so, what do I think? #1

I teach high school math in a very poor, very violent neighborhood in a major US city with a really bad school system. I'm a first-year teacher, and it's a mess. My background is intellectual, upper middle class, focused on social responsibility, politically active, and liberal: that describes my parents and grandparents, and the parents of many of my friends. Almost none are teachers. Periodically, people ask what policies I think would improve the public schools. Recently, a stranger on a plane asked. This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series exploring some possibilities. I'm interested in seeing how my thinking changes over the next year and a half.

To put one of my premises out there: I imagine, as I say these things, a conservative (like one I recently met on a plane) saying that parents should be responsible for these changes; that expectation is not reasonable or realistic, for reasons I might write about later, and really I think it's irrelevant. Do you want students in low-income districts to have the same educational opportunities as students in wealthy districts? Yes or no. If yes, saying parents should be responsible is a cop-out, unless you have a plan to make or help parents be responsible. Without further ado, the proposals.

1. More money. Schools in impoverished areas shouldn't get funding parity with wealthier districts - they should get double the per student funding. Among other things, parents in wealthy districts provide a vast number of resources that poor parents simply cannot provide: graphing calculators that students can use at home, buying college reference books, making sure their students get therapy or medications if they have mental illness, dental care, computers and internet at home - the list goes on. Money is not the only thing my students need, and more could certainly be done with the current budget, but let's be real: many of the people who refuse to throw money at the education of poor children are the same ones who throw money at their own children's education. They're not doing that for nothing.

2. More staff. See #1. Having someone constantly available to manage a student who's out of control (e.g. an office to send that student to) would free up a lot of my time to actually teach. Instead, what happens is that if a student disrupts or endangers the class, I write up a disciplinary referral and it gets dealt with later; if I'm really lucky, someone will be available to take that student, but those people all teach their own classes and are pretty overworked; they also don't have anywhere to put the student where the student will be supervised. In better-functioning schools, you can just send a kid to the office for cursing at you; in my school, no way.

More staff also means smaller class sizes, which, wow. That would be awesome. Thirty-three kids is a lot. Maybe even having two preps be standard - I have that this year, and it's great, and I don't know how I functioned without it for 2 months.

3. Better staff. The quality of most teachers is, well, not stellar. (I include myself in this, though I think one way in which I am unlike many of the other teachers at my school is that I really want to get better.) The recent NYT magazine article about the achievement gap and the KIPP schools casually mentioned that KIPP teachers work 15-16 hour days. That's great for the students, but it's not a national policy solution. You can get a few more smart, motivated, ambitious, etc, people into teaching by upping the mystique, and a lot more by making public schools better work environments, but to do this on a national scale you'll have to up the salaries. That kind of time commitment is what people do in I-banking, where they are making boatloads of money. I'd suggest making teacher schools something like law or MBA programs, where you worry about whether you'll get in and have to be intensely devoted to it for at least a year or two; I'd also suggest having teacher salaries start at $60,000 and go up to $150,000. You could even start lower if you were willing to make the ramp pretty steep. Teaching will never fully compete with Wall Street - that's not the idea. But you want a lot of talented people who have other options? You're going to have to pay for them.

I am not sure if doing that would produce a system where I wanted to work right now. For me, teaching was a step up financially, and I was fine with that. But realistically, money is a great way to attract people to a particular job, and while that kind of environment might make me less interested in teaching now, the money (and the doubtless improved work environment) might also make me more interested in teaching long-term.

4. Better management. See #3 and #1. Management at most public schools is abysmal. I have this fantasy of having professional development that's not a complete waste of my time, seeing the teaching schedules for half-days and special events before the day of, and getting feedback from observations. This, again, you have to pay for.

5. Better staff/management development. I'm going to write more about this another time.

6. For the luvva Pete, can I please just have a curriculum for every class? And maybe a computer in my classroom? And while I'm wishing for the impossible, how about paper for the flippin' copy machine?

Idlewild

What's most interesting about Idlewild (OutKast's gorgeous movie set in a semi-mythical Prohibition-era Georgia) is not what it owes to the past, but to the present. The score, of course - there's no way those songs would have existed 'then' - but also the dance scenes, floating somewhere between musicals and music videos, and the characters.

It's simple, really. Before there were gangstas, there were gangsters; before there was crack, there was hootch; before there was the club, there was the club. More complicated things, too: the role of women as simultaneous seduction and salvation, the dream of getting out, the fear and reality of violence, having to choose between being cool and having a future. Idlewild is about now, dressed up as then. Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street is about the same subjects, but it's not half as pretty.

home is....

Three full-time residents, three cars. Looking around a roomful of friends and realizing I've known everyone in it for over 10 years, except for the little siblings (I met them 8 years ago). Bonjovi on the radio. "You only bought two and a half pounds of green beans? That might be enough for your little brother.... by himself!" Constantly being interrupted. An orange and a penny in my Christmas stocking; also contact solution. At least two glasses of wine a night. The promise of the interstate. New bars with exciting beer lists and murals - what's happening to this place? My grandmother's artwork on the walls. Scraping the frost off my car before I can go anywhere. Buying rounds at the bar. My dad making cappuccino. Watching most of the first season of Big Love on DVD. My little brother at the computer. Being the only one up at 2 am. Borrowing cash from my mom to go out for a beer. Drinking cream soda and root beer. Apple pie. A golden retriever sleeping sprawled between the top of the stairs and the door. Strip malls. When the cop who breaks up the [very quiet] party is my high school biology teacher's son. Sleeping until noon. Homemade granola. Tonight's dinner question: what would you do about Iraq? They let you smoke in the bars. Almost certainly being safe to drive. My sister napping on the couch. Mexican wedding cookies, molasses-ginger drops, sugar cookies, and lebkuchen. Emmy Lou Harris singing "Light of the Stable." Knowing how to get everywhere. Do you want to talk to someone on the other side of the house? No need to go anywhere - just shout! Knowing that Git'n'Go used to be a QuikTrip. Winter grasses at the edge of the garden. The lieutenant governor coming over for brunch. Frustrating and comfortable. Drinking beer in an outdoor gear outlet store at 3 am because my friend is the manager, and the cops broke up the party at her house. Dancing to Journey. My friends' parents. Hearing about Catholic Worker houses. Hypothetical karaoke. More prosciutto than you could possibly eat. Drinking champagne. The dishwasher running constantly. Driveways with basketball hoops. Someone has to go to the grocery store every day. New kittens. Two dogs. Trading Christmas cookie plates with my friends' families. The gold dome of the Capitol building. Being surprised by how white everyone is. Driving past my high school. Reading articles aloud to each other. My mom asking what I think of the garden. Red pepper pasta sauce. Adriatic pita bread. Blessings for the road. Never wanting to stay. Never wanting to leave.

sex-neutral

In 2005, I borrowed a book called A Return to Modesty¹ and got kind of annoyed with it.

Conveniently, someone else has written the same book again, so I don't have to come up with new ways to be irritated. Dawn Eden² is older, and she became an observant Catholic instead of an observant Jew, but it's basically the same old same old. Some woman becomes religious, stops having sex, and realizes how much happier and more fulfilled she is when she's chaste (or celibate or modest or whatever) and religious. Next step: publish a book so all the rest of us can learn how to be just as satisfied with our lives.³

The arguments are oddly similar to the way polyamory advocates sound sometimes: "Why didn't I know about this before? I spent all that time trying to be [monogamous/promiscuous]! I never realized that I actually could sleep with [lots of people/no one] without being [skeevy/lame]!"

The most noticeable aspect of this interview with Eden is that the focus of her romantic life, both before and after she was celibate, was primarily on finding a husband and secondarily on relieving her insecurities about being good enough and lovable enough. Note that when she talks about her pleasure in sex, she says:

There were times when I would count how many men I had had sex with in one two-week period and thought, "I must be this really hot, attractive chick to attract so many men."

Also:

I used to believe that, if I knew that I would never get married, I would kill myself.

Not anymore, but now,

as I was writing, I didn't want to think of what would become of me if I didn't get married. It was too frightening to imagine.

It gives you a sense of how central the idea of marriage was and is to her life. Also of what she sees as the alternative.

If you desperately want one kind of relationship, and start pursuing something completely different, you'll be unsatisfied. No real surprise, then, that when she stopped sleeping around and started looking for something she actually wanted, she got happier. Chastity, in Eden's view, is about not pursuing sex, but instead pursuing serious relationships with people whose values you share.

Instead of following the pop-culture prescription, to single-mindedly pursue a man who's going to make you happy, I am suggesting women should be singular and concentrate on being the best people they can be and displaying grace as individuals and as women. In doing that they will become more giving, more appreciative of everyone around them, so not only will they be better able to have meaningful friendships and relationships, but they will also be able to enjoy this time they have as singular women.

Similarly, she says chastity made her a better friend: before, her romantic life and friendships were about activities, and now both are about values and intense personal connections.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this transformation happened in Eden's life. But check it out: fundamentally, none of this is about who you have sex with. It's about caring, respect, connection with other people. For her, that happens through her relationship with sex. FOR HER. But she, like a lot of conservatives, conflates values with sex; like Wendy Shalit, she assumes that because she fundamentally wanted marriage and preferred chastity to promiscuity, all other women want that too.

