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Friday, March 4th, 2005
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8:23 pm - Who knew it was so easy?
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4:05 pm - And you thought you were a pack rat.
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| Sunday, February 27th, 2005
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10:45 am - Big Brother keeps us safe from zombies in Kentucky.
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Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding
http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=2989614
A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.
Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.
Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.
"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."
Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.
Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.
"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing,"
said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."
On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.
Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center.
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(21 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 25th, 2005
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2:15 pm - Speaking of never...
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When I was growing up we always had an electric can opener. My mom kept it on some impossible shelf, so opening a can of soup was always this ordeal of climbing on the counter and getting it down and unplugging the microwave, plugging in the can opener, opening the can, then doing everything all over again backwards. I thought this was how the whole world lived until I went to college and my boyfriend introduced me to the miracle that is the $1.50 manual can opener, which he then taught me to use. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I did I thought it was a fantastic invention.
Many years later I asked my mom why the fuck she was still using an electric can opener and she said it didn't aggravate her arthritis the way a regular one did. So, okay, that made sense. She's forgiven. But I still think it's funny that I reached 17 without knowing something so basic.
Later I had a friend who said he couldn't drive us home one night because he didn't know how to drive an automatic. Not knowing how to drive at all was common enough, as was not knowing how to drive a stick, but not knowing how to drive an automatic? I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.
I always admire these Renaissance jack-of-all-trades people who can do everything (who was it here that learned how to weld, just in case?), but I also admit to finding it totally charming when I meet someone who never learned something obvious, like how to write in cursive, or pump gas or ride a bicycle or use an ATM machine.
So I have to ask: what obvious thing can you not do? Share!
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(109 comments | comment on this)
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1:29 pm - Never is enough.
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10 Things I Haven't Done That You Probably Have
1. Ate nuts of any kind, or a peanut butter sandwich, or cheese that wasn't melted first.
2. Got stung by a bee or wasp.
3. Watched a full episode of anything involving anime from start to finish.
4. Dated someone who liked sports.*
5. Drank more than 2 cups of coffee, ever.**
6. Walked outside barefoot over the age of 4.
7. Had a screaming match with my mother over the age of 7.
8. Worked retail.
9. Took the SAT.
10. Thought long distance relationships were a bad idea.
* Last year's World Series exempted.
** I had one cup in 1987, another one in March of 1996. Both times I had my reasons.
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(49 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005
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7:06 pm - My life escapes me once again.
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| Saturday, February 19th, 2005
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3:27 pm - R.I.P.
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I grew up with an angry, vengeful internet. By "grew up" I mean the years from 20-28, because unlike some of you whippersnappers I came of age in the world of electric typewriters and Pong. I found LiveJournal in 2001 and was intrigued by the format. "There's so much you could do with this," I thought.
But I kept my identity both public and hidden. Meaning, I didn't tell anyone I knew in real life (except for Connor) that I was doing this, and I used (what was then) an unfamiliar username because I didn't want to be found out by anyone who'd known me elsewhere. I wanted to write without being critiqued, yelled at, spied on, talked about, or otherwise harassed. I was coming out of a bad BBS relationship and wasn't ready to sleep with LJ yet. Go out for dinner, maybe, but no sex, no talk of marriage and babies. Nothing serious.
I needn't have worried. This turned out to be a surprisingly supportive place, and I ended up making a commitment. It was a new thing for me, having discussions and talking about ideas in an environment that was challenging without being hostile. I credit early users like ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20050305130810im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wouldprefernot2 for creating that culture.
Over the last couple days I've been surprised at the number of people who said he was one of their first LJ "friends" they didn't know personally. I thought it was just me. But apparently he played that role in a lot of lives, though until now we were probably unaware of it. I think he must have influenced us all, in his own dry wit/back door way, because we're all a bunch of cranky fucks who've spent thirty-plus years developing a complicated relationship with human trauma and the written word, and yet we're all still here. I wish he were, too.
~~~
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
current music: w h auden
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(13 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 18th, 2005
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9:58 am - Oh god.
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| Tuesday, February 15th, 2005
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11:04 am - Not that I'm a sizeist.
