Who Needs an AR-15 When You've Got a Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet?

In the annals of adaptive re-use I propose that every home be equipped with cast iron skillets.  You can (if you are of that ilk) cook anything from a roast to vegetables to cornbread in them, and when your husband gets on your last nerve (as mine has) you can employ them as a disciplinary tool.  (I believe in corporal punishment for grown adults.)  Plus, even a good skillet costs far less than a good gun with all the ammo and licenses and camo.

I live in a state that is home to hunters.  All kinds of people hunt here.  Enjoy it.  Part of how they were raised.  yadda yadda.  I have no problem with any of that.  But where and why did all that morph into these Army of One nuts who sleep with one eye open because the government (and it's just a matter of time) is gonna get them?

In my limited experience, here's how the government of the US of A gets it's domestic enemies:

1.  RICO (racketeering) prosecutions,
2.  infiltration of organizations via wiretapping and informants thereby sowing the seeds of mistrust, e.g., COINTELPRO, and letting vanity, ego and paranoia do the rest,
3.  persistent and relentless auditing by the IRS.

By the time the gov'mint whips out their guns, most of the damage is done.

So what if you haven't paid all your taxes?  You just aren't that important, fella.  Your hypervigilance about your own personal safety makes me wonder what you are so afraid of?  But what is more worrisome to me than the kind of naivete that leads to thinking your door is the one getting kicked in at 4 am is the indifference of many of these folks to what we so quaintly used to call the common good. For them there are not even any arguable issues to be considered to balance the tension between individuals' possession (and use) of firearms and the safety of those who don't.  And yeah, I've read the 2nd Amendment and could spend the rest of my life reading the judicial decisions that have flowed from it over the past 200+ years, but this has long since escaped being a jurisprudential argument and has become something else.

And the Winner Is ....

I don't care about the Oscars.  I don't.  And it's not sour grapes.  I don't know if my indifference coalesced before I'd served on several award panels and saw up-close-and-personal how the sausage was made or if it happened because there were whole years of my adult life where I didn't see first-run films much less own a television or if it's just the fact that over the course of a life one loses interest in things whether it be Fashion Week, the novels of Jane Austen or bathing.  Just don't know.

But, I am endlessly fascinated by by social psychology, group psychology, and the political science of cultural institutions and events.  Here's what I think will happen -- either Steve McQueen will win Best Director and/or 12 Years A Slave will win Best Picture.  Both deserve honor on merit alone, but to borrow from Mae West, merit has nothing to do with it.  In this era where even a blind man can see that social inequality has broadened and hardened in this nation, why not make a grand and empty gesture to celebrate our American Redemption Story and Our Never-ending Struggle to Live Up to  Our Ideals.  With the added benefit that the film was an allegory set in the 19th century, and we are not like that now.  Are we?

Wise Voices in CT About Education

I was teaching in NYC schools when No Child Left Behind avalanched into American education.  For those of us who treasure creativity, novelty, self-teaching by exploration and an eclectic education the principles behind NCLB were alarming.  Many teaching artists were both alarmed and wary of what it would mean for our work.  The law and the school system's policies that followed from it fundamentally changed how and what we taught.  And our revolutionary and transgressive roles in school were diminished.

It didn't take long before many of us turned our backs on the work.  We would have left anyway.  You can only work so long as an itinerant artist-educator.  At some point you long for focussed commitment -- either to your art or the teaching.  But even if I'd stayed longer, my analysis and critique of educational policy would have been disregarded.  I had no juice.  But the people I'm linking to do have juice.  One is the legendary Dr. James Comer, whose work I'd known of since the 1980's and the other is the Superintendent of East Lyme, CT Schools, Dr. James Lombardo, interviewed yesterday on WNPR-FM's Where We Live.  Lombardo wrote to Governor Malloy, Education Commissioner Pryor and others in state government enumerating just how wrong the "reform" initiatives the state is pursuing are and the false premises that led to them.

I hope these voices are part of a tide being turned.  It may be too late for much of public education, but perhaps that's the point.  I sometimes wonder if urban public education has become like early 20th settlement work.  Upper class women, prior to their coming out balls that signified their ascension into society would work with The Poor.  They performed charity work that by no means upended the systemic order of things.  The status remained quo.