I think, honestly, that it's a failure of imagination on her part that makes this happen: for her, relationships are either permanent or superficial; either no sex until marriage, or promiscuity. It's a false dichotomy, not just because there are possibilities between those two extremes, but because there are possibilities that combine those qualities, or have neither of them. It's also a way of trying to get people to be less obsessed with sex that is, itself, incredibly obsessed with sex.⁴ Really, the most telling line in the whole interview is her summary of her message:

It's about having substance as a person, seeking out friends who have depth and substance.

But why exactly does that have to be about sex?

---

1. By Wendy Shalit.
2. The Thrill of the Chaste.
3. Start following the Amazon links for those two books to find a few more. Their covers even look similar - part of a woman's face in some kind of old-fashioned painting.
4. The most extreme example of this I know is Westboro Baptist, who protest 'gay-friendly' organizations like the U.S. military with signs that depict sodomy using stick figures. That shit is weird.

whoa

"This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it."

what to eat, #4

Those who know me (and if you don't know me, why are you reading my tiny-ass blog?) know that about three quarters of my cooking is slapped together by remembering what someone once said was the right way to do something. The other quarter involves obsessively reading every recipe on the subject and calling my mom at least twice. This is the first kind of recipe.

Roasted Root Vegetables with Basted Eggs¹
What to buy
a buncha root vegetables. potatoes - yellow, purple, white, mixed fingerlings, who cares? but let me know how it goes if you try new potatoes or the big Idaho bakers; sweet potatoes; parsnips; beets; celeriac; salsify; carrots if you want, but I don't think they're much of an enhancement.

eggs. spring for happy local ones if you can, and goggle at the deep gold of the yolk.

a box of chicken broth. completely optional - you can also use veggie bouillon or water, but I really like the organic free range chicken broth at Trader Joe's, and think it makes the eggs better. you only use maybe a tablespoon for this recipe, so make sure you'll use it for something else.

What you should already have on hand
some olive oil
a little butter
salt
pepper
garlic
maybe some rosemary or chives or something, but don't stress

What you do
1. Roast the veggies. Turn the oven up to 450, then wash 'em, peel the skins if you don't want to eat them, and chop them up into half to one inch chunks. Put them in an ovensafe pan, toss in enough olive oil to coat them very lightly, and sprinkle the salt on (also lightly). Peel a few cloves of garlic and put them in the pan whole. They're gonna turn into practically spreadable, unbelievably delicious little nubbins of roast garlic. Stick the pan in the oven. Start checking on them after 20 minutes, and pull them out when they're all cooked through (soft, but not custardy).

2. When the veggies are done, make the basted eggs. (Side note: I have no idea if this is how you're supposed to make basted eggs, but it's working for me right now. This was my big revolution in egg frying - before, I was really bad at it, and always broke at least one of the yolks. This way? It works.) Melt a little butter in a small pan on low. Keep the heat really low! Otherwise the eggs will be too tough! Crack your two eggs in there when the butter's all foamy. Once the bottom of the clear white has turned actual white all the way around the egg (while most of the depth of the white is still totally clear) slide your spatula under the eggs so they don't stick. Salt and pepper the eggs, and put a little rosemary on them if you want. I love eggs with rosemary. Now add a slug of chicken broth (or water, or veggie broth, or whatever) to the pan, and cover it. What's a slug? Who knows.² Let it cook for a few minutes, or til almost all of the white is cooked. Flip the eggs over carefully, cook another few seconds, and slide them out onto a plate. Serve yourself some veggies, too. Yum.

3. Got buttered toast? You just made yourself an upscale diner breakfast for dinner.

I ate this 3 times this week - once fresh, twice with the left-over veggies reheated in a pan. I'm still not sick of it.

---

1. Hat tip to the Gardener, who made the first batch of roasted root vegetables this is based on.
2. I feel like people laugh about 19th century (and earlier) recipes that tell you to put in a handful of this or a pinch of that, but seriously? That's what my recipes, and my mom's recipes, and most of my friends' recipes tell you too.

how you know parents are on your side

"I think you owe her an apology."¹

---

1. Especially when closely followed by "Ain't no 'sorry.' What are you sorry for?"

what about misconception care?

While I could say any number of serious things about this article, all I can think is come on, preconception care?

hello, Gorgias

This Salon article - one of the ones you need to watch an ad to see, but worth it anyway - is all about rhetoric, sophists, and philosophers.

you have to ask why

There's this idea that seems to be ambling around the feminist blogs whenever people start talking about appearance culture. You might see it in the comments on I Blame the Patriarchy (it's probably in this comment thread somewhere), and I don't know where it comes from. To summarize: "Individuals decide who they want to please (and yes, there’s no reason it has to be men), and that.. is a healthy part of social existence. In other words, the problem isn’t pleasing people."¹

Ok. I'm going to try not to dump my irritation too heavily on this particular person's head just because he's got a convenient summary. But let's review. It's true, most of us like making other people happy at least some of the time. However, I think we can agree that pleasing people usually means fulfilling their desires. The one thing we can all agree on - Puritans, post-modernists, neo-Aristotelians, feminists, Marxists, maybe everyone except modernists and the occasional Third-Wave feminist - is that desire is not neutral. People want things for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it was on TV a lot when you were a kid.² Maybe you had a secret crush on your 3rd grade music teacher who always wore that kind of shoes. Maybe you're color-blind and like really really bright colors because you can see them. Maybe desires for sugar and sodium were evolutionarily advantageous to our primate ancestors. Desire comes from a lot of different places, and so when we think about pleasing other people - about our desire to fulfill other people's desires - we need to think critically about where that need to please comes from, and where the specific desires we want to fulfill come from.

It is my belief that most women's desire to 'look pretty' comes at least partly out of patriarchal bullshit on one side or the other. Kugelmass does say that there's a problem "that women are expected to do more to please men than vice versa," but I don't think he gives this problem enough attention. In fact, women are required to put vastly more effort into their appearance than men. There's the time spent picking out clothes so we look just sexy enough (but not too sexy! then we're asking for it!); even professional clothes are a lot more work for women. There's the grooming regimen: at the bare minimum, shaving legs and underarms a couple of times a week, skin care and moisturizing, styling hair, haircuts every 6-8 weeks or fairly maintenance-intensive long hair, and most women add on at least a few other things, like nails or eyebrows or make-up (in some places and jobs, these are required). There are the shoes, and anyone who's ever tried to find comfortable, professional women's shoes knows exactly what I'm talking about. Ah, you say, but women are free to reject these 'requirements' - they really are, at least mostly, about choosing to please other people. You yourself just ignore a lot of these so-called requirements.

That's true, I don't, but I'm under no illusion that I don't pay a price for it. There are a number of office environments - including some of the most prestigious and best paid - where I couldn't work looking like I do. There was a New York Times article in the last year or two in which women on Wall Street talked about how they resent the brutally uncomfortable shoes which they feel they must wear in order to keep their jobs, but which damage their feet permanently. Some of the benefits of meeting the requirements of conventional femininity are just things I'm personally prepared to do without: I'm queer - right now I'm dating a woman, but my queerness means that there are a number of straight guys who just aren't really dating options for me, and that includes most of the ones who care about all the beauty shtick; I don't want to work on Wall Street, or for a high-powered legal firm, or in most office environments; I'm willing to accept the incidental damage it will almost certainly to do to my career. This shit is coercively enforced, and while you can opt out of the work, you pay a price.

So that takes care of why women want to do their pleasing in this particular way; let's talk about why men (or heteronormative culture) enforce these particular standards. Hint: it's not handed down with our genetic code. There are a lot of specific standards, but let's look at three that have particularly elegant patriarchal implications.

1. Shave off your body hair. This makes women look young (pre-pubescent, ick) and powerless. Nuff said.

2. Wear high heels. This makes women actually physically powerless, because we can't run or move freely; it also damages women's feet. Compare to the tradition of foot-binding in China or corsetry in the Victorian era - it's just not that different.

3. Be skinny. There's much to be said here, but what always strikes me about the obsession with thinness is that women aren't supposed to take up physical or metaphorical space.

The people making the argument that it's cool to want to please people - Kugelmass included - seem to ignore the actual content of what it takes to please others, putting the beauty ideal in the same category as cooking your friend dinner once in a while or remembering your Mom's birthday. It's different, and it's different because the desires we're trying to fulfill are social, and systematically oppressive to women. Maybe the worst part is that I really believe that appearance culture is a collective action problem. Here's what I said on Bitch, Ph.D.'s blog:

As long as most people try and get as much as they can from it - by trying to be as conventionally attractive as they personally can - all the flack from it continues to fall on people who can't conform (fat folks, butch women, short men, people with less money). This, I think, is where Twisty's point about femininity being a survival strategy comes in: even if you identify as femme/femmey, even if you actually get some personal satisfaction out of wearing low-cut shirts/high heels/lace underwear, being femininely attractive still gets you cultural approval that other folks don't have access to and makes it harder for those folks to fit in (or survive) by reinforcing our messed up norms about attractiveness. So you have to weigh what you need to survive or feel ok in your own skin or your own life against the social effects, just as you do when you buy groceries and have to choose whether to spend another few dollars on having it be organic so you feel better about yourself or a little less money so you can make it to the end of the month without being broke. For each decision, it's about whether it's going to make your life better, and whether it's going to make the world a better place for you to live in.