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misia's latest post reminded me of this story about my grandmother:
My grandma worked as a meat packer for 30 years, long before the days of sexual harassment suits and the like. She had two male co-workers who were fond of discussing the relative 'looseness' of the women they worked with -- always loudly and within earshot of the women in question, of course. Most of the women were so embarrassed about this they just tried to ignore it as best they could and hoped the men would eventually grow up move on to other conversational topics.
But one day they turned to my grandma as she was cutting up some sausages and started egging her along. "What about you, Ellie? Huh? Huh? How much space you got down there? Come on, tell us!" And so on.
My grandma, calm as could be, took her butcher knife and whacked the sausage in front of her clean in half. "I suppose," she said, "that depends on what you're measuring it with."
They never bothered her again.
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 11th, 2005
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11:09 am - Running man.
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Has anyone been a six-year-old boy with ADHD*? I have a kid whose need for movement is stronger than anything I've seen before. Yesterday he literally ran laps around the classroom for twenty minutes straight. Getting distracted or wanting to play instead of read I understand, but this kid is way, way beyond that.
I'm working on adapting the curriculum we have to use so that it involves constant movement. In the meantime, though, I'm just wondering what's going through his head. Since I was... whatever his opposite is (I was the kind of kid who'd sit quietly under a tree even during recess), it's hard for me to identify with him. I do like him, though. A lot. He's one of my favorites.
But, man, I get tired just watching him.
* Feel free to replace this with "all the classic symptoms of what other people call ADHD" if you don't believe ADHD is a "real" diagnosis.
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(40 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, February 10th, 2005
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1:02 pm - Disappointed, but not surprised.
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I knew the Germans would buckle. The case was a long-shot, but I'm annoyed anyway. All they ever talk about is the hubris of America and what a nightmare it is for the rest of the world to live under our imperialistic shadow.
Now, for once, they had a chance to put their money where their mouth is, and they caved.
Reaction from the Center for Constitutional Rights is here.
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
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12:17 pm - Get any sleep?
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| Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
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8:02 pm - Cross-cultural dialogue.
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I was just IMing with a German friend about the snowstorm in Boston. I didn't know how much we got in centimeters, but he could envision 3 1/2 inches so I told him that yes, we got ten floppy disks of snow. This is the new international standard.
Then we went back and forth about some lullabye I remembered as a kid that I swear had "your father is a sheep" in its chorus. "Was ist die Mutter?" he asked. That much I didn't remember. He said, "She is raped in Poland." So, right then, it's that nice German lullabye about your mother being raped in Poland.
I have the flu. And a fever. I think I should go to bed now.
current mood:  confused
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(19 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, January 22nd, 2005
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1:29 pm - An open letter to SpongeBob SquarePants.
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Dear SpongeBob,
It's true: you and I have had our differences. I've been calling you and your lover Patrick a "cheese" and a "bedsore" since the evening my eight-year-old daughter first introduced me to you two years ago. I didn't mean it as an insult, exactly. It's just -- well, look in the mirror, dudes. Your boyfriend in no way resembles a starfish. A hemorrhoid, maybe. Or a vaginal cyst. But not a starfish.
But hey, you're right. Who am I to get in the way of your right to self-identify? So let's let bygones be bygones.
I'm writing to you today because it seems you have become the latest target of James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, a right-wing Christian organization. Mr. Dobson has insinuated that you and Patrick are engaged in a homosexual relationship, an observation to which I think the only appropriate response is a great big fat "DUH." My lack of gaydar is legendary among my friends, but even I recognized the two of you for what you were back in that first episode I saw, the one where you were going all passive-aggressive on Patrick because he made you do his ironing. I've been married twice. I recognize that dynamic when I see it.
So that much is fine. But Focus on the Family won't leave it at that. You and Patrick may have taken up residence at the very bottom of the ocean, but to Mr. Dobson you are still insufficiently closeted. After your appearance in a "pro-tolerance" video, Dobson's assistant, Paul Batura, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids."
Manipulating and brainwashing. That's heavy stuff.
Now I am a mother who has been working with children for the past four years, and though I am not as soft or as loving or as devoted as I imagine someone in my profession should be, like Mr. Dobson I have a passing interest in the welfare of our youth. And as much as I hate most children's television (and the advertising that comes with it), the fact is that on Thursday, SpongeBob, you came in handy.
