Got Me A 1-Way Ticket on the Crazy Train

Much to my surprise instead of being enervated by the wagon load that is my life:  work school marriage I am frighteningly energized, or at least my mind is.  In my mind I'm running an 8-minute mile, I'm gonna live forever and I'm not a day over 40.  This may be because I'm on my last physical self-improvement project, carving off the 30+ surplus pounds I've carried for years.  Diet.  Exercise.  Good-bye, Dewar's Red Label.  I feel better, much better, and am always in need of a mountain to climb anyway and this one (weight loss and fitness) is as good as any while I as slowly finish my education training.

That and a moratorium on listening to the news.  Even Trump bores the shit out of me.  The Democratic presidential field is so packed I'll pay attention to the race once it thins.  The awfulness of the world is beyond my control, and a certain amount of attention paid to it results in paralysis, not action.  I try to compensate by applying myself better to my job and to my New Haven work.

All the above a partial explanation to being on the crazy train, a ride I haven't taken for years, but it's real:  moments of clairvoyance (I kid you not) interspersed with moments of transgression.  I have to think twice before I blurt shit out.  As I write this, part of it is that the freak that I left behind in New York wants to come out and play, and I'm indulging her a bit.  May not be healthy for others but she and I are having a blast.  What's the point of hiding?  Many many posts ago I wrote that I was shoveling litter over my shit as I slowly positioned myself to be hired to work in public education.  The plan's still on but if someone doesn't want to hire me because I am coarse vulgar opinionated and can't be trusted to toe the party line, well color me lucky.  It's a door shut, door open world.

As as I have been saying about Nancy Pelosi and her showdown with Donald J. Trump, forget all that fancy-pants analysis.  She's a 76 year old woman who raised 5 children.  If she ever told one of them chillen that if they did not bend to her will, she was going to kill them, you best believe she would follow through on that threat.  (Parenting Tip No. 3,458:  Don't go nuclear unless you mean it.)  And literally, the woman has no fucks left to give.

What's so lovely about all this is that I'm hiding in plain sight.

And things of that nature

If I were a diligent blogger I'd:

1) change the look of my blog at least once a year
2) blog regularly

but I'm not.  And I don't.
Many reasons -- some existential some practical.

The existential.  I became a writer for the reason most writers became writers.  To be seen and heard.  And to make sense of my self.  Now at 64 I can say, as at least 2 presidents of these united states have declared, "mission accomplished".  Not to say that it's been all psychotherapy.  Between bouts of confessional poetry I've written some theater work and some short stories some essays and some po-ems that will stand the test of time.  (Remember my name remember my name remember my name.)

The other reason?  I am heading towards work in Le Public Sector and like a cat shoveling dirt over my feces, I am covering my digital tracks.  I must appear to be a woman of rectitude after all these long years as an accidental bohemian-without-portfolio.  Those who knows me now that would imagine I've said and done the things I've said and done?  Almost with no regrets; I am as much an anthropologist of my own life and behaviors as I am as others.  The life of a writer is defined by the habit of detachment.  (I'm sure there's an exquisite French word to describe the state of living one's life while observing one's life.  But, I dunnah know it.)

I am slowly, inexorably being sculpted into being a teacher and with that, at least in the tradition that I know and respect it means modeling an exemplary life for my future students.  I am going undercover; forging a persona, a way of being that I've had these 10 years in New Haven to practice and perfect.  And what is that you may ask?

I love that I've been un-blogging for so long that it will be perfect strangers and not friends who may stumble across this entry.  This is my equivalent of the confession to strangers when you're in transit.  It is sometimes, perhaps always easier to talk to someone you'll never see again.  Or perhaps that's just me and my love of the arc of a story.  One and done.  Unlike how one has to talk with spouses and therapists.  But, I digress.

So, my persona, you ask?  I am gray.  I am old.  I am sexless.  Harmless.  Thick waisted.  No longer subject to raging passions.  Safe.  Assumed, if not known.  Free to be radical, because I am invisible.  Thick-waisted.  Slope breasted.  Old.  Old.  Old.  Odds of leaving this mortal coil are high -- whoot whoot.  I can excuse every faux pas, every crazy utterance as nascent dementia, if need be.  Or, I can be firmly grounded in the World of the Sane.  My choice.

