The Intelligentsia

I had promised before last week’s post that I would contrast being a teacher with being a student, and then I forgot. That right there, although I am a teacher, is typical behavior of a student. Just so we are clear on that. But one thing that might help clarify why I might make such a studentish error is that I am currently taking an online class, delving into the depths of my experience to try to find that erstwhile student within myself once again (10 points, Katherine, for the use of “erstwhile.”) (An interesting turn of events here: the use of “erstwhile” is more typical of student than teacher, at least brown-nosing poser wannabe-comp-lit-grad-student students, whereas awarding myself points for its use is much more of a teacher behavior).

My online class is called “The Holocaust and Human Behavior” and is given by Facing History and Ourselves, a wonderful yet sneaky organization that will not allow you access to its online educational resources unless you take one of their classes. We read readings, watch videos, and reply to discussion board postings on an array of topics from identity to inhumanity. I am mostly taking it in order to get access to their online resources, indicating yet another typical student-ism: students take classes for the credit, prestige, or reward they will get from them, but often accidentally learn something in the process. Anyway, from my unique vantage point of both student and teacher—teacher by day, student by night—I can offer the following insights about the foibles and graces of each role:

1. Teachers LOVE LOVE LOVE to assign Journal Entries. Students hate them.

Every teacher’s edition of any textbook that you pick up will tell you to have students create a reading journal, or a history journal, or a vocabulary journal, an Algebra II journal,or a you-name-it kind of journal. How many journals are kids supposed to keep? I always hated journaling, whether in my own journal or in school assignments, because of the problem of audience. Who on earth IS the audience of a journal, anyway? God? Yourself at 80 years of age? Your snooping mother or boyfriend? And if it’s a school journal, there’s that whole privacy-vs.-teacher-reading it thing that is weird and only really works in The Freedom Writers.

As a teacher, I would TOTALLY ask students to journal about their goals for a course at the beginning. But as a student, I think it’s bullshit.

2. Students ALWAYS think they have more work to do than the teacher, and are always wrong.

I know my students are convinced that I go home and drink wine and eat chocolate covered cherries in a steamy bathtub, of which time about 5 minutes is spent absentmindedly devising lengthy, time-consuming assignments for them that will burn up their entire weekends, when really I spend almost every waking hour either at, working on, or thinking about school, and when they don’t do their homework I want to bash their heads in for having the nerve to think they simply “don’t have enough time” for everything.

Our online facilitator for this class sends us one email a week and poses a discussion question and a brief response to our responses. I mean, come ON. (Just kidding, Mark, if you ever read this, I hope you can see this is almost all for rhetorical effect. Isn’t the page literally dripping with sarcasm? It might not come across as well on Internet Explorer, but try Firefox and I’m sure you’ll see it. I know you do work. And I’m not just saying that as your student because I want you to like me. But I do want you to like me. You like me, right?).

3. Both students and teachers are excellent at the art of bullshitting. The difference is that teachers can usually tell when students are doing it.

It’s so funny to me to read/listen to some of the things students say when they’re bullshitting. I know EXACTLY what they’re doing, and A) I could have done it so much better, even just done the bullshit so much better, not even the real thought, although I could have done that so much better too, obvi, and B) I feel kind of ashamed and uncool for giving them an assignment that they would have wanted to bullshit.

That’s one thing I think students really don’t know. Is that their teachers still want them to think they (the teachers) are cool. And if they (the students) don’t, it can bring us right back to being the 4th-grade outcast all over again (on the inside, where it counts).

4. Student homework is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier than teacher homework.

GOD, it’s easy. And at least you get to espouse new ideas and sometimes be creative (at least you do if I’m your teacher, I like to think). It gets old just looking for Constructive Ways to Improve things. It’s like being the editor of a magazine that’s cool and a little edgy, but just not quite top-tier enough to get the already-polished Updikes and Hertzbergs, although if YOU, the editor, put in enough work, maybe someday those writers you groom will go on to publish in The New Yorker and forget about you.

5. The only parts of online discussion I read extremely carefully are the responses to stuff I wrote.

I suppose this is a student-confession. Teachers tend to think online discussion is SO VALUABLE but for us insecure students, it’s just another venue for people to [hopefully] tell us how awesome and smart we are and how much they love our opinions.

6. Both teachers and students learn things. Lots of things. Whether they expect to or not, and whether they think they ARE learning anything or not.

The class has dredged up a lot of memories for me thus far, and conflicts within myself that often lay hidden, but something about being in a student-role again is making it easier to access them (I’m sure the subject matter of the class helps just a bit, steeped as it is in identity, awareness, questions of we-and-they, stereotypes, choices, insecurity, belonging, etc.). It’s always chastening to realize that as enlightened as I think I am, I still sometimes behave in craven ways. As open-minded as I am, I still unfairly judge others. As intelligent as I am, I still say stupid things. As secure as I am, I still subtly put others down to make myself feel better. Or at least more powerful. As cognizant of white privilege as I am, I still take advantage of it every day.

We had to make “identity charts” in our first week of class, with our names in the middle of the page and a web of traits that describe us attached to the center. I did it with a certain amount of begrudging acquiescence usually reserved for education classes that make you do elementary-style activities to model elementary-level strategies. Among the “identities” I put on my chart were female, lesbian, Southern, daughter, sister, Libra…but not white. We could look at the charts of everyone in the class, and as soon as I saw someone who listed their race I felt ashamed. Not of being white, really, but of allowing myself the luxury of forgetting about race as a factor of identity, a luxury I have ONLY because I’m white. The ways in which I am a member of a minority or a historically-oppressed group were quite salient—but I put my ZODIAC SIGN and forgot about my race. Wow.

So it’s chastening to be on the student side of things again, for a little while. And comforting to realize how much I still have to learn.


Also, as an unrelated PS, GAWD, this is funny.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The good news of the week was as follows:

1. First and foremost, drumroll drumroll, WE GOT OUR TICKETS TO SOUTH AFRICA! This is the ecstasy part. And I cannot mention it without effusive, prostrating thanks to the benefactors who made it possible, B & B. However, nothing good comes easily, and the process of booking the tickets came with much frustration—see the bad news below. But I will have retribution. In response to my negative customer service experience, I have written a 3-page, single-spaced, angry letter to not only Continental Airlines Customer Care, but the president of the company (possibly at his home address, thank you WhitePages.com), and the customer relations departments of their competing airlines.

2. I got almost everything checked off my to-do list. Except sending REF and JDM emails that they deserve. Said items have been carried over to this week’s to-do list.

3. We had a successful gathering at our house. It bordered on party status, I would have to say, but remains a gathering based on the relatively small number of people and the fact that it was on a Thursday. But, as we have never really had such a thing before, I would call it a success.

4. I put the CBEST behind me—now I can move toward being certified in multiple states! Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day. Certified to teach, that is, not to be confused with certifiable…. It reminded me how standardized tests are LAME. That notwithstanding, I think I wrote a damn good timed essay on why arts and athletics should not be cut to reduce school spending. I managed, within the confines of my five paragraphs, to display my verbal agility and prowess in all its glory—as when the lion is so beautiful one does not notice the bars of the cage….yeah.

5. I took a hike with my students through my old stomping ground, Hollywood, and rode LA mass transit for the first time. It cost $5 per person for the day, and driving would have cost at most 1/4 tank of gas for all 7 people…it is sad when public transit is just not worth it. There’s something wrong there.

6. Jodi got back an art project and an English paper, and passed both with flying colors! That is, an A. What color is a flying A? Questions to ponder. But we both celebrated to the max the fact that her hard work is paying off.

7. I revisited a couple of recipes I hadn’t made in a while and had a hearty week of cooking—I made Vietnamese fresh rolls, turkey-and-veggie-stuffed cabbage rolls, and a yummy pasta dish. We still had our requisite Thursday turkey burgers, but at least we changed it up a bit.

8. I wrote a poem! That I actually kinda sorta like! I gave the kids an hour to write in their journals and actually wrote in mine too! And although it’s not just right yet, I haven’t written anything that I liked at the outset in a long time. So. Wow. I feel a weight lifted.


The Notsogood News of the Week:

1. Again in the number one spot, the process of booking my ticket, which I will spare you, but the process consisted, in short, of a shit-ton of frequent flyer miles and also a shit-ton of hours spent on the phone trying to use said former shit-ton. In the process, I was heavily shit on. Shat. But did you see how I used that double entendre? I kill myself. They kept unconfirming flights I had on hold and then wanting to charge me more to get them back, not leaving things on hold that they said they would, and contradicting the previous agent I had spoken with, no matter what the situation. But it’s over, it’s behind us now, and I can look toward the future…

2. The lack of sleep is generally not good. I remember when I was little and could never sleep, and I HATED sleep, and Mom would be exhausted and would want to take a nap, and I asked her WHY she would ever want to nap; it was so BORING. And she told me sleep was something she craved, looked forward to, couldn’t get enough of…and I did not understand. Well, I do now. Sleep, glorious sleep. Oh, sweet small semblance of death and rebirth. It actually comforts me to think of death like sleep…I know that’s a common comparison, but if you feel half the relief once you’re dead as you do while you’re asleep, it might not be all that bad. Not that I’m considering it. But it is a nice thought.