You can't just say that pleasing people is fundamental to being social. You have to ask why you want to please those particular people, why you want to do it the way you do, and what effect it has around you.

---

1. From Joseph Kugelmass, who introduces his post by saying "I really don’t want to fight a bunch of different battles when it comes to gender. I want to fight just one battle, for equality of the sexes. Which is why I’m sorry to report that I find I Blame The Patriarchy alienating, and have to respond to the latest post there." Sorry dude, you don't get to decide that there's only one feminist battle. Also, hey, you find I Blame the Patriarchy alienating? No way! You and 97% of the human race! And Twisty, she does not care. It's part of why she's cool.
2. In a fascinating bit of correlation, women who watched a lot of Disney movies growing up have notably more conventional ideas about gender than women who did not. (This from the prestigious journal, 'some chick in my grad school class.')

yes

“I came to teaching to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and they need a miracle like every day.”

so far

I've been pushed, shoved, and lifted out of the way, ducked around, called dyke and bitch, had my hair and shoes insulted, been told to quit, that nobody likes me, and that "I will hurt you," had my stamp, stamp pad, coffee mug, clipboard, transparencies, marker, pencils, and wallet stolen, been full-on cussed out 7 times by 3 people, been sorta cussed out at least every other day and usually a couple times a day, had my fingers slammed in my classroom door, had paper balls and pens thrown at my head, and had the plexiglass window in the door to my classroom broken out of its frame. And this is just what I remember.

Joy

You know what's awesome? Being the only one in the house so you can play Lucinda Williams loud at 8:35 AM. You know what's even better? Eating apple crisp and drinking tea and looking at the sunny October morning while you do it.

medium picture

Go read this now.

As self-obsessed and miserable as I am right now, thinking about the future of the country in light of the basic realities of one part - just one part - of our general situation can make me even more miserable.

Then sign up to give time or money to elect Democrats this fall. Not that it'll change much, but even changing a little is so, so, so worth it.

vampyros lesbos

I have a gay transgender vampire in my 2nd period class.

And that is the least of what's happened to me today. Absolutely the least of my worries.

tips

1. For straight teacher/educators who want to support queer teachers/educators: don't tell your kids you're straight. I realize queer-friendly straight role models are important, but it'd be nice if not denying you were gay didn't automatically mean you were.

2. For people who post in women-seeking-women on craigslist: don't mention your last relationship, the eighteen criteria any woman you date absolutely must meet, how lonely you are, or how much craigslist sucks. In fact, don't provide any meta-context for your ad at all: just talk briefly, amusingly, about how cool you are and how you'd like to meet someone for x pleasant, non-threatening activity.

3. For publishers of math textbooks: putting the section on solving equations after you've already been working with equations for 5 sections is dumb.

4. For principals of public schools: I'm probably better than nothing, but not much. I'd take half my current salary for half my current workload, no problem.

5. For my students: if you want to learn some math, you eventually have to do some math problems. That's how it works. You also have to come to class and do your homework. 9th graders, this goes double for you, because even if you've already been in a room where someone talked about it, you didn't learn it then.

6. For myself: if you haven't been hungry for two weeks and have therefore been getting your sustenance mostly from yogurt, fruit, toast-with-peanut-butter, and ice cream, and then suddenly eat a full dinner followed by pizza for lunch the next day even though you're still not hungry, and you're really stressed out and feeling like crying before you have the pizza, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a migraine.

7. For the creators of Algeblocks and the fabulous college professor/7th grade math teacher who gave me a set: you are both incredibly awesome and should know it.

This message, like my lessons, was brought to you by the extraordinary Gardener, who has been lovely to me the last few weeks, and the amazing Mathematician, who has been feeding me dinner and math advice since it all started.

also, Political Schmientist: my classroom still looks much as it did when you left, except someone wrote "ASS" on Lundberg.

at the last minute, extra work!

we are not there yet. we will never be there. I hate everything.

sometimes, things actually are inspiring. especially when you're in survival mode.

My dear friends (yes, you are my friends not merely CMs),

This is the low point of Institute. Week 3 has the most dues dates, the highest stress levels, the fewest hours of sleep and the most frustrations of any week at Institute. You can do it!

Week 3 is NOT indicative of the life of a teacher. You are learning to teach. It is difficult. That is why most ed. preparation programs require years of student teaching. We do it in 5 weeks. There is a lot to learn in 5 weeks. You can do it!

The life of a teacher is not one of day-to-day survival. It gets easier. You will have time for your friends, significant others, favorite TV shows, and life outside of teaching. You NEED a life outside of teaching. The life of a teacher is not Institute life. You can do it!

I have already seen so much skill, knowledge, talent, and drive in each of you. If I didn't think you could do it, then I would have told you by now. It is unjust to make you work this hard if it is hopeless. You will all be good teachers, but it may not happen over night. Be patient. Take one step at a time. You can do it!

Look out for one another. This is our Institute family. We have made it too far to let any our family members struggle alone. Be there to empathize and to add a little sunshine to a teammate's day. Plan a cheese steak social or two. You can do it!

Lastly, I wouldn't get out of bed every morning if I didn't have 16 great colleagues. I wouldn't live this lifestyle for 5 weeks if I didn't believe that ALL of you will achieve success with your students over the next two years and beyond. I wouldn't encourage you to teach if it meant you had to be a martyr and live everyday like a day at Institute. You don't. I do it because y'all are the good teachers that my students need.

I'll be in my room with the door open after the movie.

-S.

summer

Summer smells like sweet corn and stone fruit, clean dirt and rain, sweat and cedar.

This summer also smells like permanent markers, sharp nerves and chalk, stress, raw onion, white cheddar popcorn. And tonight, a little like sweet corn.

I am going to make it through this summer if it kills me.

this is criminal

Michael Lewis, an eighth grader who was expelled from Baker Middle School for fighting, said he had not gotten into similar trouble back in New Orleans. "You can't really hardly communicate with other people" in Baton Rouge, he said. "I don't know why they have such a grudge on us. They just do."

If it were not for the hurricane, Michael said, he would be enrolled. "I love school," he said. "There's no place I would rather be, during school hours, than school."

Mr. Cowsar said Michael had asked to join his group, whose efforts to become an official charter school have faltered. The group lost financing for the two teachers it had in the fall, and it had only a couple of volunteers to handle about 15 children ages 4 to 14. There was no room for Michael.

Michael said he had wanted to go to summer school, for which parents must pay in some districts. At any rate, he said, his mother did not have time to sign him up. "I want to stay in a child place," he said, "but life keep putting me in a man's place."¹

There are kids like him everywhere. Most of them aren't as eloquent. Either way, it breaks my heart. When a kid like this can't get a decent education even when he tries, something is terribly wrong.

March 19, 2007: Now that I'm a teacher, all I have to say is: I don't feel the same way anymore.

---

1. from The New York Times

give up

I can't keep my mouth shut about politics, which is how the Political Schmientist and I ended up having a full-volume conversation about the risk of American fascism at 11 pm in a campground in a national park in Utah. I'm sorry to anyone I kept awake that night.

This article by the Apostropher says much of what I would like to say.

"There is no war on terror. There never has been." He points out that the forces supposedly arrayed against the United States are incapable of toppling the rickety governments of countries whose populations sympathize with them, and have as much chance of bringing down the United States as of breaking up Mars to mine it for its iron.

He also points out something important: this is a war about resources. We are, as far as I can tell, nearing a historical point at which water and oil, among others, will become extremely valuable. The government of the United States is trying to ensure that those resources, so vital to the way we live right now, continue to be available to us, and cheaply. That's why we're not being asked to sacrifice materially.

Bitch, Ph.D. describes our options as, "We can go down fighting, or, you know, we can sink the money and manpower into finding ways not to go down." Personally, I don't know if there are ways for us not to go down. We may already be totally screwed. What I do know is that if we wish to stop this resource war, if we want a chance to live in a world that is not scrambling and killing over oil and water, we - we Americans - need to stop using so goddamn much. We need to give up our SUVs, our elderly Volvo station wagons, our golf courses, our imported bananas, our cheap vacations: we need to give up the way we consume resources.

It may not be enough. There are 6 billion people on this planet, and we may not be able to give up enough. But unless we try, we are making demands on our world that will require a vast and violent scramble for resources. We have to try.

I don't need to tell you what the chances of this actually happening are. I'm not even trying myself.

living in hope

Part of the reason I'm grumpy today is that I have the overwhelming sense that the world is going to hell and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. The New Yorker article about Iran,¹ the NYT Magazine article about abortion in El Salvador,² the Duke lacrosse case all contribute to that feeling, but it started in a conversation with my dad.

My dad went to Harvard in the late 60s and early 70s, and so did his best childhood friend. He sums up his time there by saying that when he got there, you had to dress for dinner; when he left, there was co-ed skinny-dipping in the Adams House pool. It sounds flip, but it wasn't, really. It meant that Harvard had liberalized, that it was going to be a democratizing force, educating women and people of color and poor people and rich white men all together and helping make a new world.

It didn't, of course. My sister's going to graduate from there in two months, and she talks about it as a place full of social climbing, personal greed, and privileged ambitious people who feel they deserve their privilege.