Anyway, the links:

 New Haven Independent interview the Dr. Comer, and

WNPR.org story on Dr. Lombardo's letter to Malloy et al.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part II

My friend, B, who is probably reading this, told me this story.  It resonated because I've had a similar experience.  My takeaway was that if you haven't lived most of your life or your entire life poor, then the how and why of getting there is complex, often involving some debilitating mental or physical illness, drug or alcohol abuse, headbangingly bad decision-making, a narcissism and neediness which exponentially increases as your natural assets decrease (some money, a job, good looks or merely one's youth, a family member or friend who unconditionally loves you, etc.).

B is living in the south for now, inhabiting the home of her deceased mother.  Like a banquet where none of the guests show up, the house is way, way to big for one person to live in and to manage.  In a mixture of empathy and practicality she allowed a woman, I'll call her Q, to move in.  In exchange for housing Q was to serve as an assistant and keep an eye on the house when B was out of town.

It worked for a while, and then it didn't when Q started stealing money from B's wallet and B caught her red-handed.  Understandably, B issued an ultimatum:  Get out.  Q refused perhaps knowing that state law was on her side, perhaps not.  My observation is that people like Q don't know the law, they know survival.  And they will do anything, ignore anything, and pretend anything to hold on to whatever it is that staves off extinction.  And so Q decided she was going to stay.  And B, faced with the month's long legal proceeding before eviction is allowed, tried an approach akin to detoxification, i.e., talking Q into moving in with a family member.  After all, Q had a brother, a sister, a child living in the same neighborhood.  But Q refused that and any alternatives, and B, realizing that as dysfunctional as families can sometimes be, by the time you have alienated your siblings and offspring, you really have reached the end of the line.

So B drove Q to the local shelter, even paying the $25 administrative processing fee (god bless the State!) to get her in.  And Q told the shelter that she would only need the assistance for 2-3 weeks because as far as she was concerned, B would settle down and let her back in.  Which wasn't true, of course, but what she had to believe as she watched B's car leaving her behind.

It's Hard to be Poor, Part I

Lately there have been a few news stories about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty now that it have reached its 50th milestone.  Until the moment I decided to write that sentence, it had never dawned on me that its advent coincides with Black History Month.  The convergence may be wholly accidental but it underscores something I've observed for a long time, that poverty and African-American-ness are used interchangeably as synonyms.

But, instead of exploring that today -- don't have the chops for a long, spit-hurling screed -- I'll tell two stories.  One involves me; the other, a friend:

I was in New York a few days ago.  As is true of my recent visits they are brief, specific and about business.  The day wasn't bitter cold but cold enough, so I was bundled up with my ersatz hunter's cap, mile-long scarf, big-collared winter jacket, and old Timberlands.  Perfect for the weather and normal for me.  As far as I was concerned, I didn't look any different that day than usual.  I should also mention that if it's not overcast I wear shades outdoors year-round; you can't see me seeing you.  That day, for whatever reason(s), people broke through my barriers -- the shades, the bundling -- and talked to me.  I was walking through the long station that is Courthouse Square.  Years ago you'd leave Grand Central on the 7 heading east, cross the East River, get a paper transfer, walk down a rickety steel and wood staircase, turn a corner and then present your transfer at the turnstiles for the G train.  It was a pain in the ass to execute and if you didn't do it often, you'd wind up wandering up and down the street looking for the subway entrance.  Some time (probably after I left the city) it all got connected and now you can transfer, under protection of a glass pavilion, between the 7 and the G which connect Manhattan, Queens and North Brooklyn.

I was heading back to Grand Central, glad that the meeting had gone well and was brief.  While marvelling (once again) about the ease of transfer, I was thinking that I could catch one of many trains before rush hour, so wasn't in any particular hurry.  Perhaps I was in a good mood, perhaps pleased with myself.  Either way I was free and heading home.  Next thing I know a skinny kid in a hoodie covered by a light jacket asks me if I can get him something to eat.

And I say, as I have in the past, would you like me to buy you a meal?  And he nods yes and I crook my head to indicate that I'll follow him and up the escalator, outside the station, around the corner, and across the street (underneath the BQE) we go.  Not a word.  We stop at the corner.  There's a bodega in front of us and a diner to our right.  He enters the bodega and goes through the store, returning to the counter with a can of iced tea.  I thought you wanted something to eat?  I didn't see where.  I'm struck by his candor and lack of greed.  This kid -- maybe 14 -- is hungry.  Hungry.  Grey from malnutrition and cold.  You don't hang out in a heatless pavilion in February begging for food if you don't have to.  We go outside.  I point to the diner.  There?  I point.  He's ambivalent.  He either can't see it because he needs glasses, or he doesn't want to go there because he has never in his life sat down and ordered from a menu, or he can't read.  Or all three.