3. The kids claim I walk too fast when we’re hiking, and Jodi claims I walk too slow. I can’t win. Or maybe I’m surrounded by whiners. Poll: which is more likely?

4. The days are getting shorter. Although one thing CA has going for it is that the long cold descent into winter is not very long or cold or wintry. But still dark. I find this gradual plunge into darkness very hard to deal with. It gives me a sense of impending doom, of hunkering down, of waiting out the worst of things. I know it won’t be that bad. But I like having hours of afternoon to spend in light.


That’s all, folks, for this week…sorry, I’m a little uninspired. But I guess it’s good to play ketchup once in a while. Next week, maybe the muse will be with me.

Californians are Flaky

or, The Characters on The West Wing are my Best Friends.

I know it’s wrong to succumb to stereotypes. My generation is supposed to be above that. But people ask me, surprisingly frequently, if there is a significant difference in the cultures of the East and West coasts. And OMG, like, there totally is.

My mom says it takes 2 years to feel at home in a place. I’m sure that at least that much is true. I don’t know how you feel at home in a place where you have no history. No one who knows you or where you come from, no one who has any concept of you from before you were exactly who you are today, in the role they see you in today. It is ideas like this that I try to impart to my students when they wonder why history is relevant to them.

Ah, the relevance of history. I KNOW it’s important, but still when I stay up till midnight trying to design a series of questions and activities based on the British Museum’s interactive website on Ancient Mesopotamia, which I can then see the kids are bored with after 20 minutes, it’s hard to remember this. What I keep coming back to is, A) Wow, all this stuff happened in what is now Iraq—the home of the oldest written epic is being slowly slaughtered—and B)No wonder God sent a flood to wipe out all the filth from the earth. If ancient Mesopotamian filth was as filthy as modern American filth.

But I digress. The subject is flakiness. I realize that I have been flaky in the keeping of my promise to upkeep this repository of writing of a Sunday—don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. And that in doing so the people I am letting down are my closest friends, my 3 gentle readers (the allusion is to Miss Manners, JDM; it might be time to brush up on your cotillion etiquette. Oh PS, I saw a license plate that said “I Heart JDM” the other day. I was like, me too! Wow.) My closest REAL friends, not to be confused with the people with whom I spend most of my time. Which would be A) my students, who are sweet but in a different category, 2)Jodi, a friend but also in a different category, and it should be mentioned that I have determined I spend more awake hours with my students than with her—sad—and C) the staff of Bartlet’s White House.

Oh, CJ, you are so tall and stunning in your all-too-occasional Donna Karan gowns bought specially for state dinners. Josh, you are a little too hot-tempered, but the righteous must also wield swords, must they not, and anyway, any friend of Mary-Louise Parker’s is a friend of mine. If you get my drift. When she took off her shoes in your office…HOTT. But Donna, don't give up hope. Your radiant idealism and trim organizational prowess will win him in the end. Charlie, don’t worry, Zoey will be a better actress someday and will then be worthy of your love. Toby, you bear the tender angst of a word-wielding gentleman with the fortitude of Atlas. And Sam?! Where is the beautiful boy when I need him most? Supposedly campaigning in the OC, which would be great if you were REAL; we could meet occasionally for lunch, I would drive you to the airport when you really needed it, because that’s what friends are for, but alas, like all the aforementioned members of Category C, you are not real. You are but a figment, albeit a beautiful figment, in whose dreamy eyes I was lost during seasons 1-4 but now in season 5 I have to reevaluate what’s most important to me….


Um, so yeah. Jodi and I have been watching The West Wing, which luckily our local library has all but one of—season 4 disc 4 to be exact, which was, according to Asif, my favorite librarian, who gives me teacher liberties like checking out Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet for 2 weeks instead of the usual 2 days, THROWN AWAY BECAUSE IT WAS DAMAGED. Luckily, trusty Asif found one at another branch and had it sent to me. I told him I was desperate. He understood. He understands me. Although I describe Asif as “trusty,” he is not immune from CA flakiness in that when I finally asked him his name, he held out his ID tag and said “As IF,” in perfect Clueless fashion.

No, The West Wing is fiction, most people who know me are thousands of miles away, and on a daily basis I have to deal with students who didn’t do their homework over the weekend because they have much more vibrant social lives than I (and who can blame them? well, I can, I guess), also people with absolutely no sense of time to whom lateness is the water in which they swim, also people who cannot make, much less keep, social commitments that would, in theory, help us get closer as friends and make them actually seem more real than my beloved West Wing characters. But hey, there are perks. I’m around kind and generous people (just how generous may be revealed next week, but for now I’m not counting any chickens), the sunsets are pretty, and Jodi and I both swear we have seen Rachel Griffiths powerwalking down our street on numerous occasions. So I’m sure we’re going to be best friends soon. And we are still wooing the cat, whom I call Clementine and Jodi calls Humpy-Butt. I’m sure we’ll settle on a name any day.


I have written far too many subordinate clauses for one sitting, so I will sign off. It’s getting late, and Season 5 Disc 3 is waiting.

Thumbelina

Jodi and I are having discussions over what to name our cat. Well, not our cat. We are having discussions over whether we have a cat. Whether to have a cat. Are we adult enough? Do we want the responsibility? Can we get around the provision from our landlords that we are not, technically, allowed to have one? What happens at Christmas? Can we afford it? Who will let it out at 7:00 AM? To which I answer yes, yes, yes, we’ll see, sure why not, and me, if it means we can have one.

I have wanted a cat for a long time. Ever since we shared a blissful abode with The Kitten in New York. Oh, and Katie. Lest we forget Katie, the owner of The Kitten and my dearest friend. But do I have videos of Katie playing not just fetch, but catch, with a bell toy? I think not.


When we left that sweet sweet closet on the Upper East Side, I was bereft of satisfying cat presence in my life. I would relish the days at home when I could see Sara. Sara, light of my life…I’m tempted to make a Lolita reference here, syntactically of course, not because she WAS the fire of my loins, it’s just how can you write “light of my life” without “fire of my loins” after it and not sound like a CBS Dean Martin special? But “Sara” doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Lolita,” not a paragraph’s worth of linguistic musings anyway. But I digress. Sara was the best thing about my childhood, she was its fire and constancy and softness and excitement. By which I mean, as sweet as she might be, you always knew she could rip your face off if she wanted to. It was that element of surprise that kept things interesting.

I remember getting Sara from our neighbors whose cat had kittens. I was seven and Robin was two and we walked up the block to where the kittens were nestled in a box and we chose from among the female ones (the one male had been claimed) and she was just a wriggling baby and we stole her from her mother. I mean, I guess she was old enough and everything because I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have let us take her if she wasn’t “of age,” but it still seems such a cruel thing to steal babies from their mothers, for all parties involved, and to expect the baby to adapt to a new family of oh, say, a different species. I remember holding her on the way home, how small she was, how light. How sharp her little claws, how like small suns her flashing eyes. She was not Sara then, oh no, she was a victim of the nameless limbo of a feuding human family, taken hostage from her feline roots. My parents had given me the opportunity to name her. With the depth and breadth of childhood imagination I had narrowed it down to “Midnight” (she was black), and “Tulip” (why, you ask? I have no answer). My dad told me I would regret these choices and we should go with either Sara, Grace, or Rebecca, which were names he had put in the running for when his daughters were born but which had lost to the ever-popular Katherine and Robin. At least the ever-popular Katherine, which when I wrote the phrase “ever-popular” I expected to see in the top-ten lists of female baby names for most birth years and was astounded to find that I rank 39th in top names of 1981, only two places ahead of “Brandy.” And this according to the Social Security Administration. So there you go.

Well, it sucks when your parents are right, but look what happened. Somehow my dad won, but I recall that it was on a trial basis, under which we agreed to try “Sara” for the time being and see if it worked. I realize now with my full adult mental faculties that I may have been duped—how would we have known if it wasn’t “working”? Would there have been signs, shadows, wonders? Torn curtains, kitten piss on our pillows, yowling in the night? But time went by, and Sara was Sara, and pretty soon it became clear that she was not really Tulip material. Midnight…maybe, but I bet if the SSA had a list of top ten black cat names, that would rank highly and then we would just be another set of uncreative WASPs. We showed them. We made Sara, the number-4 ranked female name of 1988, the name for not our baby, but our CAT. Hah.