My dad's kind of upset about this. I think it's because he had an image of Harvard that's idealized in a way I can imagine my image of Swarthmore becoming idealized. He remembers having amazing intellectual conversations. He also was part of at least one sit-in, which I found out about when I found the t-shirt with a red fist on it in his closet. The Harvard student body doesn't go in for that sort of thing anymore, as far as we can tell.

Anyway, all this got us talking about how, in that time, people believed in the power of sit-ins and activism and marches in a way that we don't. That I don't. I went to a lot of protests in college, but more because I couldn't think of anything useful to do than because I thought we would change anything by marching. All those strategies have been worked around and worked into the category of normal disruptions and don't constitute the kind of major challenge they used to be. It's what I think Foucault says in Discipline and Punish³ about challenges and repression getting sucked into the social order.

So I said to my dad that I couldn't think of anything to do that would actually address the problems I see in the world. Nothing that would actually do any good. I have no faith. He went into a speech about how, first, as humans we need some hope and we need to feel like we're doing something, or why not go be a ski patrolman?⁴ And second, the basic problem is campaign finance.

I don't know about the second. The first, though, is exactly the problem I'm having. My dad seemed to think that I was giving up hope and not doing anything; the problem is more that I feel that exact need and can't figure out how to direct it. When I was a high school activist - and a pretty effective one, considering - I felt like my choices, once I saw the injustice of the world, were to either accept that injustice (which meant defeat) or to fight it. Fighting was the only choice that had hope. These days, I'm having trouble mustering up enough hope to go on fighting.

On this day of all days⁵ I got an email from an old high school friend who just left his job as a union organizer, donated his car and all his savings to charity, and founded a religious activist center called the Burning Bush: Center for the Working Poor in L.A.⁶ I can't think of a more profound choice to live in hope than that.

---

1. By Seymour Hersh. Summary: Bush wants to go to war with Iran and change the government there. No one else thinks it's a good idea, politically or militarily.
2. It's illegal. Period. And the ban is enforced. Bitch, Ph.D. has the stunning quote: forensic vagina inspectors.
3. Which I haven't read, like most people who talk about Foucault. Also, did you know he used to be a big figure in the SF leather scene?
4. My dad was a ski patrolman, and he quit because he felt like he was just having fun and not doing something to make a difference. Oddly, that resembles my position now.
5. Before I get too cosmic about this, I should point out that it's the first day in a week that I've checked my email.
6. For those keeping track at home, this is the acquaintance who burnt all the teachers and the administration on all the activist clubs his senior year by advocating intensely for condom machines in the bathrooms, leaving us unable to find teacher sponsors for my last two years there. He also read Saul Alinsky in high school and was as dedicated (and mostly effective) an activist as I have ever met; so were his older brothers. The condom machine campaign was basically cover for a successful attempt to get a peer sex ed program in our high school. Finally, he's the one who thought I had no sense of humor because I didn't think his sexist jokes were funny. While my high school memories of him are slightly bitter, every time I've run into him since high school has been pretty awesome, and I've liked him a lot.

a better account of the emotions

The Hipster Monk once sent me a pretty awesome interview with Martha Nussbaum in which Nussbaum argues that one of the biggest problems with modern political theory is that it provides an inadequate (and basically non-existent) account of the emotions. This article on Alas, a Blog reminded me of it.

That's all I have to say right now. I'm kind of grumpy.

intentions

In the same year that I took that class on genocide - the same year in which the US went to war in Iraq - two eminent persons came to Swarthmore to argue publicly about whether we should support that war. They were Mark Danner, arguing against war, and Leon Wieseltier, arguing for it, and what I remember is being in the big main-stage hall, listening to them. Mark Danner is only about 6 years younger than Leon Wieseltier, and they are both younger than both of my parents, but somehow the impression I have in my head is of a grand old man arguing with a younger, well-spoken but less impressive Mark Danner. It's partly because Leon Wieseltier has this wild head of white hair, and partly because Mark Danner looks young and is short. Wieseltier is also one of the most articulate people I've ever heard - he's The New Republic's literary editor - and the combination of that and the general impression meant that even though I agreed with what Danner was saying, Wieseltier seemed far more persuasive that evening.

But he was wrong. He and Danner are both good people, people of conscience, people who, like me, wanted to see Saddam Hussein out of power but weren't sure they trusted Bush to do it. The difference was that Wieseltier looked at that problem and decided that, regardless of the means, regardless of the instrument, Saddam Hussein was a genocidal tyrant and removing him was the right thing to do; he argued that we were all bound to support the goal of getting rid of him, despite our fears about what would come after. Danner, like me, thought that war itself and what would come after might be so devastatingly bad for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world that we could not in conscience support Bush in going to war, not when we knew that his intentions and plans were so different from what would actually need to happen to create a tolerable postwar situation in Iraq.

If you ever wanted proof that intentions matter, this is it. What's happening in Iraq right now is a disaster, and it's because the people running this war had the wrong intentions. Their intentions shaped how they went about this war, and because of those intentions as much as anything - because of the way the war as been waged - Iraq is a chaotic, terrifying disaster, the US has negative international credibility, the US military is engaging in torture, and both the Middle East and the world as a whole are less stable.

genocide

The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with the killings of Iraqi civilians rising tremendously in daily sectarian violence while American casualties have steadily declined, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article - even before I read it - was this class I took my senior spring. I had been planning to take a class about moral decision-making and political theory, but it was a lot like the amazing seminar I'd taken the semester before, and in the first week of classes, I heard about a directed reading¹ on genocide. I went, and I felt this sense of responsibility, like even though it meant studying all of these incredibly horrific things, I couldn't possibly not take it. For the rest of the spring, I would periodically walk into the Hipster Monk's room and scream, because the things I was reading about were so horrific. The Political Schmientist is studying human rights violations in grad school right now, with some emphasis on sexual violence, and I think she's having a similar experience.

Folks, that's what's on its way to happening in Iraq. The NYT article I linked to doesn't have a lot of the explicit details of violence that are so difficult to read about, but the process it describes is familiar to me. Iraqis are starting to be scared - and apparently reasonably so - to be ethnic or religious minorities. They are leaving their homes to go to places where they will be members of the religious or ethnic majority, despite a long history of fairly peaceable coexistence and despite the major financial costs of doing so. Civilian casualties are increasing, not decreasing, and the focus of the violence is gradually shifting from Americans to Iraqis.² These are warning signs of civil war, and especially of a civil war with the potential for genocide. The situation reminds me a great deal of the former Yugoslavia's disintegration: get rid of a violent dictatorship that overwhelms ethnic tension, then watch as the record of prior coexistence gets drowned in appeals to nationalism/sectarian ideology. Watch people dehumanize "the other side," then threaten them, then kill them, then try to wipe them off the face of the earth. It's not just civil war we're risking in Iraq, it's genocide. I don't know who's at greatest risk for a genocidal campaign, but the Sunni-Shiite violence right now has that potential.

I want to draw attention to one point in this article that hadn't really occurred to me: US training and arms for Iraqi police and military are fueling this conflict.

The migrations are partly caused by the fear of partisan Iraqi security forces, many of them trained by the Americans. The police and commando forces are infested with militia recruits, mostly from Shiite political parties, and are accused by Sunni Arabs of carrying out sectarian executions. One Sunni-run TV network warned viewers last week not to allow Iraqi policemen or soldiers into their homes unless the forces are accompanied by American troops.

It's not really surprising: part of the reason for the Taliban's success is that we armed and trained the people who became the Taliban when we thought we could use them against the USSR in Afghanistan; a major cause of brutal violence and human rights violations in Latin America is the training the US provides to 'friendly' Latin American military forces at the School of the Americas. Every time we arm and train combat forces, it ends up biting us in the ass. The US government has been talking a lot about "Iraqification" - turning over responsibility for security to Iraqis - but that, in and of itself, seems to be increasing the risk of a civil war and thus of genocide. What's surprising is that it didn't even occur to me until today to connect the training and weaponry we provide in Iraq with the results we've had in providing same things elsewhere. There's no reason to think Iraq will be better, which is pretty incredibly depressing to think about.

The worst, for me, is that I can think of absolutely nothing productive to do in response.

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1. At my school, directed readings happened when a student wanted to study something and persuaded a professor to do it. We met slightly less than a normal class, and it was a one-off: it will probably never be offered again, especially since that professor's retiring. That meant it was a lot easier to get it to happen, because it didn't change the whole department's balance of course offerings.
2. The large majority (65%) of attacks are still against Americans and other foreign forces; in September, though, it was 82%.

belated outrage

As I occasionally do, I was narcissistically reading over my old blog posts in an attempt to avoid actually doing something today. I came across the one about the next Bob Dylan, and thought I might mention my total irritation over the UPenn radio station's 885 best albums list, as voted by their listeners. It's a little late, since they finished the countdown in October or November or something, but it still pisses me off. Why? Because of the top 10 albums, exactly zero were not white guys with guitars. You have to go down to #13 to find a white girl with a guitar¹ and #14 to find a black guy with a trumpet². Then it's all white guys with guitars til #23³ and then I get too depressed to keep counting. But of the top 30 "greatest albums of all time" exactly 3 are not white guys with guitars? Are you serious? And of the top ten, 4 are Beatles albums?

