Loose Leaf Writing

What I Do (In My Spare Time):

2012-02-15T07:24:00.000-05:00

Why We Should Be Talking About Bernie Sanders Instead of How Much We Hate Rick Perry

2011-12-09T10:49:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, the power of an argument lies not in the argument itself, but the underlying assumptions that it makes.

Take the case of the now-viral and already historically infamous Rick Perry "Strong" video.

Here's the full text:

"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

I'm Rick Perry, and I approve this message."

Ah, the Christmas stocking. That universal symbol of
persecution.

Let's, for just a moment, leave aside our horror at the hate imbued in this message and talk about Perry's argumentative strategies (we'll get back to the hate soon, I promise).

This ad is so clear in its message that, at first, it seems to be a shift away from the kind of meaningless mumble-mouth that afflicts many of our politicians. Compare it, for instance, to this gem from Hillary Clinton, who believes that if we "set big goals and we work together to achieve them, we can restore the American dream."

No wonder I constantly have to tell my students to "be more specific." They've learned that the best way to make an air-tight argument is to fail to make any argument at all.

At least Rick Perry, in all of his awful glory, is making an argument so clear that we can easily like it or hate it. He's coming right out and accusing Obama, and all liberals, of instigating a war on religion; one that includes allowing "gays" to openly serve in the military and that prohibits "our children" from expressing their religious freedom. Love his message or hate it, at least it's a clear, straightforward message.

We can, for instance, point out that children are allowed to "openly" celebrate Christmas and pray in school. We can support the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." If we are Christian, we can say, "I am a Christian, and my beliefs are not the same as Rick Perry's." We can argue that, in fact, Obama has been eloquent about his faith, that he is a good Christian. We can claim that there is no war on religion, that liberals can be religious, etc, etc, etc.

Easy. Right?

Except that what Rick Perry is doing here is setting up (or, more accurately, playing into) a set of assumptions that are so numerous and, in some cases, subtle, that we will almost certainly reinforce some of them even as we vehemently oppose his overall argument.

Here's a list of the assumptions I see:

1. Some Christians are ashamed to admit to their faith.
2. Keeping your beliefs private is akin to being "ashamed" of them.
3. The reason some Christians are ashamed is that Christianity is persecuted in this country.
4. People who don't talk about being Christian probably ARE Christian.
5. It's OK if you don't go to church. If you agree with Rick Perry, you are a good Christian.
6. Being Christian means believing that "gays" shouldn't serve openly in the military and that children should pray in school.
7. People who are gay have no identity outside of their "gayness." Whereas other people in the military are "soldiers," soldiers who are gay are just "gays in the military."
8. It's OK for "gays" to serve in the military, just not to do it openly.
9. Religion = Christianity.
10. Ending the "war on religion" means bringing Christianity back. Hence:
11. There was a time when Christianity was the driving force behind America's policies.
12. When Christianity was the driving force behind our policies, we were a strong nation.
13. We are not currently a strong nation.
14. We will be a strong nation again when we end the war on religion, which means the war on Christianity.
15. "We" are Christian. "They" are something else.

Some of these are more obviously part of Perry's argument than others. Some, you might say, are a stretch. I've been accused more than once of reading too much into things, so it's OK if you don't believe me. But think about this. Assuming you don't support Perry's message, how are you going to argue against it?

You might say that Obama is, in fact, a good Christian. If you do, though, you're supporting the assumption that our President ought to be a Christian, and ought to talk about his faith. That his faith is and should be an integral part of his presidency. Even if you don't believe this, talking about Obama's faith implies that you do.

You might say that "our children" have every opportunity to "openly" celebrate Christmas or pray in school, and point out the many Christmas pageants and carols that are sung by "our" kids across the nation. But if you do, you're inadvertently supporting the assumption that being openly religious in school means being openly Christian in school. That the ability and right to "openly" celebrate Passover or Ramadan in school is either already granted to students, or that it never needs to be granted to students. In fact, you are buying into the assumption that "our" children are all Christian. It's only the children of "others" who are not.

You might say that there is no "war on religion," and point to the openly Christian things Obama has said or done. If you do, you're buying into Perry's equation of Christianity with religion, and potentially also into his assumption that this is, in fact, a faith-based nation.

You could argue that there is nothing about the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that has anything to do with celebrating Christmas in school. But can you simultaneously refute his reduction of soldiers who are gay to "gays," and his assumption that it is perfectly fine for "them" to fight and die for us, as long as they aren't "open" about it, and his assumption that the closeting of Christian children is analogous to the closeting homosexuality? Can you do all of those things and, in the same argument, refute the rest of his assumptions?

Not easily. Unfortunately, the assumptions he is making are made all the time, in many ways, because Christianity is, in fact, the faith that the majority of Americans identify with, even if they don't go to church*. We may be a nation that prides itself (well, some of us are proud of it) in a separation of church and state, but the very phrase "church and state" reveals our predominantly Christian roots. For many years, homosexuality was not only considered immoral, but was accepted as an "abomination" of god's (Christian) law. Many of us do believe that America is not, currently, at her strongest. It's an easy and somewhat natural leap to feel that, because we were once stronger (who doesn't romanticize the past?) and more unilaterally "Christian," that there is some connection there. That, in fact, the ways we are now "weak" has more to do with our morality than with our economy, our unemployment rates, our lack of affordable health care, or any of the other huge, increasingly non-partisan problems that we face.

[I don't meant that it's unfortunate that the majority of people in this country are Christian. I mean that it's unfortunate that some of the assumptions he's making are easy to miss, because the majority of us aren't the target of the hate. It's simply harder to see it because we're so used to hearing it.]

In fact, the greatest strength of this ad, which will never succeed in making him President and almost doesn't seem designed to, may be in its ability to convince us, without ever seeming even to make the argument, that our problems are primarily ethical in nature, and can be fixed with a "return" to morality.

In some ways, granting any airtime to this issue is a win for Perry--or, really, for the status quo (ask yourself who paid for the thing)-- because it takes airtime away from the far greater problem of the massive financial inequalities we currently face.

And by "we," I mean 99+% of us. Not just the Christian ones.

Which is why I close this post with a link to Bernie Sander's new proposal of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would make it illegal to grant the rights of personhood to corporations. THIS is the issue we should be arguing. THIS is what we need to talk about.

Not some hate-filled moron in a barn jacket acting like he has a direct line to god.

The Saving American Democracy Amendment (click link for full text) states that:

Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.
Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.
Corporations may not make campaign contributions.
Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.

Sign the petition supporting it here.

Thank You, #OWS

2011-11-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

I believe that we are standing on the edge of change. I believe the outcome of the change is still undetermined, and the length of the arc is still unknown. This means we live in a time of both opportunity and instability. Things can go either way. Both outcomes are scary.

Given the current ecologic and economic realities of the world, there is no way that change is not upon us. The earth simply cannot sustain 7 billion people in the manner most Americans are accustomed to. Our carbon footprint is too big, our waste too excessive.

And so we have a choice. We can continue to believe that every human life is valuable, that everyone is born with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That these rights are self-evident. That they are god-given, and that no man can tear them asunder. Making this choice means choosing community, for better or for worse. In sickness and in health. It means not turning our backs on people just because we decide they are unworthy, either because they are poor, or sick, or lazy. It means asking hard questions about personal freedom, the role of government, and the rights of the individual.

Or, we can hoard our wealth, our food, and our oil, and protect it with guns.

By every measure I can think of, the Occupy movement has made the first choice. The protesters are remarkably dedicated to peaceful gatherings, despite the strong human inclination to give way to violence in the face of violence. Community is both the goal and the approach of the movement, and those in the center of the organization(s) are working without benefit of gaining high-profile individual attention. They are asking hard questions--questions that, because they don't seem to have an answer, often go unasked and un-discussed:

Are we anti-capitalism? If so, does that make us pro-Communism? And is Communism a synonym for fascism? Can we be pro-community and still be pro-individual? Can we sustain a movement or a society that makes food, books, and health care available to all? Can we even maintain a "we" without a clear leader? Can we resist corruption, hypocrisy, and the siren call of fame and glory?

At the center is one all-encompassing question: Can we live in peace?

Before you roll your eyes at the dopey idealism of that question, ask yourself: Do you really want to live without it?

The now-famous picture of Scott Olsen, the ex-marine who
suffered a "fractured skull and brain swelling" due to actions
taken by the police to break up a peaceful protest.

So thank you, Occupy Wall Street. Thank you, students of UC Davis. Thank you, everyone and anyone who has been arrested, maced, or pepper-sprayed and has not responded with violence. Thank you for reminding me that critical thinking does happen, that it is valuable, and that we have not yet resigned ourselves to apathy.

Thank you.

Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease

2011-11-22T06:47:00.000-05:00

Please, Mama. Please, it hurts.

My sweet and lovely baby girl has a disease. Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, to be specific.

Talk about the importance of a name. Yikes. Does that not sound like the worst thing ever? In truth, it IS pretty bad, at least in terms of discomfort and ick factor (I won't post a picture, and google it at your own risk, but suffice it to say that, in her case at least, it looks like a cross between poison ivy of the mouth and disintegration of the tongue.)

The poor kid can't eat anything without crying. Worse, for the first day and a half of the illness, she complained that her hand and her mouth hurt, and I, her mother, umm... how do I put this?

I ignored her.

In fact, I pooh-poohed her.

But now that her disease has a name (and now that I can see physical evidence of it), we've moved from maternal neglect to maternal love-smothering. To whit, she had ice cream for breakfast.

Because when you have a disease that has an entry on the CDC website, you get ice cream for breakfast.

I forgive myself because I come from a long line of unsympathetic moms. When I was in college and contracted mono (I'm still angry about that. I would have accepted it if I'd been in the habit of kissing people, but to be dateless, alone, and THEN get mono? Totes unfair, y'all), my first symptoms were horrible insomnia, day-time exhaustion, and, worst of all, the tendency to break out in such extreme sweat that I left puddles of it all over campus.

Lovely, yes?

The first night all this happened, I called my mom. I was a bit freaked and was, I admit, also looking for permission/an excuse to cut work and class. I listed my symptoms, making sure to dramatize them in the extreme.

Her reaction?

"Well, you don't sound sick. You'd better fake it better than that when you call in to work, or they'll get pissed."

The untrained eye might see grief in the mother and dignified
suffering on the part of the child. But no. The mother is dying
of guilt and the child is pouring salt in the wound.
I'm pretty sure.

So I went to work, and my poor writing student (I was a tutor) was very polite as I reduced her paper to a soggy mess and zoned in and out of consciousness.

You can bet my mom has heard that story more than once.

And so the cycle continues. My poor, diseased daughter can begin marking on her bedpost the number of times she's succeeded in making her mom feel like the most evil being on the planet.

Meanwhile, I'll rejoice that I'm giving her good material for her memoir. After all, every artist needs to suffer, fight, and, finally, overcome.

I'll know I've succeeded in raising a future artist
if she dyes her hair red when she's a freshman in high school.

Show & Tell: My Complex Relationship with Verbs

2011-11-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sweet, but all tell and no show.

Sometimes the most simple concepts are the hardest to understand. As a writer, lately I find myself pondering the importance of verbs.

To long, to ache, to yearn--these are all better than to want, or, god forbid, to want really bad. But why? And what does it have to do with showing instead of telling?

In the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, my favorite scene (after the multi-shade lipstick taxi conversation, of course) involves the verb "to marinate," as in, "to think about on low heat; to allow a thought time to simmer and, thus, mature."

That one character falls in love with another based on this judicious use of the verb only serves to make it more delicious.

Verbs are the action, and the action, more than the thought, the motivation, or the intention, of a character is the scene. Without action, you have reflection, meditation, even marination, but you don't have a scene.

All of this is quite obvious, or seems so as I reflect upon it, and yet my scenes-- my action, my verbs--are weak. I tell my students "remove all your 'ly' words," yet my own writing is peppered with them--these spices that attempt to cover up the flavorlessness of my bland, overcooked scenes.

As I tell my students, "ly" words are the flashing red light that says, "WARNING: this author does not know what he or she is saying." At the very least, they indicate a lack of confidence in the message.

For Cookie Monster, love is an action.

"I love you" may be a common phrase, but "I really love you" does not make it more interesting or more true. In fact, it makes it ridiculous, as qualifying "unique" is ridiculous. Very unique, really unique, extremely unique--as they say, you can't be a little bit pregnant. A thing is either unique or it is not.

I consume you. I desire you. I need you. None of these are synonymous with "love," and that is the point. In order to find a better, sharper verb, I must be more specific. After all, what is love? Love is a state of being, a feeling. Is it an action? Perhaps, but what kind of action?

I breathe you. I play you. I crawl into you. I take you apart, study you, and rebuild you.

Even this is telling rather than showing. Still, we now, at least, have metaphor and imagery. I know what it means to crawl. I see it. I feel it. I understand that this love is somewhat proprietary, possibly predatory. Needy and lustful and even a tiny bit violent. Invasive, though perhaps not unwelcome.

In order to write a scene in which my character crawls into her love, I must first know that this is her form of love. Her action of love as opposed to her state of being in love. Then I must hold that verb in my mind, in my hand, as I write. And I must remember not to let go of it. If I let it out on the paper--"she crawls into him"--then my scene, no matter how specific, falls into reflection. I am telling, not showing.

We, as writers, can't show love, because love is not an action. We can only tell love: she loves him. We must build our scenes not around a state of being, which suggests reflection, but around a verb of doing. Crawling, sinking, drowning, breathing, playing.

There is time for reflection. A novel without reflection is unsatisfying in the same way that protein without a carbohydrate is unsatisfying. But a novel made up only of carbs is junk food. Cheap calories. The scenes are the meat, and be they well-done or rare, tender or tough, if they are not high-quality to begin with, the best we can do is add spice to cardboard.

Books for Struggling Readers or: How I Finally Make Good Use of My YA Love.

2011-11-18T06:40:00.001-05:00

An updated and urbanized adaptation of
Alice in Wonderland--without the drugs.
I can't recommend it highly enough, for
ALL readers.

Fortunately for my sanity, I discovered The Hunger Games after all three books were already published. Even so, when I finished the first one, I wasn't sure I'd survive the agonizing wait for the US Postal Service to deliver unto me the sequel, Catching Fire. My husband, who is both very nice and very unfamiliar with the nature of popular YA, thought he'd surprise me by going to the library and getting it for me.

Naturally, he did not find it (there are still 30 people on the waiting list). He did, however, find another book by Suzanne Collins: Gregor the Overlander.

Sure that it would do nothing to slake my thirst, but desperate, I tentatively opened it up and peeked at the first page.

A day and a half later, having finished the book, I ran (literally) to the library and feverishly hunted the stacks for the sequel, praying (PRAYING!) it would be there.

I knew I wouldn't find it in the adult section (Is the library the only place in the world where the "adult section" means "the stuff with no pictures and little bitty type?") because it was written by Suzanne Collins. Seeing as I'm so familiar with the YA section, I didn't bother searching the book's location in the card catalog. I just ran, headlong, into the C's and scanned the shelves, my heart rate raised and my adrenaline pumping: Let it be here.

Nothing.

Disappointed almost to the point of physical pain, I trudged to the computer to put in a request, assuming it would be 3 months before my turn came.

But no! According to the library's very own site, they not only had FIVE copies of the book, every single one of them was checked IN.

So where the frak were they?

Um.

In the Children's Literature section.

Really.

In that moment, I felt every one of these emoji-motions.

In my zeal to read anything Suzanne Collins, I hadn't bothered to scan the back of the first book before I read Gregor. When I did, though, sure enough I saw the telltale "RL5" next to the ISBN number. In other words, the book is for fifth graders.

Of course, aside from a momentary giggle, I didn't care whether the book was "meant" for people with doctorates or babies in diapers. I just wanted to know what happened next.

But it got me thinking.

If I, as a life-long reader, can fall head-over-heels in love with a book that is written on a 5th grade reading level, maybe other older readers can, too.

"RL5" doesn't just mean that the book is appropriate thematically for 5th graders--it also means that the vocabulary and sentence structure is about at a 5th grade reading level. As anyone who has ever worked with struggling or disinterested older readers knows, one of the biggest challenges is finding a book that is appropriate both thematically and structurally for students who are every bit as mature as any other 15-year-old but, for whatever reason, are reading at a 5th grade level.

I know this seems an awkward position in which to read,
but give me the right book, and I'd read it standing on my head
if I had to. Everyone should experience such reading joy at least once, right?

So, given that I love YA (and, apparently, Children's Lit) so much, I've read a lot of it, and I know that a good percentage of it is provocative, complex, fascinating, controversial, and suspenseful--in other words, all the things that books should be, for all readers.

And so, below is a short list of books that I think teachers, librarians, and parents can use as tools for helping struggling readers enjoy books. And, because so many struggling readers are tough to please, they all have a bit of street cred, too.

Monster, by Walter Dean Myers: The story of a 16-year-old boy who is on trial for murder. The situation is so surreal to him that he imagines himself in a movie, and the book is written like a screenplay.

Get Well Soon, by Julie Halpern: The story of Anna, whose parents have unceremoniously dumbed her in a mental hospital because she's depressed and overweight. She has serious reservations about the helpfulness of the staff and the intelligence of the doctors, but shocks herself by figuring out some important things in spite of the ridiculous rules and "therapy."

The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau: The people of Ember believe that their small city is the only civilization in an entirely dark world. They live on canned food, which they are running low on, and their only light comes in the form of light bulbs that are powered by a generator that is falling apart. Lina and Doon stumble upon secrets that lead them to believe that Ember is not, in fact, the only place in the world. Believing that their lives, and the lives of everyone they know, depends on it, they start to look for a way out.

Alanna, by Tamora Pierce: Alanna and her twin brother look alike, but are opposites. While he wants to read and study, her would give anything to wield a sword. So, when their father sends them off to learn the exact skills they despise, they concoct a plan that allows Thom to study sorcery and Alanna, disguised as a boy, to become a squire and, eventually, a knight.

Please, by all means, tell me what you'd add to this list!

Barbie, Ken, and the Rockin' Google Express Train to Nowhere

2011-11-17T06:00:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to write a book. A novel. Or possibly a novella. Or, at this rate, a short story.

Even so, that sounds impressive, doesn't it? It does to me. I practically intimidate myself.

Until I remember that most of my time spent "writing" quickly devolves into me searching the internet, looking for images to add to my Facebook album of Things It Seems My Husband Should Know About, But Somehow Doesn't.

Here's how our conversations have gone lately:

G: "What should we have for dinner tonight?"
Me: "Have you ever heard of Jem? How about Pete and Pete?"

In my defense, the quality of the Facebook album exceeds that of my writing by a wide margin most of the time. For instance, this morning, as I was doing research for my story, I stumbled upon some images of Barbie and the Rockers.

And by stumbled upon, I mean I googled "Barbie and the Rockers" and clicked "images."

What I found, much to my surprise, is that Austin Scarlett, of Project Runway fame, has chosen for his personal stylist none other than Rocker Ken.

Shocking, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a way to weave this fascinating pearl of information into my book. Sadly, the story place in a mental hospital, and neither Barbie nor Project Runway makes an appearance.

Although... come to think of it, I did also find this gem (not to be confused with Jem) today:

She might make a very nice supporting character...

(Actually, I think her costume is fabulous, which is why I include a picture of the original Rocker Barbie so you can fully appreciate the work that went into her ensemble. She can still have a supporting role, though. Every story needs a Barbie lookalike.)

Teapendance Day, or: Thank You, G

2011-08-11T11:24:00.002-04:00

This week, I tried to do my due diligence and read up about the Tea Party. I took myself to the library and checked out a book by Rand Paul, another book called Mad as Hell, and a third called Obama Zombies. The first two are specifically pro-Tea Party, the third is simply anti-Obama.

Needless to say, when I brought them home, my fiance, G, took one look, raised his eyebrows, and said, "What the hell are you reading?"

"It's good to say informed on what the enemy thinks," I said, flexing my muscles.

This is how I flex my muscles.

He gave me a look that I interpreted to mean "It's your funeral" and went back to building a pink Tinkertoy tower with our daughter.

And so I began my journey into the depths of the Tea Party--the rhetoric, the platform, the subtext.

Two days later, I came up gasping for air and in need of some anti-anxiety medication.

It was not unlike Alice's experience in Wonderland,
except it was less colorful and there was no actual tea.

