financial constraints, these gym visits have featured a Champion sports bra, which I purchased in 2006. It was a fantastic sports bra and I would have bought it again if they still made it.

I knew it was time for a new sports bra about a year ago, when the stitching began to tear, but I couldn’t afford to buy a good one. Then, last week, I got a new job. Finally - I could afford Under Armour, what I had believed to be the best of the best in sportswear. I spent 50 dollars, no small amount given my budget, and was excited at the prospect of a more secure workout experience.

Today I got onto the elliptical machine for my regular workout, feeling particularly edgy after a very hard day. I needed a good workout to clear my head, and I was glad that I had the protection of Under Armour’s caliber. I began my workout.

A mere one minute and thirty seven seconds later my workout was over. My upper region was no longer restrained; the zipper gave way and the other gym members stared as this athletic wardrobe malfunction dishonored Under Armour’s name for all to see.

My shame is only exceeded by my boiling fury.

I am not a small chested athlete; I wore an XXL. I have seen larger-breasted women more supported in their athletic endeavors. So what have they done? Do they have custom-made Kevlar vest molds for their breasts? One thing is for sure: they aren’t wearing Under Armour.

You should be ashamed of yourselves. There are athletes of all shapes and sizes. We thought we had your support.

Regretfully,

She who shall not be named

Careers

2011-02-23T12:43:00.000-08:00

"Careers." It's a board game I used to play with my mother. Like you might expect, "Careers" is modeled after the Boomer's experience of choosing, pursuing and working in a career. You went to school for a long time to be a doctor or you went for less time to be a newspaper woman, and so on. Very simple, defined paths wound around the board. Once you chose yours you simply rolled the dice, chose between a few options, and at some point, retired. The game provided no opportunity to veer off the path and learn how to sail or anything, but there was a comforting sense of stability to the whole thing.

I have spent a lot of time lately longing for the "simpler" times of yore (which of course are no simpler, but they sure seem that way) in which careers took less time to secure. You didn't need to invest the first half of your life to work in the same field the second half of it. It seems like people such as, say, Jefferson, had lots of time to be president AND make wine AND rewrite the bible AND collect hundreds of rare books AND found universities AND pursue all sorts of intriguing hobbies. (That he relied on the labor of slaves to do much of this is not lost on me, but I think the point still stands). Read about these "Renaissance" folk and, if you're like me, the first reaction is the question, "how the hell did they find the time?"

Now, I've done all the career stuff. I built up a whole pile of debt, work in the field I chose, and do other work to maintain the necessary pieces of paper that allow me to continue doing it. I don't have any kids, pets or debilitating diseases...and yet I can barely find the time to do stuff I already know how to do (i.e. blog) nevermind learn new stuff like vineyard cultivation!

Consider earlier today, on school vacation, the rest of the week spread out like a gleaming highway of possibility. I could read a whole book today. I could finish the scrapbook project. I could try a new recipe; rearrange furniture; take photographs; whatever. I spent fifteen minutes arranging the new watercolors I received as a gift. I prepared to try my hand at a new kind of art. I realized I had everything I needed except for something on which to paint. The prospect of driving to an art supply store seemed too daunting...especially with all the chores left to do and the date night plans beginning so early in the evening...

And just like that, the sun is down and vacation is more than half over. Time to grade those papers, waiting in a giant pile right next to the computer. Repeat the mantra: "There's always summer vacation. There's always summer vacation."

uh oh

2010-12-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

I hear it all the time. The sixties are over. We have a black president, how can you possibly still be talking about segregated schools, this is America! We've come a long way. Racism only exists in the South. It's all just because people want to live in different neighborhoods. Etc. Etc. Etc.

People seem to think that racism is "dead" or at least only visible in tiny pockets, somewhere in the deep south. This is a nice idea, but racism has a new face and people in the northeast love to ignore it. In the interest of offering another point of view, I offer the following story...(the names are fake because I don't want to get in trouble).

On Tuesday of this week a student threw a big rock at another student and shoved a teacher, hard, in the chest. He is a very nice young man, this student, but he also has a learning disability that makes it very difficult for him to adjust to new situations. Since he was on a field trip that day, and suddenly things didn't go as planned, he freaked out. He was taken home and suspended for one day. The teacher wrote it up, filed it, and we haven't said much about it since. This particular student has made terrific progress over the years, and these incidents are pretty rare. Let's call this student "Frank".

Another student has a mouth like a sailor and a bad attitude. I, of course, love him to pieces. He is constantly threatening to kill me, sue me, smash my windshield, and it is a joke and I know it. It's his own socially inept way it's a show of affection. I guess we have a similar sense of humor. (I realize these statements sound awful, but in context and with the right tone of voice, telling your English teacher, "I'm going to slash your tires if you assign homework tonight" can be really funny). Let's call this student "Ignatius".

Another student, new to us this fall, also has a mouth. He is incredibly impulsive and energetic and constantly getting in arguments with one of his classmates. He makes verbal threats in a menacing tone of voice and then laughs hysterically, which several of his classmates find very funny and a few others do not. He is constantly moving and has one of the worst cases of ADHD I've ever seen. He and a few other boys have gotten into scuffles but nothing serious and he has yet to be suspended. Let's call this student "Homer".

For the past few weeks, a teacher, we'll call him "Geoffrey", has been pulling teachers aside and complaining about Homer's behavior. He says things like, "He is going to be a behavior problem, I can see it coming" and "We need to get him out now before we're in a legal mess" and "He doesn't belong here" and "We can't handle this here" and the like. He has spoken at length to several faculty members about how worried he is about Homer and how concerned he is for the other students.

Oddly, Geoffrey hasn't ever mentioned that Ignatius and Frank ought to leave, even though their behaviors are very similar, and in Frank's case distinctly worse. So...what gives?

Homer is black.

Now, is it Geoffrey's malicious intent to kick the only student of color out of our school? Probably not. Is it the result of an implicit bias that Geoffrey has not had the occasion to reflect upon? Probably. Is anyone going to react well if I bring this up at faculty meeting? Definitely not.

What would you do...?

stuff that happens

2010-11-11T14:06:00.000-08:00

Hey I have a blog! Neat!

As it turns out, teaching takes a lot of one's personal time. In addition to that, when one does get some personal time, it's kind of like being removed from a giant washing machine, all wrung out and disoriented. By the time one reaches a place in which blogging is a physical, mental and emotional possibility it's time for class again.

That said, I was at faculty meeting today relaying a story from earlier and realized that there are so many things to blog about and it's a shame to let them go unshared with the internet. For example, when one of my favorite students turned into the Tasmanian Devil this morning, attacked another student, screamed and cried at the top of her lungs while running through every classroom in the school and, when cornered, wriggled out of the library window. Then, when another student caught her as she was coming out of the window she shoved him and screamed, "don't fucking touch me! don't fucking come near me! he's touching me!" and attempted to turn the wrath of the administration upon this young man who did not speak then or for several hours after the incident.

I work in a different sort of school.

Actually, I get up every morning happy to go to work. I hate to believe this, but I think loving a job is pretty rare. I know I've had many that I certainly didn't love. Yet, in spite of children flailing and screaming and occasionally being referred to psych wards, I enjoy the hell out of teaching at my school.

Here's the thing, it takes about 80 hours of my week. So, blog, I am terribly sorry about all the neglect. I am hereby pledging to make a sincere effort to relay a teaching story here and there, because some stuff should be recorded. Like today, when, before the madness, one of my students set up an elaborate arrangement of mirrors and one beam of light so that anyone entering the girl's bathroom, upon looking in the mirror, looked like the target of a sniper. THAT is just plain funny.

we did it...

2010-08-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

...and it was totally awesome.

Bridentity

2010-07-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

Two weeks before one's wedding one may experience a certain amount of nervousness. One may have dreams in which all of the above happen: the wedding dress is accidentally dyed green, a cat attacks the bride, the bride's house burns down, the bride's brother drives the bride's car into a lake as a joke, the bride becomes allergic to her lipstick while trying to say vows, an attic full of starving cats monopolizes the brides time and she misses the wedding, the bride falls into the lake, the bride's students show up randomly at the wedding and do annoying things, the starving cats are thrown in a giant dumpster against the bride's will, the reception dinner has giant tufts of hair in it.

Two things are clear. One, I have a perplexing issue with cats. Two, I am a little anxious.

It isn't surprising. In a sense, it's a big performance in front of people who, if you screw it up, will be around to make fun of you for it the rest of your life. In another, it's a photo shoot and the pictures are going to be all over the place for, again, the rest of your life. It's a big party that you HOPE people will remember fondly for, you guessed it, the rest of your life. Really it's that all of a sudden you keep ending sentences with "the rest of your life" and it's a bit unnerving. The only time I used that phrase before this was when I got a tattoo, and no one knows I have it unless I'm naked or wearing a particularly unfortunate outfit. Just I will forever be a person who got a tattoo, I will now forever be a married person. A whole new me.

Now I know that this is an exaggeration. I can hear people clucking their tongues and saying something about marriage completing your identity, not compromising it. Fine. I think that marriage probably will do that, actually. However, being a bride, near as I can tell, has nothing to do with being a wife. And so far, my Bridentity continues to surprise me.

First off, I never EVER thought I would be susceptible to the marketing machine that is American weddings. I avoided fancy invitations. I dodged an expensive, white dress. I borrowed stuff. I left the tables blank without placecards and centerpieces. Yet...it wore me down. Thanks to the information age, I don't have to tell anyone except Facebook that I am engaged, and marketers send me stuff via mail, email, pop up ads, phone...it's endless. At first I didn't care. I didn't even click on something that said, "wedding cake trends you'll love" or "we've got the secret to a perfect wedding day". Then slowly but surely I became intrigued. What wasn't I doing that other brides were? What was I going to forget?

They had me. My ass was ordering personalized chocolates within a week. I had checklists. I bought ribbons. Colors began to match. The more I planned, the more anxious I became. I had dreams about being trapped in a basement while the reception went on without me. Lost in a jungle getting eaten by bugs. The wedding takes place in my school's gym (which doesn't exist) and all the parents are there but none of my friends. I get ridiculed during the ceremony for lack of support for our troops.

It goes on and on and on.

One of the most exciting things for a bride, if you ask the internet, is changing her name. I had always insisted that I would keep my name. Recently, upon applying for our marriage license, I had to make it official. We drove to City Hall and held hands on our way into the building. That was sweet, but I had iced coffee, which gets cold, so I kind of wanted to let go in order to switch grips.

I've been to City Hall twice, not counting protests directly outside of it. The first time was when I lost my passport on the way to Germany. I kept thinking about that on the way over there. Was this marriage thing another instance of lost identity?

We walked into the giant zoo of a building, and needed directions. We felt weird asking. It was sort of like asking how to make out with someone. Like we were childish in our inability to get married without assistance. City workers make it easy to be unashamed, however, and barely acknowledge you while pointing to an escalator.

The registration area kind of reminded me of the Kentucky Derby; all of these lines leading to windows half covered with grates like city store fronts. I was betting it all on one horse. We scanned the signs. Registration: Births. Registration: Births. Registration: Births. Registration: Births. Registration: Births. Registration: Births. Registration: Parking clerk.

Hmm. The window for marriages was wedged between parking and birthing window number 1. We waited in line behind several people who seemed either very put out or just as confused as we were. The women behind the counter traded places, handed out papers and pointed to other windows without ever speaking or looking at one another. A bureaucratic ballet. When we finally arrived at our turn, we again felt strange.

"Uh, we want to get married."

She handed us a clipboard, made rapid x marks where we sign, and told us, "has to be in black ink. Bring it back when you're done."

I opted to fill in my portion first. I filled in the whole thing, excepting one spot. Was I going to keep my name? I didn't want his name, I wanted my name. But why was I hesitating? What was this antiquated bullshit doing in my brain?

I stared at the thing for a minute or so, doing an inner check in. My fiance was pacing and moving his coffee around and looking over my shoulder and checking his iPhone.

My inner self said, "you already bought the chocolates, don't let the machine change your mind on this one." So I didn't.

[braveheart voice]
You may take 49.95 for some lame chocolates, wedding machine, but you can't have my name!

3 a.m. blog

2010-06-22T15:55:00.001-07:00

I had my last session with my therapist today. I have a therapist. Sometimes, when major life events come and go and they have yet to make themselves known on this blog, I feel like I've neglected something. Like a dog or a houseplant. One of the last things he, my therapist, told me was that my tendency to equate my "self" with my "work" was a little bit outside the norm, and that relating to people would be tough as long as I believed that everyone should define oneself in terms of one's job.

Hmm.

I'm conflicted in multiple ways on this one. First, how can I possibly WANT to relate to someone who spends 40 hours per week, minimum, doing something that isn't part of his/her identity? Two, if I make a living as a teacher, does that mean I'm not a writer? Sure, I write. I write the occasional blog and short story. Sure, my thought processes look like text on a page in my mind's eye. But, as I face the big three-zero approaching in only a matter of months, I have to wonder if the "writer" part of my identity isn't slowly dying.

I feel every day in terms of text. Usually, I have about six moments per day that seem to warrant narrative. Just before writing this I was sitting on my stoop, way past midnight, thinking about my identity. A skunk waddled across the neighbor's driveway toward me. I had had a lot of hummus and raw vegetables, which create a certain digestive imperative, and I raised one cheek and farted into the Boston night. The skunk ran in the other direction. I couldn't help thinking this was a naturally existing metaphor worth blogging about...but would I end up in front of the screen later? Or would I wash a few dishes, chuckle to myself, and end up in bed without typing a thing?

I dated a blogger once. A person who puts content on a blog five times per week or more. He asked me once, when I was trying to figure out whether or not a bit of content was worth putting out there for the "public", whether I was a writer or a blogger. I wasn't clear on the difference. He said that writers only let stuff out when it was ready; bloggers put stuff out without even spellchecking it. I said that I was a writer. Lately, I'm neither. It's past three a.m. now; I took a break to go for a bike ride around my neighborhood. It looks remarkably peaceful in the middle of the night.

I didn't spellcheck this, and I probably won't write anything else in weeks, except curriculum. Does that make me a blogger, a teacher, or a writer? I guess I should move past labels, but I'm all out of therapy sessions.

taking one's lumps

2010-05-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Among the many joys of being a woman is the special day when your doctor’s cold, dry hands stop in the middle of your boob, dig around, and retract to clasp behind his back while he says, “Okay get dressed and we’ll chat.”

“You have,” he says when you are fully clothed, “a lump that I’d like you to get checked out.”

It’s worth appreciating that in spite of a notoriously craptastic health care system doctors still seem to know not to tell you bad news when you’re naked. If only all men could figure this out.

You go out into the take-out window where a multi-lingual receptionist wearing unbelievably huge earrings calls the breast center. There is a whole center just for breasts. This is the last time in your life the words “breast center” will mean “nipple.” The wait on hold at the breast center is more than ten minutes. You ask for permission to pee, return, and still the earrings are on hold. You try to assume that this is due to an early lunch hour and not the overwhelming number of callers, but digest the fact that there is such a thing as a breast phone number in a breast center doesn’t exactly scream rarity. Yes, not a rarity. So you tell yourself, “My lump is unspecial, ordinary, boring. Like so many other lumps, forgotten and resting safely in healthy boobs across the world.”

Your coffee is sweating all over the counter, and you take a tissue to wipe it up. Everyone looks at you at once to see if you are crying. You raise your eyebrows as high as they will go, annoyed, while you wipe up the condensation. Your appointment is in two weeks, and you put it in your phone’s calendar under “Boob.”

You go home and go running. When your chest bounces in its sports bra you feel like you might be damaging something. Upsetting the lump. Five miles later, back home, your fiancé still asleep, you stare at them in the shower like foreign things. When you tell him, he is still groggy and just kind of rolls onto you, takes you under the blanket, and says that everything will be fine. You tell him that he had better not treat them any differently, and refuse to say which is the afflicted one in order to prevent favoritism.

Targets of Crime

2010-03-30T17:42:00.001-07:00

Sometimes you want the affordable, low-quality results of child labor. The sight of the oversized plastic carts in the parking lot next to oversized shoppers might induce slight nausea, but once you get inside all you can see are bargains. Let's face it, toilet paper in bulk limits the number of times I have to say, "Fuck. We are out of toilet paper." And I hate saying that.

Truth be told, I have come to enjoy the occasional evening, astride my fiance, discussing hand soap options. There are several signs of my aging, the increasing likelihood one will find actual medicine in my medicine cabinet for instance, but these evenings are unparalleled. As one pushes the giant cart through the aisles, contemplating throw pillows, the sagging ass and slow march toward death are all the more salient. But these are only the nagging thoughts of a too-thoughtful writer type. In the heat of the moment, I swallow it all and become entranced by containers. I love a good container. It was just when I was reconsidering exactly how large a salad-from-home-container ought to be that rain fell upon our parade of blissful consumerism. The rain of Crime.

To say that we became too distracted by the Lawn & Garden section would be blaming the victim. That said, prior to even arriving in Grocery, we did linger among the outdoor furniture a bit long for people without a yard. We retreated from the aisle of stackable lids back to the jungle of wrought iron and wicker, where we had left our cart, when we found the unthinkable. Our cart. Was. Gone.

"Did we leave it here?"

"Right by the pink XXL Boston shirts, yes, definitely."

"But who would take it...?"

The reality set in and we began frantically searching the vicinity. We felt naked and threatened, desperate. Who would do this?!

Target on a Friday night is a rough place. The aisles were littered with discarded items, chosen then reconsidered. A girl on a scooter whizzed past, the tag on her helmet fluttering behind her. A man tossed a ball to a toddler, who let the ball dribble dangerously into our path, nearly tripping me. Mothers told seemingly infinite children, "Stop it." They all had carts. They were all suspects. A spinning arial shot over the aisles would have been appropriate.

We walked aisle upon aisle, our anxiety growing. Did we have time, before they closed, to get a new cart and re-select all of our purchases? What if we saw someone with our cart, would we confront him/her? What if someone just happened to have three bras, a pair of socks, tennis balls and a frying pan and we falsely accused them?

I suspected another woman with similar breasts stole our cart. For some reason it is impossible to find a good 36C bra. The small breasted women have all sorts of adorable options and they don't have to worry about function since it doesn't take a lot of innovation to lift those things. The very large breasted women have to abandon style in order to prevent physical harm to themselves or others. 36C seems to be large enough so they make them in the terrible cotton "no one sleeps with you" style. Yet it is small enough so they make them in the "you sleep with people for money" style, which tends to include padding that's designed to also protect vital organs in a car crash. However, there is a style in between that combines style with function. That sweet spot, for millions of 36Cs out there, is elusive. Our cart had boasted an impossible three fully functional, highly attractive 36Cs. Two had been the last on the rack.

I was checking every lady in that place. While I ogled the chests of every female shopper we passed, Bill accosted members of the sales team. He posited that it was more likely an employee believed our cart to be abandoned and brought it back to the front of the store. I felt his theory was naive; he felt mine was unlikely but might be a fun way to pass the time.

In the end, we had to start over. It was heartbreaking. I ended up with only one bra, and it was the polka-dotted one that I liked the least. We nearly forgot to stop for tennis balls. The Lawn & Garden section, on the second pass, held no magic. Passersby neared our carts and we flinched - scarred, scared, ashamed. Closing time approached and we hadn't even discussed bath mat replacement options.

Life is so hard.

whoa a decade happened

2010-01-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning and thought it was Sunday. I had been sure since Thursday (which I thought was Friday) that I knew the date. I awoke with the sinking sense of anxiety and regret that comes after a two week vacation in which one fails to do any of the little chores one planned to do in the allotted time. Oil change. Hair cut. Refrigerator and cabinet inventory. While I managed to watch Dirty Dancing for the 800th time yesterday, I did not manage, on the last oil change day of my vacation, to drive the two miles and get my car taken care of. Nor did I manage to write that "decade in review" blog I felt, for whatever reason, was necessary.

I checked my email at the crack of ten thirty and the computer said it was Saturday. I checked my phone. Saturday. Facebook said it was Saturday. I assumed it was a grand act of terrorism in which all of America was cruelly led to believe it had another day of vacation. This was far more believable, in that early morning stupor, than my having lost track of the days this week.

Slowly, wandering around the house checking all available sources of information, I came to the realization that I did have another day of vacation. The universe had conspired to offer me one more Saturday. It was like Clarence saw me on that bridge, ready to jump unprepared into Monday, and wanted to show me that my vacation was not a total loss. I could do all those things I had planned. This was a chance at redemption. A chance to watch one more bad 80s movie. A chance to get my oil changed. A chance to...

I went back to bed. Now it's nearly two p.m. and I am grabbing the steering wheel of life and turning down productive lane. I give you, vast readership, the requisite decade in review blog...

Most people think September 11 was the defining moment of the decade. Not me. Just before the Y2K madness, in the last few months of 1999, I was lounging in the common room of my dorm with a bunch of girls. Rumor had it my roommate was bringing over some boy she thought was boyfriend material. She was a sweet girl and we were all rooting for her. She did bring him over, and he came gladly since we happened to live on the all-girls floor of our dorm. He walked in after her and went through all the introductions. He was a tall skinny guy with glasses and he had a half smile that made him look sort of unsure. I instantly abandoned allegiances with all females. He was the cutest boy I ever saw.

By the time September 11 rolled around that boy and I had dated, broken up, dated, broken up, kind of dated, kind of broke up, kind of lived together I don't know how many times. The morning of September 11 found us in the shower late. It was a delightful soapy steamy morning that I'll relive in my mind and keep this a family blog. By the time our idiot president invaded a country that didn't have anything to do with that morning, we had agreed to marry.

The way he asked you would think he was impulsive. We were walking through the Boston Common, singing Beatles songs, and he just asked. The man who requires three months of research to purchase speakers just decided, out of the blue, that he'd like to marry me. I figured it was a good idea, so we agreed. We would get married.

Of course, I'm the impulsive one. By the time our idiot president declared mission accomplished in the country that had nothing to do with the aforementioned fall morning, I had broken up with him for the last time. As it turns out both the idiot president and I spoke too soon.

I graduated from college a few weeks after the mission was accomplished. I did not see him at graduation. That night, I met someone else who would keep me occupied in my own personal Abu Gharib for two years. Like any stay in a wartime prison, I simply disappeared for a while. I violated my own Geneva conventions and revoked my own civil liberties.

I watched an American city drown. I chased and caught many a handsome man, only to let them all go, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes without a thought. I went to graduate school. I went abroad. I moved to Kentucky. I came back. I started a non-profit with some friends and a crazy author who used to be my hero. It's funny what becomes a paragraph.

The whole time I kept fighting the nagging sense that I had only loved one person. I kept having dreams about him, even after many years. Given the considerable sampling I had been doing, statistically I was doing very poorly on the love front. What if I only could love that one person? Then I saw him a few times. I cancelled a trip to Italy to visit California on the off chance I'd see him. We had a drink and he drove me to the airport. In our separation we had grown more similar. We had grown up.

Regardless of how we felt, our lives were still separate. Mine on the east coast, his on the west. Mine with a new but interesting boyfriend, his with an old but stable girlfriend. The relationships might be movable, but the careers weren't. Like any great love story, someone would have to give something up.

In the second known impulsive act of his life, he decided to pack his things and move back to the east coast. Five years just about to the day since I declared our mission permanently aborted, we decided to give it one last go. We threw our first joint election party and ushered in a new era of diplomacy and complete sentences. We tried to take advantage of the crumbling housing market only to find we still couldn't afford a house in Boston. We got new jobs. We purchased hundreds of cups of coffee. We spent nine dollars on biodegradable trash bags. We took pictures in the ER when my tubes were finally tied. We said goodbye to our senator. We got mail addressed to both of us. We became we. We celebrated our last unmarried New Year.

If you had told me in 2005 that my end of the decade blog would be a sentimental tribute to the finding, losing, finding, losing and ultimate finding of the love of my life I would have scoffed. Even if I thought that were possible, I would have believed it to be unworthy. Surely, after the erosion of civil liberties, the widening of the gap between rich and poor, the war crimes, the assault on social justice, the unspeakable horror of the Bush years I could write of nothing else. Or after the all-consuming election period, the surge of youth involvement in national politics and renewed hope for America and the world, I couldn't have imagined writing of something other than this juxtaposition. But when I sat down to type all I could think about was how lucky I am to still think, every time he walks into a room, that my fiance is the cutest boy I ever saw. Maybe it's the miraculous second Saturday, but it feels this morning like the decade began with meeting him, ended with choosing him, and everything else was a blip on the radar.

things that happen at the end of the semester

2009-12-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

It's Friday and you've had about 9 hours of sleep since Tuesday. You meet with students all throughout the actual lunch period. By the time 3 o'clock arrives you are starving. Since you are lactose intolerant and your lunch is just a block of cheese and crackers (you haven't really had time to make food this week) you dig through your bag for some pills that will let you eat dairy.

You dig. And dig. And dig. You are out of dairy pills. You know damn well you are out because you ate the last one the night before at the parents' night in which you avoided awkward conversation by eating fistfuls of havarti.

You accept an orange from a coworker. By four o'clock your stomach is making terrible noises. People are staring. You register a weak but definite synapse firing...a lost dairy pill..somewhere. Yes! Earlier in the semester you dropped one in the car and ignored it, grabbing another from the container.

Do you leave the staff meeting to dig through your car?

...growl growl grumble...

Yes. Yes you do. You dig under the diet pepsi cans and muddied newspapers and CVS receipts to find that lost dairy pill. It takes about five minutes.

You return to staff meeting, pop it in your mouth, and eat that cheese like it was the last block of cheese on Earth.

C-SPAN on a Saturday Night

2009-11-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's nice to settle into a Saturday night with a glass of wine, a home-cooked meal, and a House debate on C-SPAN.

Health Care Bill...debating a few amendments...

8:45 pm
Stupak Amendment (which is an assault on women's rights) gets voted on at 9:30. The debate just ended...I don't have the strength to discuss it.

Now we're on to the GOP Substitute Bill.

People in wheelchairs who are American heroes want you to be a Republican. If you aren't, you hate America and freedom. You can only honor the fallen by rejecting the Dem. health care bill.

Rep. Barton from Texas just said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." He was totally serious. He is very concerned that there will be too much bureaucracy involved in health care if we pass this. (Has he ever filed his own claim?!!) It will cost you 1.2 trillion dollars to get married if the Democrats win. I don't know how that works exactly but it scares me.

He is very concerned about the 10 million young people who don't want insurance. They are losing their freedom.

"We believe in choice...less freedom or more freedom...I vote for more freedom." (He is against freedom if you are female, though.)

Charles Rangel gives 1 minute to Pete Stark of CA. He has a furniture ad voice. I go to microwave nachos.

Rep. Henry Brown wants to give Americans the freedom from being able to choose abortions. That's right: the freedom FROM choice. Huh?

Rep. Jim McDermott: 50 million Americans are in the ER because they can't pay for Dr. visits. His phone is ringing off the hook all day every day - his constituency wants health reform now. He says the GOP must have failed to read their own bill otherwise "they couldn't keep a straight face." In my experience, the GOP is always in a state of collective smirking.

The GOP is offering a bill as "skimpy as a hospital gown." -Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas. "They [GOP] want to protect 5% and leave 95% worse off than they are now." He gets applause.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer has a shiny pin in the shape of a bicycle. And a bow tie. I think he should have a show on cable. "This is a colossal failure of imagination...the GOP could have passed this anytime during the Bush administration but they didn't bother because it doesn't do anything."

"Members will take their seats or leave the chamber." I think the speaker just threatened to stop this chamber right now and turn it around if the representatives couldn't behave.

Rep. Roy Blunt says the GOP version saves EVERYONE money.

I mean, you DO save money if you die.

The GOP bill increases the number of uninsured within 10 years, the Dem bill will cover 47 million people who currently don't have insurance...says Rep. Ron Kind.

So...the GOP wants to cover fewer people and the Democrats want to cover more people.

Charles Rangel promises to be nicer to the Republicans than the other Democrats. He isn't. And it's awesome.

He's talking about morality and caring for the poor. An assault on freedom!

9:07 pm

Nachos are done.

"This isn't complicated," says Peter Welch from Burlington VT, the GOP tells Americans:"You are on your own" and the Democrats say: "We are in it together."

9:08 pm
Edward Markey says that the GOP is heartless. I think they take this as a compliment.
"GOP...grandstand...oppose...pretend." Not sure that's going to catch on, Markey, but I love all the yelling!

Charles Gonzalez from Texas explains why malpractice tort reform made things suck in Texas. I'm pretty sure they sucked before that, but I like his points. It didn't lower costs for the average family in Texas and it didn't draw doctors to impoverished areas - both promises proponents of the bill assured. He begs for a no vote and gets hearty applause.

9:13 pm
About 15 minutes away from the vote on the abortion amendment and the GOP substitute.

Rep. Weiner rocks my world. Congress gets tax-payer subsidized single-payer health care, which they support for themselves but not the American people. Fuckers.

Eric Cantor is talking. I'm going to the kitchen, refilling wine.

9:21 pm
Eleanor Holmes Norton is shouting. And bald.

9:25 pm
The speaker just told the house that they need to use the remaining 5 minutes because no one was talking. He said, "Use it or lose it." This is your government at work, America.

John Boehner thinks government is growing out of control. Government is "choking the goose that's laying the golden egg." "America is a great country because here you have the freedom to succeed...but the bigger the government gets...there's less money left in families' pockets and there is less opportunity for Americans."