Dear XPN Listeners: you suck. I include myself in that, because I didn't vote, and if I had, I probably would have included at least one Bob Dylan album, thus doing my bit for the tyranny of white guys with guitars.

with grumpitude,
North

---

1. Joni Mitchell's Blue.
2. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.
3. Carole King's Tapestry. Which is not one of the 200 greatest albums of all time, let alone #23.

one simple request

please, please, when I ask for a little container of guacamole, don't put shredded cheese on it. please. it's really all I ask.

poke, poke

16-year-old boys get a bad rap, points out the Gardener,¹ but they're such fun to mess with. Witness this conversation with my cousin Dingo. Imagine me in the car, my dad driving, my brother (also 16) in the front seat, and Dingo's 12-year-old brother the Lost Boy sitting between Dingo and me in the back.

Lost Boy: "Hey, do the kids at [program where I work] have beards?"

Me: "Well, they don't get to shave, so some of them do by the time they leave."

Dingo: "Wait! Does that mean the girls get all hairy and nasty too?!"

Me: "Hairy and nasty like this?"

[pulls up pant leg to reveal unshaven leg]

Dingo: "Aaaaah!"

[hides in his coat]

Me: "I don't shave my armpits either."

Dingo: "But you're a girl! That's what girls do! ... Do you have a boyfriend?"

Me: "I did for a while. He didn't care."

Dingo: "He's crazy. Insane. He really didn't care?"

Me: "No. That was one of the reasons I liked him. But now I have a girlfriend."

Dingo: "NO WAY!"

---

1. A new addition to our cast of characters. Also, my girlfriend.

static

I had this experience in January in which I got told that I'm bad at taking feedback. Outdoor ed organizations are kind of obsessed with feedback, with having it happen all the time, and having the people I was about to be working for think I was bad at taking feedback did not enhance their desire to hire me.

The thing is, I was bad at taking the feedback I was getting, mostly because it was inaccurate. In two years of getting formal feedback (a page and a half, in writing) every week and informal feedback nearly every night that I was working, I'd heard a bunch of times that I was good at taking and getting feedback. Which I think is pretty much true, with one caveat that I'll talk about later. But if feedback's inaccurate and you say so, you're being defensive. It puts you in this terrible double-bind where your boss can think stuff about you that hurts your status, and if you challenge it you get more feedback that you're defensive, and if you challenge that it just gets worse.

So. This got me thinking. The place I'm working now has this culture about feedback in which people say "if you have any constructive feedback,¹ I'd like to hear it, but I don't really care about the positive stuff." I hate that attitude, and I don't think it's just because I like getting compliments. Positive feedback does three really important things for people and organizations.

1. Positive feedback helps people keep doing things right. People don't always know exactly what they're doing that's effective, and they need to know. These things change from person to person and situation to situation, and we all need that positive reinforcement. Sometimes those things aren't even conscious, and positive feedback does the great service of allowing us to choose to keep doing things we were unconsciously doing well.

2. Positive feedback is a clear demonstration of noticing and caring. Seriously, when someone you just met says, "I'm criticizing you like this because I care about you," do you believe it? I don't. I need evidence that this person is paying attention to me and caring about me before I'll believe it. Some people I trust to give me critical feedback, because they've already shown me a thousand times that they care about me; with people with whom I don't have that trust, positive feedback helps create it.

3. Positive feedback makes people feel happy and appreciated. Everyone likes praise. Most people will work in order to get it. Usually, people in good spirits do better work.

Don't be so damn macho, people.

---

1. Constructive is the euphemism for critical/negative. I personally dislike that euphemism, as I dislike many euphemisms. Shouldn't all feedback help you learn and grow as a person?

the only thing more painful than learning from experience

I've been on my way out of the city I used to live in for two and a half years. When I graduated from college, I thought I would need to choose between doing wilderness stuff and having friends.¹ For a while - maybe two years - it seemed like I'd squared that circle: I was working for an outdoor program, helping address the tremendous social needs of the city I lived in, and living in a community that meant something really important to me. By the end of it, I was in a kick-ass relationship. I was really happy most of the time.

After a while, I realized that I needed to work somewhere else to keep learning; I also realized that I wasn't getting enough or serious enough wilderness. So I left. Here I am, with plenty of access to wilderness, a program that's teaching me a lot, and no friends. And because I've been imagining this as something that will come to an end in a few months - as a temporary way for me to learn more, get some perspective, and be somewhere gorgeous before I returned to the city and a different job - I have no real sense that it's fair or even possible to start relationships with people here when I'm going to be gone so soon. So I've been spending my time alone. I've read two and a half books in 24 hours, gone for a two hour walk, made myself breakfast and lunch, read way more internet crap than is reasonable, done practically nothing productive, and despaired of finding something I want to do for the evening.

Nevertheless, I have this strong sense that being out here, doing outdoor stuff all the time, is something I need to do eventually. So do I do it now, when I'm here? Or do I return to my city and hope that there will be a time in the future when I can leave with a whole heart? How do I learn from what's going on right now?

---

1. Lest you think either of those is trivial or easily replaced by, say, new friends or a new leisure activity, they're not. My friends are my family in a way that's hard to explain unless you've read a couple of books and seen situations like it, and being in the wilderness is how I restore my soul. Teaching about the wilderness - being an outdoor educator - is a pretty awesome way to keep me there, and also lets me pass on one of the most important experiences of my life.

scenes from the road

2350 miles, 5 days, 3 sets of relatives, no exhaust system at all.

Average speed in Nebraska: 88. That includes breaks.

Coming west out of Denver on I-70, I floored it for a good 3 minutes. My speed went from 55 to 52.

The unexpectedly nice thing about Starbucks putting its stores next to local coffee shops is that Starbucks becomes a reliable guide to local food. I stopped in Pittsburgh, PA, and Avon, CO, to go to Starbucks so I could get something better than gas station coffee. Both places, there was a local bakery next door. Pittsburgh fed me mediocre coffee, tasty pumpkin bread, and a slice of phenomenal oat bread; Avon gave me free tea. ("Excuse me, I just got a cup of tea. I should pay for it, right?" "No, don't worry about it.") Highly recommended.

On I-70 west of Grand Junction, the sign for Mack, CO, says, "Next services 56 miles." 80 miles later, the sign for Green River says, "Next services 110 miles." The speed limit drops to 30 during dust storms.

Loa feels semi-mythical. I'm not totally sure it exists. Tomorrow I'm gone for 8 days: let's hope the world doesn't go to hell too badly during that time.

impatience

I am not patient with adults in general, which may be why my reaction to this article is "grow the fuck up." I like what Tim Burke says about it: that it's fine for a single person to have a hang-up or issue and need therapy to deal with it, but that to suggest there's a "social problem" of men who can't deal with seeing their wives give birth is silly. Grow the fuck up, people.¹

It's true that it's often harder to watch someone you love in danger or pain than to be in danger or pain yourself, especially when you feel helpless. But part of loving someone is wanting to offer whatever support you can: one way to do that is to be in the delivery room, if that's what the person you love wants and needs. Offering support isn't just something you do when it's convenient. Not if you love someone.

I think this is the general source of my impatience: if you are an adult and you sign up for something (say, get married and decide to have kids) you should be willing to accept what goes along with that. It's the same reason I'm impatient with men who want to sleep with women but are grossed out by menstruation. Dude, it happens. You want to be involved with women, you're going to have to deal with its existence.² The same reason I have trouble with teachers who say totally inappropriate things to their students, whatever. If you're an adult and you make a choice, you should be willing to accept the obligations that go with it. If you want to have kids, one of those obligations might be to help in the delivery, and not to make too much fuss about it.

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1. The disclaimer: I haven't had kids, been married to someone who was having a kid, been pregnant, or witnessed birth. I completely believe people who say it's scary and gross.
2. There may be similar things for women (straight women being grossed out by semen?), but overall I think women's bodies are treated as sources of contagion and disgust in more and deeper ways than men's, at least in the society we live in right now.

Commander in Chief

There's a billboard in the Philadelphia subway that says, "this fall, a woman will be President." It's an advertisement for a new ABC series called Commander in Chief - short version, Geena Davis plays a woman vice president who takes over when the president dies unexpectedly, before he can enact his plans to force her to resign so the [male] Speaker of the House could take over instead.

The clips don't look great. ABC wants you to know that there will be a strong focus on her family life, and the interactions I saw between her and her kids were total Hollywood shlock. It is Geena Davis, and she's pretty cool. She's also almost old enough to be president, which is nice. She's seriously femmey, but I guess that cuts both ways: still no images of non-femmey women, but more reminders that that kind of self-presentation has no relationship to the actual qualities of a good leader. The writing is almost certainly going to be blah and the acting unconvincing. No matter how good a president she is, she'll be judged on her mothering more. The political premise - that she's an Independent VP in a Republican administration - is absurd.