Sara was the best cat ever. Yes, she was a teenage pregnancy (or, what are cat years? Maybe she was the equivalent of a mere 7 human years when she got pregnant at the ripe young age of 1), and yes, she ran away sometimes, and yes, she had no qualms about clawing your face off. But she was tiny, beautiful, feisty, frank, and individualistic, but would give you love when YOU needed it most. It was never what she needed, at least overtly, but she could tell when you were weak and required it of her. She was always gentle and kind to my grandfather in his ancient fragility. She loved to “make biscuits” on feather pillows while you were trying to fall asleep. When she had kittens, she would lose count of them (there were 5) and take 3 to the next hiding place she had devised (usually among my mom’s clean undergarments), leaving the last two mewling in their box while she contentedly nursed the others. Once, she had hidden (sans kittens, thank god) inside the car engine, and we drove several blocks before we heard her howl as we slammed on the brakes, and then saw her jump from off the tire onto the road, and then followed the railroad tracks home. Or maybe my dad had to come get her. My childhood memory fails me, except I couldn’t believe she had been under the hood and survived. Once she jumped out of the second story window in pursuit of a squirrel. Once (and this is the worst), she had been gone for a few days. I had to tutor this dumb jock boy in math. This is 4th grade. He said “You seem sad, what’s wrong?” and I said, “My cat is missing.” You can imagine the rest. In case you can’t:
“Oh, that’s too bad. What kind of cat is it?”
“Black. She’s small.”
“Ooh. Where do you live?”
“Central Ave.”
“Oh, God. I saw a black cat smushed on the side of the road this morning, on Central.”
At which point, I think I started bawling. Naivete yet again rearing its ugly head, preventing me from realizing that he had garnered all the necessary information from me before stating his fatal conclusion. Luckily, when I got home that day, Sara had returned, and although she would never kiss-and-tell of her adventures away, one could only imagine the things she had done and seen in her travels, free from her clumsy human appendages.

Sara died in 2005. I found out she was sick during a peace march. We were in Winston, had just walked a couple of blustery miles with several hundred other anti-warriors, and were standing at the five points brandishing signs when my mom called. It was like war had broken out in my heart, and all that marching meant nothing. I guess it’s callous, to feel that so much more acutely than the casualties of war, but I think it’s also natural. I drove home the next day to visit her, to say goodbye. She lay quietly but her breath was shallow. Something had ruptured. Something had been done that could not be undone. She was 17, but she would have had plenty of good years left if only…if only…

When I found out she had died, it was the only day I missed school that whole year. I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back. But somehow I did. Somehow, we do. How is it? How do we do that?

So now here I am, back at school again, and this cat has presented itself at our door. Well, two cats, but one is such a scaredy-cat that it seems unlikely to succumb to our taming in the near future. We think they are related because they both have thumbs. Yes, thumbs. When they walk, their front paws look like little hands, which upon extensive research I have found out is a rare and desirous characteristic of “polydactyl cats,” or Hemingway cats, so-called because Hemingway’s son had one. I love that. The one we think is the mother wears a hideous hot-pink collar but otherwise is beautiful. For awhile, we thought the collar meant she was someone else’s, but through rumors that we choose to believe we have determined that she used to belong to someone who moved away from the neighborhood and left her. I think she was once tame, but her kitten never was and so he is the slinky, nervous one of the two. For a few days, they both sat on our porch and yowled, until, driven to distraction, Jodi gave them some milk. In telling this story to our grandchildren, she will certainly blame me for initiating the taming, but I assure you it was she. Gradually, the mother, whom I’ve taken to calling Thumbs, or Thumbelina, came further and further in. We gave her solid food. On an impulse buy at Target, I bought catfood. So we stop feeding her expensive human food, I told myself. But really so that we could feed her more easily and more often. Then one day she let us pet her. Then one day she let us hold her. Then she sat with us on the sofa. Then she found our bed. And the rest…is history.

She’s up there now, curled up on the bed. Last night she slept there with us. Jodi said if I was going to let her do that, I had to let her out in the middle of the night or else clean up her pee from wherever it was in the morning. But when I woke, she was where she had been the night before. Awake before me, of course, much more in tune with nature than needful of alarms, and staring out across the mountains from the window by the bed.

Do animals appreciate a view? I’ve never thought about this before, one way or another, but I have today quite a bit. What was she looking at, what was she thinking, as she stared across the mountains in the early hours of light? Do they look different inside her golden eyes? How can she be so calm, face the day with such serenity?

There are lessons I can learn from this cat. I think she knows it, and she is going to stick with me till I do. I’m not sure what to do about the landlords. I’m not sure what to do about Christmas. But she found me. This, according to my dad, is the only way one is supposed to procure cats. In the back of my mind, I hear the Little Prince: “One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed.”

I don’t know who is taming and who is being tamed in this situation. But somehow, I think it’s worth the risk.


*A note to my readers: thank you, THANK YOU for the guilt. It's what keeps me going. Also, the photo at the top of this post, of the paw, is not actually our cat. You can probably tell this from the human hand if nothing else. It's from Google images, but the resemblance is quite striking.

The Indiscriminate Universe

Cancer cells grow in an uncontrolled manner. They forget to die and therefore the diseased cells accumulate…Under the microscope, normal cells look uniform, with similar sizes and orderly organization. Cancer cells look less orderly, with varying sizes and without apparent organization.
—The Mayo Clinic Cancer Basics

So was it the end of dread? I’m sure you’re all anxiously wondering. Well. I began the week not, shall we say, at my physical or emotional peak. You may ask, when is a Monday morning ever one’s physical or emotional peak? And you would be right to ask this. But this particular Monday, I was suffering from a bout of ailments such as the first day of my period, utter exhaustion, AND the worst sunburn I have had in the last several years. After I left you last week, we went to the beach to spend the Last Day swooning in the sun. It was cool, one of those days where the weather is a manipulative sumbitch and you cannot FEEL the fact that your skin is being slowly broiled, due to the sweet salt air and the rush of the waves and the cries of happy children. We stayed out for hours. Jodi promptly feel asleep reading her art history book, and I was reading The Power of One and got quite carried away, forgetting that the bottle of sunscreen had run out halfway through my lathering process and that my legs had never gotten done. I didn’t even rotate, so I was literally toasting the backs of my legs. I got up once to go swimming, and it felt so good, I stayed in for a long time, happy the way you are when you’re a kid at the pool and you could stay forever, you are just so happy and diverted. I floated on my back trying to only see sky and nothing else, I swam underwater trying to use my whole body, feel all my muscles, dive like a dolphin, ride the waves. I felt my scalp tingle from the water smoothing my hair flat on my head (my flat head), and not once did my legs feel sunburned. But oh, they were. They still hurt, too, a week later, and I curse myself for my stupidity. Which makes me wonder:

Why are there some lessons you have to learn every few years? Like not to buy scotch tape from the dollar store (you KNOW it’s too shiny and it doesn’t tear right, and yet you do it anyway. It’s so tempting. It’s only a dollar! All the other tape is like $2.50! How can something that seems so right be so wrong?), or not to eat Cup-O-Noodles (it will never taste as delectable as it did when we were five), or not to buy $3 bottles of wine. Ever. No matter how pretty the packaging. Or Boone’s Farm. Or Andre. The list goes on. Or that crazy drunken college parties are not fun. Not really. Not unless you’re really smashed on one of the above fine spirits, in which case, you are already about to learn one of those crucial lessons all over again. Putting on sunscreen even when it’s not hot is one of those lessons. You think the worst that can happen is that you’ll get a little pink—so what? Soon it will turn into a lovely, luscious bronze. Not so, young friend, not so.

Which brings me to cancer. Which, I think we’ll all agree, is the worst that can happen from staying too long in the sun. I have been thinking about cancer lately. It seems like the invisible circle of Being Unaffected by Cancer that used to surround me like a shield is weakening. It’s like the ozone layer—it still basically exists, but there is plenty of room for evil to slip through the cracks. A fence with a hole in it is still mostly a fence, but a coyote can still get through and kill your cat, so you might as well have no fence. (Watch me use California-related metaphors with agility and grace. Anyone would think I had always been here).

