flag day

Flag day. Day after the Supremes issued a third rebuke to the administration (I can’t even write his name) about the habeas situation at Guantánamo. Of course the troubling thing about the decision was that it was 5-4. Just one more justice and we’d be sending people to jail for thinking bad things about the government. The tipping point is ever so much more precarious now than ever. We’ve got to get these guys out of office. They have made incompetence a professional virtue. They have politicized every level of government – particularly and especially those management and professional levels that used to actually do the work. Agencies that used to manage the everyday goings on of policy making and enforcing are now bloated with ideologues. I doubt the damage this administration has done can be undone in my lifetime.

I remember an episode of The West Wing where a reporter (I think) refused to stand when the president entered the room because she did not agree with or respect his policies. He rebuked her strongly saying, that although she certainly had the right to disagree, she did not have the right to disrespect the office of president. “You stand for the office.”

If that man entered a room I was in, I might be able to stand for the office. I think I could. But I could never respect him. How could I even remain in the room with him? What would I say were I in a position where I had to speak with him. I have nothing but contempt for him. He’s a war criminal. He’s plundered his own government. He took us into a war in a fashion so irresponsible it could be a farce if it weren’t so serious. He’s so far worse than the “drunken frat boy drives country into ditch” stuff we said about him in his first year. Before 9/11 made him into a war president. I’m not sure I could keep from spitting on him. It would be a test of all the grace I could summon just to say an innocuous hello.

We got Nixon and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then we got Reagan and thought he was bad and it couldn’t get any worse. Then the Bush continuation, the man hardly had a personality. During the Clinton years it felt as though the person who’d been hitting me with the stick for 12 years had finally stopped. And now this. Not even elected. A stolen election, in a state run by his brother and a woman who had not even a passing acquaintance with the law, lost the popular vote, did it again the next election. The extent of the damage, the trashing of civility, policy, and practice so far reaching, it’s hard to begin comprehending its enormity. The puppetmasters making plans since the Nixon administration let presidential powers slip have finally had their triumph. We are a country gutted.

So flag day. Is there a glimmer of hope for us to halt the slide this November? One small possibility we can prevent the court from tipping for the next forty years into indecency, return reason to policy and remove politics from pragmatics? A chance?

academic prose

I’m working on revising an article I submitted to an academic journal. First, may I say how I detest having to publish work in academic journals. Academic writing is almost always wooden and generally incomprehensible. A very few academics manage to bridge the gap from their world to the real world – folks like Neil Postman and Barbara Tuchman. Their writing is engaging and interesting. But most academic writing is like the article a colleague showed me some years ago. He’s known in his field and at my shop he keeps getting kudos for publishing wonderful stuff. I expressed interest in this piece he’d told me about so he sent me a copy. As I read it I was horrified. It was so poorly written I wouldn’t have accepted it from a student. I never got up the nerve to tell him how awful it was.

Anyway, I’m revising this piece based on some really negative feedback from a blind reviewer (maybe if I’d been blindly reviewing my colleague’s piece I’d have had more courage). I was initially saddened by the negative feedback until I started working on the revision yesterday and I discovered that most of the comments made are incorrect. So someone who doesn’t really understand the scholarship I’m basing the article on has decided that I didn’t interpret it correctly. I suppose I always feel that I’m not being a good reviewer when I blind review stuff – that I’m always missing the point of what the writer is saying. I always try to ascribe to the writer the benefit of knowing what she’s saying. I figure if I miss it, it’s my problem. But if, after reading the piece, three or four times, I still can’t figure it out then I think something may be missing. But really. I try not to correct things that I’m not sure about as this reviewer has done to me. She/he “corrects” a specific term used by a specific scholar. But the term is correct as used. It’s just that sort of thing that tells me the reviewer isn’t paying the right kind of attention.

NCLB for grownups

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we get quick, down and dirty, what’s goin’ on entries. So here’s one. I’m completely perplexed by the new language we’re having to start using in the workplace. I blame it all on George W. Bush – that hellcat – by (indirect) way of Margaret Spellings. After No Child Left Unharmed, she turned her sights on higher education. Like so many industries before us, higher ed said “no-no-no, we can police ourselves…at least let us try.” Hence the arrival of assessment, or as we call it ass-ass-ment. Because it’s asinine. Get it? I won’t get onto a long tear about assessment now, although I could, but I’d just like to put some of the words out here that I cannot figure out. They all sound the same to me. Take one word from column A and combine it with a word from column B and you’ll have a term you can salt into your program assessment plan. But I’ve no real idea how they differ or even what they really mean. Can anyone reading this help me make up some definitions?
A
Course
Program
Learning
B
Goal
Objective
Outcome
The entire enterprise seems idiotic. Why not just focus on what’s actually going on in the classroom? How’s that for an idea? This stuff is like looking at the very first holograms. Every now and then, if you hold it just right, for just a nanosecond, you can see the whole picture. But mostly what you see is just shards of an idea.

departing Athens

(continued from 6/9/08) The joke in Athens, as in so many place that secretly want to claim this distinction, is that everything comes in months behind schedule. But at 6 AM that day as I pulled up to Eleftherios Venizelos in my very expensive Athens taxi, there seemed to be activity all about. Maybe my flight actually would take off from the new airport.

The first thing I noticed inside were signs announcing the airport was a no smoking space. Athenians are famous for smoking anywhere and everywhere. I heard stories about people smoking in hospitals. An orderly, told that he shouldn’t be smoking inside the building replied with “Oh, I work here,” as if that was all it took to explain his lit cigarette. Athenians cannot not smoke and they were entirely flummoxed by the new no-smoking rule. Anticipating the flummoxedness, airport authorities had indicated smoking areas where it was legal to smoke. Where could you smoke? In restaurants. Yes, the first places to be made non-smoking in America were the last places you could smoke in Greece. So as I was buying and trying to eat a pastry that morning I was surrounded by puffing airport mechanics, flight attendants, airport cleaning staff, counter attendants, police, even people who worked in other airport stores, all standing just inside the white line on the tiled floor that indicated, like Les Nessman’s office on WKRP in Cincinnati, the imaginary boundaries of the restaurant. It was crowded

I lost count of the number of moving sidewalks I rode on the journey from the check-in line to my gate, but I seemed to be going directly to my stopover point in Munich. The airport was the psychic and physical opposite of the quaint old airport nestled at the bottom of Athens’ reach. I collapsed at my gate, raw with morning exhaustion, having arrived before sunrise, nibbling my pastry in an actual non-smoking area.


Athens International Airport, in Spata, was now large enough to accommodate the millions of visitors Greece was anticipating at the Olympic games. The airport’s website announces that they welcomed their 100 millionth passenger on June 4. It says she is Greek, that she arrived on an Air France flight, that she was welcomed by the marketing director for AIA and the manager of the airline in Athens, there are even three photos. But her name is mentioned nowhere. She is, apparently, every-passenger.

S.O.P.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are very difficult because I have to work first thing and cannot blog. Just got home from seeing Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Pretty damned chilling. Although I found the piece I read about it even more compelling. Seeing the people interviewed was interesting – especially with Morris’s method of straight on camera work. It was a little long and the chronological structure was unexpectedly and irritatingly confusing. It was called Standard Operating Procedure but it really wasn’t about that at all, it was about the pictures. The pictures from Abu Ghraib. It never looks straight at the question of what they were doing, who told them to do it, and what in the world they were thinking taking the photos. And the Danny Elfman soundtrack is only mildly annoying in a Philip Glass sort of way. It is a powerful and gripping film about a subject that, unfortunately, as with far too many things that have arisen during this administration, is unresolved.

arriving in Athens

(continued from 6/1, "first trip") When I arrived at the Athens in early 2001 I was stunned. I remembered, from years earlier, a photograph of the aftermath of a terrorist attack in the airport. It was a shot taken from above; people were lying in small pools of blood, chaos surrounding them. This was all I’d ever seen of the Athens Airport. We touched down on the tarmac and taxied to a few hundred yards from what looked like a small warehouse. We exited the plane via an exterior stair ramp – the first time I’d done that since the sixties. No jetway for the Ellinikon International Airport. I followed the line of people departing the plane in front of me to a bus that looked a little like an old San Francisco trolley. The large doors remained open as we sped across the remaining yardage to the small warehouse. I thought we would be going through customs in this place and then get to the airport arrival terminal from there. But no. This small warehouse was the airport. The Athens Airport. Inside were four old fashioned baggage carousels – the kind where the bags came up from below and made that oval circuit around and around on their 35 degree angle. And that was about it.

After I’d retrieved my luggage I headed toward the customs counter to let them have a look at my passport and stamp me in. But no one was tending the counter and as I waited for someone to return it became obvious no one was coming. No papers, no working desk, no sign of life told me no one was returning here. After a few minutes of trying to figure out how to make my entry into Greece legal, I just gave up and exited through the double doors. Now I was in the arriving passenger part of the terminal building. As I looked to my left there was the newsstand where Shelly had suggested I meet my friend. It was not only the only newsstand, it was the only commercial entity in the airport. I strolled over and stood near the magazines. After about twenty minutes Katy showed up, as incredulous as I was that this was where we were meeting. That this was where we were! Athens. In an airport that would probably be just the right size for Three Forks, Montana.