I had been thinking I'd write a post that was an expose, of sorts, on the kinds of language subterfuge, emotional manipulations, and other underhanded machinations that, I think, colors the movement as a whole.

However, I became so agitated that G asked me, multiple times, if I was OK. I explained that I was trying to write a blog post refuting the Tea Party, and how I wanted to do it from my English professor perspective--in other words, to do a close reading dissecting Tea Party writings.

He asked me why I was trying to do that. I replied that I thought it was important to show this movement for what it is, to expose what its leaders are really saying, to make an airtight argument complete with citations and, if necessary, graphs and mathematical equations.

"But why?" said he.

"Because..." I said, trailing off.

"Honey," he said, "some things don't need to be argued. You don't need to know everything about this movement to know that you don't like it. These people [the Tea Party] don't believe in helping people who need help. They believe in 'every man for himself.' That's enough, right there, for you to feel good about not liking the movement."

And there it was, in a nutshell: The Tea Party movement is based on a platform of individualism. That's not a secret. That's the main thrust of their argument. Government is bad because it limits individualism. Taxes are bad because they limit individualism. "Entitlement programs" are bad because they raise taxes and, thus, limit individualism.

If they were talking about this kind of individualism, that would
be such a different story.

But I don't happen to believe that poverty is the result of laziness on the part of the poor. I don't believe that hungry people should stay hungry. I don't believe that sick people should go untreated, or that uneducated people should remain so--and I don't believe that we should leave it up to the individual to figure out how to stop being hungry or sick or uneducated. I believe in community, and that, in a good community, those who have enough or more than enough help those who don't have enough. Even if the reason they don't have enough is their own damn fault.

Is this pie-in-the-sky dreamery on my part? Perhaps. But as the great Albert Einstein (or was it Walter Matthau playing Einstein?) once said, "I would rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right."

See, I did include mathematical equations. I'm pretty sure
this one proves that the universe curves toward optimism.

After a few minutes of companionable silence between G and I, he added one final pearl of wisdom, which I later wrote down and put in a safe so I'd never forget it. He said:

"I believe in positive energy. When you put positive energy out there, that matters. It makes a difference. But if you let angry people make you angry, you're not able to do that anymore."

"Besides," he added, "Sarah Palin only makes the news when she says something really stupid. And that should make you happy."

Thank you, G. I needed that. <3

This is me, and my positive love energy.

It's All His Fault...Right?

2011-08-01T10:10:00.001-04:00

The more I try to read about the debt ceiling issue, the more jumbled it gets in my head—debt vs. deficit, decreased spending vs. increased revenue, "cutbacks" (meaningless unless you know what exactly is on the chopping block), and bets on what the stock market may or may not do based on issues I may or may not understand (and given that I only have a hazy idea of what the stock market even IS…)

So I'm no expert on economics, and I'm only moderately well-informed when it comes to political games. But I CAN read subtext, and here’s what I see happening over and over again:

President Obama is heralded as the kingpin of sanity, and yet he is left to stand alone.

He's obviously being railroaded by the most extreme Republicans, and the moderates (if there are any left) are allowing and even supporting that, so you’d think the Democrats (both elected and lay) would back him up. But instead, from the Democrats, his supposed allies, he's mainly getting a lot of guff.

Those refrains boil down to this: “We need a stronger leader.”

And maybe we do. Maybe we need this guy to come out, guns blazing, and pulverize the evil doers.

I’ll grant you that I agree with Bill Maher: this time, there is a clear distinction between good and bad (as opposed to Jon Stewart, who was criticized by Maher for indicating with his Rally to Restore Reason that extremists on both sides are equally at fault). And I'll also grant you that I would LOVE to see the president put his full weight behind the good fight—I want him to turn on his rhetorical genius and expose these cretins for what they are in language that all Americans can understand.

I want him, in short, to turn the tide.

But, by the same token, I understand why he isn't doing that. This tide of insanity that calls itself the Tea Party started building way back when Bush Jr. stole the White House and nobody stopped him—and, in fact, those who tried were called unpatriotic and written off as childish spoilsports. Maybe it started building before that, with the "trickle down economics" nonsense that relatively poor people (i.e. nearly all of us) bought into by the truck loads, and in many cases still do.

The problem is that Obama has to juggle his power—not just of position, but also of rhetoric—with that wave. He has to ask himself, “Is the timing right?” Because if he times it wrong, the right wing machine that has so successfully rewritten history time and time again will merely cut him down before he can gain purchase.

Everybody who holds a public job of some kind knows that there’s a lot of silly, and sometimes worse than silly, politics at play. Educators are no exception. When I first started teaching, I received some invaluable advice from a life-long teacher who has fought the good fight for years. She said to me, “Before diving in to any fight, ask yourself: Is this the hill I want to die on?"

In other words, if I start this fight, am I willing to see it through to the very end? Am I willing to lose my job over this, and thus end my chances to fight any further fights or have any further influence?

You only get to die on one hill, after all, so you'd better make it count.

The angry mob is never up to any good.

It's a shame that the president has been put in a position where every fight will either end in death or surrender. No, it's worse than a shame. It's an epic disaster. And while I blame the Tea Party extremists, I also blame the more moderate Republicans who are allowing it (or perhaps aiding and abetting, or maybe it all comes to the same thing), AND I blame the Democrats who are standing around pointing fingers at the President and saying, “Dude, you really should DO something about this.” I don’t limit this to the elected officials, but also to the pundits and the commentators who are blaming President Obama for “letting” this happen.

HELLO.

Obama didn’t elect those extremist nuts, nor was he the one to pick this ridiculous fight.

English majors are trained to spot
dramatic narrative arcs from 100 yards.

What I see, through my English major eyes, is a man who is standing alone on the top of a hill, with a gun in one hand, a white flag in the other, and a sea of armed crazy people below him. And behind him? A couple of journalists hiding behind trees and scribbling notes on paper. So I ask you, which would you pick—the gun or the flag?

I don’t claim that President Obama is a perfect man or a perfect politician. I do think that he is a good man, but to be honest, I base that more on gut feeling than on actual knowledge. And besides, good men don’t always make good presidents.

But to claim that he is not a strong enough leader because he “wants to be loved,” or to claim that he isn’t really trying, or that he is just another cog in “their” wheel—I think that’s flagrantly unfair, unhelpful, and stupid.

And as for the advice he’s getting from President Clinton, while it may well be good advice, Clinton is backseat driving. And, like most backseat drivers, he is mostly ineffective at everything but making the driver look bad. So instead of asking why Obama isn’t taking the advice, question why Clinton is so willing to make Obama look like he needs the help.

The nagging thought I have about all of this is that something is going on here that no one wants to talk about. The reason we were so proud of ourselves for electing Obama, and then so quick to hang him out to dry. The reason we accept that the blame lies with him for surrendering instead of the Tea Party for waging war. The reason we have more faith in an ex-president than our current one:

I have to wonder how much of it is racism, however subconscious.

And that will be the topic of my next post…

In the meantime, pick a hill, because like it or not, I think the battle is upon us.

Does It Matter? No!... Wait... YES!

2011-06-07T16:55:00.000-04:00

As a firm believer in every person's right to any kind of consensual sex life he or she desires, it pains me to find myself thinking about our politicians and their... um... tweets.

I've always thought the flogging of Bill Clinton was ridiculous, and that the ongoing interest in JFK's extra marital affairs is strange, to say the least. Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger's behavior is atrocious, but this is the man who brought Hummers to the civilians of America, so it's not like I expected better.

When these political sex scandals arise, I, along with so many others, roll my eyes, ask myself how anybody in the public eye could be stupid enough to get caught, decide that such behavior is unrelated to job performance and therefore none of my business, and move on.

But you know what? I'm over it.

It's not about the sex or flirtation, exactly, and it's not exactly about the subsequent lies told to conceal the sex or flirtation. Sex that is private is not my business, and lying to cover up bad behavior is universal. Having an affair and lying about it is not high on my to-do list, but I don't really care what other people get up to in the privacy of their own pants.

No, what bothers me, and what I refuse to accept anymore, is the constant parade of jilted wives. Their public humiliation is our business, even if the details of the affairs or indiscretions are not.

This is not a good color on either of them, but let's remember that
Mrs. Spitzer is the victim, not the doer.

Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, and Jude Law may not have an obligation to the public to act like decent human beings (though shame on them for not choosing to of their own volition), but our elected officials do.

I'm not talking about "family values," which I see as a euphemism for conservative Christian ethics. Certainly, elected officials do not owe us that. But they do owe us behavior that represents respect for the lives of all of their constituents--including the female ones.

When man after man after man publicly shames his wife in the worst kind of way--asking for and generally receiving her public support throughout--that harms us. It harms us as a nation, it harms our families, and it harms our children. It harms young men and women who are learning what it means to be grown men and women, and who have so many bad examples (and so few good ones) on which to base their judgment.

That these men never seem to have any desire to actually leave their wives makes them worse, not better, because it means that the women who receive their extra-marital attention are nothing but objects to them. A means to an end. They love their beautiful, intelligent, accomplished wives, but find sexual fulfillment in women they don't love or even necessarily like. This is not a recipe for equality on any level. In fact, by its very nature it disrespects both The Madonna and The Whore--and perpetuates the age-old idea that a woman can only be one or the other--never both, and certainly never something else all together.

Thoughts, feelings, even (gasp!) sexuality.
Imagine that.

That they behave with such egotistical abandon--sending shirtless pictures that show their faces, continuing to employ their mistresses, getting women pregnant while their wives undergo chemotherapy--suggests not that they think they'll never get caught, but that they actually don't care if they get caught.

This is not just stupid politically. It also suggests the depths of their ambivalence to the wives they claim to love and their feelings of superiority or power over the mistresses they keep (For surely, she'll never rat him out, he's too important to her).

It's not that the behavior is amoral or immoral--I think it's dangerous to start defining as a society which activities are "moral" when it comes to consensual sex.

It's that it's so damn disrespectful.

As a woman, I don't want one of these guys making decisions about my rights to reproductive health, equality in the workplace, or just what, exactly, constitutes sexual harassment. A man who can only see me as either The Madonna or The Whore can't possibly also see me as a complete human being.

Everybody makes mistakes. I get that. Good people do bad things, including cheat on their spouses. It's not the fact of an extra-marital affair that bothers me. It's the repeated, arrogant, flagrant, ongoing, multiple affairs and flirtations that are entered into with zero regard for secrecy or care, and the subsequent insistence that he is sorry and he loves his wife so much.

This is not to say that Anthony Weiner (or any of the others) should resign or should be kicked out of office. When it comes to the difference between private life and public policy, I'm not sure how we decide, as a society, where to draw the line. Imperfect people can be very good leaders--in fact, I prefer them to self-righteous zealots.

But I no longer think that all of this is none of the public's business. It is our business, if only because Weiner and the others are so stupid, so begging to get caught, that they make it so.

All these years later, I can't find a single Google image of
a man wearing a scarlet letter...

Trial Weekly Feature: Movie Review Friday

2011-04-15T10:25:00.001-04:00

TiMER is not without its flaws. For one thing, it can't decide if it is an ensemble piece, a buddy flick, or one woman's journey to true love. For another, the pacing is a bit slow, particularly toward the end. For all that, it's a creative, unusual, highly likeable movie that sidesteps all the potential pitfalls of the plot beautifully.

The basic premise is that a company called TiMER has invented a product that, when implanted on your wrist, counts down to the moment you will meet your soul mate. It only works, though, if your soulmate also has one. Like Facebook, TiMER has become a household name and almost everyone has an account, including those who wonder if it's really a good idea.

Oona, played by the fabulous Emma Caulfield (who made evil demons loveable and cute in the show Buffy, The Vampire Slayer), is about to turn 30. Unfortunately, her TiMER is still blank, which means she's pretty much the only person around who has no idea when she'll meet "her One."

This premise could go one of two ways: It could be fun and a little thought provoking, or it could be a dull slog through a neurotic woman's self-obsessed quest for love. And, yes, Oona is a neurotic woman on a self-obsessed quest for love, but she's also fun. Really fun. As is her formulaic-yet-fabulous wild sister, whose TiMER says she has a 13 year wait for love.

Sleek like an Apple product,
creepy like a wrist implant.

Most of the characters are weird, and all are likeable. Emma Caulfield in particular is highly watchable, and she might be the first woman on film to make orthodontists sexy. Her love interests are adorable, which is always nice, and Michelle Borth plays Oona's side-kick to perfection.

More importantly, I liked the film while I watched it, but I liked it even more the next day, when I found myself still pondering some of the questions it raises.

I give it a 4 out of 5.

Your Nonconformity Just Ran Over My Dogma, or: Stay In School, Ya Mook

2011-04-08T11:37:00.002-04:00

I soooo love punk. At least in theory. I'd love it more if
it involved more smiling.

Yesterday I got an email from one of my students asking me if he *really* needed a college degree in order to become a published writer. Couldn't he learn this stuff more quickly and cheaply by just going to the library?

This kid is one of my more brilliant students. Well, I take that back. He's one of the more brilliant people I see on a regular basis. As a student, he stinks. He hands things in late and incomplete, he scrawls cartoon drawings on all his work, and he uses phrases like "It's sort of like how in Star Wars the Jedi Knights are a metaphor for the forces of good" in papers about "Death, Be Not Proud."

In short, I love him. And I want to slap some sense into him.

I don't care if he ends up majoring in English. I don't care if he ends up majoring in The History of Japanese Tattoo Art. But I DO care that he learns to take himself seriously. It kills me that the most brilliant among my students are the most likely to shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to play by any of the rules--by believing that the simple act of following any rules will destroy their intellect and mar their ability to think for themselves.

Ahh, Punky Brewster. THIS is punk I can support.
Two thumbs up. You tell 'em, Punky.

I've never bought into the idea that self-destruction in the name of non-conformity is the mark of genius.

Non-conformity for non-conformity's sake is silly. It's the stuff of youth and immaturity, not genius. Can you become a published author without a college degree? Of course. You can become a lot of things without a college degree, including well-educated. However, it's a harder row to hoe, and there is no inherent worth in making your life harder than it needs to be.

Few would argue that a doctor or a physicist doesn't need to go to school or that the time spent in class is a waste, but the same cannot be said of the arts. For whatever reason, artists, including writers, have a tendency to think that they don't need formal training--that, in fact, formal training will "hurt" their creativity.

My aforementioned student doesn't hand in papers that break the rules because he doesn't understand what I'm asking for. He does it because he thinks there is no value in writing a dry, formal paper that compares and contrasts the depictions of Death in "Death, Be Not Proud" and Woody Allen's play "Death Knocks." And if he has to write the stupid thing, by god, he's going to break the rules in such an ingenious way that I'll be forced to recognize his brilliance and give him an A+++.

This girl is exactly everything I wanted to be in high school.
Animation and all.

I swear, I'm not knocking this kid. I understand this kid. I WAS this kid. And fortunately for me, my teachers didn't let me get away with it either.

Because assuming the rules don't apply to you is not just immature, it's self-congratulatory and tedious. Many of us get away with it for awhile because of our natural charm, but eventually we all come a cropper of a teacher or a reader who recognizes our bluster for what it really is: a lack of discipline and a fear of doing something wrong and no longer being thought of as brilliant and special.

It's not that there is value in blind discipline--I'm a teacher, not a drill sergeant. But we must learn to think of our art as work; a skill that requires training.

If you want to read a book to learn how to stitch up your own wounds, by all means, go for it. But if you want to be a doctor, you're going to have to accept that there are people out there who know more than you do and who can teach you something new. And that you'll need a license to practice medicine.

By the same token, if you want to write poetry that you read to your cats before storing it under your bed, then fabulous. You don't need to learn to write. But if you want to take control of your writing, to have a goal, a message, something to say and a way to communicate it, then you need training. You need to accept that there are people who know more than you do and that, if you are lucky, they will pass that information on to you.

You might even have to follow a few rules in the process.

So yes, my brilliant and maddening student, you need to stay in school. You need to write papers you think are stupid and read books you find boring and useless. You need to conform a little--just a little--because, as my favorite non-conformist says, "What doesn't bend breaks."

Oh, and you need to finish Essay 3 and hand it in by midnight tonight, or you'll get a zero.

My poor students, martyrs of English Comp II.

Radio Gaga, or: My First Taste of (Possibly Accidental) Fame

2011-04-06T11:07:00.001-04:00

It's not every day you get a call from out of the clear blue sky asking you to guest co-host a radio show. At least, it's not every day in my life. But I did get such a call a few weeks ago, and naturally, after screeching YES at the caller and then quickly ending the call before she could recind her offer, I rearranged my calendar to make room for my radio debut. And since by "rearranging" I mean I canceled my Wednesday classes, my students were as thrilled as I about the invitation.

The only fly in the otherwise creamy ointment is that the radio show, which is called Creative Mojo and is hosted by Mark Lipinski, is all about Mark's passion: crafting. And while I love crafting as much as the next ham-fisted, thread-challenged lass, my crafting experience consists of knitting one-tenth of a scarf and designing one crazy quilt square. As this last was fashioned out of construction paper and staples rather than fabric, I'm not sure it counts.

Mark, who is a true Renaissance man of craft, is a quilter, a cross stitcher, a Christmas decorator, a fabric designer, an accomplished Twitterer, and, of course, a radio show host.

This fabric design of Mark's is so perfect for Liza,
I may just have to learn to sew.

So you see why my first reaction to the invitation--well, my second reaction after my high-pitched squeal of acceptance--was to wonder whether I am who they think I am. I had visions of showing up at the studio only to be turned away with a pat on the head and an apology--"Oh, you're that Alexa O! The one who does editing and doesn't know the difference between a quilt square and a square dance. Whoops! We had someone else in mind entirely. Thanks for stopping by!"

And yet, when I set about writing up a little bio about myself for Mark's blog, I realized that editing is not nearly as far removed from crafting as I'd originally thought. People tend to think of editing as an exercise in grammar correction, and almost always think I am a member of the Grammar Police or the type of teacher who delights in rapping writers on the knuckles when they write it's instead of its.

In fact, most of what I edit is fiction, in the form of novels, and while it is true that part of my job is to correct itses and theres, my real goal is to help the author, who is first and foremost a storyteller, tell the most compelling story possible. Grammar is part of that, but only inasmuch as grammar is a tool that helps us communicate with each other. When "there" is spelled "their," confusion and distraction ensue, and I always fix such mistakes. But many, many authors utilize technically incorrect grammar to great effect, and it would be an editorial sin to "correct" such language.

Radio Gaga

Dialog is, naturally, the place where this is the most true. People speak in sentence fragments, they say "who" when they mean "whom," they ask "Where you at?" instead of "Where are you?" and "A whole nother" instead of "Another whole." Dialogue that ignores these speech patterns falls flat and lacks poetry.

Stories told in first person narrative use grammatical "errors" in much the same way--we're hearing the character's inner thoughts, and therefore we should hear them the way that character would really think them, grammatical craziness, puncutational ambiguity, and all.

So what does this have to do with crafting? Well, it means that my job as an editor is to determine which mechanical errors or ambiguities are intentional and which should be fixed. This is to say nothing of pacing, chronology, word choice, and tone. Of course, much, if not most, of that work is the author's purview, but if I'm to be any help to anyone at all, I have to help mold and structure the story using the above as my tools. It doesn't have to be grammatical perfection--as any quilter will tell you, the imperfections are often what make a work glow, and "perfection" is never really the point.

One definition of "craft" is "to make or construct in a manner suggesting great care or ingenuity." By that definition, quilting, writing, cross-stitching, and even editing are very similar in nature, and if Mark's invitation indicates that he thinks my work "suggests great care or ingenuity," well then I should have squealed louder when I accepted the invitation, because that's the best compliment I could ever receive.

One of my favorite of Mark's many
gorgeous quilt patterns.http://www.marklipinski.com/

So here's to crafting, in all its forms, and here's to me not making an ass of myself on air!

Creative Mojo airs Wednesdays from 3-5 pm EST. Every show is free and available on podcast after it airs, so be sure and check back if you're unavailable during the broadcast.

Go to http://toginet.com/shows/creativemojo/ for more details.

Home-Schooling in Mermaid Town: A Guest Post

2011-03-30T06:00:00.001-04:00

Speaking of Thankful , one thing I'm most thankful for is my circle of brilliant, funny, talented friends. Now you can be thankful too, because one of those friends has written a blog post just for you. She is Elizabeth Reinhardt, and you can find her over at her new blog, Team Unpubbed. Here, she teaches you all about d-d-d-birds and sword-wielding princesses:

Yesterday my daughter sat with her eyes glued to the television screen, Super Why! characters bouncing around in their earnest, animated world of learning. They were solving a puzzle using letters and phonics. The letter 'C' popped up on the screen.