I am working in a public school now.  I leaped at the chance to tutor to see what it's like and to put what I've learned into practice.  I am working with 7th and 8th graders and I love it.  These little animals are on the cusp of the the adults they were be and yet still moldable.  They are beautiful in their varied ways, both children and little adults.  And I delight when we have an chance to unlock the mysteries of writing or math.  I am struck how much genuine affection students have for each other.  I don't think it's a function of the school's culture (although I may be wrong) but the clusters, the groupings in class and out are nothing short of amazing.  There are, of course, the outliers, the misfits, the prey, but much less than you'd think given our attention to "very fine people" and such.  There is hope, that a polity can be forged that will take on the work of liberty and justice for all.

Anyway, I'll be lookin' for a job in the local school system in a couple of years.  (Beats playing golf.)  And I must be straight.  This has been a game I've played since 1983 when I was climbing the non-profit ladder in DC.  I lasted about 2 years before I involuntarily cracked, quit and embarked on the life of the poet.  (Words no poet ever says:  The next round's on me.)  Couldn't stay straight for long then, and now must stay straight enough to get a gig in a conservative milieu so I can do the subversive work of educating the next generation.

Oh the life of a crone.  It's a great thing.  But, I miss dancing, I do admit.

So, to my 5 Russian readers and to any hapless folks who read this, adieu until the next dispatch from my middle age.

Thought I'd Drop By ....

So.  For reasons simple and not, I've not posted here in four months.  Part of me dislikes even this much exposure (20 eyeballs reading a post) and to come back now is to get away with something.  It's akin to singing in the shower, dancing in your room, you get the idea, right?

But having defined myself as a writer; a writer has to write.

So.

I am in throes of my still wonderful job, and four classes away from student teaching.  I am working in a K-8 school for a few hours a week as I continue to process of "putting my money where my mouth is."  If things go as planned (cough) in a couple of years I will end my formal work life teaching in a school.  I will make a reluctant good-bye to my Yale colleagues and the work itself, and drew on everything I've known, been, studied, and attempted, and failed at to help some yet unmet children over the massive turnstile that is American inequality.  And then I'll quit that, too, and officially be retired.

I am finally thinking of life-after-work.  Don't want to travel.  Don't want to golf.  Ain't got no grandkids.  And a dream house is just another house that needs to be cleaned.  All I want, I confessed to a couple of friends, is to live long enough to use up my stash of material.

This is what it's like (at least for me) to round the corner to Official Old Age.  As usual, my physical body preceded my mind.  It's so damaged that even throwing off a duvet in the morning to get up to pee counts as exercise.  If a fire broke out in the morning I would be toast.  Just can't move that fast after having been horizontal for hours.  Oh well.  I'm still here.  And still committed to ameliorating what I've done to my body, and what my body has done to me.  That's a good sign -- it means that I intend to be vital longer.  But, if I've learned anything as I've aged, it is that to increase the odds of vitality one has to work (hard) at it.  It means that every day a significant amount of time is devoted to exercise -- for cardiovascular health, for strength, and for the cursed case of plantar fasciitis which began in my right foot and now includes my left.  (Pause for profanity.  Were I a quadriped it would be in all four feet, for sure.)  I am to get as used to those rituals as an insulin-dependent diabetic is to the needle.  Not that old age is a chronic disease, but as far as I'm concerned it must be engaged like one.  Daily effort; constant vigilance.

Between the last time I posted and today have been plenty of trials and tribulations, shoes dropped and so on.  At the turn of the New Year I took stock and although I hate to be made a liar by making resolutions on January 1st, I did it anyway.

This is the journey back.  Day at a, meal at a, task at a time.