I can't even listen to anything else he says. This is so disgusting! Let's see...he seems to believe that the American dream is only possible when the Government stays out of the way. Was the American dream made possible for WWII vets by the GI Bill? Guess not, that was the government. Every single one of those people who went to college and became the first person in their family to enter the middle class was NOT accessing the American dream but rather some rogue socialist dream ruining the real America. When Barack Obama went to public schools and got federal loans for college he was participating in some un-American dream. Disgusting, these enemies of freedom.

He just said, "We all know we had a terrible economic shock over the last year." The last year?! Year?!! As if everything was fine before Obama came to office? This man is a moron.

He says the government is too big and it can't get involved in health care, but now he's complaining that the Dems are going to cut Medicare. Which is it you fuck? I hate this man.

9:34 pm
I have an aneurysm.

9:42 pm
He is still listing all the jobs this bill creates, as he has been doing for several minutes. He is listing these as an assault on the bill. He is against creating jobs. I don't get it. I really don't get it!

9:43 pm
My insurance company drops me because of the aneurysm.

9:44 pm
Another Boehner complaint about the Dem bill: "Requires all vending machines nationwide to post the calorie count next to the item." Letting people have access to information before they make decisions. That doesn't sound like the American freedom I love.

9:47 pm
"I came here to fight for freedom."

Yes. I want freedom from health care! Stop trying to make sure I don't die, Democrats!

9:48 pm
Dems yield the balance of the time to John Dingell. Much applause.

9:49 pm
Applause stops.

He praises the house for the debate.

"The republican bill does almost nothing for the...uninsured Americans...families would pay 8,188 dollars more under the Republican plan when compared to the Dem bill...in 2080 health care costs would EQUAL the GDP (if we do nothing)...the Dem bill is the only one that makes sure your insurance company doesn't drop you for preexisting conditions...today's vote may be tough, but it was in 1935 when we passed Social Security Act...

The gentleman's time is expired. Much applause.

9:55 pm
Further proceedings postponed. Stupak vote imminent. A 15 minute vote.

"The biggest assault on a woman's right to choose [the pro-choice caucus] has seen in their career."

10:20 pm
The house approves the Stupak vote. A bunch of people who think that government should stay out of health care just put the government in my uterus. Fuck you, house of representatives.

I am signing off so that I may swear more profusely off the internet. Will they approve the health care bill? I don't know. But if they do, I sure hope you don't have an unplanned pregnancy because even if you pay for your health care with YOUR OWN MONEY you won't be able to pay for a plan that covers abortion.

Thank god my tubes are tied.

i keep telling myself it's only a game

2009-11-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid we played Monopoly a lot. I can remember many hours spent on our stomachs, propped up on elbows. We stretched out on the floor, flanked by snacks and little piles of fake money. In particular, I remember playing with my dad and my sister at my dad's post-divorce residence. There is something intensely ironic about playing a game in which you become the owner of many properties when your family lives in a trailer. Embracing that irony, my father once took his fistful of pastel bills, after beating us into bankruptcy (as he did every single time) and ran into the yard, amid the double-wides, and proclaimed "I own this town!"

While I know it is ridiculous, I always regarded my inability to win at Monopoly as an indication of my future financial prospects. As I got older, I began to feel greater anxiety during games of Monopoly with friends and became inordinately frustrated when I lost. I literally never won. Ever.

For several years, I stopped playing. It wasn't like I "quit" Monopoly. After one graduates college, the opportunities to play any board game diminish considerably, and Apples to Apples pretty much cornered the post-grad market. In fact, I think it had been at least four years since my last attempt at simulated capitalistic success when, this Friday night, I chose to be the dog competing against a battleship and a shoe.

The board wasn't open thirty seconds before I called my dad to ask how much money everyone got before play begins. He didn't even inhale; he rattled out: "2 five hundreds, 2 hundreds, 2 fifties, 6 twenties and five of everything else." He might as well have been reciting his name and birthdate. As I said, we played a lot of Monopoly.

I brought out the board without thinking of my former Monopoly complex, but it was only a few turns before I began feeling anxious. Fortunately, we were drinking heavily.

Within minutes, my personality changed. When my cousin landed in jail, I said things like, "Say hi to your mom in there." When she won the free parking money, I told her my tax dollars were feeding her children. I scoffed when our friend gave her a break on rent because she was about to go bankrupt.

I became....a republican.

But the thing was, I wasn't enjoying it. I honestly don't know how conservative people feel happy! I wanted to win the game, but I didn't want anyone else to have to be poor. I had this terrible inner conflict between my competitive self and my socialist self. I kept cursing my choice to have only two guests, rendering games like Taboo impossible.

Thus, two hours into the only Monopoly game I ever could have won (victory wasn't a definite at this point) I had that one last drink I shouldn't have had, and fell asleep. I'm not sure I could have handled the end of the game, regardless of the outcome. Thank goodness in the real world I don't have so much or so little that I have to worry about it. Seems like we could fix it so everybody felt that way...

My President Is Awesome

2009-10-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

In their continuing effort to be selfish, greedy, and detrimental to as many Americans as possible, the conservatives can't see that when a sitting American President receives the Nobel Peace Prize it is good for America. The very same morons who during the last administration claimed that disagreeing with any president during wartime was treason are now disagreeing with the president on everything, even when he continues policies (bailout...) designed by and initiated in the former administration. That being said, there is a smattering of regular folks who question whether or not Barack Obama "deserves" the prize.

Of course he does.

First, let's understand what the prize's meaning really is. When Nobel died, his will said this: [The prize for peace was to be awarded to the person who] "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses."

Fraternity between nations. Not achieving perfect fraternity, but starting and maintaining relationships. Who else has done more, in the past year, to foster this? Perhaps there are folks, but I don't know who they are. Let's review, briefly, the stuff Obama has done to work toward fraternity between nations:

In Obama's FIRST DAY

-called Israel

-called Palestine

-called North Korea

In his FIRST WEEK

-appeared on Al-Arabiya, Arab news channel, and tried to normalize basic communications between America and Arab nations

-ended "enhanced interrogation techniques" which were in violation of the Geneva conventions and therefore an affront to the many nations who value those conventions and human rights

Within FOUR MONTHS

-Negotiates a nuclear arms reduction plan with Russia

You know what? I'm stopping there. Who else, I ask you, did more than this? Who?

People seem to be complaining that he hasn't "done anything." The perception is that facilitating conversations isn't "doing anything."

First of all, it isn't just that he's made calls and started these conversations. He entered a river flowing in one direction and he has worked tirelessly to make it flow in the other. The Bush administration's foreign policy was the exact inverse of this one. Obama came to office and had to work out from under negative perceptions of his nation that he did nothing to create. It's like getting a class full of kids that had shitty teachers for eight years and trying to get them to pass the MCAS in 8 months.

Second, conversations aren't meaningless. If conversations aren't "doing anything" then Franklin and Adams and Jefferson weren't "doing anything" when they moved a bitterly divided congress to agreement regarding independence. Kennedy didn't "do anything" when he negotiated the world out of nuclear war. Abraham Lincoln wasn't "doing anything" when he gave a simple speech at Gettysburg.

The Nobel Prize has always gone to people who persevere in the face of adversity, and who make just decisions even when justice is unpopular. When it goes to people in power, it goes to people who consider the whole of the human population before making decisions. I have thought about it long and hard and I can't fathom a more appropriate recipient. Yo go, Mr. President.

i'm going to miss my senator

2009-08-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Like most Americans, I spent a good portion of yesterday on the couch watching television. Unfortunately, I was watching my beloved senator get lowered into the ground to be among his brothers. Ted Kennedy was my senator since before I was born; he's been as much a part of the world I live in as air and trees and grass. Even if we didn't personally communicate, I have needed and appreciated his presence in my landscape. Sitting there on the couch next to my fiance, who also grew up in Massachusetts, we were both more overcome than we expected to be.

However, since Wolf Blitzer is incapable of leaving a tender moment alone, I mostly felt like watching it on mute. Wolf only shut up when the priest began to speak. Of all Ted Kennedy's flaws, I count Catholicism as one of the worst, but I forced myself to listen to this robed maniac. I nearly vomited when I realized that the bulk of what he planned to read was a letter to the Pope from Kennedy, written very soon before his death. Did Ted really want his last words to be begging a Nazi for prayers?

Nope, Ted Kennedy wanted his dying wishes to be heard on national television. Fox included. That letter, after talking about prayers and crap, was a plea for national health care.

For once, the Pope was useful.

It was a talking point for politicians all over the country. Something for them to say to the folks in small town America who think health care for everyone is the work of the devil. He was trying to do one last good thing for regular people, which, with a few exceptions, is what he did his whole life.

High five Ted Kennedy. If there is reincarnation, I hope you come back as universal health care. Peace be with you.

how to buy a wedding dress

2009-07-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

It's simple really. You drive to a mall you have never been to, because you'll need to go in the kinds of stores that have restrooms with extra little rooms that contain flower arrangements and cushioned seats, all precedents to the actual bathroom in which you do your business. These stores employ women (dressing room sharks) who are there to make you feel poor and fat. Accept it. You are supposed to want to buy your way into another life. Try to remember that your life, without perfume that only takes one squirt to smell up the whole room, is just fine the way it is.

You are here, deep breath, for a dress.

On your way by the herd of perfume counters, be sure to spray something on your wrist. The dressing room sharks can smell fear, and they can also smell bar soap. Given the bandana on your head, the 11 year old loafers on your feet, and the way you have to keep pushing your glasses up every two minutes, this perfume gesture is a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig. But, hey, you've given it a little bit of effort.

You may have to ask for directions. The store has an organizing principle that you don't understand. Aside from the shoes being with the shoes and the perfume being with the perfume, there seem to be groupings of clothing that, other than being divided by gender, make no sense. If you stand in one place and just stare blankly, someone will help you.

"You look like you have a question."

"I have two, actually. I need a restroom and a fancy dress."

She will find this sweetly pathetic, and point you to the restroom like a lost child and then say, as you back into the entrance flanked by potted evergreens, "evening gowns are down the escalator to the right."

The restroom is larger than your apartment and the sound of your peeing echoes. The handsoap is divine.

The evening gown section will be right where she said it was. It glitters. Dressing room sharks named Tiffany and Amber descend upon you within minutes. Gaze over their heads at the clearance rack. Resist. This is, after all, your wedding dress. If everything goes as planned, you will only ever get to wear one of them.

Tiffany and Amber immediately bring you two white dresses, a few golds and ivories. They start a fitting room. The fitting room is somewhere mysterious. They keep disappearing with every dress you pick up.

The more expensive an item of clothing, the less important it is that the thing fit, apparently. So try on dresses sized between 2 and 12, mentally adding a tailor to the list of people you must pay to be married. Tiffany and Amber alternate knocking on the fitting room door to ask if you need anything. They will always knock when you are bent over trying to step into something, causing a fresh jolt of panic every time. Bonus: there are mirrors to reflect back to you, at angles you hope to never see again, every inch of your reaction.

"What size shoe do you wear?"

Wonder why, suddenly, the sharks are making conversation through the slats of the dressing room door.

"Seven..."

You can't comprehend, for the life of you, why this information is important.

Like magic, a pair of gleaming heels appears outside the door. A shark says, "I left some heels outside the door." You realize that you are supposed to wear heels with this thing. Stick your arm out of the door and snatch them in quickly before one of the sharks peeks in and tries to influence your opinion of the current dress. They are laid in a box, peeking out from tissue paper. They are sharp, dangerous, frightening. Put them on the floor in front of you, press your hands to the walls, and try to balance in them. Stand in them, precariously, in one dress for about thirty seconds. Put them, carefully, back in the box and leave.

Sigh heavily in the food court.

Enter with caution the only Bridal store with a capital B. The teenaged sales girl is on the phone, chewing gum. Pick up the most extravagant, gigantic, almost too heavy to lift, white monstrosity off the rack. She says, "Okay I gotta go. Call you later."

She puts the thing in a fitting room. Inside, totally surrounded by mirrors, you step into this complicated morass of lace and satin and strings. Pull it up, stare at yourself, squint even. Drop it back down to your feet, step out of it, and leave.

Stop at a sporting goods store and, with some reverence, touch a few sneakers. You are good at sneakers.

Arrive, finally, at the other end of the mall and the last giant, shiny department store. On the clearance rack there is one dress, a crazy patterned thing without any straps. Figure that you might as well try on one dress you actually like, even if it isn't a wedding dress. Tiffany and Amber are nowhere in sight. Ask a tiny old woman in a purple sweater if you can have a dressing room. She says only, "There ya go," and wanders back to whatever she was doing.

Perfect. Alone, at last, kick off those beloved loafers and step into the dress. It's fun. It's spicy. Decide that you want, more than anything, to be having dinner and a drink somewhere, done with this shopping trip. Look in the mirror. Picture flowers, a haircut, maybe some makeup. Decide, suddenly empowered, that white, and really any solid color, is just not going to work - this is The Dress.

You have to carry it way above your head or it will drag on the ground. The cashier whisks it over the counter and zips it into a garment bag. You present your credit card, which boasts a lovely mountain scene and lets everyone know that you support some nature conservancy organization. The store, of course, will not take Visa.

Leave the store to find an ATM. Extract more cash than you needed to purchase your first car. Bring it back, more determined than ever, to be done with this transaction.

At dinner in a mall restaurant, pull the chair on which you have draped the dress close to the table. Protect it like it's a baby. Be suddenly terrified that something will happen to it. Grow, ridiculously, attached to this material thing. Register the silliness of it all, but involuntarily flinch every time a waiter passes with something spillable on a tray.

On the way home the car smells like the perfume you put on earlier. Go ahead and be somehow annoyed by this.

In your living room later that night, put the dress back on. Stare and stare and stare at yourself in the mirror. Admit, to no one but yourself and the internet, that at that moment, alone in your living room, in a very expensive dress, your little grinch heart swells a bit, and you have an inordinate amount of fun.

On the Management of Customer Care

2009-07-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

Dearest Michael, and all other customer care mangers of the world,

In an uncertain world, I feel lucky every time I settle on something that I know to be a fact. My favorite variety of fact is the kind arrived at following a long period of discovery. The sort of fact that comes with life experiences. Like...

Fact: the Greek style yogurt really IS worth the extra 30 cents at the supermarket

Fact: learning to ride a bicycle is much easier when you are under the age of 25

Fact: the only thing worse than shopping in a store owned by a monstrous corporate machine is working in a store owned by a monstrous corporate machine.

One doesn't need a crystal ball to predict what would happen if I revealed the hour and day of my visit. One simply needs some experience working in a monstrous corporate machine (MCM). Fortunately, I spent seven years waiting tables in a place where the menus had pictures and the soundtrack was dictated by "corporate." A place in which, if you ever had a grievance, you were told, "Take it up with corporate." A place that (shudder) had people with titles like "regional manager" and "secret shoppers."

I know EXACTLY what would happen to every single person assigned to that shift. They would be told there was a "Mandatory Meeting." Signs on colored paper would be taped in the bathrooms and break room. "Mandatory Meeting on such and such a day at such and such a time. All Employees Must Attend."

If some poor apron questioned the pimple-faced 12 year old manager, the apron would be told, "It's mandatory. No big deal, just show up." No additional information would be provided, and a current of frustration and worry would start to flow through the smoke breaks and lunch times. Layoffs? Annoying team building exercises? A test? What is this meeting about?

By the time the meeting happens, one person has figured out what it is about and therefore everyone already knows. Because the staff discovered the purpose of the meeting via leaked information or subterfuge of some kind (rather than open and honest communication) everyone arrives annoyed, sharply aware of their expendable and powerless position in the company, and preemptively dismissive of any information the meeting presents. Many have to come on their day off. Some have to take time off another job just to make it, since skipping the mandatory meeting, the taped-up notes insinuated, jeopardized one's job.

Presiding over the meeting is a slightly overweight white male wearing blue chinos and a blue button down oxford shirt. If you want to be a regional manager, you had better fit the above profile. You also must hate your life. You must hate your life in the particular way a regional manager hates his life, however. For example, you must smile. Picture a very, very ugly room that is poorly constructed, dark, and terribly decorated. Now paint it bright purple but do nothing else to fix it. That is exactly the sort of smile you need to be regional manager.

Everyone comes in slowly and sits as far away from the regional manager as possible. The regional manager says hello to people according to spec - most MCMs have a specific script for greetings and the regional manager always adheres to spec. So he will say, "Hello (glances at name tag) what can I help you build today?" Or whatever. Anyway, the more annoying it is the more effective he imagines himself to be.

He will use some sort of corporate-mandated assistant for his talk. Either a powerpoint or a manual or something. Whatever the circumstances, the following lines are guaranteed:

"Without the customer we don't have...what...somebody finish the sentence...what don't we have?"

Blank stares. Someone finally says, "Jobs."

"Right! Jobs! Without the customer, I don't get paid. And neither do you."

"What does the customer want?"

"Anybody?"

"I'm gonna level with ya..." [this one is particularly unhelpful, given the fact that the whole manner in which the meeting was called already made it quite clear that there is no 'let's be honest with each other because we're a community of equals' kind of crap going on in this MCM]

"What's our mission statement?"

"Anybody?"

Yada yada yada. The meeting usually ends with some kind of activity or quiz and everyone is reminded that performance evaluations determine whether or not they get raises and hey, have a great day if this is your day off!

Now, Mr. Customer Care Manager, if you want your people to treat other people well, treat them like people. My guess is everyone in there hates her job. But I have had plenty of "crappy" jobs, in terms of pay or the work I was doing, that I didn't hate. Usually, though, they were jobs working for small, independent businesses. Coincidence? Probably not. Give everyone in an apron a day off. Paid. And don't send in the blue shirt guy.

Home Depot: you can't do it, and they can't help you

2009-06-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

Welcome to this June, my first ever June without work. Normally, in spite of being a teacher, I work in the summer. Not so this year. Betty Friedan should have warned we modern females of the "summer vacation mystique." As a person who rather enjoys her job but looks ever forward to the break at the end of the school year, this elusive summer vacation has been held up as the greatest 2.5 months of every teacher's life. It's a time to enjoy a slower day, read more books, listen to music, get things done that just didn't make the to-do list during the busy school year, plan for next fall, and just plan relax.

No one tells you that if you only have one thing to do all day it is nearly impossible to get that thing done. Give me an astonishing amount of work to accomplish in not enough time, and I can do it. Ask me to run to Home Depot to pick up a simple thing today....and I'll have it done by next week sometime.

Here's another thing I didn't know. Apparently, when you are a teacher with the summers off and you are approaching 30 years of age, June, July and August become one long marathon of HGTV. When you start talking about bird watching in your yard, you're old. When you start talking about what you've done to the new bathroom, you are old in training.

I admit it. I can't stop talking about my own home improvement projects. And I don't even own this place! I guess it's like when people who want to have children buy dogs and begin displaying weirdly parental behaviors toward their Weimaraners. It would seem even we the childless aren't totally immune to certain degree of "settling down." Getting married. Shopping for a house. All of these behaviors feel exactly the same as trying on grandma's clothes when I was 8. Extremely fun, but somehow not my own.

Of all the things I have done so far in this summer of domestic boot camp, finally making the solo trip to Home Depot was the least enjoyable. I went in with what I thought was a simple request. I wanted to find a test-kit to make sure my kitchen floor tiles didn't contain asbestos. I went to the customer service desk and waited in line. There was only one elderly couple in front of me, but all four orange aprons were consumed by whatever they needed. I waited for about three minutes until another apron walked by and I asked her where I could find the asbestos test kits.

"Asbestos?"

"Yes, I'm ripping up my kitchen tiles but I want to make sure they don't contain asbestos before I do that."

Blank stare. Pause.

"Oh, ok. That would be in plumbing."

I must have looked skeptical, and I was.

"Well I think so anyway, let me check."

She uses a walkie-talkie to get plumbing to confirm her thoughts. They don't answer but somebody in Paint does, and they claim to have it in aisle 40.

Great. I walk to aisle 40, which is filled with lighting supplies. Big sparkly ceiling light fixtures. Etc. Not paint and certainly not test-kits of any sort.

I go to the end of that aisle and approach the now 6th apron I have seen. He also looks shocked at the mention of asbestos, which surprises me because it says right on the box of tiles we bought to make sure and check for the stuff before laying down new tiles.

He uses his walkie-talkie because he thinks it will be in flooring. Flooring confirms that yes, it will be in flooring. He tells me to go to flooring.

On my way to flooring several aprons ask me if I need help and I make sure I'm going in the right direction, to flooring. A nice gentleman tells me he's "going that way anyway" and will escort me (because god forbid someone actually like see me through to the end of this very fucking simple task). We get almost to flooring when apron #9 sees someone he knows and stops the cart to chat with these folks. I contemplate heading to flooring, which is now in my sights, on my own but I figure this guy is invested in me now and he'll make sure that if it isn't there he will find out where it is.

It isn't there.

He radios someone in paint, and they swear it's in paint. I walk like 7 miles back to paint, where, through extended consultations with two additional aprons, there is no such test kit.

Enter: Manager. He is about 12 and needs exercise, sunlight, and acne medication. He also needs an inventory lesson because he has "no idea if we carry something like that." He is also the fourth apron to say "Asbestos?" and wrinkle his brow as if he had never heard of such a substance.

My favorite part is that each apron, upon discovering that they didn't know the answer to my question, looked at ME like I was the idiot. If anything was going to make me grateful for my break from the Department of Education, this was it.

just in case you have the audacity to feel like going for a run at night, ladies, here is a guide

2009-05-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

Here is my step by step guide to running at night in the city as a female:

7:40 pm - Wonder if you should use headphones, as you could not hear an attacker behind you if you use them

7:45 pm - Put in your headphones, but turn down the volume

7:46 pm - standing on the front steps, looking at the sky, ask "is it too dark already?"

7:50 pm - Running, looking at the trees in bloom, have the following argument with yourself: "I want to run on the gravel by the reservoir, my feet don't hurt so bad when I run on the gravel...yeah but there aren't any street lights over there...fine I'll run on the street...you are really going to let yourself be scared into doing something you don't want to do...I guess it isn't too dark..."

7:54 pm - Run, in place, at the bottom of the steps that lead to the reservoir. It's dark.

7:55 pm - On the gravel. Feet are happy, and the water looks so peaceful at night. Try to remember how much you like water at night.

7:56 pm - Run your fastest mile ever because you are a bit scared. Perhaps this is a good way to build up speed?

7:57 pm - Pass a couple, feel slightly more relaxed, couples are good, couples have cell phones, couples don't rape people

7:58 pm - Switch directions to stay in close proximity to the couple

7:59 pm - Look behind you.

8 pm - Slow way down at the curve, where it gets really dark.

8:01 pm - Turn around again.

8:02 pm - Look behind you.

8:03 pm - Try to force from your thoughts all the news stories you have read about women "foolish enough to go outside after dark alone."

8:04 pm - Look behind you

8:05 pm - See a man with a dog. Wonder if the dog is a trick to get women to trust him.

8:06 pm - Look behind you.

8:07 pm - Decide that your heart is beating too quickly, slow down, and suddenly feel the hard, solid pressure of a desperate need to get the fuck off the dark gravel path and into the streetlights right that second.

8:08 pm - Look behind you.

8:09 pm - Pass a man running, headphones on, looking unafraid and oblivious. Suppress your desire to clobber him.

8:10 pm - Look behind you.

8:11 pm - Start to feel that weightless dizzy kind of scared.

8:12 pm - Run like hell back down to the street, heading to the streetlight like a moth.

8:13 pm - Look behind you.

______________________________

When I was in college I worked at a bar. At 2:30 a.m., when I was done for the night, the quickest way home was to cut through the Boston Common. Now, most ladies would take the longer way rather than risk it, but it made me mad that I had to walk a longer distance just because I was a girl. So I stuffed my tips into my underwear, held my wine opener corkscrew-out in my fist, and marched. I used to think that if they got to the money, they might be distracted for a split second, and I could gouge an eye out. I actually planned this, just in case. Only later did I realize both how stupid walking through the common was and how incredibly unfair it was that I had to picture gouging a human eyeball from its socket to make me feel safe enough to walk home.

I was reading an editorial in the New York Times this week in which Nicholas Kristof pointed out that the evidence in rape kits generally sits around, uninvestigated, for decades. Rape, and the manner in which it is treated as compared to other violent crimes, isn't something I hear many men discussing. It was refreshing to see it even mentioned in the paper, since it happens so often yet manages to stay out of the headlines. What he didn't mention, and what no one ever seems to mention, is that even on the nights when nobody attacks us we still have to live with the threat of it. It's like a living breathing thing, chasing us whenever we go out alone after dark. And it fucking pisses me off.

Another "Let's Respond to the Insensitive Moron" blog

2009-03-30T17:59:00.001-07:00

So, I got this comment from someone too scared to identify him/herself:

Formalized schooling is a joke. It is not only expensive, it is downright prohibitive to actual learning. Leave the system behind. You have already wasted too many years of your own life feeding the beast. Abolish the DOE, both federal and state, and return education to its true owners: Families =. There should be a true and strong BOE in every town in America, and the world for that matter, who are answerable only to the children and parents that they teach

I don't know where to start. I think I will go line by line.

"Formalized schooling is a joke."

A product of formalized schooling myself, I find this personally offensive. That being said, I'll be the first to admit that I have deep concerns about the state of American public education. Without a system of formalized education, however, we ensure a de facto caste system in which each child born into poverty is guaranteed a lifetime in exactly that position. Public education, free for all, is the foundation on which a socially mobile democracy sits.

"It is not only expensive, it is downright prohibitive to actual learning."

Again, I will be the first to admit that kids sitting in silent rows staring at a blackboard is the hallmark of an old, tired system. I am not opposed to reform. I also teach in a school that qualifies as "formalized schooling" but which contains no rows, no blackboards, and I'm pretty sure learning happens.

Per schools being expensive - you either pay early or you pay later. Every dollar spent on Pre-K education saves more than that dollar on prison costs later. Students who graduate from high school are exponentially more likely to become tax paying, law abiding students - and guess which schools have higher graduation rates? The ones we spend the money on. If you want safe, productive communities you have to educate the people living in them, even if they aren't your kids. If you don't mind paying billions of dollars in corrections costs, then screw the schools and pay for the prisons. You'll pay either way.

"Leave the system behind. You've already wasted too many years of your own life feeding the beast."

This one really hurt. I did some crying; I can admit it. Whoever you are, have you read any other entries on this blog?? I have met some of the most amazing kids on the planet. Kids who have overcome barriers I can't even imagine. Kids who have battled homelessness, domestic violence, physical and mental disabilities...kids who have lost family members to gang violence...kids who thought, every day, for years, about killing themselves. And yet they came to school and worked their asses off and kept a sense of humor the whole time. Many of them overcame their own sense of worthlessness, and actually started to believe in themselves. I'd like to think I had some tiny part in that, and I'd like to offer you, anonymous prick, a giant FUCK YOU for calling it worthless. Really. Fuck you.

"...return education to families."

This is the most ridiculously overprivileged elitist argument I have ever heard. Not everyone is blessed with a family. And if a person does have a family, that family might not be capable of offering an education. Maybe they have to work three jobs and need public education to take care of it. Maybe they don't give a shit. Whatever the case, it certainly isn't the child's fault. Had my education been left to my mother...well I shudder at the thought.

Look, jerk, public education might not be perfect. I'll be the first to admit that. But getting rid of it gets rid of democracy. It will solidify every current social class, keep the poor in poverty and benefit the rich, white overlords. Public education was supposed to be the "great equalizer." If you abandon it, you abandon any hope for equality. So, to that end, I'm going to go ahead and keep wasting my time. You, sir, can kiss my ass.

The Department of Redundancy Department

2009-03-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

During my time as a graduate student, there was a case in North Carolina regarding the rape of a stripper and several Duke rugby players. Perhaps you remember it too. Some insensitive prick wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson immediately following the incident, and I wrote a blog about it. Said blog prompted my father, lifetime editor of my writing, to say, "You know...you are good at writing about things that make you mad...but...um...you are terrible at writing WHEN you're mad."

All that to say, it is inadvisable to write this blog about the Department of Education at this very moment. Excuse me. All that to say, it is inadvisable to write this blog about the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at this very moment.

But those fuckers have earned themselves what promises to be an incoherent, disorganized blog. Actually, they have earned this honor in partnership with the Office of Educator Licensure at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Together, they form the Department of Redundancy Department.

Ahem. Let's start at the beginning. Or, rather, let's start at the end of undergraduate studies. A distant moon ago, I completed my bachelor's degree and took a job as a paraprofessional in a local school. While working at that job, I decided to pursue a career in education. This decision necessitated a Master's degree, which I got. Following that, I took the required state exams for teacher licensure in my subject, passed both of them without a single question wrong thankyouverymuch, and got the bottom rung license one can get, assuming I would move up the license ladder as I got more experience teaching.

The above paragraph took 7 years and cost approximately 127,000 dollars. (And yes, shaping young minds is priceless.)

Since earning this teaching license, I have been teaching for a tad under three years. Now, with two years left on my "bottom rung" license, I need to think about beefing that sucker up. Enter the Dept. of Red. Dept.

I call. I ask. They say, "With a Master's you should be able to get the next level just by applying."

Gee, that's simple. It must be a lie...