"Hey, you know that letter!" I said. "We learned it together, remember?" I thought back on our google-eyed cardboard cats and the many 'Cs' we scratched into the dirt, smeared on foggy windows and drew on paper.

Amelia lolled on the couch and flicked her eyes at me. "No, Ma. No we never ever learned that letter. Only Super Why! teaches me. These guys." She jabbed a tiny index finger at the screen. "These guys."

Bobble-headed animated punks leered at me and I felt my heart race. What?! We made construction paper cats with googly eyes! Who was this kid kidding? I teach her! Not them! I do!!

Oh, they look soo innocent, don't they?

Don't be fooled by their bright eyes and happy smiles!

These are the horrors of home-schooling.

When I decided to not enroll my girl in public school there were a few considerations that I took into account.

1. My precious little twerp cracks me up and, along with always loving her completely, I happen to really like her 95% of the time. Or, on an off day, maybe 83%. Okay, I'd definitely say I'm almost always 70% full of like. On a truly awful day, it doesn't go that much below 67% 'like.' Not much.

2. I've been a teacher, and I know what schools are like. There were things I loved about teaching. And there were things I hated about the system, the politics, etc, that affected the students negatively, and I don't want that for my kid, at least not right now.

3. We happen to live in an area that doesn't have the strongest schools. They're also very different from the schools I went to as a child because we live in a completely different part of the country now. I'm not ready for my daughter to be molded into this new culture, even though I know it would be done with the best of intentions.

4. I have an education degree and a spunky, spontaneous kid who I'm happy to teach. Right now I'm able to do it financially and enjoy it, so why not?

Hmm. Why not?

The curriculum I have is very liberal, nature-based, happy-go-lucky. Which is so perfect if your daughter is Mary Ingalls or Beth March. But what if your kid is a hybrid of Pippi Longstocking, Anne Shirley, Mistress Mary Quite Contrary and Princess Mononoke, the Wolf Girl? Some days I'm pretty sure the Dalai Lama would give my kid a solid spanking, then rock in the corner crying after a 'lesson.'

My kid's inspiration in fashion, attitude, learning style, the whole package.

I was an eager, wide-eyed obedient student. I loved learning! Writing! Reading!

My child often slumps in her chair, pretends to sleep, tickles my feet while I'm teaching or stubbornly refuses to accept information.

"Sweetie, that's the letter 'P.' 'P' is for 'peacock.' Please print 'P'!" I trill, happily adding alliteration to our painted peacock with googly-eyes lesson. Slam dunk, Ma!

"Ma, that's a bird. It's a d-d-d-bird."

"You mean b-b-b-bird."

Long-suffering sigh. "No. D-d-d-bird. I'll make an 'E.'"

"'D' makes the 'd' sound, bird starts with 'B', you're writing an 'O' not an 'E,' and we're doing 'P'! 'P' for peacock!" I squawk.

Amelia swirls round, lazy 'Os' on the paper, then says, "That's enough birds for today, Ma. How about you read me three or five books? Like that? I'll get them in a huge basket!"

And while I blink back tears, stare at the peacock surrounded by bubbling 'Os' where there should be 'Ps' and prepare to read not three or five but thirteen books, I wonder what a real teacher would say.

Our friends have a little guy my daughter's age who is in a real school. Last time we saw them, he patiently pointed out at least ten or eleven different letters on several signs and menus. Amelia yawned when I nudged her nervously. "Don't you want to learn to read?" I hissed. "Look how great your friend is doing?"

She shrugged. "Why should I read? I want you to read my books to me. Forever and ever. Forever and ever, forever and ever..." As my child droned, I pictured myself in forty years, being whipped by my long-grown child, forced to read every scrap of junk mail and cereal label because I had been too weak-willed to assert myself during her critical years!

Forever and ever, forever and ever...

Luckily, I'm not doing this alone, and I have even better luck because my husband sees things about our daughter that I'm just too close to see.

"She won't learn any letters!" I whisper-wail from our bedroom after a particularly long day. We peek at her playing on the living room floor. Frank raises his eyebrows.

"She just finished a 36-piece puzzle. It's been, like, five minutes. Is that a new one?"

"Yeah, I just opened it for her," I mutter. "But she only learns the letters she wants to learn. How's that going to work?"

Frank watches her. "She's reading Pinkalicious to her toy pumpkin. Listen."

"Holy crap! That's pretty good. She's got a good memory!" My nerves quiet.

Later she makes me a picture of a mermaid town. All of the mermaids are holding hands. There are dozens of them. It's beautiful.

She and Frank go outside and work on the deck. "Hey, Ma!" she yells, holding up a piece of wood. "Dad and I are building wood. It's like fifteen inches."

"Is it fifteen inches?" I ask, my eyes wide.

"Nope," Frank laughs. "That's just her new favorite measurement."

But my kid has a favorite measurement. She loves numbers, counting, stacking, organizing. She adores books. Loves them. Threatening her with no stories will quell the most vicious tantrum. She loves puzzles and games, and has a long attention span for them. She devotes hours to caring for her animals (animate and inanimate), helping with chores, making up songs, digging holes. She has passion and curiosity and real, shining interest in the world around her. She's bright, she's learning every day, and I no longer feel (much) need to push her.

"Ma," she says, breathing hard after a long run up and down the yard. "Sometimes I just gotta run. I just gotta run like all day, okay, Ma? I. Just. Got. Ta. Run."

Okay.

So I'll let Super Why! take the credit for any letters she learns and I won't freak if she insists a peacock is a bird...oh, I guess it is a bird, huh? Because she's smart and sly and focused, and she'll do just fine. And when I give her the chance, she offers wonderful input for potential school projects.

Now please excuse me. Amelia's next home-school project is around the bend and I have to make a faux-wolf fur vest to go along with our mock nature vs. humans battle in the backyard which my kid is furnishing with assorted wood scraps and freshly dug trenches.

I guess I'll call it social studies?

Our project will look just like this; but with faux-wolf vests and fake weapons and growling and probably some mud and fighting sequences. But, otherwise, just like this.

Let's Do Thankful

2011-03-24T11:08:00.000-04:00

As part of our ongoing effort to raise a kind, polite, helpful, and all around fantastic kid, my fiance and I introduced "Thankful" into our pre-dinner routine.

At first, even though I was 100% supportive of the idea of "Thankful," I felt weird doing it. I'm not religious, and I'm not used to public displays of...well, religiosity.

But leave it to a two-year-old to take all the potential self-righteous do-goodiness out of even the most self-righteous, do-goody activities. Every night, Liza runs to the table, holds out her hands (in, I must say, a very demanding manner), and shouts, "Let's do Thankful!" Then grabs our hands, says, "Umm...I'm thankful for..." and lists the most important things in her life.
Last night, it was "pink suns, tasty milks, and cheese."

This is NOT what "Thankful" looks like in our house.

Other favorites on her list include lights, walls, "mac and roni cheese," ice cream, books, pictures, Rainbow Brite and, once, "boys."

Yes, that last one gave us a heart attack at the time. Thinking back on it now, though, I must admit I'm pretty thankful for boys, too. In fact, I'm also pretty thankful for lights, walls, ice cream, books, and all the rest. And if there were pink suns, you better believe I'd be thankful for them.

Actually, aside from the fact that this is an Asian boy, "Thankful"
looks remarkably like this... only louder.

I've been thinking about this lately, as I've watched the American political landscape seep into our culture in increasingly negative ways. Instead of being thankful for lights and walls and books, we're angry about the things we don't have. That anger is being harnessed by our politicians, who have been very good at whipping it into a frenzy and then pointing a finger of blame and letting us unleash all that anger at the target of their choosing.

More often than not, lately, this target has been people more or less just like us. We've been directed to point fingers of blame at the gay community, at pregnant women, at teachers and other public workers, at immigrants, at Muslims.

Seriously, dude? How is this helpful?

We've been told that these are the people who are making our lives worse, these are the people whose lifestyles are a threat to the sanctity of marriage, of life, of liberty, of a living wage. We've been made to believe that life is a zero-sum proposition--that the more my neighbor has, the less there is to go around for me.

And the message works in part because this is so easy to believe. In our increasingly global world, we understand instinctively that there are simply too many people on the planet for everyone to consume resources at the current American averages. Add the economic crisis--and by this I mean job loss and housing foreclosures, not treasury issues--and the politicians have an easy sell.

There's already fear and anger, all they have to do is direct it.

And so I propose that we all do Thankful. Not for the big things, necessarily, but for the little things that add up to big things. Heat, shelter, books, lights, mac and roni cheese.

Add a little powdered cheese and pasta, and this is Utopia as my daughter sees it.

This doesn't mean we stop there. We don't have to accept the systemic injustices, the underemployment, the housing disaster, the loss of the middle class. But if we really want to fix these problems, it's going to take community and maybe even a certain amount of do-goodiness to get there. Because before we can fix the problems, we have to be able to see them clearly, and we can't see anything through all this anger.
Your gay neighbor is not preventing you from having a great marriage, your kid's teacher is not stealing your pension, the 19-year-old who is not ready to be a mom is not hurting you or your child, and the mosque down the street is not plotting your demise. All of these people are simply doing what you are doing--living their lives in the best way they know how.

So let's stop a minute and do Thankful.

I'm thankful for babies and music and sunshine and trees.

You?

PSA: Stop "Just Sayin'"

2011-03-17T09:53:00.003-04:00

Jon Stewart feels my pain.

The first time I saw it, I thought it was clever. Ish. The next time I saw it, I looked at it with suspicion. Now I've seen it so many times that it kicks off an instant eye-roll/sigh combination that any 13-year-old would be proud to achieve.

I am talking, of course, about the catch phrase epidemic: "Just Sayin.'"

I'm sure you've noticed it too, if you've spent any time in the blogosphere, on social media, or reading reader comments on...anything--the writer says something sharp or caustic or direct, and then ends the comment with a "Just Sayin."

Par Example:

"I wouldn't let my daughter wear on a date what Lindsay Lohan wears to court. Just sayin.'"
"New Jersey governor Chris Christie looks like he swallowed a puffer fish. Just sayin.'"
"If teachers want benefits and a reasonable salary, they should become CEOs. Just sayin.'"

*Shudder*

My problem with "just sayin'" is multifaceted. For one thing, it is the new "no offense."

"No offense, but I think the world would be a better place if you'd never been born."

Right.

Also, as an editor and a Strunk & White groupie, the addition of two unnecessary words bugs me. I feel the same when people write something sarcastic and follow it up with "sarcasm alert!" We *know* you don't really think that all funding for PBS should be diverted into an account used to pay for a nuclear fallout shelter for the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. Adding "sarcasm alert!" to the message makes it less...well, sarcastic. "Just sayin'" is even more unnecessary given that you have already done exactly that: just said.

But mostly, what I hate about "just sayin'" is that it undermines what are often otherwise insightful remarks.

Years ago, my good friend Jasmin and I developed a nasty habit of beginning every sentence with the phrase "I just think."

"I just think he's kind of a jerk."
"I just think I deserve better."
"I just think what I really need is a drink."

One day Jasmin looked at me and said, "We have got to stop saying 'just.' We're belittling our thoughts every time we say it." She was so right. I didn't "just think" he was "kind of" a jerk. He was a jerk. I did deserve better. And that drink? I needed it bad.

It took a long, long time for me to work "just" out of my vocabulary, and I still backslide. One of the first things my fiance ever said to me was, "Don't qualify your writing. Stand behind it." I started this blog not long after that, partly as a way of training myself not to qualify my writing, my thoughts, or my message.

It's not easy, but the process has made me more confident in much the same way that smiling makes me happier. "Justing" myself had become a habit, and breaking the habit in my language has helped me break the habit in my mind.

"Just Sayin'" is used by men, but I more often see women doing it. Women are taught from childhood that being nice is more important than being right, and "justing" everything we say is a way of cushioning the blow when we have to tell someone the truth and we know it's going to hurt. We qualify, we back peddle, we do everything we can to be a messenger who doesn't get shot.

THIS is the kind of confidence I'm talking about! Work it, sister.

We're not willing to be silent, but we're also afraid to speak, so we qualify. We end messages with "but what do I know," or "but I could be wrong." "Just sayin'" feels like a cuter, more clever qualifier, but it's a wolf in sheep's clothing. As are all qualifiers.

Take care with language. It is your most useful tool and your most powerful weapon. Keep it sharp, and don't be afraid to use it.

And never, ever "just" say anything.

Some of you may have seen a post from me saying that I was going to start a new blog. After publishing that post, I experienced real grief over the loss of this blog, and changed my mind. I realized that I need and love this blog, so sleep be damned! I'll write at 3 a.m. if I have to. Thanks for reading. <3

Natalie Munroe and the Great Blog Scandal; or, This Isn't About Free Speech, Silly

2011-02-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

I’m a teacher and a blogger, which means I sometimes blog about teaching. So when I heard the story of Natalie Munroe, a high school teacher who has been suspended for the contents of her blog, I had a strong initial reaction:

“WHAT!?!?!?!”

They're coming to get me!

With a self-righteous attitude, I looked up everything I could find on the situation, including some posts from the blog itself (as of this morning at 4 a.m. I could still find the original posts--now her blog has been updated).

Here’s the thing. I really want to support this woman. She’s a high school teacher, which means she is abused daily by the very people she is attempting to educate. Entitlement issues among some students are stultifying to education in a way that is hard to explain to outsiders. School systems, bowing to pressure to follow a corporate model, treat students and parents more and more like customers—and those customers have a funny habit of thinking they are always right.

When I was doing my student teaching, the first and most strident advice I was given was this: Document EVERYTHING. The burden of proof (that a student is failing, talking back, refusing to work, sleeping, making phone calls, bullying, etc) is usually on the teacher, and while there are fabulous principals and school districts out there, more and more of them are caving in and giving parents and students what they seem to want: A free pass to behave badly.

I do not know a single teacher who doesn’t need to vent—sometimes loudly and over drinks—about the system, the parents, and yes, sometimes the students themselves. After all, teachers spend their days surrounded by unfinished human beings whose lack of maturity causes them to act out, call out, reach out, poop into a cup and bring it into the classroom, and generally behave like hellions.

Some days, I think they are capable of this.

That said, there’s a time and a place for whining about work. For instance, it helps to be surrounded by other poor saps who empathize when you say “cell” like it’s a four-letter word. Or quote the creative ways your students abuse the English language. Or groan that it must be a sign of the coming Apocalypse that students think it is appropriate to greet a teacher with, “Hey.”

It also helps, if you are going to complain about your students, not to include your students in your audience.

A public blog with your first name, last initial, and photo is not the appropriate place for bitching and moaning about how horrible your students are. If you want to write such a blog, it is easy enough to make it private and give the password out to trusted friends and family or to write it under a fun handle like “MadProf.”

So although I really, really want to be a champion for a teacher who has been crucified for telling the truth, in this case, I don’t think I can.

Natalie Munroe did not write an insightful report on the sociological causes of unmotivated students, give helpful advice for other struggling teachers, or expose the dark underbelly of the profession in a new and thought-provoking way. (Though her updated blog does do some of these things). Instead, she listed the various and sundry things she doesn’t like about her students and what she wishes she could say to parents. In fact, she claimed that while she used to work hard to write useful comments to parents, she no longer does because, basically, it’s not going to make any difference anyway so why bother. And while I admit that many of us say such things in the heat of frustrated grading, we don’t all say it publically. She not only published it online, she identified herself. Granted, it’s not her full name, but it is her first name and the first initial of her last name. Add the photo to the mix and we have a fairly simple search on our hands—and yes, our students Google us. Duh.

This is not a free speech issue, though her lawyers are claiming it is. Free speech does not entitle a teacher to walk into her classroom and tell her students that they “have no redeeming qualities” or that they are “complete and utter jerks.” And if she shouldn’t say it to their faces, then it shouldn’t be on an open forum online.

Now, if the students had hacked a private Facebook account or a private blog, then yes, I would be ranting and raving that “teachers have rights too” and “freedom of speech” and blah dee blah blah. After all, your mailbox is as “hackable” as your inbox, which is why there are federal laws that protect its contents.

We like to pretend that it’s hard to know what to say and when to say it online, but it’s really very simple. Most online activities have a pretty clear hard-copy equivalent. Writing a password-protected blog is like writing a journal that you give to your (very devoted) friends—in other words, private. Sending an email from your personal computer is like sending a letter to a friend—private. Sending an email from your work computer is like putting a note on top of someone’s inbox—public. And writing a blog that is identifiable as yours is like standing in an auditorium in front of the entire world—you have to assume that everyone is listening, because anyone could.

What Munroe did was public, and therefore she can be fired for it. If she’d stood in a room full of parents on parent/teacher night and said the same, she’d be gone, and nobody would be citing the first amendment.

An Ode To the Death of My Twenties, or: How I Learned To Love My Feet

2010-12-09T11:49:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I turn 30. I’ve thought, for the last few months, that I would march forward into this new decade with grace and aplomb.

But then I looked in the mirror and realized that one day, not long from now, I will be old. And not long after that, I’ll be dead. In fact, the lifespan of a human is so ridiculously short compared to that of the universe that, in some dimensions, I’m probably dead already, if I was ever here to begin with.

For a minute, this thought made me feel very, very sorry for myself.

So I ate a few gourmet chocolates that a very good friend of mine had sent me as a birthday gift, and decided that if I’m going to be dead soon, and especially if I am dead already, I might as well enjoy myself.

And two of the things I most enjoy doing are blogging and giving people unsolicited advice.
So I ate a few more chocolates and thought about all the things I’ve learned so far during this journey called life.

Then I sat down and wrote you a list of things to keep in mind:

1. Someday, your eyes are going to get bad and your feet are going to hurt. This will happen whether you hike Mt. Everest in heels or sit in quiet meditation for the whole of your twenties. It will happen whether you read small print by candlelight or wear a Jedi knight blast shield and stumble through life afraid of anything smaller than 20 point font. The downside to this reality is that someday you will squint and limp. The upshot is that since you can’t prevent it anyway, you can relax regarding decisions about font and footwear.

2. Feeling guilty about not putting on your sunblock does not protect your skin from the sun, nor does it help you remember to your sunblock in the future, nor does it make your child more amenable to sunblock application.

3. The best, most helpful first response to almost any problem you will ever encounter is to stand still and breathe deeply. Exceptions to this rule are pretty much limited to fast-moving projectiles that are headed straight for you. In such cases, it is best to take three steps to the left before starting your breathing exercise.

4. Though they may take awhile to wear off, feelings of embarrassment never last forever. However, feelings of regret at having missed an opportunity do. When in doubt, risk embarrassment.

5. Angry people say stupid things. Therefore, while anger can be a very helpful, healthy response to certain stimuli, it is a good idea to keep your mouth shut until the feeling passes.

6. Despite your best intentions, you will never, ever manage to keep your mouth shut when you are angry.

7. You will probably get what you want in life. The trick is to recognize that what you actually want is probably not what you thought you wanted or what you were even aiming for.

8. Being on the worst-dressed list is not the end of the world. It is less fun than being on the best-dressed list, but more fun than not making any list at all.

9. If you can afford only some expensive items of clothing, opt for pricey outerwear, underwear, and shoes. With a little effort, you can find great skirts, pants, and tops at any price point, but there is no faking an high-quality coat. As for expensive underwear and shoes, the reasons for that should be obvious. (By the way, this goes for men as well as women--with the slight difference that men should buy cheap underwear and get all their pants professionally hemmed.)

10. Never pay any attention to somebody else’s list of life lessons. They are probably full of crap.

Goodbye, my twenties. We had a passionate, though explosive, relationship, and while I hate to see you go, I love to watch you leave.

Hello, my thirties. May you be filled with lots of gourmet chocolates and many, many pairs of impractical but expensive shoes. And hell, maybe a few pairs of pink cat-eye reading glasses.

Hope For the Future, or: Chickens Are Still Assholes

2010-11-23T12:13:00.001-05:00

Me, being evil. Bwa-ha-ha!

I did something this semester that made my students hate me. More than usual, I mean: I made them do group presentations.

I know. Horrible, right?

I tried to make it a little more palatable by encouraging them to present on topics that are both controversial and relevant--not an easy task, given that, at 30, I am as clueless in my classroom as Queen Elizabeth at a Jay-Z concert.