George Packer's Rebuttal to Ta-Nehisi Coates

For your consideration:  What Ta-Nehisi Coates Gets Wrong About American Politics.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (once again) Knocks It Out of the Park

If I had been able to, this is what I wished I could write to explain my bitterness, my sense of betrayal and wariness and living behind enemy lines that I've felt since the election.  Somewhere in an earlier post I told the story of my blurting out to a co-worker after hearing another co-worker insist that we all read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, "I don't owe those crackers shit," and how tired -- so very tired -- I am of the assumption that the working class that the press writes about and opines about is the white working class, as if American blacks in particular are only jobless ghetto-dwellers or former presidents of the United States.  Coates dissects the edifice upon which much analysis and understanding of Trump, who he defines as "The First White President," is based.

A Vacation Reply

I have been out of school since the end of June.  (And what an ending it was -- finishing the last of the coursework while sitting in airports as I flew to California to celebrate a friend's 90th birthday.)  Ordinarily being out of school is license for writing.  As in:  my workday went from 10 hours to 8, let's blog!  But I just haven't felt like it.

And, yes, like any other person who was horrified and outraged by Trump's election, there's plenty to write about.  Daily.  But I haven't.  Despite the fact that the hits just keep on comin'...

Tomorrow I fly to Amsterdam.  I have been bitching more than usual that I would rather just stay home and quilt and pull up weeds, but when you are married to a European who believes a 5 week vacation is a human right, well let's just say that refusing to leave home is not an option.  This evening will be chasing down electronics, books, clothes, meds, lotions and cremes enough to keep me for a couple of weeks.  Never been to Amsterdam.  I hear there's art.

Apropos all things political/cultural, one of the blogs I read is Rod Dreher's at The American Conservative.  I probably started reading TAC during Obama's first run, following the work of Daniel Larison who's beat is foreign affairs, and have stayed ever since.  Dreher is a big deal in the conservative world, and a joke to many liberal lefties -- both assessments have merit.  I mostly read the blog for the subject matter -- American cultural mores as seen through the eyes of a Southern (Louisiana-born), orthodox Christian; and for the commentary, commbox, as I've learned it's called.  The commenters are often well trained in theological and philosophical discourse, so that even if I disagree -- and I do, a lot -- it's worth engaging.  Some commenters are astounding to me for their callousness, paranoia and racism.  And I'm no virgin to the ways of white folks having grown up in Iowa.  (One of these days I'll write a pamphlet:  "Shit Those Crackers Said".)  But man, even for someone like me who's seen, heard and endured a lot, some of those folks can get ugly, and they ain't playin'.

Nevertheless, this armchair traveler always winds up at Dreher's house.  I wanted to publish what I thought was a particularly thoughtful and cogent rebuttal to one of his recent posts, "The Curse Of Identity Politics".  

EngineerScotty says:

August 13, 2017 at 3:52 pm

And if you were to ask the ghost of Josef Goebbelsm he’d happily give you reasons why the Final Solution was ultimately the Jews’ own fault. I’m not at all comparing you to him (or to any other Nazi), but you can only summon demons that are there.

And this notion that the resurgence of overt white nationalism in our politics is primarily the fault of Democratic identity politics–the “they pushed us too far!” theory–is utter horse manure.

Identity politics was not something invented by the modern-day cultural left, either last year, or ten year ago, or fifty. The term has only recently entered the mainstream political lexicon, but it has been with us–good and bad–since before the founding of the Republic.

Identity politics, of a sort, was used to justify the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of Native Americans; both of which were held to be inferior to the white man and thus unworthy of full humanity, let alone civic inequality.

Identity politics fueled Jim Crow. When George Wallace remarked that he had been “out-ni**ered” in a political campaign, and vowed it would never happen again, it was both an acknowledgement that white supremacy was the political currency of the realm at that time place, and a promise not to be outspent.

And yes, identity politics of a sort fueled the civil rights movement. The difference between Dr. King and his opponents (and the difference between Dr. King and the various black nationalists of his time) is that he was seeking equality, not supremacy.