And, indeed, it is. I apply for said license (earning the Dept. of Red. Dept. 147 dollars) and promptly get a rejection. The stated reason: my institution does not endorse this license as I did not complete a Teacher Education Program Approved by the State of Massachusetts. Duh, I knew that. I completed a sort of policy meets poetry writing meets teacher training program. BUT I had lots of Teacher Education Program folks in my classes. In fact, aside from one or two required courses and an internship, I completed the very same program they did. Some of those credits must transfer...mayhaps I could take a few more classes and be done with it??

Again, the Dept. of Red. Dept.:

"It is up to your school. Call them and they can tell you what classes you still need to change your license, and you can probably use your current job as a teacher for the practicum."

Okay now this makes sense, sort of. I call my school's office of Teacher Licensure - they have one because the Dept. of Red. Dept.'s policies are so convoluted and confusing that it takes a full-time employee 40 hours a week to understand them. The secretary answers. This office has its own assistant. Please digest this...

It takes two full-time employees a total of 80 hours per week to explain the Dept. of Red. Dept's policies to Harvard students.

I get the boss. This woman is a fucking peach. Granted, I would be too if it were my job to understand the D. of. Red. D. We get to a point in the conversation in which she says:

"Are you writing this down? I am giving you the facts. These are the facts. This office cannot tell you what you need to do. Only the Dept. of Red. Dept. can decide whether or not you need specific classes or internships. This school has no say in the matter. I am going to say it again, slowly, so you understand."

At this point I am trying not to smash things, so I just hang up.

I call the Dept. of Red. Dept.

My call was potentially monitored for quality and training purposes. I find this especially entertaining.

"Hello?"

"Hello this is [bureaucrat] how can I help you?"

"I just called, and I'm calling again. I was told that in order to change my license I needed to call my school and they would tell me what else I needed to take in order to get their endorsement. Correct?"

"This is correct."

"They said only you could decide that."

"We have no power to decide that. Only the school can decide what qualifies."

Rather than bother with Harvard again, I call another school, and explain the problem. Will they look at my transcripts, my current teaching job, a portfolio, and tell me what classes I need to take in order to change my license??

Yes, sort of. They (UMass Boston) have a certificate program for people with Master's degrees. I will have to apply to their graduate school, earn 24 credits, and I can use my current job in lieu of an internship placement so that I can continue to work. (Harvard doesn't understand that people work at jobs for a reason; they have always struggled with that concept.)

Great! So I can take night classes, for which my school will pay, and somebody will come watch me teach once and a while, and at the end of it all I can get what I need for nearly zero dollars and I don't have to quit my job. Super.

Ohhhh hold on a second there cowgirl. That sounds a bit easy, now doesn't it? I had better make sure the Dept. of Red. Dept. accepts this kind of route.

Dept. of Red. Dept.

"What are you currently teaching?"

"English."

"At a public high school?"

[with immense guilt] "No...it's...a private school."

[real or imagined disdain?] "I see. And it is a particular kind of school? A special education school or parochial perhaps?"

"It's a special ed school."

"Hmm. So you'll need your special education license and your English."

[I don't mention the history classes.]

"I just spoke with Umass Boston and they claim that I can take a post-graduate certificate course of study and upgrade my English license that way. I could go back for my special education certification after that, right?"

"How would you be completing the practicum?"

"At my school, Umass said they let you use your current job as placement."

"You can't use a special education classroom for an english practicum."

I won't bother you with the rest of this conversation. The facts are as follows:

In order to do my current job for more than two years, I need to-- 1. quit my job and get an internship somewhere else for a semester where I teach English to non special ed students 2. get another master's degree and certification in special education 3. not teach history anymore

It is IMPOSSIBLE to teach English while also teaching special ed, is the message I am getting here.

---------------

deep breath

---------------

Here's the thing that gets me. Well, it all gets me. But the thing that gets me the worst is that I spend every awake second of my day doing my job. There isn't a second I'm not thinking about how to do what I do better than I'm already doing it. At the gym, I'm on the treadmill thinking about how the day went and where I went wrong. Making dinner, I'm thinking about a new way to approach that one kid who keeps giving me trouble. Falling asleep, I'm worrying about the kid who missed three days in a row. Brushing my teeth, I am wondering if what I planned for the day is going to work. I spend my evenings and my weekends grading papers, and I think and think and think about every sentence, from every kid, every time. And I can't help being immensely pissed off by the thought that these people who keep me on hold all day only to read stock answers from info sheets posted on the sides of their cubicles spend exactly 35 hours per week and not a second more thinking about what's best for kids in schools. I know it's an old, tired thing to be pissed off about, but it feels fresh to me.

When I first got to my current school, I asked for a description of what I would be teaching.

My principal said, "Humans."

Now, the message from the Dept. of Red. Dept. is that in two years, I won't know how to do that. The real truth is, nobody fucking knows how to do that.

Eric Holder, Attorney General and also Mister Awesomely Right On (subtitle: how to kinda sorta talk about race in white suburbs)

2009-02-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

I was worried for a minute there. I spent lots of time at my last job figuring out how to make a classroom talk about race in a safe, meaningful, real way. I stopped and processed every racially charged statement I heard (over many moans and groans). I didn't allow the n-word in my classroom (or its shortened "friendly" counterpart which ends in an "a" rather than an "er" and is just as much of a problem). My argument was that by using it amongst friends you are keeping the word in the lexicon of your enemies. Why not just eliminate it from the American vocabulary altogether? I did a lot of arguing, and listening. I didn't even know what the goal was, really, except to be able to bring it up in conversation when it came up, rather than avoid it (which is what I usually wanted to do, if you want the truth.)

Anyway, I was worried because I still think the hardest conversations to have are usually the most important and I wasn't sure how they were going to happen at my new school. At my last school, with statements like "I'm gonna put her Puerto Rican hood rat ass back where it belongs" floating around the hallways, there were plenty of opportunities to say..."Um...can we talk about what you just said?"

But rich white folks' kids don't usually say stuff like that. They do this:

Last week, in Literature class with the youngest students, we were reading a story. The story's narrator is born and raised in Harlem, and talks, thinks, and acts like a person few if any of these kids have ever met. He hangs out at a barber shop and has tense relations with the police and thinks 18,000 dollars is the most money he's ever even heard of, never mind actually possessed. After reading the story, I asked the kids to point out some things they noticed.

"They are in New York."
"They are weird."
"They talk weird."
"They are, well he is...you know, everyone in the story is Afr- Bl-"

This poor girl fell all over herself trying to figure out how to say that the characters in this story were black. She wanted to use whatever the most politically correct polite words she could, but she had a very hard time figuring out what those were.

As far as I am concerned, this kind of freaking out while trying to talk about a person whose skin color is different from your own warrants a conversation as desperately as shouting racial slurs in the hallway. This is the problem our amazingly awesome Attorney General was talking about last week. We can't get past this if we can't talk about it.

Of course, it's not always easy knowing what to say. So I said two things:

"Are you trying to say that the characters are black?"

She said that yes, she was trying to say that but "she felt bad."

So I asked her why she thought that made her feel bad.

She couldn't really figure that out. But that's okay, at least she started thinking about it. I also tried to get from the kid who said everyone was "weird" why he thought that, but he didn't really know what to say either.

I think maybe she felt bad because if we had been reading a story narrated by a white person we probably never would have said, "Well I noticed that the narrator is white." Because isn't that the norm that we measure against? When a Christian pro-life wacko shoots an abortion doctor, he isn't a Christian extremist, but when a Muslim shoots someone, what do you think he's called? When Sarah Palin talks to a crowd of all white hockey moms, she's just talkin' to regular Americans, but when Barack Obama talks to an all black church group in Chicago he's playing to a special interest, right?

All this to say, I'm no longer worried about having big, scary, important conversations at my new school. Like everyone else, these kids see the world from where they are standing. And like everyone else, it would probably do them some good to look at it from different shoes once and a while.

Camelot?

2009-02-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Plenty of we the graduates of master's programs in education have spent oodles of time picturing utopia: the school. We know what its teachers are like, what's on the walls, what the classes sound like, what the students feel like every day, and a million other things. I have spent time building this school in my mind in idle daydreams like many girls do their weddings. For two years, I have been trying to shape my school into this place. At every turn, I met resistance. In part, since I did have many victories, this made the job rather satisfying. In other ways, it made it exhausting. Exhausting in the way beating your head against a brick wall is exhausting - you bleed, the wall doesn't.

The students, though, I loved. I love things that are as tough as they are delicate. I don't think I'll ever meet a group of young people more resilient, who went through so much and still somehow figured out how to laugh and trust and learn.

This is why I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, everyday, for taking my new job. It is an incredible place. So many parts of it are living models of my dreamed-up school. It's uncanny, at times. The art on the walls. The laughter in the classrooms. The passion of the staff. And, in so many other ways, it fulfills all of the selfish needs my other job did not. Money. Vacation. Health care. Better coffee. The list of perks, significant and otherwise, adds up to a situation marvelously sweeter than the last. But...but....

It's a private school. It is the exact racial and economic inverse of my last school.

Can this be utopia?! If a teacher wants to quit her night job, get decent benefits, and teach in a place where art and music aren't subjects of controversy but rather are central to the school itself...does she really, still, in 2009, have to teach only upper middle class white students?

I've been there one month. For the drama session, in which the entire school does nothing but put on a musical. For 2009: Camelot. I tell you, in spite of the magic of this place (and it is magical) neither side of segregation can be Camelot.

arne duncan: please go back to playing basketball

2009-01-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

The real education progressives aren't thrilled about Duncan, and neither am I. For those of us who feel that schools can't be pro-business and pro-military while still being pro-child, this guy is cause for serious concern.
Good article here...

And, an excerpt:

Duncan leaves his position in Chicago with quite a legacy. He used the punitive aspects of No Child Left Behind to close underperforming schools, mandate curricula, and fire entire school staffs based on standardized test scores. Working with the Commercial Club of Chicago, a group representing the city's wealthy businesses, Duncan headed a program called "Renaissance 2010," designed to close the most "underperforming" schools based strictly on test scores and open new charter schools in the same neighborhoods - neighborhoods also primed for gentrification. Some of Duncan's plans have been foiled by community advocacy groups, the only force willing to stand up against the collusion of government officials and corporate interests.

Over the past seven years, Duncan helped the city of Chicago open over 100 new schools (at least 84 charters run by Renaissance 2010 with 31 more planned), including the city's second Disney-run elementary school, 5 military academies with more in planning stages, for-profit schools, non-profit organizations receiving financial backing from "educational venture funds," and charter schools funded by big business (Boeing, Citigroup, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, and the Gates Foundation among others - all given corporate tax breaks, buyouts, and tax deductions that take money from our public schools). There are, undoubtedly, a number of remarkable charter schools in Chicago offering a high-quality education, but they are a small minority. However, since the beginning of his tenure in 2001, Chicago schools have become more segregated (in fact, America's schools are more segregated now than during 1954's landmark Brown vs. Board legislation) in part because of expanded charter schools.

______

Do we really want to send our kids to "Boeing Elementary?" At least for me, the answer is a resounding "fuck no."

requisite "year in review" blog

2008-12-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

Despite my lifelong battle with being quite ordinary, I'm going to do the banal, trite, ordinary "year in review" blog. Rather than the ever-tempting top 20 of 2008, though, I'm going to shoot for a stream-of-consciousness-brain-fart sort of thing. Let's see if you can make sense of it. It was a pretty crazy year.

2008 begins and I'm having an allergic reaction right next to the stack of espresso pods and people are expecting more champagne and dessert but fuck them and fuck their dessert and while I'm at it fuck waitressing I have a master's degree how could this happen well it seems like it isn't turning respiratory so I guess the pills are working and at least there's a cute boy waiting for me somewhere ok he's not waiting for me but I'm going there anyway the drunk drivers aren't too bad this year and his blankets are scratchy but warm January: month of total chaos last state of the union by that miserable war criminal prick I'll just read the blogs I can't stand to hear him talk Richard Rothstein says NCLB is dead in the water mild rejoicing at edaction February: stupid god damn giants ruin everything and my mother doesn't understand the concept of time zones nayad meets a man and goes to church which makes us all quite suspicious SUPER TUESDAY no dennis but barack okay and the NSA gets away with a bunch of bullshit spying state of the police state? March: Peace out Huckabee and your crazy Jesus horse! I go to an Ambassador's mansion and eat caviar with people who frighten me terribly hatred of the wealthy reaffirmed I still live in their neighborhood in a house full of crazy and also wonderful friends California sends word that my old love is heading back home, some unconscious gate cracks open April: I'm a fool, for sure, but the girls at edaction and I keep trying to save public education how ridiculous meanwhile we're starting to ignore the newscasters when they tell us people are dying in Iraq people die in Iraq everyday and so it musn't be news... May: things fall apart and come together at the same time my community organizer job sends me to a terrible conference lots of talking and very little doing but none of it matters much when I walk the same little circle out in Boston Common and fall stupid in love with the same guy I always fall stupid in love with over and over June: BABYPROOFED victory sweet victory I stay in bed for many hours afterward and feel a kind of relief that defies description, then I eat sushi and watch tennis on tv July: Venus, Serena, offshore oil drilling, impeach (go Dennis!) but it's the summer of BIKES I take my newly acquired ability to the streets and knock on wood don't get hit by any cars, move my stuff, again August: Obsessively watch the DNC coverage, China decides air pollution is worth fixing for photo ops, back to school but not before a camping trip, canoes on a pond and wonderfully terrible cups of coffee the smell of trees and dying fires, far away Georgia and Russia reopen wounds and Mark David Chapman still in jail John Lennon still dead September: Move my stuff, again, to our new place we're finally home, together, only took like 9 years, Sarah Palin shocks the world with just how dumb she is, my first ever Hub on Wheels and then school school school October: DEBATES, American taxpayers dole out 700 billion dollars so that wall street big wigs can still go on vacation and housing prices continue to fall people are forced from their homes, meanwhile we go to Maine easternmost point in the US take pictures of boats drink strong coffee long drive back grading papers in the passenger's seat Jean home from Korea, briefly November: day before the election students say they'll "kill themselves" if barack doesn't win, but weeks of knotty stomachs worth every second our 44th president wins and everybody feels alright, for a minute, about being American, I turn 28 and Bill makes everyone jealous with his roses December: Snow, finally snow sweaters ice scrapers school cancelled three straight days Bill turns 30 skis down mountains but I prefer the fireplace and old, crappy movies family family family and finally a chance to take a nap 2008 the year I got my way good bye idiot president hello handsome brilliant awesome president (we hope) and hello hello hello baby proofed body and the body it sleeps next to every night and misses all day long.

formatting

2008-12-18T16:33:00.001-08:00

If anyone knows how to make the formatting NOT look like shit go ahead and let me know. Sorry about the last blog's quote looking so weird...blogger is dumb. (The question of whether I am referring to myself the blogger or blogger.com is yours to enjoy.)

snowed

2008-12-18T15:58:00.000-08:00

The best thing about being a teacher in New England is not the proximity to so many great institutions of higher learning where you may build your content knowledge and wear tweed. Nor is it the apple picking field trip, the general lack of environmental disasters, the ability to spew left wing rhetoric at your students without a single complaint.... no no. It is your governor on the radio, a full evening ahead of you, telling you to sit back, have a glass of wine, and just forget about going to work tomorrow.

The bliss ends there.

I hate to break this to all of you who are currently enjoying your reproductive rights, but the Bush administration has dealt a final blow to gender equality, human rights, etc. He hates that stuff!

I got this in the mail from my buddy Cecile Richards:

Minutes ago, President Bush's rule limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate reproductive health information when they visit a federally funded health care provider was made official. And, unfortunately, it will take a great deal of work to reverse it — starting today. Please help.

We knew this was coming, of course. With your help, we've been fighting it for months. The rule is clearly a parting gift from Bush to the anti-choice fringe that supported him all these years.

Now, anti-choice medical staff can withhold information about abortion, birth control, and sex education from their patients. Facilities that receive family planning funding, like Planned Parenthood, will have to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. For example, a doctor who opposes pre-marital sex could refuse to provide a prescription or even information about emergency contraception to an unmarried woman.

This is the most frightening thing I've heard in a long time. As if unwanted pregnancies weren't enough of a problem, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder for women to prevent them. Nay, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder to even get INFORMATION about BIRTH CONTROL. What?! Beyond that, this will disproportionately affect women with limited access to information (poor women, English language learners, you know, the vulnerable people who Bush loves to shit on.)

I debate this issue with my students all the time. Many of these girls have been, as it were, totally snowed. They learned to believe, at some point very early in their lives, that getting pregnant is a sacred gift from god and...well I'll put this in their words:

"If you open your legs, you have to pay the price."

Three things:

1. How sad to be the child whose entire life is payment for something the mother eternally regrets.

2. How much sadder to be the girl who has been so beaten down by society that she actually believes not only that she is powerless, but that she should be.

3. Okay, so you believe "life is sacred" - but should you really advocate for those beliefs to be legislated? Because the people who are stirring this pot you're in don't give a flying poop about life being sacred (or at least not military prisoners or Iraqi citizens or death row inmates...those lives aren't sacred). They want to keep power in the hands of men, and taking decision making power out of the hands of women is the quickest way to do that. The life is sacred thing is just a convenient slogan these power mongers capitalize on to advance their anti-woman, anti-parenting, anti-medical ethics, anti-American agenda.

What a great trick you've pulled, you murdering sexist bigot war criminal. I wish that shoe hit you right in the fucking smirk.

"what do you mean 'we?'"

2008-11-25T17:32:00.000-08:00

Well it finally happened. It was the weirdest thing. I knew, eventually, this would happen. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would react, how I would deal with it, whether it should be the type of thing one "reacted" to. But how could I not?

For the past two years, I have been the only white person in my classroom (except during staff meetings). We talk about race all the time in my class. And I've taken quite a few light-hearted jokes directed at white people, which thus far have been part of a healthy conversation. I have been very careful in my pursuit of a space in which talking about race is safe, appropriate, and expected. I never purport to know what I'm doing in this regard, and my students are always very helpful when it comes to telling me what to do.

This month, I welcomed a new student into my class. He is

The. White. Kid.

in the inner city alternative school.

And all the shit I was afraid to deal with has already started to happen. Case in point:

We're studying the American Revolution. One of my personal favorite things to teach. It is a sensitive subject, what with the tendency of old lame-ass text books to glorify the brave colonists and paint them as champions of liberty who fought for their freedom and secured us all a Great American Future. Fortunately, my school can't afford text books so it's up to me to put together my own photocopied collections of readings.

All this being beyond the point. The point is, we were having a conversation, as a class, regarding why the English, rather than the Spanish or the French, ended up putting the "winning" group of colonizers on North America. This usually sparks a conversation regarding why it is ANY European colonizing bastard felt he had the right to be there in the first place.

But here's what happened. The new kid says, "We had more independence from our crown in the first place, so it was easier for us to break away and really make the new colony our own."

And I, without thinking, engage this conversation, the entire time using the pronoun "we."

And after three minutes of engaging this kid in conversation I look around, and I had lost everyone else. So I try to back up.

"Let me just check in here, what do WE mean when we say 'we?'"

And one kid pipes up and says, rather pointedly, "Yeah, what DO you mean we?"

What did I mean? Am I the teacher I read about in all those articles in grad school? The one who, regardless of all her efforts, engaged the student of her own race in conversation more readily than those of a different race? The one who used words carelessly without considering the points of view of all her students?

All of this, of course, calls into question all the work I've done so far. Did I really create a safe space for tough conversations...or did I create a precariously safe space that's easily thrown by a change in group dynamics?

Jeez. Teaching is hard. They should pay us more. Goodnight.

Baby Bling

2008-11-18T05:43:00.000-08:00

I read an article a while back about wealthy suburban couples competing with their wealthy suburban friends through a new wildly popular status symbol. Not huge cars, not elaborate vacations. Babies. Lots and lots of babies. Apparently (and one need not look further than the latest Pitt-Jolie headline in the checkout line mags) babies are the new bling.

Needless to say, this is distressing on several levels. Firstly, even to a heartless wench like me, using children to prove to one's friends (or the media) that one is a superstar with immense wealth seems an unjust use of children. Secondly, and more distressing, it's hard not to think of the wee little planet on which we pile all these grubby little water drinking plastic dependent cherubs. Do we really want to make it "cool" to have gigantic families?

I can say this: it's cool in school. There hasn't been a single month, in the entire time that I have been teaching, that hasn't brought news of at least one more pregnant student. Many of them have children already. And the news is always greeted with "awwws" from the other students, who rush over to the latest big belly and rub it, give the mom to be lots of attention, and totally freak me the fuck out.

How do we compete with cool?!

Our school has counselors on staff, and we all sit down once a week to chat about the students' states of mind, hash out strategies to deal with difficult situations, and, inevitably, lament the list of newly pregnant teenagers.

These girls, for all their lives, have been under mountains of shit beyond my ability to imagine. Abuse, homelessness, crumbling, segregated, violent schools, gang violence, hunger, lack of health care...not exactly the recipe for self-love and self-respect. So when they get the chance to be loved and needed, they take it. When they get the chance to be in control of something, they take it. And in so doing, they become part of a rapidly expanding group of their peers, and are accepted. This is just as damaging to young girls' futures as gangs are to boys' - and both behaviors are unfortunate responses to the same set of shitty realities.

I recognize that the lack of mandated, funded, comprehensive sex education in public schools is partly at fault for the rising number of teen parents. But this isn't just a sex education crisis. It's a self-esteem crisis. Hopelessness crisis.

I assure you, the last possible thing we need is for this to become cooler than it already is.

...I've sat here staring at a blinking cursor for quite a while now. I have no answers. I have no clue what to do. I'm throwing my hands up in the air, in the middle of a crisis, and saying: "What. The. Fuck."

"unmanned firehose"

2008-10-02T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm watching MSNBC and I thought that I'd like to do that "live blogging" thing I've so enjoyed reading from other bloggers during and after other debates and major political events.

But I can't think about anything pundit-ty because it's the Keith Olbermann show. And there are two things I know in this world.

1. The number of women currently getting tubal ligation surgery should be quadrupled for the good of the world and the women themselves.

2. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are totally fucking.

It's HILARIOUS!! They are dropping little innuendos. Rachel Maddow actually just engaged in a conversation about manned and unmanned firehoses. And she's blushing. Giggling.

This is too much for me.

Okay. Now on to super serious live blogging. Full disclosure: I have company; we're drinking wine and playing PalinBingo. Feta cheese is involved. This will be wildly unintellectual.

8:44 pm
Sarah Palin has arrived at Wash. U. Per Olbermann "none were injured."

8:45 pm
The merlot is really nice. It's from Chile.

8:56
Every week thousands of Americans file for bankruptcy because of medical bills. Thanks AARP commercial. In related news, Sarah Palin can't read.

8:56
It's still 8:56.

9:00
Sarah Palin asks, "Can I call you Joe?" She seems real nice.

9:01
Bailout bill...was this the worst or best?

Biden: Bam. One against Bush. One point Biden. Points out fundamental disagreement between Obama and McCain, he and Palin.

Palin: Soccer mom. First "Betchya." I'm winning bingo. She's come up with an example of McCain's record!

9:07
Biden brings up Violence against Women Act. Ding. Paints himself as able to reach across the aisle. "Fundamentals of the economy are strong" line. "Out of touch." Attacking McCain.

Palin: "McCain was talking about the American workforce." Ummmm...they don't have jobs.

Gwen points out that neither of them answered the question...

9:09
Who was at fault for the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

Palin: "Darn right it was the predator lenders."

I'm just going to go ahead right now and say [sic] and apply it to all her quotes...

Republicans love strict oversight...new from Sarah Palin.

Biden attacks deregulation and accuses McCain of voting for it more than 20 times. And then connects it to McCain's plan to 'deregulate' health care. The middle class needs relief. Ding. Two points.

Palin: "Darn right we need tax relief." Darn right number two. Cuteness points: two.

Biden: "That is absolutely not true. John McCain voted the same way." "John has voted 477 times to raise taxes."

9:10
Palin's sparkly pin is distracting me.

Palin: Talks about all the taxes she cut in Alaska. Biden smiles widely.

Biden: "Where I come from it's called fairness. The middle class is struggling...they got not a single tax break [from McCain.] He brings up the old 95% people under Obama's plan will have lower or same taxes. "We have a different value set."

I agree. We have them. They don't. Values, I mean.

Palin: Appeals to small business who fit into the 250,000+ range...will cost jobs...says government is the problem, not the solution.

To her, the definition of patriotism is the near absence of government. Hmm.

9:19
5,000 tax credit...health care plan...it's shitty.

"With one hand you give it, with another you take it."
-Biden on McCain plan. I love it.

Bridge to nowhere joke! Zing!

100 Billion dollar tax dodge is unpatriotic! Ha!

Palin: Calls Biden/Obama two-faced. She says that Obama voted for the tax cuts for the oil companies. She says "the oil companies, bless their hearts, don't like me too much..." She took on the big guys. One point Palin.

9:24
Sarah's dumbness gets into the airspace...

Small government = "MASSIVE OVERSIGHT"
Palin. Maker of sense.

9:28
"There has been so much revelation made aware to Americans these past weeks...rear the head of abuse...it's a toxic mess on Main St. that's affecting Wall Street."
And. I. Quote.

9:29
Biden says homeowners should be able to adjust mortgage principles when they are near bankruptcy.

Palin doesn't engage it. She goes back to energy. She says we have energy all over the U.S. but East Coast politicians won't let us have it!

9:30
The climate change question. What is true Palin...?

"Alaska feels and sees climate change more so than other states...I'm not one to attribute it all to man...there are cyclical changes in the climate...I don't want to argue about the causes...we gotta reduce emissions[even though that's not what's causing it according to her]....we're allowing other countries to pollute more than America would ever stand for [WHAT?!!]"

From Biden:
"I think it is man made. I think it's clearly man made...if you don't know the cause you can't solve the problem...John voted 20 times against...clean energy sources...we can create jobs in wind and solar...John thinks the answer is drill drill drill."

Palin:
"The chant is drill baby drill"

Way to correct him, Sarah Barracuda. Brilliant.

Biden 10 points.

9:35
They both support carbon emission caps.

9:36
Ooooh same sex question.

Biden
"In our administration there will be no distinction between same sex and opposite sex couples in the constitution or anywhere else" (slightly paraphrased because I got excited.)

Palin
"Not if it goes to redefining marriage as anything other than between a man and a woman...I am tolerant...we won't prohibit visitation rights in hospital...my non-support for anything other than traditional marriage.

Biden, do you support gay marriage?

Biden: "No."

Okay he's an asshole. Ten points for me for being a better citizen than both these people.

Did he really say that?! What an ass hole.

9:41
On to Iraq...

Palin: "It would be a travesty if we quit now in Iraq...etc etc" No mention of a clear plan. She did mention "grow our military." So I guess that's the plan.

Biden: Lays out a clear plan. Mentions the 10 billion dollar per month bill for Iraq. Ding.

"We will end this war."

Palin
"Your plan is a white flag of surrender. That is sure not what our troops need to hear right now....The surge worked..." Blames Obama for cutting off money for the troops.

Biden
John McCain voted to cut off money for the troops...because the bill had a provision in it to end the war and he didn't like that.

Ding.

John McCain has been dead wrong. Obama has been right.

Ding.

9:45
Tough question about Pakistan vs. Iran in terms of dangerousness...

Biden: Says a lot of smart stuff. Believes Al Qaeda attack will come from Pak. or Afg. not Iran and they are more of a worry, which contrasts with McCain's view that, in terms of an attack on us, central war on terror is in Iraq.

Palin: More worried about Iran because they are a threat to Israel...brings up Obama's willingness to meet with world leaders without pre-conditions.

"Those who try to destroy what we stand for should not be met with." -Palin

Basically she hates diplomacy.

Biden: "I'm surprised John doesn't realize that Ahmadinejad doesn't control the nuclear capabilities in that country."

Ding!

"John McCain said he wouldn't sit down with the government of SPAIN. Our NATO ally...I find that incredible."

Double ding!

Palin
Reasserts that she and McCain are friends of Israel. Claims she's preventing another Holocaust. Because that's what Iran is threatening...a Holocaust.

Minus 10 points.

Biden
"No one has been a better friend to Israel in the Senate than Joe Biden."

Talking about yourself in the third person? Kelly hates it. Minus 1 point.

"These last 8 years have been an abject failure."

Palin
Accuses the dems of being incapable of making change when all they do is talk about how bad the past is.

I guess one point.

Biden
The past is a prologue! I still haven't heard how your ticket will be different from bush's! But how are you going to be different from george bush??? The same policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran...it will lead down the same road we're on now!

Crickets.

127 points Biden.

9:58
I got up to get more wine. They were talking about Afghanistan. No points awarded in the interest of fairness.

10:00

Biden lets out a heavy sigh.

10:01
Darfur? Do we have the stomach for it?

Biden
We have the stomach for success. Look at Bosnia. We took Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians and we have a relatively stable government there now. McCain disagreed at first, and then he agreed. "I don't have the stomach for genocide." Ding. Several million points. "We should rally the world..."

Palin
"You voted for the war and now you're against it...Americans are craving that straight talk...you supported McCain's war strategies adamantly...as for Darfur we can agree on that making sure all the options are on the table there also...as governor of a resource rich state...[they had business with Sudan] we called for divestment to make sure we weren't seen as doing anything in support...that legislation hasn't passed yet but it needs to."

3 points.