The intersection before us gathers like Five Points.  We cross two streets to another bodega.  Almost every corner store worth its salt has a deli counter.  Why the first one we went into didn't is a mystery.  But this one does and he orders a Philly cheese steak.  I stand aside as he luxuriates in the power of having and exercising choice.  The clerk bags the sandwich and offers it to me because I'm the one with the wallet open.  I turn to the boy; for a moment the clerk is confused, but I wait for him to figure it out.  The boy steps up and the clerk gives him his food.  The boy thanks me and because of necessity and because when you're poor you learn to abdicate your dignity quickly and often he asks, in front of everyone, the important ask, the one for train fare to get home.  Oh.  Sure.  I say, handing him a few bills.  Then I leave.

Rumor Has It

... that it's Black History Month.  I forgot.  An easy thing to do when you're as untethered to any institution as I am right now (discounting the institution of marriage which knows no Black or White, or any Wrong or Right.)  You know I'm kiddin' about marriage, right?

Anyway, I finally copped on to the fact that it was time for our annual and peculiarly American malady, Racial Reaction Formation, when I started to read fascinating longform pieces that dealt with the history of 20th century American race relations in its many manifestations.  It's much on my mind as I prepare myself to enter what has become Ground Zero in American inequality, the nation's public schools.

Here's a link to Part I of Tanner Colby's multipart piece in Slate, The Massive Liberal Failure on Race, and yes, the title sounds like the clickbait it's supposed to be.  But, you know what?  I largely agree with what he's written.

A Gaggle of Geese, A Year of Elegies

Whatever I was determined to write about last night when I decided to write at all has passed through my mind faster than the V of geese on their way north.  (Perhaps to escape an unusually cold Atlanta?)  What remains is evidence of getting older, not the least of which is these bouts of forgetting.  In answer to someone who asked if I used to dance I started talking about salsa -- which I love and haven't danced since my first years here -- and it's cousin, mambo, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what to call it except that it started with an m.  This was mambo I was struggling to recall.  The passion for which caused me to get up at the crack 'o dawn each and every Saturday for years and take the 2 or 3 to Harlem, exiting at the 135th Street station and then around the corner to the legendary Y, exchange street shoes for dance shoes and dancing my ass off.  In studios, on gym floors.  In clubs.  And every once in a while on the street.  I needed mambo like peanut butter needs jelly.  And yet I couldn't recall the word.

Moving on.  It will be that way, for the immediate future and perhaps even for the future future.  (Other than in grammar there is no such thing as the future perfect.)  I have never been a fantasist (or at least don't consider myself one) but since I'm not going to remember things, might as well make them up, eh?  Or, at least try to remember the broad strokes of a life lived so long that I can point to a 40 year old crown in my mouth that now makes contact with a 24 hour crown, both of which better last me forever.

A year of elegies, I call this.  My friend, Fred, is dying.  He, who I had designated as the executor of my will 20 years ago, will not live long enough to do me the honor.  He's leaving before me, a result of Stage 3B colon cancer diagnosed 7 long years ago.  He, and any honest medical provider would tell you the same, should not be alive in 2014.  But he is and it has been grueling, magnificent, humbling, lonely, relentless, stupid, exhausting, infuriating, and tiring all at once.  Throughout most of the odyssey he kept a journal, the Cancer Diaries, which was published as a book by Skyhorse Publishing.  Not everyone, with or without cancer, can read it.  Much of it is too raw, too painful, too indicative of a fate from a disease that seems to say tag! you're it!  And we are superstitious creatures wondering if I read this will I get cancer, too?  But if you want to know some of what it's like to fight to live through searing pain and depression and hopelessness -- well, this may be the ticket.  Anyone who knows Fred knows he is one tough motherfucker and if you've been his friend or colleague for more than a minute, chances are you've been on the receiving end of his toughness.  But, he is also one of the most honorable and loving people I know.

As anyone who's gone through this with a friend or family member, there is dying and there is dying.    Fred's in the former stage, not the latter.  Which means that the, if not quite zest, but will to live is very strong.  Very strong.  He and many others will swim up from, literally, the depths of despair towards any and every kind of ameliorative treatment so that one more day -- even if it's flat on your back poised for the visitation of the roiling pain that tumors poaching your life force is -- of precious life.  So, we go on.  A drug here.  An definitive answer there.  A nap.  