But who cares? There's going to be a reasonably prominent media image of a woman as president. We've never had a woman president, and we've never had any very good images of one, and I think it's made it very difficult for people to imagine that it could really happen. Even if the series is bad - even if it's poorly written, badly acted, and full of silly gender roles itself - at least it's addressing sexism head-on. At least it's showing the possibility that a woman could be president. It's a huge deal to create that image in people's minds, and I think that we lefties should acknowledge that, and not criticize it (too much) for not being utterly revolutionary. Interestingly, some of the crazy conservatives on the Free Republic message boards are, in between some sexist drivel, arguing that it's a liberal plot to normalize women in the presidency in time for Hillary Clinton to run in 2008.¹

I don't think it could possibly be that causal, but who cares? It's great to have this image out there.

---

1. Others argue that, because it's a Republican administration encouraging her to step down before the president dies, it's an attempt to discredit Republicans if they run Condoleezza Rice as the VP on the 2008 ticket. I think this betrays a basic misunderstanding of how media images work: that kind of complexity is totally ineffective in a mass media image. Subtleties work, yes, but they need to be organized around basic elements of identity and social interaction. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is not strong enough or basic enough to anyone's identity to actually work its way in through this kind of imagery. Gender, on the other hand? Yes.

public service announcement

I am not a Jedi, much as I would like to be. I am not English, Irish, German, French, or "from the islands." I do not have an accent. I am not gay. I am not straight. I do work too much, but I am not interested in hearing about it from 16-year-olds. I am not from New York City. I am not in my early thirties. I am not seventeen. I do not eat meat. I am neither an anarchist nor a communist, nor am I a hipster. I am not a ninja, the Terminator, or your mom. Especially not if you're 40.

scenes from some trips

wild raspberries and black birch
He's 16. He's smart, he writes reasonably well, and he might see more living things - birds, spiders, raccoons at night, toads in tiny crevices, green-gold flies - than anyone I've ever met. When he's listening, he looks at you with a fixed intensity that humbles you: better have something worth saying to someone like that. He knows when he's being a fool, which is not true of most people his age. Maybe not of most people.

He's not going to graduate from high school. He's been on probation since he was 14, and he got kicked out of school. I don't know the details, but here's what I know: he deserves another chance. Watching him discover the river, the stars, climb a mountain for the first time and not even realize it, seeing him eat wild raspberries and be amazed at the taste of sassafrass, black birch, Indian cucumber, seeing everything I've never noticed about the woods where I spend half my year: the awe and wonder of it would be enough, even if he weren't one of the coolest students I've ever had. He's not patient, but he cares a lot about other people, and if you can talk to him when he's just starting to get frustrated he'll listen with that deep focus and then you can see it in the next conversation he has. When he cried at our graduation it made me tear up. I can think of nothing better than to have him as a student on his first canoeing and backpacking trip except maybe to have him as a student in his first field biology class.

He's a Native American kid from inner city Baltimore and he lives in a violent, aggressive culture. He got in trouble young, and now he can't go back to school. At least he's getting his GED. At least his family seems good. At least the piss tests keep him off drugs. But I worry about his safety and I worry about his future and I can't let it go, because I so desperately want to make something more available to him, and all I can think of to offer is a letter of recommendation and some ways to get in touch with me. Pitifully little.

trust
Second day of a two-week trip, at breakfast. Kid puts his hand up like he's testifying and says, "I don't tell anyone this. Not even my best friends. But since we're going to be out here together for two weeks, y'all might as well know. I like James Taylor and Steely Dan."

disaster and premonitions
At our climbing site, a 17-year-old kid I don't know comes running up a trail screaming that he needs help. His friend just took a 40-foot fall off a cliff. The three staff members who aren't instructors are the first responders to that incident. They breathe for him and pack him into the helicopter cradle and get covered in blood and bile. He dies two days later at a hospital in Baltimore.

Earlier that day, one of our students said he felt death around him, that it felt like it did when his grandmother died. We thought he was just nervous about climbing, but he insisted it was something different. I have no idea what to make of it. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

loving it
Me: "You know it's not just the AT, right? There are two other big trails: the Continental Divide Trail in the Rockies and the Pacific Crest Trail out west."

Student: "I'm going to hike them all. I want to stay out here forever."

priorities
I know it's a sign of good judgment to watch the sunset at one of the best views in the state instead of setting up camp during daylight, but it still makes me damn tired.

blessings
At least eight bald eagle sightings in two days. Sometimes two at once. A hunting osprey. Two red-tailed hawks circling twenty feet overhead near the top of a ridge for maybe fifteen minutes. Turkey vultures flying within ten feet of rappeling students.

being hardcore
I got off my second two-week backpacking/canoeing course in a row and didn't shower, eat, or finish my paperwork. Instead I got in a whitewater kayak for the first time and got my ass kicked. I flipped nine times, at a conservative estimate, mostly in this one wave I was trying to surf. I might have gotten it for about five seconds towards the end, and I mostly figured out how to stay upright.

I'm just a little worried about my future.
I have a great offer from the place where I'm working now, and another option that I'd pretty much decided to take. Should I stay or move on? How should I make this decision?

reasons to ride your bike

1. Bike seats don't stick to your back when it's way too hot and way too humid.

2. Being outside is better than being in a big metal box.

3. You're not spewing greenhouse gases into the air or supporting authoritarian states and repressive corporations.

4. $100 for a decent used bike, $50 for a lock, $30 for a helmet. What kind of car will you get for $180? What kind of insurance?

5. You can ride fast if you want exercise, slow if you just want a little air.

6. All the other bicyclists will be happy you're there, making us all more visible.

7. When the oil-based economy collapses, you'll be a step ahead.

8. You become 35% more attractive. You get 45% for riding the bike, but you lose twenty points on the chance that you're a member of some stupid hipster/poser/anarcho-punk subculture. Then you get ten of those points back for wearing a helmet, which suggests that even if you're a stupid hipster/poser/anarcho-punk you have some kind of sense; but not all the points, because helmets are still doofy. Even better, you can be more attractive in whatever style you like. European single-speed doing the grocery shopping with a basket and some baguette; tough fearless bike messenger moving way too fast; cute interesting person going to a non-profit; teacher with a backpack full of books; hipster/poser/anarcho-punk; you're still 35% more attractive.

9. In San Francisco, you start at 60% more attractive, and go from there. Gets you all the way to 50%.

hobbies

There's an entry on One Good Thing about reading. Flea says, "If you don't read, how do you think?" and I basically agree with this. I'm an intellectual snob. But here's what struck me. In one of the comments, someone mentions a situation where "reading" is listed on a survey of potential hobbies, but "socializing" is not; apparently this annoyed some non-reading socialite. I'm sitting here thinking, reading is a hobby? Socializing is a hobby? What the hell kind of life does someone who doesn't read or talk to other people have?

Hobbies are optional. They're entertainment and puttering - sometimes very useful entertainment and puttering, like when my grandmother knit me a lovely hat or my dad built me a bed. They usually involve some degree of skill, like flyfishing, crocheting, building model airplanes, making fancy desserts. But they're not a basic function of life, the way I see reading or talking to people. I feel kind of the same way about music: being really into music, as a listener or a musician, might be a hobby, but music is just a basic thing about life that everyone needs. I know there are people - even people who don't have difficulty actually doing those things - who don't care about music or reading or talking to people and think those things are optional, like hobbies. But I find myself totally baffled by them.

scale

There was an article in the New Yorker, back in April, about the Matthew Thornton Health Plan up in New Hampshire, which worked phenomenally, for a few years. It was a clinic, with an internist, a general surgeon, a pediatrician, a family practitioner, and an obstetrician, and you bought into the clinic for some kind of monthly fee, totally bypassing insurance companies. All the doctors got a flat salary - $30,000, in 1971 - and referred things they couldn't deal with to specialists, and after a while they asked the specialists to accept a flat-fee contract. Those who did eventually started training the general practitioners to deal with simple problems, so instead of referring all patients with blood in their urine or runny eyes the GPs could treat some of them and send the ones with serious or just confusing problems to the specialists.

Basically it was a little tiny HMO, and it was wildly popular. They had reinsurance in case someone got catastrophically ill. It was substantially cheaper than most other plans, so employers loved it. The salaries meant that doctors could see their jobs as jobs, not full-life commitments, and they liked that. Patients got good care: fewer referrals, so they had to go fewer places to get the same care; and their doctors were committed to what they were doing and cared about their patients. And it exploded, becoming the second-largest insurer in New Hampshire before Blue Cross bought it and the whole thing was over.

As I see it, the Matthew Thornton Health Plan did one really good thing, and it had two really good consequences. They radically simplified the administration and overhead that went along with getting and providing health care, without giving up the benefits - lower costs to patients, risk pooling - of a health insurance company.¹ No reimbursements, no need to worry about whether a particular procedure was covered or which forms to fill out.

This certainly cut costs. The US medical system costs about twice as much to administer as the medical system in comparable countries (31% of US medical costs in 1999 were administrative, compared to 16.7% in Canada),² which is part of the reason US health care costs are so high (15.3% of GDP, compared to 9.7% in Canada).³ The Matthew Thornton Health Plan was cheaper because it didn't have to pay someone to be the CEO, or people with M.D.s to decide what care to pay for, or lots of people to process claims and fax paperwork to one another. That's partly a consequence of being a small organization, partly a consequence of its flat-fee structure, and, I suspect, partly a consequence of attracting doctors who didn't expect to make zillions of dollars.

