Living it up in the garden...

The newly built bean/pea trellis gracing the garden...


I will admit that the carpentry is inexact architecturally, but it has a homely charm.


Or maybe we just need a different angle.


I call this nail "Northern Aggression" (Little Cold Mountain reference there)


The roses that Cocoa nibbled on...you'd think aloe and roses would make her breath smell a little better, but no...


Doesn't she look penitent?


Doesn't she look oblivious?


Doesn't he look dignified?


Shootin' the breeze on the front porch. While the Rents yak, Fiona has a little lick of beer.


"Help me! They make me do the laundry."

News from Lake Cappsbegon

The first bit of news here at the dead end of Huntington Drive is that we have gone high speed. Yes, we've moved on up in this world. Even cavemen have broadband these days, and while we still clobber each other with clubs around here, at least we have fast internet. The Rents just don't know what to do with themselves. They just didn't know what they were missing.

The second bit of news is that my piece-of-shit mac is back, and so far it has been behaving really really well. Lets not jump the gun, though, and get too excited.

The third bit of news is that I my feet have grown since I was 11. It's kinda sad really. My heels still fit in the slots, but the rest of my foot doesn't.




Another interesting development is Daddy's culinary failure. Who would have thought such a thing to be possible. But here you have it. I've named it Vegetable Porridge (please, sir, may I have some m-m-more?). It looks like something Cocoa barfed up, and while I can't attest for how Cocoa's vomit tastes, this tasted like spicy regurgitation.




Stevie's new book is almost complete. I think I have maybe 2 or 3 more pages to do. I don't know what to call it yet, though. The first one was just called Stevie and Bobo. I was thinking "Stevie and Bobo's Grand Adventures," but that doesn't quite cut it. This painting makes me sad though, because I'm the one who would most likely be there with her...that exact position. J and D, as mentioned before, have weird sleep issues.


This is the remains of the aloe plant. Cocoa, in one of her frequent moments of insanity, decided that she needed to eat it. You have to wonder, don't you, what goes on inside that head of hers. I mean, aloe tastes really bitter like rubbing alcohol, and she didn't just nibble at it. She consumed about 7 or 8 of the fat, 12 inch spikes.





Have no fear, Shosha, the Africa water hasn't eaten through the plastic of the Voltic bottle yet, though the sometimes I hear the foreign microbes and microscopic parasites talking to each other at night.







This is what I would look like if I was an Anne of Green Gables doll. Oh wait, I think I would be Diana.








I really think I should be getting workman's comp for having to sleep upstairs. This is the stripped room with a hole in the floor. I have to dodge rusty nails sticking up our of wooden planks...really. I actually don't think I'm up to date on my Tetanus. Wouldn't it be fun to go to the emergency room again. Wonder if hospitals are cheaper here?


In my own little corner of my own little room. This is what Shosha's room looks like now that I have moved into it. Though I'm not sure where I'm going to go when Shosha comes back. Somebody is going to have to move out into the camper. I hope it is me. I wonder what Jennifer would say if she saw the product of my unique interior design style. I hope she'd be traumatized.




I have re-established my "thinking space." I used to sit up on the roof, but I've become nervous in my old age, so I just stare out from the sill.



The best bit of news is that I have taken up my hammer with a vengeance and glorious things have happened in the garden. I mean business. More later, because this post is seriously busy already.

I just want to thank the Academy for this tremendous honor

I wouldn't be here today had it not been for my dog, Cocoa. I just don't even have the words (voice cracks). My god, it's just so heavy.



Yes, I have put my hands on Shosha's bronze statuette she brought back from Ghana. It is Oscar-sized and you better believe that I've been practicing my acceptance speech in the mirror. It's actually a very interesting piece of art. I can't tell if it is a woman or a man. It seems to have breasts in addition to a short and squat penis. Maybe it is confused.

And here is my muse: Cocoa and Daddy howling together.



I'll be posting the News from Lake Cappsbegon with lots and lots of pictures as soon as the high speed is installed (oh damn, I just gave away the most exciting news).

What it takes to cross the great divide seems more than all the courage I can muster up inside...

