Month May 2019

This Day

Dusty 1 Comment

This day, I’m thinking about Kendrick Castillo. And about Riley Howell. And about gun violence.

Kendrick Castillo was the high school senior, three days from graduating, who lunged at a fellow student who came into his classroom with a gun in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, this past Wednesday. He was shot to death. Eight other students were wounded by the two gunmen, one of whom was detained by a school security guard. Two other seniors tackled Castillo’s killer, and the other people in the classroom credit Castillo with saving their lives.

Riley Howell and another young man tackled another gunman at UNC-Charlotte on April 30. Again, it’s believed that their actions stopped the shooter from murdering more people, potentially many more people. Howell was shot three times, and died of his wounds.

We call them heroes.

We call them martyrs.

We grieve for them, we remember them, we hold military funerals and vigils for them.

And then we make more of them.

I had a brief discussion — not a bad one, though I was a bit rude and I made the other person upset with me — on Facebook about Kendrick Castillo and whether or not he was a hero. I said he was a tragedy, and I was told that his situation was certainly a tragedy, but that calling him anything other than a hero dishonored him and his leadership and his legacy. And I struggled with how I wanted to respond to that. At first I said that I understood the other person’s point, and I agreed with it, for the most part. But really, I’m not sure that I do. I don’t mean to rehash the argument without giving the other person a chance to rebut my points, so I don’t want to get too far into this specific topic, but — I don’t think that my consent and participation are necessary for someone to be honored. I’ve disagreed often with those we choose to view as heroes, as leaders, as those worthy of honor; I don’t think my opinion has much of an impact on their status or their reputation or their legacy. Especially not something I say in a Facebook comment, or even on this blog. I will say that I would not state my opinion directly to the person or their loved ones, I wouldn’t go to John McCain’s funeral and call him an asshole even though I wrote a multi-page essay to that effect during the 2008 presidential race. But I do also think that if I lost someone I loved, if my wife sacrificed her life to save her students from a school shooter, it would not make me feel better if people told me she was a hero. So if I ever spoke to Kendrick Castillo’s family, I think the first and last thing I would say is, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

But none of that is the point I wanted to make here; just the impetus that has me writing about this terrible topic, again. During that same discussion, I wanted to say that I would rather use my grief for the loss of Kendrick Castillo, and for Riley Howell, to try to ensure that this never happened again, that nobody else would ever have to make the choice that they made.

But I couldn’t say that. First because I don’t know that I am grieving. I’ve grieved for deaths before, and this feels nothing like that. I will say that, inasmuch as you can grieve for someone you’ve never met, I do feel genuinely sad and sorry about these deaths, and I have been thinking about them all day; so if that’s grieving, then I am. If it’s not grieving, then I’m doing whatever this is, and maybe that honors their lives and their loss.

More to the point, though, I don’t think I’m going to do anything to prevent this from happening again. I want to, I genuinely do; but I’m not sure what. I can post on this blog, or elsewhere on the internet, and maybe my opinion can sway some others — but first I have to know how to sway them (you)  in order to make a difference, to move us closer to this goal we all share of never again having to hear of a school shooting. I usually think that’s the most powerful impact I can have on issues; because I have this small platform, and I can use it. Though as I said above, I’m not sure how much this blog, my words, these posts, really matter. Probably not much. I could run for office, but I wouldn’t win nor want the job; I could work for a campaign — and I might — but I’d have to be sure that the campaign I was working for was the right one, the one that would help make this happen. Of course I can vote, and will  — but again, I have to know that I’m voting for the right person. And when it comes right down to it, if the options are between someone who doesn’t share my opinions about preventing gun violence, and, say, Donald Trump — well, I’m not fucking voting for Trump.

I suppose I could also carry a gun, and stand guard at a school building. But I don’t think that is the right answer.

So the first thing that I need to do, to actually accomplish, is to decide what I think is the right thing to do. And then look for opportunities to pursue that right thing.

I’m saying this because I want to help move other people to do the same. My opinions may not sway anyone, but I do hope that when I say things that make sense, that aren’t simply my opinions, then people will listen: and this makes sense. We need to figure this out. We should all decide what we think is the best thing to do. We should also be open-minded and willing to listen, and honestly think, about what other people say is the best thing to do. We need to do this thinking because if nothing else, the 20 years between Columbine and Highlands Ranch, and the incessant stream of similar tragedies that have paraded by us over those two decades, should show us that we don’t know what to do. Because we’ve done nothing. Nothing other than drill students in how to deal with school shooters: and that has led directly to this point, these two dead men, these — heroes. We made them. We taught them what to do, we encouraged them, we failed to do anything else to prevent these situations where they chose to sacrifice themselves for others. If they are martyrs, then we are not the inheritors of their gift, the beneficiaries of their sacrifice: we’re the ones who killed them. We’re the Romans, with the cross and the nails. We’re the Inquisition, with the stake and the fire. We’re Jack and the hunters, chanting “KILL THE PIG! KILL THE PIG!” while Simon comes down from the cave.

At best we’re the ones watching it happen. At best.

 

I actually intended this post to be about what I think we should do to stop this. But it hasn’t gone that way, and I don’t want to get into it now. And tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and I don’t want to talk about ending gun violence on  Mother’s Day. So I think I will leave this here, for now, and come back to it next week — probably Monday.

I will end with this last remark. I do not think honoring dead men like Kendrick Castillo and Riley Howell as heroes does one single thing to reduce the tragedy of their loss. In a perverse way, if they are heroes, then that makes their loss worse, because heroes are valuable people, people who improve the lives of others, and they shouldn’t have to die to do that: they don’t have to die to do that. If they die doing it, then that is the end of their heroism, and it is a loss, it is a terrible loss in addition to the unforgivable loss of their lives. I think they probably were heroes, because I think that fighting to stop or prevent harm to others is a good thing, one of the best things, and so people who try to do it are good; if they try to stop harm this horrific, then they are great. I can call them heroes for that.