Biden
"I never supported John McCain's strategy on the war."

Palin
John McCain knows what Evil is....he knows how to win a war.

10 points.

What would you do if you became president?

Biden
I would carry out Obama's policies...all stuff taking care of middle class. Awesome. "I agree with everything Barack Obama says." 37 points.

Ha ha. He mentions Bush Doctrine!!

ZING!

Palin
I don't agree with McCain on everything. I would push him on the ANWAR thing. I will put government back on the side of the people. I will put Wasilla in the white house and show Washington how we feel about all this bureaucracy.

10 points, people will like this one.

Biden
Ask any regular American whether or not the last 8 years has been kind to them. They'll say no.

15 points.

Palin
We're not the bush administration.

3 points.

Palin came from a house full of school teachers. How is that possible.

"we need flexibility in NCLB..."

We need to get RID OF IT!!! Minus 9 zillion points. (Oh and FUND whatever goes in its place!)

Biden
We need to get back to education.

I can't blog this part because I'm having an orgasm. Go Joe GO!

Funding for ECE...Funding for NCLB...etc etc all awesome. Plus 900 points.

10:16
Am I watching Fargo?

10:17
Palin wants all the powers (in two branches of government...) that cheney seems to think the VP gets. Biden thinks cheney is dangerous and has read the constitution recently. 10 points Biden.

10:18
On experience...

Palin
She resents the experience accusation. As an executive in my big state, being a mom, my connection to heartland in America, going through no health insurance periods in life, sending kids to college...etc I understand what it's like to be an average American.

Oh here she goes about the exceptionalism as Americans. Fuck that. We don't want to be exceptionally good or exceptionally kind or exceptionally fair. We just want to be exceptionally hypocritical. We can point fingers at other nations for extremism, but be incredibly extremist in our policies at home. We can say global warming is a problem, but we won't change any of our own behaviors at the risk of offending a few fat wallets. We say other nations are dangerous, but we invade countries that didn't do a damn thing to provoke us. We say democracy means peace, but we are in the middle of two wars. She means exceptional in that we don't give a shit about anyone other than Americans, and even IN America we don't treat the majority of our citizens with respect.

10:23
Biden proves the Maverick title is bullshit. 700 billion points!

"So, Maverick he is not." Bam.

Oh man that was awesome.

10:30 pm

Well, she didn't totally fuck up. I'm slightly disappointed. BUT, she did go totally off topic a lot, doesn't know what the Holocaust was about, can't reconcile McCain's love for deregulation with his "reform of wall street" crap of late, wants to be even more powerful than cheney, and she did a heck of a lot of winking.

Biden was awesome. Except for the gay marriage thing. What a dick.

In other news McCain has pulled his people out of Michigan. Ha! We're gonna win. Ohhh please let us win.

10:40
Rachel Maddow has sex hair. High five Keith. I'm going to bed.

peace out

2008-09-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Of the approximately 200 million Americans with more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin, one of my personal favorites has left the building. Permanently.

In an attempt to sleep with a handsome young man in grad school, who happened to be a fan of some writer called David Foster Wallace, I read some of this guy's books. 3,768 pages later I can go ahead and assert that the work of DFW outsmarts, outfunnies, and outcrazies any other writer out there. His work is the best I've read, and I haven't looked at writing the same way again. I would kill to see the world through whatever hyper-aware ultra-smart lens he's got.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wallace hanged himself on Friday night.

The peculiar emotion that comes with the loss of someone important to you but whom you do not actually know is something I really wish DFW had stayed around long enough to write about, because it is both right up his alley and way beyond my capacity. I woke up this morning at the crack of 11, a bit hungover, and I stumbled to the kitchen table and opened my computer, as I do first-thing every morning. The pre-coffee news was shocking, of course. I gave a shout and my better half, who was also doing his pre-coffee computer opening news-checking ritual, did his best to be comforting.

But I am not upset about the loss of a person, am I? I'm not going to miss David Foster Wallace's great back rubs. Or his awesome eggplant casserole. Or his terrible singing voice. I am upset in a very selfish manner. I am upset that I was saving two of the stories in Oblivion, so that I would have some unread DFW material at all times, while I waited for his next book to come out. I was rather terrified of having read all of his work, and having nothing at all to which I could look forward. Now I am two stories away from having no more Wallace to read. I am sorry for the literary world. I made sure to post my grief on Facebook.

It is this exact kind of crap that he wrote about. The detached people of the modern world, their helpless pathetic searching for a cure for loneliness. The empty entertainment to which we cling. The odd places we find comfort. I think he would find it just fitting that people asserted their status as mourners on a social networking website.

And now here I am blogging about it.

At this point in America, with the ever-growing population offering no cure for an increasingly isolated, lonely collective existence (not to mention the growing popularity of extremism and the demonization of intelligence) any person as in tune to it, as able to characterize it so crisply as he was would be bound to suffer terribly. So I guess he ended that suffering. Or some other sort of suffering that he didn't write about. I have no idea; I didn't really know him.

run dnc

2008-08-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

After suffering through the dull parade of people throwing their bodies around in the air for little trinkets and the chance to hear their national anthem one more god damned time, we finally got to the best show of the summer. Bill Clinton's teary-eyed "God I love her." Dennis Kucinich's insane arm-waving shouts to "wake up America." The apparent love child of Chris Farley and George W. Bush, Governor Schweitzer of Montana, delivering an SNL-worthy performance. Ted Kennedy passing the torch. The beloved crowds of protestors all over the city. There is no event I more enjoy watching on television...actually, I'll rephrase. There is nothing I more enjoy watching on television, event or otherwise, than the Democratic National Convention. Normally, if I am in front of the boob tube I can stand about five minutes, ten if it's a Seinfeld rerun, and I'm up out of the seat looking for something else to do. I find the thing terrifically boring. However, the giant blue circus that is the DNC held my attention for nearly seven hours straight yesterday.

It's basically the nerd's Kentucky Derby:

Thanks to CSPAN I got to watch the whole thing uninterrupted and without any of those pesky news channel morons blathering on about strategy, wardrobe choices, and who knows what else. So I got to the see the B-listers like Cecile Richards (my hero), the Congressional Black Caucus, the Women of the Senate, and my forever favorite B-lister Dennis Kucinich.

The B-listers are my favorites because with a lesser spotlight you get more personality, and they tend to really let it all hang out. Kucinich of course does this all the time, regardless of the position he's in, which is why I love him so much. But, sadly, the awesomeness ended there this year. Cecile Richards was what every Planned Parenthood executive is: poised, spotless, strong but careful. The Congressional Black Caucus didn't mention race. (In fact, nobody has mentioned race at all. They've mentioned gender about 67,000 times, though. Hillary's introductory montage was all about women's rights...Michelle Obama's speech commemorated women's suffrage (she did mention it, remember, right in the middle of her suzie homemaker speech that everyone but me seemed to love.))

This brings me to the women of the Senate. I am frickin' pissed off at you ladies!!!! The touchiest issue they brought up was equal pay for equal work. And they should bring it up, what with this 77 cents on the man's dollar bullshit. And they brought out the lady the Supreme Court told she was paid less and would just have to deal with it. Fine, fine, fine.

But where oh where, I ask you, was the discussion about reproductive rights?! Remember those, the ones that are in grave danger as we speak? They just left it all to Cecile Richards. Women of the Senate, shame on you all.

So in case you happen to be speaking at the dnc tonight, let me break it down for you.

Stuff you CAN talk about:

The Economy

Energy

The War

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Health Care

Stuff you CAN'T talk about:

Race

Reproductive rights

So don't fuck it up, because we wouldn't want anyone getting uncomfortable.

Crap! Is it August?!

2008-08-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

Besides being a reminder that I’m one of the several hundred thousand Bostonians about to move on good ole September 1^st, the arrival of August is always moderately depressing. One begins to reevaluate one’s summer. There have been exactly zero trips to the beach, days off, picnics, one nasty tan line from a day of biking but otherwise still Scottishly pale… And of course every new month delivers the sinking, cold realization that I have criminally neglected my blog yet again.

I’ll go ahead and sum up all that I missed in…

Top Five Things I Totally Meant to Blog About Last Month

My Summer Thus Far

#5 PROOF that my asshole coworker actually is an asshole

Oh most desired gift at last you’ve arrived. For the entirety of my employment I have known that this woman (referred to in previous blogs as Jabba the Hut) is an asshole. Like the worst kind of asshole, she manages somehow to evade what should be a companywide intervention based on the universal consensus that she is so egregiously awful that it is a violation of state safety regulations to force other employees to work anywhere near her. Rather, she manages to win the favor of certain administrators who, uh, clearly find their asses and elbows indistinguishable from one another.

What she does is the following:

We’re in community meeting, a weekly gathering of all students and staff wherein all may make announcements to the entire school and student leadership may put various things to a vote and blah blah blah. At this particular meeting one student, who had not attended the graduation ceremony, was receiving an award that came with a small scholarship. She was sitting with her case manager (our school has counselors assigned to each student) and both ladies were jokingly grabbing the scholarship check back and forth from one another during the rest of the meeting. Jabba the Hut notices this playful act and bellows, to a roomful of people who HADN’T necessarily noticed what was going on, “Whoops! Hang on to that check, you gotta watch these Puerto Ricans every second!”

Pause. Digest.

Now, if a student had yelled some racially charged statement like that in the middle of a meeting, I would stop everything and process the statement with everyone. I am constantly doing the work of getting the students to reflect on their own racialized statements and beliefs so that, someday, we might be in a place where those kinds of statements aren’t even thought, let alone screamed at the top of one’s lungs.

But what was I to do when a staff member did it?

Apparently I was to drop the dry erase marker I had in my hand, and say, “I can’t believe you just said that.”

Everyone tittered awkwardly and things moved right along. How the hell are we going to get the kids to start reevaluating their beliefs about race if the teachers make these kinds of statements?!

Silver lining: now everyone knows she’s an asshole.

#4 Culture Clash: Bikes v. Cars

I’ll admit right away that I used to loathe bikers. Those idiots weaving in and out of lanes wearing pants three sizes too small and flipping everyone off. But now having seen Boston drivers from behind the handle bars, I would flip everyone off too if I wasn’t so scared of riding without holding on… Car drivers’ sense of superiority and imagined entitlement to the entire road is at worst dangerous and at best really fucking irritating.

I had a run-in with just such a gas guzzling enemy of the planet mid-July while on a leisurely bike ride through Watertown. I don’t know how many of my several thousand dedicated readers are familiar with Watertown, but it’s a pretty mellow place with many residential areas. My boyfriend and I were taking a left off one residential street onto another, waiting in the middle of the road for oncoming cars to pass, just as a motor vehicle would have done. The car behind us begins laying on horn, yelling, “Get out of the road!”

This poor soul thought that only cars had the right to use the roads that all we taxpayers pay for. As I often do, I responded to potential conflict with grace and respect for another point of view…

I screamed a string of obscenities in the direction of the speeding car as it headed toward a red light one hundred feet away. My better half responded the way a person as level headed as I never would, and chased after the car. The following interaction ensued:

My better half (MBH): Hey you really didn’t need to yell at us

Patty Petroleum (chewing French fries): Get out of the road

MBH: You get out of the road; I have just as much right to be on it as you do

PP: You have the sidewalk

MBH: Sidewalks indicate their purpose in their name and bikes aren’t allowed on the sidewalks anyway

PP: Whatever

MBH: So it’s okay for you to scream at people, but it’s not okay for me to-

Light turns green. Petroleum Patty wields her enormous arm to form a familiar gesture with its sausage fingers and yells the following brilliant statement out the window:

PP: GET A CAR!!!!!

Well we hadn’t thought of that! Thanks, Patty Petroleum! I mean, it’s really hard to eat all my meals out of a Styrofoam box while riding my bike! I could just GET A CAR! It’s been such a drag being able to park right next to my destination rather than patronize my friendly neighborhood garage three blocks away! I should buy a CAR! I really hate fitting into the same jeans I’ve worn since my early twenties, I need to gain weight so I can rationalize buying new clothes. I’ll get a CAR!

….of course, I do own a car. But I’m nice about it. Eat me, Petroleum Patty!!!

#3 JUST IN CASE YOU STILL DON’T THINK MY COWORKER IS AN ASSHOLE

Oh boy is this one priceless. We are in a staff meeting, headed by our boss who is African American. Jabba the Hut is taking the notes, and says…

“How do you spell your name again?”

Our boss, who has worked with us for three months now, replies.

Jabba says, “Oh that must be one of those made up black names.”

… … …

I’m just going to leave that hanging…but trust that it did not make it into the meeting minutes.

#2 Dante’s Sixth Circle of Hell

Otherwise known as the Boston Children’s Museum. A cesspool of diapers, whining, snotty sleeves, untied shoelaces, frantic parents, disobedient little persons darting around with no regard for passers by. When I face my ultimate comeuppance, it will be there I am sent.

During summer school we take the students on field trips every Friday. Since most of our students have children themselves, we take one trip on which students may bring their families. The amount of hatred I harbor for this annual event cannot be properly expressed in words. See, a group of teenagers gathered together, regardless of whether they are playing the role of parent or student, behaves like a group of teenagers. So when you combine a group of teenagers with a group of sub-3 year olds plus cell phones plus all the social pressures and conflicts and norms of school you get:

“Oh hell no she won’t. I am not playin’ with that ho- ”

“Don’t say ho in front of my kid.”

“Why hasn’t he met his momma?”

“Bitch I am not PLAYING with you.”

“Baby get out of the ROAD get out of the fucking road get the fuck out of the road.”

“Yo your baby is mad cute!”

“I’m at school. I don’t know a museum. I told you don’t be chirpin’ me at school….hello? Motherfucker I KNOW you didn’t hang up on me.”

“Hello? Did you just-”

“HellOOOO?”

“Where the bathrooms at?!”

“Where’d Miss Kelly go?”

Miss Kelly went straight to the museum shop, where she sat and read a book for the entire day.*

*Conscience alert: If I were a different blogger, I might have talked about observing my students in their roles as parents and how a palpable sense of community made the chaperons smile as the students encouraged their kids to play together. And I might have also mentioned the moments of unguarded, unselfconscious curiosity and wonder while they learned with their kids at various exhibits…but we can’t have that messing up my reputation.

#1 Unprotected Sex

Second only to the Children’s Museum as a reaffirmation of my decision to barricade these baby tubes with two coils of steel, this delightful endeavor is ill-advised for most of you poor saps but gee golly if it isn’t making fine and dandy my vacationless summer vacation. High five!

Retreat! Retreat!

2008-07-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

According to the dictionary, retreat means: 1 a (1): an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable

According to my boss it means disguising a team building marathon as a mini work vacation. The main mode of disguise is location. Meetings aren't meetings when they happen in some OTHER conference room!

Thus, the gaggle of overweight pale grouchy non-profit employees in second hand clothes and comfortable shoes gathered in the early morning sun at a dock in the Boston Harbor, bound for trust falls and ice breakers. The teaching staff was especially attractive, the ancients in their sun hats, I in the same skort and sneakers I wear every day all summer long, and the bipolar chain smoking bad poetry writing weird ass new girl in some kind of hemp outfit. Our boss waddled up to the dock dead last, laden with the giant Post-it easel pad and a copy of The Complete Idiots Guide to Team Building.

As we motored through the harbor, flanked by rows of rusting freight cars and floating plastic bottles, I leaned over the railing and stared at the water. There is a certain mindless peace that comes only on a boat. I had my own twenty minute retreat, which was interrupted by the question, "Hey which Gilligan's Island characters would we all be?!"

I. Would. Rather. Drown.

The new girl was mystified by her nomination to the Gilligan role, proof of a casting job well done. My role was decided as follows:

"Kelly's the professor."

"No she's Ginger."

"Ginger??"

A glance in my direction.

"The movie star? The one that dresses up all the time?"

"Yeah, but wasn't Ginger really self absorbed?"

"Oh, yeah. Okay Kelly's Ginger, so who's the professor?"

And the team building just kept on rolling, all day long.

Post Game Wrap-Up

2008-06-24T10:45:00.001-07:00

I would love to tell you all about my surgery, but thanks to my friend anesthesia, I don't have much to report. I can assure you that I entered the hospital with a sense of somber reverence, deeply thoughtful about my decision...

And, of course, I spent the following two days off of work resting quietly, allowing my body to heal...I certainly didn't use it to play tennis or ride my bike or put a new composter in the back yard or walk around town in the sunshine. I mean I just had SURGERY for heaven's sake.

My doctor came to talk to me in the recovery room, and he mentioned that I was his third sterilization of the day - perhaps more women are realizing the children path is one only SOME people should take...? If you are considering it, let me ease any worries you may have: As it stands, the most difficult recovery period of my life was right after the 2004 election, and the most painful surgery I've yet to have involved three very wise teeth. The most difficult part of the surgery was abstaining from food or drink all day, and of course dealing with the antiquated sexist breeder-brained world which, I hope, is changing.

My Final Fertile Weekend

2008-06-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

Ah, the final days of fertility. The condom collection is down to the dregs, resorting at this point to the rain-slicker-thick ones tossed to me from a pick up truck filled with transvestites at the gay pride parade. The mandated pre-op blood work is evidenced by a nasty bluish junkie mark near the unlucky vein. The Depo shot to cover the risky post-op you-still-might-get-pregnant period has made of me a bi-polar Dolly Parton in heat. Between the migraines, back aches, weight gain, ear aches, weird fucking shaking attacks, and general psychoticry, I am reminded of exactly why I hate birth control.

All the more reason to go party in NYC all weekend with one of my favorite childless couples in celebration of a huge kiss goodbye to all of the above. Thus, I give to you the Final Fertile Weekend Recap:

1. The Bus
You know the bus. It was what you took in college. I am not in college. When you take the bus and you aren't in college you basically take a little trip into loserland. But you also don't put a whole lotta extra carbon into the air, so this counteracts the loserness of the whole escapade. Also it's an excuse, at least for me, to count gummy bears as a meal.

The driver on the way down must have wanted some sensitive national security information from one of the passengers, because we were basically in a traveling guantanamo. This rattletrap ramshackle poor excuse for a bus sounded like a collection of New Year's Eve party favors every time we: turned, accelerated, braked....etc. This was "auditory torture." The constant fear that we were going to tumble into a collection of bolts and seats flung wildly all over the highway was not enough. Oh no. There was also the traditional "olfactory torture," guaranteed to shock and awe even the toughest conscience. And it wasn't just the bathroom (which was egregious) but the air in the bus seemed thick with a potpourri of industrial cleaning agents and urine. On top of these add "climate torture." Our tyrannical driver turned the temperature dial to "Tundra" and rejoiced in our collective shivering. Then, just when we were about to fall unconscious, he spun the dial entirely around, selecting "Ethiopia." I actually extracted clothing from my bag (tank tops, underwear, a tee shirt) and fashioned leg warmers for the Tundra setting, which I had to periodically remove when we entered the Dallol Depression, and so on. It was as if he was waiting for the entire bus to scream "Uncle!"

By the time I climbed out of Port Authority and hit 42nd Street I had Dysentery and PTSD.

2. Indulgence
Luckily, my friends knew to inject me with Sangria and Tapas. In a Hell's Kitchen restaurant by a name I've already forgotten, I devoured marinated artichokes and portobello and manchego and octopus and prosciutto and aioli covered potatoes with shameless abandon. Like any good evening in new york, it was three am before we even thought to check our watches.

The next day we walked through the world, as microcosmed by Queens. India, Mexico, Korea (and, later, a quick cab ride to Greece for dinner). It got hot, so we stopped for what ended up being an inordinate number of frozen margaritas and a soccer match. The bartenders were very pretty and very dumb.

The streets are covered with a layer of grit in New York, and no matter the flow of sanitation workers there are just too many packages and papers and discarded pieces of gum to keep up. If you are ever looking for a visual to back up your personal worries about overpopulation, go hang out in New York.

After our impressive midday margarita pit stop we required naps and then showers. By the time we finished dinner it was nine thirty. We stopped at a local bar for a night cap at ten, and ended up unlocking the fifteen bolts on the front door right around three am again. Whoops.

3. Back home
On the bus ride home (considerably less reminiscent of abu gharib) I had plenty of time to reflect, over gummy bears, on my last day of fertility. After leaving dirty, crowded New York, I'm first reminded of my genuine belief that we should be pumping contraceptives into the water before we send the human race to follow the dinosaurs, because I'd actually like my species to stick around despite how annoying I find most of its representatives. I think of the little girl on the E train, packed between other passengers, whose mother kept trying unsuccessfully to keep the child from grabbing everyone's hair and how decisively uncute I found this to be. Mostly, I think of my relationship. There are thousands of late-night groggy conversations where we crystal ball our way through a wedding, through new careers, through cities and languages we've yet to see or speak, through a future that we only half plan and have pictured and repictured, both with and without each other, since we first knew how to think. Distinctly and consistently absent are: babies and voting republican. If I change my mind on the former, send me to an adoption agency. If I change my mind on the latter, send me off a cliff. Either way, tomorrow, I'm sending myself off to surgery. Au revoir, condoms. Ciao, depo provera. Adios, fertility. It's been a long strange trip. I'm glad to get off that bus.

the best thing i have done as a science teacher

2008-06-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

I rearranged my room the other day, and moved my model of the solar system to a new location. Now, it sits atop a tall file cabinet, right over the oft-visited pencil sharpener, which also got moved. So now, I've gotten to have the following interaction approximately sixteen times:

Student: Hey, where's the sharpener?
Kelly: It's right under Uranus.

It's definitely June.

Memorial Day

2008-05-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I had to sit through the funeral of a kid my age. This guy was kind of an asshole, in the way that most high school boys are assholes. He was on the wrestling team, very cute, obnoxious, got away with terrible breath. I was two grades behind him, and had trouble breathing normally when, after the break up of some awful cops-chasing-us-through-the-woods kind of party, his hands came at me in the dark northerly portions of a friend's barn. He was most assuredly cheating on some pretty girl or another. And there's nothing particularly fabulous about the coming of age shit that happens in the northerly parts of barns amidst handled bottles of brown liquor and red plastic cups. However, on every Memorial Day, I think of him. I'm really not sure how this 26 year old kid falling from a blown up helicopter thousands of miles from home helps America. So, this is me, remembering our fallen, in my journal that is NOT on the internet, which I feel like putting up here now:

The church is so white your eyes hurt. At noon the sun is right above it, and the steeple is constructed so that the shadow cast is a long cross, falling over everyone who passes under it. It is late fall; the trees are mostly dead. The leaves on the ground are mustard and the now only occasional brilliant red maple leaf. I’m wearing borrowed shoes, with toilet paper stuffed up into the toe. My heel keeps slipping and I’m holding onto a boyfriend’s hand. We join the line three yards from the church, watching the cross spread out over the mourners. The governor is there, shaking hands solemnly. I pass under the shadow, and refuse his hand, as he gracefully rolls away to another hand. He says anyway, “I’m sorry.”

Travis’s casket passes through the aisle, preceded and followed by incense and prayer. The hymn books are straight in their pockets on the pew backs. The wood is making me sit too straight. I don’t look at anyone. My feet are hurting and I can see the back of Travis’s mother’s head. Her lines are soft and slouched. The governor sits with the family.

The family speaks. The clergy speak. The governor talks about honor and country and freedom and love of one’s family and nation and fellow men. I roll spit around in my mouth. The boyfriend squeezes my hand. I say, “Bastard” and start to cry in the quiet way you cry at funerals.

At the close of the whole thing they play Bob Dylan. We all walk out behind him, his mother holding the folded flag in her fingers like a dirty sock. The squeal of the harmonica bounces around the rafters. And I can see Travis in his flannel shirt and ripped jeans with a guitar across a campfire. His face blurry and warm through the heat. It smells like the woods, like pine and thick, dark, meaty soil.

eating wasabi peas in rapid succession

2008-05-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Depending on your goals, this could be either a good or bad thing. Since I had no blocked nasal passages to clear, it's not really helping me out much.

I am what the kids call "freaking out." Not the immediate kind of "holy shit I just got hit by a bus" freaking out. Rather this is a slow, painful build up to freaking out crescendo.

You see, for many years I longed to live alone. For anyone who has endured years of roommatedom, as I have, the reasons for this are clear. There are the roommates who eat your food. The roommates who constantly remark that your living habits belie an upbringing "in a barn." The roommates who actually WERE raised in a barn. The sex party throwers. The suicide attempters. The non payers back of loaned cable bill money when you never watch the goddamned ass box in the first place. The fuckers of your ex boyfriends. I've shared mail slots with them all.

Thus, when both of my roommates left last week, and my house was to be my own for nearly two months, I believed myself embarked upon a journey of peace and joy!

As Howard Dean would say: "That turned out not to be true."

Due to overwhelming popularity, this is actually the first day I've had zero social engagements and zero people waiting for me at the house when I arrived home from work. Thus, today was the first day in the life of a person who lives alone.

Already, I blog.

I walked in the door, put down my stuff, and kind of just stood there. There was no Nayad running down the stairs at high speeds, telling me why it would be so great if we all had cocks, just for one day. Or Gina, offering me a nice big slice of salami without looking up from her computer. There was no food cooking and no crisis to deal with. I could do whatever I wanted, as loudly as I deemed necessary. I could make a mess. I could play with myself on the kitchen counter. I could...

Actually, hang on a sec...

...

Or I could eat whatever was in the fridge without worrying who it belonged to. I only had two responsibilities: clean the bathroom upstairs and put out the recycling.

When you have eight hours to complete two tasks that will take about 45 minutes, something terrible happens. They become impossible. I have often wondered why I keep my life so busy, but I think it is because that if I had too much free time I would never get anything done.

Itinerary: Day One Without Roommates

5pm: stare at the entry way
5:15 pm: enter the house
5:23 pm: walk upstairs
5:27 pm: put stuff down
5:28 pm: sit down
5:28 pm: look out the window, breathing
5:39 pm: check email
5:40 pm: check email
5:47 pm: turn on public radio
...proceed to spend two hours getting overinformed...
7:47 pm: realize you are starving
7:48 pm: frantically run around the kitchen assembling a dinner that could feed four
8:15 pm: wrap up leftovers
8:25 pm: think about putting out that recycling, and the upstairs bathroom
8:32 pm: check email
8:33 pm: listen to the counting crows for an hour
9:33 pm: think about the recycling, mentally table the bathroom issue for another day
9:41 pm: feel guilty about neglecting your blog
9:42 pm: procrastinate blogging by putting out the recycling
9:53 pm: put on pajamas
10:00 pm: blog with a sad face, eating wasabi peas in rapid succession

Sigh. I miss my little overeating, dirty talking, mess making, food stealing, loud screwing, leg humping, shoe borrowing, endless trips to the grocery store buddies. Ohhh the sorrow.

Dear Bobby Breeder

2008-04-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to deal with the comment left anonymously (read: huge pussy) on my last post. The text of the comment is:

So, I was vagging out on the couch reading your entry from my laptop. Congrats on your va j j day victory! Like, it's totally tubular! Nothing quite like increasing the cost of insurance for others by electing some expensive, thoroughly unnecessary elective surgery. Oh yeah, let's hope that you don't encounter any of the many complications (thus making our insurance more expensive): hot flashes, heavier periods, mood swings, depression, anxiety, insomnia, vaginal dryness, mental confusion, fatigue, bladder infections, bowel infections, hemmorage . . . you know, the basics. You should know that doctors have reasons for putting young women through the ringer when they request tubal tying. Many, whoops!, change their mind. Insurance won't be covering that change. And, of course, let's not forget about the joys of malpractice suits when things go wrong. The fact is that more men who decide to end the jizz biz remain comfortable with their decision than their female counterparts.
Again, congrats!
Bobby BreederMarketing Director, Trojan Corp.

Where oh where to begin. First, let's heave a sigh of dismay for the planet because these people are the ones who reproduce. Then let's ask...what the heck is "vagging out" exactly? Anyone?

Okay, let's break this down issue by issue.

Bobby Breeder's first issue: increasing the cost of insurance.

I find it hard to feel guilty about increasing the cost of insurance on this one. It would seem that Mr. Breeder's brilliant editorializing would be better directed at all of the people out there who, say, smoke during pregnancy and produce little hospital-residents-for-life. Or women who never want children but just remain on birth control their whole fertile lives, messing with their hormones in ways that might be more harmful than we currently realize, thus becoming at risk later in life and "medically expensive" (not to mention visiting the doctor over and over again to try new types that don't make them feel insane/get migraines/gain weight/etc etc etc and therefore driving up the cost of insurance, if one must look at it like that.)

Besides all that, it seems insane that we accept a system that pits patients against one another, debating the term "necessary" for medical procedures, when most developed countries don't make citizens pay for health care anyway. Again, I feel Mr. Breeder could redirect his ire for the better of us all in this instance.

Bobby Breeder's second issue: Complications

First off, thank you for your concern for my safety. I feel warm and fuzzy. The fact is, over 10 million women have had tubal ligations and most of them are just fine. The complication rate is about 1-3% - and that includes the gamut of complications from "being irritable" to ectopic pregnancy. And concerning the latter, that happens far less than 1 percent of the time. The chances of anesthesia issues are the same as when I had my wisdom teeth out, and I'm willing to accept that five of every ONE MILLION anesthesia procedures result in death. Really, Bobby Breeder, do you think odds like these should alter behavior? Because if you did, you would certainly never ride in a car, which is statistically like seven billion times more dangerous.