Some of the topics did manage to hit their mark, though. I wrangled a few great presentations out of the pot heads, who came out of their fog long enough to articulate persuasive arguments regarding the legalization of marijuana.

The "Body Image and the Media" presentations also went over well--change the face from Kate to Giselle and the topic really hasn't changed since prehistory, aka my undergraduate years. The students who presented were passionate in their conviction that it is wrong for companies to make money off of Kim Kardashian's photo-shopped body.

But the topic that surprised me, the one I threw in as an afterthought to pad my list of suggestions, was "Animal Rights."

Animal rights, as a presentation topic, does not strike me as particularly sexy. Weed and supermodels are one thing. The visuals are cool and the arguments are, from the perspective of a college freshman, incredibly obvious. But animals and their rights are another matter entirely. Sure, the group arguing that dolphins shouldn't be killed by the thousands were hardly risking classroom alienation, but still, the presenters were a three guys who seem more likely to rail against government conspiracies than to get teary-eyed (literally) in class while they showed pictures of blood-red water and dead animals.

The photo my students presented, which shows the blood
that fills the water after the dolphin slaughter in the
documentary The Cove.

Then there was the couple who generally sit in the back of the room and paw at each other rather than listening to what I have to say. They presented such a compelling argument against animal testing that there wasn't a dry eye in the place when they were finished.

In another class, another group of three guys argued that KFC should have been more pro-active in dealing with the cruelty that took place in the slaughterhouse at one of their suppliers' factories. Another group stated outright that there are three things we all need to stop using animals for: food, clothing, and entertainment.

If it doesn't seem surprising to you that these topics were both passionately presented and very well-received, walk into a room sometime and announce that you are vegan. Or even just vegetarian. Or that you don't wear leather. Unless you happen to be making this statement at a PETA meeting or in a UU church, chances are very good that you are going to be met with eye rolls at best. You are likely to be accused of self-righteousness, and someone will surely mention the words "rabbit food."

I know from experience that if you explain that your vegetarianism is for health reasons or because a plant-based diet is more ecologically sound, most people will back off, nod, and respect your lifestyle choices.

But tell them that you think it's wrong to kill a chicken and watch out. You'll undoubtedly face ridicule and scorn. I know, because I've been the one who ridicules and scorns.

"A chicken?" I've said. "Please. I've known chickens. Chickens are assholes."

But no one ridiculed or scorned my students, who all had one clear argument: Animals have the same rights to non-suffering, dignity, and quality of life as humans.

In fact, the group that presented the KFC case of cruelty toward chickens said, "This cruelty would be illegal if it happened to dogs or other companion animals."

All the kids in the audience nodded in agreement.

Now, I'll grant you, it is possible that some of my students were simply being polite. Politeness does not seem to be a top priority of theirs when I am in front of the room, but maybe seeing a fellow sufferer struggling through a presentation is enough to bring it out in them.

Or possibly they just weren't paying attention. The looks on their faces as they learned what happens to animals in research laboratories suggests otherwise, however.

I love my job, and one reason I love it is that I really like teenagers and young 20-somethings. They say the darndest things. They are naive and half-formed, but they are also passionate, thoughtful, and caring.

And in the days that have passed since the first group of students stood up and presented pro-animal rights arguments, I find that I am feeling pretty good about our future.

We talk a lot, us "grown ups," about how "these kids" don't know anything. How they are too consumed with their facebook and their iPods to crack open a book. How their inability to understand what, exactly, an apostrophe actually IS signals the decline of civilization.

How their use of "2" to mean "two," "too," or "to" interchangeably angers the gods and brings the floods.

And, as a lover of the written word, I admit that these are real problems. We have other real problems, too. They don't understand how government works, they are incredibly ignorant about world and national history, and they really, truly believe that Katy Perry is a "singer."

But there are signs that all is not lost.

They are citizens of the world in ways that we couldn't have been. They understand, even the least intellectual among them, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. They don't know what it's like to fight a war that feels morally simple and right, or what it means to live a life surrounded only by people who look the same. They write essays that, for all their major grammatical errors and lack of organizational clarity, express the simple yet revolutionary belief that life is complicated and that we create more problems than we solve when we try to tell other people what to believe.

I know that college students are notoriously more liberal than the average bear. And, speaking of bears, I know that the vast majority of my students are not vegetarians and that some of them are, in fact, hunters.

But I can't help but feel a little bit good about the fact that they were all so respectful of the idea that animals have rights. In this political culture of intolerance, distrust, and mud-slinging, it warms my little bleeding heart to know that my students are sitting around talking about how we need to be kind to chickens.

The Beauty of Abstraction, or: The Proof Is Not in the Pudding

2010-11-05T12:00:00.001-04:00

This week I watched two documentaries about regular people who were unexpectedly thrust into the art world.

One was a little girl named Marla who, at four, was selling paintings for thousands of dollars each. Paintings that, it turns out, were probably painted by her father. The other was a truck driver who paid $5 for what might be a Jackson Pollock.

Neither of these things could ever have happened if it weren't for Abstract Expressionism, and therein lies the fascination.

Abstract Expressionism, as you probably know, is that crazy, much-maligned, highly misunderstood art movement that started after WWII and is still the one movement guaranteed to get a rise out of most people.

"My kid could paint that" is such a familiar refrain that it is actually the title of the documentary about Marla.

Given that Abstract Expressionism is simultaneously highly emotive and totally non-narrative, it probably shouldn't be surprising that it evokes such intense reactions from people who can't explain their distaste. People who say, "I don't know anything about art, I just know what I like...and I don't like that."

People tend to say this defensively, as though they sense that "liking" art is beside the point. The idea that art should be pretty or match the colors in your living room is one that is so anti-thetical to modern art that even people who know absolutely nothing else about the subject often know enough to sound at least a little apologetic when they say they want it to look "nice."

But that can't be the only reason that people react so strongly, and so negatively, to Abstract Expressionism. After all, a Mark Rothko painting is pretty undeniably fun to look at. Most abstract expressionism is nothing more or less than an experiment with color or shape. Really, it is not so different from Impressionism, or, say, a beautiful homemade quilt. Everyone loves those things. Why not Abstract Expressionism?

And why can't we look at a Pollock and judge its worth solely on its aesthetics? Why, oh why, do we insist on feeling that this is a great big scam?

After all, a painting is a painting. You can commit fraud by selling someone a diamond necklace that is not made of diamonds, or a car that turns out not to have an engine, but a painting is a pretty literal example of "what you see is what you get." Sure, there are forgeries, but no one who complains that Pollocks shouldn't be worth so much money is claiming that they aren't really Pollocks.


Pollock

And yet, despite the fact that Abstract Expressionism is exactly what it claims to be, and is labeled and sold as such, many, many people think that the worth of Jackson Pollock's paintings is a real-life example of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

The answer lies, I think, with story.

When we look at a Rembrandt, a Degas, or a Leonardo Da Vinci, we probably react first to the aesthetics of the piece--the colors used, the composition, the brush strokes. These we react to from across the museum floor. But the first thing we conceptualize about them is the subject matter. We put words to the items in the painting--cathedral, flower, woman. Having labeled them, we understand something about them. We have seen a cathedral, a flower, and a woman before. We know something about each of those things. We can ask, and answer, questions about whether or not we like this particular depiction of these items.

Pollock at work. Well..."work."

More importantly, when we look at such a painting, we can, even if we know nothing else about art and have no way to articulate an opinion about color or composition, contemplate the story that is being told. We can look beyond the paint to the thing that the paint has created.

Art is short for artifice, after all, and most artists invent something with paint that goes beyond the paint itself.

Abstract Expressionists don't. You aren't meant to look at a Pollock and find a hidden still-life or portrait. You are meant to look at the paint as paint, to see red as red and orange as orange.

And yet, we apply story to them. We can't help it.

Maybe we feel that the art is legitimate as long as the artist does know how to draw. If he have proven that he can paint an apple, then we'll accept that he has chosen to paint a red square. Thus we apply the story "he knows what he is doing" to the picture we are looking at.

Or we look at it and find a literal story in the paint itself--"here is a door," "here is anger," "here is a metaphor for Life and God and Everything."

Rothko

Non-experts fear that the experts have some knowledge to which the rest of us are not privy--that they are either smarter than we are or are in on the fraud. But Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? and My Kid Could Paint That are fascinating largely because they prove that the experts look at art exactly the same way we all do: they apply a story to it, and determine whether or not they like it (i.e. whether or not it is worth money) based on that story.

Take the case of Marla, whose paintings were worth thousands of dollars when the world knew they were painted by a four-year-old, but worth nothing when the world suspected they were painted by the four-year-old's father. They are the same paintings before and after, but we see something completely different before and after the question is raised.

Or the case of Teri Horton, whose thrift-store find had art "experts" claiming that a confirmed Pollock fingerprint on the back of the painting was not proof that he painted it. That it didn't "feel" like a Pollock, and therefore wasn't. They just couldn't believe that this woman, this nobody, could possibly have gotten that lucky, or that she could possibly know what she was talking about. Or maybe they didn't like the idea that the painting could have spent so many years in thrift stores without anyone realizing it was special--maybe that threatens their belief that it is special.

Klein

Like a creationist who can't bear to learn about evolution, their faith in their own expertise was too shaky to accommodate the story of The Pollock Nobody Wanted. Ergo, if nobody wanted it, it must not be a Pollock.

Not once in the course of either of these documentaries did anyone say, "I love that painting, and therefore I will pay X dollars for it." And yet, the paintings were the same at the beginning of the films as they were at the end. No one was claiming that the diamonds were not really diamonds.

Or were they?

In the case of the fraudulent diamond necklace, the worth of the necklace lies indisputably with the diamonds themselves. In the case of the paintings, we insist on pretending that their worth lies in the paint itself--the color, the shape, the method of application on a canvas.

But the paint really is paint, the canvas really is canvas, what you see is what you get, and yet everyone is claiming fraud.

This is proof, undeniable, that the worth of a painting lies not in the paint, but in the story it tells. Even in the case of Abstract Expressionism, where story is supposed to be beside the point, where the artists did everything they possibly could to remove story from the equation, all we want to know is who painted it, and when did they paint it, and were they drunk when they painted it. In other words: What does it mean?

So perhaps, genius or hack, this is the worth of Jackson Pollock and his ilk: he taught us that you can't remove the story from the canvas. We'll apply story even if all you give us is a blank canvas with your signature on the bottom. We have to. It's the only language we speak.

Sparkly Figure Eights, or: The Importance of Being Symbolic

2010-10-28T11:51:00.000-04:00

Exhibit A

The rest of the world appears shocked, but I've seen this coming since I first laid eyes on that ring he gave her.

I am speaking, of course, of the separation of Courtney Cox and David Arquette.

I know, I know, successfully predicting a Hollywood divorce is not exactly Psychic Friends Network material. I don't care. I don't even know why David Arquette is famous. What I do know is that this divorce has been coming down the pike ever since he gave her a double-diamond ring.

Just call me Dionne

Why? Because he designed it to look like an 8, and 8 is his favorite number.

Now, far be it for me to judge any woman for her choice of mate. No matter how many times he appears in public wearing a frakking ugly suit, he can't possibly be a more questionable choice than some I've made.

And I have been accused (more than once) of over-analyzing. I've been told--generally by someone who is gritting his teeth and pulling out his hair--that I have a maddening ability to find meaning in the most insignificant of details. For instance, when I realized that my college boyfriend tended to like male musicians better than female musicians, I became convinced that this preference was symbolic of his inability to truly see women as equals.

When the poor guy told me he loved Jack Kerouac, World War III erupted.

BOOM!

And let's not even discuss the beleaguered high school boyfriend who listened to Christian Rock.

Of course, when you are inside a relationship, it is impossible to determine where the symbolism ends and the actual problems begin. Whether or not I was right about the inherent incompatibility of Christian Rock and, well, ME, the fact is that, though he and I remain good friends, my high school boyfriend and I were not destined for a future of happiness together.

And Jack Kerouac?

I stand by that.

The point is that symbolism does matter. It can be hard to see and almost impossible to figure out, but it is always there, under the surface. If we know how to read the signs, it does tell us everything we need to know about the people in our lives.

For instance, if you find yourself donning camo on your
wedding day, run. Run away. As fast as you can.

A man who designs his wife's wedding ring to resemble his favorite number is not choosing a life mate so much as he is branding someone as his property.

Meanwhile, those stupid suits he wears, far from being cutely quirky, are the clearly desperate attempt of a man to draw attention away from his more-famous wife and onto himself.

Exhibit B

This is not the stuff of a mature man who is capable of supporting his wife as a partner and being supported in his turn. This is the stuff of a man whose wife will, in time, throw up her hands, tell him she no longer wants to be his mother, and kick him out of the house. At which point he will sleep with a few women and then call Howard Stern to cry about the whole thing publicly.

Symbolism is as important in fiction as it is in life, and though college students groan when they are asked to identify it in literature, it is something that we feel instinctively.

Blood stains hands that are forever sullied by murder. Killing a mockingbird destroys innocence. Burning books is embracing ignorance.

Naturally, some symbols are more obvious than others. In life, as in fiction, we often don't understand the significance of a certain act until long after the last curtain call, when it hardly helps us to point and say, "this is the moment where it all fell apart."

There are actions, though, that don't require explanation to be understood perfectly through their symbolism.

Book burning is one of them.

Giving your wife a wedding ring that is shaped like your favorite number is another.

I rest my case.

Fright Night, or: The REAL Halloween Horror

2010-10-21T11:53:00.002-04:00

We are still holding Halloween in October, right?
Not August...at a brothel?

Lately I've been thinking about sex and little girls.

Wait.

I mean...

No, unfortunately, that's exactly what I mean: lately I've been thinking about sex and little girls.

Before I go on, let me just go on the record as saying that I don't like thinking of myself as either a social conservative or a prude. I'm an American, so by definition I'm a bit more of a prude than, say, a Frenchman on a nude beach, but by and large I believe that people should do what they want when they want and generally let it all hang out if that's what keeps their panties untwisted.

I'm all about free love, baby.

So it really, really pisses me off when I find myself thinking, "Shit. That's just NOT appropriate."

It makes me feel old and boring, which is icky. When I was in high school, I had pink hair and my favorite shirt said "Playmate of the Year" in large, sparkly, rainbow letters. And that girl never turned up her nose and said, "Shit. That's just NOT appropriate."

Women should be encouraged to feel sexy, to express their sexuality freely, and even, when it suits them and when they control the how and the where and the why, to use their sexiness to their own benefit in various and sundry ways. At the very least, women's sexuality is a topic worth talking about.

But notice... I said women.

Not girls, not "tweens," and certainly, for the love of all that is holy, not toddlers.

Really? A black velvet catsuit with pink feathers?
What do you even call this?

So it is with all this in mind that I bring up the unfortunate topic of Halloween costumes.

Now, I love a feather duster as much as the next girl, and while I personally prefer a costume that is cutely clever to one that is repackaged fetishwear, I am all for a holiday that encourages us to bring our freak to the street and shake it to the beat.

However, Walmart and the rest of the Halloween-hungry retailers, aided and abetted by parents who should know better, are taking all the fun out of what was once a subversive and controversial holiday and, ironically, turning it in to something far more distasteful than a teenage delinquent with a roll of toilet paper and a handful of rotten eggs.

This...thing is being sold under the label "tween."
That's right...it's for 9- to 12-year-olds. As are
all the following costumes pictured.

The costumes available for purchase for "tweens," girls, and even toddlers, are nothing short of revolting and belong, I am sorry to say, in a brothel closet--you know, the secret one for the special customer who is looking for something a bit different and is willing to pay extra.

Which would be one thing... if they were costumes meant for women. But they brazenly align themselves with children, and come in sizes as alarming as "3T." (A toddler size, for those of you not in the know.)

This. Is. Not. Appropriate.

Culturally insensitive, culturally inaccurate, AND inappropriate as hell.

"Angry Goth Streetwalker. Now with wings!"

We all know that some parents are crazy enough to tan and bleach their toddlers in the hopes of winning a beauty pageant. But surely, SURELY, these parents make up a bizarre and tiny fringe group that the rest of us look at only to remind ourselves not to live vicariously through our children or to allow ourselves to be, you know, FUCKING INSANE.

But to look at the display of costumes at Walmart is to wonder whether, in fact, insanity is a dominant gene.

I can't claim that the boy's section is without potentially damaging body-image-distorting superhero worship, but the girl's section--dear god, the girl's section.

And the regular clothing racks are hardly better.

I believe as strongly as the next liberated woman that wearing a mini-skirt is not an invitation to rape. The victim of a sex crime is never at fault, and certainly no amount of inappropriate sexualization of a child excuses any predator anywhere.

However.

If we, as a society, accept that it is appropriate and normal to dress a child in a sex costume in order to walk up to strangers and ask them for candy, how can we expect anything other than an increase in sex crimes against children?

When our understanding of healthy interaction with children is so incredibly screwed up that we can't take a picture of our kid in the bathtub but we're totally comfortable dressing them as sex cats (literally), what can we expect but an increase in sexually deviant behavior?

I know that common sense is in short supply these days, but let's dress our kids as fuzzy bunnies, not Playboy bunnies.

Please. Because I never, ever want to write the sentence "Lately I've been thinking about sex and little girls" again.

Shut your Fat Face, or: Word(s) of the Week: Politically Correct

2010-10-14T11:59:00.000-04:00

These two can be politically correct while getting a
colonoscopy.... to clean out all that raw food.

Political correctness is one of those ideas that is so good it's terrible. Like raw food diets and colonoscopies, the more people know they should do it, the less anyone wants to.

It seems, in fact, any time anyone uses the phrase "politically correct," they are saying it to disparage someone as insincere.

Part of the problem, ironically enough, is with the phrase itself. No one likes politics and no one wants to be corrected.

According to UrbanDictionary.com, the term "politically correct" means all of the following:

A way that we speak in America so we don't offend whining pussies.

The idealogy of weird left wing liberals who want society to be nothing but accepting of all perverts and freaks everywhere. The main basis is not to offend anyone with one little incorrect word.

A method of controlling and dictating public speech and thought.

A form of censorship practiced by faggots and leftist subversive fucks so they don't have to hear any points of view that they don't agree with.

With the exception of what I can only hope was an intentionally ironic use of the words "pussies" and "faggot," these authors have a point. The idea of political correctness comes from the notion that acceptance is better than rejection and an understanding that language is powerful, but it has had the unfortunate affect of making people afraid to speak at all for fear of offending someone or saying the wrong thing.

But the language of labeling people is not complicated and frought with land mines because of political correctness. It is complicated and frought with land mines because the very act of labeling people is contradictory and troubling. Attempting to corral this language into something positive rather then negative is necessary but nearly impossible to do well.

The point is not, or shouldn't be, to censor language, but to bring it into the public sphere so that our use of it is intentional as opposed to unthinking.

Labeling people as part of one ethnic, religious, or even gender group is complicated. On the one hand, those of us who are part of a group--and we all are--don't necessarily want to shuck our label completely.

We can't embrace our identity if we don't identify it first, so identify we do.

I am woman, hear me roar.

And yet we don't want to be limited by our group membership. We want the benefits only. That's tricky, maybe impossible, and it involves self- rather than social-definition. In other words, if my membership in the group "woman" and the definition of what that means is a choice I have made, then I am in control of my life and my identity. But if it is made for me then it controls me.

He throws like a girl. Don't be a pussy.

Grrrrr.

This is why the LGBT community has reclaimed the word queer and why the black community has embraced nigga as a term of endearment, and it is at the crux of the question of who can say what when.
Unfortunately, when we create an us, we automatically create a them, and nobody wants to be the them. I want to be an insider in my group, but not an outsider to yours. I want you to recognize my femininity, but I don't want to be excluded from any of the benefits associated with being a man. Like higher pay, for instance.

...Though I can happily forgo standing while peeing.

Meanwhile, language is important. It shapes our thoughts at least as much as our thoughts shape it. If we say that something is gay and mean that it is stupid or say that someone is a pussy and mean that they are weak, then we absolutely create a mental connection between homosexuality or femininity and inferiority.

There's a reason we don't use the word "dick" to mean "powerless."

So is it important to be politically correct?

Yes.

And no.

The concern is not whether you offend someone, but whether you communicate with intent. If you understand the power of your language, you can use it wisely and well. If you close your mind to the changes of language, or if you turn away from the question in a bitter refusal to understand what someone is telling you, then you offend everyone--not because you say the wrong word, but because you don't care enough about the words you are saying to be worth listening to.