Right-wing media has been engaged in a constant stream of identity politics for the past thirty years–ever since Morton Downey Jr. discovered it was profitable to invite the Louis Farrakhans of the world on his to be ridiculed by an audience of hootin’ and hollerin’ working class folk, who would never fit in Donahue. (Farrakhan, for his part, enjoyed the exposure of mouthing off on national TV–even if he was essentially starring in a minstrel show–and Downey would later show quite a bit of regret before he died). Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Malkin, and the rest all studiously avoid the N-word, but nobody is fooled as to what they are talking about.

And of course, the election of Barack Obama dropped the contents of the Augean Stables into a rather large fan. Having an African-American president, no matter his actual politics, seemed to awaken something terrible in a whole lot of people. Long before Trump entered the political scene, things were being said in our national politics that we hadn’t heard for a generation.

The problem is, the fight for equality isn’t entirely over, even if the vast majority of the legal barriers were torn down last century. You may righteously vent all you like about trivia like “SJW”s objecting to bad sushi, or about campus arguments over which pronoun to use, or about “cultural appropriation”, and such–and I would be sympathetic–but many of the issues advanced by the broader left, such as police brutality, or continued discrimination in housing and employment, are nottrivialities, not petty concerns of woke yuppies who have little to fear from the law or anyone else, and are secure in their own homes and careers.

And yet this blog–and many other parts of the conservative media sphere–routinely conflate legitimate grievances, which still very much exist, with the obnoxious behavior of petty campus revolutionaries.

The left certainly has a share of the blame. But the rise of the “alt-right” ultimately remains the responsibility of the mainstream right, which for the past thirty years has tried to ride the tiger of white resentment to electoral victory–and now finds itself dinner.

This. When asked (not that I am) why I don't get enthused about quixotic campaigns (see Nader, Ralph, 2004; Sanders, Bernie, 2016) it's largely because I've been an eyewitness to the political re-alignment that's been going on since Carter lost his bid for re-election and have known for a long time how reactionary this country can be.  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  They.  Ain't.  Playin'.  Enter stage right, Donald J. Trump.

I Come From A Long Line of Mediocre Cooks

This morning I am thinking about my grandmother who was an indifferent cook, and my mother who was like her in that way, and now me.  So, I come by my aversion honestly.  But, the American Egoist™ in me wants to constantly improve, do better, is convinced that one day I'll get this cooking thing right.  Or die trying where you'll find me standing at the stove in my apron.  (Heh.)  Yes, the semester is coming to the end and I can imagine a life that's comprised of more than hoovering up black strokes on white paper trying to coerce my 63 year old working memory to hold on to this pleez for a few more weeks.  And so thoughts turn to food and gardening and quilting.

Last Sunday I thought it was Saturday, which is why I posted Saturday Poetry without irony, and without realizing the mistake until I was jumping up and down in my own kitchen arguing with Cuthbert and Kim that "No, it's not Sunday.  It's Saturday and I have another day!!!"  Alas, they were right and I was wrong, and it was good I found out when I did instead of not showering or showing up for work as is my habit on the weekend.

I like food.  I really do.  But I have not yet made an enduring bond between my like and appreciation and the production of such.  I've written before and I'll write again about looking at cookbooks, being inspired, knowing much of what there is to know about the connections between good nutrition and good health.  I'm old enough (and beat up enough) to know that my survival depends on what and how much I consume from here on out.  I am in awe of cooks; I love to watch people being fed well and with love.  I love the sound of infants eating because they eat with their body and soul and they make such wonderful noises as they feed.  I can organize a great dinner party.  I so much want to be one of those people, those let-me-whip-a-little-somthin-somthin-up-for-you-while-we're-waiting people when I grow up and yet.  And yet.  My aversion to cooking is so bad that I'd eat a spoonful of raw ground beef (not even shaped into beef tartare nor adorned with an egg) before I'd boil water for pasta.

Perhaps I should be counter-intuitive about this and take a class, let my competitive nature kick in  and actually cook because I want to be the best in show?  Maybe that would get me to cook.  Don't know; not sure.  Every August when Cuthbert goes home I have to fend for myself, and if ever I cook on a regular basis, it's then.  I'll wait to see if anything changes.  If it doesn't expect a post:  You're Not Going to Eat That, Are You?