The other benefit may not even be clear in the article. I may be making it up. But I'm guessing that one of the reasons the Matthew Thornton Health Plan was good was that it promoted good doctoring. Doctors weren't providing more expensive care to make more money, like they might in a fee for service set-up. They didn't have separate HMO oversight, so they didn't have to fight with the insurers to get reimbursement. They could focus on treating patients appropriately. The egalitarian set-up - every specialty made the same amount - and the extra training from subspecialists like urologists and opthalmologists promoted a working culture that valued patient care and the health of the organization more than the doctor's ego.

And it died. It was great, and everybody loved it, and it no longer exists.

You can read the article and draw your own conclusions about what went wrong, but let me get up on my soapbox for a minute and tell you: they got too big. I know all about the desire to serve more and more and more people with your essentially not-for-profit program. You've got a good thing, right, and more people should have access to it. But there are things that only work on a small scale. There are practical benefits to having a small program. With an office of ten people, say, you can have weekly meetings with everyone. You don't have to write twenty memos to find out what people think about something: you can just walk around and ask. If you make a change and everyone hates it, you can change things back. There's not enough confusion and complication to have much of a bureaucracy. But it goes beyond that: getting bigger changes how people feel about a program, and that can kill what made it work.

This program depended on a particular ethos: the GPs and the specialists had to believe in what they were doing, and they had to understand exactly what they were supposed to put in and accept that they got less money, more stability, more equality, less hassle. It's easier to maintain an ethos and a sense of mission in smaller groups. You can have a meaningful, experienced identity with people; the inner workings of the group or organization end up being pretty transparent, usually, so you understand how that identity affects the actual program. Each individual is also responsible for more of the program itself: even people in basically administrative jobs are closer to the management of the program and thus feel more responsible for its over-all quality. They feel invested.

At the heart of it, programs work better if the mission of an organization and the people working for it are really close together. Not just non-profits: the reason small businesses often have better food, objects, whatever is that people start their businesses with a certain pride in their work. The bigger it gets, the more capitalist, the more that basic organizational goal around which everything should grow gets distorted. How can the CEO of Nabisco, for example, have pride in its products? The CEO's job is layers and layers from the people who are actually doing something that could involve what the organization actually makes. What this tells us, of course, is something we already knew: Nabisco is about making money, not about the quality of what it produces. The quality is only a means to an end. In most small businesses I know, though, there's an underlying care for the quality of what they make. Not that they're indifferent to money, but it's not the only consideration. The quality of the food or how interesting the clothes are or their relationship to the community are also important: they come from a felt need or desire for something, and want to fill that need or desire well. That care can also spread throughout a small organization, where it can't in a big company. As organizations get bigger over time, even the people who had been really invested in their distinctive quality - like the doctor who started the Matthew Thornton Health Plan - become absorbed in the culture of bigness, bureaucracy, and capitalism. That doctor is now a CEO at a conventional health plan.

For a small program that depends on its smallness, the way you serve more people is not to expand your own program. It's to offer a model that others can replicate. It's hard to hold on to that idea when you start thinking about the money you could make or the people you could serve if you would just expand. But scale, in and of itself, affects program and business quality. There are ways around it, of course, but big organizations can never completely avoid the problems of bigness. I think that's what the Matthew Thornton Health Plan found out when it started expanding.

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1. The same article mentions a surgeon in the L.A. area who doesn't accept insurance: if you want him to do your surgery, you pay cash and either just deal or fight with your insurer yourself. It's a radically simple process, but it's only an option for patients with a lot of available cash.
2.Physicians for a National Health Program, 2003.
3. National Coalition on Health Care, 2004.

who gets to say what?

Someone has come by and left an anonymous comment about this aside I made in my last post. I'm intensely curious about who this person - let's call her Anonymous Jew and use girl pronouns, for the sake of argument - is and how she found my blog, but let's put that aside. If you want to know what she said, go read the comments; but she does bring up two interesting questions.

First, does the fact that I'm Jewish change what I can say about Jewish issues? Anonymous Jew says, "Your being Jewish is not a carte blanche [sic] to make inane generalizations about Jewish people." Which is true, to some extent. But the rest of what she says suggests that she thinks me being Jewish has no effect on what's ok for me to say, and I disagree. I think that when people are talking about what their own communities do, they get more slack than people who aren't in that community; they can speak more loosely, use different words, be frank about sensitive issues.

Partly this is because when I'm talking critically about Jewish stuff or feminism or queer stuff, you can be pretty sure I feel sympathetic toward the people I'm talking about, because I'm one of them. When I use words like queer or dyke or whatever, I'm not using them as slurs; there's a whole conversation about whether you can reclaim words like that at all, but the conversation you can have with me is about that, not about how I'm slamming queer people and am really homophobic.¹ The same thing operates with other kinds of identity, though its rarely as clear as with the language issue. It does mean, though, that I can make casual asides about Jewish stuff and get the benefit of the doubt. So. The presumption of sympathy.

There's another reason, though, which is that because I grew up Jewish, etc, and am part of that community, I have a pretty intimate knowledge of its virtues and vices. When I have something to say about my own community, there's a lot more nuance and experience that goes into it than when I'm saying something about other people's communities. Less perspective, maybe, but more background knowledge. You might call this the presumption of knowledge - you can argue about whether something's true, but my identity means I get some slack about backing things up. It's worth pointing out that people who aren't actually members of a particular community but hang around it a lot and feel strong identity with and concern for it also get presumed sympathy and presumed knowledge, but in more limited ways.

Second, was what I said true? Like other people, I've been known to say things that, in the cold and sober light of other people's scrutiny, I regret. This isn't one of them. The pope's past as a child in the Hitler Youth has received at least as much attention as his active complicity as a powerful adult in AIDS deaths throughout the developing world, just for example. Lots of Jews are incredibly socially engaged, and there's a lot of good in the world that's done by Jewish social action organizations; but I wasn't denying that. I was referring to the way Jews talk about the Holocaust, as if it's a trump card. In some ways it is. Its horror was unique. But you know, every historical tragedy is tragic in its own way.² I'm not being flippant. Rwanda was uniquely horrible; so was slavery. They were different, but they were also terrible, and to act like the Holocaust trumps them is to misunderstand the nature of horror and tragedy. The point I was making earlier is that this is a specific situation in which the Holocaust has particular moral relevance, and in which someone's behavior with respect to it is genuinely, seriously worth talking about. This is not
always the case.

The Holocaust is not the most important issue in every conversation, nor is it appropriate to bring up with respect to every issue. And I have to say, if you hang out in Jewish communities, you will see this happen. True story: when I was 14 and someone in my confirmation class smoked pot on a class trip, one of the parents brought up the Holocaust. I mean, can you be any more absurd? In many Jewish communities - less so in college-age activist ones, more so in older, more conservative ones like the one where I grew up - the Holocaust is this enormous deal and other tragedies are secondary, marginal, one step above irrelevant. What did I hear about in Hebrew school as a kid? Anonymous Jew, what did you hear about? Because in my Hebrew school, it wasn't how the Holocaust should make us extra-sensitive to other people's suffering. It was all about how this was the biggest deal ever and nothing else was as important. How we should never forget.

I'm tired, and I need to do something other than write, so let me leave you with this:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but she will also never sit down on a cold one anymore.

--Mark Twain

and with a link to this post about Ratzinger on Body and Soul (a beautifully-written blog, by the way) which says things like what I said, but better written and with actual citations. Also this follow-up about sin. Hipster Monk and Political Schmientist, I think you'll both like these.

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1. OK, funny story. I got my hair cut last time I was home, and said something to my sister about how dykey it looked. My very straight, very earnest sister looked at me and said, with no discernible sense of irony then or after, "But isn't that just a stereotype?" People, I had this spiky pixie haircut that was almost exactly the same as my little brother's, except for having pointy things by my ears. It's practically the regulation dykey haircut. And it's not like I haven't been doing queer activism FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS. My sister clearly knows about two queer people, total.
2. Thank you, Tolstoy.

about roles

I am nearly beyond words in my fury about Joseph Ratzinger being the new pope. I don't even know where to start explaining why I'm so angry: with Opus Dei?¹ with his doctrinal conservatism, which makes him describe homosexuality as an "objective disorder?" with his membership in the Hitler Youth?

And here is where people will say, as they have already, that he was required to join, that he was not enthusiastic about it, that he was never a member of a combat unit in the Nazi military. All these things are true. He probably wasn't a serious Nazi, he was probably just trying to get by, he was 14. I know. I know. It was a long time ago. I'm as sick as anyone of Jews talking about the Holocaust like it was the only bad thing that ever happened in the world.²

But he's the pope. And if you're going to be the pope, you have to expect to be better. Maybe it would be ok that he was in the Hitler Youth, if he had spent a lot of time repenting and praying and wishing he'd been a member of the resistance. This is a man whom God calls to the priesthood, and he never returns to that part of his past in pain and anguish, wishing he had done less to serve the machinery of genocide and more to save at least one of the Dachau slaves he worked beside? He dismisses it as just something he was required to do?

