with insomnia-induced grogginess. And I am only blogging because my one fan says she checks this website often. I am throwing her a bone. Here, a bone!
-----
Today's Contrax lesson: shrink wrap, click wrap, browser wrap. AHHHHHH what the hell does that mean?
Tomorrow's feminism lesson:
Q: How do transmen fit within the framework of feminism?
A: They don't! AHHHHHH!!!!!
What am I talking about? I am appearing on a panel on lesbian feminism tomorrow. I'm moderating the part about "The Body." And all I can think is, how does lesbian feminism in the 21st century understand insomnia, as suffered by a lesbian feminist? Clearly I'm going to be AWESOME tomorrow.
Looking at Lesbian Feminism 1970-2005: Conversations Across Generations
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Bingoless
This is the third consecutive game of Scrabble where I have been bingo-free.
I am starting to worry about my synapses. Fire, little neurotransmitters, I know you're in there!
I am starting to worry about my synapses. Fire, little neurotransmitters, I know you're in there!
Outrage so muted I think it's perfectly silent
State v. Norman, 324 N.C. 253, 378 S.E.2d 8 (1989): 39 year-old woman suffers through 25 years of marital torment. Her husband beats her, chokes her, extinguishes cigarettes on her, forces her to prostitute herself at a truck to support them financially, verbally abuses her, forces her to eat pet food on the ground from a dog bowl, forces her to sleep on the floor, beats her, beats her, and beats her. She leaves the house one night with her grandchild--yes, at 39 she has a grandchild, which might tell you something about the circumstances of Judy and J.T. Norman--and then she gets a gun and shoots him while he's sleeping. N.C. Supreme court overturns appellate court's reversal of voluntary manslaughter conviction: she's guilty.
A note after the case in my casebook: this decision conforms to the law but not what is morally required. "These ignored facts have no place in the moral reasoning mandated by the traditional law of self-defense, yet they cause us to suffer moral disquiet with the result."
"Moral disquiet"?!! The Holocaust makes me suffer a frisson of moral disquiet as I eat Hot Pockets in front of my fifth episode of "Seinfeld" in a row. Thinking about the Killing Fields of Cambodia imbue me with a soupçon of moral disquiet. Pinochet? A pinch of moral disquiet.
Fuck the law! And fuck critics of the law!
Seriously, when the best you can do in expressing moral outrage is to whinge distractedly about "moral disquiet," what the fuck use are you? You see my point about how law really trims away the extremes until you are just a moderate walkie-talkie, a mannequin filled with high-falutin ideas about maintaining consistency and adhering to rules and no sense of how your own weak-kneed balancing act actually plays out. I think the proper response to Norman is FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIG!
A note after the case in my casebook: this decision conforms to the law but not what is morally required. "These ignored facts have no place in the moral reasoning mandated by the traditional law of self-defense, yet they cause us to suffer moral disquiet with the result."
"Moral disquiet"?!! The Holocaust makes me suffer a frisson of moral disquiet as I eat Hot Pockets in front of my fifth episode of "Seinfeld" in a row. Thinking about the Killing Fields of Cambodia imbue me with a soupçon of moral disquiet. Pinochet? A pinch of moral disquiet.
Fuck the law! And fuck critics of the law!
Seriously, when the best you can do in expressing moral outrage is to whinge distractedly about "moral disquiet," what the fuck use are you? You see my point about how law really trims away the extremes until you are just a moderate walkie-talkie, a mannequin filled with high-falutin ideas about maintaining consistency and adhering to rules and no sense of how your own weak-kneed balancing act actually plays out. I think the proper response to Norman is FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIG!
It's awesomely awesome
that I now sleep about four hours a night. Why? Why? I went to bed at 11pm, getting all excited about a long night of uninterrupted sleep. Then I wake up. At 2am. Then again at 3:30. And remain awake. My head is a jackhammer. My heart is a frantic min-pin. My eyes are shuddering in their sockets. I'm attempting to read a couple pages of Contracts but all these words, they make no sense!
Turning now to Section 2-207, "a definite and seasonable expression of acceptance or a written confirmation which is sent within a reasonable time operates as an acceptance even though it states terms additional to or different from those offered or agreed upon, unless acceptance is expressly made conditional on assent to the additional or different terms."
All these words, individually, make plenty sense. But when they are strung together, some baffling beast emerges sui generis and conspires against my head. I mean, I get it, I guess. But not without some effort and lots of discomfort.
Having said that, though, law really appeals to the failed biology student in me. I like how it is an attempt to categorize and order the universe of human justice. I like how ostensibly after one understands a coherent system of law--oxymorons aside, of course--one can look at any event, let's say a windy day sweeping leaves up in Morningside Park around the Little Leaguers and Pop Warner football boys, and then divide that event into juridical categories that can be scrutinized one at a time. The liability of the Parks Department for a tree branch falling on my head; the contracts made between the manufacturers of baseballs and the cattle farmers who raise the cows for the leather on the balls; the criminality of the high school kids who give each other blowjobs at the top of the stairs, etc. I mean, the above quotation regards when a promise is made and then the promisee tries to change the terms of the promise. Following that, there are additional subsections that deal with how the promisee attempts to change the promise--whether the changes are material or whether there exists express language in the promise that forbids such changes--and then after that, there are even more specific tests for determining whether or not a change counts as "material" etc.
There's something so gratifyingly organized about law, at least law in theory and not messily and arbitrarily applied to practice. Unlike the social science I spent most of my undergraduate days studying and then scorning, law at least constructs a putatively rigorous scientific-seeming system for students to attempt to understand. I hated how other social sciences put forth these pseudo-scientific theories--here's a theory of multiple intelligences, or an equation for determining a country's expected growth rate based on the dental hygiene standards of the middle income bracket--that were just hard science flunkies disguising their wack social science ideas with outline form. I mean:
I. I guess if you look organized, then
A. What you say is to be believed
B. What you say looks more rigorous
C. What you say looks like it might be valuable
D. What you say can be funded by undergraduate tuition coffers
II. But really, all you're saying is
A. I had a cousin once
i. My theories are really based on what I learned from my cousin.
ii. My cousin also told me some interesting stories about what
people are like in the South.
B. I also read some anecdotes from David Brooks' articles.
i. I guess I can reliably make predictions about red v. blue
states based on what I have read about people who live
in those states based on David Brooks.
ii. Has David Brooks ever ventured into a "red" state?
a. It is unclear.
But no worries, critical readers. I have long since disabused myself of naive notions of "objectivity" and "rigor." As I have suggested in other blogposts, I've been appalled at not how judges obviously map their own identities onto their interpretations of the law, but rather how law attempts to claim that this subjective interpretation doesn't happen. Hello, "objective standard"? Hello, "reasonable man"? Obviously law as a scientific system is fundamentally flawed. But, I can still prize it for being more flow-chartable than, say, the anthropology of food and culture.
What I also like about how law bills itself as a comprehensive system for understanding justice is that there are such obvious and irreconciable conflicts when you put up two competing systems of law side by side. If one theory of criminality bases culpability on offending community standards, and another theory bases it on offending the Koran, and both theories are neat, perfect packages, your head explodes! It's just not possible! It's just like the fable of my people about man who claims to sell an impenetrable shield as well as an indominable spear:
In the State of Chu, there was a man who shouted loudly to praise his spear and
shield which he was offering for sale. "My shield is so strong that nothing can
go through it. And my spear is so strong that it can go through anything" he
sang loudly. A man walked by and asked: "What would happen if you use your spear
to pierce your shield?" He could not answer the question.
Okay, my analogies are stretching thin and now it's 7:15 and I should get to bed. More about law as science some other sleepless night.
Monday, October 24, 2005
CONTRAXZZZzzzz
Blogger swallowed my last post (wasn't the first thing Blogger swallowed--oooh, *SNAP*!) which was good because it was just out and out narcissism about that time that I made out with Jodie Foster and then Gayatri Spivak asked me to explain Derrida's theory of deconstruction to her and then I hit a lead-off home run in the first game of the World Series 1989, the Battle of the Bay, the last time the San Francisco Giants were good for anything, before that goddamn earthquake ruined everything.