But still, the only thing I can say is: I am so sorry for your loss.

Image result for kendrick castillo

Kendrick Castillo

Image result for riley howell

Riley Howell

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about appreciation.

Yesterday I tried to recognize the teachers and educators I have worked with (And I still forgot a few — so thank you, Mary Wells, for all that you do, and thank you, Nora Caragan, for being the best paraprofessional in the history of paraprofessionals), and I got a grateful and heartwarming response. Teachers loved hearing what I had to say.

But there’s a problem there: I had to say it.

One of the things I object to, even though I participate in, is the support network that teachers provide for each other. It is a staggeringly wonderful thing: these people, who are already working so hard, and who are already giving so much, turn and without hesitation give even more to each other. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it: teachers go into each others’ rooms all the time, and frequently the visitor comes in mad or frustrated or down — until they see the face of the person they are visiting, and see that that person is feeling even worse. Suddenly, whatever the teacher came in to complain about or vent or even ask for help with is gone: frustration vanishes in concern, and the visitor says, “What’s wrong?” Prepared, in an instant, to take more burdens onto shoulders already weighed down with overwork and the emotional strain of seeing up close and personal the struggles and sufferings of children (And also with the strain of struggling through the suffering caused by children — and the worst is that it is often the same children, that those who are neediest and most desperate are the most obnoxious people we see. Which is saying something.), not because we don’t need help any more, but simply because a friend, a fellow teacher, needs help more, or even just needs help too: and so we help.

It’s amazing and inspiring. I will say, without any humility, that I participate in this, that I support my fellow teachers at all times and in whatever way they may need, and that I rarely ask for help myself because  I don’t want to trouble them.  I’ve even seen this go too far, when I was part of my union’s negotiating team and we were  fighting for better compensation and working conditions; trying to get teachers to actually stop working, to stop sacrificing, to start asking for something for themselves — and not luxuries, but a living wage and necessary health care and the like —  was nearly impossible. They wanted to give up whatever they had to give up in order to make everyone else happy. The magnificent bastards.

But here’s the thing: we shouldn’t have to do that. Of all the people who should be sacrificing in order to keep teachers sane and healthy, IT SHOULD NOT BE TEACHERS WHO DO IT. That makes no sense. It defeats the purpose. We not only put on someone else’s oxygen mask first, we take ours off and strap it on top of that person’s own oxygen mask just so they can be twice as safe while they watch us suffocate.

If it’s not clear already, this drives me nuts, that teachers do this. I don’t like that I do it, either, but it is without doubt who we are as people, and what the culture of teachers encourages in us. This is why we spend our own goddamn money on school supplies for our students, despite how little we are paid. And perhaps the worst part, though this is not the place to get into this, is that we are therefore propping up a system that is in many ways a terrible system: not terrible for us, though it is that, but terrible for the students, and terrible for the country. Yesterday I bought donuts for all of my students taking the AP Literature test. I encouraged and helped students to “succeed” on a high-stakes test run by a private corporation with disproportionate influence on college admissions. I structure the whole class around that damn test: a test I should be opposing with every fiber of my being. But I bought them donuts.

So here’y my request, for those who want to appreciate teachers — REALLY appreciate us, not simply nod in our direction while we lie bruised and bleeding in a ditch. (I know, it’s hyperbolic, but it’s also the end of the year, and it feels like that. I feel bruised. I feel sick because I haven’t been sleeping, and I feel sore because my body has been too tense for too long: my shoulders honestly ache right now.) Ready?

Make it so we don’t have to hold each other up.

Give us enough support, and take away enough of our burden of responsibility, that a single person can do a teacher’s job alone, or at least can handle the pressure alone.

Specifically, that means essentially three things: money, time, and trust. In the first years of a teacher’s career, there is a fourth, which is: help.

I don’t want as much money as I want, if I can be permitted that sentence. I want as much money as is needed so that I don’t have to worry about it. That’s all. I’ve been a teacher for twenty years, and I still don’t earn enough to own a home, and I don’t have any retirement savings, and I still have debt that I haven’t been able to get rid of.  I want to make enough money to take care of those problems. I don’t need enough to pay for vacations or jet skis or that diamond-encrusted pirate hat I’ve had my eye on; just enough so that I don’t have to suffer from money stress. I want to be middle class. I aspire to the bourgeoisie.

I want enough time in my school day to get my work done in my school day. I don’t mind planning lessons from home; it’s kind of fun sometimes. But I don’t want to have to spend one more weekend grading, not one more evening filling out paperwork. I already work 40 hours a week at school; why is it that I am expected and required to add another 10-20 hours on top of that, every week? It’s because I have too many students, and too many requirements for teaching those students. Too many things I have to cover, too many things I have to compensate for, and too many people I need to report to and satisfy in order to show that I did my job. You know what should be the only evidence needed that I did my job? That my student can read a book, write an essay, discuss a poem. That’s it. Don’t ask me to prove that I did my job: ask the kid. See what he can do. And ask him, honestly, if I helped him do that. Make it his responsibility to prove that I did my job. He is the product, after all. (Please note: this is not a serious suggestion for assessment of teachers. Students shouldn’t have to have that burden either, and too many of them are not reliable witnesses nor reliable learners. All I’m saying is that I don’t want to do it, to prove to all and sundry that I did my own job.)

And anyone who thought “But you get summers off!” just know: I am currently mentally punching you in the brain. Hard. Kicking, too.