School's almost over.  The garden beckons.  Ciao bella.

Saturday Poetry: Is Your Husband Married?

I'm almost free.  I have one more class and one more final, and time enough to study for it.  This freedom has coincided with the advent of a Spring so long overdue I have a hard time even one day before May Day believing that it won't snow, and that I won't need to rescue my winter coat from the one-of-these-days-I'll-drop-this-stuff-off-at-the-drycleaners bag.  Perhaps this is my personal era of being slow to come around -- slow to realize the season's changed, slow to believe that that asshole is president, slow to ... you get my drift.

Anyway, here's another poem from the unpublished manuscript, Turn Left At The Dead Dog:

There was one man who called her Baby

He said he had been at the Yard since the War

Like all the old guys he was married

And proud of the way he made money

Down on the docks in Red Hook.

All this he told her while eating his lunch.

She’d turned him down three times as he ate lunch

She knows what it means when they call you Baby

They say there are no nice girls in Red Hook

That’s been gospel since before the war.

The only girls left need to make that money

They aren’t even thinking about getting married.

Hello darling, is your husband married?

That’s the first time he asked her to lunch.

Right then he almost offered her money

Just to be his noontime baby.

She was mad enough to go to war

Here in God’s asshole, Red Hook.

Back in the 60’s in Red Hook

When a couple got married

It’s because they believed in making love, not war.

You’d toast over lunch

And wish them a baby

Then slip them some money.

How you get money

Is all that matters in Red Hook.

Get enough so you can pay for the baby.

They say it’s a good thing to get married.

Too bad they only spring for a lunch.

That custom started during the war.

Now, it’s a different kind of war

Otherwise, why would the bait of fast money

Make a girl give it up during lunch?

I know that it’s not just in Red Hook

When girls pretend they are married

You’ll get caught with a baby.

A Member of the Next Generation of Libtards

My beautiful niece, Lilli, is down in DC this weekend marching on behalf of Mother Earth:

I'm so proud of her (and her mother) for standing up with those who believe we have a moral obligation to fellow human beings.  It's that simple.

What Kind of Mother#)A$(*#?#?!!ckery is This?

To borrow from the inimitable Amy Winehouse.

It's 60 days and counting and I am still in a state of simmering apoplexy.  What kind of nation have we become that this ignorant, lying philistine with his concubine faux-wife represents our collective American selves?  What does that make us?

What kind of Democrats have we become that white liberals believe reading J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is revelatory?  (Or for that matter that the existence of a Barack Obama was chimerical.)  I and the rest of my siblings grew up among these north-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line crackers and have listened aplenty to them, and as far as I'm concerned they are my fellow Americans worthy of civility and entitled to their dignity, but I sure don't owe them any apologies.  Now solid research shows that working class white folks are dying of despair and I'm supposed to have enough magnimony left in me to care?

It's always been abundantly clear to me that the USA cuts way too much slack (an informal way of saying "privilege," which has now become too weaponized a word) to white people.  Period.  That only when a phenomena significantly harms white people is it recognized as mass suffering as opposed to moral defect or criminality. (1980's crack epidemic vs. 2010's opioid epidemic, anyone?)  But frankly, judging from some of Congress' rationale for gutting the ACA I'm not sure the "significant harm to white people" bar is holding either.

And yes, when I'm not as inflamed as I am in the Age of Trump, I am well aware that class and other variables determine collective and individual fates.  But, I am tired and the harm in communities of color (and yes, it's another fashionably weaponized word, but sometimes you need shorthand) continues as a crisis and I am nowhere near the mediation stage.

24 years, 1 Month, 26 Days, 8 Hours and 49 Minutes...

... but, who's counting?  In April I will have been married for 20 years.  (Pause while friends pick themselves up from the floor.)

My husband and I have known each other almost 25 years.

We play a game, probably not uncommon for people who can see the other side of the mountain, i.e., I Know Who Your Next Spouse Will Be.  His guess for me?  Mr. Nobody.  Mine for him -- well without giving too much away I finally figured out his ideal wife after having known the man for a long long time.  And, Dear Reader, she is not like me.