That would be the end of the story had it not been for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. My Greek friends who lived in Piraeus loved the old airport. Arriving visitors could call when they deplaned to say they’d arrived and Katrina and Dionysus would be at the airport to pick them up by the time they’d retrieved their luggage. It was close, it was convenient, it was teeny tiny. But the Olympic committee could have none of that. Millions would be coming and going when the games returned to their ancestral home. So a new airport was built. You now have to drive over 20 miles on the Attika Tollway (Attiki Odos) to arrive at Eleftherios Venizelos – the Athens International Airport, in Spata. That's Spata, not Sparta.

Athens International Airport is enormous. Just to bookend my experience with Athens airports I returned to Greece in 2002. I flew in to the old airport. My departure, however, was to take place on the opening day of the new, gargantuan, airport 20 miles north of the city. I called three or four times to make sure everything was on schedule. In Athens things are famously delayed. I lived in terror that I would arrive at Eleftherios Venizelos only to find that my plane was taking off from the old airport.

childhood

I’m not sure how it can be so that I’m old enough to remember a time when women weren’t welcome in the workplace, when they were expected to stay in the home and take care of the children and the cleaning, when they were supposed to keep their mouths shut, when they were not only not taken seriously, but were ridiculed for the very notion that they might have independent thought. I’m not sure how it is that I was actually a part of not the first, but it seems the second wave of women entering a work force where non-discrimination was the battle cry – the battle cry but far, far away from accomplishment. I’m not sure how it could be possible that I can remember all those commercials that made women stupid, that made a woman’s prime reason for existence to make her family happy, that made women simply sexual objects – but only as long as they were pretty and young. But I do. I lived this.

In the same vein, I remember childhood as a distinctly different experience than what I see children living through these days. My childhood seems just a few seconds removed from the childhood when a good toy was a board with a nail in it. We had toys. But the most our dolls did was wet themselves. Dolls were babies. It wasn’t until Barbie came along that dolls became adults with lives, and careers, and plans of their own. The television we watched was for adults – the Max Fleischer cartoons were a terrifying peek into his nightmare where children wandered into the forest and were accosted by trees that bounced and danced ominously in time to the threatening classical music and hurled apples at the backs of the few children who tried to escape. Gumby and Pokey were virulent racists, making sarcastic double entendre insults to the redface Indians they visited. The highest tech toy we had was Mr. Machine – a plastic man about 18 inches high wearing a top hat and showing his totally non-functional assembly of gears and buttons through his flat transparent body. Our playgrounds had no soft landings, steel cage jungle jims, and working concrete water fountains.

6/7/08

A consecutive date. Only possible in the beginning of the century. Today Hillary Clinton suspends her campaign for the democratic nomination and concedes to Barak Obama. Yes, Hillary is not my personal favorite woman in the country. Certainly not the woman I’d select as the first woman president. Far too conservative for me and I’m not a Clinton bandwagonite. But she has made a powerful statement in history. Just forty years ago, when we lost Kennedy and King, the very idea of a woman even running for president was laughable. Even if we dislike the Clintons, we have seen her crumble that notion. It is often left to those most unlikely to take on the tasks the advocates move most passionately. Only Nixon could go to China. Only Begin could make peace with only Sadat. Only a republican Governor could commute all death sentences and clear Illinois’ death row. And only the intensely loved and intensely hated Hillary Clinton could become the first serious female candidate for highest office. In my working life, I experienced the trailing end of gender discrimination. And even as it began to slither to its death it was a powerful element in all our lives, defining so many things about what we were permitted to do, think, be, and become. It’s not gone yet. But Hillary has brought us another few feet toward the road’s convergence. And for that, we must all be grateful – like her or not.

RFK

Fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Like most Americans my age, I’ll never forget that day. It’s seared into my memory as an eternal event, one of those events by which I mark off the time of my life. JFK’s assassination. MLK’s assassination. RFK’s assassination. But for RFK, a special place. In those two days after he was shot, before he succumbed, I’d written on my sneakers “pray for Bobby.” (I think it was the first thing I ever wrote on my sneakers. Later I’d write “acid queen” after the Who song from Tommy.) Many years later when I went to Washington for my first time as an adult I visited Arlington National Cemetery. I thought I wanted to see John F. Kennedy’s grave and we walked up the hill to the enormous cut out that was laid with granite marking his grave and the graves of his two infant children. The eternal flame floated invisibly above the gas spigot, identifiable only by the vapor curling the air. I was impressed. I summoned my memory of Black Jack and his backwards boots high stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue. I recalled the feeling of having been shocked. But I was not moved. Then I walked a few steps away down the path to Robert Kennedy’s grave. And as I saw the small pool, the simple white cross, and the green hill climbing up behind it I began to weep. Carved in the granite behind the water was a quote from Aeschylus that has been with me since. “In our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

spellcheck

I completely forgot to blog yesterday. I remembered at one moment early in the day. But I was in class and couldn’t get to my blogging equipment. By the time the day ended I’d totally spaced it out. I will try to blog twice today to make up for it. Blog is another word spellcheck needs to learn. In fact spellcheck is a word spellcheck needs to learn. It’s interesting to have this technical evidence of how the language evolves. Sometimes I feel like we should all just adopt the spellings that spellcheck offers us for difficult words. We’d wind up with words that are completely different from what we’d intended. Some words that were close, but just spelled slightly differently. It’s particularly interesting to see what it does to names. Sometimes it seems that if you capitalize something it’ll leave it alone. But other times, as with Obama, it insists. In this paragraph alone, I’ve got nine words underlined with red squigglies. Now ten, because squigglies is not a word (eleven).

finally...

Finally. “Obama clinches nomination…marks end of epic battle with Clinton” is today’s NYTimes headline. Finally. So. Now Microsoft Word will need to teach its spellcheck that Obama is not a misspelling. It would be unseemly for the president of the United States’ name to be constantly underlined with a red squiggly.

And now it is entirely up to Hillary Clinton too unify the party. She needs to bring her vociferous and unyielding supporters in line with the democratic nominee. Otherwise the November election will be lost and she will be to blame. She must not only stop them from staying home, but she must engage them to be vocal, happy, and equally demanding supporters of the party nominee. She needs to work as hard on this as she has to get the nomination.

Yes, it’s true that she’s been eliminated principally as a result of the deeply embedded misogyny in this culture. Yes, it’s true that she probably would have won the nomination had she not been a woman. (Or a Clinton.) Yes, it’s true that she’s been vilified and dismissed in ways no other candidate has had to suffer. But now the race is over – these things become fodder for academics and her role remains in the real world. She must knuckle down and get back to the job of making sure a democrat is elected in the Fall. If republicans win the White House in November it will be at least, at least, partially her responsibility.

ER photo

The photo of Belle with ER and MMB came to class with me today. Students were interested in it and its origin. We agreed that I’d keep at the mystery and see if I could find out more for them. We gave me an assignment. I asked if they were interested and they said I could give myself that assignment. Now I have to work on that too. It’ll keep me blogging about the actions I take to find the answer. I feel, after all my work in the past, that the answer is not out there. But someone suggested I post it on flickr. I’d never even thought of that because flickr didn’t exist when I was doing this last time. How things have changed. I will do the posting (although that student may have to explain to me the best way to do it). I will look at the websites and archives they suggested to me. What fun, to bring them in on the mystery. It’s not really visual or verbal rhetorically related. But it is a mystery and a mystery is always compelling. Now, if only I can get the rest of the class involved in discussions.

two dead

Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday, Bo Diddley today. Two giants. One brought us the pantsuit the other, the clave, 3/2, beat. A father of women’s fashion and a father of rock and roll. Who will be their successors? How will we survive without them. Without Yves what would Hillary wear? Without Bo where would the beat be? Ahh me.

first trip

My first trip to Athens was made easier by my friend Katy joining me for the first of my two weeks. Except for a long forgotten business trip to Santo Domingo (yes, Santo Domingo, yes business) I’d never been off the continent of North America. Canada, a northern-most town in Mexico had been the stretching of my boundaries. Katy was living in Germany at the time and I’d suggested that we meet in Greece for a working vacation. I needed her European expertise – how to manage in a place where one is unfamiliar with the language. She needed a vacation. It was perfect.

I did have one contact in Greece who wasn’t associated with my quest. Shelly, the sister of a friend had married a Greek man and been living in Greece for over two decades. She would help me understand how to get around. In our very first discussion about the trip she’d made it clear that she was a limited resource. “You can’t stay with me” was the first thing she said as she began listing the ways she could and couldn’t be helpful. But she was a font of helpful information. And when I finally visited her home in Marathon I understood perfectly why I couldn’t stay with her.

But I needed her help to figure out a spot to meet my friend Katy since the two of us were arriving at the Athens airport less than an hour apart. When I’d asked Shelly for a spot where Katy and I could meet at the airport she’d said “Oh, just meet her at the newsstand.” I kept sending her emails asking her to describe specifically which newsstand, specifically where it was, where it was located on the concourse, which concourse. Each question was frustrated with the same reply, “the airport is small, you’ll find each other.”

I could not believe that any international airport was so small I could just tell someone to meet me at the newsstand, but getting absolutely no satisfaction from Shelly beyond “meet her at the newsstand” I reluctantly told Katy that’s where we’d meet. She had the same questions and was similarly disbelieving when I conveyed the reply. But since that was all the information we had, I approached the day thinking I could page her if it came to that.