...But then we get to have some answers when we reach the other side. The prize is always worth the rocky ride.

I’m just so upset about Jerry Falwell’s passing. I can just imagine him sitting there in his office, bent sinisterly over his donation checks and then BAM!...struck by lightening. You know, they say that evilness raises your cholesterol. That and french fries. That’s just too damn bad. I can’t wait to see Jon Stewart tomorrow. Actually, I guess it’s really mean to get pleasure out of someone dying. He probably had a mother who loved him. I find myself fairly ruthless when it comes to crazy, revolting chrustians (as George would say).

Today was a hard day for me. I felt weepy all day. I wanted to be back in New York, alone. I don’t know why I would want that again. I don’t want it really, but it is just so frustrating to be here with no clear direction. And I’m doing all the right things: I’m writing every day, I’m taking care of my little garden, I’m playing music, I’m sending out resumes and filling out applications, I’m going to the Y, I’m watching depressing movies, I’m getting out with friends. I haven’t been so on top of things in ages. I’m doing all these things that I know are good for me...the concrete things, but I still just can’t shake this lost feeling. It creeps up on me in quiet moments or it just lingers under the surface, waiting to bubble over.

And it comes when I least expect it. Tonight I went upstairs and had a dance party of one. I turned my ipod up and just danced around to happy/angry music without any inhibitions for about 30 minutes. It’s been a while since I’ve let myself go like that. It’s always very therapeutic. And I got this welled up feeling in my chest that I thought was just pure joy, and maybe it was, but then I came down and came down hard. Before I even realized it, I fell apart. One second I was high as a kite and the next second, I’ve got snot and tears dripping onto the floor and I’ve cried my contact out. And for some crazy reason, the music went from Sin Wagon to A Long December, and I’m like “Maura, why would you put that fucking song on a dance mix?” Maybe this year will be better than the last. Hold on, excuse me Mr. Duritz, but is that calendar years? I think I’m still in the eternally long last year and it’s a hell of a long way till next year.

But I believe in the other side. I really do. My heart trusts that I just have to wait it out and hold on for the ride. I’ve believed that for my whole life, even as a little kid, that one day you can look back on the hard times with a sense of peace and accomplishment. It’s a gift, I think. Or maybe it is just my version of faith. It doesn’t necessarily make things easier. I’ve spent a good bit of my life wading through dark places and I know those places well. But I’ve never really entertained the possibility that I was beyond redemption or healing, not deep down.

Or maybe I don’t believe in the other side. It’s a big concept and I feel like I’ve visited it some. I’ve found that I can be two breaths away from drowning in some aspects but have my feet on desert dry land in others. So maybe I believe in lilypads, little resting spots. Maybe some are big and wide and leathery with plenty of room to spare for friends. And some are kind of shaky, thin and moist. And maybe one day you find a lilypad that is so sturdy and green and lovely that you decide to build your life there and let the water take you where it will. Okay, I’ll shut up with the metaphors now.

Good afternoon and welcome to The Waffle House! My name is Maura and I'll be your server today. I do ask that you refrain from peeing in your booth.

I watched Tsotsi last night and did not get the nice cleansing cry I was going for. I guess I need to go dig out the VCR and my copy of Steel Magnolias. Tsotsi was more of a “I think I’m going to be sick all over the floor” cry. First of all, there is this sweet sweet sweet little baby that makes me bite my lip. And I know Tsotsi is the hero and everything, but he does not treat that cute little bub very well at all.





There is this god-awful scene where an 8-year-old Tsotsi’s father kicks their dog (looks like a Rottie/Lab mix) twice, breaking its back. And it just writhes in pain, whimpering, and crawls out the door and the father yells at Tsotsi not to go to him. Meanwhile I was frantically digging around for the flipper to fast-forward and eventually just dove at the DVD player to skip a chapter ahead. It was terrible. Do not see Tsotsi. Do not!


And it also bothered me that the guy who plays Tsotsi looks a whole lot like my old friend Themba the PIE student at Bard. Except Themba would have taken much better care of that baby, I’m sure.