All the pretense that there was no way around it diminishes the great sacrifices made by other Germans in the name of resistance and human decency. It also diminishes the papacy. There are certain offices - the papacy, the presidency, a few others - that are so important that I don't really acknowledge the right of people to hold them and be imperfect. I think that if you're going to be pope, or president, you should be willing to give up just about anything - your life, your free time, your wandering eye, the innocent fiction that there was nothing more you could have done - to hold them. You are responsible for so many people and so much of history that whatever your own personal problems are, you should just deal. Skip that vacation, stay up late, don't have a dog, take whatever rest you need to make it possible to do your job, but no more. If you don't want to make those sacrifices, someone else will. We only need one.

The President of the United States, as the Venezuelan with whom I used to wash restaurant dishes pointed out,³ is responsible for the whole world. I have zero sympathy with Bush as a president, but it's not just the appalling policy his administration makes: it's the fact that he doesn't seem to care. That faced with the enormous responsibility of being one of the most powerful people on the planet, he goes to his ranch, he goes to bed early, he slacks off. I disagreed with a lot of Clinton's policy decisions, but at least I knew he took it seriously. He was up nights worrying and studying and being responsible. ⁴

I'm not Catholic, but the pope can affect my life, directly and indirectly, and he is the spiritual leader of a billion people. I know that people are people, and fallible. I know that people get to do stupid things and not be sorry for them and still be good people. I'd be ok if someone with Ratzinger's record were a member of the German parliament, and I'm sort of ok with people who used to be hardcore racists being senators (hello, Robert Byrd). I'm ok with members of Congress taking vacations like ordinary people and not being available because they have to raise their kids. There's a feminist argument - most recently applied to high-powered science professors - that not acknowledging workers as people with obligations hits women hardest, because we are more likely to have no one to give our obligations to. Yes. People need time and money and accommodations, and are imperfect. People don't always take things as seriously as they should. It's ok.

But not for the pope. And not for the president.

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1. It's a cultish, fundamentalist "personal prelature" with an incredibly undemocratic governance structure. There's an official site, a "source of information," and the Opus Dei Awareness Network.
2. I'm Jewish, people, back off. I get to say it.
3. He was super-cool.
4. I actually find this really painful, because I would love to be able to affect policy that way. Seeing Bush have the opportunity and not caring is like watching someone destroy da Vinci sketches or something.

city magic

I went to the grocery store last week, exhausted and starving, and found it both incredibly frustrating and kind of nice. Grocery stores freak me out. Too many products, too many choices of ridiculous things (the world does NOT need six hundred kinds of toothbrushes), and where are the damn batteries? Not in the aisle marked "Batteries and Batteries," that's for sure.

The good thing about it was the random human interactions. I needed ziploc bags, which were roughly impossible to find, but this really nice guy who was doing his own shopping, but still wearing his Safeway tag, tracked down a woman who was in no sort of uniform but knew where the ziploc bags were.

At the check-out line, a 4-year-old boy was running around saying, basically continuously, ooh-ooh-ooooh-oooh-oooh. He grabbed a pack of Starbursts, ran up to his mom, and held them up to her: ooooooooooooh. She looked at him and said, "NO." He put them back and ran off. Ooooh-ooooh-ooh-oooooooh-oooooooh.

The cashier took my discount card and was confused about whether it was a Safeway card or not (it's from a local subsidiary, but not local to where I am), and I said something about people in California thinking I was crazy when I handed it to them. She got really really excited and started telling me how she was going to fashion college in LA in the fall.

This is the stuff that makes it worth it for me to live in a city. All these little interactions with people you don't know. So here are a couple more.

The other day I was at a little produce market in the suburbs and there was a girl - probably about six - behind the counter with her sister or aunt or mom or cousin or something. Making faces at babies is like, the best thing ever and they hide and then laugh, so I forgot that she wasn't a baby and made faces at her. But she was old enough that she made a fish face back at me, and I blew out my cheeks like a pufferfish and she laughed.

Today there was a tiny, toy-looking white dog - probably a bichon frise - at a city park. It barked at another dog and then walked past me and the Hipster Monk sitting on a bench eating ice cream, and I barked at it. It got sort of confused and excited and came over to sniff me and be petted, and stayed interested for a while, til its owner - this woman who looked sad generally and confused because I had barked at her dog, but eventually smiled about it - decided it was time to leave. Off they went. The old couple on the bench - old enough to have started looking frail, and to dress in a way that was noticeably old-fashioned - across from us laughed and started talking to each other and then to me. "Did you see that?" said the old man. "That was funny." "Yes it was." To me: "Do you have a dog?"

I told them I didn't have a dog, but that I grew up with them and love them. They nodded and talked a little more, and then walked off arm in arm, slowly.

perennial champion Bob Dylan

If, like me, you're surrounded by hipsters in hooded sweatshirts, their even more hipster siblings, and college public radio,¹ you might have heard someone say Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes is the new Bob Dylan. Of course! He's a folksinger-songwriter boy with a scratchy voice, floppy hair, and a brooding expression. He's even a good poet. But it's a really basic misunderstanding of why Bob Dylan matters.

Bob Dylan was a fucking prophet. He was a poet, yes, and a musician, and his music amplifies his words in a way few people can duplicate. That's why, despite how unbeautiful his voice is, his versions of his songs will always tell you something new about them. But he was important because he was a prophet. Prophets don't know the future, but they see the present more clearly than most, and they give us their fury, their vision, they tell us our own stories and make us cry. They see our sins and tell us about them, and woe betide those who refuse to listen. Every time I hear The Times They Are A-Changin' (song or album) I think about what it must have been like to hear it for the first time in 1964 and know that it was about you. Especially to be young, and to hear the voice of this new world you were going to inherit singing about the massive disruption that was creating it. To hear the voice of the prophet.

There are still musicians who do that, but they aren't Conor Oberst. They're not Bob Dylan either, for that matter. I'd nominate, with the approval of my friend the Red-Headed Stranger, Ani diFranco. Like Dylan, she's important. People care about what she says, even if a lot of them do it in this sort of annoying teen-age feminist way.² People imitate her music, but more important, they listen to her. They hear something about themselves and the world in her music. The fury and vision of prophecy.

I was talking about this at one of my temp assignments this winter, and one of the other temps suggested Ice T, saying that his moral stature and his position as a role model make him the Bob Dylan of our generation. I have no idea. I am white as they come, and don't know enough about Ice T (musically or otherwise) to say anything about it. I listen to the occasional bit of hip hop radio, though, mostly because my students like it, and it's the only mainstream radio I've heard that might, maybe, possibly, have some prophetic leanings once in a while. Most of it is crap, a lot of it is just sexually explicit for its own sake, but Kanye West has given me goosebumps once in a while. I had one of my Outward Bound groups perform All Falls Down (their choice of song) once, and it was the first time I'd ever really heard the lyrics. One of the kids said, "Kanye West speaks the truth." That's the feeling Bob Dylan and Ani diFranco give you at their best. It's not on the radio very often, so not that many people hear it. But you're not a prophet unless you can get some attention, unless you become culturally resonant.

Anyway, I think these are all better proposals than the people David Dye named when he was doing a "new Bob Dylan" top five at 5 on XPN.³ They were all just young guitar guys with scratchy voices.⁴ No prophecy at all.

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1. Affectionately. I say this affectionately. And while wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
2. Let me point out that I get to call them annoying because I was a teen-age feminist Ani fan. Boys, don't try this at home.
3. The top five at 5 is a daily themed list. Like, songs about New Jersey. Or songs about rain. Or songs by people who might be the new Bob Dylan.
4. Conor Oberst, David Grey, Ryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen, and someone else. Bruce Springsteen is the only one I might consider.

training

Staff training for my outdoor ed job started this week, and we talked a lot about tools and judgment. It reminded me of the many first aid trainings I've done, and how totally split they are between wilderness focus and front-country focus. The front-country courses - CPR, lifeguarding, the EMT classes I've heard about but not taken - are all about getting people to the damn hospital NOW. Preferably five minutes ago. You isolate body substances, you maintain potentially damaged spines in alignment, you perform CPR, but before you do any of those things you tell someone to call 911. The real treatment comes from the hospital.

There's a mentality that goes along with this that you should only do exactly what you've been trained to do, with the materials you've been trained on. My lifeguard instructor actually said, "You're only as good as your equipment," and told us about all the stuff he carried. Rescue masks, cravats, an arm splint, maybe even a blood pressure cuff. It's the lifeguarding tube that makes you a lifeguard, not your skills.

Since my primary training is as a Wilderness First Responder, I'm used to a really different attitude. It came out most clearly in my most recent recertification class, where we spent basically the whole time talking about bad situations where you don't have equipment or support and have to make the best of it. In a wilderness situation, you have to know how to splint people's arms comfortably enough for a 20-mile hike out, you have to make sure your patients don't get stressed because they're hungry or need to pee, you have to make judgment calls about what's really serious and what can wait. And your back-up is far away. You are the real treatment. You are also only as good as your head, your heart, and your ability. I think the idea that you're only as good as your equipment is utter bullshit: you can improvise cravats and splints out of t-shirts and sticks and do just fine. You can tell how people are actually doing without taking their blood pressure.

It's a totally different attitude, and I like it a lot better. Philadelphia Boss said he quit teaching Red Cross classes because it was basically a matter of teaching a bunch of morons not to fuck up. If that's what you teach people, it's not surprising that they follow protocol and nothing else.

Now I'm going to get out of bed and celebrate the fact that I don't have to work 14 hours today.