Ferreol's call

I didn’t think this last day of the month would ever come. Something about writing every day makes the days slow down to an absolute crawl. Also all the work. So I’m hoping to get to some of the other writing I want to do this summer. And reading. Of course I now have someone living with me. Which is not a burden but requires a little extra mental energy. And dollars. As always, it is interesting to witness the young man growing up. And the mirror of who I am in his doing so. (Of course it’s always about me. Whoever me is.)

Three months ago, at the end of February, my phone rang just as I was getting ready to go out the door. Often, I’d ignore the ring and just head out for work. But for some serendipitous reason on that day I did not. The voice on the other end asked “Is that Belle’s Mouthpiece?” I said yes, but I could not quite place who I was talking to. “This is Ferreol Welter. In Holland.” In such shock I had to sit down, all I could say was “how are you?”

As the conversation continued it turned out he’d come across my name in some papers he was clearing out, isn’t that always what happens, and was calling to inquire about whether I’d gotten on with the story I was writing about Belle. His father is in the story, far in the past at an early point. I’d tracked Ferreol down years ago and had a phone conversation with him. We had a couple of email exchanges and then, as with the entire project, I’d allowed it to drop. One of my problems in working on this project has been maintaining contact with the folks I should be talking with. The only one I’ve been good at has been Marguerite.

So here I was on the phone with Ferreol, it’d probably been at least five years since we last spoke and he was remembering me and asking about my project. The call came completely out of the blue. And, given this golden opportunity, I fell down completely. I didn’t get his new address – he’d moved after a bad car accident. I didn’t get his new email address – all his info was changed, he’d said. I didn’t insist on getting his phone number – he promised he’d send it all to me in an email later that week. And then. The great silence. I waited each day to hear from him, but no email came. And now, three months later, it’s just a strange and coincidental blip in the course of Belle’s story.

Belle’s story that is still sitting in pieces in a cardboard filing box behind me. Bits of it are on the table next to me. Three small blue spiral notebooks, none completely filled, smirk at me. As I leaf through them I see notes about events I have no memory of. People I’ve talked with once but never followed up with. At the time follow up seemed unnecessary. During the conversations it felt as though I was digging frantically with a pick axe for the tiniest bit of information they could mine from their memories. But if I’d made more time I could have gone in with small and nimble archaeologist’s tools to pick away miniscule bits of earth and brush away the dust to see if anything was revealed. My desperate desire that they remember didn’t help. And now, as my friend Rafael warned, most of them are gone. “Every moment you don’t work on this someone you need to talk to dies.” And now I’m left with my blunt force notes of conversations with people I barely remember. Each time I dive back in I feel enormous sadness. For what I missed while staring at it, for what I’m missing because I cannot return, for a story that must be reconstructed – if at all – from shards.

almost over

The month is almost over. It has seemed interminable. So much has happened, I feel as though I’m in a nighttime soap opera. Climbing outside. New housemate. Drive to MA, drive back. Search committee. Semester with a new teaching partner. Semester ends and awards given. Week totally full of evening activities. Five days of six parties. Two graduations. House decisions: plenty of ‘em. Summer school begins without a break. I’m hoping for some moments to catch up which I still haven’t had yet enough of in the days that have gone by with any moments that were not totally already filled up with stuff that I had to do. And that’s that.

One more day. Then June. Phew.

Things really do work much more better when I write in the morning. This evening writing always feels petered out.

secrets

Secrets. A and B and C and D. They all know each other. A is a part of C’s secrets. C is part of A’s secrets. A and C know each other’s secrets. A and C play the eternal game: push and pull, hand over hand, lie and hide. D, odd letter out, knows only C’s secrets – and those only by accident of issue. But B. But B knows A’s secrets and C’s secrets. A might know that B knows all secrets, but A is not paying attention. A is obsessively focused only on A. C knows only that B knows one secret, but not all other secrets. C knows not that B knows everything about A that C knows about A. B is the silent, secret fulcrum or all the secrets. An odd position for B and B tries hard not to let any other letters know that B knows all. But it is very strange. Very strange indeed. B is secretly afraid that more will be revealed. The closeted alphabet, may it stay forever hidden.

tasks

Summer. Do I have any time off? Not yet. I have a busier work schedule than during the regular semester. My summer class is enormous – 17. I’m hoping one or two or seven might drop, but somehow I doubt it. I thought I’d head off the possibility of so many by holding the class at 8 AM, but no luck in that area. At least the search committee I’m on will be completing its work quickly. I hope. I really wanted to get away for a real vacation this summer. But I need to get the house painted, give the graduate a real gift, maybe two. I’m hoping for a long weekend somewhere. Anywhere. But what I really need is at least a week. I still haven’t even started the long list of summer stuff I need to do. I mean literally – I haven’t begun making the list. I’m a dedicated list maker. I hear myself giving this list-making advice and it’s beginning to feel slightly neurotic. “Write it down.” “Make a list of everything you need to find out about.” I hear the words leaving my mouth and I wonder who is speaking. It sounds a little bit like a crazy woman. Or a woman with a desperate memory. And then when people can’t answer about the things I want them to know about I want to chastise them for not writing them down. “Why didn’t you make a list?” It feels just slightly compulsive. But it works for me. In a firmly organized and ordered sort of way. Yes. I can control these tasks. These tasks won’t run roughshod over me. I can corral them, round ‘em up, and bring ‘em in. Weeeeee ha.

next...

It’s tough to keep my own craziness separate from the twenty something who’s now staying/living with me. I don’t even know what to call his presence here because I’m trying to avoid making him feel that he’s trapped in this backwater home in this god-forsaken state. This is interesting payback for all the horrible grief I brought my family. He’s a complete wonder and at the same time an anxiety filled puddle of self-doubt. Praying for help.

home again

Arrived home last night, this morning, at just about 2 AM. Couldn’t make a blog entry, just to damned exhausted. The drive home was treacherous. I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. My other driver couldn’t drive at all – too tired. I stopped to catnap a couple of times. It delayed us, but probably helped us arrive home safe and in one piece. As I parked I announced that the chances of being in a fatal accident were now slim. It really felt like that. And now I’m just reassembling the pieces of my brain into a coherent pattern. All his stuff is still in the trunk and in an unsecured roof bag on top of the car. That is, it’s secured to the car, but opens with a zipper. He’s sleeping it off in his room, probably won’t emerge until late afternoon. And when he does it’ll be as a new man – an alum of one of the best schools in the country. But still struggling with making his way in life. Who wouldn’t be.

gettin' outta town

Somehow the month goes by very slowly when I’m putting the date on paper every single day. There’s no “how did the month fly by, it was just the 2nd and now it’s the 27th!”

So today we leave for Amherst. Talk about time flying by. It feels like just a couple of months ago I was taking the boy up to college and now he’s graduating on Sunday. He’ll be an Amherst alum. I wonder what sort of mood he’ll be in. Will he be happy? Unrepentantly sarcastic? Unrelievedly stressed? I’m still getting accustomed to the moods I cannot impact. I have no wise words for him. I wish I did. Watching his struggle is both enlightening and difficult, I guess those two are always together. I wish I knew the best way to be of service in this situation, I feel completely bereft and useless.

So I will miss tomorrow here on the blog. I will do my best to make an entry on Sunday when we return. Just one more weekend as life flies by.

fiction

Well the parties might finally be over. But of course I speak too soon – I’m heading up to Massachusetts tomorrow for another graduation on Sunday. I suspect there may be some celebrating, although it’s not likely that I will have to attend an actual party. That will be more for the graduates. A reception/luncheon after commencement is more the probability for me. Yesterday we had a department luncheon. Indian food, quite nice. Fake roses on the tables, an extended effort to dress each lovely place. The blooms were in their most open phase – just as the rose is about to drop its petals. Artifice constructed to resemble a dying flower. A peculiar choice.

I’ve always said what, in the end, is the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Either way you must tell a good story. If I read non-fiction, I learn something about the world. But my fiction-writing friend was aghast. Memoir is ruining fiction, she stated with great certainty. But I don’t think memoir is the culprit, it is a symptom. What is ruining fiction is cultural insistence that all authority emanates from the individual and that all individuals are equal sources of authority. It is the same insistence on all points of view being equal that I see in my students. It is the unwillingness to accept expertise, to view an expert voice as elitism. Fueled by the Internet, and the vast abundance of easily available opinions, people seem to believe, really believe, that the only experience worth hearing about is the personal one because no one can possibly be any more authoritative than anyone else.

It is yet another paradox – the paradox of access. You can make a system more accessible, more transparent, and everyone will delight in understanding its functioning and content. But at a certain point these qualities begin to drag the system into inefficiency and eventually breakdown. We get things like Wikipedia. A tantelizing reader controlled text that easily has reams of incorrect information. Without gatekeepers information is unreliable. It leads also to a president people would like to have a beer with, rather than a president who is a deep thinker. We get a jovial, albeit sometimes nasty, advisor controlled executive who has easily made hundreds of bad choices because he has replaced thinking with patronage.

graduation day

Graduation day at my shop. And last night comes another party invitation. Ugh! I’ve already done four parties in three days. I’m totally partied out. Was expressing gratitude on the way home from the last (or thought it was the last) party on Monday night that the parties were all over. And now a surprise party tonight after commencement. I can’t even express how badly I do not want to go to this thing. But go, I shall. I think it’s a mistake – I’m guessing many of the invitees will feel as I do and be totally spent. But there’s always relatives – they haven’t been to four parties in three days and will be delighted to celebrate her momentous achievement.