As per your worries about depression, anxiety, and insomnia I'm hoping this will cure those, not cause them.

Bobby Breeder's third issue: Defensive of Doctors

"Doctors have reasons for putting young women through the ringer..."

Yes, I agree. The primary reason is plain jane sexism. There are programs in nearly every state that offer vasectomies to men FOR FREE (that comes out of your tax dollars big guy). The man need only be 21 and have a valid ID. Women are "put through the ringer." If this isn't treating people differently based on gender, I don't know what is. Saying, "Women change their minds more" is a bunch of sexist bullshit. Examine, in your little brain, why women might be more likely to change their minds. Perhaps part of the reason women change their minds is the social pressure to have children, and the cultural assumption that a woman is incomplete without children. Perhaps it is a need to be loved unconditionally in a world that treats women like a different species (that does something to one's self esteem, see, and then the need for love comes after that.) Men remain comfortable because society is, by design, more comfortable for men. They are allowed to be comfortable in their decisions because they have designed society; it looks like a pretty sweet deal from here. I'm going to go ahead and give you the satisfaction of a "fuck you" on that one.

Bottom line, tubal ligation is a valid form of birth control, and the one that is the most effective. It is cost-effective over the course of a person's fertile years. Again, you're welcome for choosing not to produce another costly water drinking air breathing co2 emitting human in this already overpopulated world. Talk about increasing costs for others! Your idiotic arguments and egregious offences to the laws of grammar and spelling aside, Bobby Breeder, I appreciate the fan mail.

Fallopian Tubes: 1 Sexist Bastards: ZERO!!

2008-04-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Victory, she is mine!

In October 2004 I was standing in a crowded bar, having just watched Foulke throw that last pitch, ending 86 years of near-victory blue balls all over New England. Most of us, watching them win that series, just stood there for a second and stared at the TV and said, in our heads, "Um...what do we do?"

That's kind of how I felt when I encountered Dr. S., who popped his head into the examining room yesterday and, before introducing himself, said, "Hi I'm Dr. S--- and I don't have a problem with it."

Then he went on to say that he knew I had probably been through a lot of bullshit, and he had a strong allergy to bullshit, and would perform the surgery whenthefuckever I could get the day off work.

I just kind of sat there for a second. Wait...we won?!

Unfortunately, I didn't get to crowd-surf across Government Center afterwards, but it was still pretty sweet. I called my best friend, and my dad, and a few others, and we all kept saying, "Finally finally finally." No one thanked me for refusing to continue overpopulating the planet, but I'm sure they meant to. You're welcome.

So let the countdown begin! 61 days of fertility left, and liberation here I come. As Dr. S. put it, "You can say goodbye to messing with your hormones, and all the crap that comes with birth control. You can say goodbye to smelly, I-can't-feel-anything, mood-killing, expensive condoms."

I love this doctor! (That being said, this is the internet and I feel compelled to go ahead and put in a plug for condoms since STI's are just as horrible as babies.)

All of the resentment and frustration I have been feeling just melted away, and I was even nice to a child today without an onrush of nausea! I took my students to an Earth Day festival at MIT, and several of them brought their kids. I was photographed holding a 10 month old child, and I must say, I felt significantly less like dropping it and running in the other direction. There is something so liberating about this part of my identity being respected, and validated, and acted upon. I mean, I still think all you breeders are totally insane, and that my world view makes a whole lot more sense, but I think having this surgery might lessen the instances of me wanting to push strollers into traffic. (She says smiling sweetly.)

Look forward, vast readership, to a full surgery report and how to throw a fabulous "NO Baby Shower." Hooray!!!

Test Prep

2008-04-23T05:51:00.000-07:00

I am doing the only test prep I know how to do - I am drilling and killing myself on what it is, exactly, I must say to the doctor this afternoon to convince him that my tubes need tying.

The relaxed jocular Kelly didn't work. You can't say, "Trust me, Doc, if you knew me well enough you'd stop me from reproducing at any cost." They just don't have a sense of humor about these things.

What I'm really preparing is my response to the inevitable request that I seek therapy. Will I get on the couch (do they still have couches?) to buy myself a shot at saving thousands on birth control? Is this conceding to the bullshit sexist assface jerks? Do I, perhaps, need therapy after all?

Times over the past month I have displayed signs of craziness:

1. Anger Management

I was riding my bike through harvard square yesterday at like 5:30pm. There was a wall of people thicker than that thing they are erecting in Iraq. I was up on the sidewalk because some stepchild of the big dig has slithered into cambridge and there are cones and ropes and boards and cops directing traffic all over creation. Not that I ever go fast, but I was going exceptionally slowly, barely moving. Some bespectacled dinosaur born wearing a cravat had just bought a copy of The Economist (ahem, take note: I was going slowly enough to see what magazine he bought) and had his little harvard head stuck in his magazine and was backing up without looking. So I yelled, "Heads Up!" He stopped, did not back into me, and was unharmed. I felt like this was the best possible outcome. I continued on, toward the end of the roped off section where another cop was telling cars what the green light means. The Economist runs up behind me and says, "Excuse me, little girl, but did you bother to consider that riding your bicycle during rush hour might not be the most intelligent thing to do?"

Pause.

Did he just call me "Little Girl?" !!!

Then he goes on to say that if I had blown a horn, he would've known what that meant. But "heads up" means nothing to him. (And it's my intelligence in question - who the fuck is confused about the phrase "heads up?")

So I reply, all sweetness and light, "My voice is free; a horn costs like twenty bucks."

And he says (this is priceless,) "You aren't willing to invest twenty dollars in my safety?"

And I say, "I would be willing to invest several hundred dollars to watch a Clydesdale have its way with you and then drop your old rich white ass in a port-a-potty so I could tip it over at the top of beacon hill and watch you, in a fantastically horrific shittumble, gasp for your last shitty shitty breath on this earth that feels sorry for ever creating you."

Okay I didn't say that. But the fact that I THOUGHT it might suggest to some that therapy is in order. ...And make that SEVERAL Clydesdales.

2. Eating Disorder

My house is dysfunctional in many ways. Particularly charming are our truly disgusting eating habits. I don't like to call people pigs...but, um, we're pigs. A common utterance is, "Oh, I'm not eating anything, you guys can eat but I just ate." The list of things consumed directly following that phrase, trekking into our mouths in direct opposition to the outgoing breath that carried the words, could fill a ream of paper. Just last night I was keeper of the "Oh I'm not eating" torch. I sat through almost the entire meal, sipping my wine, enjoying the company, having already eaten but glad to have a nice dinner conversation with my household.

This is how it starts. It's a normal meal. We have rice and vegetables and some leftover grape leaves heated up. Wine and a salad. Then...out comes the hummus. The feta cheese. The Irish cheddar. The grated Asiago. The pita chips. The wasabi peas. The eighty seven different sauces. The chocolate covered nuts. It ends up here:

The pot full of rice sits in the middle of the table and we dump everything we have yet to eat in the middle of it and go at that thing with our forks like savages. I can't resist! I am physically unable to sit at that table and not pick up a fork at this point. There is something way too wonderful about diving into a pot of food with friends and eating the shit out of it.

So, I had dinner twice...once consumed standing up...out of a trough. This might be reason enough to seek help.

3. Schizophrenia

My neighbors are conspiring against me. They descend upon me in choreographed swoops like a swarm of over privileged bats every other week or so. I live in the richest, whitest, most thoroughly annoying neighborhood in Cambridge and their trust fund sense tells them that I am not one of them. (Or it's the times I sit in my shorts, barefoot on the porch, drinking beer and talking too loudly. At least I'm allergic to it, which is my best chance to fit in.)

So the unifying principle of their conspiracy against me is that I don't belong, and then they divvy up the duties. They are the suing type, so I'll change the names. The responsibilities go like so:

Ellen Fitzgerald has spy duty. She is the decoy. Feigning neighborliness, she knocks on the door occasionally to inquire about seemingly innocent things. "Oh, is that your little car over there? How nice." "What are you all, friends or...?" "It's so nice to have ethnic people in the neighborhood you know we're terribly the same around here usually." (No fucking lie, she said that.) "I looooove low income people, I have a lot in common with my garbage man, more than I have in common with anybody from harvard, I'll tell you that!" (Again, direct quote.) "Make sure you button up that gate, we get the riff raff around here sometimes. Plus it looks nice closed, and, everyone likes to keep them closed." "Are you planning to stay only the semester or are you permanent neighbors?" "Any vacation plans?" Etc etc ad naus.

Doug Wastenhoff is "The Enforcer." His job is to make sure we don't bring anyone's property values down by violating any important neighborhood rules. Leaving snide ass notes about how one should properly park one's car figures prominently in his job description. If, after trash day, the trash container is not whisked immediately from the sidewalk, this unsightly mistake is addressed in one passive aggressive manner or another by the enforcer. In the event of snow, he is very important. The second that snow stops falling, he must run at high speeds to my door to reiterate the shoveling policy. A perk of his job is that his dog gets to shit in my yard when he thinks I'm not looking.

And, finally, the bitch with the dog. I don't know her name. But her job is to walk around and look like her cunt is made of diamonds, giving everyone dirty looks and leaving whiffs of Chanel no.5 in her wake. She makes people like me want to move somewhere else, and is therefore indispensable to the conspirators.

Let's review.

I need therapy for lots of reasons, but I'm pretty sure that only solidifies the fact that reproducing is just not a good idea in my case. No couch for me, not on account of my totally sane and reasonable baby-proofing desires anyway. The Clydesdale thing...maybe.

Perseverance Award

2008-04-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

Every year, at graduation, my school gives out the "Perseverance Award" to a student who isn't graduating that day, but who has worked to overcome amazing barriers. They get a small scholarship which they can use toward college tuition when they do graduate. The last two recipients include one girl who battled her way through several homeless shelters with her daughter in tow and came to school as a 19 year old barely able to read, and a young man who was so afraid of being killed by the same gang members who killed his brother that we picked him up when he missed the bus so he wouldn't have to take the T. The world has been terribly unfair to some of these kids, but they are a resourceful group and we like to reward that. I was writing the text of the Award speech for graduation this year (because I was at work, on a holiday, because we aren't in a union and therefore get to show our "entrepreneurial spirit" by working every fucking vacation day) when my boss called this morning.

"Traffic is really bad, there are roads closed for the marathon. I can't figure out how to get around it. I think I'm just not going to come in today."

Way to be, fearless leader.

I tried to think of another title for this post, but "the pope is an asshole" is really the only option

2008-04-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

The Pope Is An Asshole

The head of everyone's favorite pedophilia club flew from Rome to the U.S. today. I wasn't going to say anything about it, because I don't give a hell, but then he went and said some stupid shit about which I couldn't possibly remain silent. When commenting about the oh so mysterious and suddenly discovered tendency for priests to rape small boys, he said:

"It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen"

A great suffering for...for YOU?! A great suffering for the church? You unbelievable asshole. I am continually shocked by the catholic church's complete and total refusal to offer an apology to the victims, and in this case, to even an acknowledge that they are the ones who have suffered. The church in which he is the head cheese abuses over 5,000 kids (that we know about) and he tells reporters that he is suffering.

Mr. Pope expressed his personal remorse about the abuse scandal, which up to this point he hadn't really given much attention, and said the church is "increasing its efforts to keep pedophiles out of the priesthood."

You asshole. You total complete asshole! "Increasing?" This implies that they were like kinda sorta maybe gonna figure some way to alleviate this suffering for the church when they got around to it, but now they are really going to start doing something about it. Increasing? Whatever efforts, which of course don't include letting priests marry or (god forbid) be female, should have already been at maximum.

Since 2002 over five thousand victims have come forward, and those are only the people who have braved exposure in a culture that socializes its children to feel shame when they are abused. Not to mention what that experience must have been like in their own families and church communities. I hope every single one of these five thousand people didn't have to hear the horrifically insensitive remarks of their "spiritual leader."

What's New Here?

2008-04-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

Hmm. Same messy desk. Same backpack. Same coffee mug. Wha...is that...is that a bicycle?

It's true. Hal the Hyundai has taken a few days off this week so that I can try my hand at the cool kid commute. Just when you thought, "Wow, Kelly can't possibly get any cooler" look what I go and do?!

The coolness of the whole adventure was mitigated by the fact that I had to, as an adult, take LESSONS to learn how to ride a bicycle. In a very Cantabrigian manner, I hired a private tutor. This was less because I felt the quality of a highly paid private tutor would far exceed learning from any old regular American who learned to ride a bike as a child and more because I was not about to embark on this very uncool journey under the tutelage of someone I had to see ever again.

Enter: The Bicycle Whisperer.

Susan the Bike Teacher calls herself the Bicycle Whisperer, and that's exactly what she is. I was a wild, untamed klutz of equine proportions and for forty bucks an hour she guaranteed she could get me to stay upright on two wheels. I drove to Somerville for my first lesson, skeptical. I parked on the street outside of her house, one of those huge old Somerville paint peelers that, to me, always look homey and welcoming. Still, I'm apprehensive and practically tip toe to the front door. Considering I found her on the internet, the chances that this woman might strangle me in her basement with a bike chain are slightly higher than normal. As in any dangerous situation, I just tell myself: "If you survive, think of the story you could write!"

Alas, no bike chain murder here.

Susan answers the door and gets me a parking pass so Somerville's finest won't charge me extra for the lesson. She is the definition of east coast baby boomer, living out her golden years with wild gray hair, attending every available leftist talk and rally in town, and trying to save Africa. She lives with roommates; she started her own organization in Mali; she makes a modest living teaching people how to ride bicycles. She's basically super awesome.

As a teacher, it can be hard to assume the role of the student. Luckily, the bicycle whisperer is about as comforting as a womb, and I immediately trust her with my safety. We walk to the barn, where the bicycle collection lives. We maneuver through the maze and extract my special learning bicycle. The process of building character through humiliation begins here. If anyone videotaped this I would murder them with a bike chain in Susan's basement. The bike is a special machine for special people. Literally. Its center of gravity is very low, the pedals are wrapped with soft fabric, and the rider sits totally upright with feet slightly out in front rather than right underneath. For me, the padded pedals are by far the funniest part. Moving on to: wardrobe.

Susan wraps me and pads me and covers me in so many articles of safety gear that I feel a weird combination of invincible and incredibly ridiculous. It feels like I could just dive into the pavement without getting hurt. Which is great, because at this point I'm pretty sure I am destined to do just that.

Through the streets of Somerville we march with our bikes. People smile at us because they think Susan is volunteering her time for some organization that teaches the mentally handicapped to ride bicycles. Little do they know, she is charging the mentally handicapped forty dollars an hour.

[[real time check in: I am at my desk; it is 7:15 am. Lessons for the day are planned, and I am free to blog. As I have mentioned, my school is located beneath a homeless shelter. Today in the room above me there is a child screaming at the top of its lungs. Again. I. Hate. This. Child. Judge me if you want to, but I do. I hate it. I mean, I don't really like any children until they are old enough to drive. But this child...ohhhhh this child.]]

So we arrive at a large abandoned lot adjacent to a basketball court. It is on a slight incline. We walk the bikes to the far corner at the top of the incline. This is what my life has done to me: a woman I met on the internet sends me down the hill on my bike when I am 27. What the fuck, parents?!

Offering all manner of supportive words, Susan takes me through step by step. By some miracle, I don't fall and it really doesn't seem that hard. Except turning. I still can't really turn. But that's another blog entirely.

She has me practice signaling, changing gears, etc. etc. calling at the top of her lungs from the center of the lot, "Left turn!" "Emergency stop!"

All of this is made exponentially worse when two young men decide they are going to play basketball. I am basically an adolescent male when it comes to the opposite sex. I cannot be expected to behave rationally or devote my attention to anything else when there are boys around. It's a sickness and I've got it. So here I am wrapped up like the Michelin Man on the short bus bike and there are male twenty-somethings playing basketball right next to me. I learn that I cannot yet look over my shoulder at a boy while trying to steer a bike. Horrible horrible cruel stupid world!!

I graduate to the bike path. This amounts to walking through Davis Square with the bikes until we hit the path, thus increasing the potential of being recognized by someone I will have to see again. Still, I am operating in my "I've decided to do this" mode, which means that I will ride the godforsaken idiot bike until my ass bleeds if that's what it takes to learn how to not fall off of it.

Fortunately, riding a bike is not nearly as difficult as I have imagined and my ass, while rather sore these days, has not bled.

The bike path is basically an interactive obstacle course. There are all sorts of moving, unpredictable things and people that you have to avoid hitting. I narrowly missed a family of four, and yelled at them to make sure and teach their kids young or...well or just look what would happen to them!

That being said, the bicycle whisperer felt that after one lesson, I only needed practice and did not have to take another lesson. While I had a pang of separation anxiety just thinking about mounting one of the two-wheeled death traps without her womb-like presence to soothe me, I was willing to save the forty bucks.

Since then I've bought a bike and commuted to work a few times, but I've gotta go shape the minds of the future and will have to write about that later. It involves less padding and way more bone chilling moments of pure terror.

Believe to Achieve (Part Two)

2008-04-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

So, the conference.

A project of the National Urban Alliance, this conference was billed as "The Most Important Educational Experience of 2008." The goal of the conference was noble: give educators the tools to close the achievement gap one classroom, or one district, at a time AND reaffirm that education is a fundamental civil right. The goal of me and my Education Action! buddies: meet as many passionate activists as possible and get them working on educational justice in their home communities. It seemed, on paper, that OUR goal and NUA's goals were going to dovetail nicely in gorgeous downtown Albany. We piled into the EdAction Mobile at 8 p.m. Friday night, bound for Achievement.

Saturday morning, very early, we entered the Crowne Plaza's lobby. A small crowd milled about. Everyone was sort of swaying in place, waiting for what we did not know. The whole scene had an underwater quality. The concierge informed us that everyone was waiting for a shuttle to the convention center, where the conference was ACTUALLY being held. Lugging our collection of recruitment materials, promotional materials, NCLB information, and general whatnot, we waited outside amid the flotsam and jetsam. We piled in the van. It took us approximately seven feet North to the convention center. We piled out. These things always have a funny way of making us realize what our students must feel like when we create inefficient systems for them to operate within.

The convention center is the weirdest building on earth. It is HUGE. Absolutely huge. The hallways are wide enough for three Hummers and a horse drawn carriage. Everything echos. Sporadically, in random corners, modern art appears, the sort of art that makes you wonder what distinguishes "art" from "nice try buddy." We walk through this building a longer distance than we traveled in the van, arriving at last in the center where registration tables are assembled.

The registration tables look like tic tacs sitting in a swimming pool. This place is a rough venue to generate conversation and build community. But we hang on to our optimism. This is the Most Important Place To Go All Year, remember?!

Fast forward. It is lunch time. Three people have passed our table. They did not stop. Those little golf cart things carrying maintenance workers and security guards whiz by like tumbleweed. This. Place. Is. Empty. We decide to split up the table-watching duties, and two of us head to a breakout session.

My session is concerned with reframing the idea of underachievement. The primary take away: it's all in our attitude. If we expect our students to underachieve, they will do just that. We find what we're looking for, every time. So, if we look for success, if we expect it, we'll get it. This is an important message. Too often, I sit in staff meetings addressing each student according to weaknesses. This is the language we speak: failures, risks of failures, weaknesses, challenges, etc. We almost never speak in positives.

At one point, the presenter asked us to share with our neighbors some positive words we felt described urban "underachievers." I am flanked by administrators. They are very encouraged to hear that I teach the homeless/teen parent/court involved population, which they had experience doing earlier in their careers. So we start thinking about generalizations, of the positive nature, that we can make about our students, past or present. I say, "Resourceful" which makes everyone nod. They say, "Persistent." One woman is writing down all of our suggestions, as was directed by our facilitator. I say, "Passionate." They cock their heads. Really? Passionate? They don't write it down, and move right along in the conversation.

When we come back together as a group, the four most common responses are put up on the powerpoint Family Feud style. Our group had written down all four. Passionate was not up there. My neighbors are very satisfied with themselves. They got the right answers.

That pretty much sums up my review of the conference right there. We want to address the achievement gap, and we do a lot of rephrasing terminology, looking at the results of expensive research projects, and fighting a system riddled with racism and sexism and classism and greed. We want our schools to be equitable and excellent and the education they provide to be a guaranteed civil right. But, when it comes down to it, we are up against ourselves. We are up against our own expectations for our schools and our students. We are up against administrators that don't think "passionate" is a valid adjective to describe a group of students. We are up against a culture that values getting answers more than really thinking about questions.

All weekend, we spoke to about six passionate advocates for change. Since then, we've been in contact with one of them. I want to say to these people: attending a conference for a weekend isn't making change. Writing one email to an activist organization about how much you believe in the cause and then never following up on it isn't making change. Getting the same answers as everyone else in your workshop on closing the achievement gap isn't making change. It's as if the standardized testing mentality, that many of us agree is detrimental to schools, has been ingrained into the minds of these well meaning educators. Reform efforts seem to fall into the same "just skim the surface and move on" trap as test-prep obsessed curricula. There seems to be this idea that never using the word "Underachiever" again is all one needs to do to eliminate underachievement. It's a valid step, sure, but creating an educational system that provides an equal education for all races and social classes is going to take more than vocabulary.

Get out there and DO something, people!

Believe to Achieve (Part One)

2008-04-01T11:47:00.001-07:00

Normally, my weekends are rather joyful. I flee work on Friday like the building is on fire no later than 4:30 pm, and go straight to the gym (or, if there are warmer-than-tundra conditions by the river, head outside to run). Boxing, running, spinning class - whatever it is, I sweat a lot. Then I get to tumble into a big hug from a cute boy, and spend all weekend lolling about asking each other, "What do you want to do?" More times than not, the plot involves a lot of napping and a delightful martini or two. By Sunday night I am armed for battle again.

This weekend, however, I got to attend my first ever All Weekend Professional Conference. This is different from the All Day Conference, which I've already mastered. It is different because instead of missing a day of work you just work all fucking weekend. No lolling. No cute boy. No martinis. Just a three and a half hour drive to Albany.

Let me tell you something about Albany.

...something...something to say about Albany...

My search yields nothing. There are exactly zero things to say about this place except that Albany in March is like Worcester in December. A crappy, cold, not-quite-a-place. I'm getting ahead of myself. The drive:

We take the company car, possession of which I find hilarious given that we have, technically, three human staffers, two bunnies, and an empty bank account. My coworkers and I prepare like we would for any car trip longer than forty five minutes - pack a bag absolutely filled to the brim with snacks. Wasabi peas, crackers, gummy candy, peppermint patties, a grapefruit, beef jerky, cans of soda, three nalgene-fulls of water, salt and vinegar chips. Three minutes into the drive we stopped for coffee and a sandwich. (Just in case we got stranded!)

The three little piggies and their Fast Lane barreled onto the Mass Pike headed west, bound for the 2008 Believe To Achieve Conference. I mean, if we're going to close the achievement gap, we'd better not go in hungry.

Somewhere close to the New York border the world forgets that it is spring and begins to snow like a banshee. I am in a contemplative mood, arms crossed in the backseat, listening to Radiohead and staring out the window. The snow on the side of the road gets deeper and deeper. Somebody switches the CD. The Shins. I squish my forehead into the window and contemplate suicide, hand in the salt and vinegar chips.

We're on Route 87, in search of our Pricelined stay at the Regency just outside of Albany.

I judge my hotels across a complicated cross-section of criteria. I won't bore you with those here. Just know that this Regency fell, judging by that index, in between the first Motel 6 you hit after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into Tijuana, and the time I went camping in the bed of a Ford F150 with a capped bed.

The door bell drew a customer service representative who looked like a defendant in a domestic violence case. This gem of a beefcake, bedazzled beneath gold chains, sported a sweatshirt with a sewn on logo for the NYPD and an embroidered message: "Cops for Cops."

Either he had some internal digestion issue or he said hello, I couldn't tell. Nayad, who is like a pretty flower doused with honey wearing a cloak of sunshine and music, says: "Oh hello sir we are just checking in."

For fun, we hold hands.

Nayad says, "I'm so excited for our weekend, Pat."

We make kissy faces.

Cops for Cops is unamused.

Nayad says, "We have to be downtown tomorrow morning by 8 for a conference, what times does your shuttle run?"

Cops for Cops emits grunts that translate into, "We don't have a shuttle." Nayad, like a little wood sprite sprinkled in fairy dust and happiness flakes, informs Officer Congeniality that the website lists a shuttle to downtown as an amenity and this particular amenity figured prominently in our decision to book this room.

Cops for Cops hands Nayad her cards back to her and says, while walking back into his cubicle of manliness, "Shuttle only on weekdays." We can hear, as the door opens and closes, that he is watching a film. I can't resist. I walk over and peer in.

He's watching Phenomenon starring John Travolta. For those of you who haven't seen it, it ranks just above Steel Magnolias on the "Funniest Movies to Catch This Guy Watching" list.

We have trouble abandoning the shuttle issue, even though we can drive in just as easily. Luckily, we brought the printer. We print out the web page, and march back out to the lobby. Nayad may actually have been concerned about the issue at hand. I one hundred percent just wanted to screw with Cops for Cops. He hands us the list of amenities and the list goes like the following, asterisks are for the ones of whose existence we found zero proof:
Cable TV
Tennis Court*
Pool*
Continental Breakfast
Air Conditioning
Shuttle to Albany
Room Service

The last two, on every such card we found throughout our stay, were CROSSED OUT WITH A PEN.

Cops for Cops one. Us zero.

Since it was just about midnight at this point, we gave up and went to bed.

In Part Two I'll actually talk about the conference. Not to ruin it, but...we didn't do shit about the achievement gap. We didn't even get lunch.

how the other half gives

2008-03-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

"If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich....

...It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat."

It's not just that John Steinbeck is a huge pimp. It's also that rich people are the devil. I can't help it - I don't like them. They freak me out. Unfortunately, I am cursed with a particularly discerning palette. Thus, when uber-rich people invite me to dinner, I can't say no. On Tuesday I was representing my boss at a house that could swallow up the trailer from whence I came seventeen times over. I walked over with my iPod blasting Bob Dylan singing about a dead hobo. The jazz trio could be heard from the courtyard. Cheek-kissing ladies funneled through the doorway. I stood at the edge of the drive in my favorite blue sneakers, a little post-welfare ball of anxiety. I hate these people. But I want to eat their food.

The entry way is clogged with activity. A frantic young woman repeats "May I take your coat" to the air, her arm outstretched toward no one in particular. She takes my coat and points to a table covered with alphabetized name tags. This young woman has the perfectionism disease big time. Her pearls sit exactly one quarter inch above her neckline and if you somehow threatened the sanctity of this exquisitely planned event, she would eat you for breakfast.

And so begins the excruciating "mingle" hour. To me, mingling is drinking wine in the corner and mocking people. This is delightful with a partner, but alone it just looks crazy. I stand there with my wine, not eating, staring at people in shifts, leering just long enough to make them uncomfortable. One woman accosts me.

"Oh hello, dear. I thought I saw you walk by the house, and I said to myself 'well she looks like she would be coming here, why would she walk by?' and now here you are."

I say, "Yeah, I was listening to music and I hate to stop mid-song."

"Oh! Isn't that wonderful, sounds like you've got your priorities straight."

I'm so bad at this. I have nothing to say to this woman. I gulp Fume Blanc.

"So, tell me dear, what do you do with yourself."

I tell her what I do: Teach. She cocks her head. Then I mention my employer's name.

Within seconds there is a flurry of Burberry and Chanel; I am engulfed by five old ladies. "Ohhhhh you work for him? How iiiiiiis he. It has been tooooo looooong. Oh you must tell him I say hello. Oh you are so lucky to be working with him. It must be just fabulous."

All of a sudden, I exist.

They poured upon me stories of the late 1960s, when they met my boss and fell in love with his work. I offer words of admiration for his work, looking into my wine glass, which is looking mighty low. They hand me cards and tell me to make sure to pass those on to him and flutter away as a unit. Existence by association. Blissful, as you might imagine.

Alone again. Mingle hour is almost up; I have eaten exactly nothing. The furniture looks like a museum collection. The art on the walls is old and represents an obnoxiously vast cultural diversity. I feel like I might break something.

Along comes the Ambassador, tinkling a bell. She holds it up over her head and motions for us to gather elsewhere. She herds us into the largest room, we moo obey. We sit facing a podium. I take a chair next to a sleeping cat. The Ambassador tinkles her way to the front. She has a microphone - it's time for introductions. She instructs us to speak about ourselves, and passes it to her left. It is five people away.

I look at the cat. The cat looks at me.

The five before me are presidents and founders of various philanthropic outfits. They kept saying, "By day, I'm an attorney. By night and weekend, I run this or that organization that I started. We help 'the communities.'"

What communities, exactly? Certainly not the ones we all live in.

Anyway, I'm struck by the sudden presence of a commonality: We all have more than one job. I will hand that to these rich people. They are really busy giving small fractions of their fortunes to "the communities."

I stammer through some mildly humorous thing about teaching. Then I mention, again, my boss whose name makes everyone go, "Ahhhhh." The Ambassador winks at me.

The microphone passing takes a significant amount of time. As it nears the end people are either more comfortable or more drunk, because the two sentence intro turns into paragraphs and jokes and commentary. Most entertaining are the high school students invited to represent their schools. They are perfectly adolescent, and say funny things. Two of them are black, and this pleases the crowd immeasurably. Oh look how integrated our little party is.