I was trying to explain this to my students, and I still don’t think I’ve found a way to do it exactly right, but I always think about the health reports on the news, and how when I was a kid, and even to some extent now, when they talk about some exciting new drug they’ve developed or some breakthrough research in Lou Gehrig’s disease or some way to give people new hearts or eyes or hips, I listen to them but I don’t really hear. I think it’s because there are so many things in the world to worry about that when something so specific as a certain ailment comes along, I compartmentalize it. I think, “Maybe someday I will have to deal with that, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” and if I think about it much harder, I get scared or sad or convinced that I have it. Like head lice. You know how whenever anyone mentions head lice your scalp starts to crawl? I know fatal diseases are not like head lice, but when I think about them too much, my soul starts to crawl. So I tuck them away into the little pantry in my brain that I will never open unless I have to, where ominous eventualities are stored, the kinds of things you don’t want to think about because even if you could think about them rationally, without freaking yourself out, there is always the fear that the Law of Attraction will suddenly start actually existing and you will make these things happen just by thinking about them.

That’s where Cancer (specifically Breast) has been for most of my life. It’s also where I keep the Death of Close Family and Friends, Getting Blinded/Deafened/Lamed in a Freak Accident, Terrorism, and Kidney Stones. Every now and then something forces me to open the closet and face those things, but usually from a distance, across the dim musty light to which the closet is accustomed. Lately it seems like I’m getting closer and closer to having to take something out of the closet and really examine it.

First it was Dana, on The L Word. I should state that A) I know she’s not real and B) I realize this may be a silly way to begin to illustrate my point. But it felt like I had known her for three years. Known her from afar, maybe, in that…fictional sort of way, but when you think about how many women’s first true love is Mr. Darcy, it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine.

Actually, I lied. First, it was Justin’s mom. In college, when we were all so young and beautiful and busy and self-obsessed, we all quietly ignored the fact that Justin was losing his mother. Not ignored-ignored, I mean, we gave him hugs and everything, and tried to “be there for him,” whatever that means, but there was the terrible silence in which we knew that we all still had our mothers, maybe even complained about them or, hell, complained about anything, and while we knew that most of us would probably have to face that kind of pain someday, hopefully when we’re older and wiser and readier (yeah, right), Justin was having to do it now. And no matter how sympathetic we were, we could not possibly know what that was like.

Then it was Dana. And now, suddenly, there seem to be so many more. Sue, the mother of a boy I knew growing up, and whom I haven’t seen for years. My aunt gave me her son’s email address so that I could get back in touch, but I haven’t yet because I don’t know quite how or what to say. Jenn’s mom, to whom everything random and unfair in the world seems to have happened, now, on top of everything, has breast cancer. And Katherine, my mom’s best friend after whom I was named, after a sad divorce years earlier, finally became engaged to a good man she loved and then found out she had breast cancer. They still got married, this summer, but soon after that she had surgery, chemo, the works…which begs several questions. Why is life not fair??? And even if life is going to be not fair, why does it have to happen like that? Finally find happiness, and then bang, life plops in front of you a potentially fatal obstacle course.

There is a picture of my mom and Katherine where they’re both laughing so hard, the kind of laughing that completely distorts your face but you don’t know it because it’s too funny, whatever it is, so you lose all inhibition and just laugh. It’s in black and white, they are teenagers, and when my friends from college saw the picture at my house, they asked who it was in the photo with me. I didn’t understand at first, and then I realized that they thought my mom was me. I didn’t see how they could, but if I close my eyes and then open them on the picture expecting to see myself instead of my mom, it works. It looks exactly like me.

They were once as young and carefree as me. Once, they had something to laugh so hard about that their faces, morphed with mirth, transformed into the faces of their unborn children. And one day I will not be as young as I am now, and it could be, might be, hell, probably will be me and my friend from a longago, faraway picture having to negotiate a new and scary world. Will it be me, or will it be my friend? Why was it Katherine and not my mom? Why is it anybody? What’s weird is that, evidenced by the quotation that serves as epigraph to this essay, cancer itself, the cells themselves, mirror the randomness and unfairness with which they strike. They “forget to die” and so you must. Talk about life not being fair. And if breast cancer strikes one in eight women, which of my closest eight will it be? And if I think about this much more, will I draw this future negativity to me like a poisonous moon caught in my gravitational pull?

I tried to explain this to my students as we were preparing to go to volunteer for the day at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I told them I had no idea what we would be doing, and it might be menial and it might not seem like we were helping much in the grand scheme of things, but if it started to seem like that, they should think about One in Eight, they should think about the picture of my mom and Katherine, they cultivate empathy for perfect strangers so that when there comes a time when they need perfect strangers to have empathy for them, maybe life will decide to be just a little bit fair.

We had a beautiful day. It was a wonderful place to volunteer, because it was so well-organized they had plenty for us to do and everyone was genuinely friendly and positive and working in pursuit of a common goal. We spent the whole morning preparing to welcome the walkers to registration, and when we finally opened the doors to them, they came in droves and we were all cheering for them and they were so fierce and proud and determined (they had each raised a minimum of $1,800 in order to walk). And I watched my students, who, like me, had been bleary-eyed when we met at 7:00 AM, no doubt wondering why it was again that we were doing this and was it really going to look so good on a college application that it was worth such exhaustion. They worked so hard, with such enthusiasm, whether they were welcoming participants with pom-poms or putting together shelves or directing traffic or cutting off the long ends of participants’ wristbands. One of them was riding separately and got terribly lost, and when he arrived over an hour late he rushed in and said desperately, “Katherine, I’m here, how can I help?”

Simple words. “How can I help?”

How can I help feeling scared, how can I help my cowardice, how can I help the randomness and unfairness of life, how can I help when I am so small, how can any of us help?

But hearing those words, and seeing that work pour forth from kids who are so often shy or just caught up in their idyllic bubble of youth, I felt that dark and awful brain-closet become just a little bit less scary.

How can I help but feel a little better?

The History of Pirates

I have been spending a lot of time in bookstores. Most recently, I have been trying to find a book to teach me a very concise version of world history, so that I can teach my students an even conciser one. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. I mean, why they don’t have a short and sweet, riveting and yet simple summary of a few thousand years of human history, with plenty of pictures, that doesn’t relegate Africa, Asia, Latin America, and women to the sidelines and provides a variety of perspectives without being complicated is just beyond me. I think such a thing could easily fit in under 300 pages, and the print wouldn’t even have to be too small. I read some good reviews on Amazon of a German book from the early 20th century aimed at younger readers called A Little History of the World, which it said was appropriate for all ages, but when I browsed through it at Barnes and Noble it began something like, “Once upon a time, life on earth began as something very small, even smaller than you! Too small to even sit in your lap!.” And I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the next 299 pages.

However, where the bookstores (and probably the historical canon) lack such a book as I require, I discovered one thing they have myriad plethoras of. Yes. Myriad plethoras. That many. Guess. No, really. You’ll never guess. Books about pirates. Not just Johnny Depp as a pirate, but historical books about pirates. And we’re talking the section designated “World History” in both Borders and Barnes and Noble. It’s not a large section, considering what it should hold, and I would say as many as 40% of the books in it were about pirates. There was even, I kid you not, The History of Pirates for Dummies. There were first-person accounts of pirates, broad surveys of pirate history, geographical focuses such as the Caribbean or the South Atlantic. So many that now, in relating this to you, I have gotten to the point with the word “pirate” where it starts to lose all sense and form and begins to sound like gibberish. You know? Say it about 10 more times: pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate. Yep. Total gibberish.

It was as though I had gone to the education section looking to brush up on the foundations of educational theory and had not found any such books but instead found an abundance about Hogwarts and the “magical educational approach that made Harry who he is today,” including one entitled How to Pass Your N.E.W.T.s and O.W.L.s for Dummies. I mean, right? Or if I went into the art history or religion section and all I could find were “historical” spinoffs of The Da Vinci Code. Oh wait…

It’s interesting to me though, what it says about the correlation between pop culture and history. Pirates are fascinating, I guess, in the dangerous way that natural disasters and the wreck of the Titanic are fascinating, and in the transgressive, we-all-wannabe-outlaws kind of way that Robin Hood is fascinating. But would there be so many history books about them without Johnny Depp and his sweet sweet eyeliner? Is it good when movies, or any such pop-culture element, incite a temporary boom of historical exploration, which then becomes what people interested in history read and what bookstores carry? I’m all for the argument, when it comes to a literate public, that reading anything (like Sweet Valley High or car magazines or even the dreaded Left Behind series) is better than reading nothing at all. But if what we read about history becomes all we know about history, at the expense of learning about the influences of what brought us to where we are today (all the influences except piracy, that is), and at the expense of learning from our forefathers’ mistakes when it comes to thinks like, oh, say genocide or tyrrany, are we in the process of rewriting history for the worse? Will such tunnely knowledge of history infiltrate the collective memory of humanity like poison into an aquifer making this generation one step closer to 1984 where once you lack the words for a concept you lack the concept?

Probably, books about pirates are not the most important thing to worry about. But it makes ya think, huh?