There are two processes, excepting c-sections and suicide, that take their own damn time:  birth and death.  Make plans if you want to, but don't expect them to be followed according to your wishes.  The body will do what it wants to do.  We must make the most of time.

I Got Nothin'

As you may have surmised, the interlude between posts has almost everything to do with the fact that I am not writhing in the crucible of Mathematics these days.  By comparison, the things I consider on a daily basis -- death and taxes -- haven't driven me mad enough to post.  Or more accurately, they are both too personal to post about.  Yet.

So, not much in the bloggage department, but in that way I'm not much different than the bloggers I follow.  The scandals come.  The scandals go.  The President has a SOTU speech?  Well, suh, as my grandmother used to say.

It has been a bitter season.  Short of a pair of snow pants I have enough coat hat glove sweater scarf boots to protect me and even I have found excuses not to go out much.  My gym membership has lapsed and I haven't picked up anything heavier than a carton of half 'n half for a month.  By choice and aptitude I am at home a lot pushing the peas of creative ideas around my plate.  I spend my time trying to stay ahead of the freezing cold which infects our plumbing so that there has been many a morning where you can't flush if you wanted to.  I share my yard with a very hairy skunk.  Just like me its coat has become thicker and whiter, but at least I don't fart when I'm terrified.  So, if we are in the yard at the same time (even at night I can spot her traipsing around on the snow) I cut her a wide berth and she extends me the same courtesy.  Occasionally she gets into it with a friendly neighborhood feral cat and I'll be sitting here watching some British thriller (my preferred oeuvre du jour) while trying to filter out the hissing, howling, banging and scratching right behind me.  If I ever hear shots fired I'll call Animal Control, but until then let the best mammal win.

This Just In ....

... I can not, repeat, can not do math.  Trying to do a quilting project that involves working on a 20" x 20" square.  Ya following me?  I measure, cut, and painstakingly stitch 1" strips of fabric onto the 4 squares that would be combined to make the aforementioned big square.  So far.  So good.  Strips go on.  Strips are pressed flat.  Four squares are combined.  I hold up the result.  Uhmmmm, I sez to m'self, this looks kinda small.  Being the genius that I am I measure the final product.  I had created a 11" square because I had originally cut 6" blocks.

Just shoot me.  Or similar sentiments ifya know what I mean.  How stupid can I get?  I don't even want to find out frankly.  Perhaps the only wise thing I've done in the past few weeks is to decide not to enroll in yet another mental labyrinth with no exit which is what higher level mathematics courses have become for me.  I need a respite from abject failure for a while.  I need to have time to screw up a simple sewing project or read a book before the local library sets a bounty for my arrest for late returns.  I need some time to take stock of a life that will certainly include death, taxes and replacing a major appliance or computer.  Life, in other words, I need some time for life.

Almost unbeknownst to me I have crossed a threshhold.  In a few months I will be on the other side of 60 but I feel it deeply already.  More friends than ever are telling me about the birth of their grandchildren.  I am amused, sometimes amazed at the changes in my body.  Unwelcome hair everywhere and always another test to take to rule out cancer or another serious disorder.  You learn, or you better learn, to live with uncertainty:  your body is more your antagonist than your glory, and you don't know when your ticket will be punched, but punched it will be.

So, get on with it, you tell yourself.  I spend a lot of time these days looking back.  The past looks more interesting than the future.  Gleaning my personal experience and others for answers, for guidance, for meaning.  And, now out from under the yoke of all-math-all-the-time, the imperative to write has surged in like water through an opened sluice gate.

All of this to say that at least for 5 months, I won't be whining (at least not about math) and there will not be any blood splatter on the monitor as I try to prove the infinity of ∏.   My plan is to do a self-study of linear and abstract algebra -- okay, I'll wait while you snort through your nose -- but like working out at home it's far too easy to jettison self-imposed deadlines and projects.  We all know it, but that's the plan.

Women of a Certain Art: Simi Linton & INVITATION TO DANCE - Trailer 2013

   Long ago in a shining city far away I made an opera with Bill T. Jones and Leroy Jenkins.  While doing that I met two of the artists who danced in the piece,  Edisa Weeks and Homer Avila.  We became friends.  Then years later Homer Avila introduced me to his friend, disability activist, scholar, dancer and memoirist, Simi Linton.  Then Simi and I became friends.  We used to see a fair amount of each other.  In Central Park and Koreatown.  Then she started making a movie.  And I moved here.  Our 3D relationship is now 2D.  But whatcha gonna do?  Above is the trailer for Simi and Christian von Tippelskirch's work.