Marriage is many things, not the least of which is that it is a cosmic joke that many of us, no matter how many times we're told the punchline, just don't get.  And yet, every time the joke's set up, we listen expectantly, hoping this time, this time we'll be as delighted as everyone else.

We Are All Joe Wilson Now

President Trump will addresses Congress on Tuesday night.  Who among us will stand up and yell, YOU LIE?

Gone Quilting ...

A few random thoughts:

Wayne Barrett died yesterday,

Please, a certain strand of liberals, take off the hairshirts.  You don't owe those crackers an apology.

My head will explode if I hear or read one more superficial pundit talk about "the working class" as if it is only white guys who drive F-350s.

Read the history of the conservative movement's long march to power after Goldwater got crushed in 1964; and the Tea Party's ascendance to power.  If you are on your way to a state or national capital to protest in the streets, don't leave town without dropping by a politician's office.

My white husband never believes it's about race; it's always about race in these United States of America.

I can't go on.  We go on.

Do Not Disturb

I've finally settled on what should be engraved on my headstone.

More than anything it's solitude I want.  I've learned in the past few weeks that it is the destination at the end of a causeway -- the road to Galveston -- and music will get me there.  I told someone after the election that now was the time to fall in line with art again.  Advice I've been taking my own damn self.  I own a wonderful record collection.  It's a combination of what I bought in my 20's when not only was I part of an innovative music programming organization at the University of Iowa, but as 20-ish people do letting musicians tell me (and others) who I was.  Then I inherited a friend's classical collection when she retired and then I got older, had a baby and fell into the abyss of dire poverty with seat-of-the-pants moves, and could no longer buy records.  Lastly, my boyfriend-not-yet-husband's hometown room-mate who DJ'd when he wasn't being a neurotic asshole moved out and left his collection behind.  (Which is why I own the music of Joan Jett, Béla Bartók, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Donna Summer.)

In my 30's I couldn't write fiction and listen to music, so I didn't play my records except occasionally, like when I struggled to keep depression at bay.  (I have some vague memory of 2 year old D. exclaiming, "Al Jahbay, Mommy, Al Jahbay!!!"  as she danced to Al Jarreau, who as I write this is sittin' on the dock of the bay.  Now in my 60's always aware that I will not much longer have ears to hear and eyes to see am slowly playing this deliberate and inherited collection before I will it to a friend.  It is the way to peace these days.

It is a paradox that life has gotten simultaneously better and harder.  I've always been a bit of a dreadnik but really, it seems like most personal news are tales of loss, damage, diminution and struggle.  I'm having to call on more skills to cope with it because if I don't I will not have a stomach left by year's end.  Music -- live and recorded -- helps a lot because it takes me back and away and opens me up to commune with a place beyond words and rational thought.  Now playing, Norman Connors' Love From the Sun.

Trigger warning :-}
In January I will be taking 2 classes because I'd been subtly warned that there's a sell-by date to getting my degree and you ain't getting any younger .....  I may be crazy by May.  (Editor's note:  make that crazier) and I doubt I will be posting much although godknows there will be plenty plenty to write about.

I wish us all luck.  And solitude.

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya, Part II

From an e-mail reply I sent a friend who, like many others, is passing on much of the ink that's been spilled as she tries to figure out what to do:

It was undeniably grief that I felt by late Tuesday evening, like millions of others.  I have urged friends that I talk to submit to it for the time being, and resist the urge to get into frenzied action.  By yesterday I was able to pick the scab and read blogs (including the excerpt from Rorty’s work) and online news accounts of What Happened, but soon tired.  I don’t know if it’s my age, or my temperament, or the fact that I grew up in an environment where my family and I were a tolerated novelty so have always been an outsider, but for whatever reasons I am not despairing.  Angry, yes.  Disgusted, yes, but not despairing.  In what age and in what nation-state have people not suffered and died unjustly as one regime ends and a new one begins?