And another one of my students is delivering today’s commencement address. He’s a wonder. He was in, I think, the very first class I ever taught here, 17 years ago. After two semesters he went off to pursue another profession, one where he has done well and still works. But at some point about five years ago he returned to school hoping to claim his Bachelor’s degree. He’s been an incredible student and deserves every moment of his talking-in-front-of-the-crowd glory. Although his commencement speech looks to be a tiny bit sappy (reading a poem written by a 13-year-old muscular dystrophy victim), at least he is imploring his fellow grads to do something about the world. I’m not sure that showing how a 13-year-old can be as wise as wise can be is what you want to tell a group of people who’ve just struggled through days and nights of neglecting their children, husbands, wives, and other relationships, who’ve worked their butts off just to get a C, who’ve been told repeatedly that getting this degree will help them advance but who know in their souls that the world is actually not their oyster. This ain’t Harvard. But then, that’s why they’re getting Mattie Stepanek (the young and far too accessible poet) and not Maya Angelou or Herodotus.

Final grades are finally done. All I must do now is submit them and await the return barrage. “A C!? Why did I get a C? I did all the homework.” The “I paid for this, why should I have to do any more work” attitude grows more pronounced each semester. Even when they haven’t paid for it – a parent might still be footing some bills – they are still indignant. The student-as-consumer model corrupts every relationship in the university and damages any chance at a real education. This place really should be a benign dictatorship – why I got into this line of work, I’m sure – we really do know better than they do what they need to get into their heads. Or at least what they need to be exposed to, the getting into the head problem, unfortunately, is yet another issue.

But when the upper administration adopts a business model, as so many schools have, and begins treating students as customers the attitude seeps into every crevice of the institution. And we have people asking questions like “Did you tell them the writing had to be good?” Students expect to have requirements waived, or dispensed with, because they object to taking business ethics, or find Shakespeare inconveniently challenging. Students want courses offered in a particular sequence because it fits their schedule better than the sequence we, after eighty or ninety collective years of experience, have determined. I’m not averse to learning from any situation – even situations that I feel I’ve mastered. In fact, that’s why I chose this profession. Being a teacher provides a forum for decades of learning. I try to be always open to new possibilities. But one thing I’ve learned is that experience really does bring wisdom. Ah. Another paradox.

busy day

Phew boy. Didn’t feel particularly well last night. Think it was something I ate before I turned in. That might teach me to leave stuff out too long. But also it might not. The next thing I need to try doing is writing in the morning rather than the evening. I find, as you might notice, that I write less, have less to say, less interesting topics, and less well written when I check in at the end of the day. This is not working for me. But I need to quiet the voice that tells me I need to get everything else done before I’m allowed to work on my own stuff – my blog, my essays, even my own academic writing. The no-writing voice is very powerful and irritating. Tomorrow morning I will try writing before I start working on my syllabus. Yes, working on the summer course syllabus – class begins one week from today. I’m pretty much finished with grading, must still submit them. But tomorrow is commencement, then a day of no appointments (I hope) and then up to MA to see the guy graduate. But this means that the day of no plans will be taken up with the rushing around of preparing for a trip. I’m making prayers to the gods that the roof bag I ordered will A. arrive and B. be left at the door tomorrow. FE is not always great about leaving stuff. I must leave a letter of supplication taped to the door. Well, that’s enough rambling for this evening. Getting all the commenting and grading done, three phone interviews, final grades, feeling sick, answering email, and a few odds and ends have made for a full day.

Carroll Pickett

So what did it feel like for Carroll Pickett to minister to a man he was convinced was innocent just before that man was led down the hall and executed? What is it like to be in the room as a man is strapped down and pumped with three chemicals back to back – one to put him to sleep, the next to paralyze him, and the third to stop his heart – after having spent the day with him watching him cower in the corner as a thunder storm passed over? What is it like to say to a guard you feel convinced the man about to be put to death didn’t commit the crime he was convicted of and have the guard agree with you. And know that neither of you can do anything about it. That the courts, the governor, and the supreme court of the land have all said this man received justice, ‘s OK to kill him. What can that be like? Listen to Pickett tell his story.

ninja warrior

Ninja Warrior is pretty amazing. It’s on the G4 network (a gaming network). The commentator is outrageous and involved, but it’s hard to read the subtitles while you’re trying to watch the athletes running the incredibly difficult obstacle course. And it’s timed to boot! True athletes – Japanese and many other countries, many Olympic athletes – compete in this unbelievably difficulty course, three stages. So far I’ve seen only the fist stage – mostly because I haven’t seen anyone make it though more than the first part of stage two. But then I have to see commercials for things like Ultimate Fighting and it makes me feel like I’m watching the adolescent boy network. How did I ever get addicted to competition shows? But mostly on Bravo: Project Runway, Top Chef, Shear Genius, Dancing with the Stars, Amazing Race. Oh my.

parties

It was a two-party day. First class then work pot luck – salad, lemon mousse, lemonade pie, California rolls, pasta salad (tomatoes & mozzerela), rice salad (artichoke hearts and feta), garlic grits, strawberry rhubarb pie, cookies, beers, chicken salad, squash baked with turkey-bacon and goldfish (yes, that’s correct), lots of wine (some on the floor). And the Preakness.

Then climbing folks out in the middle of the woods. Middle. of…the. Woods. Drive through the Greenspring Valley Golf Club (through the middle of the course), then deeper into the woods, then deeper into the woods. And then deeper into the woods. And then through someone’s front yard, then deeper into the woods. Then deeper into the woods. And then over a tiny corrugated bridge – two widths of corrugated steel each about three feet wide. And then up a hill. And then his house in a large clearing. I can’t believe I didn’t get lost. Anyway, it was a fun party. But two parties was way too much food. And now I’m still hungry from all the eating. Better have some chocolate.

dollars

At the bank today I tried to get the latest golden dollar. It’s just a manifestation of my compulsion to collect things. I collect golden dollars, state quarters, wheat pennies, cobalt glass, other colored glass (only deeply saturated colors), luster ware, political buttons, other buttons, postcards, matchbooks, small television sets (not real), martini shakers, bowls, vintage men’s scarves, vintage kitchen ware, Manhattan deco pattern bowls, cartoons, books on the Titanic, books about the death penalty, movies about the death penalty, I’m sure there’s more stuff that I can’t remember…

She didn’t have any dollars for me, only the old ones. And she told me that in order for the branch to send the dollars back to the government, she needed to have a thousand of them. They have to go in the box and the box holds a thousand. She seemed almost desperate when she said that right now she has only seven hundred. And I’m betting she’s been collecting them since they were released. Over a year. And only seven hundred. They’re clearly not a collection point for the golden dollars.

On the bright side the delightful teller seems to remember me. I bank the old fashioned way – at least for deposits – at the window.

Marin

Just arrived home from the Symphony where I heard Beethoven symphonies 1 and 4. What growth into his own between the two. The 1st is Hayden’s student, the 4th is Beethoven working out yet another problem. You can just hear the precision vehicle starting and stopping, banking left and right. “See, I can do this. And I can do this. And even this.” Each symphony another step into Beethoven’s personality until it culminates with the 9th. Glorious. Guest conductor and composer, Thomas Ades, performed full body conducting. His music, and Beethoven’s.

It reminds me that I heard, also at the BSO just a couple of weeks ago, the Carmina Burana again. What a fantastic piece of music; I never get tired of hearing it. And I love seeing it performed. It was after this performance that our new Maestra, Marin Alsop, made clear who the boss is. Usually when a group of soloists are onstage the women leave the stage first; even if they have been standing far stage left, all men gallantly sweep their arms in front of them to permit the women to exit stage right first. I’ve never ever seen a male performer – instrument or voice – or conductor permit a woman to follow him off the stage. Never. But Marin is the conductor. She is the boss. So when the three soloists – two male, one female – finished the Carmina and took their bows it was clear that she had already made it clear backstage that the conductor was to follow the soloists off the stage. Even if the conductor was a woman. The conductor always brings up the rear. And so it is with the Maestra of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She leaves the stage last, politely and gallantly ushering her soloists off first.

In the early, early days of her tenure here – she is still in her first year – there was confusion about who would exit first. A male violinist tried to show his respect for the gentler gender by motioning that she go before him. They piled up into a small crack up just to the right of the podium, and exited the stage together – her hand gripping his upper arm. But she’s obviously left instructions that that is not to happen any longer. Marin is the boss and she will depart in the boss’s position: last. Good for her!

Israel's birthday

When I was in seventh grade I was required to write a report about a country. Since I was one of two Jews in the entire school the teachers would often “encourage” me to do Jewish oriented subjects. It was so helpful in my objective to totally blend in. I can’t remember if this was one of those times or if it was my own choice, but I did Israel. I don’t remember anything about writing the report, it was one of those reproduce-the-encyclopedia 7th grade papers. What I do remember is being shocked to find out that Israel had been in existence for only twenty years. It must have been a spring assignment because I remember giving the oral part of the report and saying that the anniversary is next month.