But enough of this. What I really want to talk about is the assholes at the Unemployment office. They have a lot of jobs there for waitstaff and catering and hotel mumbo-jumbo that you can’t apply for from anywhere else. I wasn’t going to receive benefits. One, I’m an optimist and think that gainful employment is just around the corner, and two, I’d have to apply to New York which is a big pain in the ass. But this guy, my “career counselor,” is a total moron and can’t seem to understand this concept. And he can hardly string two sentences together without getting distracted. And he can’t seem to figure out how to get the printer to work because he keep pressing the print to file button. When I point this out, he tells me that I am not allowed to look at the company profiles. And all the while I am thinking, why can’t I just have this guys job as I could easily be 20 times as competent. And then I yell at myself in my head because this man probably has kids to feed at home.

So I spend about 30 minutes on their computers looking for jobs and copying down job codes to give to him so that he can print out the application information. I found about 10 or 12 things that looked reasonably promising. Of course, the actual company name is hidden from us lowly, unemployed peons, until we give it to our “career counselors.” So it’s always a shot in the dark. Then I take my paper with all the numbers on it and he says, “Sorry, we can only look up five jobs for you per day.” So I sigh and let him look up those jobs. The fourth job was listed as “wait staff” in Greenville (I’m thinking Red Lobster or Sticky Fingers, etc). And in his robotic voice he says, “Greenville...Server...$2.35/hour plus tips...will train...The Waffle House.” I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. The guy looked rather put out. I don’t blame him.
“No, sir, I think I’ll pass on that one...the smoke...yeah, the smoke. I can’t be around that much smoke.”
Can you imagine? I’m willing to stoop low, but not that low. Besides, no one ever tips at the Waffle House. Ava worked at the Waffle House in Greenwood and said this woman used to come in, order a cup of coffee, and then peed all over the seat. I just can’t.
And then, to add insult to injury, I try to get him to look up another one of the jobs instead and he’s like “no, sorry, I can only look up 5.”

Why the fuck can’t I get a stupid job anyway? I mean, I have a college degree...the most useless college degree ever. I feel like I’m walking around town with a big E stitched on my shirt. Beware, this unruly woman majored in English. I’m telling you, they scatter like flies.

Maura! You are on notice

Happy Mother’s Day! That's me and my mama ;c)

I must really love my mother because I went to Anderson and shopped on Mother’s Day Weekend. Good thing I didn’t pack my automatic weapon in my hand bag or several people would have been hurt. I got her a mix of the traditional (lavender smellies and assorted candle smellies), the untraditional (cruelty-free tea-tree smellies) and the really untraditional (freezable beer mugs). This morning we met the grandparents and ate at L’hôpital, saw GG at the home for a little while (we played toss with the beach ball and lubed her up with lotion), and then sat through 2.5 hours of classical music (it was actually very good, but I enjoy complaining). Nicholas was good...I could sort of see him up there. Then, because I must recover from these things, I went home and took a nap in which I dreamed about being inside a Bruegel painting....the peasant wedding one.





I was sad today. I guess I am still sad, but I’m going to go watch Tsotsi so that I can feel okay about crying my eyes out.

Salman Rushdie was on Colbert this week, the same program where Jane Fonda gave Stephen a lap dance...to die for. Which brings me to another goal I have set for myself. I really shouldn’t be getting all of my news and political/cultural analysis from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Though as my father said, it is a sad sad day when the most hard-hitting, significant interviews being performed on this administration and the thinkers (or non-thinkers, as it may be) around it are on Comedy Central. I know about the power of Satire (think Voltaire and Jonathan Swift) but this is a bit ridiculous. (Speaking of Voltaire, I’d really like to reread The Baron in the Trees if I find it in the piles of books upstairs.)

Mostly I’ve just a little disappointed in myself when thinking how participatory I used to be when it came to political issues, how hungry I was for knowledge and alternative perspectives. I guess growing up in the reddest county corner of SC gave me a bit of eat or be eaten mentality and so I was really proactive in my political engagement. Then I went to Bard where all of a sudden I am surrounded by people who make ME feel conservative.