The last thing I need is trust. I have proven that I am a good teacher. I’ve won awards, I’ve won accolades, I don’t have anyone who disagrees with that basic premise: not students, not students’ families, not other educators. Of course not everyone likes me or likes my class: but I don’t believe there’s a single person who could genuinely say that I teach badly. So please, I beg you. BACK OFF AND LET ME TEACH. Don’t try to improve my curriculum for me, or my methods. If you’ve got suggestions, I’ll listen, of course; but don’t tell me what to do, especially if you’re not versed in my subject or my profession. Stop assessing me: my driver’s license is valid for 25 MORE YEARS: and that’s based on a single test I took more than 20 years ago. Yet my teaching license expires every three to six years, and requires hundreds of hours spent on learning to be a better teacher. I get observed every year, often twice a year, and have multi-page evaluations, every year. How much proof do you need that I can do this job? The answer is that there will never be enough proof that I can do it, because I will never be trusted to do it. That has nothing to do with me and everything to do with our culture and our system, but I don’t care why it is that way: I just want it to stop.

I already care about my profession, and about my students, and about my subject. I care about my fellow teachers and educators. Please, stop making me also care about and for myself: let someone else do it. Give me some real appreciation.

And don’t let it come from other teachers.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about teachers.

It’s teacher appreciation week. That doesn’t always mean a lot, but the only way to make it more meaningful is to actually fill it with meaning. So here goes.

Thank you. Thank you to all the teachers who have worked with me over the years. Thank you to everyone who has been an inspiration, who has been a help, who has stood beside me and fought back against the rising tide of ignorance.

Thank you to Molly Jonnum, Deanna Martin, and Robin Mills for mentoring me as a student teacher. You let some random jackass come into your experimental new course that you’d been planning and fighting for for years, and you taught me everything teacher preparation classes couldn’t. I wouldn’t be a teacher today without you.

Thank you to everyone at San Pasqual, my first job. Carol Byrnes, for taking me in and giving me advice and friendship. Kelly Devine Grigsby, for being the teacher I wanted to be, and for being my friend at the same time. Linda Schott, for working with the hardest students and never losing your sense of humor. Laura Whitten for being the perfect mentor and friend. Cindy Finn for struggling right alongside me. Renee Sherry-Farrell for being the ultimate math teacher, and Marc Salazar for being an awesome social studies teacher. Art, Trish, and George for being the best supervisors and APs I’ve ever had, and Steve Spraker for being one of the best principals. And the guys in the band for letting me play with you —  that was one of my favorite experiences. Thank you to all of you for your neverending patience and kindness, for your intelligence and your experience, and your ability to translate what you know into something that others can learn. You’re all amazing.

Thank you to — well, most people at St. Helens High School. (Maybe not the ones who tried to take my license away. Or the one who was arrested last year.) A thousand thank yous to my PLO cohort, Tonya Arnold, Carrie McCallum, LaDonna Joy, David Schmor, Gerry Tinkle, Martha Sipe, and Ron Barnett, for everything you shared with me and showed to me and talked through with me. You were the reason I made it through ten very difficult years. You do the same for your students. Thank you. Thank you to LK for being the coolest person in the building, to Brian Dickerson for being one of the most dedicated and honorable and optimistic, to Amber Horn for having the biggest heart. Thank you to Keith Meeuwsen for always fighting. Thank you to Tamera Wahl, and Bill Dale, and Sib Owens, and all the other teachers whose names I can’t remember offhand, for being the best SPED department (along with LaDonna) that I’ve known, by far. Thank you to Mike Herdrich for being an entire damn school all by yourself, and the same to Pat Brame, and also for being an artist. Thank you to Jaime  Meadows and Jean Simmons for being the librarians and for doing everything good librarians should do, despite all the crap that got heaped on you by people who don’t understand that librarians are solid gold. Thank you to Diana Peterson and Lorraine Coopersmith and Denise Bennett — and Ruth at SP — for being the secretaries and functionaries who actually run the school, and thank you to Ted and Andy and especially BG for being excellent administrators in a sea of bad ones. Thank you to Alex Reed for being the best neighbor ever, even though I was the only one who thought that. Thank you to John Prunty for beards and music and laughs, and for looking exactly like Socrates. Thank you to all the teachers I knew and talked with and liked but did not name here — including Jessica Porter and Linda D’Amario and Alexia Hamilton and John Lessard and Cory Young and Todd Smith and Mary Downey and Kelli Curtis and — honestly I don’t remember everyone’s name, but I remember you, and I am grateful to you for the work you do.

Thank you to Tom Fuller for teaching me.

Last but not least, thank you to all of the excellent teachers at my current school here in Arizona: thank you especially to the brilliant and wonderful Lisa Watson, for everything that you do and everything that you give, and for everything that you are not appreciated for: I see you, I appreciate you. Thank you to Scott Ayers for being so damn delightful, and to Marty Sade for being so damn cantankerous, and to both of you for your brilliance and your dedication. Thank you to Danielle Randall for being so incredibly practical and capable, and also so much damn fun. Thank you to Toni Ramos-Hickman for being everyone’s mom, and for sharing coffee with me. Thank you to Jim Collins for teaching math without being evil yourself, and for reading every day. Thank you to Amanda Hanson for being the Platonic ideal of a teacher. Thank you to Adriana and Veronica, and Kellie, for fighting through the first years and being excellent teachers despite all the terrible nonsense you had to confront. Thank you to Mustafa Kilcak and Aichu Zhalilova for being so cool and so kind. Thank you to Helena Boosamra-Ball for being so — everything — and for loving dinosaurs and trivia. Thank you to Melisa and Scott Cole, Diana Benson, and Barbara Kahn for doing good work, and then getting out when the getting was good. Thank you to Mimi Akcay for being an excellent counselor, and to Carol McCluer and especially Dana McGirr for running the office. Thank you to Mustafa Alkhazov, and to Tim Luttrell in St. Helens, for being the angels of the school — and also for being the kindest men, and good fathers, and for working despite terrible health crises, both of you. I don’t know how the hell you do what you do, but I am forever grateful. Thank you to Florencia Ruiz for being the linchpin that held the admin together and made the school a hundred times better by your presence and professionalism.