I tutor elementary students in reading. Teachers like myself are hired under the No Child Left Behind law, which forces "under-performing schools" to provide their students with additional afterschool instruction. Some of my students are there because they truly need extra help. Others only need a place to go on the days when their parents work late. Still others have an array of learning disabilities that are above and beyond my capacity to address in a regular classroom, though under NCLB they will still need to pass the same standardized tests their classmates take if they want to be promoted, so they are placed with me regardless.
Thursday's lesson was about "character analysis" in literature. Two boys in my class have yet to learn the alphabet and I assumed the subject would be over their heads. Nevertheless, I'm paid to teach what I'm told to teach, and so I forged ahead. "Who knows what a character is?" I asked.
One girl scribbled in her notebook; the boy next to her crawled under the table. "Get back in your seat," I said. "What's a 'character'?"
Another boy, one who likes to please, half-raised his hand. "It's when you write something your teacher tells you?" In his regular school life I imagine this answer works for him at least fifty percent of the time, regardless of the question. Although I appreciated his ability to work the system, it wasn't what I was looking for.
"Uhh...." I said, searching the room. I tried to draw them out; gave them outrageous hints about the book we'd just read, a book about a girl named Sandy. "Who can tell me something about Sandy? What's she like?" I asked. Still there were no takers. They simply weren't used to talking about books, not when the act of reading them at all was still so new to them.
Fed up, I threw the book down. "Who watches SpongeBob SquarePants?" I asked.
This time every hand shot up.
"Who's the main character in that show? Who's it about?"
"SpongeBob!" they answered in unison.
"What's he like?"
"He's a sponge!" they cried. (I didn't take issue; didn't mention my cheese theory.) "He's goofy!" "He's stupid." "No he isn't!" "He wears a tie." "He's square!"
Yes, yes, I said. And who's his lov-- er, I mean, best friend?
"Patrick!" they cried.
"What's Patrick like?"
"He's a starfish!" (Again, I let it go.)
I wrote their responses on the white board as fast as they could produce them. Once they'd listed ten or twelve characteristics describing you and Patrick, I gave them my pedantic little educator lecture: "SpongeBob and Patrick are characters in a cartoon. They're the people -- well, the sponge and the starfish -- that the cartoon is about. We've listed some things about each of them. Now, who can tell me who the character of our book today was?"
Eight little light bulbs went off, and their hands flew in the air. "Sandy!" they said.
"Yes! This is a book about Sandy. What are some things you can say about Sandy?"
"She's happy!" "She's silly!" "She likes her dad!"
Yes, yes, very good!
The conversation took off. They compared the characters of cartoons they had seen (Scooby-Doo is his show's main character, even though Freddie and Velma are smarter) and then of books they had read (the cat in The Cat In The Hat is sneaky, and if he showed up at my house and treated the fish like that, I wouldn't tell my mother, either).
I can't say I was thrilled with this turn of events. I felt low, resorting to cartoons to get my point across. It's not that I begrudge parents for using the television as a babysitter. (I only work part-time and I've been using the television as a baby-sitter for years, so I can only imagine what a comfort it is to the parents of my students who work two or even three jobs.)
So I'm not anti-TV. But neither do I want to add to kids' pressure to keep up with what their friends and the media are doing. I want to be that one lone weirdo adult they can count on to be pathetically out-of-the-loop on the days when their friends accuse them of being immature and behind the times. Their classmates are already right there to chastise them for not having heard of this-and-that or such-and-such; I want to be the safe uncool haven they can come to as experts in their kid-culture field, the one who hasn't already heard and seen it all.
But it is one thing to have a general skepticism of the power of pop culture, and another thing to take issue with a specific cartoon for its homosexual overtones. I am sorry that Mr. Dobson and his organization view you and Patrick as a threat to young children's developing minds. While it's true I doubt you'll ever end up on the same shelf as Homer and Plato, you definitely served an educational purpose for me this week, and I would like to thank you for it.
So if the fundies ever get you down, please remember that there are eight first-graders in South Boston who appreciate you, eight first-graders who are not put off by your love for your best friend.
Yours, in solidarity with the Liberal Gay AgendaTM,
Laura
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(54 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, January 16th, 2005
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7:32 pm - I hate meta-journal entries, but.
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| Friday, January 14th, 2005
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9:13 am - Right, Sophie?
