we did it...

...and it was totally awesome.

Bridentity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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?

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

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."