I kept up my activist inclinations for my first year (long enough to be spotted on national television at the WTO protest by my super conservative Christian cousin...something they will never forget) and noticed that nothing I was doing, nothing I was reading, nothing I was feeling had any impact at all on the downward spiral of the world as a whole. My idiotic fellow American’s re-electing that bumbling fuck-wad didn’t help. I also think part of it had to do with a seriously depressing course on the Modern Middle East which chronicled the region from the 1790s to the present and everything seemed so hopeless and my teacher, Nerina, basically said that it WAS hopeless. It was about this time that I started focusing my energies elsewhere. I became somewhat of a British Colonialism scholar. Instead of focusing on the quagmire in my own country, I began looking at the messes of the 19th and early 20th centuries in India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand (New Zealand in particular, actually), etc.

I also did some really in-depth work on internal American imperialism. I’m trying to read A People’s History of the US start to finish (my education so far has been smattered with excerpts) and I’ve just finished a chapter where Zinn basically says that the American Revolution was less about sawing off the yoke of Britain and more about getting their silly laws and treaties out of our way so that we could start kicking up the dust and pave the road out west with our own reign of terror. And the eventual development of the Constitution served to bring economic and political injustice into law from its premodern place as a practice of brutish force. So then I became a bit of an expert on frontierism with a primary interest in nuclear colonialism of the native southwest.

Anyway, I traded in my sorrows. And I’ve really enjoyed it and plan to keep enjoying it, but I do feel rather guilty. I never thought I’d be the one to succumb to political apathy. And I haven’t...not really. Apathy is a bad word. I do care...more than care. I guess I’m more politically disillusioned. The articles and interviews and protests and letter writing that I used to thrive on have lost their enchantment. I’m trying to rekindle the flame. I guess the easiest way to do that is to start reading again.

Things That Smell Like Eggs

FINAL JEOPARDY

A couple, in their 50s, sit in two recliners in front of a TV set. DAD is an intellectual type, tweed pants and cream-colored shirt, thick glasses and graying facial hair. MOM is the turtle neck and vest type, a cup of tea in her hand. The couple are watching an imagined TV. On a stool downstage left sits a GIRL in her twenties, in professional attire with bad posture.


GIRL: (to the audience) Dad’s the kind of person to bellow out all the answers to Jeopardy before anyone on the show does.

DAD :(to the TV) Murdoch, Iris Murdoch.

MOM: She had Alzheimer’s you know. They made a movie last year.

DAD: Shhh, I can’t hear.

MOM: I saw it with Peggy down at The Colony. Peggy’s mom’s got Alzheimer’s

DAD: Seamus Heaney!

MOM: Wow, good job, honey. You should write in to them, see if you can get on. You’re better than all those guys.

GIRL: She always says that.

DAD: Uh…oh shit, who is it…

MOM: Where do you suppose they film it?

DAD: It’s not Yeats, it’s….

MOM: New York?

DAD: Ah, Jesus, I’m blanking out on his goddamn name….

MOM: Or L.A. I think I remember it being L.A. I’m sure it says at the end.

DAD: What? Damn it! Sheila, I missed the answer.

MOM: Oh, sorry.

DAD: Do you have to talk through the whole thing. I don’t talk during the Wheel of Fortune.

MOM: Don’t be silly, honey. See, that guy’s doing the Chemical Elements one. You won’t know any of those. You don’t know Chemistry.

DAD: Yes, I do…..uh, uh, Beryllium!

GIRL: Sometimes Mom says the answer softly after someone answers it on the show, as if it had been on the tip of her tongue.

MOM: Uranium…

DAD: FE, what’s FE?

MOM: Iron.

DAD: Iron. How did you know that?

GIRL: Dad’s always surprised when Mom knows something he doesn’t.

MOM: Folic Acid. Remember I took Folic acid when I was pregnant with Amelia.

DAD: General Electric

MOM: That’s the only reason I know.

DAD: Westinghouse? What the hell.

GIRL: When Dad gets an answer wrong, he assumes that there must have been a mistake.

DAD: That can’t be right.

GIRL: And Mom looks smug.

MOM: Remember when Amelia was a baby and got shocked when she pulled out the coffee maker plug.