Oops, that was lost to Cyber Space.
Better news: contractzzzzzzz reading continues. The latest case: guy makes contract with one person and then with another person for the sale of the same piece of property...tricky! The second person gets the court to declare the first sale null because they didn't sign the forms in the right order. Ooooh, *SNAP*! The world of contractzzz is fast-paced and full of action!
Oops, that was lost to Cyber Space.
Better news: contractzzzzzzz reading continues. The latest case: guy makes contract with one person and then with another person for the sale of the same piece of property...tricky! The second person gets the court to declare the first sale null because they didn't sign the forms in the right order. Ooooh, *SNAP*! The world of contractzzz is fast-paced and full of action!
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Where'd these tattoos come from?
Got drunnnnk and woke up with three temporary tattoos on my arms: flaming skull with an eyeball on its forehead, cartoon tiger in profile raising a pink flag on a crown, and some Matthew Barney/Cremaster butterfly-elf with vacant beetle-eyes and socks. I also have a massive hangover, huzzah! How fun it is to have almost no recollection of my subway ride home at 4 a.m.! That's when you know you're truly leeveeeng.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Awesome Day of Sleeplessness + Not Reading Criminal Law at 1:21 a.m.
Anxious nighttime classical guitar: Francisco Tarrega etudes consoled this insomniac this morning around 4:30 when I realized that there would be no way to get more than three hours of sleep today. I barely dragged my ass out of bed and to the subway, after debating whether or not to just lay in bed and groan, only to find myself trapped at 23rd Street while a West 4th Street control room burned like a yule log. Got to Contraxxxz half an hour late anyway after walking the rest of the way through a grey sky and fog threatening drizzle, then, trying to find a place to nap in or around the law school, spent forty-five fitful and wakeful minutes lying on the ground in a study room in Furman hall wondering if my cadaverous feet could be seen through the peephole and mistaken for dead.
I either ditched out on all my plans or ditched them de facto by attending them in my zombie state. What the hell happened at that review session? My big plans to finally break through the Q-Wave force field failed again. Oh well. At 7:45 I shut the blinds, put in ear plugs AND turned on a small fan for the white noise, and muted my cell phone in preparation for 18 straight hours of sleeping, but the cell phone vibration still managed to wake me up after only an hour of sleep. That, and Boo whining in lingua caninus: "PLEEAASE I NEED TO PEE!!!! PLEEEAASEEE!!!!"
A friend who lives in an apartment called "Tofia Coppola" (because she is vegetarian and likes tofu OH MY GOD HOW FUCKING BRILLIANT) called and saved me from the social wasteland of my somnambulent, Lolo-less night. GODDAMN BITCH COME HOME! I am useless without wifey.
I either ditched out on all my plans or ditched them de facto by attending them in my zombie state. What the hell happened at that review session? My big plans to finally break through the Q-Wave force field failed again. Oh well. At 7:45 I shut the blinds, put in ear plugs AND turned on a small fan for the white noise, and muted my cell phone in preparation for 18 straight hours of sleeping, but the cell phone vibration still managed to wake me up after only an hour of sleep. That, and Boo whining in lingua caninus: "PLEEAASE I NEED TO PEE!!!! PLEEEAASEEE!!!!"
A friend who lives in an apartment called "Tofia Coppola" (because she is vegetarian and likes tofu OH MY GOD HOW FUCKING BRILLIANT) called and saved me from the social wasteland of my somnambulent, Lolo-less night. GODDAMN BITCH COME HOME! I am useless without wifey.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
High Lonesome
I think another thing contributing to my unrest is that Lolo is out of town for a radio conference. Good for her career! But very bad for me. I alternate between sniffing her shirts and eating small scoops of strawberry ice cream and thinking about the schoolwork that needs to be done.
This blog is getting boring. I think this is because I no longer have anything to say.
So I guess I'll just describe what I'm learning:
- Parents sue doctors, on behalf of their infant, for pain and suffering, for not telling them during woman's pregnancy that fetus had Down's Syndrome so that they could perform a timely abortion. Parents win.
- Chicken buyers sue chicken sellers for breach of contract, for selling "stewing" chickens of lower quality than the expected "broiling" chickens. The court decides that "chickens" refer to all kinds of chickens, from foul fowl to baste-able breasts, and spurns chicken buyer.
- Menial laborer who drives drug dealors to airport but does nothing illegal himself is convicted of conspiracy to import 100,000lb of marijuana.
- Man sues Pepsi for advertising that one can acquire a Harrier Jet by accumulating 7,000,000 Pepsi Points but not delivering jet when presented with 7,000,000 Pepsi Points. Man loses; court rules that Pepsi's offer was obviously in jest, a "piece of puffery."
- Irish and Canadian parents of children born with birth defects as a result of American drug cannot sue the pharmaceutical company in an American court.
- For the purposes of diversity jurisdiction, domicile (some residence with intent to remain) establishes citizenship.
Look at what I paid $19,732 for!
Mouse in the House
Instead of slogging through Contractz (with a "z" it is hipper, with a "z" it is stronger) for the Nth interminable hour, I've decided to make the fight against hairy grey vermin--no, not Paul Wolfowitz!
--a full out war. I've laid and baited the glue traps, covered the stove with bowls so that Paul Wolfowitz cannot crawl through the gas vents, and used Marty Feldstein's "Principles of Economics" to block the avenues that Paul Wolfowitz scurries along. (The best use of that book, besides that one time we ran out of toilet paper...)
Anyway, if any Paul Ws are caught, I will duly kill them with a swift but merciful snapping of the neck. They will go the way of the other rodents. I feel maniacal writing it but I still know that it's better than to leave them squeaking and gasping sad deaths of dehydration and asphyxiation.
In other news, school perked up briefly. Don't get me wrong--the work has always been interesting and I'm luxuriating in student lifestyle, it's just that I feel like a three-headed alien with no feet, fifty cumbersome hands, and halitosis when I spend time around law students. So today there was some muted talk of mutiny, or at least squeaking wheels getting grease. I realized that my alienation, mild though it has managed to remain, is shared by other people. And these people are nice people, and they seem not to be buying into that whole horrible acculturation/assimilation that happens to law students--why is it that so many law students are risk-adverse middle-of-the-roaders who are worried about sending the right message and covering their asses? When I learned that the biggest protest of the year is carefully marketed and branded and messaged by the administration--what the fuck, Outlaw?
Anyway, less polemic, more pole dancing. Sorry for the Righteousness.
--a full out war. I've laid and baited the glue traps, covered the stove with bowls so that Paul Wolfowitz cannot crawl through the gas vents, and used Marty Feldstein's "Principles of Economics" to block the avenues that Paul Wolfowitz scurries along. (The best use of that book, besides that one time we ran out of toilet paper...)
Anyway, if any Paul Ws are caught, I will duly kill them with a swift but merciful snapping of the neck. They will go the way of the other rodents. I feel maniacal writing it but I still know that it's better than to leave them squeaking and gasping sad deaths of dehydration and asphyxiation.
In other news, school perked up briefly. Don't get me wrong--the work has always been interesting and I'm luxuriating in student lifestyle, it's just that I feel like a three-headed alien with no feet, fifty cumbersome hands, and halitosis when I spend time around law students. So today there was some muted talk of mutiny, or at least squeaking wheels getting grease. I realized that my alienation, mild though it has managed to remain, is shared by other people. And these people are nice people, and they seem not to be buying into that whole horrible acculturation/assimilation that happens to law students--why is it that so many law students are risk-adverse middle-of-the-roaders who are worried about sending the right message and covering their asses? When I learned that the biggest protest of the year is carefully marketed and branded and messaged by the administration--what the fuck, Outlaw?
Anyway, less polemic, more pole dancing. Sorry for the Righteousness.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Deontological+
I must be releasing ova like crazy because I'm looking at people on the subway in a way that I don't usually look at them. Spent the day in a post-insomniac daze, three hours of rest after a night of hand-wringing worry about the state of my social life. Why is it so hard not to feel like an alien? My class laughs about the prospect of eating from the trash. Everyone laughs. I cringe--what's wrong with food from the trash?--and am swept along the uneasy laughter tide. But today I spoke to some nice folks, and I'm feeling a little better.