So today is Israel’s sixtieth anniversary. Apparently Harry Truman recognized the new state within seconds of its declaring itself a state. And today our embarrassing president is there saying both Israel and the US are committed to peace. (Somehow I just don’t feel authenticity from him.) Sixty years and never any peace. Sixty years and thousands of Palestinians displaced with more settlements germinating every day. Sixty years and a homeland with an anthem in a minor key. Joy and gratitude, melancholy and disaster. Will the pain make us stronger? Will the unceasing conflict bring wisdom? Will there ever be kindness?

climbing outside

Rock climbing outside was great fun, exciting, invigorating and challenging. It felt almost like it used an entirely different set of muscles, I was fatigued after we finished. Even though I’d only done about five or six climbs. It was also frightening and nerve wracking. The idea of falling is far more frightening outside because, although you’re on a rope, when you fall you scrape down an uneven wall and can often wind up swinging out to the right or left – more scraping against an uneven wall. Not scraping, actually, slamming after a wide swing. Trying to pull a roof was terrifying because I knew I’d swing ten feet to the left when I came off. Which I did.

I managed to hit myself in the head with my helmet. An excellent example of irony. I ate a lot of gorp. Went up to the top of the rock to take photos looking down, On the way to the top I saw a snakeskin which caused me to have a small panic attack – being terrified of snakes as I am. Every time I climbed up this one route – the bunny slope I called it – I saw a hole directly into the dirt between the rocks. Round and snake shaped. Every time I was eye level with it I had to control my panic and just climb on past.

I enjoyed the day and, although the climbing was sort of frightening, I definitely want to do it again. I’m not ready for real hard routes yet. But I loved the feel of the cold and flaking rocks beneath my fingers. The teeny tiny holds I can’t get onto in the gym felt enormous outside. The support of the convex wall beneath me helped more than the flat unnatural wall in the gym. Can’t wait to try again.

Vanishing Point

Well, missed yesterday. Last day of my 12 days of non-stop franticness. Today I’m on the couch, in couch clothes, doing only couch things. Hooray. Finally a day off.

The play, Vanishing Point, was fabulous. Very tight, story clear, music lovely. I have high hopes for it to go places beyond Dignity Players in Annapolis. Should be off Broadway at the very least. The plot concerns three women born in the late nineteenth century – all famous. All three of them at some point in their lives, vanished. Two returned. One remains missing. The parallels among them are eerie. Agatha Christie, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Amelia Earhart. What would it have been like had they known one another, helped one another, held one another closely to the heart? It was, in the twenties and thirties, so difficult to be a succeeding woman. The culturally embedded dislike of women getting things done wasn’t even hidden at that time. There simply was no taking women seriously. Would they even have taken each other seriously? What would they have said? The play explores these questions and more. A wonderful production.

However when it gets to off Broadway, there must be a better costume mistress. The costumes in this production were sad. My companion knew they would be a problem when the program announced of the costumer that “Costuming is her thing.” Oh dear. The woman playing Agatha Christie was costumed fairly well, our guess was that she was wearing her own clothing. The clothing seemed dated – appropriate for the part – but fit her perfectly. The woman playing Aimee Semple McPherson was dressed in a shiny, glaringly white costume, a cross stitched in gold adorning the center of her front. If it’d been even off white it wouldn’t have been as awful. But the shininess and the ridiculous look really made her stand away from the other characters and not in a good way. It looked as if it’d been sewn just for her, just finished the afternoon the play opened. The woman playing Amelia Earhart wore a leather jacket, white scarf, flannel shirt. That all sounds right. But it was far from it. The jacket was some man’s – a blazer, not a flying jacket, about five sizes too big. She swam in it, the shoulders poking out too far from her body, the sleeves taped up to try and hide their enormous length. The scarf was not a flying scarf, but a regular knitted winter scarf. The fringe on the end was the only thing saving it from being totally inappropriate. The flannel shirt, not too visible beneath the enormous jacket was also enormous. Her khakis fit fine, thank goodness, and the shoes weren’t too bad, although the white socks were a mistake.

But, hey, the play was fantabulous enough to overcome the poor costumes. It was a high wire act for those three women and they accomplished the feat smoothly. All three were onstage for almost the entire two acts – not even a sip of water to moisten their singing throats. What a great job they did. Can’t wait to be going to the Broadway opening.

phew

This is the last day of unadulterated work, six in a row. But it felt like twelve since last weekend was a visit-the-family twofer. After this I have a tiny break. Phew. (Although my list of things to get done over the summer is already growing exponentially.) As soon as I finish my grading for this semester I need to start preparing for the summer semester. I have several packs of grading to do, but the deadlines give me at least a tiny window instead of all those I-beams across the head I had this week. Tonight I get to see a musical written by a friend, a play I’ve been waiting to see for years. High anticipation.

Dave

As I pulled my arm back from giving him a big hug, my wrist brushed against the hard and unyielding metal and plastic housing of his weapon. Tucked snugly against his back, a waistline holster holding it in place. For a split second I saw his face wondering if he’d need to explain. Or apologize. But I continued on as if it nothing had been revealed. Although his face betrayed nothing more I could tell he was relieved not to have to go through it all again and gently ask my indulgence. His face is pudgier now than the last time I saw him. So is mine. His presence in the room far more grounded than that last time too. He drags behind him, like his shadow, a palpable sadness. When I last saw him he’d just been accepted into the police academy. Now it is almost nine years later, and he was telling a tale about a drunk he’d not arrested under the bridge, a guy who couldn’t stop drinking. What a gift that he and I both had.

yet another day

It's 9:40. I just got home from work. I left my house this morning at 8 AM. The entire dang week has been like this. I'm exhausted and I still have a stack of papers to respond to -- by Saturday. I feel on the verge of a little tiny collapse. If I can get through the rest of this week...it'll be cause for great celebration. Then I can think about better blogging items -- like why American Gladiators is coming back to television, what happened to the horse stuck in cement statue that used to be on Maryland Avenue (and other statue disappearances), and why a skull and crossbones adorns one of the coffins in which the pope is buried.

still no brain

This has to be the worst week of the semester – last week of class. Four different stacks of projects and papers to respond to and evaluate. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Candidates coming for interviews. Open houses to attend and answer questions at. Public presentations of three different sets of projects. Group presentations in one class. Breakfast and lunch dates with work people to discuss various work things. And the cap at the end on Saturday night will be a fun evening seeing a friend’s play. Next week a little bit better – still a bunch of things to do, but three of them are parties. I like parties, but after a one or two it begins to feel like a chore.

Today I got done most of what was on the list. Still one group of grades not written up. But I think I can get to it tomorrow. I wish I had even a tiny bit more brain power to write even a tiny bit of stuff here that’s not about work. But my brain simply is not working for anything else. It’s barely working for this. I’m keeping up with my daily commitment, but I feel completely dazed by this semester. It’s worn though me. Added to all the work, all the bad news I keep getting is also wearing me down. I know it’s not happening to me, and for that I’m grateful. But it begins to feel like everywhere I turn.

That’s it for tonight. Soon, soon…my brain will be returned to me. I hope anyway.

work and more work

Work work work work work work work. Is there no end to the crowded days and swamped nights. Waking up at 3 AM thinking about what I have to do tomorrow. Working straight through all day no break lots of different things to do all of them requiring brain power and eyes that pay attention and never ever ever stops. Yipes. Maybe tomorrow I can grab a few moments before I start on the big pile again. Let’s hope for some moments to be able to write. That would be nice.

today was...

Somewhere someone has finished all her grading. This person is not me and the place is not here. I have a brand new telephone on my desk. Taped to it is a tiny sign that says “please continue to use your old phone until May 11” and next to the test is a small clip art picture of an old hook and receiver telephone. Like from the movies. Under the small sign is a larger – but still perty darned small – piece of paper upon which is printed some instructions about how to use the phone. But the essential part is that you must call to set up a time to take new-phone-training. And every time you go to the new-phone-training website it says the trainings have been put off. I wonder if I’ll ever learn to use my new phone.

Today a very packed day. Two live chats and about eleven hundred papers graded. Tomorrow an actual class. And then more papers. And then the next day. More papers. And the day after that…more papers. Will this god forsaken semester ever come to an end? Too many problems piling up at the end. Too many.

sorry

Well, I missed yesterday because I was in Arlington with a bunch of other family members and the computer problems were like a comedy of errors. This old computer ran out of juice because I forgot power. By the time I realized that I couldn’t get on the computer in the room I was sleeping in because it’d been shut down because it’s too noisy (and then this morning it didn’t even come back on anyway – its own power problems). I was working all the live long day yesterday. A student missed class, and never emailed or called. I checked my email at lunch and said to my partner “I have an email from Caroline Kennedy. But no email from [this missing student] – she didn’t even bother to tell us she wasn’t showing up. This is going to be a big problem for her. My 6 year old niece has lost three teeth, but can’t remember where they were lost. The 4 year old is whiney as ever. The 2 year old is just a joy with his little tiny hands – what could be better than feeling a small hand tugging you to come with him? Not much. Certainly not trying to figure out what happened to that blasted student. Anyway. I’ll make up for missing yesterday…promise.

belle's mouthpiece?