And thank you especially, forever, with all of my heart, to my wife: who taught me everything that has made me what I am, who taught me everything I know about being an adult, and being an artist, and being in love and being married. Thank you for being so incredible in every possible way — and, as if you weren’t already perfect, for coming to teach beside me every day for the last three years, for being an inspiration, for being an amazing teacher even though you didn’t have the experience or training. Nothing stops you. You are a wonder. I love you. Thank you.

Thank you to everyone I missed. Thank you to everyone who teaches.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about compromise.

When you compromise, when you meet your opponent halfway so that both of you get something but nobody gets everything, it feels like you — just didn’t win. Probably because humans focus more on our losses than on our gains, but maybe because ‘Merica, often it seems that all we care about is that one little bit, that minor surrender to the other side’s will. “If only I had held out longer or fought harder,” we think, “I could have won it all! I could have gotten everything I wanted!” We got some or even most of what we wanted, after all; the other party was willing to give on some things. It feels so close to victory that it hurts.

Compromise sucks. I hate giving in, and giving up something I want to the other side. I hate letting the other side have something they want, because, frankly, they don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve to win, they don’t deserve to get what they want, and they certainly don’t deserve to get what they want at the expense of what I want. Clearly what I want is more important, and if my opponent could just see that, and let me have it, that sure would be great.

But who deserves to win? I want that answer to be me, all the time, but of course that’s not true. I also want it to be the underdog, the little guy, the victim; but it’s hard to tell who’s actually a victim, sometimes. It’s easy to tell who’s the underdog, but I mean, Ted Bundy was an underdog when the State of Florida put him on trial for murder. That’s a case where it was easy to see who the victim was, and it wasn’t Bundy.

I think that the best answer is this: the one who deserves to win is the one who is right. Of course there isn’t always a right side, but if there is, if it’s me, if I actually deserve to win everything I’m asking for, and I can communicate that to the opposition — chances are they’ll let me have everything. Last week Minnesota repealed a law that shielded people guilty of raping their spouse (because marriage implies consent) with a unanimous vote at least partly because one woman brought her case to the public: Jenny Teeson’s husband drugged her and raped her — and filmed it — and then served 45 days in jail for invasion of privacy. The case was so clear, so obvious, that the right side won, completely, without compromise.

When I’m not clearly in the right, when I can’t communicate my rightness to my opponent, then maybe I don’t deserve to win outright. Maybe at that point, I should be willing to compromise. Even if I really don’t want to. Even if I still think I should win everything. There may be some advantage to compromise, then.

When I argue with my students, about an assignment, say, if I can tell them why I want it to be a certain length, and turned in on a certain day, they don’t argue with me.  And not because they respect my authority unquestionably; but because what I say makes sense. Because my assignments don’t have arbitrarily hard requirements, because I always use their assignments as teaching tools, never simply as busy work (Well, almost never), and because I know how to teach my subject, I can show them clearly why an assignment is what it is. My assignments make sense. They can see that it makes sense, and they don’t argue, and they rarely even complain.

The other reason they don’t fight me on assignments is because they recognize that when I am not right about an assignment, I am willing to compromise on it. When I give essays, I ask them how long they think they need to complete it, and when they want it to be due. If they need more time, they can ask me, and I give it. I don’t give length requirements — and I don’t then penalize them for not meeting the imaginary length requirements that were secretly in my head the whole time, which is a common enough thing for teachers to do.

So this is the other side: if there’s not a clear winner based on who’s right, then it has to follow with who’s reasonable. The reasonable side, the side that is more rational and more willing to consider both arguments rationally, is the one who will end up winning: precisely because that is the side that is more likely to compromise. Because really, everything I said about compromise feeling like a loss? Of course that’s only emotion speaking, and pissy, self-centered emotion at that. Reasonably speaking, if I go into an argument and end up agreeing with my opponent that both of us are at least partly right, that has to be considered a victory. Maybe even a better outcome than an absolute victory, because in an argument where my opponent is right and I recognize it, I will learn something, and change and grow. And then afterwards, if I have another argument with the same person, they will be more willing to meet me halfway, to recognize that my side is right at least partly, because I showed that I was willing to give up the things I wanted that maybe weren’t reasonable, or at least were less reasonable than the things the other side wanted.

The problem in this country, at least in politics, is that we stopped wanting to compromise. We decided that we wanted only to be right. Both sides — and it was both sides, regardless of which side you are on and therefore consider to be the right side, the reasonable side, the one that was still willing to work rationally on achieving workable compromises — realized that if they held out, then they could win everything from the side that was willing to compromise; and if their intransigence, their unwillingness to be reasonable and to compromise, led to a collapse of the conversation, which must be rationally considered a loss for both sides because nobody is right and nobody gets anything they want — then they could crow to their fans that they held out, that they stayed strong, and it was the other side who let everyone down because they weren’t willing to accept that MY side, the STRONG side, the side that WOULD FIGHT TO THE DEATH AND NEVER QUIT, was therefore the RIGHT side.

And irrationality wins, and everyone loses.

Compromise is the only way forward, the only way to fix this. We have to get back to a willingness to be reasonable, and a belief in the reasonable will of the other side. We have to be willing to give while we get, always, even with those who are irrational. There are principles one can’t compromise; but that’s not “all of them,” and we have to recognize that the other side also has principles that they can’t compromise, and we can’t simply say “Too bad” and go ahead with our victory dance because we let negotiations collapse.

I know. It kinda hurts me, too.

But I’m right.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I don’t know what to write.

I’m planning to do a post on procrastination, but I’m putting it off.