After the introductions and a few longer speeches by guests of honor, the Ambassador talks about raising millions of dollars through parties like this for great organizations that support the arts in education in Massachusetts. Then she says, "Because I only invited rich people!" Everyone laughs. "Like me!" Laughs.

Oh. How we chuckled.

Then she goes on to say that in "this very room" Frederick Douglass and other community leaders of the past gathered and plotted against oppression and inequality. Everyone gets reverent, breathing in the space.

Yeah. I'm sure this is just how Frederick pictured the future. We have fabulous parties to raise some money to put a year's worth of art and music programming in the urban schools because otherwise "those kids" wouldn't get any. Nice work America.

No, Actually, It Did Not Go Well

2008-03-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the third and apparently nowhere near final entry regarding my quest for permanent baby-proofing. This promises to be the most frustrated entry yet, so bear with my ranting.

[to self: Deep breath. Settle into a calming, excessively wordy description, and go from there...]

The Women's Health Center is on the same floor, down the hall, from Dr. H's office. I approach it with great excitement, as I have waited two months for this appointment. (Actually, that is only the length of time between appointments. I first asked a doctor for tubal ligation at age 18, making my wait time just under ten years.) This visit to my gynecologist seems like a step toward the light at the end of a really, really long tunnel (if you are thinking that this is an intentional invocation of female anatomy you are correct, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it).

The Women's Health Center is a reproduction (pun totally intended) of the Medical Specialties Office. Same muted colors for the upholstery, television in the same corner, different magazines. I go through the check-in rigamaroll and sit. And wait. The television bestows upon we waiters the slings and arrows of televised small claims court. In this particular episode, a woman is suing her landlord for her security deposit and he is simultaneously suing her right back for damages. Plaintiffs and defendants both, they glare at each other beneath ill-combed mullets. This world provides daily reminders as to why reproducing humans is an act engaged in far too often.

My appointment time comes and goes. Cases are settled. The suers and the sued offer post-trial commentary beneath rolling credits. I wait and wait.

Finally, the receptionist comes around from behind the desk and calls me over. She points me down the back hallway, where a nurse is waving a clipboard. She tells the receptionist thank you, sending her back out front. The nurse explains to me, "I didn't want to go get you myself, because there's an angry lady out there who says she's waited too long and I wasn't gonna deal with that."

We go through the motions. Weight. Blood pressure. Doctor will be right with you.

She pops back in.

What was the last day of your last period.

I have no idea. We look at the calendar, thinking that will jog my memory. I literally have no idea. Do people keep track of this shit?

To get rid of her, I tell a complete lie. I say, "Ohhhh yeah. The sixteenth." She happily marks it down, thanks me, and leaves for real. I have lied to a nurse.

Two minutes later the doctor is in. She is a healthy sort, in her late forties I'd wager, and looks like she rides horses or something else that requires physical exertion and wealth. Tennis. No make up, no jewelry. Whether she remembers me or not, she acts as if she does. I mean, I do have a rather memorable...um...face.

"Hellloooo, good to see you again."

"Hi, it's good to see you."

"You look great."

"Thanks."

"So." Clipped, but not curt. "What can I do for you today?"

"Well I think Dr. H told you that I am requesting tubal ligation."

"He did. Tell me, Kelly, have you hooked yourself into some counseling yet?"

As you may remember, as a teacher I am the Apotheosis of Patience, and this is no different. I make no gestures to reveal how vile I find the idea that one must seek counseling before a simple medical procedure.

"No, I haven't."

"Frankly, even if you had, I'm just not comfortable performing this surgery on women under thirty. However, I do want you encourage you to get a therapist or psychiatrist or other mental health professional involved before you continue with this. I think anyone potentially performing the surgery would want you to have sorted that all out."

Stop time, Zack Morris style. You won't do it at all? And you knew what this appointment was about? Um, that might have been appropriate information to offer BEFORE the $25 copay, ass hole. Or BEFORE I took the day off of work. Or BEFORE I got my little child hating hopes up.

Dr. Gynopussy, as she will heretofore be known, senses that I am frustrated (might have had something to do with heavy sighing and eyeball movements...she's very perceptive) and says, "I'm sorry to make you come all the way over here. And I hope you don't feel like I'm abandoning you."

No, actually, I don't feel abandoned at all. Here is the list of things that I feel:

1. Fucking irritated

2. Patronized

3. Belittled

4. Judged

5. Did I mention fucking irritated??

So then she launches into this defensive speech about regret rates, and her oath to "do no harm" and blah blah freaking blah. I say, "Would it be easier for someone to get a vasectomy?"

She says she isn't sure, but that she would certainly be interested in knowing. Then she says, "Are you in a relationship with someone who does not want children?"

I first mention that one's relationship status shouldn't really have any bearing on medical decisions. I then tell her, in an attempt to escape what had just become an awkward moment, that dating someone who wanted kids would be like dating a Republican. Someone who wants children disagrees with me on something pretty darned fundamental to my identity, something that is non-negotiable. Then I go ahead and make it awkward again with this: "I find it incredibly frustrating to have the entire medical profession, not to mention 98% of everyone else I know, consistently calling that part of me into question, as if there is some part of me that is unknowable, or that I need to be protected from decisions I MIGHT make later."

So then she says, "I understand completely," and IN THE SAME BREATH, asks if my boyfriend would seek a vasectomy.

What?!

Despite whatever antiquated world-view Gynopussy is operating within, I thought she might see how I would find that offensive. Regardless of who I am dating, my reproductive decisions are my own.

Folded into her suggestion is the assumption that obtaining a vasectomy for a young unmarried male presents fewer obstacles than obtaining tubal ligation for a young unmarried female. If this is true, me and the nice folks at Cambridge Hospital are going to be in our own little courtroom drama. I left the office with her repeated urging to seek counseling echoing in my brain.

I make an appointment at the desk with another gynecologist in the building. He represents one of three more "shots" within Cambridge Hospital. I have to wait another month. I have to pay another fee.

On my walk to the car, my mouth excreted foul language unlike any I've ever spoken. I ran out of swears. Now, I come from a long line of laborers and drunks. Running out of swears is not a small thing, people.

Then I do what I always do when I am about to for serious freak out. Like any grown up who can make her own damn decisions, I call my dad. He says a number of unhelpful things like:

"Given the likelihood that your offspring will resemble me, it's kind of your duty to the world to have at least one."

and

"General anestesia sounds like just what you need right now, actually, I'm surprised she wouldn't give it to you."

and, his only serious comment:

"Well, all she's recommending is that you explore a really important decision with an impartial person before going through with it."

To which I say:

Do people who want to have children have to seek counseling?

Do people who are having trouble conceiving have to go see a psychiatrist before receiving fertility treatment?

Do people seeking fertility treatment get a speech about how the process of having kids is non-reversible?

NO! Why is the seriousness of choosing NOT to have children GREATER than choosing TO have children?

There. Aren't. Enough. Swears.

test prep test schmep

2008-03-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

This will be short. Remember that time I got demoted for being too "unfocused on testing" and "progressive to a fault?" You know, the time when they told me to do more test prep or they would fire me. Well I do. And since then our students have taken lots and lots of tests. Ohhh how we love tests.

Lo and fucking behold:

ONCE AGAIN, upon receiving the test results this morning, we can see that: the test scores in my subjects for my students were higher than every single other subject and every single other teacher.

Did I bend to the will of the test prep wackos? No, no I did not. In fact, in my childish stubborn manner that is both adorable and effective, I did approximately ZERO test prep this school year. You know what I did do? I loved the crap out of my kids and my job and I did not for one nano-second believe that any of them could fail. That's it.

Huzzah! Drill and kill this, bitches. Sniff...sniff...mmm...I love the smell of victory in the morning.

Internet Puberty

2008-02-29T05:12:00.000-08:00

My sentiments exactly.

Listen everyone. All five of you. Two days ago I used blog as a verb. I have been known to show Youtube videos in my classroom. I edited something on Wikipedia last week. Things are happening that I don't entirely understand...like when changing in gym class suddenly became a thing of horror.

But just like when these two perfectly shaped behemoth enchantresses began to grow on my chest in fifth grade, I am coming to accept the fact that the internet can be useful. Given my age, I SHOULD be one of the kids who grew up right alongside the internet. But I didn't even have cable television until age 9 or 10. A computer?! A computer is on the list of things we requested as children, sure. And it met my mother's only response to inquiries about material possessions. She would throw her head back and bellow, "You can't always get what you want...but if you try sometimes..." and raise her eyebrows. We would stare back, forced to glumly admit that we had what we needed.

When I was a teenager I could walk a mile and a half to my best friend's house, and she had the internet. But she also had a pool. So I squandered my only pre-adulthood chance to get acquainted with this...this "internet" for the sweet cool chlorine bath out back. We spent entire summers on floats shaped like alligators, eating sandwiches made from white bread and mustard. At night, the neighborhood convened in giant games of capture the flag. I never had to go home and I never had to go on the internet. It was perfect.

Thus, I went to college having used email once or twice and able to type. I sailed through college as a writing major, researching the depths of my own imagination. Sinking into the glorious world of fiction. All my papers were composed on collections of loose leaf paper, napkins, in the margins of other books. I would gather them up, spread them out on a table at the library, and type them in one shot. My thesis was written almost entirely at a dusty old man's bar three doors down from the library. I took to drinking red wine and letting the neighborhood regulars listen to late-night paragraphs of my work. This sort of madness suited my college identity rather well. There were people around who thought I was a crazy Luddite. There were the "media studies" kids, who to me were just as crazy as the theater arts kids. Their art wasn't my art and I wasn't interested in being anything other than a writer. I couldn't understand what the hell was so interesting about the computer. I could spend six weeks in a tent with nothing but a copy of Babylon, Revisited and not get bored. There were whole worlds in single sentences, what the hell did you need a computer for?!

Then I went to grad school. Oh fuck. These people get their research on. Here, a computer becomes a necessary tool. Syllabus: online. Class discussions: online. Test results: online. Okay, okay. I give. I purchased a computer. An adorable little laptop. It plays music; it plays movies; I can send email from the toilet. These are useful, enjoyable things.

HOWEVER I still did not really grasp the extent to which people engaged with this "internet." I thought I did. But I did not.

There is a bunch of knowledge out there that seems ubiquitous. I take great pleasure in being ignorant of most of it. People magazine is a collection of beautiful strangers; I know nothing about Hollywood and all that noise. But this is the conscious, deliberate result of watching almost zero movies and refusing to own a television. Recently, I have been blindsided by a whole other world of things to which I have been blind. Perhaps you are familiar with the website whose charming assault on grammar involves photographed cats. Until recently, I knew only the "Hang in there Baby" cat. Apparently, cats and captions have been married for some time on the internet and I had no idea. These cats are everywhere. Literally everyone knew about this except me. As it is with any new knowledge, I am starting to notice references to these grammatically horrifying pictures all over creation. I feel I have joined some other realm. I have moved to the lunch table where the girls talk about periods and boys and shaving their legs instead of...of...whatever we talked about before that. I have got internet pubes. And with them comes all the uncertainty and weirdness of that first real bout with adulthood in grade school. The internet awkward phase. iAcne.

Thanks to my workplace, my status as computer pubescent is paradoxical. No matter how tech-inept I may be, simply by virtue of my twentysomethingness and my coworkers' babyboomerness, I am The Resident Computer Genius. Countless are the times I have heard: "Kelly, you're good at computers..." followed by a request to, say, explain why the machine was suddenly "typing in only capital letters." My love for learning is second only to my love for knowing things my coworkers don't, so this works out for all of us.

This is a recurring theme with me, this being dragged into my generation. At a sleepover in grade school I remember sleeping on some girl's New Kids on the Block sheets wondering, self-consciously, "Who the hell are these guys?" When my girlfriends were making mixed cds I was still pushing the speakers of my turntable up to a taperecorder, recording all my Beatles albums onto cassettes. At a birthday party when everyone went to see Ace Ventura Pet Detective, I left them and watched Mrs. Doubtfire by myself. I identified with middle aged divorcees, it seems. I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time three years ago, yet I owned a copy of Gone with the Wind by eighth grade. I denied being a member of my own generation.

This has made for a great time in adulthood! Two years ago I started listening to Radiohead and Pearl Jam. They are GREAT! While everyone else who grew up in the eighties actually GREW UP IN THE EIGHTIES, I created a little world for myself and grew up in the sixties and seventies. Looking back, this was a smart decision on my part. So, now I'm using blog as a verb. One thing is for sure, though, I will retain my grammatical prowess, and resist the temptation to find subject verb disagreements cute.

AWKWARD

2008-02-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

Ok, I was blogging about teaching Hamlet. But I'll do that later because I cannot possibly allow this moment to pass without sharing it. It'd be like Horatio choosing to die at the end instead of promising to tell Hamlet's story. It is that serious.

I am at my desk. It is...let's see...4:30. School has been over for a long while now. The halls are silent. There are open rooms and offices in abundance. If you wanted to, I don't know, have a remarkarbly personal conversation or marital spat, there are ample spaces in the building.

I am sitting approximately four feet and seven inches from the desk at which my boss is sitting.

She is in here. Now.

You are thinking: "Kelly, shouldn't you stop typing and talk to your boss? I mean she's looking right at you?!"

No she isn't!! She is ON her CELL PHONE arguing IN SPANISH with her husband. I can hear him yelling from here. He is very very pissed off. So is she. She keeps trying to cut him off....

"Entonces...entonces...ENTONCES MI AMOR...mi amor...si, si...mi amor..."

I'm going to go ahead and file this under "Fucking awkward."

just like riding a bike

2008-02-18T08:02:00.000-08:00

There's lots of stuff I don't like to admit. Like: I don't buy peanut butter anymore because I was consuming a jar a week. Or: I wept like a beaten child at the end of Ice Age 2*. Also: I have never seen any of the Godfather movies, and I probably never will. And of course: When I lived in Kentucky I watched Project Runway. A lot.

Up until recently I had one admission that didn't bother me so much. Said admission being that, other than the one time in France, I've never ridden a bike. I just never learned. And I've told people over and over again, always savoring a bit of satisfaction in their shock: "What?!" "Really?!" "Where the hell did you grow up?" "Can you swim?!"

I can swim.

Typically, this encounter involved me and one or two other people at a time. Yesterday, however, I was submerged into a world wholly unknown to me: the indoor bicycle race. Far be it from me to refuse an evening of beer and sweaty men in spandex. This is a world of people obsessed with bicycles and riding them and talking about them and fixing them and reading about them and bragging about crashing them. A world of uniform uniqueness just like good ol Emerson College. With their tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, "no one else here has ever seen this t-shirt" t-shirts, and tight pants. Also beards. They love beards.

I'm sitting in the middle of this bikefest like a dude with herpes on Spring Break. Do I tell them...?? Can they tell anyway...?

It is like any subculture, I guess, so the concept isn't new to me. Any gathering of runners is just as ridiculous in its obsessiveness. I have purchased my fair share of runner crap. I subscribe to Runner's World; I have a runner hero; I have run a race with a broken foot. I love talking about running, reading about running, looking over my running log, and of course actually running. But running can be painful, arduous...I can understand why someone would think that loving it is pure madness. In fact, at any of the bizillion running events I've been to, never have I heard anyone trying to convince a non-runner to run.

Not so for the bikers! They will make you sit on a bike, they will offer to teach you to ride a bike, they will offer to find you a bike, they will offer you a bike they have sitting in their basement. They will stop at nothing.

[I just need to interrupt myself here for a second to report live, from my desk, in the deserted basement o' learning: I just bought a bag of peanut m&ms from the vending machine upstairs. I am about 3/4 of the way through this sucker and I have to let it out: There are NO peanuts in this bag. They are just giant m&ms. Forgotten peanuts. What the fuck, Mars, Inc??]

Enter Wicked Mature Kelly. I ask you to envision the following conversation:

Me: I will not eat the broccoli.
Adult: Yes you will.
Me: No. I won't.
Adult: Eat the broccoli or you can't watch a movie after dinner.
Me: Fine.
Adult: Okay, no movies til you eat broccoli.
Me: I will never watch movies again.
Adult: Kelly, just eat the broccoli....

This might as well have happened when I was 25, because nothing has changed. My decision to NOT do something involuntarily cements itself at the exact moment I am told I should do the given thing. It's the eight year old reflex. I've got it big time.

In the midst of my internal resistance and surrounded by sweat and spandex, a tiny tiny microscopic portion of my stubborn constitution gave a little. Mentally, I revisited the sole instance of my bike ridership. The following conditions applied:
1. I was in France, and therefore all drunk on cheese
2. The bike path was entirely closed to traffic
3. The person with whom I took the ride had also never ridden a bike
4. The temptation for "it's just like riding a bike" jokes was just too strong

...What I didn't realize was that the distance between the bike path and the sheer rock face of the cliffs of insanity, a reassuring fifteen feet at the rental shop, narrowed to approximately three inches for the last several miles of the trip. That's another story entirely. It involves elevated blood pressure and walking.

Like most everything I see and do in the world, I relate this back to teaching. The conditions necessary for me to try a new thing (which is all that learning is) were:

I was in a place that held no memories of previous failures. While I feared for my safety (and the safety of anyone biking near me) I didn't worry about being judged.

The place was secluded from real or perceived dangers (at least initially, the dangers being cars. The cliffs of insanity kinda ruin this part of the analogy.)

The person with whom I DID the learning was learning herself.

So, how do I make my classroom like a small fishing village in France? It seems like the work to be done first is twofold. One, getting students to abandon any negative associations with the classroom. Too often the simple act of sitting in a desk and looking at a white board immediately brings back negative feelings in students, especially those who have left the mainstream system. In my opinion this is best done by getting the hell out of the classroom. Field trips don't have to be elaborate, expensive, or rare. One of the best trips I've ever done was just a walk down the street to practice descriptive writing. They could have just as easily described the classroom, but the act of walking out of school and describing a neutral place brought out some great writing and some improved attitudes. And it was free! Two, making sure you are willing to be wrong in the classroom. Being fallible in the classroom helps build trust and makes students feel like they aren't being judged. This is my rationale for being wrong a lot, but I'm pretty attached to it at this point. Also, I have found that cheese and baguettes serve a person well in any situation.

*I am sorry, but when Queen Latifah and Ray Romano realize that they are not the last Woolly Mammoths on Earth, and that they do not have to stay together to save the species, but choose to stay together for LOVE, that shit is a tissue-fest and you know it.

Code Talkers

2008-02-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

boxer shorted well into
a tuesday afternoon,
it is summer.
he's showing me

the dictionary left
for him
after the war -
our grandfathers'
sons
born in letters
the same year,
invisible from the Pacific -

how quiet I had to be,
pondering a list
of words
that had forgotten love
(or thought it
unnecessary)
and made fighter planes
of humming birds.

Pall Thee in the Dunnest Smoke of Hell, Jerks!!!!

2008-02-15T04:50:00.000-08:00

I have written before about my school's opposition to Shakespeare. When I tried previously to bring it into class, I was shot down for being unfair to students who "weren't ready" for that kind of material. Lord what fools these administrators be. But...Huzzah! Those crusty botches of nature that are the administrators allowed us, this fall, to incorporate electives into the schedule and eliminate "study hall" (formerly known as "myspace hour.")

Thus came the happy task of designing two semester's worth of electives. My first one was a community organizing/civic engagement jobby that had us writing letters and making phone calls and yelling a lot, which was a blast. And now it's time to register again! After February vacation we begin the next round of electives. We're pretty low-tech around here, so they register by signing up on pieces of paper posted in the main hallway. There's "How to Make Lunch," "Looking up Words in the Dictionary" "Stuff to do In Line at the Bank" and "Hamlet Will Kick Your Ass."

Six brave souls have elected to allow Hamlet an ass kicking, and not ONE peep has been thrown my way about deciding to teach it. I can't believe I'm being allowed such cruelty, asking inner city homeless kids to read Shakespeare, when we all know that kind of reading is reserved for the children of administrators. Have I no heart?!

According to the man himself: things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing. Mmmm...I don't know Bill, I sure as heck am enjoying the winning part.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me....

MCAS...putting the ass in assessment

2008-02-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

This was going to be a recap of the wonderful MCAS Reform Day at the State House yesterday. Between two and three hundred youth, teachers, parents, and activists showed up to ask for a more rational system of evaluation in our public schools. The kids were amazing. They created posters, postcards, plans of action, and delineated clearly the issues they felt MCAS unnecessarily brought to their schools. One group even created a book filled with young people's voices from all over the Boston area, outlining their academic struggles and what they thought their schools could do better. I for one am energized and relieved that our standardization factories haven't squished out every bit of the hopeful, creative juice that makes our kids so great.

Then, I read the Scot Lehigh's Op-Ed in the Globe:

Here, "reform" and "reforming" are artful and elusive terms. What they really mean is, weaken or water down. If the group, which counts the teachers unions as "significant contributors," according to director Marilyn Segal, has its way, high school students would no longer have to pass the MCAS to graduate....

What MCAS reform means, actually, is the opposite of watering it down. It means strengthening assessment to include all learning styles. It means creating a range of graduation requirements, rather than just one. Broadening the scope of an assessment is not weakening it; it is allowing that not every child demonstrates his learning in the same way. Reform also means taking the frenzy out of the test. High stakes environments are simply not conducive to learning. High stakes environments are great for performance, but we seem to want kids to perform well without creating a situation in which they can LEARN.

Mr. Lehigh also claims that the MCAS is not related to the dropout crisis:

Further, when the Department of Education surveyed superintendents several years ago about why students were leaving school, the MCAS exams weren't one of the major reasons cited.

Okay, deep breaths. There are two problems with this.

One: They asked the Superintendents?! They wanted to know why STUDENTS were dropping out so they asked...the Superintendents? That's like saying, "Hey, I want to know why 65% of women are unhappy in their marriage. Let's survey the...um...fathers-in-law. They'll know."

Two: If they HAD bothered to ask students why they left school, the majority of kids probably wouldn't have said the MCAS either. What they would have said was that they were bored or their teachers didn't care. Again, this goes back to what a test-obsessed system does to the culture of a school. If teachers are straightjacketed into a drill and kill curriculum and working under the constant threat of state takeover if those test scores don't go up, their demeanor might be less than caring. They might feel like quitting every single day. And if the curriculum is constant preparation for a test, well the boredom thing makes a lot of sense. So perhaps they didn't cite MCAS as the reason, but this is just a case of patients complaining about symptoms without naming the disease.

And then this guy:

"Someone should tell some of these people that the debate is over," says Senator Robert Antonioni, Senate chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on education.

Thank you, captain eloquent. And I apologize. Were we questioning the wisdom of determining everything a student has learned in his entire academic career by one measure? Did we dare to suggest that there might be a better way? You do not have the power to declare this debate over, Senator.

And, then our fair Governor Patrick had this to say to Mr. Lehigh at the Globe:

"I came to the MCAS by talking to parents of poor kids who told me that before the MCAS, their kids were just promoted on without even being able to read . . . I start, because I personally stink at standardized tests, highly skeptical of standardized tests, but I got there by talking to these parents, I mean, all over the place, talking to these parents. So it would take a lot - it would take a whole lot - for me to reconsider that position."

First of all, kids are still being promoted without being able to read. This one gets me particularly upset because I work in a school for kids who have been forced out of the Boston Public School system. In our school, at present, we have two teenagers with second grade reading levels and one girl who cannot read at all. All three of these students left high school in the tenth grade. Hmmm. It looks like the MCAS didn't prevent these kids from being promoted without reading ability, but it just waited until tenth grade to force them out.

Second of all, the governor doesn't really want to make the call on MCAS. His readiness project is conveniently set up to decide all of that stuff for him. So our job now is to convince the various committees of the readiness project that MCAS reform is a priority, is necessary, and is the best thing to do for our kids. For more information on how to do that, please visit Citizens for Public Schools, and revel in their awesomeness.

My Kinda Valentine

2008-02-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

Sick. And twisted. Like a pretzel with dysentery. Oh, how my heart swells with emotion!

What to Do When A Student Threatens Your Life

2008-02-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

Ahhhhh youth. A time of blossoms and blooms. Sunrises and sparkling, shining, shimmering beacons of possibility. A time of exploration and continual redefinition. An energetic charge into the unknown and unknowable. Youth full of pleasance...youth like the summer morn...youth like summer brave. Blah blah blah.

I love my students. I do. They present about 1,000 joys and 1,000 challenges per second. But once and a while, I find the latter clouding over the former in a dark, foreboding, rain-heavy cumulonimbus of doom. Other times they say things like, "Miss Kelly, why don't you run for president? You'd be good at it." THOSE things make it totally worth it, even after encountering one or more of the following:

The 10:30 a.m. Verbal Abuse Break

Now, I have been a stepchild. And a stepsister. Therefore, I have been called lots of horrible things. There is something especially difficult, however, about being interrupted in the middle of a sentence by an adolescent who believes you must know, right that second, that you are hideous. I give you you the following example, from my time in Cambridge Public Schools (my lawyers want you to know that the names are fake and I in no way actually encourage anyone to behave in the manner I behave, although it is really fun...)

Gabriel: I'm not reading this book. It's stupid.

Kelly, Apotheosis of Patience: What is stupid about it?

Gabriel: Everything.

Kelly, AP: Any chance you'll be more specific? I can't help you find a new book if I don't know what's so stupid about this one...

Gabriel: (throws book at wall)

Kelly, AP: Okay. The book may or may not be stupid, but it certainly didn't do anything bad to you. Maybe we should-

Gabriel: I don't learn from ugly people!

Kelly, AP: Well, you are damned lucky I teach ugly people.

...This might be the worst thing I have ever said as a teacher. Except for the thing I said about the Pope that one time. That is so not going on the internet. Anyway, I'm sure if you're a teacher you can feel your classroom management skills improving already. I find that it helps to sink right down to whatever level the student is on, and just argue until the noise draws an administrator.

The Absolutely Unbelievably Ignorant Statement

As I have mentioned, my school has decided to combine History and Science. I'm no scientist, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor am I even remotely qualified to teach it. But I do have a strong sense of admiration for it, mostly due to its consistent opposition to stupid religious wackos. What I lack, and this applies to most things in my life, is tact. I can only identify bullshit; I don't have the science background to effectively fling a rebuttal against moronic statements that arise in science discussions. Or, at least, I feel unsure of myself in a way I wouldn't if the statement came up in a discussion about history or literature. So if someone said something idiotic, say, on the T, I would say, "That's fucking bullshit," and be confident that I was right, comfortable in the feeling that I had zero obligation to elaborate.

Alas, now I have to try presenting gentle, calmly stated, thought provoking questions that might get people to dig more deeply into the beliefs they've held all their lives.

Examples of statements that have challenged my "just scream bullshit" reflex--

"What?! Fuck that. I didn't come from no god damned ape."

"If god wanted gorillas to talk; they would talk."

"We are not animals, we're people. We can't eat people; we can eat animals."

"If dudes were supposed to whatever with dudes and girls were - I mean - we wouldn't be shaped the way we are. You know? It doesn't make sense."

"Babies are a miracle. I know people that been trying to have a baby and can't. And then other people just can have them. If god wanted people to get rid of babies, he would just not let them get pregnant."

"If we all don't have babies, people will die off."

And, my personal favorite:

"All this "earth" shit, I mean, that stuff, recycling, is for white people to worry about."

That last one sparked one of the best and most difficult conversations I've ever had, actually. What I've come to realize is that even though it's a different subject, all the same arguments and conversations come up again and again. Addressing someone who really believes that god made the world a certain way and there's no reason to think about it any more than that and addressing someone who asserts that the Holocaust could not have possibly happened require pretty much the same tactics, in my opinion. I'm just freaked out by the idea that I have to teach Science. When you're moving around in a subject that is totally foreign to you, it's amazing how much more difficult facilitating conversation becomes. This has me really thinking about the whole "which is more important: studying pedagogy or studying content area" debate...but this isn't that kind of blog. So...uh, back to frivolous sarcasm!

The Request to Aid and Abet

Last year, we were on a trip to the State House for a lobby day. We all had written letters to our representatives. The kids were informed, pissed, primed for civic engagement. Gathering at the entrance, making the requisite jokes because the gate is dedicated to General Hooker, we prepared to enter. One kids pulls me aside.

"I can't go."

"What? Why? Whatdya mean you can't go?"

"I forgot something."

"You forgot something you need, right now, to go in the State House?"

"No, I forgot to NOT take something."

Pause.

"You forgot to not take something that..."

"That won't make it past the metal detector."

You ever play that game Scruples? (Because what's a party without hypothetical moral predicaments?!) Anyway, I have. And I think it's good for teachers to occasionally glimpse into the out-of-school lives of their students. So I did that. Nothing generates a teachable moment like jogging around Beacon Hill, trying to look inconspicuous, while you hide a weapon.

Everybody's Favorite: The Death Threat

This is the one where a student is gripping the edge of a desk, white knuckled, screaming, "Don't make me fucking kill you I'll kill you don't make me fucking kill you." Here's how you handle it, if you're super awesome at difficult situations like me:

1. Look awkwardly at the other students and gesture, with your head (Garth Algar style) to run from the room.

2. Raise your eyebrows really high and fail to take the situation entirely seriously.

3. Ask the threat-maker if he would kindly stop threatening your life.

4. Say something snide like, "You know, I don't have a television, so if you go totally ape shit I won't even get to watch it on the news so really it's not even worth it."