Check out the blog, Invitation to Dance, and look for the film to premiere in 2014.

I Shot A Man In Tucson

Well, not really.  But one of these days someone will walk up to me while I'm buying coffee for my milk and confess to me that they did that very thing just to watch him die ....  This has been going on since I was prepubescent:  strangers seek me out and tell me things.  You'd think after 19 years in New York where averting one's gaze is the penultimate survival strategy that it would stop.  But, it didn't and it hasn't.  And to this day people come to me having decided I have or am the answer to their question or I'm the one they want to tell It to and they proceed to tell me.  So, I am in the supermarket the day after Thanksgiving.  It seems crazy to be shopping after having spent 2 days cramming the refrigerator with all manner of great American foods -- turkeys, brussels sprouts, peas, mashed potatoes the size of salt domes, yams, pies and pies and more pies.  And here I am with a-tisket a-tasket and little purple basket picking up milk (which, frankly, I don't like) and half 'n half (which I'd sell my firstborn to have).  And this lady and I cross paths in front of a display of toilet paper and she says to me out of the blue, "I ain't nevah gonna get that stuff again it take a whole roll to wipe your butt."  And then she marched off to find frozen green beans, I guess.

My eyes don't even widen anymore.

And how was your Thanksgiving?  Mine?  I let go a bit.  Didn't polish the silver (hee hee).  Didn't make any noises about cooking.  (I made some stuffing a la hockey puck last year.)  Just cleaned house, set the table, made runs to the train station and politely consumed my usual measure of "My mother wasn't...." "My sister isn't... " My wife doesn't...." that is my gruel for being the starting point of a Hasse diagram called My Family.  I've survived what has been a debilitating 2 weeks as I nearly threw in the towel and quit studying math, met with a dying friend who is finished fighting, medicated myself through a head cold so I could take Exam IV, and waited for the check to clear.  Things are the same but better now.  I go on.

What keeps me going?  Music from Mozart to Gregory Porter to Shostakovich to Drake.  Friends near and far.  They carry my history; they are my memory.  Children being their beautiful delicious selves.  Art and the need to create.  Waking up in each morning to start again.  Being in the presence of those who are deeply religious (not pious, but religious) and spiritual.  And love.  In all things love.
 

With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies?

In a fit a sodden pique, I stomped my foot to alarm the skunk who was probably fighting with one of those 15 lb. feral cats who visit my yard.  I made the skunk who lives behind and underneath my office both scared and mad.  S/he has registered her/his displeasure by employing the nuclear option.  I am sitting here listening to Drake's "Hold On We're Going Home" as the stench leaks into my office.  It has been that kind of week.

Cuthbert, who has never had any liking for me going back to school, has seized upon my despair of ever getting abstract algebra into my brain to berate me for doing this instead of travelling the world (with him, I suppose) ordering 3rd world people around while the dollar is strong.  And my oldest, in an attempt not to be burdened with a wheelchair-bound drooling misanthropic and senile mother, lectured me on how I should be making sure our property in New York was profitable and chastising me for going back to school instead of being the next Conrad (not Paris) Hilton, because going back to school at your age is a fool's errand because you know, she said, nobody's going to hire you.

What's a mother to do?  I went to the gym.  On a Friday night it is pretty damn empty, and I lifted weights while bopping to Drake, who has now displaced La Beyoncé as the pop artist whose music I am obsessively fixated on.

And, too.  There will be a time when Xtian or Chinese anthropologists will write about the current obsession with Jackie's pink brain-splattered suit as the English and American scions of the elite wrote about the strange and quaint customs and folkways of the Africans, the South American Indians, the Pacific Islanders, the Japanese, the ancient Egyptians, and so on and so forth.  Maybe even hang it in one of their national museums.  Yeah, I was alive in 1963, and I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing when Kennedy was assassinated, but Americans please, give it a rest.

Over and out.