Sorry. Both things are true, though; I’ve had a lot of conversations over the years with my students about procrastination, and I have some things to say about it — but I don’t want to do it now. Partly because I am fairly close to my maximum stress level, because I’m waiting for an email today that will tell us whether or not we get to move into the place we want to move into, or if we’ll have to compromise even more; and partly because I am in the middle of some fairly serious procrastination for school, because I am not keeping up with my grades. And so because I am doing it, I don’t want to write about it for fear that I will strip away my own illusions and excuses, and then I’ll have to grade things. And I really can’t take that right now.

I want to write a whole post of bad jokes. I love bad jokes. But they actually need to be clever, and I’m bad at clever. I’ve been trying to get one to read right, about sneezing into a mustache, but I can’t make it move.

I want to write about what’s bothering me, about trying to find a new rental; but I already did that, and I don’t know what else to say other than to repeat the same things I said before: renting is a terrible thing, landlords are generally terrible people, the internet has made it even harder to find a place because there’s no longer one source to turn to for listings, like the Classified ads used to be.

Then there are all the things I should be writing about: the wars  around the world, and the likelihood that the U.S. will be entering one so that Trump has something to rally his voters around if the economy craps between now and the election. Climate change, and how nothing else will matter if we don’t do something to solve that — but also, how even that doesn’t matter very much. The fact that reading is dying, and there’s nothing that can be done to save it; our best hope is that something else will take its place, and that the new thing will be as powerful and useful as reading is.

But I can’t write about any of that. I don’t have time to formulate the good thoughts and put them down on the page. I would have written it last night, but I was grading, because I’ve been procrastinating. Because I’ve been looking for a new rental. And also been very stressed over it and not sleeping well and so therefore napping during the day and being very tired, as well.

These are all excuses.

I want to write about what matters, but I’m not really sure what does. Love seems the best answer.

I want to write about the opening line of Highly Suspect’s song Serotonia: “I wish that everyone that I knew was dead/Just so I’d never have to pick up the phone.” That is a brilliant line: I can’t think of anything that could be so self-consciously insightful and idiotic at the same time.

I wrote before about how writer’s block is really about this: when you have too many ideas, and simply can’t choose between them, so they all clamor for attention, all at once, and you can’t pick one out of the cacophony to focus on.

Have I done the right thing here? Bibbling on about this without accomplishing anything useful? This way I give you something to read, maybe some insight into my thoughts; maybe that’s useful. Maybe this is a waste of time. Is it worth it to keep the streak going? I’m up to 73 days in a row, I think; WordPress is very impressed by me. I’ve been thinking that I should try for a solid year of daily blogs, which sounds great, but if too many of them are going to be like this, maybe I should let it go. I figured the constant deadline would give me impetus to write, a way to break through logjams like this and come to a decision; normally it does, but today, not. So this is my compromise: it’s a post, but it’s not a good post.

It’s a Monday post.

I’ll try to write something better for tomorrow.

This Morning, This Week

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I am thinking about down time.

Image result for candy crush

Specifically

 

This morning I played a video game for the first time in a week. I gave them up last week as part of my ongoing project to try to change one of my habits for a week and see how the change affects me. I wanted to change my video game habit because it’s been a constant for essentially all of my life; because it can get pretty invasive; and because the games I’ve been playing lately are brainless and dumb, and that makes me feel lame. I mean, if I was a serious gamer, who participated in some MMORPG  or online tournaments, then it would be a waste of time but at least I’d be involved in something; I’d be part of a cultural moment, of some kind. I’m rarely involved in those types of things, and I often feel bad about it — for instance, I’ve seen neither Game of Thrones nor the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, so everything on Twitter right now goes over my head, instead of just most of it going over my head.

So if my video gaming was at least marginally cool, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it. If I felt like the video games I played had some positive place in my daily routine, I wouldn’t feel bad about that, either — so if I had a following for my video game reviews, or if I wrote for games, or even if I played the Sims and used the opportunity to work on my storytelling, all of that would fit in with my more-complimentary views of myself. Solitaire, though? Mah-Jong? Freaking Candy Crush? How do I feel good about those? Surely I would be better off without them: more focused, more productive, more — interesting.

Turns out: nope.

The big lesson from this past week is this: I don’t veg out because I am addicted to video games; I play video games because I need to veg out. This entire week, the times when I would have been  playing video games, but I wasn’t, were all spent doing something else that wasn’t terribly productive. Mostly scrolling through Facebook and Twitter, which I did more of this week than normal; I watched far more videos, which I usually just scroll past. Losing the video games had a minimal effect on my habits and productivity.

I did try: I tried to read more, and I tried to do some research on the Democratic candidates for President for 2020 (Okay, only on Elizabeth Warren. She’s been my pick since 2016, honestly, and I wanted to look into her policy proposals more. I think I looked at  her website for ten minutes? Maybe fifteen?). But the issue was, I’ve been exhausted all week: I’ve been having pretty serious insomnia; and this is the hardest time for teachers because we have to drag both ourselves and our students through the last few weeks; and there have been stressful things going on for my friends, which has affected me for their sakes; and I’ve been trying to find a new place to live. So it was not a good week for productivity: it was, if I may paraphrase Monty Python, a week for lying down and avoiding. Even my reading, which is one of my other preferred relaxations and escapes, was no good for this week: I’m reading a history of philosophy, written by the mathematician/logician/philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom I admire enormously, but who is always more interested in math than anything else, and whose writing requires quite a lot of focus and effort to get through with full comprehension. So even reading was exhausting.

But when I did find the time and energy to be productive, I did it well: I pursued housing diligently all week; I kept up with my classes and got a lot of grading done; last night I finished a lengthy short story I’ve been working on as a present. I’ve been blogging faithfully all week, and with some pretty substantial posts. It’s been a productive week, considering my circumstances. Just — not because I stopped playing Solitaire.

Leaving behind the video games didn’t make me happier, and didn’t make me more productive. So back they come.