Then there's the flip side of wanting to see everybody naked, not because the sex is gratifying but because the intimacy is humbling. Then that goes away and I'm just angry ant mad at The Way Things Were.
Not making much sense but I'm having trouble keeping my eyelids open. My newest favorite food is not "Nerds on a Rope" but "Nerds Rope." Laura pointed out that the former would sort of be like CoreyCide, her imagined holocaust of men named Corey--Feldman and Haim first and foremost--which occurred, one surmises, in the early 1990s.
Then there's the flip side of wanting to see everybody naked, not because the sex is gratifying but because the intimacy is humbling. Then that goes away and I'm just angry ant mad at The Way Things Were.
Not making much sense but I'm having trouble keeping my eyelids open. My newest favorite food is not "Nerds on a Rope" but "Nerds Rope." Laura pointed out that the former would sort of be like CoreyCide, her imagined holocaust of men named Corey--Feldman and Haim first and foremost--which occurred, one surmises, in the early 1990s.
A. Carol O.
AO, you are currently my favorite person on the planet. Who else would say "Happy birthday and FUCK YOU"? Don't worry, we shall drag our slovenly bodies around Central Park soon. Meanwhile, I am working on a version of "Firefly." You will be Tony Bennett and I will be Kermit the Frog and we will record a duet that will be posted on your graduate-nerd blog.
Also, I am renaming this blog PYGBYNS just for you.
Anyway, come over to my apartment and load up your new zombie machine with my The Clash mp3s so you don't have to listen to Grieg or Emmilou Harris or whoever the fuck it is you listen to while you carom around the park. Capisci?
Update: Sorry to expose your secrets to the paparazzi. More discretion next time. You are still my favorite person on the planet, but I think this is because I'm pretty sure I'm ovulating right now.
Also, I am renaming this blog PYGBYNS just for you.
Anyway, come over to my apartment and load up your new zombie machine with my The Clash mp3s so you don't have to listen to Grieg or Emmilou Harris or whoever the fuck it is you listen to while you carom around the park. Capisci?
Update: Sorry to expose your secrets to the paparazzi. More discretion next time. You are still my favorite person on the planet, but I think this is because I'm pretty sure I'm ovulating right now.
POACHING, 78 points
Bingoes abound. The Scrabble tournament continues.
I'm struggling to find people at the law school who share my aesthetic and political sensibilities. Now I have raised the bar to a single standard: people who do not use deodorant. Law students who do not use deodorant. I WANT TO MEET YOU.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Also, people who tell stories about themselves, let's say stories about traveling in foreign countries, that aren't self-aggrandizing survivors' fictions but are honest stories about being puked upon or unable to communicate without a Lonely Planet phrasebook. Or people who ask questions. I WANT TO MEET YOU.
But especially people who don't subscribe to that horrible habit of applying overwhelmingly pungent carcinogens to their shorn underarm bristles--I WANT TO MEET YOU.
I'm struggling to find people at the law school who share my aesthetic and political sensibilities. Now I have raised the bar to a single standard: people who do not use deodorant. Law students who do not use deodorant. I WANT TO MEET YOU.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Also, people who tell stories about themselves, let's say stories about traveling in foreign countries, that aren't self-aggrandizing survivors' fictions but are honest stories about being puked upon or unable to communicate without a Lonely Planet phrasebook. Or people who ask questions. I WANT TO MEET YOU.
But especially people who don't subscribe to that horrible habit of applying overwhelmingly pungent carcinogens to their shorn underarm bristles--I WANT TO MEET YOU.
Monday, October 17, 2005
It's Hard to be a Black Dog on a Hot Day
Fortune cookie messages from an Authentic Chinee:
- People who change their names after a certain age ought not to be trusted.
- Poisoned poisson mitigates against the effects of aging.
- "Galaxy" comes from the Latin word "galaxias," or something like that, for "milky." Why? Well, "Milky Way," of course! Etymological connections may be the only stars studding the dark, dark sky of life after 25.
- One must appreciate one's girlfriend/life partner when said girlfriend stays up until the dark, dark hours of the Manhattan night with you describing to you what a Drake's "Funny Bone" pre-fab cake looks and tastes like. (E.g., Q: "Is it leavened?" A: "It's cake! What, you think it's a matzoh? I forgot to tell you, it's a chocolate matzoh! Jesus!" Q: "Must be a Philly thing.")
- If one plays "RETARDED" in Scrabble for a bingo for 97 points, one is allowed to celebrate with a Tastykake Kandy Kake.
- White hats unflatteringly flatten one's hair.
More to come, from Manfucius.
(Note to the classmate with whom I had a lovely pizza lunch a month ago. Please, please, please. Do not say "Confucius saaaay..." in your "Chinese" accent anymore. I love you, but your accent sucks and it makes me want to remove your teeth one at a time with a ball-peen hammer.)
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Law-law-land
Shana tovah, bless those handsome Jews for granting me a day of reprieve from Contracts reading. I'm sitting at home cowering from the rain. My last pair of dry pants joined all my other pants on the drying rack today after the morning's extended play session with Boo, a muddy dog run, a deflated white basketball (Bunnicula?), and a nor'easter called "3.74 inches of rain with flooding expected late afternoon." I now find myself in the unenviable position of deciding whether to stay indoors all day or wearing tight, tapered, light-colored blue jeans and my Michael Bolton t-shirt, my only remaining dry and marginally clean shirt, and my white heel-less pumps
to go about my daily business.
Just kidding! I only hope and pray to one day own this outfit. I do not own this outfit. I'm slouching pantsless at my kitchen table, surrounded by cut up pieces of a civil procedure textbook, allowing crumbs to fall onto my stomach, trying to figure out how to make myself feel even more attractive than I feel right now.
I started off this post imaging I would write intelligent things about the way institutions institutionalize people, even supposedly liberal or left-leaning institutions, toward median values, and how my specific institution, a law school, especially values following rules, talking pretty, talking down, deferring to hierarchy, deferring to tradition, honoring honors, and looking polished. I think the secret to law school is talking forcefully and confidently about whatever you're talking about, despite or perhaps because you have no idea what you're really saying, whether that be the unconstitutionality of prejudgment seizures of property or what pie slice of the world you hope to conquer and sublimate after graduation.
A friend likes to say that after a certain point, people start winning awards for having won awards. You're selected for accolades because people see that you're previously decorated and therefore assume you are worthwhile of more accolades. This is frighteningly true, or at least in the cloistered world of prestige-hunger in which I begrudgingly but consistently live. I'm not sure it relates to anything I was talking about before, but it doesn't matter because I'm saying it forcefully and confidentally.
There's also some crap I'd like to write about the guy I heard on the radio a month ago when I was in Philly. On a show about Hurricane Katrina, a guy calling in from Georgia first sputters about how "Mayor Nagin, all those, the black people, they--from cradle to grave, all they want--public assistance" and then says, "How can you say [the unconscionably poor job the federal government did in responding to the hurricane was] racist? Did Bush say, Oh, they're black, I don't like them so I won't help. No!" and triumphantly declares the end of racism. I heard this snippet of conversation and then my cynicism overwhelmed me and I turned the radio off. Racism isn't racism unless there's a guy with a white sheet? Racism isn't racism when 99% of the faces you saw huddled in the Superdome were black, it's just coincidence?
Bob Herbert recently quoted Lee Atwater (who was the ur-Karl Rove, until an early brain tumor made first penitent, then dead) in a column on Bill Bennett this week, as saying:
I think the common thread here is that once naked racism is abolished de jure, people congratulate themselves for abolishing racism and then return to the same de facto racism that persists in their lives. Once we have the Civil Rights Act, all other suspicious school segregations, abrogations of voting rights, disproportionate applications of capital punishment, omissions in urban planning and transportation routes--all of that is just coincidental! This attitude is reflected nowhere better than the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, where the court upholds the constitutionality of the death penalty even though it is applied way more to black people killing white people than white people killing black people:
Well, at least the Court has not yet criminalized flag-burning.