I Want Someone Who Looks Like Me

The first truly competitive New Haven mayoral race in almost 20 years is over.  I have not written much about it deliberately.  A couple of post-election observations:

1.   I've always considered New Haven a very conservative town.  Not just in comparison to NYC, but also I suspect from its cultural DNA -- Yankees, African-American agrarians, relatively new South American immigrants, the traditional white ethnic Catholic settlers.  There's an aspect of "wait your turn" in so much of what happens here and we've just elected a 65 year old mayor (which to me is a more significant factor than her gender or her race -- which I'll get to in a minute).  I will say about her what I say about myself:  at this age much of one's energy is spent overriding resistance to change.  We can learn new things and we can do new things, but our willingness to do so is much less than before.  (An enduring difficulty studying math at my age is an asinine conviction that there's no more room in my brain for new material and enough skill at rationalization to convince myself that it's true.  Some people call that the Devil; I call it self-defeating.)  We have elected someone who will probably be a caretaker Mayor, an incrementalist or gradualist.  I hope there is room in her dynasty for younger, innovation-focused risk takers.

2.  My second point is the oft-repeated remark I hear from other African Americans:  I want someone who looks like me.  That has never set well with me.  Perhaps because before it was fashionable I was raised in what's now called a multicultural environment, a university town with students from all over the world.  But that was in the context of growing up in Iowa that even in the 1970's was 98% white and 2% colored.  Even if I wanted to be with S.W.L.L.M. my mother would have to drive me to Cedar Rapids (where we got our hair done) or Des Moines.  All of that to say, it usually wasn't possible.  Instead, through good experiences and bad, I learned that race or ethnicity has little to do with character.

Now, I'm not so obtuse that I don't understand what my friends and colleagues are saying.  In the pecking order of these United States, African Americans have been brutally short-changed in occupying the higher rungs of the social and occupational ladder.  So much so that symbolic achievements such as a gorgeous brown girl becoming Miss America contain as much value as a brilliant and gifted brown-skinned once-in-a-lifetime politician becoming president of the country.  They get conflated.  And it makes us feel good, salves the wounded collective ego, holds at bay the doubt and shame until the next Young Black Male performs some egregious crime that shocks the nation or a Young Black Woman (who should know better ) comports herself in a way that makes her indistinguishable from a street prostitute.  It is as if we are connected via our umbilical cords and their guilt is our shame; their triumph is our success.

Given that, while Toni Harp being Mayor-Elect of New Haven is laudable, the symbolic significance of her election and of her subsequent tenure can too easily overshadow any clear-eyed assessment of her strengths and weaknesses as a legislator, and soon-to-be chief executive.

When we so readily set the bar at S.W.L.L.M. then we allow ourselves to valorize and excuse all manner of bad behavior including criminality,  (cf.  Marion Barry, Kwame Kilpatrick, William Jefferson, O.J. Simpson, R. Kelly to name a few).  More commonly we excuse mediocrity as if race or gender sufficiently makes up for it, (cf. Jesse Jackson -- father and son).  All I'm saying is that race triumphalism often trumps actual accomplishment and character.  Just because there have been (and will always be) white hacks doesn't mean that I want to be unjustifiably proud of and an uncritical defender of African-American hacks.  Because that says to me that deep down we don't believe we can do or have better than that.

One of the many reasons I've eager to teach is that I know role models are valuable.  (Someone wrote that you can't be what you can't see, which is pithy and memorable, but, eh, not really true.)  I used to do Career Day at my oldest daughter's school.  I would have the children guess my occupation.  Teacher.  Social Worker.  Token booth clerk.  Nurse.  That's what we -- African-American women -- do, right?  It would surprise them when I said artist, writer because I was probably the first professional of that type they'd met and certainly the first African-American one.  So, I get it.  The shock of the new can open up worlds for kids who are isolated by poverty and a homogenous culture.  But this world that these children are entitled to is not made up of people who look like them.  It is made up of people good, bad and everything in between, some of whom look like them, many of whom do not.  And the sooner they learn to learn from, to know, to work with and to negotiate and interact with all the everyones, the better off they'll be.

I fully intend to be a very good math teacher.  But, if someone who doesn't look like me comes along who can do better by my students than I can, that's the teacher those students deserve.  Nothing less.

Get the F#*@(!ck Out of Here You Asshole

And thus that's how my yesterday began.  I was in my office (as I usually am) at 9 in the morning taking my weekly blood pressure reading.  (I kid you not.)  At that time in the morning, day workers are gone, kids have been picked up for school, the block is very quiet.  I glance up to see a skinny hoodie standing in my back yard looking at my bicycle.  I bust out the door sans shoes (which I leave outside) and scream, "Get the F#*@(!ck Out of Here You Asshole!" and in my stocking feet take off after the kid who, mirabile dictu, was long gone before I could get to the end of the driveway.