I did learn that if I’m going to pursue anything serious on social media — try to expand my book sales or the following for this blog — I need to improve my use of the platforms. There is no reason whatsoever why I didn’t find new accounts on Twitter and new blogs on WordPress for me to follow; I just didn’t. So I think there will come a week soon when I set aside time every day to do that, and see if I can make a new, useful habit.

Not this week, though. This week is still everything stressful: my friends are still struggling; my rental search is still ongoing; schoolwork and students are still dragging me down. I’ve slept better this weekend, but we’ll see how that goes when I go back to work.

So this week, I asked my wife what I should give up.

She said, “Gum.”

“I don’t chew gum,” I said.

She nodded. “Exactly. Think how easy it will be.” I laughed, and she added, “You think I’m going to make it hard on you? Really?”

I love my wife. And so I’m going to take her suggestion.

I am going to make it slightly harder on myself: I’m going to give up snacks for the week. I come home pretty much every day and eat some kind of salty finger food, pretzels or peanuts or Cheez-its or potato chips; and we frequently have a little ice cream or a couple of cookies for dessert. I rarely eat those things because I’m actually hungry; just because I want some comfort, something to keep me awake. I don’t think I need to use food for that. So I’m going to give all that up, and only eat the major meals, and maybe an apple in the afternoon — I am a teacher, after all; apples sort of come with the job, right?

But if it comes down to it? I’ll let myself slide on everything that isn’t gum.

That’s what my wife told me to do.

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning, I am thinking about this bullshit.

We celebrated Michael Phelps’s genetic differences. Why punish Caster Semenya for hers?

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Semenya is an in­cred­ibly powerful runner from South Africa, a two-time Olympic champion. She has also been the subject of controversy since the beginning of her career a decade ago. Semenya is believed to have an intersex condition, though she doesn’t publicly speak about it: Her body allegedly produces testosterone at a higher level than most women. On Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that if Semenya wanted to continue to compete, she would be required to take medications to lower it.

The CAS, which was upholding a previous ruling by the International Association of Athletics Federations, admitted that the decision was tantamount to discrimination. But, a statement read, “discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics.”

“Preserving the integrity of female athletics.” What a remarkable way to phrase a ruling that has nothing whatsoever of integrity in it.

What a remarkable decision: in a world where sports fight tooth and nail to keep people from doping — that is, using artificial chemical treatments to give some athletes an advantage over others — the IAAF is going to use artificial chemical treatments to give some athletes an advantage over others. It’s just that in this case, the chemical treatments are meant to make the other athletes win, rather than the one being forced to take the drugs. The one being doped.

Make no mistake: that’s precisely what this is. The arbitrators here decided to chemically handicap Caster Semenya because she is a better athlete. Because she is more likely to win. When criminals fix horse races, they use two different strategies: one is to give the winning horse a boost, and the other is to give the losing horses a drag. Since the term “dope” comes most prominently from references to opium, it seems likely that the use of the term to represent cheating through chemical substances springs from precisely this: using dope to slow someone down so that someone else can win. [History of the word “doping” found here, which also includes the magnificent user comment, ‘I believe “dope” has also been used as slang for “good”, or “excellent”.’ Thanks, Craig J.!]

I presume the next step is to cut off Usain Bolt’s legs, and replace them with shorter legs; because a large part of the reason why Bolt has won nine gold medals and holds three world records is because he is 6’5″.

But even among top sprinters, Bolt stands out, and this is partly because of his height.

“Bolt is a genetic freak because being 6ft 5ins tall means he shouldn’t be able to accelerate at the speed he does given the length of his legs,” says former Great Britain sprinter Craig Pickering.

“At the beginning of a race you want to take short steps in order to accelerate, but because he’s so tall he can’t do that. But then when he reaches top speed he has a massive advantage over everyone else because he’s taking far fewer steps.”

[Emphasis added] [Source]

So clearly, Bolt has an unfair advantage. Seems to me that is because of his sex: men are taller than women, and so if Bolt has too much height, it’s because he’s a man. A more mannish man than other men. We should add a third category of sports: women’s sports, men’s sports, and super-manny men’s sports; Bolt belongs in the third group, along with Lebron James and Michael Phelps. The only way to maintain integrity in sport is to prevent Bolt from taking advantage of his genetic aberration and unfairly dominating his event.

This entire argument is, of course, preposterous. It’s obscene to take an athlete with a natural advantage — the same description that could be applied to every single dominant athlete in the history of sport; the first article comparing Michael Phelps to Semenya does this well — and decide that their natural advantage is somehow unfair. The whole point of sport is to reward those who have natural advantages. Of course we like it better when the people who have trained harder and worked harder are able to win; but we love cheering for the genetic aberrations who have the natural gifts that give them an advantage. And really, in the modern world of competitive sports, there is no such thing as a top level athlete who doesn’t have genetic advantages: it’s just that some of them are more visible than others. We can talk about Lebron James’s size and strength as part of his gameplay, but though Michael Jordan lacked those genetic advantages, there’s no question that he had agility and speed and coordination and reflexes that were inborn and greater than a normal person’s. Look at Muhammad Ali’s speed, which was unmatched by heavyweight boxers and allowed Ali to dominate over stronger men: wasn’t that a genetic aberration? Wasn’t that an unnatural gift? Am I supposed to believe that the only reason Ali could float like a butterfly was because he trained harder? Ridiculous.

No: the point here is that Semenya has an advantage that we as a society (and by “we” I mean the fucksticks at the IAAF, not myself and probably not you) think is wrong. She has “an intersex condition,” I keep reading, which means her body produces more testosterone than most women’s bodies and which therefore makes her a better athlete.