It's like flying a Confederate flag. You can yell at the top of your lungs that it's about honoring history, not racism, but when the rest of us look at that flag, all we see is hate.

Is that really the best way to honor anything?

If you speak a language no one understands, the quality of your thoughts don't make an impact.

So eat your raw foods, make your doctor's appointment, and for the love of God, watch your language.

(What? Wha'd I say?)

Be Kind, Unwind, or: Treat Others As You Would Have Them Treat Your Mama

2010-10-05T11:09:00.000-04:00

If it's not Arizona passing a law that requires people to carry papers, it's religious "leaders" planning public burnings of the Qur'an.

If it's not an insane celibate trying to spread her "I'm not a witch, I'm a muggle" message, it's an insane blogger/Assistant Attorney General spreading his obsessive hatred of a college student council president who happens to be gay.

And this is to say nothing of that jackass Fred Phelps, who finds it not only acceptable but righteous to picket the funerals of dead soldiers with signs that say "God hates fags" and "Thank God for 9/11."

Bad message, bad graphic design, AND bad fashion.
There's really NO excuse.

What the hell is going on, people?

I realize that not everybody who reads this post is going to agree with me politically or theologically. I'm anti-death penalty, pro-gay marriage, pro-reproductive rights, and pro-polar bear (but aren't we ALL pro-polar bear?).

Me and my Tree. Note the sandals
and hairy legs.

I don't care one way or the other if there is a god, which is really hard for some people to get past...

But I think that I am safe in saying that most of think of ourselves as good people. Whether we're left or right, Christian, Wiccan, Muslim, or Atheist, pro-this or anti-that, most of us want to leave the world a better place--if not for all of humanity, then at least for our own children.

And I believe that the people I've mentioned above feel that they are doing just that (with the possible exception of Christine O'Donnell, who is a nut job). I can take a leap of faith, if you will, and accept that Fred Phelps, or at least his followers, truly believe that it is of vital importance to the betterment of the world that they carry signs that say "God hates you" to a soldier's funeral.

I don't get it, but I'm willing to believe it.

Ditto anti-immigrationists, who truly believe that undocumented immigrants will take all the jobs and all the welfare and leave us, the "real" Americans, with nothing.

I'll even buy that the religious "leaders" who planned the Quran burning believe so strongly that Islam is dangerous that they thought they were doing the right thing.

But this does not excuse their behavior. In fact, it makes it that much scarier.

Plenty of people are speaking out about all of this hate and fear, and it's a great start. But there's also a growing group of people demanding that we respond to the Fred Phelpses and the Andrew Shirvells by refusing to give them air time.

Andrew Shirvell, getting his air time. In the background is
a picture from his blog. As you can see, he's a very
rational man.

The idea is that if we let them talk to Anderson Cooper, it legitimizes their position. Putting them on TV, in short, makes them seem important enough to be on TV. And I get why people don't like that.

But they ARE important enough to be on TV.

We can't assume that turning our attention away from book burners will make them go away. We can't assume that it's OK to let these people--these hatemongers--go on believing that we accept their actions as righteous.

It's true that putting them on TV disseminates their ideas. When Terry Jones received national attention for his "International Burn a Koran Day," copycats popped up all over the country. But the reason they popped up all over the country is partly that they were reacting against the rest of us, the people who were jumping up and speaking out against book burning in general and Islamaphopia in particular.

Just some Nazis, hangin' out, burning books.

When you threaten people's easy assumption that their behavior is righteous, they react. When their "righteousness" is actually based in hate and fear, they react with more hate and more fear. But you also shine a light on them that casts that "righteousness" into doubt. Their behavior becomes more obviously off-putting, less rational-seeming, and more radical in its nature. People who may have seen them as well-meaning, if misguided, see them for what they really are: hateful, dangerous, and unattractive.

I think about the story from Rutgers this week of the boy, Tyler Clementi, who was outed by his roommate and subsequently committed suicide. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, and his friend Molly Wei, are accused of filming Clementi and his date with a webcam and broadcasting the footage on the internet.

This story is, obviously, a tragic one for Tyler Clementi, his family and friends, the gay community, and the rest of us whose heart bleeds for a kid who thought life was never going to get better than freshman year at Rutgers University.

In Memory

But the story is also a tragic one for Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, not just because their lives will never be the same, but also because someone, somewhere, failed them--failed to teach them to reject hate, to question their actions, to be careful with people.

Ravi and Wei might be good kids who got carried away or they might be real assholes, I don't know. But I do know that at some point between the planning and the execution of outing Clementi in that humiliating way, one or the other of them could have been expected to--should have known to--stop and ask themselves, "Are my actions going to hurt someone?"

Anytime any of us act, whether we believe ourselves to be righteous or fair or just funny, we should be asking ourselves, "Is this going to hurt someone?"

It's a simple message that every kindergartner learns, and yet it is the question that the people I've mentioned in this post have failed to ask themselves. It is the question that, all to often, the most righteous among us ignore completely.

And when we broadcast such people and bring their beliefs to light, we highlight that failure. We question, as a society, their righteousness. We must keep doing that. We must question, as publicly as we possibly can, people who believe it is right and good to hurt others.

Because when we let people hurt each other in the name of goodness (or Christ or Allah or Whatever), we let them make the world a worse place--for us, for our children, and for their own children. And we can't have that.

Helvetica, or: This Is Your Brain on Type

2010-09-24T10:26:00.004-04:00

This is Helvetica.

The font, that is. Do you know how often you see this font? More often than you'd think. Here are a few examples:

Helvetica

I know this because I just watched the documentary Helvetica. Which you should see immediately. (Yes, George, this is another homework assignment. Enjoy!)
The thing is, typeface is a huge part of our world--much more so than any of us (except the designers interviewed in the movie) realize. There was a time, not so long ago, that our visual landscape did not include type. Certainly there is more type now than ever before in the history of the world.

Pre-printing press, of course, there was no type. Unless, I suppose, you count Ancient Roman stone carving.

jk. This is the Lincoln Memorial.
Not Helvetica.

The invention of moveable type changed everything. It made books affordable. It gave men an excuse to read Playboy while claiming their interest lay in the articles. It allowed gigantic corporations to lull us into a sense of comfort and trust via the use of a comfortable and trustworthy font.

Helvetica Bold. Because drinking Coke is
pretty much exactly the same as eating fruit.

To hear the graphic designers in Helvetica tell it, Helvetica is either a shining beacon of democracy (everyone can read it, everyone can use it) or a metaphor for capitalism run amok. One woman in the film equated it to Vietnam because, she said, the people who used it supported Vietnam.

That's a lot of weight to put on a font. After all, doesn't WHAT we say matter more than HOW we say it?

Well... I'm not sure. I don't think anyone would know the name Sarah Palin if she weren't attractive, and I am positive that no one would listen to a word she said if she flew a Nazi flag at her rallies instead of an American one.

In fact, I'm not at all sure that most people ARE listening to her. They notice that she's speaking in a font they like--in this case, a font that is red, white, and blue and good at looking slightly victimized while still maintaining a sense of entitlement.

And, in a way, because there is so much type coming at us all the time, we are forced to tune out the fonts we don't like. Yesterday a woman with an IQ of 70 was executed in Virginia. But also, Facebook was down for two and a half hours. There was also flooding somewhere in the middle-ish area of the country, stocks moved around, and the woman down the street from me lost her cat.

Meanwhile, if you happen to live in New York City, this is what might have greeted you during your walk home from work:

OK, so nobody who lives in New York actually goes here. But still. Helvetica.

So, with all of this going on, are you going to wait to hear what someone is actually saying before you decide whether or not to tune it out? Or are you going to rely on the font to tell you what you to pay attention to?

I Heart Emoticons, or: :) :) :) :) :)

2010-09-17T10:19:00.004-04:00

I'm a laggard. New technology comes out and my first thought is always one of two things:

1. Who would ever need THAT?!?!

or

2. This is a sure sign of the end of the world.

In an IQ chart, the people on the right are the smartest ones...

I love the smell of old books. I like pens that write with a thick, inky line and pencils that don't click. When I cut and paste, I use Elmer's. Remember the ad with the cute hipster Mac and the dumpy, besuited PC? After watching it, I wasn't sure if it was an ad for Mac or for Microsoft.

That's how much of a PC I am.

I'd so rather have dinner with PC. He laughs through his nose, but
Mac spent too much on his jeans to take me somewhere nice.

My phone does have a Qwerty keyboard, but as my boyfriend sweetly pointed out, the phone itself is smaller than the screen on his. Also, of course, mine doesn't do anything but call people.

Well, and text.

And text and text and text and text.

Texting is a perfect example of my laggery. When I first heard about this thing called texting, I thought, WTF?

Actually, I thought, "What the fuck?" Because I had no idea what WTF meant. OMG I could've figured out, and of course even I knew LOL, but ROTFL and LMAO were completely beyond me.

But I'm a talker and a writer, so it was inevitable that eventually the adds for Qwerty keyboard phones would pique my interest. And let me tell you, once I started texting, I never looked back.

Even Mac is too hokey for these three Innovators.

Because I'm an English teacher and an editor, people tend to think I'm a language purist. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I adore specificity and intentionality, but I don't care how either is achieved. And while it is true that a writer needs to understand grammar in order to be specific and intentional, it is also true that language is alive. The purpose of grammar is not to give teachers an excuse to use their red pen, but to give us a common ground for understanding each other.

LOL annoys me, but only because it's overused and misapplied. People use it less to describe the act of laughing out loud and more to couch a harsh joke or a comment that is just plain dumb with a veneer of humor.

It's Generation Text's equivalent of "No offense, but..."

"No offense, but I hate your new haircut." "No offense, but your ass looks huge in those jeans."

No offense, K Dash, but you look insane. lol!

But as we rely more and more on informal writing to communicate our deepest feelings and desires, it's inevitable that we will use shortcuts of some kind. Many think that these shortcuts are having deleterious affects on society in general and language in particular.

That may be true. Right now, though, we're in the midst of what one writer calls a "sea change," and social scientists are hard pressed to agree upon how to study the effects of this change, let alone the effects themselves, so I feel somewhat justified in having an opinion that is not based on anything more scientific than my observation of my own and my friends' behaviors.

And my friends use emoticons and initialisms the same way they use those hefty, traditional things called words: Creatively. Funly, even.

My sister insists that because I am a writer and my friends are writers, I facebook, text, and email in a different and more creative way than most people do. Perhaps she is right. But I maintain that being funny, clever, or flirty in 120 characters (or so) is hard to do, and that doing it well requires both specificity and intentionality.

Or maybe I'm overly optimistic.

But my keyboard doesn't think so. :)

UPDATE: Use initialisms with caution. My aunt famously started sending us all text messages when my mom was sick a few years back that all ended with "lol." One example: "Hope your mom is feeling better. LOL!"

Turns out, she believed it stood for "lots of love."

Um, not exactly.

:) <3

The Internet and the Malcontent, or: Step Away From the Keyboard

2010-09-09T21:02:00.000-04:00

Next week my students will be reading an essay called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The basic premise of the essay is that reading online is causing us all to have a harder time focusing on long, complex pieces of writing.

Internet reading, with its hyperlinks, graphics, and tendency toward blurbiness, is very different from book reading, which requires extended focus. People tend to spend very little time on any one given site--far, far less than is required to read, say, War and Peace.

According to Nicholas Carr, the author of the essay, it may even turn out that internet reading is so different from book reading that it is actually changing the way our brains work.

I've had a tendency over the past years to be skeptical of technology. And that's been only in part because I can't afford the really fun stuff. iPods? Screw that! I want the tactile enjoyment of a cassette tape. Texting? Pi-shaw! I want to reach out and touch someone!


Anyone can make an iTunes playlist. A mix tape is true love.

And I believed, absolutely, that the internet was screwing with our heads. That our writing, our reading, and our attention spans were all suffering from over-stimulation and under-comprehension.

But recently I've come to a slightly different understanding of the internet and it's inevitable influence on our brains and our lives. Which is, in a nutshell, this: The internet is neither good nor bad. It is a tool. Like any tool, you can hone it, use it, master it. Or you can use it once to dig one hole, then leave it lying around rusting for days until you step on it and it whaps you in the face.

Or you can be a total boob and let someone sneak up behind you.

The point is, the internet is here. We write more as a result, but what we write is more informal--texts, facebook status updates, quick emails to say we'll be late for dinner. We also read more--all those texts, for instance.

Inevitably, with all this informal writing and reading going on, the percentage that is scholarly is going to drop. But writing can be complex without being scholarly, and the internet has the added complication of being interactive. Granted, not everyone who comments on news articles does so in an educated fashion, but there are plenty of examples of people sharing thoughtful critiques.

As a writing teacher and a writer, the piece that interests me the most is not actually the way our reading is changing, but the way our writing has to change as a result. I don't believe that War and Peace would be published today. Ditto Anna Karenina. Charles Dickens, if he were writing now, could keep the irony and the social consciousness, but he'd have to lose 50-75% of his words.

WTF?!? No pictures? No color? I can't read this!

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Limiting the length of your writing forces you to be more specific and more deliberate. Complexity of ideas is wonderful; complexity of writing is often just a fancy word for lack of clarity.

I always have at least one student in every class who asks if they are allowed to hand in a paper that is longer than my 5-7 page range. And I always tell them the same thing: No.

Of course, that's partly because I don't want to read any more pages than I have to. But that's exactly my point: Nobody else does, either.

The Common Knowledge Question, or: Wiki Liki Hi Miki Heiny Ho

2010-09-02T11:28:00.001-04:00

You can just see the top of my head behind all these
noisy men. They wouldn't let me get a word in
edgewise. Assholes.

Having immersed myself for days in the construction of a new, improved syllabus, I emerge victorious from my computer cubby (I have yet to graduate to the coveted "cubicle"), wafting wads of paper and the scent of stale coffee in my wake.

And with the words of scholars, both wise and idiotic, floating around in my head.

In keeping with my own personal thought processes of late, I am starting my semester with a unit on technology, thinking, and social change. Specifically, we'll be talking about how the internet is changing the institution of education (Well, I'll be talking about it. God knows what my students will be doing). To that end, I've assigned my students the Marshall Poe essay "The Hive," which is both a history of Wikipedia and a reflection on its social ramifications.

Poe's essay is fascinating, and if you haven't read it, you should. It's not really possible to understand what Wikipedia is without understanding a little bit about its philosophy and its programming. And understanding Wikipedia is today what understanding the Civil War was during the height of the Civil Rights movement--i.e. very fraking necessary, and mostly misunderstood.

However, there's no way I can say it better than Poe does, so I won't try to. Instead, I will offer you this link to the essay and urge you to head over and read it.

The piece of the essay that is most relevant to me as a teacher is Poe's discussion of authorship and ownership of Wikipedia pages. He says, "on Wikipedia, contributors own all of the pages collectively, and each can edit nearly every page" [emphasis his].

Let's put it to a vote, shall we?

Now, anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. You can go on right now and add "Goddess of Light" or "Unrepentant Whore" to Lady Gaga's page. As Poe points out, such additions will quickly be deleted, but if you happen to know a lot about a topic, you really can go on and make legitimate changes that will most likely be kept. You can also join the "discussion" that exists on every article and become part of the vetting process for the contributions of others.

As of 2006, when Poe wrote his essay (4 years being, in WikiWorld, a lifetime and literally hundreds of thousands of articles ago), Wiki had "65,000 Wikipedians--registered users who had made at least ten edits since joining," and an untold number of other "authors."

Remember that dratted New York Times article that started my obsession with plagiarism and students? It mentioned a student who had to be "reprimanded" for failing to cite a Wikipedia article. The student, the article snarkily suggests, was basically too ignorant to realize that Wikipedia, "unsigned and collectively written," does not count as "common knowledge" and therefore needs a citation.

But according to Poe, the student was right. If Wikipedia articles are indeed owned by all contributors, and anyone can become a contributor, then, really, Wikipedia is the definition of common knowledge.

Now, if the student in question went on Wikipedia and copy/pasted a section of the article into his paper, then perhaps, yes, he should have cited his source. Of course, if a student is copy/pasting articles from an open encyclopedia into his college paper, then his professor should be failing him on the grounds that he isn't writing a college-level paper, not on the grounds that he stole his encyclopedic reference.

Me, to my students.

My point is that what we understand as "authorship" and "ownership" of information is dated. We're fossils. God, I'm almost 30. The first time I went on the internet, I was practically grown. AOL was king, every minute cost money, and the only thing you could really "do" on there was find a chat room and wait to be hit on by an old perv. My students are at least ten years younger than I am, which is, like, a thousand in internet years.

And age is only part of the divide. Plenty of young whipper-snappers are barely internet literate, and lots and lots of doddering old people are much more savvy than I.

The "digital divide" is another hot educational topic, and it's a very real problem. It's the equivalent of having a classroom half populated by students who can't read and half populated by students with a PhD in literature. And half the people in each group only speak Mandarin. It's worse, really, because at least I know what reading is and can point definitively to a person and say, "yes, this person can read."

The internet, on the other hand, is a place where the very definition of "reading," of "truth," and of "ownership" is under constant debate and in constant flux.

Poe has this to say about the subject:

"Can we all agree on what an apple is, exactly, or the shades of the color green? Not easily. The wiki offered a way for people to actually decide in common. On Wikipedia, an apple is what the contributors say it is right now. You can try to change the definition by throwing in your own two cents, but the community--the voices actually negotiating and renegotiating the definition--decides in the end....

"The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is "true." We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars--we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth....

"The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn't likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability."

Apple

apple

The idea that the definition of "apple" is open for constant renegotiation is interesting enough, but more important, I think, is Poe's use of the word "community." He should almost be capitalizing it, and I wonder if he considered doing so.

"Community" as Poe imagines it is greater than the sum of its parts. There are people who make up the community, but then there is The Community, a force that is unified despite the total lack of unity among the participants.

And in WikiWorld, it is a force to be reckoned with. Poe says that at one point Wikipedia's owner, Jimmy Wales, considered selling ad space on the site, but "the community was now set against any commercialization."

Wow.

So who owns the words on Wikipedia? The Community? And if, indeed, it is The Community, is it also the community? Can I go on Wikipedia, learn something, use it in my paper, and treat it as "mine?"

Or if I do cite my definition of "apple" as having come from Wikipedia, what do I do tomorrow when the definition changes?

I have no answers, and this post is getting too long, so I'll stop here. But I am bursting to know what you think about all this. What is common knowledge, and how do we deal with this thing, The Community, that we have all helped to create?

Let's Take a Short Recess

2010-08-25T20:41:00.000-04:00

Not this kind of vacation...

Dear Lovely, Wonderful, Delicious Reader,

Organizational skills are my Achilles' heel. Well, that and calculus. And... addition.

But I digress.

The point is, school starts in less than a week and this time I am determined to be well organized and fully functional as of the first day. All the bugs must be worked out of Professor Offenhauer, version 2.0.

All of which is to say that I miss my blog. I miss reading your blog. I miss the flurry of commenting and re-commenting that ensues after all the reading has happened.

I don't know how long it takes other people to write a blog post, but it takes me about three to four hours. Then there's all the reading and flurrying that has to happen because I love you all so much and want to read every syllable you post.

So I'm taking a vacation from my favorite job (blogging) to focus on my other favorite job (teaching). I'll be back in about a week and a half...

In the meantime, when you think of me, think of me with fondness. I'll be thinking of you.

Plagiarism On Campus, Part 2, or: An Argument Against Argument

2010-08-23T11:36:00.000-04:00

I've spent the morning reading the essays that are new to this year's edition of our English I textbook and wondering how on earth I am going to change my syllabus to create a more effective learning environment for my students.

Or at least cut down on the number of eye rolls per 90 minute class period.

My favorite of these new essays is called "What's So Bad about Hate?" It was written by an openly gay essayist named Andrew Sullivan and published in 1999. In it, he reflects on the nature of hate and asks several intriguing questions: How do you deem one murder more hate filled than another, and how does the label of one as a "hate crime" benefit our society? Does it, in fact, hurt the victim more to imply that the perpetrator of the hate crime has more power over us than does the average violent criminal?

He writes, "For hate is only foiled not when the haters are punished but when the hated are immune to the bigot's power. A hater cannot psychologically wound if a victim cannot psychologically be wounded. And that immunity to hurt can never be given; it can merely be achieved."