It is rare that my Inner Tigress comes out.  That has always been so; I can be preturnaturally passive and I know it.  In the last 20 years my aggression has mostly been wasted on take-no-prisoner arguments with Husband No. 1.  (A futile enterprise if ever there was one.)  Anyway, she surged yesterday morning and I hope I made that kid shit his pants a little bit and tell his buddies to stay out of that yard because that old lady will Fuck.  You.  Up.

It wasn't about the bicycle.  I've lost more things from theft and carelessness than many people have owned.  It was the the presumptuousness of coming into my domain without my explicit permission.

I am not in the mood.

A Tragedy's Second Anniversary Without Press Coverage

Exactly two years and a few days ago there was a shooting in a house 2 doors down from us.

I remember it being fairly early in the evening, schoolkids were still up and the air was cool.  We neighbors came out to see what was going on.  Was it a shot we heard?  A voice yelling?  The police arriving as they do, driving the wrong way on our one-way block?  At first we knew little, but when you see EMT's strolling instead of trotting, you know for whoever it is, it is too late.  Many, many years ago that section of the house was a candy store, when this was part of a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood.  That evening it became a crime scene, a tear in the fabric of a city becoming known more for its young male homicide rate than its universities.

The dead one was a 13 year old boy.   He was shot in the head.  By a friend.  In a house that seemed to be connected like adjoining hotel rooms.  There is not much more that I know as fact:  his killer was 18 years old at the time and ran away, leaving behind the other witness, a young man who lived there.  The killer turned himself in and as could be expected, lied to the police (and probably himself).  The newspapers and TV stations lost interest after all the salaciousness was squeezed out of the story -- the boys' ages, the quiet street, the speculation about where and how a gun wound up in the room, the entreaties for money to bury a child.  After a few days there was only a tiny TV reporter in a cheap pantsuit standing alongside the antennaed van, shivering in the late October sun waiting for someone who wanted to be the center of attention at all costs to come outside so she could make her bones.

I'd written here previously about what happened last October.  Since then the family that was living in the house moved out -- traumatized, a little heartbroken, ashamed.  The original charge of murder was revised to manslaughter, and 2 years to the day that it happened the boy's mother and family and still very young friends gathered outside the house to remember him.  Where else can they go?  It is the one place on the planet that they are certain he was at, because this is where he died.  So, a small group gathered to light candles and tie balloons around a street sign, and not say much at all.  As each person left she thanked them for coming.  Then more kids would arrive to pay their respects, walking that cool night across Legion and Frontage from The Hill.  No cops, no press, no curious neighbors.  Just a woman enduring the longest night of her life, her remaining children and family including a couple of toddlers too young to remember, and a handful of teenagers crying.

Each night someone has been lighting the memorial candles.  And then that will end and the balloons will wither in the cold air.  And then that boy's mother will count the days until she must come back.  I plan to be there with her again.

Saturday Poetry: Noon

I was reading

on the teaching of poetry

and it galvanized me into

being consonant, too.

I believe in the word

and I love it as I do her.

Breaking the morning’s regimen

I stop reading and start writing these poems.

It has to be done:

Commemorate

life’s entropic beauty.

Saturday Poetry: Where the Title References Itself and Is Longer Than the Verse

Dear Lord,
Have mercy on this poor soul.
I am studying math and
the more I learn the less I know.
Selah.

I feel like one of Beckett's hapless creatures.  Wandering the campus muttering, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."  Seriously, folks.  This course is Killing Me™.    My weekend Times pile up.  The days shorten and the leaves fall.  I don't return phone calls.  Anniversaries come and go.  I see nothing; I know even less.

I'm getting desperate here, people.  Might start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a boob job.  (I have my scruples -- maybe I'll just have one done.)  I used to sneer at people who complained about The Hawk in Chicago.  Then I spent an October long ago working there.  As far as I'm concerned, the wind off of Lake Michigan violates human rights.  And there were my parents' friends, the doctoral students, complaining about Statistics.  They have my full sympathy now.

That is all. 