5. Sit down, right across from him, and ask him what he's really mad about.

6. Try to not think about whether or not he's got a gun.

7. Stop blabbering, and just sit there til he talks to you.

Looking back on every day of teaching that has left me wanting whiskey or a cliff from which to leap, it's never really the kids who screwed up. It's me getting frustrated with my inability to explain something in the best possible way, or my lack of proper planning, or my momentary lapse in understanding that whenever somebody behaves badly in the classroom, it's most likely because he is struggling. No matter how I feel by six o'clock, though, I'd take hiding weapons in Beacon Hill over some lame brained office job any day.

maternity bites (volume two)

2008-01-31T09:14:00.000-08:00

Step one complete! It went a little something like this:

As a result of being weirdly uptight about punctuality and therefore consistently arriving at appointments at least forty-five minutes early, I am superb at killing time. My half hour in the waiting room is chock full of activity. First is the requisite contact-information-update marathon with the receptionist, which is always fun. Then: an iPod, a book, a journal, a camera (probably not a good idea to use that in this context), a phone, part of a newspaper, and a stack of mail that has been stuffed in my backpack for inspection going on three weeks now. If ever a person wanted to film a little clip about what it's like to have ADD, this would be the time and place. I read two pages, then open my journal. I write three things down, then find the paper. I open the paper but decide to go back to the book. I switch albums on the iPod and go back to the journal. Then I stop to bite my nails, which I only do the day after I cook because my hands smell like garlic, then I go back to the backpack for something new to look at. (You can trust that this adds up to me being very, very attractive.)

In the middle of my charmingly insane little routine, Cancer Lady makes an entrance. I am not being insensitive; she was superhero-ed out. Her bald head was covered by a neon pink bandana, and her sneakers were hot pink Reeboks reminiscent of a pair I had circa Paula Abdul. Hot pink spandexish pants were barely visible under her shiny fluorescent green floor length CAPE, on the back of which she had sewn (quite adeptly) giant fuzzy pink letters that spelled "Chemo Girl." Her shirt, which could only be seen for a split second when she unfurled her cape to take out her insurance card, said "Fuck Cancer."

She was totally upstaging me.

Now, at this point my brain does something that it does a lot, which is make me think funny things over which I have zero control. My iPod is playing the Decemberists, and my brain whispers to me, "Heh, Chemo Emo." And so I chuckle at my sick, sick little brain. And then The Worst Possible Thing happens, which is Cancer Lady's assumption that I am chuckling at her. Now, if Larry David created me (oh, would that it were) this would be super. But in real life making cancer patients feel bad is not funny.

...is it?

Anyway, I got saved by the nurse. This moment is always awkward, because she's waiting for me by the door and I have nine thousand things to pick up out of the three closest chairs over which I have draped my stuff. She's very nurse-ish, like a couch - well-worn, calming, cozy. She says her name and I immediately forget it. She puts me on the scale, and puts the weights where she thinks, approximately, they ought to go. This is my favorite part of the day.

Nay, the week.

She estimates that I weigh somewhere in the 110-115 range. Oh, sweet sweet sweet nurse, no longer the drudge and toil in my delight! I pray thee, thy news is good?

This poor woman was pushing the weight up pound by pound: 115. 116. 117. Finally I had to break it to her that the thing would need a good shove to the right before she was even close. And she said, "There's no way you're over one twenty, you're so tiny! You must be all muscle."

Let's just pause and enjoy the hell out of that for one second.

Two seconds....

Moving on.

She leaves me in the room to flex and feel my muscles in privacy until Dr. H gets in. When he finally knocks on the door I feel suddenly nervous. I feel like I have to sell him a car. He starts right in with an update, looking over my chart. A quick check in on all previous jottings down, inquiries, ailments, etc.

"How's the cough?" "Your foot all healed?" "Still teaching?"

Then I get the report back. "Ohhhhh kaaaayyyy, looks like, whoa! You've lost nine pounds since I last saw you. Everything okay?"

"You told me to lose ten pounds last time I saw you."

"Yeah, but no one ever actually DOES it. No troubles with eating disorders..."

"I have trouble acquiring them, yes."

He doesn't laugh at my jokes, which is a barely forgivable flaw. Otherwise, he's a super doctor.

We get to the end of our respective updates, and there is an awkward pause. He's just smiling all sweetness and serenity, head slightly cocked, looking as Willie Nelsonish as ever. And I get flustered. I'm not sure how to say...uh...

"I want to baby proof my body."

So I just say that.

His face doesn't change; I have no idea what he's going to say. I'm pretty sure all doctors train their faces to make the same calm, half-smiling super benevolent and understanding expression in every situation. It makes sense. Otherwise they would constantly struggle with what to do with their faces when they have to say stuff like, "You have six weeks to live." I know my face insists upon smiling a big toothy grin when I give bad news, which is why I never made it through med school.

He says, "And you've thought about this..."

I say, "Since I figured out that babies come from women and not birds."

He says, "Mmmhmm," and looks at the chart again. He points out that my gynecologist can perform the surgery herself, and asks if I liked her. I try to remember her. Is this how men feel? I really can't conjure up an image of this person who has seen me naked. I don't even remember her name. She gave me her card. Never called her.

Whatever, I'm sure she's nice. So I say, "Oh Doctor Baaaaaaandlebaum. Of course, yes, she's lovely."

He says, "Well, then your next step will be to meet with her, she'll want to spend a lot of time with you, talk it over, maybe several times, and decide if she will perform the surgery."

I must have glowered, because he jumped in with:

"I'm sure you feel like you are jumping through hoops, and I apologize."

I assert that, yes, I indeed do feel that I am jumping through hoops and that the whole process offends me more than a little bit.

He says, "Well, Kelly, you have had the pleasure of knowing you for twenty seven years. We only see you for a few hours each year. So we've got to make sure that we know the you that you know, so we can perform the surgery with confidence. We have to protect ourselves, too, you know."

God damn it, Dr. WillieNelsonlookalike, that is kind of a good point.

Back in the lobby, Cancer Lady had disappeared and several patients pace or watch Ellen Degeneres do a funny dance on the television. The receptionist takes the paper upon which Dr. H. had written "27 y/0 seeks tubal ligation - est. four consult pre-proc" and calls down to women's health. Her phone has one of those shoulder rests so that she can be on hold and type at the same time, which she does. She never moves her neck, and rolls her eyes up at me when I am supposed to answer a question.

Type type type.

"Hi, it's Linda in Specialties. Mmmhmm. I have a patient here who needs an appointment with Dr. Bandlebaum for a...a...tube? Tubal Ligahhhh...yeah."

Long. Pause. Type type type.

Eyes roll to me.

"You're sure?"

I say, "What?"

She says, blinking several times, "She wants to know if you're sure?"

I say, "Yes, I am sure."

Eyes roll back down.

"She says she's sure."

Eyes roll back to me.

"March 17th at 1 pm with the Family Planner and then at 1:45 with Dr. Bandlebaum."

"Works for me."

Eyes roll back to the computer.

Type type type.

The printer pushes out my appointment, and it is handed in my direction with a quick "have a nice day" directed at the computer screen. Ahead of me is: a two-month wait, the promise of at least four "consultation" visits for twenty five bucks a pop, and an awkward St. Patrick's Day reunion with the gynecologist with whom, it seems, I have already been intimate. One thing is certain: Nothing will make me more resolute in my decision to bring zero children into this world than a parade of drunk Catholics. Slainte.

A Series of Ten Second Plays

2008-01-23T05:53:00.000-08:00

The federal government would really prefer we process our thoughts in the form of multiple choice tests. So here you go. I neglected to write about my baby-proofing appointment because:
a. It got way too personal for the internet
b. I forgot I had a blog last week
c. Cambridge Health Alliance is a mismanaged fuckclog and canceled my appointment
d.I saw the cutest baby ever in the Boston Common and decided I needed one too

I think we all know that on any multiple choice test you just choose "c" every time anyway. So, in lieu of a report on my visit with Dr. H, which has been rescheduled to an even less convenient time than last time, I offer the following short-attention-span-friendly glimpse into a lifelong refusal to procreate.

I.
Setting
1989. Old brick school house way the hell up a hill in Granville, Massachusetts
Cast
Stacy, sweet freckled nine year old blond girl
Kelly, 9 years

Stacy (braiding the hair of a doll): I’m going to name my daughter Jessica.
Kelly (removing the head of a doll): I don’t think I want a baby.
Stacy: I want lots of babies.

II.
Setting
1993. My grandmother’s kitchen. Most of the decorating involves antlers.
Cast
My grandmother, a devoutly religious republican
Kelly, 13 years

My grandmother: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Kelly: A journalist. I want to go all over the world and write stories about it.
My grandmother: Well my stars, that sounds interesting, but it could be dangerous and make it very hard to have a family.
Kelly: I don’t want a family.
My grandmother: Oh, you’ll change your mind.

III.
Setting
1994. Mrs. Haftman’s Class, Softball game
Cast
Mrs. Haftman, gym teacher/tyrannical overlord/deliverer of humiliation/the Adolf Hitler of Physical Education
Kelly, 14 years

Mrs. Haftman: Here she is, Hate my Guts Henderson. Wearin’ black. (Sighs heavily) Young lady, why are you sitting in the outfield making a bracelet out of clovers and dandelions?! Do you want to fail gym class?
Kelly: I don’t feel good…?
Mrs. Haftman: What are you going to do when you have kids and they want to learn how to play sports? You need to learn the rules!
Kelly: I’m not going to have any kids.
Mrs. Haftman: That's ridiculous, of course you will. Now get off your duff and catch something this inning.

IV.
Setting
1995. My mother’s kitchen table. There are piles of mail everywhere. Flies swarm around the dishes, which are piled in an impressive heap.
Cast
My mother, speaker to plants and animals, stymied by human beings
Kelly, age 15

My mother (staring at the dishes): Who’s going to do those?
Kelly: One of your other children.
My mother: I hope you are cursed with wise ass children.
Kelly: I’m not having any kids.
My mother: That’s what I said. Look what happened. You’ll end up juuuuuuuust like this. (Kelly shudders violently)

V.
Setting
1996. The Only Store In Granville.
Cast
Peg, former wife of the owner, permanent fixture behind the counter
Kelly, 16 years

Peg (to a customer): Oh, is she? A boy or a girl? (To Kelly, over her shoulder.) Kelly you hear that? Sue is pregnant.
Kelly (slicing forty pound blocks of cheese into perfect one-pound hunks): Whatever.
Peg: Whassa matter, you don’t like babies?
Kelly: Nope.
Peg: You’ll change your mind.

VI.
Setting
1997. Sandwich, Cape Cod – family vacation. A traveling circus of Hendersons, we are stuffed into a camper on wheels driven by my aunt’s latest husband. Stopped at a grocery store which is packed full of lobsters and white people.
Cast
My father, man of a thousand naps.
Supermarket lady, I remember her in a bonnet, though cannot be sure
Kelly, 17 years

My father (looking down at a pouting Kelly): Okay okay OKAY you can pierce your goddamned belly button. Just don’t get pregnant because not only would that thing get all scarred but also I would kill you.
Kelly: I promise I will never get pregnant.
My father: Right, not until you’re thirty six.
Kelly: No ever.
My father: Ever?
Kelly: EVER.
Supermarket lady (chuckling benevolently at the nutritional information on a box of Fruit Loops): She’ll change her mind.

VII.
Setting
2000. Emerson College, weirdos abound.
Cast
Unnamed former boyfriend, adorable but hopelessly traditional
Kelly, age 20

Unnamed former boyfriend: Sure I want kids, someday. I mean like, waaaaaay someday. But of course I do. You don't?
Kelly: Nope.
U.F.B.: Really?
Kelly: Really.
U.F.B.: Really really?
Kelly (sighing): Really really fucking really.
U.F.B.: But then who's going to pay for your nursing home?
Kelly: That's why you're having kids? To pay for a nursing home?
U.F.B.: No...but, I mean, it's something to consider.

VIII.
Setting
2003. Cambridge Public Schools, a classroom.
Cast
Nora, a sixth grader
Chorus (Twenty Five Other Sixth Graders)
Kelly, age 23

Nora: Miss K, do you have kids?
Kelly: Nope. Do you?
Nora (fit of giggles): Nooooo!!!
Kelly: Well good let's stick together.
Nora: But you're supposed to have kids by now!
Kelly: It'll never happen.
Nora (shouting): Miss K isn't having kids EVER!
Chorus (Twenty Five Other Sixth Graders): What?! Miss. K whyyyyy? Are you crazy? What, you hate us?

IX.
Setting
2006. The University of Louisville School of Dentistry, Louisville, Kentucky. The same terrible music that plays at the dentist plays in the halls.
Cast
Dr. Currens, dean of students, jokester, True Southerner
Dr. Gambrall, neo-con professor, golfer, payer of attention to stock market trends, True Southerner
Kelly, age 26

Dr. Currens: Whatdya think, Massachusetts, we gonna be able to marry you off to a nice young dentist?
Kelly: I don't know, Dr. Currens, all the people around here go to church and have babies.
Dr. Currens: Oh Christ, Henderson. I knew you were a god hating liberal. Now you're telling me you hate babies?
Dr. Gambrall: I don't know, Woody. Maybe it's best if liberals don't procreate.
Dr. Currens: Ah, she'll be voting Republican and carting around a pack of kids within ten years.
Kelly: Not going to happen.
Dr. Gambrall: You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.
Kelly: I'm a Harvard woman.
Dr. Currens (sighing as he leaves the office): Dear lord she is from Massachusetts, isn't she.

X.
Setting
2007. A bar in Cambridge, full of corduroy and expensive degrees.
Cast
Drunk lady 1, middle aged, owner of pearl necklaces
Drunk lady 2, middle aged, maker of manicure appointments
Kelly, age 27

Drunk lady 1: 'scuse me 'scuse me, are you readng in bar?
Drunk lady 2: leave 'er 'lone she's a student she's a...are you student?
Kelly (with saintly patience): No.
DL1: You are reading?! 's Friday.
Kelly: Mmmhmm.
DL2: She's smrt. Hey 'r you smrt?
Kelly: I'm feeling rather smart at this moment, yes.
(Oh how I wish I really said that...)
DL1: Whatev'r. Let 'er read then. Do whatchyou want now before...before KIDS!
DL2 initiates a toast.
DL2: Amen. Am'n. I'm say'n don't have 'em now. Have 'em-
DL1: I m'n I love my kids. I fuck'n LOVE my-
DL2: We know, Cheryll, we- hey, you don't have kids yet reader lady hey-
Kelly (saintly patience waning): No, no I don't.
DL1: How many you gonna have?
Kelly: Zero.
DL1 (SO LOUDLY): WHAT?! Ha! Thass what I said. Thass essackly what I said.
DL2 non verbally confirms DL1's claim.
DL1: Lissen. Lissen reader lady, you will meet a MAaaaaan. All of it (wild hand gesture) out the window.
DL2: Sh'll change 'er mind.
DL1: YEP! You keep...juss read the book, lady. You read yr book.

The End.

maternity bites

2008-01-23T04:35:00.000-08:00

Due to a combination of funding trouble and what, as a former special ed teacher, I feel confident calling mild to moderate retardation on the part of administrators, my school has combined the history classes with science. Which means that I am a science teacher. Which means that the world is ending. This is not the point of this blog; I don't have the energy. The point is...well I'll get to it. First, as a science teacher (feel free to laugh) I am well aware of all species' biological predisposition for procreating. Fortunately, modern science has allowed we humans to opt out of this vile process.

Since as far back as I can remember, I have lacked those pesky "maternal instincts" that make girls want to dress wounds and talk in high pitched voices at small children. I do not understand how any rational human being could really, in his most honest space, believe that a puppy is less cute than a baby. But people love those things! Even when they are all purple and hideous, fresh squeezed out of a vagina. People say, "Awwww." Well not me damnit. Person after person, over the course of the past 18 years or so, has claimed this would change. But change it has not. Which brings me to the point. (There is one, I swear.) If you are a woman who does not want children people think you are weird. Babies? Normal. No babies? Abnormal. They are sure, beyond any doubt, that you will change your mind. They will show you pictures of their children and expect you to have this bubbling epiphany, "Oh! Yes, I cannot run fast enough toward gaining forty pounds, getting stitches in my vagina, eternally supporting one of those noisy, smelly expensive car seat fillers with cake on its face."

I have had it. I am baby proofing my body. Thus, this the first in a series of blogs about the arduous process of convincing a doctor to tie those baby tubes once and for all.

Step one. Make an appointment with your doctor.

I did this already. Dr. Himmelstein, year round wearer of Birkenstocks and wool socks, will see me on Thursday. (He looks like Willie Nelson, which personally I have found very comforting during sick visits.) Being that he is my physician, he is aware of how abhorrent I find the idea of pregnancy. He has also warned me that recommendations for surgery in women as young as me are rare. I am unsure what sort of process I will have to endure in order to "convince" him, but the thought of having to cajole a doctor into believing that I am able to make up my own mind makes me absolutely irate. Let's hope Dr. H. gives in nice and easy like, so we don't have any trouble.

the garden level of eden

2008-01-18T05:03:00.000-08:00

7:13 a.m. in the Basement O’ Learning. Bliss abounds. The smell of thawing cigarette butts, extra thick on a rainy morning, mingles with the inexplicable but distinct essence of cat pee. The homeless shelter upstairs is bustling. A woman, whose room is directly above my classroom, is trying to calm her screaming baby. Her method is questionable. She screams “fuck you” “fuck you” “fuck you” over and over and over again. The child screams and shrieks. A neighbor steps in, helpfully shouting “shut the fuck up.” I recognize the neighbor’s voice. She’ll be in my second period class. Funny what the classroom can do. If I couldn’t hear her down here in the mornings, I could not picture her yelling. As a student, she is a mouse.

This blogging business is procrastinative. Papers need grading. Quizzes need photocopying. Lessons need planning. The cursor blinks at me. I am staring off to the left, at my Periodic Table of Elements. The painting crew over winter break decided to touch up my room. This touch up, it seems, required no removal of wall art. So there is a big swipe of off-white paint over the bottom corner. Who needs Mendelevium anyway.

Languages II

2008-01-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

My separateness becomes obvious, noisy

sends my face seeking

asylum in armpits or elbow crooks

eyelids pressed right up against that infinite

distance, fumbling the translation

of ever expanding languages

I’ve put my alphabet all over this new skin

but we’re illiterate in the dark, here

fingers blinking like cursors

between my shoulder blades

they speak in code to freckled galaxies

under the warm soup of night noises:

heat pipes, traffic two blocks down, a radio

turned really low

This stillness doesn’t calm me, I want

to claw through the roof just for

an examination of all those dots,

patternless harborers of endless wishing

Languages I

2008-01-14T21:13:00.000-08:00

Way in the back

cigarette clouds

the after hours Portuguese

talk around pitchers of

dollar drafts stabbing

out smoke after

smoke

they call me

mama

mama, from under

baseball caps

from cities none

of us

have been to

Carlito he’s twelve

or maybe

fourteen

they are pretending

to shave

his chin, smooth

as glass

he says, in English,

I’m old enough for you

mama

the window’s gone white

from drifting

snow

nos somos furados aqui

I say back

Songs Water Can Make

2008-01-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

Blooming Technicolor in otherwise dull gray North American meadows. Snow, hard New England ground, wind ravaged Midwestern plain, its roots seemed to notice nothing.

In 1997 he expresses regret that it has come to this. The proverbial This being the town’s decision to condemn the old eyesore. He expresses also his thanks for the landscaping work three years back. Never seen so many colors out there. So much purple, more purple every year.

The Harts lived on Babbling Street, which invited all sorts of obvious quips. The street’s namesakes are two south bound streams. Running from the reservoir atop Cobble Mountain, flanking Babbling Street for eleven heavily wooded miles, they meet only twice before, at the edge of town, funneling into Arnold’s Pond, depositing a season’s worth of catchable trout every year. Two miles up stream, they cut under the road immediately North and immediately South of the Hart’s house, making their 2 acres the only yard in town to host both streams.

In 1989 Mona is in the dirt. She is shaking dark, clumped soil loose from a plant’s roots. A man’s shadow has spilled down the long sloping lawn. His head is thrown in elongated gray scale onto her forearm. She is detangling the roots like hair, smoothing them over her thigh. The pond is invisible to both of them. The water reflects no light, shrouded by cattails and tall purple flowers that look like explosions, patchworked with lilypads. The man’s hands keep finding things in his pockets but never extract anything. Mona’s daughter is seven and hides on the bank of the stream. A car pulls in the driveway and all three of them stop breathing.

Unlike most other species of plant, it is known by and sold under its botanical name. This until sale is made illegal. It quickly develops common names, varying according to region.

The man sits on the couch and fills the air with himself. He plucks at denim fringe on his shorts, which are splattered with paint. Blue, white, yellow, brown. Vestiges of house exteriors, a kaleidoscoped work history.

Sixteen days she spent with her fingers in their dirt. Mrs. Arnold on a reclining plastic chair covered with a puffy pad. They had someone else come and till the quarter acre behind the pool so when Mona got there the soil was supple, ready. She worked to the rhythm of the water. It was impossible not to hear it.

Nearly perfect circles, the leaves.

Andy lives with her mother in a giant garden. The house is unfit to be built, but is already built. They kneel in the dirt and trade hearsay, going nightly back through a sinking doorway. Mona tells her someday the house will sink into the ground, the roof will bow and give. Andy picks at dirt under her nails at night, eyes on the ceiling.

By 1993 Babbling Street is quiet. It’s like when hair grows. The streams had gotten quiet by degrees until one day a reclined Mrs. Arnold paused mid magazine page-flip, her arm hair suddenly poised.

Mona arranges the tiny pots in rows on top of newspapers, columns run up and down the kitchen table, little soil mouths open for seeds. She pokes a pencil into the packed soil, a quick stab and retract, until she has moved from one side of the table to the other. Andy follows behind, dropping a seed into each tiny plastic tub.

Endlessly they are seeding. Spring after spring the bank recedes; the cattail patches thin. Flying on the breeze or rolling ever slower on the surface of a stream, the seeds find a place to make roots. Roadside on Babbling Street, the fringes of ponds and yards, the banks of the reservoir, even in the soft grass underneath the stretching arthritic apple tree branches, they grow.

They all sit down to dinner; Andy doesn’t eat. Or breathe. He asks about things like her favorite color.

In 1989 the Environmental Safety Commission for Marshlands is digging up truckloads of purple flowers. Their green logo swipes across white pick up trucks that manage to stay clean even on trips up dirt roads in the rain. White truck beds cradle the uprooted mounds, the contraband purple so bright it makes noise.

The woman’s trunk is lined with heavy plastic. She lays the plants in sideways; they are too tall to keep upright. She pays Mona while Mona watches East, the woman West. It is dusk.

Men are driven distracted at the way Mona walks up stairs.

In summer Mona balances the speakers in the living room window facing out. Budweisers poke from foam holders and pass Andy on the swing set at eye level. The grill balanced over the fire periodically hisses at uncooked meat.

Andy’s science teacher is building a tide pool out of colored paper and foam. She is saying, “Delicate ecosystems suffer at the introduction of dominant foreign species.”

The shiny white truck is in the driveway. Mona kneels on the bank of a silent stream. Men force shovels into the dirt, pushing them through resistant roots with tightly laced boots. There is a sound like biting celery.

Mona is on the floor, laughing up at her daughter who begs her to please go to bed. Her skirt is somewhere outside. The space above the fire looks oily or underwater. The faces across it change but are always familiar.

In 1993 men float silently, rods poised, and catch nothing.

The men watch her kneel there, and tell her quietly that warnings will be informal, but warnings there must be. She sinks into the mud by imperceptible degrees, staying like that until the white truck backs from the driveway, a fraction of garden in the bed.

It’s a shame, she is telling Mona, closing her trunk, to treat something so lovely in this way.

In 1995 it is a cold winter. The top of Cobble Mountain is a tundra. The reservoir’s surface is lily padded with ice. A man and Andy are packed like frozen steaks in the back seat, the nose of the car pointed out over the water, the sun dipping under and making morning some place else. Andy’s mouth is too cold to move. After, they sit there and breathe, thaw.

The woman pays Mona, who has to bend to reach the lawn chair. The woman carefully keeps her hands from touching Mona’s still-muddied fingers.

The wood seemed to give in before impact. It just crumbled, eliciting expressions of disbelief that it survived a strong wind.

Andy is a teenager when she says to Mona (whose forehead rests on the table, her shoulders pointed toward her daughter) while smoking one of her cigarettes, “You’re going to get caught.” But Mona doesn’t hear her.

In a breeze, the tiny circular leaves fall like confetti. It spreads, slows waterways, extinguishes certain species of cattail. It quiets Babbling Street to a whisper where there had been a rush. Andy sits on the bank of what used to be a stream, holding ice to her face. The shades of purple vary by climate, but in New England they are a deep indigo.

She brings her head forward, as if on tracks, and up and back. The ceiling is sponge painted and the texture shifts like water at this moment, always, for both of them. The taste like metal, or like cold. Mona is braced against his weight in the bedroom upstairs; Andy is watching the ceiling melt and laughing, inaudibly, to herself.

They don’t speak about it but somehow it is there, replaced, no matter who goes after it, no matter when.

He is holding the cat up above the fire. He is saying to the cat that its last request must come quickly. Mona and Andy both put a palm on their stomachs; they laugh this same way. The cat leaps, pushing off from what looks like air, leaving the man with a deep mean scratch.

Its stem is rigid, almost a square. Like a child drew it, square stem, circles for leaves.

She puts two fingers in the soft divot just beneath her nose but her shirt caught the first drop. He throws his hands in the air and says look who’s had enough. There is one deep red drop on her white shirt, the contrast distinct. Pans catch rain in three rooms, punctuating any passing moment of silence.

She resists at first, but the town is resolute. They express their hatred of even the thought of possibly speaking to the men who run the organization that sends around the white trucks. They absolutely loathe that idea. And so the old eyesore’s eyes are covered in two by fours, nailed in willy nilly, leaving space to peek in. In the ten years between the boards and the bulldozer it hosts twelve adolescent gatherings, all but one featuring a Ouji board and candles. The foundation, that was the thing. Marshland isn’t good for building; it can’t support a foundation, and eventually, everything will sink.

I Don't [Expletive] Think So

2008-01-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

Of course you realize, fair sister, that this means war.

There are days...

2008-01-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

There are days when I am grateful for sunshine. There are days when I am grateful for the people I know, the music on my radio, the way the sky looks at dawn. There are also days when I am grateful to the English language for phrases like “insufferable cunt.”

Today is one of those days.

Without that phrase I’m not sure I’d ever be satisfied with my description of a certain coworker. The words “lazy hag” and “idea stealer” just aren’t quite enough.

First, let me paint a picture. I work in a basement. The Basement O’ Learning (BOL), as it has been affectionately dubbed. We have to earn masters degrees to get here, then they stick us in the basement. Highly qualified but undervalued. Ah, the paradoxes of my beautiful profession. Anyway, our little school is underground. Airless. Lightless. Institutional white walls to which nothing sticks, thus the continual flopping over of posters and student work. Dust. Vestiges of an old pink and green pastel paint job in the hallway, 98% painted over. The doors are painted purple to make it look cheery. The kind of place that you have to paint to look cheery only looks sad when you paint it to look cheery. Alas, this place is characterized by an obsessive clinging to procedures long outdated in the world above our BOL.

Within this den of enlightenment we find three educators. One, for now, I will spare. One is me. Ambitious, energetic, abrasive and argumentative. Hated by the administration, who secretly call me the “pita” for pain in the ass. (Love that!) The third is this mind bogglingly backwards lump of a religious wacko who expects criminally little from her students due to some combination of pity and racism and whose deportment, not that it matters, finds its best comparator in one Jabba the Hut.

For my first two semesters, I fought the administration and the staff to institute a few fresh new education ideas backed up by fresh new educational research. Research?! Ideas?! Immediately, everyone froze up and resisted. Which I, of course, received with grace, patience, and understanding…

Anyway, the point is these “innovations” that I tried to get people to buy into were the equivalent of…say…telling a hospital that, based on new research, it’s a really good idea to screen blood donations before giving the blood to patients. For example, this school still has a designated smoking area for students. Break is called smoke break. I am not kidding.

One particular battle I remember quite well. I wanted to take the students on a field trip to Shakespeare in the Park. It’s free, we could take the T, they could read the play in English class. At the staff meeting, where I had come to expect arguments against whatever I said, they did what they are amazingly good at doing. I prepared as well as I could, but they can come up with arguments that defy a defense or counterpoint. They are so unbelievably ridiculous that you can’t possibly anticipate them. Besides the one I had expected, which is that Shakespeare is too advanced for “these kids,” I received this:
“Kelly, you can’t bring them to an outdoor play, there might be bugs.”

Just let that sink in.

Is it in yet?

THERE MIGHT BE BUGS.

I still can’t entirely wrap my head around why going to see Shakespeare was something from which they felt they must protect our students. And I still can’t see how I was the only one on the staff who thought field trips were a good idea. But they did. And I was. They passionately, adamantly believed that I was harming them by introducing Shakespeare to the curriculum. One lady actually cried, because she thought I was trying to push them to learn things “they just couldn’t learn.” This is one amid too many examples to type.

So Jabba the Insufferable heads up the Resistance campaign. The battle is dirty. The entire department quits, except we three teachers. We hire a mediator to facilitate “Play Nice Time.” We play nice.