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My sister gives me shit because I've become one of those people: People Who Talk To Their Pets. I think this is unfair, since I also talk to my radio and television, and yesterday I had all kinds of words with my car, so it's not like I'm one of those weird animal people. But it's true that my mechanical objects don't give me the feedback I so reliably get from Sophie. Barring some terribly tragic event, like having HELP STRANGERS HELP ME over, or the presence of another cat, she's the talkiest cat either of us has ever known. This is annoying when she parks herself in front of your chair and looks you dead in the eye and meows for fifteen minutes straight, one meow after the other -- and not that anguished cat-in-heat thing, even, just this polite professor-like "Meow. Pause. Meow. Pause. Meow." -- on and on until you fucking clutch your head and scream "What do you WANT????" ("Meow.")
But other times it's so great, because her meows are so deadpan that you can pretend they mean anything you want them to. In our household, we seem to have decided that unsolicited meows are meows of dissatisfaction and existential angst, but solicited meows are always meows of assent. Therefore all three of us have developed the habit of ending every emphatic statement by looking at the cat and saying, "Right, Sophie?" And nine times out of ten she'll look back at us with her frowny serious cat face and say, "Meow."
Man, is that shit validating.
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(54 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 13th, 2005
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10:11 pm - FUCK THIS.
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I swear to god, I am SO OVER the money pit that is this car. That's it. It's parked on the street and that's where it stays until it's sold, donated, or reclaimed by its original owner. I have put more dollars than miles into this vehicle. I know this because I added it all up during the THREE HOURS I spent sitting by the side of the street this evening, AGAIN, waiting for my third tow in less than a month. The only wise investment I've made since I've had it has been my membership at Triple A.
On Tuesday I spent half a month's salary getting it fixed so I could continue to go to my job. Tuesday. This is Thursday. And the thing that broke isn't the thing they fixed, of course. Some totally different shit, so it's not like I can go back to the mechanic and complain about their work. Plus the emergency brake is inexplicably trashed, and the battery's dead from having the hazards on for three hours, and I am just SO OVER IT.
current mood: fed the fuck up
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(26 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, January 9th, 2005
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4:30 pm - My new favorite quote:
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I love writing the way someone cussing up a storm and threatening to throw the fucking computer out the fucking window loves programming.
-arielblue
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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4:04 pm - So, so, wrong.
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| Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
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10:32 pm - That's not funny! I mean it!
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And in other eschwa- and death-related news, I think "nobody puts Jerry Orbach in the coroner" might be the most groan-worthy joke I've EVER heard.
current mood: :)
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, January 4th, 2005
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12:11 pm - Humanity.
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| Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
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1:58 pm - Book search.
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Can anyone point me to some books about cross-cultural marriages and/or cross-cultural families? I'm mainly looking for memoirs like An Italian Education, but also sociological studies or even novels, as long as they're book-length and by a single author. (But not travelogues or anthropological stuff unless there's a cross-cultural family relationship where "family" is defined in the traditional sense, i.e. the anthropologist in Writing Women's Worlds gets "adopted" by her Bedouin host family, but that's not what I'm talking about.)
I'm not even looking for good stuff or stuff I'd like, necessarily. Not Without My Daughter would fit squarely into this category, even though I have all kinds of problems with its politics.
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(25 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, December 19th, 2004
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5:41 pm - Creation.
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I just finished Mamaphonic and something struck me. There's so much talk about how children ruin art, but I think most people's real suspicion is that art will ruin children.
When I was 20, newly married and having baby pangs, I read a lot of Anais Nin. She described spending her childhood in the company of her father's artist and writer friends, and how the wrenching loss she felt after her parents split up when she was eleven was not so much about losing her father per se as it was about being taken out of that community and starting a new, much less cerebral life with her mother in America. At the time I was writing travel pieces for an expat magazine and keeping copious diary notes about my life in Cairo while my husband was playing jazz music all over the city. My closest friend was Kitty, who was off winning poetry awards, and everyone we knew was either a writer or a musician. I kept trying to imagine inserting a child into that environment and I kept not seeing a problem with it, but it was so opposed to the view of motherhood both X and I had been raised with: a view that when you give birth your life closes down and you devote yourself not just to your child but to the business of becoming normal, solid, stable, secure. It's not the diapers and the school permission slips that get in the way of creativity so much as it's the idea of your child waking up at 2:30 in the morning with a head cold and finding you working wild-eyed in your studio instead of sleeping soundly in a four-poster bed next to your husband who is also your child's biological father, the way a proper mother should do. This is the real sin. Being weird. Children shouldn't have to suffer weird mothers, however devoted they may be to the parental project. Or so goes the party line. So go all the assumptions.