In other news, the countdown to school starting is rapidly depleting. My mom says this is good because it can’t be as bad as I’m building it up to be. But I don’t even think it will be bad, it’s more…this unexplained dread, not the dread of it being bad, but the dread of it being. Like, the responsibility of it. The endlessness of it. The always-being-or-at-least-trying-to-be-one-step-ahead-of-the-gameiness of it. I doubt my students read this blog, but if they do, hi darlings! It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll be fine. Really. I used to dread going back to school as a student—not so much in college, but definitely in high school and oh god, definitely in middle school. But all you students out there, my dad and I can tell you that nothing compares to the dread of going back to school as a teacher.

But even though it’s the end of sleeping in day after day (not that I’ve done much of that), the end of waning afternoons at the beach, the end of doughnuts and optional seminars and whitewater rafting and the Orgasmic Spider Hair Tickler Thingy (it really is called the Orgasmatron, no joke, and even comes from the land down under), the end of MSCL, the gayest-themed-show ever, the end of “you are beautiful” and the hairy baby fan club, the end of being in one home in exchange for another that doesn’t quite fit yet, the end of sunlight that lingers past 9:00, the end of reading books for pleasure and the end of reading everybody’s tarot cards at 2am, even though all of that, perhaps my mom is right and it will also mean the end of dread.

And there is so much to learn about pirates, how can I help but be excited?

Of Hairy Babies and Halliburton

After years of searching for get-rich-quick schemes, I have finally found the key to success. I ask you, gentle reader, what is your reaction to the following image?



I expect that after your initial revulsion came the following thought: The only thing better than seeing this hairiest-of-babies on Katherine's blog would be to have it on a t-shirt. And you know what? Everything is possible. This is America.

Exhibit B:

From whence this revelation, you ask? Well, credit must be given where credit is due. Primarily to a Mr. B. Wynia, who was responsible for both the concept and the design of the Hairy Baby. You see, this summer we became intimately acquainted with the stages of fetal gestation, thanks to the pregnancy of our office compadre Robyn, and learned such gems as the fact that fetuses have TAILS which do not disappear until about 15 weeks (tails, people!) and that at about 21 weeks, a fine hair, called lanugo, begins to grow all over the baby's body AND FACE, and is usually shed before birth. Into the uterus. Your unborn baby, once rid of its TAIL, sheds hair into your uterus. And these creatures aren't considered parasites? Anyway.

Robin (my sister, not to be confused with Robyn, who is pregnant) was quite disgusted to learn this. We learned it right before a delicious Refectory lunch one day, and at lunch, Robin shared our newfound knowledge with all those sitting at the table, including Blake, who, as a second-year med student, is the closest GSW comes to having a doctor on staff. "Oh yeah," he says, laden with nonchalance, "you didn't know that? And that's why you can only have a limited number of babies in your life--with each baby, the hair gradually builds up in your uterus so there's finally no more room. That's part of why it's harder to lose weight, too."

As smart as all of us employees are at that haven of NC's best and brightest, some of us are also quite gullible, and Robin, bless her heart, believed this preposterous tale, and now, even after realizing her error, has sworn off baby-having for the foreseeable future. Which is good, since she's a mere wisp of a 20-year-old herself and since this is what they look like at 8 weeks. Parasites. Or aliens. But all's I know is, it ain't natural.


Still, natural or not, the hairy baby t-shirts have caused quite a stir among all who have seen them, an audience which now spans at least 4 states and 2 countries, thanks to the modeling efforts of Robin, Jodi, and Alexis. The best reactions are the simple ones, like from Jodi's kids at camp, whose jaws dropped as they ogled her shirt: "That's a HAIRY BABY." Because that's exactly what it is. I can see the shirts also coming in very handy as abstinence-promotion tools. Maybe we can sell them to public-school health classes and Christian fundamentalist camps across the country. The possibilities are truly mind-blowing, no? So keep the checks coming in, only $19.95 plus shipping. As seen on TV. Or at least the internet. I think I have a future in finance....

The other financial revelation I have had recently came about while perusing the prospectus for the mutual fund that will support me in my retirement. I have saved a grand total of about $3,000 to last me from age 65 onward. Oh, but don't worry, the Social Security Administration's got my back in case that's not enough. And I have the feeling that $3,000 is going to multiply exponentially given that there are over 6 billion people in the world to exploit and the U.S. Government and its favorite pet corporations have only gotten to maybe half of them so far. Let me explain.

So I'm looking at the prospectus for the "Cornerstone Strategy Fund," a name that holds just the appropriate amount of enigma for the average facile investor. I chose this fund because I was talking to the USAA mutual fund analyst and he said it was a good, stable choice with little-to-moderate risk, a variety of investments in a variety of companies, and great growth potential. How can you lose, right? I've had it for about two years, it grows steadily, I don't feel there's much risk involved, and so basically I'm getting exactly what was promised. So I'm reading the prospectus, which I have never done before, but after discovering that my grandmother has thriving stakeholdings in Monsanto (knowing only that she makes money off of them and probably totally unaware that it's blood money), I was a little worried about what I might find. As well I should have been. Because...drumroll...little old me, whose Facebook profile proclaims her to be "Very Liberal," who espouses progressivism, feminism, regime change, equality, love for one's fellow humans and planet, etc, has stock in the following companies:

Wal-Mart, the root of all evil
Halliburton (and about 50 other oil companies), the spawn of all evil
Lockheed-Martin, the perpetuators of evil
Procter & Gamble, the evil animal-testers
Altria and Loews (tobacco companies)/cancer manufacturers
Abercrombie & Fitch, sweatshoppers and damaging-advertising purveyors extraordinaire
A bunch of mining companies
A bunch of biotech, "healthcare," and pharmaceutical companies with sinister names like "Salix Pharaceuticals," "Viropharma, Inc.," "Immucor Corp.," and "Haemonetics Corp."

to name a few.

Now, I was listening to an interview with Dolly Parton in which she spoke of her songs as being like children to her, because they were going to support her in her old age. I think you see where I'm going with this. By this count, my children are Wal-Mart, Halliburton and friends. I now know what Shakespeare meant by "from forth the fatal loins...." I think I had better commit to abstinence before anything bad happens (o guide me, hairy baby). Or at least start looking for a green mutual fund. Or else in my next life, I might come back as a citizen of a third-world country at the mercy of my own evil children.

Back in the Land of the Living

An apology to my readers, who probably are not my readers anymore. I don't have a good excuse for two years of absence, although I do regret it. First it was grad school, then I was just busy, then I never stopped being busy, and somewhere around the year-and-a-half mark, it just seemed impossible to show my blogalicious face again because what could possibly be good enough? How could I start again, what post could possibly encapsulate so much time, absence, distance? Why should I assume anyone cares? Why would anyone care? When I was a consummate traveler, it was one thing. Death-defying feats, the risk of malaria, smallpox, petty theft, or at the very least a funny story involving the language barrier. But a normal life? A frustrating life populated primarily by high school students, The West Wing, getting stuck in traffic, buying whatever's on sale at the grocery store? Why, indeed?

Of course I knew all along that it was a pitiful excuse, a sign of my inherent weakness and lack of work ethic, a slumping away from the creative genesis that was at its height in college and in my post-baccalaureate foibles and travels, and worst of all it was a falling-out-of-touch. And if there's one thing I have learned this summer, in that Edenic land known under an alias here, for its own protection, the alias of, oh, let's just say, the Head-Honcho-of-North-Carolina's School West (HHNCSW), it's that keeping in touch with those I love is the key to my happiness. When you don't hear from me, I don't exist. Or might as well not, to you. And so, might as well I exist just for my own enjoyment, and the enjoyment of those in my immediate vicinity? Probably not, because not that many people are generally in my immediate vicinity, which is the nether-regions of the Santa Monica Mountains north of Los Angeles. So sharing myself with you is more important to me than ever.

I hope that I'm able to rekindle that flair for, and love of, words that once flowed so naturally. I hope that I'm able to make my life and my musings on its existence, and the existences of other works of art and life, interesting enough for you to keep reading.
I hope that you give me another chance to be a reliable communicator.
I hope I don't let you down.

My goal is to post at least once a week, on Sunday, like PostSecret, so that when those of you who read PostSecret read it, you will remember to read mine as well, and also so that if I don't write something I can deny myself the chance to look at PostSecret until I've written something, and maybe that will be a good incentive. Because I am a product of public education, and I'm here to tell you that rewards work. Intrinsic motivation = BS. Is all I'm sayin'. If I don't post on Sunday, please send me nasty emails about how disappointed in me you are. Because guilt is another excellent motivator.

I'll be writing again soon. Thanks for reading, and take it light.

In lieu of my words...