Fast forward to now. This woman has, in her classroom, implemented an idea I suggested last year. An idea that was rejected as ridiculous, impossible, a disservice to “students like ours” (a phrase this place uses often.) She presents this idea to the administration as a new, exciting thing she’s doing in her classroom. They love it. It is just the sort of fresh, brilliant kind of stuff they’d expect out of her classroom.

I am taking in and releasing breath very slowly. It’s helping, sort of.

beacon street, just before six a.m.

2007-12-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

This morning, very early, I drove through my old neighborhood. Brownstones and wrought iron fences. Plowed-in cars cocooned until spring. Graveyards of the revolution, uneven streets barely wide enough for a city bus. My first life in Boston. It has been followed by other lives, all part of one story but, also, distinctly separate. College student, girlfriend, runner, fiancée, mistress, grad student, teacher, friend, activist. Sometimes I can’t find a string to grip that runs through all of those people, even though they are all me. Other days I think my eight year old self and my current self are too similar for comfort. There are times I am blindsided by shock in a world I thought I had a handle on; other days I lose hope that I will ever feel anything new. Then there are these paradoxical moments – both constant and new, permanently. Driving through Beacon Hill this morning I was struck by the way the public garden looks after a snowfall, before anyone is up. I’ve seen it a million times. White lights on white snow. Bent, arthritic tree branches, snow laden, poking toward the sky. The black of the branches and the white of the snow frozen in stark contrast, neither in rows nor appearing chaotic or wild. It will always be both new and old to me. The roll of emotion is part nostalgia, making me ache for one of those old lives. I remember long, cold walks, pauses under lightly falling snow, gloved hands soft on my face. The breathless shock of loving someone. I long for the sense of newcomerness in my city, being awed by it, scared of it, lost in it. This all seems so completely part of the past, out of reach. On the exact same roll of emotion is the surprise at how much I love to look at trees covered in snow. It has been falling every winter now for as long as I’ve been alive. I know what it will look like. But the magic of that snowy hush, the noiselessness of an untouched city park just after dawn, will never be old to me. I could turn that corner onto Beacon Street every day for eternity. And if the snow had stopped falling but the walkway wasn’t cleared yet, the white lights were shining in a haze through bright white snow on wet black branches, and the city’s morning hadn’t started, I would stop. As if for the first time, I would leave my car illegally parked, breath caught in my throat for reasons quite unclear to me, and let my ungloved hands freeze to the fence, leaning there feeling full and new, staring at the snow.

Snow Days: 1988 vs. 2007

2007-12-16T17:28:00.000-08:00

Snow Day 1988:

I woke up most winter mornings in the eighties already wearing many layers of clothing. On a normal day, the thirty seconds between the hot shower and taking off all those pajama layers was horrific. On a potential snow day, the pajamas stayed on, and we headed downstairs in bed gear.

First of all, going down our stairs in feet-on-pjs was dangerous. I imagine the guy who built our house, at some point in the late 19th century, understood the basic idea of stairs. But I understand the basic idea of converting matter into energy, yet I’m definitely not qualified to put that into practice. Pretty much, with the thin-plastic-covered feet, little tufts of pj material sticking out between the cracks, pajama clad children rushing down those narrow, a thousand times painted over, death trap stairs was a mini-chernobyl waiting to happen every snowy morning.

The kitchen housed an electric stove. This is important. In the spirit of progress, the mid 1980s found my house abandoning the ancient wood stove system in the basement and adopting oil heat. The little thermostat thinger on the wall that I had seen at friends’ houses appeared on our living room wall. No more waiting for the dank basement’s wood piles to dry enough to burn! No more smoky eyes! Control over how warm it was in the house! Not so much. If you EVER even entertained the idea that you might think about potentially in the distant future possibly touching that thing, my mother would sense it and say, “If that thing is above fifty-five…” And this was all we needed in the way of a threat. We had no other rules. We could come home tattooed, pregnant, smoking cigarettes in a stolen car and she’d just sigh and ask us to do the dishes. But you did not fuck with the thermostat.

I digress. The eight-floor-tile-wide space in front of the kitchen stove was the only place in the house that ever went above tundra temperatures. Between November and March that spot was the nexus of the house. So we would wedge ourselves into the hallway between the wall and the stove, our plastic feet pressed against the grate. We’d use our toes to scrape remnants of dinners past, blackening on the once white stove side. The morning news went on in the living room, the TV just visible from our spot by the stove. We’d watch that scrolling cancellation ticker, inhaling the somehow comforting smell of singed plastic. Mother standing behind the stove with coffee, both hands around her cup. Her glasses get steamed, so she periodically raises her head, then lowers it again, all very slowly, so she looks like a turtle. It seemed we always just missed our school in the rotation, so we’d wait through the whole alphabet, squirming. Then there it was. Granville. Closed.

My sister and I are jubilant. Our mother’s eyes roll.

Leaving the stove front was a challenge. But eventually we braved the Alaskan living room. The couch was covered with a perpetual layer of laundry waiting to be folded and extra blankets. We burrow into a knot of blanket and mismatched socks, pulling the dog onto the couch for warmth. We burrowed for only a moment, because no amount of cold air could keep us from The Greatest Luxury of my Childhood for very long. Figuring prominently in every snow day was that fiercely addictive 8 bits of pure joy, the Nintendo. Stacked on top of the television, which was stacked on a broken television, that little gray box brought way more delight to our childhood than could be considered healthy. Even the ritual of banging on it just right, blowing in the game cartridge, blowing in the console, taking it out, doing it again, screaming with fury when the screen went blue mid-game – all a labor of love, people!

Eventually, though, one must go outside and play in the snow. Snow is great for kids who have an acute and absurd resistance to potential physical harm. To qualify this, I was great at BEING hurt. Once I got hurt, I was super tough guy. But if I wasn’t yet hurt, I would avoid getting hurt so carefully that my caution often impeded certain instances of fun. The snow meant invincibility! All my best uninhibited feats of derring-do occurred in the snow. And, of course, there was the temptation to tie the sled to the dog and yell “mush!” Then watch her look around. Lick a paw. Lie down. Roll around.

…in the interest of retaining the attention of my three dedicated readers, fast forward through:

Mittens, hats, socks, snow pants, drying in rows over the heating vent. Hot cocoa powder from the giant box of brown paper packets. The little balls of ice stuck between the pads of doggie feet. All reporting back, by dark, to the warm part of the kitchen.

Snow Day 2007:

This is me reporting live from an adult snow day, December Fourteenth Two Thousand and Seven, the year of our lord. I am at my desk. There is no Nintendo here. Or back to back episodes of The Price is Right. What I wouldn’t give for even one glimpse of that tiiiiny little microphone…

This particular snow day started yesterday. A snow two-day. A couplet of bliss! In its usual staunch resistance to common sense, Boston Public Schools ignored the doings of EVERY OTHER school district in the area and kept students in school all day. At the last minute, we got a call that buses were leaving the bus yard thirty minutes early. (Again, a classic BPS move, which is a good old fashioned “oh shit.”) After a few Sisyphean attempts, the bus opted to wait at the bottom of the ridiculous hill our school sits atop. It was only twenty minutes late at this point. So we tell our students, who are cooperative angels and accept unexpected schedule changes with grace and patience, to bundle up – we’re walking down the hill. You would think we told them we were going to tie our wrists together, form a line, and swim the English Channel dressed in giant lizard outfits. Eventually, one teacher (ahem, me) and all of our students waddle out the door. The boys are fine, sliding to the beat of whatever’s on their iPods. The girls are pregnant and walking very very very slowly. We make it to the bus. They get on, I wave through the blizzard at them.

My car is a cocoon of danger, parked at the bottom of the hill so as to avoid (another) sliding accident. I turn it on, and whatever radio station I had on that morning blasts John Mellencamp’s (sans Cougar) “Hurt so Good.” Bad omen? Perhaps.

I’m still cheerful. I got to leave work a few hours early. It’s almost Friday. Singing along, I wipe the blizzard from my little car. The snow is light and fluffy and flies into the air with flourish! Within minutes, the heat is working and the windshield is becoming less and less opaque. Things are progressing. I will make it home.

The snow is really coming down. Every window I clean is covered by the time I clean the next one. It becomes clear that my insistence upon ONE HUNDRED PERCENT visibility is going to have to be compromised. I feel a little bit of the nervies coming on.

I drive at about four miles per hour out of my parking spot and into the street. I. Am. Going. Very. Slowly. It. Is. Tedious. But. Also. Frightening.

The cars behind me are more concerned with the tedious part and less moved by the frightening. Honking happens. Who the fuck honks in a blizzard?! Then, out of nowhere, traffic stops. It just stops. We aren’t moving. No one is moving.

From the same Boston drivers who brought you honking I give to you “The Impatient Ass Hole Gridlock.” This is a phenomenon found only among the most impatient and inconsiderate cultures of the world. It occurs when people REFUSE to sit still on a green light and drive into the center of an intersection, thus blocking traffic moving in all directions, and leaving everyone else waiting through several lights. So we all end up in this white-washed clusterfuck of biblical proportions. I call some people. I eat a banana. I listen to five or six cds. I listen to NPR tell me important stuff. I get out of the car and pretend to do something to the windshield wipers, just to get some air. I get back in. I feel the need for air.

Hal the Hyundai was so named for alliterative purposes but also for Space Odyssey jokes. After the first forty-five minutes on the Eliot Bridge I started feeling trapped. Akin, I’m sure, to being stuck in a pod. In space. Dark, indifferent, cold, scary...space. I considered abandoning Hal. Hal says, “Without your snow helmet, Kelly, you’re going to find that very difficult.”

This portion of my commute is directed by Stanley Kubrick. In short, I start to FREAK OUT. All those stories of the storm of ’78 come back to me. People freezing to death on the highway. Pipes bursting, pools of water up to the waist. Abandoned cars stolen after the melt. (Rationality check in: I am, at this point, about ¼ mile from my house and in exactly 0% real danger.)

Hal says, “It’s cold, Kelly.”

I try to engage the driver trapped beside me in non-verbal communication. She’s on the phone. I feel a rush of hatred for her.

Hal says, “I’m almost out of gas, Kelly.”

This time, Hal wasn’t fucking with me. He really was below “E.” My face looks like one of the twins at the Overlook Hotel. I start mixing up my Kubrick movie references. Things are getting wacky. Snow is covering signs. The world looks unrecognizable.

Time check: 1.5 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: .8

Just when I start to resign myself to getting stranded on Memorial Drive, we start to move. The next turn is a slight incline. I have been less than impressed with Hal’s snow ability thus far, and figure I can only make it if I get a little bit of a head start to propel him up the slope. This means I have to allow the car in front of me to advance without following directly on his bumper. This is something so insufferable to other drivers that I fear for my safety. I turn up my music and block out the horns. Finally, I have enough space. Hal fishtails his way up the incline and onto Mt. Auburn without incident. I’d like to say this all happened without me rolling down a window and informing the other drivers near me how they could use certain parts of their bodies to do certain things to other parts of their bodies. I would like to say that very much.

Time check: 2.7 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: 1.3

The evening consists of red wine, sweaters, early retreats to bedrooms. (Not before shoveling the sidewalk.) I change my alarm so I’ll have extra time in the morning to dig myself out, and go to sleep.

By morning all evidence of the night’s shoveling is gone. Unless you count the ache in my lower back as evidence. I start negotiating what I think is a good balance between “warming Hal up enough” and “not running out of gas.” I am sweeping the snow off the top of the car when a neighbor walks by toward the hospital. He’s wearing scrubs.

He says, “Woah. You got a long way to go.”

I smile a smile that I hope conveys the message “No shit ass hole” with plenty of sweetness and grace.

I did have a long way to go. And when I thought I was done, and tried to back out of the driveway, Hal the Hyundai informed me that no, I in fact was not done. By the time the little guy got his wheels onto the street that young man in scrubs had already read three charts, given advice for somebody to ignore, and flirted with like six nurses. Traveling at about six miles per hour, my little four door accident box swished its way to the nearest gas station, a chorus of unsafe drivers honking in a union of impatience alllll the way. When I got there I realized that the gas tank was covered by a protective shield made of ice. Chipping away with my key, a fellow driver felt that I was not using my time at the pump wisely and said so. With his horn. So I killed him.

Noooo. I didn’t. In real life. In my mind, however, mister “long way to go” in the scrubs wept over how totally impossible it was to extract my keys, complete with the thingy that gets me sale prices at Shaw’s and a Kentucky Derby 2006 Collectible Key-Ring Jersey, from his unbelievably tight little bottom.

When I get to school I realize that I had left out one very important part of the potential snow day ritual. I had forgotten to CHECK TO MAKE SURE SCHOOL WAS NOT CANCELED. Since many BPS students had suffered 4-8 hour commutes home the night before, the district had decided to give them the day off. Thus the following Extreme Rarity in my life:: 1988 beats 2007 (in this one, ultra specific category.) Needless to say, I spent the day in my classroom, alone, writing blogs and spinning in my spinny office chair. No stoves. No couch. No Nintendo. Bollocks!

geography

2007-11-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

One of my students skipped a class and wandered into my room earlier this year. I should’ve sent him back to “career exploration” but I didn’t. They were searching for jobs on monster.com and I got the wonderful sense that you get with some students that he knew, as much as I knew, that the whole class was a bunch of bullshit. I folded my glasses, put them down, and asked what I could do for him. He said, “Teach me something.” (I imagine this creates a feeling similar to the one a comedian gets when asked to ‘say something funny.’)

In this situation, I am comforted by maps. I happen to have a set of fantastic pull-down full color shiny brand new maps that are the jewel of my classroom. So I pull down the map of the world. The whole globe in pinks blues and oranges is pressed flat right in front of us. His hat is pulled down to his eyelids and little braids poke out toward his face and covering it all is this gigantic hood with that gold faux-Louis Vuitton print. But he can see the map.

I say, “So what’s going on out there?”

He looks at it.

He points to the Middle East and says, “Well this is all fucked up.”

And I say, “Okay…why?”

And so begins an impromptu lesson that meanders between American foreign policy, destruction of the rainforest, Israel vs. Palestine, the Holocaust, Shiites, Sunnis, evolution, the Prophet Mohammed, war, and, everyone’s favorite, the value of a human life. For everything I say he has another question. He exhausts my knowledge of Islamic culture, which doesn’t take long. He wants to know exact dates that I don't remember. He jumps from country to country, wanting to know how each one is involved with the next now and in ancient history, know each country’s stake in the current war, know how each one picks its leaders, treats its women, worships its god. Had I tried, I could never have created such a lesson. It was disjointed and at points, I’m sure, less than perfectly accurate. There were a thousand stumblings and much struggling to remember names and ideas. It was entirely driven by this kid’s whim, his finger, shaking from nicotine withdrawal and too much coffee, bouncing all over the world.

Then it shifts.

“You ever been anywhere?”

I say that I have. And he asks where. I point to Portugal. I point to Spain. I point to the Netherlands, which draws a bit of needling and forces me to remind him that, ahem, Amsterdam has more museums per capita than anywhere else in the world. I point to Ireland, Mexico, France.

I say, “Where would you like to go most, if you could go anywhere?”

And we start randomly pointing at the map. Taking turns. I’d like to see South Africa. He’d like to see London. I’d like to see Moscow. He’d like to see Egypt. What would this be like. What’s this place like. What’s this place. What’s here. Over and over. The image of these two pointer fingers, one black, one white, poking whimsical destination points all over the globe is one that will stick with me my entire life. The realization is crystal: I have about one four-thousandth of the knowledge I’d need to be the teacher he deserves. Or the teacher that could totally satisfy that curiosity, which emerged and then buried itself again by third period. Or the teacher that has even the slightest clue what it is like to be this kid.

eastern standard time

2007-11-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

Some cold morning very, very early after a whole three days of sunless rain the neighborhood stuck with post it note leaves which are just that, small yellow adhesive reminders plastered to the sidewalk and windshield peeking in at wrists bent over the steering wheel looking pale and bony just waiting for the glass to warm up enough to see the sun, freezing but getting up anyway because the river sends it up to catch some piece of partnerless silver jewelry barely winking through the tarnish up from the back seat nestled safe in unsharpened pencils and unposted photocopied flyers for things cared about so deeply they were never posted near the tapes abandoned for the radio is too loud for this time of day when blinkers clicking jog chilled reflexes just in time to take lefts all the way to the river who is paying the sun back fourfold for the favor and split in half by a single kayaker no doubt she sees her breath and, maybe, marvels that somewhere inside she is warmer than this air while cutting in half a river that will just keep on being one river like it has since way before her first ever breath all of it silent and uninterrupted but still offered punctuation by traffic horns and ten thousand clicking blinkers and sips of coffee and international news updates reporting live from the kitchen where the trash waits in vain for the Thursday evening somebody remembers to take it to the sidewalk with all the yellow post it leaves all full of letters addressed to a person who looks so different, just right this second, you are shocked. Shocked to look at her.

The Power of Horses

2007-09-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

You might think this is a blog about my girlhood obsession with collecting model horses. Breyer horses. The finest model horses in the world. You’re expecting, perhaps, a long whimsical recreation of the hours I spent dusting Secretariat’s perfectly miniaturized face with a Q-tip.

Or maybe you’re geared up for a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s work. The American west, aching lonesome souls in a world of disorder and disappearing civilizations, the mysterious, untamed, violent beauty of a horse. Blah blah blah.

Lest we forget the possibility that I feel like talking about Robert Redford and his uncanny ability, circa 1998, to really pick up what a horse is putting down.

But no! I am talking about the power of several horses encased in one fine piece of machinery! Yes, horsepower. Or, in the case of my recently purchased Hyundai Accent, the power of a small donkey with Leukemia. But this donkey beats the hell out of the T. AND it’s good for increasing the chances that we’ll all be under water in, say, 50 years. And there are plenty of poor people in Kansas who could use a good bit of beachfront property. Just doing my part, people.

Here are just a few of the spectacular perks I’ve recently discovered as the proud owner of a motor vehicle:

A place to put stuff. There is a drawer in the kitchen filled with the manuals for appliances I can’t find, batteries that don’t work, the glove that matches a glove somewhere so I can’t throw it out. That drawer is full. So now I get to put stuff in the TRUNK! It’s a traveling misc. drawer. That way if I’m ever trapped on the highway with a VCR, I can program it correctly while waiting for AAA.

Sing-a-longs. The only thing better than singing along with Disney Classics Volume One is singing along with Disney Classics Volume One at a red light and watching people’s reactions. Don’t judge me. Elton John and Time Rice get together and that shit is pure magic my friends.

A quick getaway after glaring at pedestrians. When you’re five feet two inches tall with a foot that tends to break, you don’t walk very fast. Or at least not fast enough to get a comfortable distance from people immediately after you leer at them. Not any more! I can now stare down those stuffy-ass popped collar brats crossing JFK in a hurry to get to a squash game, make eye contact, and then speed away. Sometimes I stick out my tongue. Because I am mature.

Bumper stickers. I am always looking for new ways to make people angry. And as if my sub-par driving skills and tendency to stare at boys running along the Charles instead of driving through the green lights on Memorial Drive weren’t annoying enough, now I get to piss people off with my IDEAS! I’m going to cover the whole damn car! Besides the requisite “Got Democracy?” and “Think, it’s not illegal yet” type stickers I’m thinking of getting some of my own design. Like, “This abortion is really sucking the life out of me.”

Oh man that was wrong.

Kelly vs. Mt. Washington

2007-09-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

Kelly: 1
Mt. Washington: Zero

I am tired. But, before bed, this favorite moment: I'm on my way down and I pass a guy headed up. He stares up the ravine I am about to descend. It's steep and requires hands. He's carrying poles and has to hook them onto his bag and start the all-fours climb. He leans against a tree and sighs, "You have got to be kidding me."

This makes me happy. Because that's basically what I was thinking on the way up. I'm glad someone else was willing to actually sigh at the mountain and question its decision to stack these damn rocks in such a challenging manner.

after hiking in the rain

2007-08-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

There is a singular, lonely feeling that comes with speaking words that have some value to you, out loud, to a person who, as it turns out, wasn’t listening. They turn and smile and say, innocently, “What?” And you’re there, trying to recover from the realization that you can’t identify what another person’s attention looks like. I woke up that way this morning. Feeling like I had to muster up the courage to repeat something. Or not say something at all, even though I had intended to say it. I was up early enough to warrant headlights. And my tank was full of gas.

Speeding over highway while the sun rises, the city shrinking in the rearview, I am singing my loudest to a song I would never admit liking had I a passenger. The windows are down and my hair is crazy crazy crazy.

The lanes get fewer and narrower. I chase the sun through windy roads; it ducks behind pine trees that are impossibly tall. When I get out, my legs take their time remembering how to walk. I just stare at the trees. A little girl in my memory had a yard dotted with birch trees. She tore scrolls from the trunks and wrote crayon stories. She put the scrolls back around the trees afterwards, letting them hang there, or sent them floating like boats down a stream. In the time between those birches and womanhood, she had come to place value only on words heard by others. Asking, always, “Listen. Listen. Hear me.” How to exhume a person who thinks trees and streams a fine audience?

I’m staring at the trail map, turning it and turning it. I can never establish which way I’m facing. I start walking without destination. When faced with a fork, I consult the map and head, I think, toward water. My breath and footfalls sound foreign, I feel like a secret guest. The mountain tops are both close and distant, indifferent to me. If they had faces they’d always look away. I stop, periodically, to appreciate my smallness.

That’s it, then. It’s the being wrong that hurts. When a little girl sends a story woven from some now untouchable imagination off to the stream, she expects no answer. She is giving her story away, and that intention protects the words’ value. When we mutter our thoughts to the woods it is so that we can hear them, unobstructed by sirens and televisions and all the metronomic ticking and clicking of city life. We so rarely get to listen to ourselves. But when we give words to someone else it is risky. Stuttering mumbling under the breath shy attempts at talking, all defenses against speaking to someone who doesn’t hear. Someone who looks you right in the eye for the duration of a sentence and then has to say, “What?”

The lake arrives, spreads herself out for me, completely silent and beachless. A patch of sand large enough for my feet sends me into the water. I float, and the water swallows me. My ears take it in and the trees’ susurrations are replaced with the muffled underwater silence that is not quiet but not loud. The sky is white, and rains a little. I stare at my things piled on the bank. Plastic and nylon and leather. It’s funny how one day can continually redefine the word necessary. I kick myself in circles, a small white naked little boat. I am the object of zero attention. The rain and the trees and the patch of sand cannot listen or speak, and cannot know that I am lost. And I can’t tell the difference between raindrops and tears, but I am crying.

A Clandestine Affair with the Alphabet

2007-08-30T22:39:00.000-07:00

The vowels were having a cocktail party in a New York City loft. U was smoking a cigar on the balcony, staring into a well-lit apartment across the street. He leaned on the railing and let his hands flop over the edge, ash falling onto Central Park West. By the time it reached the street, it was just part of the air.
“Y is here,” said A, walking toward him in the way only A could walk.
“Showed up, did he?”
U turned, resting his elbows on the railing, and faced her. He crossed his legs easily in front of him. His shoes caught the light of the red Chinese lanterns that framed the balcony.
He reached inside his jacket, extracted a slim silver case. He popped it open, held it at arms length.
A’s long fingers plucked a slim cigarette from the case and put it between her lips. She waited while U replaced the case and put flame before her. She raised an eyebrow at him, took the first drag slow. She crossed an arm over her narrow waist, jutted a hip to the left, and smiled at him through smoke.
“Jealous?”
“Really, darling. We both know A and U make gold,” he let the lighter fall into the pocket of his jacket.
She didn’t laugh but let out a smiling, “Mmmhmmm.” U had been making that joke for longer than A cared to remember.
O poked his head between the French doors, which A had left slightly ajar. “Are your glasses full out here?”
“Everything’s grand, just grand, O,” U rolled the ice around in his glass.
“Lovely, O, thank you,” A spoke in her low voice.
“Join us by the piano later, A?”
“Sooner rather than later, darling,” she winked and moved her eyes to U.
“Coming inside, dear?”
“In a moment,” said U, and he nodded his head in the direction of the piano, “go on in.”
She watched his face in the warm light, and turned.
Inside the party was gay. O was at the piano, banging out raucous harmonies. The whole room seemed to vibrate. While A walked to the piano, all fell to hush.
“Sing something for us, will ya,” called I, raising his glass to her.
“Yes, do,” echoed E.
She smiled at no one in particular, and put her hand on O’s shoulder. He looked up and back at her, eyebrows poised.
She nodded at him and sipped her drink.
Her husky voice filled the room. U stood halfway in from the balcony, barely visible behind the door. Y stood parallel to U, at the entrance to the apartment. They looked at one another briefly, but then watched only A.
She didn’t look at anyone’s face when she sang, yet every man assumed she was singing to him.
Later, on the balcony, U raised a hand and pushed the wave of hair obscuring A’s right eye back from her face. She let him look at her for a long moment, and then put the cigarette back to her lips. U stepped back to the railing and looked down at a line of limousines. The drivers leaned on doors, talked, and smoked.
U spoke with his back to her, “You’re glad Y is here?”
A finished her cigarette before she spoke. Her hands dropped to her sides and hung there. She took a long breath, went to U, reached to touch the shoulder of his jacket, and let her arm drop again.
She said, “Sometimes.”

the ants are my friends; they're blowing in the wind

2007-08-06T09:15:00.001-07:00

That misheard Dylan lyric gets repeated over and over in Lorrie Moore's novel Anagrams via the protagonist's imaginary daughter. Like all of Moore's work, the book is funny and sad, and has forever etched this whimsical line onto my brain, leaving me picturing ants every time I hear the song and thinking about the song every time I see an ant.

This is all background information to help me explain what is happening RIGHT NOW in real time at my desk. I am sitting at my desk because zero students showed up for school today. Zero! For years on Monday evenings as a waitress, I would lean on empty tables in an empty bar, just wanting to escape the whole thing, and wonder, "Will absolutely zero people come in tonight?" Inevitably, people would trickle in. There is something horribly wrong when people will always always ALWAYS show up at a bar, but there are days when zero students show up to school.

So my chin is heavy in my hand and I'm prepping for Fantasy Football 2007 when I notice this little ant climbing the wall directly to the right of my desk. The radio in my head immediately starts humming, "The answer my friends, is blowin in the wind." I watch him walk up the wall in the determined manner of a good little ant. And he falls. I've never seen this before. He gets back up. Walks halfway up the wall, toward the corkboard, and falls again. He just keeps doing it. Either the wall is slippery at that spot or his sticky ant feet aren't sticky enough for my concrete wall. Again, up from the desk, past the light switch, and he falls. The same exact path, halfway up, and falls.

And so I just sit there, humming that song, without any students, and start to cry, getting my list of top ten running backs all wet.

2007-07-06T19:25:00.000-07:00

On my recent trip to DC I was quite surprised to note that before he even leaves office they have erected a statue in George Bush's honor.

Fireworks

2007-07-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

Gee, thank Christ we got out from underneath the UK’s tyrannical rule, otherwise we might all have health care.

Here I am in Cambridge, land of the free range eggs, where the neighbors’ litter of blond haired private school kids are waving sprinklers in celebration of their avoidance of the public school system that fucks over every child who can’t afford such escape. They trot past me in Harvard Square and they say, “Happy Independence Day.”

You know what, oh handsome family of four, you can say that when we are independent from foreign oil. You can say that when all schools are created equal and our highest courts don’t disable the only mechanism in place to correct the injustices perpetrated by a racist system designed by and for white people. You can tell me to enjoy my independence when my vote counts. You can tell me to celebrate independence day when this country stops acting as if it is independent of the planet on which we all live and joins the rest of the civilized world in doing something about human’s rape of the earth. Oh, dear family whose car runs on soy, you are totally saving the world in between tennis matches, and I WILL have a jaunt around the Charles with you. Yes, I will celebrate a victory for Democracy when Democratic nations stop behaving like tyrants under the guise of peacekeeping. I will look fondly upon big explosions in the sky when they don’t immediately remind me of friends coming home in boxes. I will enjoy a brewsky on the lawn when I am independent of NSA wire taps. I will lather a chicken leg with BBQ sauce when those rights our creator endowed us with are offered to somebody other than your average white male.

That’s right, I’m not freaking celebrating independence day because I am not, as a member of these united states, independent from anything except morality. And I’m damn grouchy about it, too.

With all these bombs bursting in air I thought for a second I was in Iraq. Thank God, and it’s all about God, that I am here, able to enjoy a wine spritzer and a government of by and for the people.

For fun, let’s just revisit a few of the ole colonies’ issues with the Brits:

He {that would be George III, for those of you who went to public school and your history class was replaced by test prep}has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

…it would seem that George was holding secret meetings and making decisions without consulting the appropriate information. Sounds like another George I know.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

…Boy that must have sucked. Good thing our court today transcends current political climates and adheres only to the principles of Justice. And they stay out of elections and stuff, because that’s important.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

…So it was possible for the military to engage in actions unsupported by the public? Thank Christ we escaped these wackos!

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.

…That’s madness. We, these independent united states, would never, ever, consent to depriving a human being of a trial. We would never, say, suspend someone’s right to a trial by jury because we thought they were involved in some kind of…I don’t know…terrorism?

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments…He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us…He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

…Man, we must have really learned from this experience because now we would NEVER do this kind of thing to somebody else’s country.

Screw you guys. I’m drinking tea tonight.