Off to the law books now! said the law drone.
to go about my daily business.
Just kidding! I only hope and pray to one day own this outfit. I do not own this outfit. I'm slouching pantsless at my kitchen table, surrounded by cut up pieces of a civil procedure textbook, allowing crumbs to fall onto my stomach, trying to figure out how to make myself feel even more attractive than I feel right now.
I started off this post imaging I would write intelligent things about the way institutions institutionalize people, even supposedly liberal or left-leaning institutions, toward median values, and how my specific institution, a law school, especially values following rules, talking pretty, talking down, deferring to hierarchy, deferring to tradition, honoring honors, and looking polished. I think the secret to law school is talking forcefully and confidently about whatever you're talking about, despite or perhaps because you have no idea what you're really saying, whether that be the unconstitutionality of prejudgment seizures of property or what pie slice of the world you hope to conquer and sublimate after graduation.
A friend likes to say that after a certain point, people start winning awards for having won awards. You're selected for accolades because people see that you're previously decorated and therefore assume you are worthwhile of more accolades. This is frighteningly true, or at least in the cloistered world of prestige-hunger in which I begrudgingly but consistently live. I'm not sure it relates to anything I was talking about before, but it doesn't matter because I'm saying it forcefully and confidentally.
There's also some crap I'd like to write about the guy I heard on the radio a month ago when I was in Philly. On a show about Hurricane Katrina, a guy calling in from Georgia first sputters about how "Mayor Nagin, all those, the black people, they--from cradle to grave, all they want--public assistance" and then says, "How can you say [the unconscionably poor job the federal government did in responding to the hurricane was] racist? Did Bush say, Oh, they're black, I don't like them so I won't help. No!" and triumphantly declares the end of racism. I heard this snippet of conversation and then my cynicism overwhelmed me and I turned the radio off. Racism isn't racism unless there's a guy with a white sheet? Racism isn't racism when 99% of the faces you saw huddled in the Superdome were black, it's just coincidence?
Bob Herbert recently quoted Lee Atwater (who was the ur-Karl Rove, until an early brain tumor made first penitent, then dead) in a column on Bill Bennett this week, as saying:
You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'
I think the common thread here is that once naked racism is abolished de jure, people congratulate themselves for abolishing racism and then return to the same de facto racism that persists in their lives. Once we have the Civil Rights Act, all other suspicious school segregations, abrogations of voting rights, disproportionate applications of capital punishment, omissions in urban planning and transportation routes--all of that is just coincidental! This attitude is reflected nowhere better than the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, where the court upholds the constitutionality of the death penalty even though it is applied way more to black people killing white people than white people killing black people:
At most, the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race. Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system. The discrepancy indicated by the Baldus study is "a far cry from the major systemic defects identified in Furman." As this Court has recognized, any mode for determining guilt or punishment "has its weaknesses and the potential for misuse." Specifically, "there can be `no perfect procedure for deciding in which cases governmental authority should be used to impose death.'" Where the discretion that is fundamental to our criminal process is involved, we decline to assume that what is unexplained is invidious.
Well, at least the Court has not yet criminalized flag-burning.
Off to the law books now! said the law drone.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Long Time No Blog
Back from a long, refreshing absence. Can you hear it? I am sounding Bananarchist's death knell. Actually, Bananarchist died a long time ago, when my banana and anarchist ambitions went abruptly south. Actually, it's just late, I'm lying, I'm tired, and I wanted to write something. I am now in law school. It is impossible to be a bananarchist and a law student at the same time, since law seems to encourage blind adherence to procedure and tradition, on the assumption that procedure and tradition is something arrived at, if not democratically, then at least through the unimpeachable virtues of civic republicanism. It's hard to be an anarchist when you're signing up to be complicit with the system. And who said anything about being an anarchist in the first place? What the fuck am I talking about.
Today (29th?) is also my 2,500th birthday. I'm sad because I was not able to produce a novel before this birthday, hence earning me the privilege of being the Jonathan Safran Foer of my generation, only better, and only nothing about the Holocaust. I told some friends this weekend that this birthday officially seals my failure to become a prodigy, or a virtuoso, or a wunderkind, or even just a plain old phenom. All amazing, gravity-defying feats performed from here on in fall squarely within the unimpressive ambit of mere adult competence. The delusions of grandeur which used to cloak my kakorraphiaphobia has, with time, become a moth-eaten granny shawl through which my self-doubt is clearly, embarassingly, evident. *Sigh*.
Which is another way of saying that I'm full of shit. There's plenty of things to write about here but I'm chosing to forgo the dissemination of information for the high dive into self. Sorry!
Here are things that I don't have the wherewithal to articulate:
0) I met a young man named Roger in the dog run. We had an altercation because his unneutered pitbull was barking at my neutered border collie (note metonymic class tensions) but then an amazing, hour-long conversation afterward about our fight and our assumptions and how society usually keeps people like us from talking with one another as co-equals--him a young urban black man from Harlem who had a pitbull with balls, me a young suburban Chinese woman transplanted to Harlem with a dog surgically cut in accordance to middle-class dog maintenance standards. It was illuminating until he asked for my phone number and then called me fifteen times in the next four days asking me to go to the movies with him, asking me to identify songs from the radio he would play into the phone mouthpiece, asking me what was up with me for not getting back to his calls, asking me what was wrong, etc. Regardless, a conversation that only happens in movies directed by racially-sensitive white Hollywooders actually happened between Roger and Me. I mean, me.
1) I went on a meditation retreat. People of color only, a.k.a., 200 black women with dreads and 1 non-black woman with no dreads. I mysteriously got hives every night so all my self-centering and focus and lovingkindness and mindfulness went to shit every night at midnight when I would break out into strawberry cheesecake hives. I did yoga three hours a day and ran two hours and then occasionally sat in on meditation sessions. I walked so slowly it took a half hour to move fifteen feet. I fell asleep while meditation about a hundred times. I ate incredibly slowly, and drank peppermint tea like it was my only connection to the world. I tried not to speak, read, write, communicate, or think about sex but actually I text-messaged and called Laura every night to whine about my hives and even once amour de soi'd semi-silently one night when I was particularly sleepless. It was wonderful.
2) I got married. It was an elemental wedding. There was the sun, water, fire, and earth. I just thought of that, I swear. The 100 guests produced only 3 bags of garbage in four days; the rest of the refuge was composted, along with the refugees from the compost toilet, in the woods and will be used to fertilize two non-self-pollinating fruit trees that Laura's older sister has given us as our wedding gift. We're thinking plums? Cherries? My dad came and made me cry. My borrowed car broke down on the way to pick him up and we ended up sitting in an autoshop for an hour fretting about the smell of the transmission fluid. My older cousin Peter came and told a computer science riddle about perfectly rational executioners and stumped the crowd. We all jumped in the Huntington River with our clothes on and it was so clear you could see to the bottom and you could see everyone's clothes perfectly clear but refracted a bit. We had ten different cakes made by our helper bees the day before. We ate vegetarian patties until we became vegetarian patties. A big posse of people got lost on the hike home from the ceremony and ended up on Main Road, Huntington, wondering where the hell everyone was. We had a big campfire that Clay almost fell into during an impromptu "naked goat dance," whatever the hell that is, apparently something that required me taking my shirt off and Jessica H. getting totally naked and Clay pretty much rolling into the campfire but for a couple of hands that pulled him away quickly. We swum at Tadpole Rock every night, late at night, with nothing but a crescent moon and occasional headlights from the road lighting up the water. We bought local and produced food from the land (sumac lemonade, honey wine, blackberry pies, corn on the cob, some wild mushroom expeditions), camped out in a rainstorm, and lay on the ashes of the fire playing indie rock songs on our guitars until Laura pointed out that it was just me and her, singing Neutral Milk Hotel by ourselves, 4 a.m. on our wedding night. It was so beautiful it made me want to hold the world in my mouth.