When someone has a hormonal “condition” that makes them abnormally tall, and therefore gives them an advantage in basketball, we don’t see that as unfair, nor as wrong. When someone has a hormonal “condition” that gives them greater body mass, and therefore an advantage at sumo or in football, we don’t see that as unfair or wrong. Again, as the article points out, Michael Phelps has a genetic aberration that means his body produces less lactic acid than the normal human body, and yet he was lauded as having a lucky gift  — not sentenced to inject lactic acid in order to give other swimmers a fighting chance against that unnatural freak Phelps.

The entire argument, the only argument, against Caster Semenya is that she is not really she, that she is more he than she, and therefore she can’t compete against shes unless she becomes more she-ish. That’s it. If she was abnormally tall and therefore had the same advantage Usain Bolt has, it wouldn’t be a question. If she had less lactic acid, and therefore the same advantage Michael Phelps has, it wouldn’t be a question. She probably does have greater reaction time and naturally greater twitch-muscle  mass, as that is what sets sprinters apart; but the IAAF isn’t talking about that. Just about her lack of sheishness. I mean, it’s not even subtle:

The combination of her rapid athletic progression and her appearance culminated in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) asking her to take a sex verification test to ascertain whether she was female. (Wikipedia) [Emphasis added, but unnecessary. You saw it too.]

Do you think it’s also a factor that Semenya is a married lesbian?

Of course it is.

This case is much more about humanity’s discomfort with gender. We (Again, not me, and probably not you; mostly fucksticks.)  want to think that there is an easy line to draw, and that line has value. Sports is one place where we really, really like drawing that line. Because men are generally stronger and larger, and therefore have an advantage in most sports, we like to think it’s fair to separate men from women and have them only compete against each other. (You want to talk about unfair advantages, let’s throw some men into women’s gymnastics. Watch some 6-foot dude try to compete on the uneven bars. That will be funny as hell.)

But there’s nothing fair about that. Caster Semenya shows that. Transgender athletes show that, and the fact that most people have far less of a problem arguing that transgender athletes shouldn’t be allowed to compete with their identified gender simply goes to show that this argument is really about what kinds of gender identifiers we are comfortable with.

It’s clearly not about a level playing field. Serena Williams has won 23 Grand Slam titles partly because she is taller and stronger than most women tennis players. (Being taller gives her more reach and a more powerful serve because she can swing the racket in a wider arc, generating more speed and thus more force.) That’s not to say she’s not an incredible athlete; she is. I like using tennis  s an example because it requires an inordinate amount of training in addition to the physical gifts that make a player great, and Williams has obviously mastered the sport to an unprecedented degree. But the simple fact is that one reason she wins is because she hits the ball harder and faster than her opponents can, and part of the reason for that is because she has the genes to be taller and stronger than most people. But because Serena Williams is more she-ish, nobody argued that she should be given performance-debilitating drugs in order to level the playing field and give all the other women a chance.

An even better example is Shaquille O’Neal. Shaquille O’Neal is 7’1″, which is extraordinarily tall, though not unheard of in the NBA: but he was also 325 pounds when he was playing, which is entirely unheard of in the NBA. He outweighed everyone he played against. Because of that, he had an advantage, and in O’Neal’s case, it was his only advantage: I watched him play hundreds of times, and believe me, that man had not a single skill when it came to basketball. No, I shouldn’t say that; he was a good passer, which is a skill and helped him win championships. But as an offensive player, he had exactly one move: he would catch the ball (using his height to reach above any player between him and the person passing to him)  and then, with his back to the basket, he would dribble the ball and simply– step backwards. When he was close enough, he would turn around and shoot the ball, from the kind of range that allows anyone with eyes to hit the shot. He could do that because none of the men defending him could push back, because O’Neal outweighed them. If they tried to set their feet and shove him, it would be a foul; if they tried to out-muscle him, he would win, every time. Because he was bigger. And stronger, which surely came partly from lots and lots of physical training; but mainly because he was bigger. He pushed his way into the Hall of Fame with his enormous ass.

That is an unfair advantage. But because it doesn’t have anything to do with gender, nobody ever investigated O’Neal. Nobody ever ordered him to lose weight before he would be allowed to play. Nobody ever questioned whether he should be allowed to play with other men.

Either accept that Caster Semenya is a woman by any rational standard, and allow her to compete and crush all of her competitors like bugs the same way that Shaquille O’Neal was allowed to use his genetic aberration to win NBA games; or else accept that the separation of men’s and women’s sports along gender lines is stupid, and change to something that makes more sense.

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

 

 

This morning I am thinking about singing with my mother.

My mother and I used to sing together all the time when I was small. Whenever we’d drive anywhere, we never listened to the radio; we sang songs. Old songs, silly songs, campfire songs:  John Brown’s Baby and My Grandfather’s Clock and If I Had a Hammer.

She called me the other night, happy because a friend who could handle the interwebs found for her one of the original singers of some of her favorites, which she used to sing with her father.

Here’s the one she mentioned specifically. I don’t know if your mother does this, but my mother drops conversational references that I have never heard before, because she talks about things to someone else — my mother has MANY friends — and thinks she told me. There are also times when she tells me things, and I forget, but she remembers forever that she told me. I don’t know which category this is in, but when she said, “I found the prune song!” I was at a total loss.

Here it is: the prune song. That I don’t remember her ever talking about. Dang sure we never sang it together, though she might have sung it to me.

 

Here’s one I sang with my dad, (Surprising because my dad can’t sing), and he had a different set of lyrics; I had no idea this one had this many verses — we only sang the chorus.

 

(Here’s the version my dad taught me, by the way. I love this man intensely. I love my dad, too — but this guy RULES.)

 

Here’s the same man singing another one I loved singing with my mom; this one made her uncomfortable, I remember, I think because we’re talking about a six-year-old singing about beer and sliding over naked people.

 

This one I loved, and still sing, because it’s pirate-y as hell. Here it is by a chorus, because my mom loves choral music.