Forget how limiting that view of the artist is. How limiting is that view of children? Are they really so dull-witted, so fragile?
I see kids whose only impression of their mothers is that of maid and servant, who believe their every whim is worthy of indulgence. Most of their mothers are "good mothers" by every standard, even my own. They are devoted and responsible and sensitive to their children's needs. Their children are often sensitive as well; freed from the burden of worrying that they've lost their left shoe and only have that one pair that is okay to wear to school (a crisis we went through last week) they are able to tune into the needs of others and they are often popular and well-adjusted because of it. But secretly I wonder at how such children will fare when they leave the home, or if they were to be suddenly orphaned in some kind of hellish Dickens scenario. I have had friends who grew up on schedule in homes where they were pampered, and they were always wonderful human beings as long as we were operating within a familiar milieu, but once things turned difficult I wanted to push them into a ditch and get on to the real business of figuring out how to cope with the unexpected. In those cases it was always a different set of friends I came to rely on: the ones with single mothers, unemployed fathers, the mom with the mental illness, those who'd grown up shit-poor or in foster homes writing to their dads in prison. They were the ones who could assess the circumstances and come up with a workable solution, just like that. They wasted no time mourning the loss of the familiar or feeling wronged and persecuted because they'd been thrown temporarily off-kilter.
That's not to say there's virtue in throwing your life away in order to encourage your kids to buff up their survival skills. But the flip side is the mother in suburban Colorado who once asked what was so wrong with giving your kids a big home and lots of toys, if you could afford it? "Resilience" was the first word that popped into my mind.
The thing about living artistically in full view of your children -- and I'm defining "artistically" very broadly here -- is that you're showing them how to sustain themselves emotionally and intellectually with or without a lot of stuff. Spend the initial money on a used guitar or some art supplies and kids can entertain themselves for a lot longer than they could with an endless stream of brand-name toys.
You're also giving them permission to be obsessive, something girls, in particular, get so little of. We laugh and roll our eyes at a thirteen-year-old girl who spends six hours on the phone, but if the same girl spends six hours in front of a computer writing science fiction stories we start to worry that she's a freak, emotionally stunted. I'm not having it. Artistic skills take years to develop and, for most people, that apprenticeship starts in childhood. To make full use of that time they need the mental space and the uninterrupted hours to do their work, and, whether their parents are actively supportive or simply tolerant, they need to not be embarrassed by their first faltering endeavors.
Today I asked K to pick up the living room and we immediately launched into the same fight we always have -- the one undertaken with Clinton-like precision -- about the exact definition of "in a minute." When I give her any leeway at all on housework matters she interprets it as "only necessary after the fifth warning and my mom has popped a blood vessel with her screaming." Despite this I'm reluctant to go into now-means-now territory, because when I hear her typing rapidly at the computer I know she's got a thing in her head and I don't want to ruin her flow. I know how horrible that is. She knows I know how horrible that is, and takes full advantage.
The flipside, though, is that, because we're on the same page, she's also started respecting my own furious typing (rare as it's been lately). I tick my tongue when she walks into the office and she says "I'll come back later." There's no hostility in her voice now that she's started writing herself. She gets it, because she lives it.
This morning I woke up and the first thing I heard was the tack-tack-tack of her typing in her bedroom. Oh god, I thought, she's already up and writing. She's so dedicated. I was jealous of her commitment, and forced myself out of bed.
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(58 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, December 17th, 2004
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8:12 pm - Curvy.
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The nice thing about gaining weight is that you can fit into your fat clothes again.
Haha, how come no one ever thinks of it that way?
Well, it's true. I love these pants. When I cinch them with a belt they sag and look puffy. Right now? They rest on my hips as god intended.
Rock on.
current mood: hourglassy
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, December 13th, 2004
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12:38 pm - In which I refrain from referring to Dick Cheney as "Mr. Burns."
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