Then,
3) I started law school. What's all the hype for? It's not as bad as "they" said "it" would be. I like almost everyone I meet. I only regret that I haven't met everyone I will like. The work? Not so terribly overwhelming, yet. The only problem is that my shoulder has rounded into a boule and my back is bent into a peak. I'm becoming conical, with my apex falling somewhere between my fifth or sixth vertabrae. I'm thinking of becoming a corporate lawyer only to pay the chiropractic bills that await me in my middle age. My classmates and I send 70 emails per class to one another in an attempt to mitigate the agony that is Contracts. I managed to sneak a photo of a boytaur into one of the emails today.
I say all this because I have become so cloistered in my day-to-day -- I'm in the same goddamn spot in the same library in the same buildling all day long -- and so enmeshed in studying that I haven't had time to document in the way that I usually like to do. Now it's late, I'm tired, I'm verbose, and I'm 25. Wow!
Today (29th?) is also my 2,500th birthday. I'm sad because I was not able to produce a novel before this birthday, hence earning me the privilege of being the Jonathan Safran Foer of my generation, only better, and only nothing about the Holocaust. I told some friends this weekend that this birthday officially seals my failure to become a prodigy, or a virtuoso, or a wunderkind, or even just a plain old phenom. All amazing, gravity-defying feats performed from here on in fall squarely within the unimpressive ambit of mere adult competence. The delusions of grandeur which used to cloak my kakorraphiaphobia has, with time, become a moth-eaten granny shawl through which my self-doubt is clearly, embarassingly, evident. *Sigh*.
Which is another way of saying that I'm full of shit. There's plenty of things to write about here but I'm chosing to forgo the dissemination of information for the high dive into self. Sorry!
Here are things that I don't have the wherewithal to articulate:
0) I met a young man named Roger in the dog run. We had an altercation because his unneutered pitbull was barking at my neutered border collie (note metonymic class tensions) but then an amazing, hour-long conversation afterward about our fight and our assumptions and how society usually keeps people like us from talking with one another as co-equals--him a young urban black man from Harlem who had a pitbull with balls, me a young suburban Chinese woman transplanted to Harlem with a dog surgically cut in accordance to middle-class dog maintenance standards. It was illuminating until he asked for my phone number and then called me fifteen times in the next four days asking me to go to the movies with him, asking me to identify songs from the radio he would play into the phone mouthpiece, asking me what was up with me for not getting back to his calls, asking me what was wrong, etc. Regardless, a conversation that only happens in movies directed by racially-sensitive white Hollywooders actually happened between Roger and Me. I mean, me.
1) I went on a meditation retreat. People of color only, a.k.a., 200 black women with dreads and 1 non-black woman with no dreads. I mysteriously got hives every night so all my self-centering and focus and lovingkindness and mindfulness went to shit every night at midnight when I would break out into strawberry cheesecake hives. I did yoga three hours a day and ran two hours and then occasionally sat in on meditation sessions. I walked so slowly it took a half hour to move fifteen feet. I fell asleep while meditation about a hundred times. I ate incredibly slowly, and drank peppermint tea like it was my only connection to the world. I tried not to speak, read, write, communicate, or think about sex but actually I text-messaged and called Laura every night to whine about my hives and even once amour de soi'd semi-silently one night when I was particularly sleepless. It was wonderful.
2) I got married. It was an elemental wedding. There was the sun, water, fire, and earth. I just thought of that, I swear. The 100 guests produced only 3 bags of garbage in four days; the rest of the refuge was composted, along with the refugees from the compost toilet, in the woods and will be used to fertilize two non-self-pollinating fruit trees that Laura's older sister has given us as our wedding gift. We're thinking plums? Cherries? My dad came and made me cry. My borrowed car broke down on the way to pick him up and we ended up sitting in an autoshop for an hour fretting about the smell of the transmission fluid. My older cousin Peter came and told a computer science riddle about perfectly rational executioners and stumped the crowd. We all jumped in the Huntington River with our clothes on and it was so clear you could see to the bottom and you could see everyone's clothes perfectly clear but refracted a bit. We had ten different cakes made by our helper bees the day before. We ate vegetarian patties until we became vegetarian patties. A big posse of people got lost on the hike home from the ceremony and ended up on Main Road, Huntington, wondering where the hell everyone was. We had a big campfire that Clay almost fell into during an impromptu "naked goat dance," whatever the hell that is, apparently something that required me taking my shirt off and Jessica H. getting totally naked and Clay pretty much rolling into the campfire but for a couple of hands that pulled him away quickly. We swum at Tadpole Rock every night, late at night, with nothing but a crescent moon and occasional headlights from the road lighting up the water. We bought local and produced food from the land (sumac lemonade, honey wine, blackberry pies, corn on the cob, some wild mushroom expeditions), camped out in a rainstorm, and lay on the ashes of the fire playing indie rock songs on our guitars until Laura pointed out that it was just me and her, singing Neutral Milk Hotel by ourselves, 4 a.m. on our wedding night. It was so beautiful it made me want to hold the world in my mouth.
Then,
3) I started law school. What's all the hype for? It's not as bad as "they" said "it" would be. I like almost everyone I meet. I only regret that I haven't met everyone I will like. The work? Not so terribly overwhelming, yet. The only problem is that my shoulder has rounded into a boule and my back is bent into a peak. I'm becoming conical, with my apex falling somewhere between my fifth or sixth vertabrae. I'm thinking of becoming a corporate lawyer only to pay the chiropractic bills that await me in my middle age. My classmates and I send 70 emails per class to one another in an attempt to mitigate the agony that is Contracts. I managed to sneak a photo of a boytaur into one of the emails today.
I say all this because I have become so cloistered in my day-to-day -- I'm in the same goddamn spot in the same library in the same buildling all day long -- and so enmeshed in studying that I haven't had time to document in the way that I usually like to do. Now it's late, I'm tired, I'm verbose, and I'm 25. Wow!
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Malibu
I just got back from a two week trip to California, Utah, and New Mexico. Not to be overwhelmed by the fun blah blah blah, I managed to find a few quiet moments of my own, in which I acquired two black eyes. Beautiful! Even more beautiful to take a fourteen hour Greyhound bus with two black eyes--you fit right in! The sad thing about these black eyes is that they now just look like faint lines accentuating the bags under my eyes, which have only ballooned in my old age, and so I again have nothing external to prove my internal pain. Internal bleeding, for this reason, sucks.
Anyway, in my gainful unemployment, between a four-mile run in the morning and a six-mile run in the evening, I managed to hack out my first poem since 1994's prize-winning entry, "Mom and Dad, U Suck." Since I am too lazy/"private" to really describe what I did on my lengthy vacation, I'll just let the "poem" below "describe" one of the more eventful events in two weeks of eventfulness: "surfing" in Los Angeles.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
They make it look so easy.
Riding foamcore half a mile into shore,
blond-backed, perfectly poised,
easy as pushing a grocery cart,
easy as slouching into a couch,
easy as the baking day:
They don’t go pitching face-first into the water.
Surfing: an asshole’s sport, full of
wrinkles and wrong turns. After a lifetime of seeing
surf iconography, one thinks,
How easy and free, to be
Swiftly skimming the surface,
and then one thinks, Why not me?
and then one solicits a California mermaid
to teach oneself that majestic art,
Which is not art at all but just a feverish
Attempt not to drown. Not to drown
drawn into the riptide, not to drown
with one’s entrails exposed by coral, not to drown
with one’s much-valued brain cored by rocks,
drifting matter from Malibu to Venice, inviting
sharks that devour the rest of you.
Not a hypochondriac’s sport, surfing, not a sport
for the top heavy, or bottom feeding, or risk adverse,
nor a sport for ungulates, for ham-hands,
for the porcine.
Just like a knockwurst in its intestinal casing
was I in a borrowed wetsuit, plumped up from the heat,
salted, sotted, sweetly unaware
of the big, wet maw about to bring it home.
My mermaid saw a swell.
“Paddle!” she instructed.
“Paddle!” she insisted.
“PADDLE!” she howled.
So, I paddled. First tentatively,
then aggressively,
then maniacally,
until the wave came up
and began to push
(there was one infinitesimal moment of levity)
and then I rolled off the board
like a ham shank,
and the board rushed into me
like a holiday feast.
Right between the eyes! If I had a nose to break,
it would have broken. I clutched my face.