You might be interested in Belle, the person who keeps signing the posts. She was an interesting woman. The story is both long and circuitous and brief and to the point. She and her sisters hated each other. "What did they fight about?" I asked a cousin from South Africa once. "Anything. If one said it was black, the other said it was white. They just fought all the time." And so it was with a pervading sadness that, after my grandmother's funeral, my father implored me and my young brothers to always get along with our siblings. Belle was born one off from the youngest of a large eastern european brood. She wanted, however, to be the youngest. And to that end she insisted her younger brother, Sam, swap birthdays with her. When she died, at age 84 or 86 or 87 (it will never be totally clear), her death certificate gave her year of birth as 1902. But I know she had simply succeeded in fooling her nephew, a rather famous doctor, into thinking that. She was almost certainly born in 1899. Maybe in Poland. Maybe in South Africa. But somewhere, she had a beginning.

American Idol

I can’t believe I’m about to discuss this topic, but I have something to say about American Idol – the ridiculously popular television show engaged in finding, via popular vote, the next big singing sensation. On Tuesday night Paula Abdul, one of the judges and the object of infinite ridicule by Kathy Griffin, seemed confused when she started to critique one of the singers for his second performance after he’d performed only once. Apparently there was great media outcry about this – some accusing Abdul of being, let’s say, in an altered state. Some just accusing her of stupidness. And some accusing the show of underhanded tactics.

Then today comes a revelatory story – in the New York Times, no less – that she “acknowledged on Wednesday what some ‘American Idol’ viewers have long suspected: The show’s judges sometimes see portions of the dress rehearsal for the show and use that to help formulate their comments on the evening’s live performance.” For god’s sake. (You can see I’m not even alarmed enough to give this an exclamation point.) Who in the world would have expected them to not watch dress rehearsal.

I’ve been watching this show for only this season. Quite literally, I have never before seen a single episode – although I’ve been listening to people talk about it for years. But even I know – the judges having mentioned it – and would expect – how could they possibly make those judgments on the fly on live television – that they see dress rehearsals. In this single season I’ve been watching (just, mind you, to get a sense of what this cultural phenomenon involves) I’ve heard them make reference to having seen the dress rehearsal. Has the rest of the viewing – and critiquing – public not heard these comments? Made, as they are, on the air and in front of millions.

And why, why?! (there’s your exclamation point), is it a big deal? Why is it a small deal? Who in the world could care about this? The “judges” don’t even judge the competition. They evaluate people’s performances. But the “judging” – the evaluating that results in elimination and/or victory – is done by the voting public. So why would it matter if Randy, Paula, and Simon get to see dress rehearsal?

Baffling – the event, the response, the attention. Another example of an out of control media response, fueled by bloggers and lapped up by the public. Oh my.

computer is getting old

I can’t wait until I get a new computer. This one is getting very tired. It often won’t go to sleep even when I close it. This causes the motor to work extra hard and get exceedingly hot. I hope it doesn’t burn all the way out before a new one arrives. I do love my Mac. And I don’t want to make the computer mad – I want it to hang out and be happy until its replacement arrives. I want to give it lots of love and caring so it feels all warm and fuzzy and continues to work at its top capacity until it gets to retire. I suppose I should turn it off more often. It probably deserves more rest than I permit it to have. I am a computer slave driver. And it sees everything I do so I want it to know how much I love it.

Well it’s been a long hard day. That’s about all I can get tonight.

traumatic brain injury

Who am I if I lose the ability to do my job? Not if I lose my job, but the ability to do it. Who am I if my mind, not my memory, betrays me? What if I have memories but no access to their how they got there? What makes my personality? I can be traumatically changed by a short circuit in my head. Electrical impulses work sometimes, sometimes not. My memory wanders off sometimes, it’s small and shouldn’t be out on its own. But the basic abilities, the likes and dislikes, the frameworks for reasoning. What when they disappear?

the accident

Oh my god. I just found out my good friend was in a terrible car accident in November. Pedestrian versus car, she was the pedestrian. A pedestrian because she was being a good Samaritan and trying to help a woman in a car who was having a seizure. She saw a car bouncing off the guardrail as they both sped up Route 95. Finally the bouncing car came to stop and she could see the woman in the driver’s seat having a seizure. She stopped her car on the other side of the road and other cars helped her stop traffic and get across. As she and her son approached the car that had come to a halt it started moving again – a Mercedes SUV – barreling toward them. “Run!” And she tried to jump the guardrail, but it was too high. As she tried to lift her leg over it, the car made contact and her son, running ahead of her, turned just in time to see her being cartwheeled over the rail. He was hit next – the car actually ran over him, but the big chassis straddled him (thanks be to Allah) and he wound up with a broken leg. She’s been out of work with TBI since then. Holy shit.

It happened in November, I’m just finding out now. As she spoke I kept saying “my mouth is hanging open.” I feel so unmoored finding this out. Let me speak selfishly for a paragraph or two.

She’s been a friend for 38 years – a long time. Learning of this horrible accident makes me so aware, once again, of our mortality. And it makes me feel so personally lucky that I am alive and well – after all the things I have also survived. And the things my other friends, so many of them, have not survived. Her life is changed forever. And I am still fine. How does this happen? How is it that I keep surviving?

And why, after I found this out, was my first reaction to try and finish up everything I had to do before settling in to process the horror? I was trying to make myself grade a few papers before blogging about it. Finally I put the papers aside, and here I am telling you. But my first instinct was to put everything in order and then set aside some time to feel.

OK. Done being selfish (at least for the moment). Our lives change in a moment, an instant. While we’re walking dully along, or watching our children play, or trying to help. And suddenly and forever everything is different. Could be better. Often it’s worse. And even if the alteration is itself minor, miniscule, too small to be seen with the naked eye, the impact can be unfathomable. We are entirely changed. And then…who are we? We are in unfamiliar skin. The mind has familiar memories, but the window to the present is suddenly fogged. How to carry on? It’s the finale of the Carmina Burana, or a whisper. The question rolls silently through the open door and into the center of the floor. How to carry on?

assessment I

I thought I would have a day to relax today and it was starting to look like that. But then I went down to help a friend and it took the remainder of the day. There was some entertainment, and a meal. But I was hoping to clean up a little bit after my busy week and trip to the dorky assessment conference. Assessment. Donkey, donkey, certs – as a colleague calls it. I can’t think of anything more idiotic. I think we’re even converting one of the assessment gurus here at my place of business. The conference was nothing new, but a bit frightening. I did hear a few people talking about how they’re actually using it to help students – that’s the only way I can justify taking my time for this most useless and time consuming of tasks. It has the potential for too many serious problems. And that potential is all but certain to materialize. How can it not? If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you must use it by the third. So sayeth Chekov. So the big question is to figure out how to have this monster live among us and not have it consume us. This requires serious thought and cooperation for subverting the master’s plan. More anon.

returning from Raleigh

I’m at the airport in Raliegh/Durham (RDU – although I’ve no idea what the U is for)
I’m watching a mother (or possibly a sister) sitting with two boys, one about 17, the other maybe 14. Her entire energy is devoted to trying to take pictures of the 17-year-old with her cell phone. she sits between them aiming her camera at him by holding it out and pointing it at him. She does not look a the screen. The 14-year-old tries to foil her picture taking by swinging his hand out in front of the phone as she points it. The 17-year-old devotes most of his energy to trying to avoid a good picture. He holds his hand up in front of his face. He turns his head away. He turns to look at her with eyes half closed as if badly hung over.

But although his motions tell the tale of someone who doesn’t want a photo taken, every time she snaps one he leans in to look with her at the tiny screen and see what she has captured.

She seems old enough to be their mother, but might not be. She and the young boy keep engaging in a slapping contest. They all have similar looks, tall and thin (except for the adolescent boy). She is inked with tattoos of a dragon and and eagle crawling up her lower leg.

Behind me in the rows facing one another are about ten grown men exercising their testosterone; carrying on in loud resonant voices filled with privileged laughter and audible winking. The tannest one among them has a sharp haircut and a Bluetooth fastened in his ear. Every single one of them is wearing shorts. Hard to imagine more obnoxiousness than this.

They’ve called my flight and we are lining up by our “position” numbers. Southwest no longer relies on groups A, B, and C, but now assigns actual boarding positions. This, I assume, is to finally stop the entire boarding group from rejecting seats in favor of queuing up on the floor. I’m off to board in the 29th position.

just leaving

I'm off to North Carolina for a conference. After I get done with that hot mess, I'll be back here. See ya.

just home

I've just arrived home from seeing the Nationals pelt the Mets horribly. It took me 45 minutes to get from the park to Union Station. In all, about two hours home from the DC ballpark. A long trip. Too long. And too late.

Hillary I (beause I'm sure there'll be more)

Driving up Charles Street today I saw a car with four homemade bumper stickers taped to its trunk. “Stop her” “Stop her now” “Put her in her place” “Vote for Obama” Such venom. The driver was an old hippie – male. And people continue to argue that misogyny is not a part of Hillary Clinton’s undoing. They don’t even see it – how people say things about her they’d never, ever, ever say about a male candidate. Because it’s acceptable to speak with that kind of derision and contempt about a woman. Even when a woman is doing the speaking.

organization(?)