Going To the Motherland This Weekend

No, silly.  I'm not going to Africa (which, ehem, is not a country) but to New York which is why I'm writing today because I will not be sitting in some Wi-Fi'd cafe cracking out words tomorrow.  And I haven't written for a couple of weeks because when one is having one of many Mathematics-Dark-Night-of-the-Soul™ moments, there is nothing to say that doesn't begin and end with:  {Shit.  Shit.  Shit.}  Math joke, so close your eyes:  The aforementioned set is a vector space under the standard operations.

I realize now that acquisition of knowledge is elastic.  Mathematics is vast, worlds-within-worlds and all that, and one of my seminal problems is knowing what to learn and knowing what I should be able to know at this level of training.  Also, many of us who do math got our start as computers and calculators:  We are good at arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and gasp, even calculus.  And we pride ourselves on cranking through numbers and equations and deriving The Answer.  But the skills that got us that far are less important with higher level math.  It is about conceptualization:  One has to think.  To be able to "embrace" realities that one cannot see or physically produce, e.g., R4, a vector space.  And then perform operations on it as if it were in front of you.  That, as you can imagine, can take some doing.

Yesterday's impending exam, with me being 2 quizzes behind and completely mystified, forced me to look at the work differently.  I listened to what the professor deemed important, and it was to know the theorems and lemmas that make the foundation for the study of vector spaces, linear independences, bases, representations of bases, and so on.  If, he seemed to infer, you understand the principles, then you'll see how they need to be applied to the problems.  I followed his lead and approached each problem (those I could solve and those I couldn't) with the question:  what is it that we are suppose to determine?   And also told myself that, hey, whatever I know by Thursday, I know.  I can't speed up this process.

Those 2 things seemed to have opened the door for me.  I finished studying Wednesday evening before 9 pm, and spent the next day doing paperwork, housework, cooking.  Anything but math.  The object was to relax and to hoard my energy to focus on the evening's exam.  I showered, dressed and went to campus 2 hours early.  Ours, unlike Yale's, is not a beautiful campus.  It has some beautiful buildings, but everything else about it is as imaginative as a new suburb.  Nevertheless, I hung out in the Adanti Center, with it's vast windows and simply let my mind wander while watching 19 and 20 year olds and cars go by.  Eating pasta with pesto, chillin'.  As I told Cuthbert this morning the one place I didn't want to spend a lot of time in was the landing a few feet from our classroom where we students wait for the professor to unlock the door.  The tension, the anxiety is palpable.  So, I arrived there a few minutes early, closed my eyes and just meditated.  And I took the exam, using almost every minute he gave us, enjoyed the hell out of it and call myself ready to climb the next mountain.

That's enough of that.  Going to see my friends' work:  Magdalena Goméz's, Dancing In My Cockroach Killers, and Fred Ho's, The Sweet Science Suite.  Hot.  Diggity.  Ciao.

 

Obamacare or Nobody Gets Out of This One Alive

Remember this day all you Chicken Littles.

The World As We Know It™ is coming to an end.  At least according to those who think broad-based mandatory health insurance coverage is an awful thing.

Two things I do know:

1.  Nobody, no body stays young and healthy forever.  And I don't care how much echinacea you quaff.

2.  In theory not having insurance seems like an wonderful idea until either you have a major medical calamity or illness.  (cf.  Doctor, Will I Be Able to Play the Thumb Piano Ever Again?)

Like abortion, you can be against it if you want.  And then you find yourself pregnant for all the wrong reasons.

Now back to Give Me Linear Independence or Give me Death!

Saturday Poetry: This Is Where That Teacher Got Shot

Time?  I don't have any.  So, another poem from Turn Left At the Dead Dog.  It's based on the 1992 murder of a beloved Brooklyn principal, Patrick Daly, who got shot in crossfire in Red Hook.
  

This, she told me

pointing with an acrylic nail

her lucky charms colliding like teenagers in love

is where that teacher died.

Some hoodlums shooting at each other.

You know, sometimes I think I seen them

coming out of the projects

They’re the ones laughing cause they never get caught.

But God knows

God always knows.

Rest that poor man’s soul.

Annie’s wand swipes the humid air

and makes those hoodlums their bullets the projects

and that early autumn day disappear for

that poor man, rushing back to school

with treats to surprise his kids when

the crimson buzz of a lonesome mosquito

bit him like it was personal

and he went down.

Look.

Go away she means.

I wish --

oh I know it’s a sin, a mortal sin --

but, I wish that their mothers had gotten rid of them

the minute their red-headed aunt didn’t come.