Another surfer came by, too close, and washed my surfboard
back into my face. Twice in two seconds. I was attacked!
I got two black eyes for it.
The mermaid dove and rose anxiously around the waves,
asking if I was hurt. I kept waiting for a bloody nose to have at
least something internal become external to prove my mettle;
God humiliated me with only salty snot.
I sat on the sand on a towel for the rest of the day,
holding my face, cursing the surf,
taking pills to keep the swell down.
Anyway, in my gainful unemployment, between a four-mile run in the morning and a six-mile run in the evening, I managed to hack out my first poem since 1994's prize-winning entry, "Mom and Dad, U Suck." Since I am too lazy/"private" to really describe what I did on my lengthy vacation, I'll just let the "poem" below "describe" one of the more eventful events in two weeks of eventfulness: "surfing" in Los Angeles.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
They make it look so easy.
Riding foamcore half a mile into shore,
blond-backed, perfectly poised,
easy as pushing a grocery cart,
easy as slouching into a couch,
easy as the baking day:
They don’t go pitching face-first into the water.
Surfing: an asshole’s sport, full of
wrinkles and wrong turns. After a lifetime of seeing
surf iconography, one thinks,
How easy and free, to be
Swiftly skimming the surface,
and then one thinks, Why not me?
and then one solicits a California mermaid
to teach oneself that majestic art,
Which is not art at all but just a feverish
Attempt not to drown. Not to drown
drawn into the riptide, not to drown
with one’s entrails exposed by coral, not to drown
with one’s much-valued brain cored by rocks,
drifting matter from Malibu to Venice, inviting
sharks that devour the rest of you.
Not a hypochondriac’s sport, surfing, not a sport
for the top heavy, or bottom feeding, or risk adverse,
nor a sport for ungulates, for ham-hands,
for the porcine.
Just like a knockwurst in its intestinal casing
was I in a borrowed wetsuit, plumped up from the heat,
salted, sotted, sweetly unaware
of the big, wet maw about to bring it home.
My mermaid saw a swell.
“Paddle!” she instructed.
“Paddle!” she insisted.
“PADDLE!” she howled.
So, I paddled. First tentatively,
then aggressively,
then maniacally,
until the wave came up
and began to push
(there was one infinitesimal moment of levity)
and then I rolled off the board
like a ham shank,
and the board rushed into me
like a holiday feast.
Right between the eyes! If I had a nose to break,
it would have broken. I clutched my face.
Another surfer came by, too close, and washed my surfboard
back into my face. Twice in two seconds. I was attacked!
I got two black eyes for it.
The mermaid dove and rose anxiously around the waves,
asking if I was hurt. I kept waiting for a bloody nose to have at
least something internal become external to prove my mettle;
God humiliated me with only salty snot.
I sat on the sand on a towel for the rest of the day,
holding my face, cursing the surf,
taking pills to keep the swell down.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Wow, I used to be a teacher.
I forget sometimes that I used to grind away the precious moments of my youth teaching unpleasant and oily teenagers about empires and countries that I'd only heard about in the funny pages of Ziggurats & Janissaries magazine. Just kidding! No such magazine exists. But ziggurats and janissaries surely do, and lucky for me I've forgotten almost everything I taught about those two weird ancient human phenomena.
And lucky for you that I am a chronic insomniac and my tossing and turning can only be alleviated by the best soporific ever: my old journals! In my trolling I found something from almost two years ago, when I started "co-teaching" at a shitty, shitty middle school in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. My God, was this place a school-shaped rat turd. The infrastructure sucked: we had two huge industrial fans that cooled the subtropic school to a barely tolerable, wilting 95 degrees but produced a baritone throb that drowned out all instruction. Most of the students were decent kids who had fucked up in school somehow. But man alive! My "co-teacher," a woman who proudly showed me pictures of her "shorty" 5'3" husband, with whom she had taken a two-week honeymoon the last October--yes, that meant that she had deliberately planned two weeks of vacation during the second month of the school year--and whose utter disinterest in teaching translated into her half-hearted attempts to read lesson plans aloud verbatim, including the parentheticals that only teachers are supposed to read, silently, like, "Solicit responses from students on the following question: 'What did Michael Jordan learn from playing basketball?'" This woman was so fucking lazy that she just sat in the back of the classroom and read children's books while the majority of the class lay their heads on their desks and panted from the heat. Wow.
Below is a "field observation" I wrote for one of my grad classes that summer. I've diplomatically changed the teacher's name, since she is now a high-ranking White House librarian. This is what I used to do:
7/22/03
My field observation #4 for Mercurio’s class:
This observation is not a direct response to a specific argument made in the Ryan book, but rather it is a series of related notes that respond in general to Ryan’s ninth unit, on inclusion.
Today was probably the worst day I experienced thus far in summer school. There were individual and classroom-level discipline problems, and I had to bear the brunt of it because my cooperating teacher left the room for ten minutes to sharpen pencils – an act which, by the way, I resented because it left not only an uncertified and therefore illegal teacher in the room, it also left someone in the room who could not command authority with the kids. I am seen in the classroom as something of a colorful appendage, an occasionally helpful voice but definitely a subaltern to the grand mistress, Mrs. Linda.
Specifically, my frustrations began when the two most troublesome kids in the classroom, Damien and Tyonna, sauntered in at roughly the same time, both about 90 minutes late. Damien has been in summer school three times – and this for a class that has met for four weeks already! That’s an attendance rate of 18%. Both Damien and Tyonna routinely brag about how they prefer to smoke marijuana before coming to class or miss class entirely. They are friends and scofflaws in arms. Because both have missed so many class days, they were not able to participate in the group exit project, which everyone else was working on. Thus, I was left with the onerous task of setting two notorious fools to work.
However, when I approached Damien, I realized that I was singularly without any means of motivating him. You’d think this wouldn’t be the case for a summer school, where the natural incentive is promotion. When I made this case to him – that he wouldn’t be going to high school unless he passed the class – he rebutted me by saying, “The Board of Ed told me that I don’t even need to be in summer school. I just need to pass the Regent’s exam.” I confirmed this with Mrs. Linda, and it’s true. He does not, in fact, need to be in school at all. I could not help but think, Why is he in school? On those rare occasions he does attend, he spends the class hours either 1) scowling menacingly and bullying the other kids in the class, who for the most part are decent workers willing to put in some effort or 2) hanging his body out the classroom door, setting a terrible example for the other students and inviting disorder or 3) wandering the hallways unchecked. Tyonna, his lackey, is in a similar situation (doesn’t need to be in summer school and so only causes trouble in class.)
I found it difficult to level with these two kids, not only for their insolence but also because I didn’t know how to impress upon them that summer school work was important, when in fact, it is not important at all. Mrs. Linda has given up on these children, and she does nothing to stop Damien from cruising the halls. (Not much can be done, anyway. Sometimes I really begrudge the legal injunction on touching children, because nothing short of a Silence of the Lambs-esque straitjacket will keep Damien from the hallways. I followed him out and asked him to speak to me, but he responded by walking away. I was left in the disgraceful position of either following and haranguing him and his deaf ears, or walking away without having asserted power. I chose something in between, and ended up only angry and unheard.) Mrs. Linda tells me she won’t try because they won’t try. She tells me that I can’t reach all of them.
While I’m frustrated with Mrs. Linda’s opinions, I’m also reaching my breaking point with these two students. Tyonna is less of an asshole, and, if sternly pressured, she will dolefully and insouciantly chicken scratch her barely literate and nearly incomprehensible answers on a worksheet. Damien, meanwhile, is impervious. He fancies himself a badass and thus answers to no one. But who could make him answer? Even the Board of Ed condones him. I can’t stand letting Damien bring the whole class down, which is effectively what he does. When he is in class, he disrupts and bullies, and the other students respond to him by disrupting and bullying each other. I can’t be his friend, and I can’t be his mother. What the hell do I do?