I have not been a reliable blogger of late, as many of you have reminded me. Unfortunately, this post will not atone for that. I'm incredibly busy with school right now, and it (and J) have been consuming me since late September. I will be back in mid-December, though. Until then, please read/savor:
Photo-A-Day
Beating Bush
PostSecret
Cam Jansen's Protege

listen to:
The Everybodyfields

and, for a rough idea of what I've been up to, or at least what's going on around me, check out Jodi's blog and photos.

and go in peace until I can write again.

This American Life

Terry has convinced me, leading by example, that I should listen to one episode of This American Life per day until I finish their archives. Now, I had known that the internet was a beautiful thing for awhile. You can get textbooks--well, any books--cheap, people will pay to look at my feet, I can send mass emails and self-publish the scattered noise in my brain and feel like I'm keeping in touch with everyone I hold dear. Movie times, weather, eBay--so much to be grateful for. And now this--Ira Glass and, on a lucky day, David Sedaris or Anne Lamott to tell me stories and keep me company. I recommend it to anyone who, like me, can't afford therapy.

In other news, I took a much needed adventure last weekend to Sin City--not the one you're thinking of, but perhaps equally deserving: our nation's Capitol. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was visiting from Oz, Sarah the Leepfrog from South Africa, and the beautiful people who live in DC were in town to ice the cake. The weekend was wonderful, but in my School of Education we emphasize process over product as much as The Man will let us, so I mustn't get ahead of myself. Getting there proved half the battle.

I cringed as I bought the Greyhound ticket, my memories of South American buses functioning in much the same way as the memory of what you were drinking when you drank so much you threw up. Not one to waste days, I booked an overnight bus with two changes. I left Winston at 11:40 PM (mad props to John for waiting at the station with me to discourage rape-and-pillaging) and, blatantly judging books by their covers, took a seat next to the person closest to the front who looked like she didn't smell bad.

Her name was Sarah. She was 17, traveling alone for the first time to visit her fiance, a Marine stationed in Jacksonville, NC. She had been on the bus for about 20 hours, having started in Ohio. No one had sat next to her the whole time, so she was eager to talk. She works at Burger King, which is better than KFC but her manager is a bitch. She graduated from high school a year early so she could get married. She has three younger siblings, she can't wait to move from her parents' house. She met her fiance when she was 15, and only wishes she could have met him earlier so she could have been spared several bad experiences with men. He is 19, and enlisted earlier this year, despite her pleading him not to. Despite her hatred of the war. He has been gone since February, first in boot camp and now in further training. He may or may not be deployed within the next few months. If he is deployed, they'll get married first, "because he wants to take care of me," she said.

She was so young. It was evident in her false bravado: sure there were sketchy people on the bus, but she would beat up anybody who tried anything with her. But it wasn't so evident in how she spoke of love. Whenever our conversation turned to Josh (her betrothed), she softened, and spoke simply but never trite-ly about him. Inadvertent smiles would dance over her otherwise plain face (her description as much as mine: Sarah, Plain and Tall is her favorite book, because that's what she is), she never wavered in her certainty of their destiny together, which impressed me in one so young who has spent the last 7 months far from the one she loves. She spoke simply, truly. For much of it, she could have been describing my relationship. She was, in a word, wise.

We rode together to Raleigh, where we waited for 3 hours (2 more than we had bargained for, as is the way with Greyhound) for the buses to come that would take us our separate ways. A guy with a Nascar T-shirt and a huge hole in the crotch of his jeans bummed a cigarette from Sarah and proceeded to tell us a story, of which about 15% was at all intelligible (he was very Southern and spoke very fast), of why he had had a bad day.

Let's call him Bo. I never caught his name, but calling him Bo will communicate more about him to you than description ever could. Apparently, Bo's bad day had started 2 weeks ago when he was wrongly arrested in Virginia. I didn't catch what for--but he was definitely innocent, of course. He had to sleep on a concrete floor because they were out of beds, and his woman back in Fayetteville wouldn't answer the phone. So when he gets back there she will probably have moved out because she'll have thought he was gettin' busy behind her back. Meanwhile, during his jail time, his truck got impounded, so his brother picked it up and made off with it and all his stuff, which is why he had to hitchhike and then take the Greyhound from Virginia to Fayetteville and why, apparently, he didn't have a cigarette. He asked where I went to school. I told him. He whooped, and congratulated me, because their hospital is the only one worth its salt and he wouldn't have nobody pokin' around inside him unless they worked at Duke. I felt strangely validated.

By the end of our 3-hour layover, he had some woman with a ratty perm and scrunchie and a few missing teeth sitting on his knee bouncing up and down playing horsey.

Sarah's bus left before mine, and boarded as soon as it was called, so she hurried over. "It was nice to meet you," she said, and before I could say anything, she was gone. Strangely, I felt as though we hadn't had proper closure. No words of well-wishing or advice. No knowing looks of sympathy for the hard road ahead (I had told her all about Jodi as well). She should have gotten back to Ohio sometime today. I can imagine her sadness, but I can't decide whether I'm glad I'll never know if Josh gets deployed or not, if she goes on to nursing school (as was her dream) or works at Burger King for all her life. Because this way, I'll never know they made it, if they do.

So here I am, faced with the Little-Prince-paradox. In one universe, the stars are laughing, in another, they are crying. I guess having both is something to be thankful for--and may be better than knowing the truth.

The First Day of School

Part the First: Into the Fray

When I was little, I almost always got a new outfit for the first day of school. When I was really little, it was a "first day of school dress," and I was always super-excited about it. The first day of school was always a new experience for me, moreso than for most, because I was always at a different school. Yes, gentle reader, except for my fourth and fifth grade years, I went to a different school for each year of elementary (which included, back in my day, sixth grade as well). In all, I have been the new girl eight times, if you count kindergarten and two universities, which may skew the data a bit since, in those situations, everyone is the new girl. Or boy. But even not counting those, I have three summers' worth of summer programs where I didn't know anybody, and then two summers of working in new places where I didn't know anybody--all leading to the conclusion that I have been forced to make an alarming number of first impressions during my brief existence.

Part the Second: In Which Our Heroine Judges Books By Their Covers and is Judged in Turn

I used to sit in new classrooms and look at people, trying to guess which ones were going to be my friends. I was almost never right. Or, to be more specific, there were a lot of false positives, but only a few false negatives. I could tell who was not going to be my friend quite reliably. The characteristics by which I determined this naturally changed over time--I hardly remember anyone specific from my kindergarten and first grade classes, but I remember a few characteristics: the girl who stood in front of me in our alphabetical line for the cafeteria had awful-smelling hair. She was not going to be my friend. With one exception, boys were probably not going to be my friend until middle school, where they might be my friends if I met them through theater, but very rarely if I met them through school. The exception was in fourth grade, where a kid named John played the New Boy opposite my New Girl, and he may have been my first crush. I adored him because A) he didn't make my life miserable, and B) he hadn't grown up in Belmont, North Carolina. That meant, I thought, that the odds were good he came from a more enlightened place. He and I were both Library Assistants, which made us supreme nerds but meant that we got to leave class for a few hours each week to help the librarians shelve books and check them out to students. Sometimes we did this together, which was nice, and sometimes we did it alone, which was sublime. Children are so seldom alone, and I craved it. I hated that school and most of the people in it, but I loved that library because it was an escape. A place to be surrounded by stories better than the one you were in, where the harsh voices of my provinicial schoolmates who thought their lives were the whole world could not penetrate. To be fair, I probably thought my life was the greater part of the world as well, but at least I knew about global warming and endangered species and the Holocaust and the fact that you can't call black people the N word. Most of the people at my school were not thusly educated.

So I sat in class and surveyed all these new people, year after year, looking for likely friends. I discounted the boys with buzz-cuts and rattails and anyone who sweated a lot or was fat. I look back and wonder why I did to them, in my mind, exactly what others did to me in person that made me hate them. And it's sad, scary even to admit, that even at 9 I had some inkling of social capital, and those people were not it. My deep, dark, dirty secret is: I wanted to be in with the in-crowd.

The in-crowd. The girls who never set foot in a K-Mart or a thrift store (until it was cool in 10th grade), whose sweatshopped shirts proclaimed the names of elitist brands in large letters, with "Made in Honduras" in the fine print. One in particular never wore the same outfit twice for all of fifth grade. They laughed at people, made fun, criticized. They were neither very good nor very bad at school. They looked at me with disbelief when they discovered I didn't go to church and that my dad taught at a college for black people. Imagine what they would have done if they knew he taught evolution. My father further added to my mortification by attending a school open house carrying his "green bag," which I had always taken for granted until an in-crowd girl came up to me, giggling: "Your dad carries a purse?!" One time, never-repeat-an-outfit girl and one of her cronies told me I needed a makeover, and pulled my shirt out of my pants where it was tucked in and told me I shouldn't wear those colors together. They suggested I tweeze my eyebrows. And for some reason, rather than suggest they shove their tweezers somewhere unmentionable, rather than tell them they were silly buffoons and I couldn't believe I had to go to school with the likes of them, I wanted to be them. Not, I think, because I wanted to treat other people as they did, but because I saw that no one treated them the way they treated me. At least, I like to think so.

