Internet Puberty

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

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

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

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!!!!

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

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

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

What to Do When A Student Threatens Your Life

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course you realize, fair sister, that this means war.

There are days...

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.

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

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

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.