I thought this might fit into Ryan’s framework because Ryan exhorts us to include all students, especially those in need of extra assistance or special education. But what is there to do when the student is so stubbornly and violently resistant? I can’t stop the kids from walking out of the classroom. I stand in front of them, but the walk around. I turn my back, and another one slips out the door. I didn’t come here to literally be a gatekeeper. Sometimes I just want to smack the kids in the face; Damien worldview seems to include the belief that respect is only due to those who can physically dominate others, and sometimes I want to slap him in the face, rip out his eyes, spit down his throat, if only to humiliate him and get that one ounce of thug respect. I hate this attitude, and I hate what it makes me do. Today, as he walked away from me in the hall, I had the displeasure of shouting after him, “Well, Damien, you were just complaining that a teacher was yelling at you, and now that a teacher wants to talk to you, you walk away. That’s just the way it’s going to be for the rest of your life.” I wanted to lock him in prison, because that’s how I foresee his dismal, criminal, pathological future. I’m also tempted to tell him to go away and not come back, especially now with the revelation that summer school is utterly perfunctory. Why bother? Let him stay at home, smoke his brain away, and let the other students learn. Ryan’s platitudes are lovely in the book – love everybody, try to include everyone – but when it comes to the classroom, Damien’s presence is actively annihilating the learning potential of everyone else in the room. Let this one go, Society, this is a kid who will never amount to anything but a potential murderer, rapist, thief, petty criminal.
I hate this attitude, but days like this provoke this kind of reaction.
And lucky for you that I am a chronic insomniac and my tossing and turning can only be alleviated by the best soporific ever: my old journals! In my trolling I found something from almost two years ago, when I started "co-teaching" at a shitty, shitty middle school in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. My God, was this place a school-shaped rat turd. The infrastructure sucked: we had two huge industrial fans that cooled the subtropic school to a barely tolerable, wilting 95 degrees but produced a baritone throb that drowned out all instruction. Most of the students were decent kids who had fucked up in school somehow. But man alive! My "co-teacher," a woman who proudly showed me pictures of her "shorty" 5'3" husband, with whom she had taken a two-week honeymoon the last October--yes, that meant that she had deliberately planned two weeks of vacation during the second month of the school year--and whose utter disinterest in teaching translated into her half-hearted attempts to read lesson plans aloud verbatim, including the parentheticals that only teachers are supposed to read, silently, like, "Solicit responses from students on the following question: 'What did Michael Jordan learn from playing basketball?'" This woman was so fucking lazy that she just sat in the back of the classroom and read children's books while the majority of the class lay their heads on their desks and panted from the heat. Wow.
Below is a "field observation" I wrote for one of my grad classes that summer. I've diplomatically changed the teacher's name, since she is now a high-ranking White House librarian. This is what I used to do:
7/22/03
My field observation #4 for Mercurio’s class:
This observation is not a direct response to a specific argument made in the Ryan book, but rather it is a series of related notes that respond in general to Ryan’s ninth unit, on inclusion.
Today was probably the worst day I experienced thus far in summer school. There were individual and classroom-level discipline problems, and I had to bear the brunt of it because my cooperating teacher left the room for ten minutes to sharpen pencils – an act which, by the way, I resented because it left not only an uncertified and therefore illegal teacher in the room, it also left someone in the room who could not command authority with the kids. I am seen in the classroom as something of a colorful appendage, an occasionally helpful voice but definitely a subaltern to the grand mistress, Mrs. Linda.
Specifically, my frustrations began when the two most troublesome kids in the classroom, Damien and Tyonna, sauntered in at roughly the same time, both about 90 minutes late. Damien has been in summer school three times – and this for a class that has met for four weeks already! That’s an attendance rate of 18%. Both Damien and Tyonna routinely brag about how they prefer to smoke marijuana before coming to class or miss class entirely. They are friends and scofflaws in arms. Because both have missed so many class days, they were not able to participate in the group exit project, which everyone else was working on. Thus, I was left with the onerous task of setting two notorious fools to work.
However, when I approached Damien, I realized that I was singularly without any means of motivating him. You’d think this wouldn’t be the case for a summer school, where the natural incentive is promotion. When I made this case to him – that he wouldn’t be going to high school unless he passed the class – he rebutted me by saying, “The Board of Ed told me that I don’t even need to be in summer school. I just need to pass the Regent’s exam.” I confirmed this with Mrs. Linda, and it’s true. He does not, in fact, need to be in school at all. I could not help but think, Why is he in school? On those rare occasions he does attend, he spends the class hours either 1) scowling menacingly and bullying the other kids in the class, who for the most part are decent workers willing to put in some effort or 2) hanging his body out the classroom door, setting a terrible example for the other students and inviting disorder or 3) wandering the hallways unchecked. Tyonna, his lackey, is in a similar situation (doesn’t need to be in summer school and so only causes trouble in class.)
I found it difficult to level with these two kids, not only for their insolence but also because I didn’t know how to impress upon them that summer school work was important, when in fact, it is not important at all. Mrs. Linda has given up on these children, and she does nothing to stop Damien from cruising the halls. (Not much can be done, anyway. Sometimes I really begrudge the legal injunction on touching children, because nothing short of a Silence of the Lambs-esque straitjacket will keep Damien from the hallways. I followed him out and asked him to speak to me, but he responded by walking away. I was left in the disgraceful position of either following and haranguing him and his deaf ears, or walking away without having asserted power. I chose something in between, and ended up only angry and unheard.) Mrs. Linda tells me she won’t try because they won’t try. She tells me that I can’t reach all of them.
While I’m frustrated with Mrs. Linda’s opinions, I’m also reaching my breaking point with these two students. Tyonna is less of an asshole, and, if sternly pressured, she will dolefully and insouciantly chicken scratch her barely literate and nearly incomprehensible answers on a worksheet. Damien, meanwhile, is impervious. He fancies himself a badass and thus answers to no one. But who could make him answer? Even the Board of Ed condones him. I can’t stand letting Damien bring the whole class down, which is effectively what he does. When he is in class, he disrupts and bullies, and the other students respond to him by disrupting and bullying each other. I can’t be his friend, and I can’t be his mother. What the hell do I do?
I thought this might fit into Ryan’s framework because Ryan exhorts us to include all students, especially those in need of extra assistance or special education. But what is there to do when the student is so stubbornly and violently resistant? I can’t stop the kids from walking out of the classroom. I stand in front of them, but the walk around. I turn my back, and another one slips out the door. I didn’t come here to literally be a gatekeeper. Sometimes I just want to smack the kids in the face; Damien worldview seems to include the belief that respect is only due to those who can physically dominate others, and sometimes I want to slap him in the face, rip out his eyes, spit down his throat, if only to humiliate him and get that one ounce of thug respect. I hate this attitude, and I hate what it makes me do. Today, as he walked away from me in the hall, I had the displeasure of shouting after him, “Well, Damien, you were just complaining that a teacher was yelling at you, and now that a teacher wants to talk to you, you walk away. That’s just the way it’s going to be for the rest of your life.” I wanted to lock him in prison, because that’s how I foresee his dismal, criminal, pathological future. I’m also tempted to tell him to go away and not come back, especially now with the revelation that summer school is utterly perfunctory. Why bother? Let him stay at home, smoke his brain away, and let the other students learn. Ryan’s platitudes are lovely in the book – love everybody, try to include everyone – but when it comes to the classroom, Damien’s presence is actively annihilating the learning potential of everyone else in the room. Let this one go, Society, this is a kid who will never amount to anything but a potential murderer, rapist, thief, petty criminal.
I hate this attitude, but days like this provoke this kind of reaction.
Marzipan Bra
Dream:
The Harvard College Class of 2002/Palo Alto High School Class of 1998 is on a train to its “senior trip” destination: the River Why. It’s as if we are in India: there are thousands of us overloading a colonial-era British train with ten cars, each following the engine car in a seating hierarchy. Air-conditioned and windows closed is the first car; hot gusts of air off the plain flooding the caboose.
At the river, Laura and I venture off on our own. Most people sign up for expeditions, like river-rafting or inner-tubing. Some follow the river downstream. Laura and I go upstream. There are shallow puddles into which we dip our heads–my hair has grown long so I whip the water from it and suffer mild whiplash–and still deep pools into which we effortlessly dive and disappear, like shooting stars. We go upstream for half an hour, and there’s a natural land bridge damming up the river. Just beyond it the river turns into churning rapids flowing the wrong way. We hear the engine’s whistle and know it’s time to head back.