Part the Third: In Which Our Heroine Discovers Self-Consciousness

You might think, after a forced makeover in the hall, I would have learned self-consciousness the hard way. But even though I saw that they had things I didn't, and I wanted their name-brand clothes and their condescending attitudes against my better judgment, I never saw myself as others saw me, which is the true meaning of self-consciousness. Until the first day of school, sixth grade, when I discovered my butt.

By the ripe age of ten, I had certainly begun to notice other people's butts. Their whole bodies, in fact. Not with desire so much as noticing what looked attractive and what didn't, especially as pertained to different types of clothing, and I would look at adults and either wish I could look like that someday or hope I never looked like that ever. Butts were only a small part of the equation. But, trying on clothes in anticipation of the first day of school (I was beyond first-day-of-school dresses at this point, instead attempting to create the perfect f-d-o-s ensemble from found objects in my closet) I accidentally turned around in front of the mirror and saw myself from behind.

I take this for granted now, when trying on clothes at the store. Of course you look at yourself from behind. You do the little shimmy to try to simulate how your butt will look while walking. You bend over and see if anything obscene happens. But before that day when I was ten, I don't think I had ever looked at myself from behind. I had never realized that other people saw me from behind. But I understood now that they did, and that if my own nature was at all indicative of human nature, they (at least some of them) were evaluating me. And their first impression of me would be what I saw in that mirror: baggy jeans that hung like a sack and made my butt look dumpy. Before that day, when I looked in the mirror, I only saw myself. Since that day, when I look in the mirror, I see what I imagine others see.

Part the Fourth: Fast-Forward

It is now 2005, and I am no longer in fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. The trends of self-consciousness and conflicting desires do be both a smart, independent person and a stupid, popular lemming continued throughout high school, and to a lesser but certainly still present extent throughout college, the difference being their waning slightly year by year and the fact that I had friends, so I was not going it alone anymore. I am now a self-confident adult, it's pretty safe to say. If I indulge in throes of self-doubt now, it's always to do with my choices and plans for my life, not my appearance or popularity. I don't know whether to attribute my surge in self-confidence since leaving Duke to A) leaving Duke, B) having Jodi in my life, or C) natural maturation and wisdom, but each has probably played a part. Now, on the first day of school, I debate wearing nice clothes or going to the gym right before class and showing up sweaty (the former won, but only because I was too lazy to go to the gym).

I've used this opportunity to observe others on their first day of school, though. The sorority girls at Wake are all wearing their matching sorority T-shirts and flip-flops--I guess so they can pick out their kind in the crowds. One of my roommates, a new teacher, bought a skirt to wear on her first day of school. The other, who has been teaching for a few years, didn't know what she was going to wear till she got up this morning. But the most touching observations came on Tuesday, when I accompanied Amanda on a trek across town to visit each of her 9 students in their homes, to meet their parents and make sure they knew how and when to get to school on the big day. Amanda's teaching at an ESL middle school, and all of her students are recent (in the last year) arrivals from Mexico and Honduras. Amanda is bravely trucking ahead, even with limited Spanish skills, and announced she was going to do home visits and she had scripted out things to say to the families in Spanish and their possible questions. I asked if she wanted someone to go with her, for moral support, safety in numbers, and the occasional language backup. So we set off to meet her students (glory be to Mapquest).

They had names like Ana, Felix, Luis Infante, and Maria Guadalupe. They lived in houses filled with people, babies, and Virgin Marys everywhere you look. And they were so excited about school. Their parents invited us in, and made us sit down even if it meant they had nowhere to sit. They thanked us so much for coming, even when we interrupted their dinner. Amanda got to school today at 6:30 AM (it starts at 7:30), and two children were already there with their parents, who had to be at work at 7:00. She said they had a wonderful day. At 2:00, their families were waiting outside the door of the classroom to pick them up, wanting to hear how, for many of them, their first day of school in America had gone.

That seems ideal to me. A first day of school filled with happiness and excitement, rather than nervousness and fear. But then it seems natural for them, who have probably known real fear in their lives, probably experienced it in the process of arriving here in this land of promise, that school wouldn't be scary. After real fear and danger, first impressions, and even the first day of school, are a piece of cake.

Something Lovely

how we look to God








(click image to enlarge)

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

My parents have received two citations from the City of Charlotte--one about mowing the grass, and one about clearing weeds from the borders of the property. After the first, we were a bit suspicious--only the backyard grass was high enough to write home about, and it seemed unlikely that roving inspectors whose job it is to find flaw with Charlotte citizens' lawn hygiene (whom we didn't know existed prior to our citation) would have noticed. The second one was a pretty big tip-off that this was not just our unluck of being chosen at random. We were being ratted out by our neighbors.

Picture this: we live in a lovely neighborhood full of lovely folks, most of whom voted for Kerry, many of whom have children and dogs and say hi as you pass and sit on their porches sipping wine in the summer twilight. Most people in our neighborhood would never get this kind of citation, but if they did, they would probably have a good idea of which of their neighbors was the tattletale. But we happen to live between two houses whose inhabitants were equally likely to have made the fateful call. So naturally, after grumbling about having to fix the lawn mower, our family conversations fell to the topic of which neighbors were the culprits.

Neighbor A, on the left side, as you're facing our house, was my mother's favored contender. Let's call her Lurlene for our purposes here. For the 12 years that we've lived here, she has lived alone, keeping the same daily routine, becoming older and dumpier year by year as the weight of time crashes upon her. She works in a security booth at some ritzy subdivision, but be not fooled--she doesn't really come across as the bouncer type. The church on our corner holds weekly AA meetings, and the attendees' cars have been known to spill over now and again onto the street. Lurlene's response was to put up a sign reading "No AA Parking" in front of her house. A few years ago, she cut down a big tree in her yard, which was the only beautiful thing about said yard in the first place, and replaced it with gravel on which to park her car. My dad has not spoken to her since.

Neighbors B, on the right side, shall hereby be called John and Maude. John is probably approaching 60 if he's not there already, and Maude is his mother, about whose age we will not venture a guess. John does some kind of work with computers in South Carolina, and Maude spends her time spying on her neighbors out the window and playing computer solitaire. She comes out to have a word with us if we or our visitors park in front of our house too close to her driveway, since it would be unsafe for her to back out (in her estimation). That's if she had somewhere to go, which seems a rather rare occurrence--but then, I don't spy on her as often as she probably does on me, so I'm not 100% sure. They have a can-crusher mounted on the side of their house outside my bedroom window, and they seem to get great joy from crushing about 50 cans a day at 7:00 in the morning. They have a greyhound that John walks once in the morning and once in the evening to a distance of about 4 houses away before returning home. Once, a tree limb from one of our trees was hanging over their side porch roof and threatening everything they hold dear. They told us we would have to pay for them to call someone to take care of it. My dad said he would do it. They said this was unacceptable for liability reasons. My dad said he wouldn't pay for someone else to do it. Finally, they said he could do it as long as he didn't set foot on their property, which proved impossible. He did end up standing on their property to remove the limb, a situation complicated by Maude's insistence on standing beside him for the entire process. They remind me of the ancient lady on the street where I grew up whose only pleasure in life was yelling at me when I ran around without shoes in the summertime.

My mom's arguments for Lurlene were strong. Lurlene is very picky about her yard, and keeps her grass trimmed within an inch of its life. She has just planted vegetables right next to our yard on her side of the fence, and she's probably mad that they're shaded by our vegetation. And she doesn't speak to us anymore. My mom says she'll say "Hi, Lurlene," and receive no response. I was not so convinced--John and Maude seemed just as strong contenders at least in the having-nothing-better-to-do department. They had a yard sale recently in which they had many items for sale for hundreds of dollars: camera lenses, darkroom equipment, a spotless guitar, computer hard drives. They came over and encouraged us to come to their yard sale. We went, but unfortunately I had neither the $700 nor the space to construct my own darkroom, so I contented myself with buying two Beach Boys records for $1 each. Before completing the sale they asked if we were sure we didn't want a camera or a hard drive. When the yard sale was over, they asked if we wanted to buy any more of their records (most of which were German Christmas music).