This is a stunningly complex essay, beautifully written and subtly argued (in fact, it is listed as "reflection" by the editors of the textbook). Sullivan clearly has an opinion--an educated one--about hate crime and the role it plays in our society, yet he leaves room for debate, room for continued conversation. He doesn't seem to feel that his words ought to be that last or even most important on the subject.

In building his argument (or reflection, depending on how you look at it), Sullivan quotes many primary sources such as news stories, FBI statistics on violent crimes, and even gives a short history of the use of the phrase "hate crime" in the media.

But his essay is not, itself, a primary source of information. It is an opinion piece, and it is full of assumptions that are not the central argument itself but that form a foundation upon which he builds his central argument. For instance, he says, "To be sure, we have made much progress. Anyone who argues that America is as inhospitable to minorities and women today as it has been in the past has not read much history."

The problem is, my students haven't read much history. What little they have read has probably not been focused on the social history of women and minorities in America. My students will either accept Sullivan's assumption as fact ("Yes, we have made obvious progress") or they will reject it as false ("No, we haven't made progress"). Either reaction will be knee-jerk and based almost solely on their own personal life story.

And that's fine, as far as it goes. We all have to start somewhere, and we almost all start with ourselves. When we grow up enough to realize that there is a world beyond our tiny sphere of experience, we enter into academic and social conversations before we know much about anything at all.

After all, conversations about gender and civil equality have been going on since, well...forever, possibly. In this country alone the conversations are hundreds of years old. I don't expect my students to be experts on everything that has ever been said on the subject of civil rights before they offer the first opinion.

Academic argumentation is basically a game of double dutch. If you want to play, you have to jump in and trip on the rope a few times.

But I'm starting to wonder: Why is it that, as a teacher of English composition (i.e. academic argumentation), I am asking my students to whittle their opinions down to one thesis, stated in absolute terms, and to then argue it to within an inch of it's life?

Most of my students, if asked to write an essay in response to Sullivan's argument about hate crimes, will say something like the following:

"Sometimes it is good to distinguish hate crimes as different from other violent crimes, and sometimes it is bad."

Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that the above sentence is brilliant and interesting. However, it isn't wrong, either. And I, for one, am starting to question the validity of asking my students to come down on one side or the other.

Why is it that my role as a teacher is reduced to asking my students to form an opinion on a topic about which they can know very little? Why am I encouraging argumentation over nuance, reflection, and thoughtfulness?

Why am I asking them to slap their thesis statement at the beginning of the essay, when that clearly encourages them to form their opinion first and research it later, if at all?

Less shouting...More Thinking

The media becomes a more omnipresent force in our lives with every passing day, and most of what we are faced with is an ad for something--either a literal product or a "brand" like Justin Bieber or Sarah Palin.

If I ask my students to start the semester by writing an air-tight argument, I am asking them to become part of the noise without asking them to first understand the noise.

This strikes me as counter-productive to education, to say the least. Furthermore, I think that, as a teaching strategy, it begs students to plagiarize. After all, what can they say about hate crimes that hasn't been said before if I don't first teach them how to learn about hate crimes before they form an opinion?

My students first need to understand how to read a piece like "What's So Bad about Hate?" They need figure out where the facts are, and where the opinion comes in. What the argument is and how Sullivan is building it. They need to know something about the conversation(s) it comes out of, a little bit of the history of hate crimes in our country.

I'm not sure how to end this post because I still don't know what it is that I should do, as a teacher, to facilitate this process. I'm not even sure I'm saying anything worth saying, because I'm sure that all of my education instructors would agree with everything I've said here. And yet, my experience with the practice of teaching writing is that we teach our students that their argument is the most important piece of the learning experience--forming it, articulating it, defending it.

And I no longer want to approach it that way.

So tell me, please, what is your experience with academic writing--either learning it or teaching it?

I am all ears.

Word of the Week, or: Putting the Hoop in the Hoop-da-la

2010-08-19T09:42:00.000-04:00

Hoop-da-la!

As I believe I've mentioned before (maybe just a time or two), I love words. I love the way they sound, the way they feel, the way they define the things around me.

Ball! lamp! jar! marble! How satisfying it is to point your finger at a thing and name it.

And, conversely, how utterly debilitating it is when you can't find the name for the thing. When you point to it, think about it, see it, but can't reach far enough into the recesses of your mind to unearth the set of consonants and vowels that will put a label on that thing and mark it as your intellectual property.

Before you have a name for a thing, you cannot even see it properly.

But worse than having no name for something is having the wrong name for something. A name that is close to but not quite entirely the right name. If you call a bagel "bread" or you call Carvel a "cake," you miss the point entirely and end up shortchanging the thing in question. It gets catalogued in the wrong place in your brain and you lose out on the genius of boiled bread dough and ice cream with birthday candles in it.

This is SO much more than cake...

Fortunately, when we can't find a word for something, it is sometimes possible to create one. We, as a society, are embracers of words and lovers of language trends. There are so many word trends that whole chunks of our virtual landscape are dedicated to sites like UrbanDictionary.com and SlangSite.com. We've been so quick to adopt Twitter into our language landscape that we all understand what it is to Tweet our Twits on our Twatter--even if we don't actually know how to Tweet our Twits or even have a Twatter account.

In short, when we can't find or remember the right word for something, we often make one up.

All of which is the longest prequel in the world for this week's

Word of the Week

Hoop-da-la

This dog understands hoop-da-la, and he doesn't
even SPEAK.

This glorious word came into my life several years ago via a friend's Indian co-worker. My friend presented him with a gift for his new baby girl, and the box was wrapped with an abundance of pretty, shiny bows.

Sameer, her friend, took one look at it, grinned from ear to ear, and said, "Ah! I'm loving all the hoop-da-la!" Then he did a little dance of joy, opened the box, and became even more ecstatic when he saw that it contained a beautiful (and tiny) red velvet dress.

A little dance of joy

Talk about hoop-da-la!

He meant "hoopla," I think, but I am so fully in favor of the extra syllable that I'm not sure I can fully express my love for it in the space of this one blog post. "Hoopla" is too often preempted by the snarky, bitter people among us, and it's lost it's joy as a result.

"What's with all this hoopla?" is what you say when you walk into a room full of toddlers jumping on the bed or politicians pretending to be busy. "Hoopla" implies frenzied movement with no purpose. "Hoop-da-la," on the other hand, suggests fun for the sake of fun. A little celebration of whatever just because. A short dance of joy, a bundle of pretty ribbons, a tiny red velvet dress.

Really, what's wrong with a little bed jumping? Could this
kid be happier? Hoop-da-la!

And so, blogger friends, in honor of this fabulous word, I ask a small favor of you: As you go about your day, keep your eyes open for one thing that makes you smile, that is fun just for the sake of fun, point to it, and say, "Ah! A little hoop-da-la!"

Then come back here and tell us what it was.

UPDATE: After writing this post, I googled "hoop-da-la" just to be sure it means what I think it means. Wouldn't you know, it cropped up all over the place. And here I thought Sameer had invented it. But, as with "hoopla," it was being used sarcastically. Don't let this happen to this fabulous word! Reclaim the language!

Why Judge Walker is Right, or: Straight Men Can't Dance

2010-08-18T11:36:00.002-04:00

I saw the above picture in an article about Prop 8 and I just couldn't help myself from writing a blog post about it, despite the fact that I try not to get political on here.

No, it's not the bizarre midriff-bearing banner being worn by the man in the picture that strikes my notice (though it's odd, to be sure). It's the black and white poster, "A moral wrong cannot be a civil right" that makes me go "huh?"

Because this is exactly at the crux of this issue, isn't it?

Many people believe that homosexuality is immoral. I don't happen to agree with them, but they have every right to feel that way. They also have every right to stand on the courthouse steps and scream it at the top of their lungs, if they feel so inclined. They are free to attend a church that refuses to marry a homosexual couple, or to boycott a business owned by gay people.

Just like I have every right to boycott their business and refuse to attend their church.

I bet this guy can't dance. And I consider THAT morally wrong.

See, that's what separation of church and state means. It means that the state (or government) can't constitutionally write a law based on morality or religion.

Forgive me if I'm saying something that seems flagrantly obvious and not worth repeating, but I can't help but think that we are losing sight of what that phrase means and why it is so important that we hold to it with everything we've got.

It is hard to see outside of our own lives--It's hard for everyone, no matter how liberal or open minded we believe ourselves to be. When a law or a practice matches our own moral understanding of the world, it can be very difficult to see that the law or practice is culturally specific. It feels like a moral absolute. The way life is and should be. We don't question it simply because it doesn't occur to us to question it.

One man is protesting for gay marriage, one man against.
Both would benefit from a light dusting of foundation.

There are laws that seem as though they are based on morality. Murder, rape, and theft are all illegal and all, most of us would agree, are morally wrong. However, the reason that these things are illegal is not because they are immoral, but because they rob someone else of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So, murder is not illegal because God doesn't approve of it, or even because the majority of the people don't approve of it, but because it infringes upon the rights of the murdered person.

Why is that important? Again, forgive me if this is painfully obvious, but the reason that it's important is that my morals (my religion, my beliefs, my theology) don't have to be the same as yours. In other words, as far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned, there are no moral absolutes.

You don't have the right to be protected from moral outrage. You don't have the right to go through life without being offended.

Therefore, in order for gay marriage, or any other marriage (including a marriage among five people), or any lifestyle at all, to be constitutionally banned, it has to infringe upon the rights of other people.

This is what Judge Walker was saying when he wrote, "Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license." The "rational basis" would be proof that gay marriage infringes upon the rights of others.

There are many, many times when a moral wrong IS a civil right. Why? Because there are no moral absolutes. Not as far as the state is concerned, at least. The state does not deal in morality. And it shouldn't.

I for one am morally outraged by this picture. What
gives these women the right to accessorize a wedding
gown with a black leather bag and a pair of Birkenstocks?!?!

So if you happen to believe that gay marriage is immoral, well... too bad. It doesn't in any quantifiable way affect your rights, and so you can rail against it all you want, but legally speaking you don't have a leg to stand on.

More importantly, if you value your own rights, you should be standing right next to the lesbians in matching wedding gowns (whether or not they are appropriately accessorized) and offer your support for their marriage at the top of your lungs.

Because someday it'll be you who wants something that the majority of people consider morally wrong. And you know what? That'll just be too damn bad for them.

Something Different This Way Comes

2010-08-16T11:04:00.001-04:00

I have been thinking a lot for the past few days about the importance of trying new things. And especially the importance of trying new things that are scary. The beginning of the school year always brings this out in me, more so now that I'm the teacher instead of the student. Teaching scares me tons more than studenting does, but I also find it much more worth doing, and that's not just because I get paid to do it.

One thing that so impresses me with the people I have "met" through this blog is that they (you) are so brave and so willing to try something that is, by almost any definition, terrifying. In a word: blogging. Putting your ideas out there, holding them up to the light to see if their roots will take or if they will just wither and die in the heat

Everything worth doing is scary, I think. Well, everything except reading. And even reading is scary, sometimes. That's why great books get banned. People are afraid of the ideas within.

Anyway, the point is, a lot of the blogs I read are written by people who are doing something new and scary in addition to blogging. Like Mary A, author of The Gift of Fat, who has embarked on some sort of insane workout mission that has already landed her, red-faced and panting, on television (Sister, I feel you. I can't walk two blocks without turning into a sweaty tomato). Or Chris Wible, whose blog, In Between Goodbyes, details her experiences with self-publishing her first novel. Self-promotion is not for the faint of heart, people. My blogger friend Charles Emerson III writes, among many other things, about his twelve steps and the often embarrassing and generally uncool (though always completely hilarious) things he did before he got clean. If that's not brave, I don't know what is.

Wonder Women (and men) unite!

There are a million more of you out there, blogging about your goals, your fears, your flaws, your penchant for verbal (and sometimes literal) diarrhea. And it's inspiring.

So, because the school year is fast approaching and I have a syllabus to write, and because I have some (yea!) editing jobs to do, and because I'm a single mom with a toddler, and am just swimming with free time as a result of all of these things, I've decided that it's time to embark on one more project:

The Do Something That Scares The Crap Out of Me Project

I think of this as more stupid than scary, but you get the point.

Here are a few things that I'd like to do that scare the crap out of me:

Write a book. Yikes! what if I pour my heart into it and then nobody cares?
Learn a language. Probably Spanish, which I think is beautiful. This scares the crap out of me because I hate hate hate speaking when I'm unsure of pronunciation or vocabulary. That's why I took Latin in high school.
Take a dance class. Something like tap or ballet. Picture me in a black leotard with pink tights, standing heads above the rest of the students, who are all five.

Me in my dreams...

...And a little closer to reality.

One thing that is amazing about embarking on a new and scary project is how quickly it becomes the home you run to when other, newer things scare you more.

This blog is like that for me. I'd rather write a new post than try to write a chapter of a book or appear in public in a pair of tap shoes. This feels familiar, that feels terrifying.

But that just means it's time to push myself a little more, so I'll be blogging a little bit less (Still twice a week at least. I know, you're breathing a huge sigh of relief that you won't be completely without my glowing wisdomosity.) and doing one of the above New Things That Scare The Crap Out of Me.

Oh, and parenting. Lots and lots of parenting...

As for sleep? Whatever. I'll do that when I'm old.

So here's what I'd like from you today: First, tell me which of the above scary things I should do (or add a new one). Second, tell me what YOU do, or want to do, that scares the crap out of you.

Word of the Week, or: An Exercise in Bloggerbation

2010-08-12T11:44:00.001-04:00

Yeah, but bloggerbating is really satisfying...

I love blog terms. "Blog," of course, is itself a blog term, and I find this delightfully fitting given that the blogging world is so self-referential and incestuous. In a good way.

Are there blogs that break out of the blogosphere and find themselves posted on hundreds of facebook profiles and discussed at the water cooler? Sure. Maureen Dowd's is a good example (I really need to start reading something other than the NYTimes). But then, bloggers who blog on the sites of major media outlets aren't really bloggers. They're columnists.

So, for the most part, bloggers are usually talking to other bloggers or people who read a lot of blogs, and we're often talking about...blogging. Even when the topic of our posts isn't specifically "blogging," we do a lot of what, in acting, is called "breaking the fourth wall." That's where we look at the camera, so to speak, and say, "Sorry this post is so long and rambling" or "Please follow me!"

Which leads me to my new favorite blogging term, and our

Word of the Week

Bloggerbation

I have a lot of respect for UrbanDictionary.com, and they are usually always right. For instance, they define "Alexa" as "AH-MAZINNGGG" and offer the following example for using me in a sentence:

"dude#1: wow that girl is SUCH an alexa!

dude#2: tootally!"

With insight like that, who would question them?

But there is one word about which I beg to differ, or at least offer an alternate definition, and that is why "bloggerbation" is the Word of the Week.

Here's what Urban Dictionary has to say:

Bloggerbation

A compulsion to gratify one's ego and/or OCD need for attention by daily, or incessant, blogging. This blogging is often emphatic ranting about nothing of real substance, or, sad attempts to be writer while expressing their "feelings", or, about astonishingly boring trivial matters. This is not be confused with normal, healthy blogging which doesn't insist on having a captive, and often twitchingly unwilling, audience.

"I used to subscribe to his MySpace blog, but I got sick of his constant bloggerbation!"

"You shouldn't piss her off, you'll just set her off on a dramatic tirade and a good hard round of bloggerbation."

Really? Then maybe your time would
be better spent bloggerbating.

Ok, granted, there are bloggers who fit this description. However, I submit to you that there is nothing wrong with blogging daily, or even incessantly (I don't consider the two to be synonymous), even if you have no readers.

Personally, I blog because I have a need for attention and I insist on having a captive audience (is there a way for me to make unwilling people read and comment? Because I'll totally do it).

I am crazy, stupidly happy that I have 55 followers, which is a solid 50 more than I ever expected, but I'd be bloggerbating my way through my days even if I had to log on and write comments to myself under an assumed identity (don't think I didn't consider doing that in the early days of this blog, because I did).

I bloggerbate while imagining Marlon Brando
as my audience.

Meanwhile, I have several friends who blog because it helps them keep to a writing deadline. My friend Liz (yes, of Montreal fame) is writing a blogel, or a blog novel. She's posting a chapter a day (that's a lot of writing, folks) and at the end of every chapter, her readers get to vote on what will happen next.

She's only been doing it for a week and a half, so I consider her 8 followers to be a respectable number, but a chapter a day is a LOT of words for five or six votes a day and a handful of comments. Is she bloggerbating? Yeah, kinda. She doesn't troll the blogosphere for other similar blogs and comment in order to get word out that she's among us. She just writes. But you know what? In a week and a half, she's finished a first draft on EIGHT chapters of her novel.

She is certainly not the only one out there who posts regularly without expecting or getting much in the way of a response. Most of us are fiends for followers, but some writers (arguably less annoying and self-serving writers) are doing it because blogging is writing, and writing regularly makes them better writers.

So I submit to you alternate definition #1:

Bloggerbation:

2. The continued and regular posting of entries for one's own gratification, self-growth, and discipline, without expectation of or need for audience accumulation.

In my opinion, some of the best blogs fit this definition. After all, writing for yourself (or the imaginary audience in your head) is how we all get started.

There's nothing wrong with using your blog as a journal. Granted, if you don't put any energy into thinking about your audience, you may not gain a lot of followers. But if you want to write a post describing the exact color of your toenails, and that makes you feel good, I say go for it. Blogging is different from journaling because it IS published. It gives otherwise-unpublished writers the ability to become "published" in a way that, I think, does our writing good.

When I started, I continuously forgot to spell-check before posting (and I'm an editor), I didn't post any pictures, and I wasn't great about commenting on my comments. Now I'm a better writer. My posts are more cohesive, my voice is more confident. I've been stalking some of my favorite bloggers and reading their first posts, and I find that this is true across the board--whether someone has 1000 followers or 2.

One day, this could be YOU.

Do I bloggerbate? Sure, sometimes. My Mom says it'll make me go blind, but I've yet to see evidence of this.

So, do you bloggerbate? If so, does it worry you? Do you think you'll grow out of it? Do you think that writing your blog makes you a better, more disciplined writer, with or without an audience?

You Are What You Buy, or: Who You Calling a Junkie?

2010-08-11T11:08:00.001-04:00

Is this how you want to be defined?

I'm no economist. In fact, when it comes to the subject of money, I'm pretty much at a loss. But I have enough sense to know that if our economy relies on people spending money they don't have to buy crap they don't need, then we're in big trouble.

So when the media starts to talk about "jobless recovery" and the stocks rebound because spending is up, my ass starts to twitch and my lip curls into a sneer.

That's why I'm very happy that my cousin posted "But Will It Make You Happy?" on her facebook profile, because I'm very busy with super important things (like catching up on True Blood episodes) and never would have found it otherwise.

It's a longish article. In it, Stephanie Rosenbloom makes several important points, but the one that I take away from it is this: If you want to be happy, spend your money on experiences instead of stuff.

The first time I was introduced to this concept, I was in Montreal with my bff Liz (Sorry, Tara. One of my bffs). It was January and we were freezing. No, I mean freezing. It felt like the wind was tearing at my flesh and stripping my bones.

A whole lotta what we didn't have.

But in order to hang out inside, we pretty much had to spend money, and we didn't have any. We couldn't go back to the hostel to hang out because, well... it was a hostel. And we had an insane Japanese roommate who thought it was adorable when she woke up screaming her head off in the middle of the night. Which she did. Multiple times.

Now, as a rule, neither Liz nor I hesitates to spend money on food or drink, so we were happy to sit in pubs and restaurants and get toasty warm. But as I said, we were broke, and there's only so long the bartender will let you sit at the bar after you've finished your beer...like, they tend to draw the line at three hours. Even if you are adorable college girls.

Our final night there was one of the longest and strangest of my life and included the following experiences:

Carrying all of our luggage with us because we'd run out of patience with our noisy roommate and checked out of the hostel early.
Watching a French movie about a Canadian girl who freezes to death (i.e. a biography of our trip).
Eating pink chicken.
Getting food poisoning.
Sleeping off the food poisoning in the cathedral where Celine Dion got hitched.
Oversleeping in said cathedral and almost missing our train home.
Throwing the last of our cash at the cab driver who got us to the train on time.
Suffering the ride home with zero dollars, zero food, queasy bellies, and frostbite.

Ok, not frostbite. But the rest is true.