One thing I really need to do is clear out my email box. It has 4,703 messages in it, and that is just the in box. It doesn’t count all the messages I’ve moved to other specially created mailboxes. I’ve got boxes for different things going on at work, boxes for my death penalty avocation work, boxes for particular people, boxes for projects I’m working on, boxes for organizations I’m a member of, boxes for particular interests, boxes for personal items, boxes for things that amuse me, too many boxes. But is it really too many boxes? It’s fairly well organized. But what happens is (the same thing happens any time I’m trying to organize something) that I start a box called Box 1, thinking “this is what I need.” Then I make a new box, Box 1-a, thinking it’s a class of Box 1. Then I make Box 1-b, then a Box 2, then a Box 3. And then everything winds up in Box 3 because all the other boxes were false classes of what I thought I was collecting. So I’ve got the box I’m using (3) and all those other boxes (1, 1-a, 1-b, 2) just sit around collecting dust because I never tidy up the boxes. It’s all very confusing to describe without using actual box names – but I can’t bring myself to actually do that since it would show the world, in no uncertain terms, my organizational goofyness. I choose to simply write about it nonsensically.

Anyway, I need to clean out my email boxes. But the job, I fear, will take a few days of concentrated effort and I’ve not got the stomach for it. After that I need to clear off my computer desk top because my Firefox decided to start downloading everything to the desktop without telling me and it got out of hand very quickly before I got around to changing the preference setting. Oh the things we need to look after on our computers. More on this tomorrow.

uniform v. costume

I do have a pair of Groucho glasses – eyebrows and mustache – that I sometimes wear at work. Would this be clown-like? I wouldn’t want to frighten my companion from Ft. McHenry. She put re-enactors with clowns because they wore uniforms. What about other uniform types – police, fire fighters, catholic schoolgirls? Are they frightening too? Clowns wear costumes, not quite the same as uniforms. Would she be a-feared of trapeze artists? Opera stars? Actors? Re-enactors? Re-enactors don’t really wear uniforms. Since they’re not actually civil war soldiers, they are wearing costumes.

Ft. McHenry

At Ft. McHenry yesterday re-enactors were roaming the grounds. Sometimes shaping themselves up into formations, sometimes wandering off individually. As we sat eating a cupcake (not a very good one) one came over and told us they were about to fire a cannon and we were just barely in the safe zone. He seemed hot in his woolen uniform but insisted, although he was also wearing a flannel shirt beneath his coat, that he was not. We missed the cannon fire, but my companion did not like the re-enactors one bit. She said they were too much like clowns and she is one of those who does not like clowns. Apparently this is a breed of person – the clown hater. She felt their being in uniform made them resemble clowns. I pointed out that maybe she didn’t dislike clowns, just people in uniform. However, she felt pretty certain it was a dislike of clowns. She might have even been a little afraid as she was very nervous when the one came over to talk with us. And as we were leaving the company was marching in our direction and she adopted a swift pace to make our hasty exit.

cupcakes

The Baltimore Cupcake Company on Fort Avenue makes a pretty good, although not superb, cake upon which they pile several swirls of extra sweet icing. The flavor is mostly in the icing, although we did discover the blueberry pie had a layer of what is essentially blueberry jam at the bottom of the cupcake paper. You cannot extract the cake and jam together – leaving the “pie” aspect unmet. The cake is vanilla and the topping is a sweet swirled purple frosting about two inches high. The cupcakes are OK. Not fabulous or terribly moist or to-die-for delicious. The icing, like the actual cupcakes, is extremely sweet, almost too sweet. I am not a cupcake connoisseur. They were good, but not wonderful. They were rich but a bit too sweet.

The issue with the BCC is its exterior. They need to hire me to come and explain to them what is wrong with their look. In their limited display window they have a cupcake display tray – brightly colored, but with no cupcakes on it. No cupcakes in the window. No product for passers by to see. In fact, the window makes them look as though they might have closed and gone off leaving this cupcake tower behind. In front of the store on the sidewalk – by the street, not directly in front of the store – is a large (about 8 feet high) dead bush. This should be cleared away. They need a tiny makeover.

A few blocks down the road is Fort McHenry, the place that flew the flag that Francis Scott Key saw when he wrote the Star Spangled Banner. More on this tomorrow.

sermon

Note in the margin of a sermon: "Weak point. Pound pulpit." And so it is with all fascism.

Papal visit

I’m sorry but there’s something just a little bit creepy about a Pope – head of the catholic bunch, those wily papists – who speaks with a German accent. Just hearing him sound like all those actor Nazis (because the real Nazis probably rarely spoke English) feels like a confluence too bizarre to stomach. Joey Ratz (his former name) is visiting America. Benedict ex vee eye (his current name) is coming around saying he wants the church to return to its roots – belief in miracles blind faith to church teachings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a gentle voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah he’s appalled by the abuse scandal. But his voice says crazy things and he’s appalled because the scandal gave the church a black eye, not because it was horrifying. Since when did a religious leader of a relatively small group of people become a world leader? That other guy – Beatles guy – he made the papacy an icon of coolness. And now the former head of the church censorship office – the office that used to be in charge of the inquisition – is speaking in a German accent about what we ought to believe. This guy used to be John Paul’s Dick Cheney.

Paradox

I’m possessed by the notion of paradox and how it plays out in so many arenas. Everything contains its own opposite. Take the seasons. Winter contains spring. I was cured of being depressed in winter by moving from an apartment to a place where I could see the ground. As the deepest winter days drape gloom from high clouds down to the horizon’s edge I can just see the beginnings of tiny bulbs shoving their teeniest shoots up for a tiny peek. Even when snow covers the ground I can still see the azaleas preparing their buds for when their moment arrives. They are not budding, mind you, they are preparing. I can see them breathing deeply in their period of rest, making ready to be ready for what is to come. And the same for other seasons – while we enjoy the glorious days of summer, the light is shrinking away from us. Fall contains winter and spring can barely hold summer back.

Homeopathy is paradox. We ingest a tiny bit of the disease we want to prevent. Immunization works on this same principle, western medicine steals the best from eastern. How in the world did any person ever think that what might kill her would heal her? Who was the first person to eat the poison? We use it cosmetically too – botox, that highly toxic poison, is our current fountain of youth.

Sometimes we call paradox by other names. Irony is paradox that’s kicking you in the ass. Nixon made “launder” a dirty word. Culturally we want people to behave one way – like nursing infants because it is the most healthy way to begin life for both mother and baby – but we do everything within our symbolic power – like asking them to do “that” in the bathroom – to make it impossible. Beethoven went deaf, Julie Andrews’ surgery on her vocal chords took away her voice, Beverly Sills had a deaf daughter. You might call these last few coincidences. But if you do, coincidence is paradox that stumbled and took a header into a rosebush.

Quoting his father, Martin Luther King once said “if a man has not found something worth dying for, he is not fit to live.” Surely this is paradox.

Our most painful paradox is that we need people who’ve been in war occupying high places in government so they can speak up against other wars. People who’ve fought know the horrors of war and why it can never lead you where you think it will. But the only way to get people who’ve been in war into high positions in government is to have wars for them to fight in.

phew

Walked six miles today -- to and from work. Uphill both ways.

Vicki's story

I hate listening to my good friend Vicki Scheiber tell her story. It’s always a struggle not to be infuriated by the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s murder. Four similar rapes had preceded Shannon’s attack. But the police downgraded the first two so the third rape was considered the first attack in the area and, thus, not part of a pattern. When the rapist broke into Shannon’s apartment her scream alerted her neighbor and he called the police. They came quickly and were actually pounding at the door to her apartment probably as she was being killed inside. But because the first two rapes had been downgraded, the two young cops knew nothing about a pattern in the neighborhood. And when they received no reply to their knocking and they heard no noise inside they told the neighbor who’d called they couldn’t break a door down for no reason. And they left.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be trying desperately to find your child, knowing she’s not shown up to take an important MA degree exam, that something went on at her apartment last night, that she’s not answering her phone, that the balcony sliding door has been discovered open, that she’s nowhere to be found. The doting parent must think the worst, yet thinking, perhaps unconsciously, that couldn’t possibly really be what’s happened. Maybe she’s hurt, maybe she was at a friend’s and took ill, maybe an accident. And then the worst is confirmed. She’s dead in her apartment, discovered by her brother who, along with the police-dialing neighbor, finally broke down the door the next afternoon. How can you go on?

And every time I hear her tell the story I get angry all over again at the police behavior. Trying to improve their stats they erased a pattern that might have stopped this rape from becoming a murder. Young cops who didn’t understand the real situation or believe the neighbor that he’d heard a scream took the silence in the apartment to mean all was well. But it feels almost ridiculous to say it makes me “angry.” Angry is not what hearing this does to a person. I’m incredulous and enraged, and every single time I hear the tale I still can’t believe the horrific serendipity of events that led to that moment. Her brother was going to come stay with her that night, but she told him not to because she’d be studying. If he’d been there… If the police department hadn’t tried to pad their numbers… If the police at the door had gone in… If, if, if.

And then your daughter is dead. How to bear that pain?