Everyone boards on the third or fourth cars and then squeezes and pushes to get back into their assigned cars. A stranger hands me a red tea kettle, filled to the brim with boiling water, and asks me to shepherd it to the last car in the train. I burn my hands against it and wrap it in a sweater to keep the heat away. I’m now in a wheelchair, so I put the kettle in my lap and push toward the exits.
I’ve accidentally gone the wrong way and ended up at the first car. It becomes immediately obvious that God is conducting the train and the first car is the first two books of the Bible. That is, the heavens and earth are in the first two rows, then Adam and Eve, then all the way to Moses and the desert at the rear of the car. I beat a hurried exit and rush toward the last car with the tea kettle.
The last car is a thirty by thirty foot banquet hall with food laid out near the exit. Ilana or Yuan-Ming, one of the two, or perhaps a blend of both, takes the tea kettle from me and whispers conspiratorially, “C’mere.” I follow. She says, “These pitchers, these glasses”–and points at the drinks table–“Would it be bad to take them?” I say, “Yes,” then hesitate, and say, “It would not be honorable.” Ilana/Yuan-Ming shows me a brittle newspaper clipping but I can’t make out the words. I see that its meaning is more metaphorical than literal anyway, so I say, “If you take the pitchers, one of two things will happen. Either you will feel bad about it, or it’ll be like this clipping. It will be brittle in a few days, and then everything will disintegrate. Polvo.” I mean this to suggest that all bad feelings fade in due time; instead I suggest mortality.
We alight in Central Park. Laura and I leave to walk the loop. It’s the park but it’s not, because there are 200-foot tall redwoods everywhere. One has fallen across a stand of a few more, and it’s balancing precariously. A boy jumps up and down on one end of it while his parents snap photos of him and the fallen tree creaks ominously. I say to Laura, “Book it! We don’t want to get crushed when this stupid ass kicks the tree loose.” We race up the hill and notice a beautiful bouquet. There are daisies with no petals, surrounded by baby’s breath. I say, “This is the most beautiful flower I have ever seen.” Laura pokes one of the flowers with a spatula and says, “This is made of baby corn.” She looks even closer and says, “It is made of marzipan shaped to resemble baby corn.” We wonder who has made this delightful scene, and notice that just beyond it is a farmers market. The first booth in the market bears a sign that says “Mrs. Peters’ Marzipan.”
Laura chitchats with Mrs. Peters while I ogle the verisimilitude of her marzipan concoctions. On her table, there is a basket filled with real green peppers and a handful of green marzipan that has not yet been shaped into green pepper form. I steal half a handful of green marzipan and half a handful of yellow and then drag Laura into a room in a nearby convention hall and sit her at the twin-sized bed that happens to be in it.
A small audience gathers as I sit her in front of me on the bed and take her shirt off. “I’m going to make you a marzipan green and yellow pepper bra,” I say. I spend a half hour diligently sculpting the marzipan into shape, using my thumbs to press out the bellows of the peppers. I make half a green pepper and half a yellow pepper and push them together into one, and then apply it somehow to Laura’s ribcage. She stands up after I take my hands away and shows off her new bra, to great applause from the scattered audience. It is a beautiful bra.
But a closer examination reveals that this bra has virtually no marzipan on it at all. I look at the clasp. “I spent half and hour and all I supplied was the clasp?” I ask. But even the clasp is plastic, not almond paste. I look into the folds of the bedsheets and realize that the marzipan has fallen off Laura’s chest and that Laura is modeling the bra she had been wearing all day.
I woke up to the high-pitched whine of a dog that needs to pee.
The Harvard College Class of 2002/Palo Alto High School Class of 1998 is on a train to its “senior trip” destination: the River Why. It’s as if we are in India: there are thousands of us overloading a colonial-era British train with ten cars, each following the engine car in a seating hierarchy. Air-conditioned and windows closed is the first car; hot gusts of air off the plain flooding the caboose.
At the river, Laura and I venture off on our own. Most people sign up for expeditions, like river-rafting or inner-tubing. Some follow the river downstream. Laura and I go upstream. There are shallow puddles into which we dip our heads–my hair has grown long so I whip the water from it and suffer mild whiplash–and still deep pools into which we effortlessly dive and disappear, like shooting stars. We go upstream for half an hour, and there’s a natural land bridge damming up the river. Just beyond it the river turns into churning rapids flowing the wrong way. We hear the engine’s whistle and know it’s time to head back.
Everyone boards on the third or fourth cars and then squeezes and pushes to get back into their assigned cars. A stranger hands me a red tea kettle, filled to the brim with boiling water, and asks me to shepherd it to the last car in the train. I burn my hands against it and wrap it in a sweater to keep the heat away. I’m now in a wheelchair, so I put the kettle in my lap and push toward the exits.
I’ve accidentally gone the wrong way and ended up at the first car. It becomes immediately obvious that God is conducting the train and the first car is the first two books of the Bible. That is, the heavens and earth are in the first two rows, then Adam and Eve, then all the way to Moses and the desert at the rear of the car. I beat a hurried exit and rush toward the last car with the tea kettle.
The last car is a thirty by thirty foot banquet hall with food laid out near the exit. Ilana or Yuan-Ming, one of the two, or perhaps a blend of both, takes the tea kettle from me and whispers conspiratorially, “C’mere.” I follow. She says, “These pitchers, these glasses”–and points at the drinks table–“Would it be bad to take them?” I say, “Yes,” then hesitate, and say, “It would not be honorable.” Ilana/Yuan-Ming shows me a brittle newspaper clipping but I can’t make out the words. I see that its meaning is more metaphorical than literal anyway, so I say, “If you take the pitchers, one of two things will happen. Either you will feel bad about it, or it’ll be like this clipping. It will be brittle in a few days, and then everything will disintegrate. Polvo.” I mean this to suggest that all bad feelings fade in due time; instead I suggest mortality.
We alight in Central Park. Laura and I leave to walk the loop. It’s the park but it’s not, because there are 200-foot tall redwoods everywhere. One has fallen across a stand of a few more, and it’s balancing precariously. A boy jumps up and down on one end of it while his parents snap photos of him and the fallen tree creaks ominously. I say to Laura, “Book it! We don’t want to get crushed when this stupid ass kicks the tree loose.” We race up the hill and notice a beautiful bouquet. There are daisies with no petals, surrounded by baby’s breath. I say, “This is the most beautiful flower I have ever seen.” Laura pokes one of the flowers with a spatula and says, “This is made of baby corn.” She looks even closer and says, “It is made of marzipan shaped to resemble baby corn.” We wonder who has made this delightful scene, and notice that just beyond it is a farmers market. The first booth in the market bears a sign that says “Mrs. Peters’ Marzipan.”
Laura chitchats with Mrs. Peters while I ogle the verisimilitude of her marzipan concoctions. On her table, there is a basket filled with real green peppers and a handful of green marzipan that has not yet been shaped into green pepper form. I steal half a handful of green marzipan and half a handful of yellow and then drag Laura into a room in a nearby convention hall and sit her at the twin-sized bed that happens to be in it.
A small audience gathers as I sit her in front of me on the bed and take her shirt off. “I’m going to make you a marzipan green and yellow pepper bra,” I say. I spend a half hour diligently sculpting the marzipan into shape, using my thumbs to press out the bellows of the peppers. I make half a green pepper and half a yellow pepper and push them together into one, and then apply it somehow to Laura’s ribcage. She stands up after I take my hands away and shows off her new bra, to great applause from the scattered audience. It is a beautiful bra.
But a closer examination reveals that this bra has virtually no marzipan on it at all. I look at the clasp. “I spent half and hour and all I supplied was the clasp?” I ask. But even the clasp is plastic, not almond paste. I look into the folds of the bedsheets and realize that the marzipan has fallen off Laura’s chest and that Laura is modeling the bra she had been wearing all day.
I woke up to the high-pitched whine of a dog that needs to pee.
Friday, May 20, 2005
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