Can you think of a more appropriate place for Celine
Dion to get married? It's like Rainbow Brite threw up
in there. Which, actually, she (I) did...

Neither of us bought any souvenirs on the trip. I remember taking hundreds of pictures, but for some reason I don't actually have any. I meant to keep a travel log but only wrote half a page. And the trip itself wasn't even that fun. I mean, it was, but only because Lizzie makes everything fun and knew we would laugh about it one day. One day many, many years later.

But now (many, many years later) I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. If we'd spent our money on stuff, perhaps we would have had a couch in our apartment at school that year. But who needs a couch when you have a perfectly good floor and a friend who'll sit on it with you, eating Ramen noodles and watching Late World with Zach?

As an added benefit, if you spend your money (money you actually have, not money you're borrowing) on experiences instead of stuff, you become part of the anti-consumer movement. You make a stand against an ideology that is unsustainable both economically and ecologically, and you force the top 1% to rethink the way they do things.

In the article, Rosenbloom describes a woman who pares her personal belongings down to 100 individual items. Does that seem doable to you? Or even desirable? What are some of the things that you don't actually need or use but would have a hard time parting with?

Please let me know what you think!

Stuff? Or junk? You decide. And then tell me...

Stinky Poo School Uniforms, or: I Wanna Be Different...Like All the Other Different People

2010-08-10T11:31:00.001-04:00

Let's start with a little blog business:

First, I'd like to say thank you for the comments you write. I have smart, thoughtful readers and I am crazy in love with all of you. Knowing that I'm writing to you makes me a better thinker and a much better writer. So thanks! And if you're reading but not commenting, please do! I would LOVE to know what you think.

Second, my last two posts have been about the changing nature of teaching writing in an increasingly digital world. I will come back to this topic, I promise, but I've been wandering about, lost and confused, in a "post modern rabbit hole" (love that phrase, Mae!) and I need a breather. So today will be a little different (but still about schools because I'm preoccupied with the upcoming school year...):

I hate school uniforms. So much so that I am going to add my opinion to the cacophony of noise regarding the issue, despite the fact that there is surely nothing new to say.

First of all, for those of you not in the loop as far as public school is concerned, uniforms and strict dress codes are trending upward and have been for awhile. Part of the reason for this is the insidious problem of gangs in schools, which is increasing at a troubling rate and which, so far, appears to be as difficult to handle in rural and suburban America as it is in urban areas.

Certainly this is a very real issue, and one I am in no way qualified to spout off about. Except to say this: expecting school uniforms to ease a gang problem is like expecting abstinence-only sex ed to stop kids from having sex. It just isn't going to work.

Having said that, of course there are certain dress codes that can and should be in place in schools. No child needs to show up at school looking like this:

The ever-classy Tila Tequila

Unfortunately, if you don't stop them, plenty of teenage girls will wear this to school. And I'm certainly not suggesting that it's a good idea to let them.

However, as inappropriately sexy as the above outfit is, I'm not sure that school uniforms are necessarily any less alluring...

Sweet? Or something else entirely?

The sad fact is that we, prudish Americans that we are, have managed to fetishize innocence, naivete, and purity, and nothing is more fetishized than a girl in a conservative little uniform.

Certainly, there are very a-sexual school uniforms. But I put it to you: would you want to spend every day looking like this?

If there's anything I dislike more than a fetishized
school girl outfit, it's girls being forced to wear men's
clothes... Blech.

Have we as teachers, parents, and administrators really become so out of touch with what kids do that we really think that forcing them into the above polyester numbers will prevent them from forming cliques, identifying the rich kids, or picking on the geeks?

This is one of the most-cited reasons given by the pro-uniform camp, and I think it is also the silliest.

The fact is, human beings are born to categorize and label. It's a survival tool and it's built into our DNA. We can understand the difference between edible and poisonous berries, between an angry lion and a passive kitty, and between a cool kid and an uncool nerd. No amount of forced conformity is going to change that.

Remember the gel bracelet story? Supposedly these bracelets were worn by girls to signify which sex acts they were willing to perform--different colors for different acts.

Whether or not this is true seems to be up for debate. According to an Ask.com article, some middle schoolers (this is, sadly, where the trend and rumor originated) claim it is true, others reply with "hoots of derision" when asked to verify this trend.

In other words, adults have absolutely no idea if this rumor is true and no real way of finding out. The reality is that even elementary school children have social lives that their parents are not privy to. Talking to your kids, asking questions, paying attention--these are good parenting skills.

Banning gel bracelets on the strength of a rumor, thereby making it national news, giving credence to the idea, and causing the trend to spread exponentially? Not so bright.

The point is, you can't legislate conformity. Not successfully. Kids especially will come up with more complex, secretive codes in response, and adults will be left scrambling behind, frantically adding page after page to the dress code until it is twenty pages long and teachers spend more time enforcing it than teaching.

We've taken away art classes, music, band, clubs, home ec, shop, and a million other outlets for creative teen expression because they cost too much and they aren't "necessary" subjects.

For heaven's sake, these kids only get one chance at childhood. By all means, let's figure out how to prevent our twelve-year-olds from being hyper-sexed (here's a hint: turn off the TV), but let them be kids. Let them dye their hair pink, let them wear (gasp!) baggy pants, let them draw on their shoes.

It has to be better than policing whether or not a student has three buttons or five on their polo shirt.

And yes, that is a real-life example of dress code insanity run amok.

This image came up when I searched "conformity."
I couldn't resist.

In the interest of not rambling on for ten pages, I've only given a few of my anti-uniform opinions. Please comment with some of your ideas... Whether you agree with me or not, I'd love to know what you think...

What Is "Common Knowledge," Anyway? or: Everybody Knows That, Stupid.

2010-08-09T16:46:00.000-04:00

These fetch big money in antique stores these days...
Or they will, if we ever run short of timber for firewood.

Last week I defended students against the claim that they are "The Plagiarism Generation." I promised a follow-up post on my brilliant plan for fixing this problem.

Four hours and a massive bowl of homemade macaroni-and-cheese later, I have ten pages of junk ideas and a stomach ache.

It turns out that I have far more questions than answers, so the official "Part 2" will have to wait (possibly for months, maybe years) until I am a smarter, more well-informed writing teacher. In the meantime, here's what I have on the topic of "common knowledge."

(Oh, and for the record, it only took me three and a half hours of writing this post before I realized that the New York Times article that inspired this whole mess is itself a blog and is entirely lacking in scholarly citations...)

It isn't plagiarizing if you fail to cite information that is considered "common knowledge." In fact, you aren't generally allowed to cite an encyclopedia because its contents are, by definition, considered common knowledge. But what IS "common knowledge?"

This was a concept I, as a student, had a hard time with in 1995, and that was long before Wikipedia and Google took the world by storm.

In fact, the New York Times article [blog] that inspired me to write about students and plagiarism mentions a professor whose student claims that Wikipedia doesn't need to be cited because it contains "common knowledge." The point is supposed to be that students are totally ignorant, but I think there's more to this story. For what IS Wikipedia if not common knowledge?

Anna Nicole, showing off her Oscars.

For instance, what do you know about Anna Nicole Smith? According to the first line of the Wikipedia article on Anna Nicole, she "was an American model, sex symbol, actress and television personality."

Really? An actress? Really??? On what is this statement based? Is this "common knowledge?" Does it need to be cited?

I believe that it is common knowledge--but only because Wikipedia makes it so. Well, at any rate, it's "common." Is it knowledge? If a tree falls in the woods and Wikipedia renames it Phil, who's going to disagree? (A biologist, you say? Who cares! Nobody who Wikies "Phil" or "tree" is going to click on Dr. Whoseez scholarly article when Wikipedia is the first link to come up.)

The whole "common knowledge" rule needs to be thrown out the window. Why? Because, since the internet, everything is common knowledge. And nothing is.

In other words, we are living in a post-modern world. Citation isn't necessary because someone owns the sentence "Anna Nicole Smith was an American model, sex symbol, actress and television personality," but because the reader of said information needs to know where it came from in order to process it appropriately.

Wikipedia creates common knowledge. Someone types in a definition of Anna Nicole Smith and hundreds of people read it and accept it.

It's always been true that "common knowledge" influences and is influenced by members of the media, but now anyone can become a member of the media by signing up for a free blog or going on Salon.com and commenting on an article (which itself is a series of blogs).

In fact, thanks to Google's search engine, which organizes results based on the number of hits on all the websites that have "tagged" (or that contain) the search word, "common knowledge" is now basically determined by a popularity contest. A self-determining one at that.

Think about it. If Wikipedia's Anna Nicole Smith page has the most hits of all pages that contain the words Anna Nicole Smith, then it comes up first when you Google it. Which means most people click on it. Which means it comes up first if you Google it. Which makes it (ta da!) common knowledge.

Can you think of a more post-modern reality than that? Even Alanis Morissette recognizes the irony.

This book will tell you everything you
need to know about citing your source.
Doesn't that sound riveting?

I generally shy away from making or believing sweeping statements about changes in generations. However, I have noticed that my students enter college with so little background in actual facts that they have a desperately hard time analyzing what they read and synthesizing an opinion about it.

Their sources of information--television and the internet--are nearly absent of anything remotely resembling fact, and they aren't well-versed in separating all that opinion from what little real information may be hidden inside.

How could they be?

So they, as most of us anymore, bring to the table a very shaky knowledge base, and the "research" they do only serves to make it shakier.

Does this excuse a student from copy/pasting someone else's words and passing them off as their own? Of course not. Does it suggest that students don't know the difference between there words and someone else's? No.

But it does mean that teaching them the difference between a scholarly source and a Wikipedia article is that much harder. That there is no "knowledge" that can be taken for granted as "common" (or as knowledge).

That the line separating fact from fiction, while still bold and sure in reality, is in practice non-existent.

Because what chance does fact have if everyone knows it's wrong?

Plagiarism On Campus, Part 1, or: In Defense of Students

2010-08-05T11:07:00.001-04:00

Property thief

Recently, there have been several good articles in The New York Times about plagiarism and education, specifically as it pertains to college students.

The general gist of the articles goes something like this: Students today have grown up in an internet-induced world of blurred intellectual property rights. It's so easy to cut and paste someone else's words into their own documents that they do it all the time and, consequently, have a growing sense that there is nothing wrong with it. As a result, professors are policing more than educating and students are being trained to stitch together the ideas of others instead of vocalizing their own. In failing to synthesize their own argument, students are not really becoming educated.

Plus, they are stealing the work of others.

"Found art" in Amelie

I've been thinking about these articles a lot because I'm gearing up (read: procrastinating) to write my syllabus for the fall semester.

Last year, I experienced all of the frustration expressed by educators in the NYTimes articles. I moaned about the collapse of education and I was struck dumb by my students' seeming inability to understand why cutting and pasting is cheating and why Wikipedia is not a valid source for a college paper.

This year, as I read the articles, I am struck by another thought: Maybe it's the educators who are missing the point here, and not the students.

Some people call this "sharing."

In this article, published yesterday, Trip Gabriel says, "Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image."

I agree, but I think it is a mistake to dismiss this change as negative and immediately move on to thinking of ways to fight it or educate students away from it.

Gabriel's words bring to mind the Barbara Kingsolver book Pigs In Heaven. One of the main themes of that book is that America's individualism--in which the work of the individual is done for the individual with the expectation of individual gain--is just that: American. A cultural construct, not a global reality.

This is not the only way
of doing things...

In some cultures, the value of the group is greater than the sum of its parts. Kingsolver focuses on Native American culture, where stories and art are the intellectual property of the entire group. Individual storytellers may put their own spin on them and may earn a reputation as a talented teller of tales, but the stories themselves have no author--or, to put it another way, the community shares authorship.

In the arts, this trend of community property has been gaining ground for years and hasn't necessarily relied on the internet. "Found art" is a concept whose popularity is older than the internet, and adults have been complaining about music sampling since I was a kid--before the internet made music sharing a copyright issue.

Grown-ups grumbled that musicians aren't really musicians if they aren't writing their own music and that artists aren't really artists if they aren't creating their own art. Maybe it's because I was a teenager when I first heard these complaints that I always bristled at them.

I will grant you that creation is important. When it comes to writing, it is essential that students learn to first understand their own point of view and then express it--themselves, in their own words. And I am certainly not suggesting that students be encouraged or allowed to simply take the words of others and present them as their own.

A finished paper should include the words of others--properly cited--and also the words of the student author--thoughtfully expressed.

However, I think it is a mistake to dismiss this generational trend as an unfortunate side-effect of the internet and react to it with nothing more sophisticated than increased policing.

Instead, we need to work with it. We need to understand what is good about the relaxation of intellectual proprietorship--the increase of community knowledge. We need to understand where our students are coming from and start there.

Because if all we do is tell them they can't copy and paste, then all they will learn is how to be sneakier when they cheat. But if we meet them where they are, accept that there is valuable skill in culling the internet and successfully sifting through the junk for the valuable nuggets of information, we can help them hone the skills they bring to the table rather than dismissing those skills as "cheating."

Club DJ:
Creator, plagiarizer, or something in between?

This gives us a jumping off point, a common ground for then discussing sophisticated topics such as, for instance, intellectual property. Then we can make some headway when we explain why Wikipedia isn't a legitimate source and how and why we have to cite the sources we do use.

We can't fool these kids into thinking that there is anything they can say that hasn't been said before, and we're wasting our time if we try. So we need to focus our attention on helping them find the person who already said it best, teach them to read that person's words carefully, and then how to enter into that conversation as a peer.

And then, of course, how to give that person the credit they are due.

It's a subtle distinction, but an important one: Don't fight the trends of a generation. Work with them, understand them, and let go of a sense of moral or generational superiority.

Should Marcel Duchamp credited the designer
of this urinal before he "signed" it and called it his own?

In my next post, I will discuss the specifics of my plan on how to do this. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your opinion. Am I crazy for embracing this generation of students? Am I nuts to suggest that good can come from this relaxation of intellectual property rights?

Don't be afraid to disagree with me-- I really want to know what you think!

Disclaimer: All of the images in this post have been stolen. I can't credit the creators of the images because I stole them from people who had stolen them from someone else.

In Sickness and In Authorship, or: Why I'm Not the Next Stephen King

2010-08-04T10:44:00.000-04:00

Cutie Pie King, many years (and dollars) ago

Stephen King says that he writes to one person only--his wife. She is his intended audience, and if she laughs in the right places or gets scared in the right places, he considers his job done.

Clearly, that works for him.

And there's a big part of me that envies that kind of cohesion. Imagine having a partner like that! A woman who is your muse, your wife, the mother of your children, your accomplice in spending the obscene gobs of money you have raked in over the years.

Imagine having an actual audience of millions, but choosing to pour all of your concentration and energy into the entertainment of one person. And then to go on living with that person day in and day out!

Could YOU stay married to the guy who created this?

My mind is both more private and more scattered than would allow for Stephen King's writing strategy. I need some breathing room between my writing life and my living life. I am always writing to someone--usually one person--but with my internal audience I am a serial monogamist. Sometimes I am writing to my mom, sometimes to one of my friends, and, yes, every now and then to one of my many, many lovers.

The adoring audience in my head

But my minxy little brain never rests for long with one person, and I often write to people as varied as an ex-boyfriend, a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, the guy at the gas station, or Rosie the waitress.

I can't tell if my writing would be better and more consistent if I stuck to just the one mental audience member, or if I would get stuck writing the same crap over and over, trying to push the same buttons on that same reader.

In the end, the question is moot because I can't be what I'm not. My muse is a little bit of a whore for love and attention, so she demands I write to the person who is most likely to like what I'm writing right then.

My whorish, drunken muse

Which means that, sometimes, I'm just writing to myself.

So:

Who is your audience? Do you like the idea of writing to one reader, or does the thought of virtual commitment have you running from the church so fast you tear your dress and end up running naked through the fields?

I Love Romance Novels, or: Take Me, Sir Valient Prince Charming Reginald Darling! Take Me!

2010-08-02T11:37:00.007-04:00

My love of crap books has a long and healthy history. My cousin Anne started it all when she sent me an enormous box filled with a gold mine of junk literature love: The entire series of Sweet Valley Twins books.

That was a good day.

Years later, the same cousin sent a huge box of romance novels. I was about sixteen and had never read them before. In fact, I'd been downright disdainful of the whole idea of romance novels, which I was sure were stupid in the extreme.

At any rate, the box showed up on my doorstep and I thought, "Oh, man, I can't believe Anners reads these!" I picked up a book that looked a lot like this:

"Oh, Fabio!"

I opened it to the first page, telling myself that I would read just enough to get some silly quotes to share with my friends. Ten hours later I emerged, feverish and satisfied, as if from a sex-induced stupor.

I learned two things that day: Viking men can do amazing and delicious things with feathers, and I love love LOVE romance novels.

People tend to think that, because I read a lot, I am a) always spending my time wisely and b) full of wisdomosity. For some reason, reading is considered a legitimate activity by people who don't believe in television. And if I were reading actual literature, I might agree with them. But I never am.

There's not always a big difference
between a real cover and a mock
cover...

Really. I NEVER am.*[See update below]

It's true that I read a lot. Before motherhood came along and changed every aspect of my life, I usually had two or three books going at a time. You know, one by the bed, one on the toilet, and one in my purse.

Sounds impressive, right?

But believe me when I say I was not reading The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, I've never read The Grapes of Wrath. Or Oliver Twist. Or Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Candide, or Lord of the Flies.

Trust me, I know that I should. I know that I would love them, and that my life and mind would be enriched a thousand-fold if I did. And maybe someday I will.

But in the meantime...

In the meantime, there are these delicious things called romance novels, and I love to love them.

For one thing, the genre is dominated by women. We write, agent, publish, and publicize these things.

Equality eshmality, I'm glad we have our little corner of the world.

For another thing, romance is a great genre for new writers. The parameters are clear, publishers make them known, and if you follow the rules set forth, you'll get your manuscript read. Maybe not published, but read. And that's more than can be said for most publishing houses.

But enough about that. You know what the best thing about romance novels is?

All the sex.

Duh.

Now, there are plenty of Christian and otherwise conservative imprints out there, but blech, don't waste my time. Whether I'm reading a classic regency, a contemporary about a sassy psychic whose best friend is a ghost, or an 80s style bodice ripper, I want sex.

Expect to see an unrealistic number
of redheads. And white stallions.

Lots of it.

Preferably dirty.

And that's not just because I enjoy reading it, though, of course, there's that too.

It's because the sex in romance novels is usually liberating, often taboo, and almost always includes some detail or element that ladies are not supposed to read about, write about, or (God forbid) actually do.

I will grant you that most romance novels follow the conventional plot of a man and woman falling in love and getting married. It is also generally true that the man will have a lot more sexual experience at the onset of the relationship than the woman does. Also, pretty much by definition, sex equals love in the world of the romance novel.

There are plenty of books that don't fit the above criteria, but they're more erotica than romance (with the exception of a growing trend of lgbt romance, which I admit I haven't read and therefor can't comment on).

However, within that conventional setup, the sex is varied, graphic, surprising, and (when it's good) downright blush-inducing.

For instance, "bodice rippers," which are, in a nutshell, historical romances wherein the woman is ravaged by the man before (or sometimes as) they fall in love, rape fantasies are played out by the dozens. Bodice rippers aren't as popular today as they once were, and a lot of people take issue with them for the obvious reason that rape is not sexy.

I swear, they're not all like this...

But I stand by bodice rippers as a healthy expression of fantasy, and I get a kick out of the idea that housewives everywhere have read them while partaking in such mundane tasks as vacuuming, or while their husbands watch football. There's something so naughty about that, something that makes the whole thing so playful and silly.

Which I love, because women should be allowed to view sex as playful and potentially silly. Thanks to the very real issues of pregnancy, disease, and general fear-of-bad-reputation-ness that still clings to our culture, we so rarely get to think of it as fun.

Contemporary romance novels, and YA romance in particular, are even more obviously unconventional than historical romances are. Women and girls take the reigns in their relationships more and more, and their demands for their sexual partners are high. Women in romance novels simply do not marry men who aren't a good lay, and being a good lay means paying attention to her needs and desires. It also means being faithful, kind, and loving... right up until the ravaging, of course.

Most romance novels deal with safe sex, some deal with real issues such as pregnancy, and most of them have as a heroine a woman who is successful, smart, and who challenges the man outside of the bedroom as well as inside it.