Food Network

I’ve recently become addicted to the Food Network. I haven’t watched enough shows to be able to know who I really like yet. But so far I’ve discovered that, even though she is somewhat (somewhat?) annoying, Rachel Ray’s 30-minute meals are good ones. I also like Bobby Flay. I discovered the Food Network one day when I came downstairs and turned on the TV set. It was already tuned to this channel and I just sat down on the couch and started watching. I found myself fascinated and began seeking out this channel again and again. I began learning things about food and cooking food that interested me and made me feel like I wanted to cook. I knew I was hooked when one afternoon, while watching Rachel Ray, I found myself thinking “I can do that” and in the middle of a fairly packed workday I made a list, went to the store, purchased ingredients, came home and whipped up three 30-minute dishes for two people who were coming over to watch the finale of Project Runway. I guess it might not be all bad to be addicted to the Food Network.

Poker night

Tonight is poker night. (Although we started out playing Catch Phrase, so I’d say it’s simply game night.) I actually write this missive from the middle of a game. We’ve got brand new slippery cards and so far I’ve won two hands. We have a stack of post-it notes on which we’ve written the names of the games we generally play. When the dealer calls the game we display its name on our little post-it note stand (an old desk calendar stand) so that we can remember the game we’re currently playing. We are women of a certain age and along with all the chatting we can’t always remember what we’re playing from one moment to the next. I wanted to get one of those scrolling LED signs to use for display as that would have been far more ridiculous, but we would not have been able to input all our game names and the game-to-game maintenance would have been far too labor intensive. We go low tech. So far I’m up. Back to the game.

A good fit

It took me ages to figure out how clothes are supposed to fit me. For years I was buying the wrong size, too large because I didn’t understand that clothing was not supposed to hang on your body lifelessly. I didn’t understand that some clinginess was expected, that you were not supposed to look like a house draped with one of those gigantic flags you see at used car lots. (“Bigger than my house” is what I say every time I pass one of those enormous pieces of star spangled drapery.) I can’t even imagine what I used to look like before I understood this. But apparently I am not alone. Tim Gunn has based an entire Bravo TV show on helping people understand that they’re wearing clothes that do not fit. They don’t fit physically, they don’t fit chronologically, they don’t fit style-wise, and they don’t fit emotionally. We do love Tim, he’s gentle and non-threatening, and he seems able to explain what he means – a rare quality. I still sometimes have problems understanding proper fit, but I’ve grown better over the years. Now if I just had some hair to mess about with. Ah me.

Expectations

Expectations. How they mess with us. My saying about it is this: the second I have expectations, I’m fucked. And how true it is. When I go into a situation wanting a particular thing to come of it I am always disappointed. Always. Because what I want will never be the outcome. It’ll be something worse, something better, something entirely unexpected. Whatever it is, it’ll not be what I thought would happen. I might be happily surprised. I might be bitterly disappointed. I might be bitterly surprised. But it most decidedly will not be what I was thinking it would be.

The Tao says that truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. Desire bends our actions into misshapen brittle twigs. Expectations cloak us in a fog genuine experience cannot penetrate.

plans (I hope)

Wanting to get back to two things soon. 1. Hoping to return to working a little more actively on repealing Maryland’s death penalty. Want to get back to getting my hands in the process. Wanting to put my energies where my beliefs are. and 2. Really wanting to return to working on some writing about Belle Mazur – the Belle of Belle’s mouthpiece. Somehow the day job (which I like) keeps getting in the way of these things. Hopefully as we approach the end of this season I’ll be able to rearrange some working focus. That’s my plan. I’ll keep you posted.

parking

There’s a big bru-ha-ha brewing where I work. Management is planning to raise fees for parking and one enormous segment of the community is hugely, and justifiably, furious about it. A couple of them made a YouTube video and our CEO was reportedly pretty angry about it. Apparently he didn’t see it coming. My question is how could he not see it coming? This is 2008 and this segment of our community uses the Internet and YouTube the way other people use the telephone. It’s a daily and regular part of their lives. The video is fabulous. It tells the problem, says what they want as redress, has moments of humor, even (appropriately for their secondary audience) bleeps out the one curse word they use. It's well made and fun to watch. Our CEO simply isn’t used to having this population around and expected them to lie down and accept the new policies as the rest of us are expected to. Hooray for them!

The tag

Recently manufacturers have stopped putting tags in the necklines of topwear – you know, shirts. How wonderful is that? No more scratchy tags on the back of your neck. No more trying to fold the tag down in the drawer so it will learn that position. And most importantly, no more tag sticking up from your the back of shirt. No more small outcropping climbing up your neck that some person embarrassingly has to tuck gently in. Hooray. When Hanes started billing this on their commercials, it was as if they were touting a revolution. Viva la revolucion!

But we should have known better. Every advancement is a Faustian bargain. You gain something, you give something up. We lost the tags at the neck. But we were presented with the even more annoying tag on the lower left seam. It’s even worse than the neck tag. More annoying, more scratchy, more likely to make the wearer yell. It won’t ever show. That much is true. But it’s far worse than the tag at the neck. Part of the problem is that since the tag is not visible as you fold the shirt, you don’t remember to extract it. The thing elicits a constant absent-minded scratching of the left side until, filled with rage, you finally dash for the scissors – in the middle of a meeting, while you’re on the bus, at the opera – and cut the thing out. If this is the price for no tag at the neck, it’s definitely not worth it.

pitching...

So speaking of baseball, I’ve been noticing that several pitchers are wearing number 44 these days. What’s up with that? This large number used to be used mostly by the big sluggers, Hank Aaron wore number 44, so did Reggie Jackson. But now pitchers for the Astros and the Padres are both wearing number 44. Pitchers used to take the lower numbers: 10, 12, 15. But now they’re up in the stratosphere with their numbers and I wonder if it means that they’re planning to become big hitters.

I’m definitely a fan of the National League rules of having everyone hit. The designated hitter rule of the American League is for sissies. Everyone plays – that what I say. Anyone playing on the field should hit. Managers need to figure out how to negotiate around other good fielders who cannot hit. Pitchers should take batting practice and they should do what everyone else does.

Pretty much the only thing the DH does is allow old baseball players who’ve passed their prime on the field and are losing speed to continue playing. It emphasizes power over strategy and steamrollers over any subtlety that might be summoned by having to negotiate around the problem of a low-hitting pitcher. Bob Costas says that “anyone who has so short an attention span and so little appreciation for baseball that he can't bear to watch a pitcher bat is probably beyond hope, anyway” and I agree with him.

First Mets Game

Watching the NY Mets for the first time this year. Playing the Atlanta Braves. The Mets’ collapse last year – 7 games ahead then losing 12 of the last 17 in the last three weeks of the season – was the second worst in baseball history. I wish I could buy a TV station that would just show one team. I don’t want a hundred and forty for thousand games over the season. I just want this one team. I can either get all games, all teams by paying extra. Or all games of my local team on local station. But I can’t get only the team I want – the Mets. I’m listening to Tim McCarver, I still can’t stand him. Years ago, before his network career when he was just the Mets announcer, I once met a friend at the door to my apartment with a list of things I hated about Tim McCarver. He’s irretrievably annoying. I’m committed to getting back into baseball this season. Hoping it won’t mean all Tim all the time.

today's writing

If you add the day and the month together they equal the year. Fun with numbers. I wrote so many things today I wish I could post them here but, alas, I cannot. One was an exceptionally well composed email to a colleague about personnel issues. I take issue with his plan and made a brilliant case for an alternative plan. Another was an email to a friend from whom I am drifting away, an email trying to get us back on track. I wrote two emails to people I supervise summing up my recent visits to their work stations, and an email to one person explaining why something she’s using at work is an inappropriate example of what she thinks it might be. All writing was, if I do say so, terribly well done and completely unworthy of appearing here. Very sad. But it explains why I’m all written out for the moment and am going to bed. Goodnight.

Washington

The cherry blossoms were beautiful as usual. I have a photo somewhere of me when I was about 8 years old, sitting in one of those paddle boats that people take out on the tidal basin. I remember really enjoying that trip, but my father tells me I did nothing but whine. How idyllic it is that our memories permit us to enjoy what at the time we may have hated. I returned to DC years later with my friend Marion when I was living in NY. We had a Washington DC vacation. It was mostly dead people – monuments, cemeteries, art. No cherry blossoms. But I enjoyed that one too. And now I live down here. I love being close enough to my nation’s capital to go blithely to a protest for an afternoon. I can take up so many additional causes. What fun.

Interesting that a sign along the tidal basin path says it is visitor information, but really it's a series of commands. It's just a big do not.






The FDR Memorial has so many pieces to it, it covers a huge area. In this part we find out that apparently he did not like war. I agree.

home late

I've just returned home from a day in DC seeing the cherry blossoms and an evening of Jigu, Thunder Drums of China. Left at 7:30 this morning and getting home at 11:30, totally wiped out. More anon.

Seeing Satrapi

Saw Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, tonight at Notre Dame College (College of Notre Dame of Maryland). She was insightful and thoughtful and clear. “The intellectual work of art – written, visual, any sort of art – is anti-fascistic.” I went with a Persian friend (a former student) and her cousin and we ran into another former student, also Persian. (I love so many of my students and I’m so happy to see them after graduate and fly the coop.) Marjane's honesty with the crowd and her integrity as an artist sparkled in a room full of people living under a government filled with denial and existing on lies.