I disagree vehemently with Masha Gessen – outrage on the level of what is happening in the streets of our cities cannot and will not be sustained.  White-hot anger is a force that eventually gets spent because it can kill the host.  Unless we are willing to elect radical politicians to the Statehouse and Congress; and unless we as a liberal polity learn to tolerate that our elected leadership will become comfortable, and more conservative, and eventually accede to legislative decisions that stink of betrayal, then we are fooling ourselves.   By the time someone is elected to office they have to be willing to “do the nasty” of politics or they will be ineffective.  And who is willing to be the next Lyndon Baines Johnson, who by all accounts was a son of a bitch’s son of a bitch?

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya

This will be (mercifully) brief, because I have lots to do before leaving town on Monday.  A few thoughts:

1.  Trump's election was a revolution.  A set of ever-wobbling cultural and political norms were tossed off the balcony.  The enforced piety and moral probity required of high office-seekers in the USA has been diminished.  It may be forever possible now to have let your freak flag fly and still become President.

2.  Go ahead and grieve, but refrain from engaging in a flurry of activity as if the world will end on January 17, 2017.  Take more time to do the things you love doing, not the things you should do.

3.  Understand that while the person occupying the office (and the attendant departments under their control) can do great harm, the office changes the person.  In ways few of us understand or will imagine.

4.  And lastly, to quote my older brother, "Keep your head down and your pad low."

Ciao, bella.

Painting Ourselves Into A Corner

I am surprised as any that I do other things besides obsess about Donald Trump and the future of a mortally wounded American polity.  But, I do.  I am in school this semester, continuing my brick-by-brick attainment of teaching credentials.  I don't have any doubt that I'll finish; my only concern is that I will obtain my degree posthumously.  There are faster pathways that would make it possible for me to teach math within a couple of years, but I've decided to continue at this pace largely because I love my job and the psychic and practical benefits it provides, and because occasionally I'll take a class that will invite me to do some real scholarship and I don't want to be in any program thats paradigm resembles fast food delivery.  At least those are my current rationalizations.

This semester I'm enrolled in an undergraduate class, School Health, and I spent the first month writhing with impatience because I am "learning" with 19 and 20 year olds.  We have group assignments, y'all, and even with peers that's challenging.  Last week I confessed to the professor that every week I swear it's going to be The Very Last One, I'll Do This On My Own, Thankyouverymuch!  And every week I climb down off my high horse and get to work.  As much as I loath the phrase it is what it is, it's apt in this situation.  I cannot make my classmates any older, wiser, more worldly, or smarter than they are right now.  They don't exist to entertain and interest me.  I've resolved (and pretty much stuck to it) to make as much as I can out of the class and move on.  But I have to admit I miss the days of way-over-my-head math and of Java programming.

A while back I took a great workshop which closed with some questions asked anonymously.  One asked of the facilitator was (and I paraphrase):  Should you as a white woman be teaching students of color history?  My reaction to that is the culmination of my pretty peculiar childhood and education, my parents' values, the nature of intelligence, and my conviction that we do ourselves irreparable psychic harm when we elect to restrict our curiosity.  (I've written about this before in another post -- the phenomena of someone "looking like me" as a requisite for effective teaching and learning.  How much you want to bet I'll write a mega-paper about it in some class before I'm done?)  The question so disturbed me that day I felt I was going to write the instructor immediately.  Didn't, of course.  But I could not let this go unremarked and so last night this is what I told her:

First let me introduce myself.  I was the white-haired African-American woman at the workshop [From Genocide to Generational Continuity: Frames for Understanding and Transforming Education] who you thanked for "getting" what you were explaining as the historical precedents for where we are today in education; we spoke briefly.

Ever since that great workshop I've been intending to write you, and every day more mundane, yet pressing demands have -- or at least I've let them be more pressing -- superseded that.

But, since I won't be able to join you and others at the Salon on the 25th I wanted to get this said.  One of your closing remarks (and 2 1/2 weeks on I can only paraphrase) was about your legitimacy in teaching/facilitating discussions about these matters in the first place.  I wanted to speak directly to that.