They aren't, of course, all good. Some of the worst prose you will ever read can be found in published romance novels. Some of them feature men who are theoretically kind but who are actually controlling and a little scary. A lot of them have such heinously hideous descriptions of clothing and hairstyles that I can't get past it. Some of them just stink.

But overall it's a great genre. Try it and see.

Or tell me that I'm full of crap.

Either way, tell me what you think...

*My loving boyfriend tells me I'm foolish to suggest that I never read anything but crap. Apparently, I am allowed to "dismiss Kerouac completely," but only if I'm well-read otherwise. For the record, I love Faulkner, Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Barbara Kingsolver, Ralph Ellison, and all of the other "smart" authors and books I've talked about in previous posts.

When Fiction Goes Mainstream, or: Don't Be a Muggle

2010-08-01T23:02:00.001-04:00

Muggles

I love when a story goes mainstream. We all know what a Boo Radley moment is and what it means to pull a Thelma and Louise. We know that a single man of good fortune is in want of a wife and that the pigs are more equal than others. Ever since I learned what a Hobbit is, I've made second breakfast a staple of my day.

It's fun because it's part of our culture and proof that good fiction tells the truth better than the truth does.

My favorite such mainstreamed idea is J.K. Rowling's word "muggle."

I, for one, use the word "muggle" so often that it's becoming a problem.

Let's face it, those muggles are everywhere--clogging up the roads, filling seats in the Senate, wasting airtime on TV... Every time I look up I see another muggle.

Muggles

Do I even have to explain what a muggle is? No. Because we all know. We get it. And if you don't, you never will. The word is perfect because it a) sounds like what it means, b) describes a phenomenon that never before had its own word, and c) if you know what I mean when I say it, you are automatically not a muggle.

I like a word that's self-selecting. Don't know what I mean? Give it a shot. Go out in public--anywhere will do, as long as there are people within earshot--and find an excuse to sigh loudly and say, "God, that guy is such a muggle."

Muggle

Guaranteed, someone will look at you and nod as if to say, "I totally know what you mean."

When they do, no matter how old they are or how odd they look in their wizarding robes, strike up a conversation with them. You won't be disappointed.

Not a Muggle

There are many other words and ideas of J.K.'s that have taken on a life outside of the books. Take Dumbledore, for instance. You know how "The Ingenue" is a classic character? Or "The Best Friend," or "The Villain?" "The Dumbledore" is also a classic character--an older, father/God figure who is both a mentor and a physical manifestation of the protective, wise part of the self. He is Dorothy's red shoes--the power we thought existed outside of ourselves but that turned out to be within us all along. There have been other Dumbledore characters, of course-- Noah, Gandalf, The Fairy Godmother--but Dumbledore is, for me, the quintessential Dumbledore.

Not Muggles

Then there's the Golden Egg, a phrase that, in my family at least, gets used all the time. When my step father, who is a framer, got a fragile, large, three dimensional piece to frame, he carefully tucked it away and more or less refused to talk about it. My mother called it "his Golden Egg" and then, eventually, just "Walter's Egg."

Not a Muggle

I also find myself wondering, when I'm picking up after my daughter, when I became a house elf, and at least once a day I wish I had a light putter-outer. Not to mention a nice butterbeer.

"Muggle" is still my favorite, though.

Genius.

So tell me: What are your favorite mainstreamed ideas from fiction?

Journalistic Gem, or: Why I Love Facebook

2010-07-30T07:32:00.002-04:00

No one I know has anything good to say about mainstream media news coverage.

Unless you count The Daily Show as mainstream, and recently even they have come under fire for supposedly hiring their newest correspondent based on her resume item "eats hot dogs on camera." (Personally, I think this is an unfair charge, but I digress...)

Complaints about the news come from all sides--the Right shouts that the news has a leftist slant, and the Left laments that special interest groups (read: corporations) control the content.

Others say that both sides stink and point the finger at incendiary and misleading headlines, the disproportionate amount of detail and nuance dedicated to the Gosselin family exploits as compared to, say, health care reform, and the unfortunate number of screaming heads on television.

Meanwhile, a smaller but no less loud minority wanders about in an existentialist funk brought on by lousy prose. For after all, what good is a hard-hitting expose on a subject such the latest political scandal if one must wade through sentences like this in order to read it:

"The senator’s reaction was only outrage that a man’s career should be threatened, it was her word against his, they chose to believe his."
To all these negative notions I add yet another complaint: The news is damn depressing. The last thing I want to do is slog through page after internet page of oil spills, global warming, health care insanity, and the Kardashians.

I mean, life is hard enough, right?

Who wants to slog through the mess? I'd rather go read a good blog or two.

But slog through it I do, because I see it as my duty as a citizen of the world to keep myself as informed as possible...

Actually, that's a lie. I let other people slog through it post links to the good articles on their facebook pages.

This is how I came upon one gem in a sea of journalistic mediocrity. One shining example of how it should be done--this article is concise, specific, and factual. In five short sentences it tells me everything I need to know and yet leaves me wanting more. It is neither exaggerated nor slanted, yet my understanding of the event is as nuanced and clear as if I'd read an entire memoir on the topic.

Maybe even more so.

But why don't I let you see for yourselves. The following is from The Associated Press:

Police: Pa. mom cleaned bath with son's toothbrush

BETHLEHEM, Pa. – An eastern Pennsylvania woman has been cited for harassment after her son told police she cleaned the bathroom with his toothbrush, then returned it to its holder. Police in Lower Saucon said 52-year-old Deborah Woist decided on July 18 that a bathroom inside her home needed a good scrubbing because it hadn't been cleaned in two months.

Her 26-year-old son, Justin Novack, said the scrubbing was done with his toothbrush. He said his mother put it away when she was done.

Novack then called police, claiming his mother applied feces to his toothbrush.

Can you not see, with perfect detail, the bathroom in question? The overflowing trash, the hard water stains, the coagulated toothpaste in the sink... it's all there, in these five perfect sentences.

Can you not also see the before and after of the tub in question? The wet, black muck growing out of the caulking, the rings of soap scum and hair that coat the bottom, the ancient shower head that is so short one has to duck to wash one's hair. This is both the before and after, of course. You can't clean a whole tub with a toothbrush.

And then we have the phone call itself, the "grown old but not up" son speaking with righteous indignation to the police, shouting some words of the conversation more loudly than necessary so that his mother will hear him, demanding that someone come to the house so that he can brandish the brush in question.

Finally, we have the introduction of fecal matter. Whose is it, and why was it in the tub?

These are burning questions to which we may never have an answer. There is one question, though, to which we do have an answer: No, it never occurs to Justin Novak that he should be embarrassed to admit he brushed his teeth with shit.

The thing I like best about this article is its brevity. It's not easy to get so much across using so few words. As a writer, I know how hard it is to cut the crap and remove unnecessary words, and as an editor my hardest job is convincing other writers to do the same.

So if you have a favorite short--be it article, story, or blog post--of yours or someone else's, please comment below and tell us what it is.

Better yet, provide a link!

The Word of the Week, or: Eggcorn, Mommy, Eggcorn!

2010-07-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

At my house, summer is synonymous with corn-on-the-cob. Non-Jersians may not realize it, but the best damn corn you'll ever eat is grown right here in the armpit of our nation. Along with Jersey tomatoes, Jersey sweet corn is the reason we persist in calling ourselves The Garden State despite our having large tracks of land that have not seen a garden since Ben Franklin suggested the turkey as the national bird.

We've had corn-on-the-cob every night for the past two weeks, and so far no one in the house is tired of it (Of course, this is partly because we slather it with huge pads of butter).

My lovely Liza, who has christened it "eggcorn," shrieks with delight when we pull out the unhusked ears and ask for her help "cleaning" them.

In fact, she talks about eggcorn so often that, on a whim, we googled it to see if it really is a word.

Long behold, it is.

And not just any word, either. Oh no. It is the Best Word Ever, which makes it this week's

Word of the Week

Eggcorn

So first of all, "eggcorn" only dates back to 2003, where it first appeared in the famous (in dork circles) Language Log, which is an online blog for linguists. (Not for the feint-hearted. This is technical writing at its most dense.)

According to Wikipedia, an eggcorn is "an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect. The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context....Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar, archaic, or obscure word with a more common or modern word..."

Ok, don't worry, and don't let your head explode. I'm going to put this into lame man's terms for you:

An "eggcorn" is when someone gets a common saying a little bit wrong, so that it sounds like the original and means more or less the same thing. Usually, the original saying is old enough that it no longer makes literal sense to us, and so it is easy to get it wrong. The trick is that it is only an eggcorn if the "new" phrase has a current literal meaning.

For instance, "ease drop" is an eggcorn of the original "eavesdrop." To "eavesdrop" literally means to stand on the "eaves," or overhanging roof, of a house and listen to the goings-on inside. But "eaves" no longer has much meaning to us, and so people mishear "eavesdrop" as "ease drop." This makes more sense to the modern speaker/writer because she can connect "ease" with the literal meaning of listening easily to someone's conversation.

Another example is the substitution of "leopard" for "leper." So instead of saying that someone is "a social leper," which only makes sense if you know what leprosy is, people mistake it for "social leopard."

Though why anyone would assume that a leopard would fail to be the life of the party is beyond me.

Here's another great one:

"In the rears" instead of "in arrears." "In arrears" means, of course, behind in payments. "In the rears" means either behind in payments or... well... you know.

Eggcorn is another word that is poised to make a splash in wider circles. Once you know what an eggcorn is, you see them all over the place. Thanks to the internet, everyone and his brother is writing something somewhere these days, and eggcorns thrive when people write down a phrase they've heard a million times but never encountered in print.

I'm in love with both the meaning and the sound of this word, which is why I've included five of them in this post in addition to the ones I gave as examples.

A prize to the first reader who can find them all!

***btw, I cribbed my examples from The Eggcorn Database, which is a ridiculously fun, though aesthetically challenged, website.***

A Room of My Own, or: Rethinking the 'F' Word, Part 1

2010-07-27T11:04:00.000-04:00

...and it was terrifying.

As everyone who knows me well is aware, I'm a recovering Feminist.

Shocking, I know.

But now I've grown and changed, and I can admit that I had a problem.

Some people can handle their feminism, you know? Limit it to the weekends, stop at a couple of hits. I just wasn't one of them. I could be at a party, having a great time, laughing even, when someone would innocently pull out the words "abortion" or "Ani Difranco" and ask me if I wanted a toke.

The next thing I knew, I'd be standing on a bar, stamping my feet, and yelling at some poor guy who'd made the mistake of being alive.

What can I say? Those were dark years.

And because I've been in recovery, it's been awhile since I've read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Or any of the multitudinous critiques of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. But now that I'm writing every day, which earns me no money but requires the expenditure of $524/month in daycare fees, I think it's time to revist Woolf's thesis.

There is so much to love about this picture.

If you are even remotely familiar with feminism, you are familiar with ARoOO, and if you aren't, you should be, so I won't spend too much time in summary. Suffice it to say that Woolf argues that, in order to write fiction, women need money and space. Without both of these ingredients, which, she argues, most women throughout history have been denied, writing cannot happen.

Woolf has had many detractors over the years. Her critics generally point out that her essay speaks exclusively to and about white women of means and denies the ability of poor women who cannot access a room or financial independence to write. She is also basically saying that motherhood and writing can't co-exist, which seems to suggest that a fairly large percentage of women are excluded from the club.

These critics make valid and important points. Still, I love A Room of One's Own. Yes, it is incomplete and dated, but the idea of a private, quiet space in which to write and the financial security to do it comfortably are Sirens whose songs I cannot ignore. Given that I was assigned the book in no less than three of my college courses, I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way.

But is it still a valid argument? Or have times changed since it was published in 1929?

Woolf's argument is not that women need space and money and men don't. Woolf's argument is that men already have space and money, while women have been denied these necessities. So the question of the book's continued validity is two-fold: Are these things really necessary, and are women still denied them?

I can't speak for all women, but I can speak for myself. For me, the idea of a room with a lock and financial security are really two symbols of the same need: independence.

We've all been here...

A writer needs to have indepencence of thought, and there are a lot of things that can prevent this. Fear of failure, guilt at revealing family secrets, and a misplaced desire to please everyone are all examples of gender-neutral problems that can clog a writer's brain like a clump of hair in the tub. Writers--as all creators--need an empty, quiet space in their heads that can be filled with story instead of self-criticism. This, to me, is the Room with the lock.

I think it is still true that it is harder for women, as a group, to gain this internal space. Women are still raised to be more polite and more discreet than men. We are also exposed to heftier bouts of public disdain when our children are left for even two seconds to watch television or play on their own while we get some time to ourselves. If we are home with our children while their father goes off to work, there is a strong inclination on our parts to prove our worth by filling that time with proactive motherhood and house cleaning.

But more and more this seems to be a gender-neutral problem. If Virgina Woolf were writing today, I think she would acknowledge that there are many women who are able to be delightfully indiscreet and many men who stay at home with children and struggle to justify how they are spending their time.

Bueller... Bueller... Anyone?

The bigger problem for writers now seems to be that everyone is all about productivity and efficacy. Even our schools are being run like corporations. We've slashed art and music programs, shortened recess, and phased out French and Latin courses. Why? Because these programs are expensive and don't directly correlate to helping our children grow up to make money.

In other words, we don't, as a society, value play. Or learning for the sake of learning. We want to know how our activities today will translate into dollars tomorrow. And writing is playing. Playing with words, playing with story, playing with ideas.

So yes, we need a room of our own. We each need a space in our head that is free not just from duties such as laundry and vacuuming, but also from the need to justify its existence.

In short, we need to be unapologetic about who and what we are and write. We write because we have to, we write because we can, we write because their are things in the world that are bigger than the economy.

Is this harder for women to do than for men? I don't know.

What do you think?

An Ode to Picture Books, or: Butterfly in the Sky

2010-07-26T12:59:00.001-04:00

I love picture books. I read them still. When I'm broke, which is pretty much always, I give people picture books for Christmas. It's the best and cheapest way to buy great art that I know of.

Now that I have a two-year-old, I love them even more. Liza's still a little too young to sit and listen to me read anything longer than a Max book, but that doesn't stop us from going to the library and getting good-smelling, much loved, wordy picture books.

Instead of me reading to her, she reads them to me.

"Dinosaur pocket book!" She says when we read Edwina, The Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct, by Mo Willems, and she sees Edwina's favorite accessory.

"Monkey sit down!" She says when we read Wild about Books, by Judy Sierra and Marc Brown and she sees the picture of the monkey standing on the horse's back.

I'm not anti-television. There are a lot of great shows. Sesame Street continues to be fabulous, Charlie and Lola are a sweet brother and sister pair with amazing British accents, and reruns of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood still make me smile.

But the thing about television is that it doesn't require anything of the viewer. Even Sesame Street, with its songs and dances and incessant recitation of the alphabet, all of which Eliza does participate in to a certain degree, gives her everything--the sights and the sounds. It's someone else's imagination at work, not hers.

Television also doesn't give her--or anyone--time to process what she's seeing before it moves on to something else. Even though we watch it together, there isn't a lot of time to react to the plot or for discussion. The timing is dictated by the show.

By contrast, we can spend two full minutes discussing the toy house and small mouse in Goodnight Moon, but fly right past the comb, brush, and bowl full of mush, which we find less enthralling.

Technology is making television more interactive, and I think it's great. Youtube is an excellent resource for parents (and by "excellent," I mean that it allows you to watch Elmo's song 15 times a day. So I'm speaking in relative terms...) and we certainly take advantage of the Sesame Street page.

But picture books are interactive by their very nature, and the best ones are as much fun for me as they are for her.

Well, maybe not after the 50th read, but for the first 25 or so.

At any rate, the picures included in this post are of some of my favorites.

Please comment and tell me yours!

Go Forth and Anosognicate! or: New Weekly Feature

2010-07-22T10:40:00.004-04:00

The more I read other people’s blogs, the more I realize that mine is seriously lacking in one critical area: A weekly feature. All the good blogs have one. There’s this blog, with its weekly reality TV updates, this blog, with its "photo de la semaine," and this blog… ok, so it’s just the two, but still, the cool kids are doing it and I wanna be one of them.

I thought about doing a weekly grammar lesson, but blech, even I wouldn’t want to read that, and I’m in love with the sound of my own typing.

Then I thought about doing a weekly book review, but that would require reading one worthy book a week and, frankly, I’d rather catch up on Mad Men.

And then it hit me. The perfect feature. Something you will look forward to all the live-long week. Like Christmas, but more often and without the good behavior requirement.

So here it is, my New Weekly Feature, my NWF, my Brilliant Idea:

The Word of the Week: Anosognosia

Anosognosia is the best word ever, and is poised (you heard it here first) for a major pop-culture breakthrough.

It’s pronounced an-o″so-no´zhah and its dictionary definition is "a lack of awareness or a denial of a neurological defect or illness in general, especially paralysis, on one side of the body. It may be attributable to a lesion in the right parietal lobe."

It’s an industry term.

So, there are people who become paralyzed (I think usually from a stroke) and don’t or can’t acknowledge it. If you ask them to catch a ball with the paralyzed hand, they will say they don’t want to or fail to even acknowledge the question. Then there was Woodrow Wilson, who apparently suffered from anosognosia after his stroke and was unable to recognize that he was no longer in any fit state to remain president.

So that's pretty fascinating in and of itself, but it doesn't help you incorporate the word into your lexicon unless you are in med school.

Anosognosia is a medical term that, until recently, has been used only in the context of physical or neurological disabilities. However, it’s starting to be used in the context of general incompetence, and this, I think, is how it’s going to come into more wide-spread use.

As in: “Ugh, that guy thinks he’s soooo smart. What an anosogniac.”

I saw it here first. It’s an advice column on salon.com. A woman had written in to say, basically, “my boyfriend is the love of my life, but he hits me and stole my money.” A commenter called the woman an anosonosiac—meaning, in this case, that the woman thinks this guy is the love of her life because she is unable or unwilling to accept that she made a mistake… i.e. her judgement was so bad that it was like a disability, and her unwillingness to accept that her judgement is crappy is a further psychological problem.

Now, before you write off this lovely word as a) dark and b) an excuse to make fun of battered women, let me remind you that that comment was on salon.com, which is notorious for being full of comments written by morons. Still, it introduced me to the word, and for that I am eternally grateful.

My next stop on the anosognia train was here, a blog by Errol Morris on nytimes.com that discusses anosognia in a fascinating (though long and quite dense) five-part series on the topic.

In the first of the five posts, Morris interviews a psychologist named David Dunning, who did a study in 1999 that basically proved that incompetent people can’t (not just don’t or choose not to) know that they are incompetent.

The logic is a little hard to follow, but it goes like this:

“[W]hen you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In…problem solving, the skills you need to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate that answer.”

In other words, part of being incompetent is being unable to recognize your own incompetence.

At first, that seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated, let alone studied—stupid people don’t realize they’re stupid? How is that a news flash?— but if you think about what Dunning is really saying, it’s a fascinating distinction.

Dunning is not simply saying that people don’t recognize their own intellectual lack. He’s literally saying that they can’t. Just like the patient who cannot recognize his own paralysis, each of us has failings that we cannot see. Not don’t, not won’t, but can’t.

Dunning doesn’t define this as anosognosia, but he uses anosognosia as a metaphor to illustrate his point.

This has all kinds of serious implications that deserve to be discussed by people who actually know what they are talking about. Like, for instance, Errol Morris, who does a lovely job of it in his blog.

However, from my perspective, the piece that matters is that this is an excellent word that you can now use in a wide variety of circumstances to illustrate the multi layered incomptetencies of others while simultaneously highlighting your own sparkling brilliance (i.e. because you know the meaning of this long and difficult-to-pronounce word).

For instance:

“I would have gotten that job with The Daily Show, but Jon Stewart is a complete anosogniac. He wouldn’t know a brilliant writer if she landed on his head. Which I practically did.”

I like it, too, in the context of bitchy fashion critiques:

“Oh, my, god. Becky, look at her butt. It is, like, soooo big. She must be a total anosogniac to wear those jeggings.”

This woman suffers from noassatall, but these jeggings are still a "don't."

As are all jeggings everywhere.

And finally, my personal favorite, as a vehicle for charming self-deprecation:

“Holy crap, I am SUCH an anosogniac! I totally think I’m a brilliant blogger but it took me six weeks to come up with a Word of the Week weekly feature! Duh!"

Now go forth, fellow loons, and anosognicate!