 

Here’s the song I remember most fondly: a completely ridiculous, and frequently racist, song about an Ottoman Turk in a feud with a Russian Cossack.

 

 

And here’s a version of it with an equally offensive cartoon — and it says it was banned, but I SWEAR I saw this at some point in my life.

 

I’m going to go sing some songs now. You should, too.

On top of spagheeeeettttttiiiiiii, alll covered with cheeeeeeeseee….

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about how much I wish I was still asleep.

I woke up at 4am again, and tossed and turned for an hour before trying first to write in my journal, and then deciding to go ahead and write this on my Web-log here (I hate that word, actually. I like the word “blog,” have been using that even though I’m sure it’s now passe, that it has been yeeted along with every other “world wide web” term by the new generation who talk more about wifi than internet; but I’ve always hated “weblog” because it looks like “we blog.” And we do, oh yes we do blog, precious; but that’s now how the word is said, it’s said “web log” because it’s a log kept on the web — but there’s no way to indicate that without adding a space or a capital letter or a hyphen, all of which ruin the visual indication that this is where the word “blog” comes from, a shortening of “web log.”) what thoughts are running around in my head and keeping me from going back to sleep.

This. This is what I think about when I wake up at 4am. Along with the thoughts, “God, I’m tired” and “I should really get more sleep” and “Today’s going to suck.” See why I said yesterday that my brain, like everyone else’s brain, is unwell and disordered and just — stupid? Because I really do need sleep, and my brain knows it, but yet somehow it can’t stop thinking “Man, I’m really tired. I should be sleeping now. I’m not though. This day’s going to be awful.”

I would like to apologize in advance to everyone today for my crankiness and slowness, for my confusion and my general inability to remember anything or to think clearly. I blame my idiot 4am brain.

No, the main thing that’s waking me up, and has been all week, is this: we need to move. We’re downsizing to save money, and our lease is up, and we need to find a new house. We want one that is cheap but decent, and that has a good yard with a solid fence for our dogs and our tortoise, who lives in the yard.

That right there is the first problem we’ve been having: most places don’t have a fenced yard, or don’t allow dogs, or don’t allow TWO dogs, or don’t allow anything but small dogs. And if you’re not a dog person, okay, fine, sure, you don’t want hair in the place and you don’t want poop in the yard and you’re scared that they’ll bark or dig. But if you’re willing to allow me to have a dog, what is the problem with me having two dogs? You think two dogs will bark more than one? Are you afraid they’ll fight? Is there some calculation in your head that says the place is too small for that much canine mass? I mean– can’t you let me handle those problems? If you don’t want dogs, fine; but if you allow dogs, what’s with the weight limit? If it’s an apartment without a yard, again, that’s fine, I understand; I wouldn’t move my dogs into a place that didn’t have a yard for them, but lots of people do that, and I think it’s wrong, too; but with tiny lap-dogs it’s much more manageable, so in that case, you can say that you don’t mind tiny yappy puppers. But if you have a yard, why couldn’t I have as many large dogs in there as I can cram in? Why does the landlord care how many dogs I have? Is there a fear that too much will create a canine supernova, which will then collapse into a doggo-black hole?

At any rate, once we find a place, we’re going to have to downsize and get rid of stuff, and we’re going to have to move.

And that’s it. That’s the thought. That’s what keeps me up at night, why I can’t sleep, why I am currently seeing double because my eyes won’t focus well, and having trouble typing because my fingers are not hitting the right keys in the right sequence. Because I’m going to have to get rid of stuff, and then move the remaining stuff from one house to another, and put it all away.

I don’t know why I’m having trouble with this. Sure, there is anxiety about the house hunting: will we find a place that we like? Will we still like it once we move into it with all of our possessions and our pets? What about our neighbors, will they drive us crazy? Will we hate living there after six or eight months? All of that is one thing; but this morning I was thinking about stuff. I was trying to picture how we could cram our current possessions into the condo we looked at yesterday — which was a dump, by the way, as per our expectations; it was in a good neighborhood and it was dirt cheap, but that was because of all the dirt.

Now: why? Why was I trying to make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of? Why was I worrying that we wouldn’t have room in the garbage can for the junk I’ll want to throw away, junk that has accumulated in our back yard simply because we have room for it, and I haven’t bothered getting rid of it before now? Garbage? 4am, I’m exhausted, and I’m literally worrying about garbage.

Garbage.

I think I need to clear my brain out, too.

That also, I have to say, represents most of the stuff that we’ll need to downsize and get rid of: things we just haven’t bothered to remove because we had room for it. The house we’re in now is quite large, four bedrooms for the two of us and our pets; the bird has his own bedroom. So we have the chair that isn’t as comfortable as it used to be, but we kept because our Boxer mix likes curling up in it. We have a bookshelf full of CDs that only I listen to any more, and that rarely because most of them are either uninteresting to me, or are already ripped onto our iTunes. If I just consolidated my tools, and cleaned out the half-empty plastic bags of hardware that has been left over after assemblies and repairs and installations over the last few years, I’d be able to put all of my home-repair stuff into one medium box.

I just haven’t done it. Because we’ve had room to store everything, so why worry about it?

And now, it seems, it’s time to worry about it. Except there’s nothing to worry about. Not even the move itself: it’s now May, and school will end in three weeks (And THANK GOD FOR THAT), and then we’ll have nothing to do but move; while we’ll need one day with a U-Haul truck and friends to help us move the big furniture, the rest we can do in small trips with our car. We’ve done this many times before, and it’s never been hard, and it won’t be hard now. It’ll be good for us, in fact, because we really should get rid of all of our clutter; it’s not sparking any joy for us.

Now someone, please, I beg of you: explain that to my 4am brain. Because the one thing that will make this move hard is if I can’t get enough sleep.