Within my family, we all tended to agree that the only way to know for sure was to confront them, but no one wanted to be the one to do it. Lurlene was considered the more likely candidate, and my dad refuses to talk to her. My mom decided it was surely her and set about hacking away all the vegetation on that side of the yard that could in any way offend. It took two days. She did some basic pruning of the other side as well, and two weeks later an inspector appeared at our doorstep, saying he was here to mow our grass. By this time, our grass had died. "We don't have any grass," my mother said. He admitted that this appeared to be the case. "In that case, I'm here to trim your border weeds," he offered. My mom said she had done that. He agreed, and they were in the yard trying to decide of there were any left that were complaint-worthy, when John, from his side of the fence, asked why we hadn't cleared the side for which we had received the citation (which, for the record, made no mention of sides).

The mystery was solved. At least, now, we could find out which weeds had been cause for complaint. In a striking instance of deja-vu, there were some that could not be cleared from our side of the property, but Maude initially insisted that we couldn't set foot on hers. She did offer a half-apology: regarding the citation, "I'm sorry we had to do that to you." My dad asked her why she didn't just ask us. She didn't have much of an answer.

A couple of days ago, a for-sale sign appeared in the yard of John and Maude. Despite initial celebration, my family's reactions were mixed. "They're giving us their collapsible carport," my mom pointed out. "And Maude asked if we all made it safely home from the trips we took this month." My sister and I bemoaned the loss of their wireless internet. My dad had the most forboding: what if the next neighbors are worse? What if they play loud music, or have yappy dogs, or gang-member adolescent sons? What if they tear down John and Maude's little house and build a big one (the trend in our neighborhood) and we have to deal with the noise and ugliness of its construction for the next year? What if they're, as my sister is fond of saying, Republicans for Voldemort? It's becoming apparent that there could be evils worse than the evils we know. Only time will tell.

Anniversary

Two years ago today
we went tubing down a river near Woodstock,
New England and Canada suffered the famous Blackout,
we ate Cheerios for dinner,
and I told Jodi that I loved her.

My life has never been the same.

And I'm so, so glad.

closer i am to fine

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was walking through Piedmont Park in Atlanta when she found a balloon that had lost its way. It was pink, and read “It’s a girl!” She had not found out the sex of the baby from the doctors—I suppose she wanted it to be a surprise, or maybe it was just that she knew How It Should Happen. Not in a white room while dressed in a paper smock from the mouth of a doctor for whom it isn’t magical. Not like that, but with signs, intuitions as subtle as a kick against uterine walls. Like a balloon blown across your path as you and your unborn unsexed baby walk through the park in the waning summer sunlight.

Fast forward 24 years and my mother’s two daughters are going to Piedmont Park together, for Atlanta Pride. Their mission: to see the Indigo Girls, Doria Roberts, and Michelle Malone for free. We’re not on the lookout for prophecies; there are no pink balloons proclaiming “It’s a girl!” But there are girls. Hundreds of them. Old ones, young ones, butch ones, femme ones, girls with funky T-shirts spouting left-wing axioms and girls without T-shirts, wearing nothing but bikini tops or, in one case, stickers in strategic places proclaiming she had donated to Keep Pride Free. Girls who are parents and brought their children, and girls who didn’t tell their parents where they were going when they left the house that afternoon. And they all love each other.

I stand there watching, wondering what it meant to my mother when she knew I was going to be a girl. What were her expectations? Did she dream of the dresses I would wear, the dolls I would cherish, the heart-to-hearts we would have as I got older? Did she imagine the people I would love in my life? Did she dream of my wedding? Did she have any idea how many ways there are to be a girl, and what kind I would be?

I’m standing in the place where I was first proclaimed female, and now, on the cusp of adulthood, I’m finally able to be proud of it. I’m here mostly for the music, but I’m also here to celebrate my molting: my juvenile feathers, which showed my insecurity and fear, which wished for my body or face or mind to be different than they are naturally, which valued other people’s approval over my own, have flown away. I started crying as they sang Galileo, because it’s been so long, and my soul has finally gotten at least some of it right.

My Newest Crush

Howl from Howl's Moving Castle--Disney has delved into Anime and produced a specimen who's a lovely combination of Justin, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Catwoman. Or Storm. The movie was really pretty (kind of like Moulin Rouge) but also pretty hard to follow (kind of like Ulysses). So if anybody wants to go see it and explain it to me, please do.

Rock of Ages

We've had a sub in Psychology of Diverse Learners all week, while our normal instructor is at the beach with his in-laws. This being a summer course, however, that means this "sub" is teaching us for 25% of the entire course, so I wonder if one can really call her a sub.

She meant well, of course. She led us through guided imagery exercises to get us in touch with our empathic listening abilities, had us role-play student-teacher and parent-teacher conferencing, and told us one too many stories about her own children. And today (her last day) she gave us each a rock.

She passed a basket of rocks around--they were nice rocks, polished, some of them quartzy even, of the type you might find to weigh down a decorative glass vase. We each chose one (later we would find out that actually the rock had "chosen us"). Mine is small, sort of bland peachy-pink, and I don't know why it chose me. Our teacher told us that we were not very different from these rocks--we are each unique. We have our own patterns and textures. We would look very nice at the bottom of a glass vase. Just kidding. We got to keep our rock, to remind us of our own uniqueness.

Now, I love Mr. Rogers. I really, really do. But this gesture seemed to me some strange, twisted spin on "you're the only person in the whole world like you." Mostly because, what am I supposed to do with it? I don't want it; I'm trying not to accrue Stuff. It's a pretty ordinary rock, not a beautiful amethyst geode or anything that you'd want to put on your mantelpiece to remind you of the beauty of the natural world. It would get in the way anywhere I might display it, weigh down my purse, which is already heavy enough, and I figure creating a rock-labyrinth is too sacred a thing to waste on rented property. But this teacher (she's really not a teacher--she's a psychologist, and it shows) endowed this rock with a sense of importance. She made us hold them in our hands, close our eyes, and feel their presence. She equated their rockdom to our humanity. So how can I just throw my rock away?

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I could leave it in the classroom, and maybe someone else will think it's their rock and take it with them. I could suck up the weight and keep it in one of my bags, as a talisman of my own uniqueness. I could take it with me to the park I've found where I walk Susan's dog and let her run free, off the leash, as she trots around devouring more smells than you or I will ever be able to imagine. I might do that. Take it there, throw it in the creek, and let it, through time, burrow into the sand and be washed even smoother by the water. And some small extension of myself will be there too, a tiny weight anchored to the world.

Quotation of the Day (I know, how bourgeois)

from The Once and Future King by T. H. White

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil hordes, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

(jdk6, since our Book Conversation I have made it my mission to read as many of the books on your bookpile that I've not yet read as possible. So far I've done The World According to Garp and am 1/4 through The Once and Future King.)

In Memoriam for the Bug

Yesterday my dad sold his 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, which he has had for all 38 of its years. He bought it new for $2,000, and sold it, 38 years used, for $2,000. And to think most cars depreciate in value.

He was pretty torn up about it. The reason he sold it is because he bought a truck, and there was room in neither the driveway nor the bank account to keep all of our cars. But can you imagine? Saying goodbye to something that has seen you through 2/3 of your life? Something that represents your entire youth? I'm sure some of you can, actually, with much more poignant examples than a car. But, so far in my innocent and lucky life, I can't.

In the dimming light of the last night the Bug would spend with us, we took family photos around the car. "You were almost born in this car, you know," my dad said. I did know, but had forgotten (those days of before-birth are but distant memories). On the coldest October night on record in Georgia, they drove in the Bug from Athens to Douglasville, several hours, where there was a hospital that offered midwives instead of doctors. They stopped at regular intervals for my mom to throw up. When I finally did come (I managed to wait for the hospital), the first thing I did was poo in my mom's hand. I came into the world with shit and bile, but also with love. And, as my dad points out, "If it wasn't for this car, you wouldn't be here."

He says that about a lot of things. If it weren't for his choosing my mother over the Most Beautiful Girl in All of France who picked him up while hitchhiking on his last days in Europe before grad school, if it weren't for his choosing not to visit the mainland while he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, on a routine courier flight that exploded over the Pacific, if it weren't for World War II, even, which brought my grandparents together, I wouldn't be here. Is it worth it, I wonder? Am I really so necessary to the world that WWII should have happened to bring about my existence? It's a scary burden to hang on unsure shoulders.

It's much easier just to think about the Bug, and how if it weren't for that, even if we were here we might be in totally different places. My dad, for instance, would have paid a lot more for mufflers over the years, having bought a lifetime-warranty Midas muffler for as long as he owned the car. All of us might have aged faster without that tie to younger, more carefree times. I've only felt sorrier for my dad when his mother died, and when various pets have died over the years. The Bug is far from dead, and will continue to please some other die-hard VW enthusiast, but that's part of what is so sad: to have to say goodbye, move on from something, to cut the cord yourself when what you are letting go is something you could be holding onto. Letting go of something before its time, and ending the era of your youth in doing it.