Whenever knowledge is balkanized, racialized I think it is a bad thing.  I understand, and have been subject to the white supremacist gaze/POV for my entire 62 years.  I understand, at least superficially, cultural imperialism and I've observed how it plays out in these United States of America, much less in contemporary Africa.  And yet I disagree vehemently with what has become a canonical trope in our discourse, i.e., that certain subjects must be taught by people "who look like me”(the me being disadvantaged students of color).

In logic, we learn that an inverse is the negation of the conditional statement.  So if for a statement such as, "African-American students are best taught by African-American teachers" the inverse is:  Non AA students are best taught by non AA teachers".  By the extension of the logic, the inference is that non AA students should NOT be taught by AA teachers.  And we could extrapolate from there in terms of what are appropriate subject matters for appropriate instructors -- AA history, French literature, the European Enlightenment, the geo-politics of ancient Mali.  Despite the ravages of cultural imperialism on our collective psyches, the solution is not assignment by tribe/caste/race.  At the very least it means that if I were interested in modern Danish history, I would be discouraged from studying it and writing about it as a scholar because I'm not caucasian.  So why would I enforce a norm that prohibits caucasians from studying and writing about African-American history and sociology?

Would I love more students of color to have role models that look like them?  Hell yeah, which is why I'm pursuing a masters in elementary education.  But, do I think that that alone is sufficient to address the miseducation of public school students of color?  Not by a long long shot.  The situation is so dire, and the need for thinking, committed people is so great that I would rather we commit to the work and struggle together (and mature together) through our differences than banish potential allies because of notions of the primacy of racial phenotypes.

I understand that part of your odyssey is grappling with white privilege.  But having you and other whites step away from this work as an act of atonement accomplishes very little.  Very few of those who pose the question as to your right to teach where you teach and as you teach are doing the work themselves. When they are able and ready to step up to replace you, then and only then should you consider standing down.  But until that day comes (and it never will) do your work.

September Song

For your pleasure.  Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown:

Two Self-Dealing Inveterate Dissemblers Walk Into A Presidential Election ....

.... and ask to be our President.  A caretaker incrementalist who is an archetypal example of what becomes of a socially liberal idealist when they gain entrée to the Establishment's sausage-making machine vs. a colossally ignorant, boorish, ADHD-afflicted case study in greed and arrested development.  Those are the choices, folks.

Fuck them.
Fuck Gary Johnson.
Fuck Jill Stein.

I'm voting for Clinton.  It solves nothing but buys time to do the work that needs doing.

Work-In-Progress: excerpt from "Baby Mine"

Roselle was really tired and wanted a seat more than anything or she thought she would die or at least not be able to make it through another day.  The girl with the three babies got the last one.  Two who the mother pretend were twins by dressing them the same but anybody who’d had twins or too much sex before her 6 week postpartum checkup knew that those 2 babies were born 10 months apart and they and the toddler who already had streaks of dried snot forming a parentheses around its open and drooling mouth were staring up at Roselle.  She sighed, no seat, no mercy for her knees and the pain got louder as the bus lurched down the boulevard that she almost bit through her tongue.  But, Roselle made it to the Wexlas Avenue stop and thanked God that the bus stopped right in front of the school.  She lurched her way forward into the employees’ entrance and promptly sat down at her station ignoring that she needed to pee.  The children, all blue legs and white arms, gamboled past her with box cutters, Nintendo PlayStations and sodas in their ballast-like backpacks.  She prayed that the morning would be over fast.  It was the only thing that kept her going on the job except for seeing Mr. Washington, who had begun work at PS 304 the same day she had.  Everybody talked about how fine he was; and the more he ignored them, the more the girls said he was funny.  At break, Roselle didn’t join the argument one way or the other.  It would give away whatever feelings she had, and she was not going to give herself away, not even to herself.  Every Monday Mr. Washington was the topic of the guards’ 15 minute break, and when she was asked to take sides about the man, Roselle sucked her teeth and waved away the question.  Besides, because of how she esd nobody expected her to have much of an opinion about a good-looking man.  He was none of her business.