DAD: What? No.

MOM: Westinghouse makes Mr. Coffee.

DAD: Um…Oh God, what is it?...The beer company…oh…Busch, Anheuser-Busch

MOM: You don’t drink beer.

GIRL: Dad does drink beer, but Mom thinks it’s an undignified drink, so she pretends that he doesn’t.

(A long silence…MOM and DAD just sit, staring at the TV.)

GIRL: During commercial breaks, there is always silence at first, until Mom realizes that she can’t just talk during the show itself, she has to talk through it all or else he’ll get mad at her for talking during the important stuff and not during the commercials. So a few awkward moments pass.
(more silence)
Until Mom can find something to say.

MOM: I can’t believe they put that filth on between the Jeopardy show…I mean kids watch this stuff.

DAD: Kids don’t watch Jeopardy.

MOM: Amelia watched Jeopardy with us.

DAD: She did not.

MOM: She did too. She always liked to watch you, see how smart you were.

GIRL: Don’t, Mom.

MOM: Amelia came by the other day, wanted to see you. She got accepted a job offer in the city.

GIRL : Accept, to allow or receive as in a gift. Except, to omit, to exclude, not including

MOM: Copyediting for a publishing company.

DAD: Amelia? Copyediting? Amelia can’t spell dog.

MOM : That’s not true, honey. You were always harping on her and she was only trying to please you.

GIRL: Complement, that which makes up or completes. Compliment….praise.

DAD: Good grammar is essential.

MOM: I get by okay without it.

GIRL: Dad always grunts when Mom says something like that.

(DAD clears his throat)

MOM: I tried that stuff, and it didn’t work at all. I should write in.

DAD: Just use bleach.

MOM: I know that, honey.

DAD: It’s cheaper.

GIRL: Between Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy, they introduce the players…two males, one woman, always the same. The woman never wins. Mom says it is because women have better things to do that become trivia pros…we work and have children…but Mom never worked.

MOM: Who the hell knows what a systems analyst is. I wonder if Jeff even knows.

GIRL: Hell is the only curse word she will use.

DAD: Don’t be ridiculous.

MOM: Well what do they do?

DAD: You know…portfolios, software fuctions, company profiles…

GIRL: His voice trails off.

MOM: Oh honey, she’s from Myrtle Beach….remember Myrtle Beach.

DAD: One big strip mall.

MOM: It was Amelia’s first trip to the beach. She got bit by those little sand fleas and cried all the way to the airport before we gave her some Benadryl.

DAD: Was bitten.

GIRL: I remember the little red bumps on the backs of my thighs, the sand still in my socks.

MOM: But she slept all the way home.

DAD: An audio category? Since when do they have that? It isn’t Name That Tune, it’s Jeopardy.

MOM: We should have taken Andrew to Myrtle Beach.

GIRL: My younger brother, Andrew. He died when he was 2. Pneumonia induced asphyxiation. Our family tragedy.

DAD: All About Alice…Famous Alices. They say it helps to think of possible answers ahead of time. Alice’s Restaurant, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Munro...

GIRL: Mom gets passive aggressive when Dad won’t talk to her about Andrew.

MOM: They should have a category called “All About Chafing.”

DAD: Alice in Chains

GIRL: I listened to Alice in Chains. He remembered.

MOM: All About Mucus

DAD: Alice Walker.

MOM: All About Gum Disease

DAD: Alice Roosevelt

MOM: Things That Smell Like Eggs

Mending My Ways

When signing up for my last semester of classes at Bard, knowing that I needed to take the easiest classes imaginable, I just couldn’t resist Yuka’s Environment, Development, and Power Senior Research Seminar. The reason senior research seminars usually only have about 6-8 students is because any senior in their right mind wouldn’t subject him or herself to the ridiculous reading and writing load while writing the project. But I suppose my six classmates and I were so brain-fried and delirious from our first semester of senior projecting, that we exercised severely poor judgment. Or maybe we just thought seeing Yuka’s sweet, smiling face every week would make it worth it, would make us forget that behind that smile was 400-500 pages of incredibly dense reading every week. I’ve had lit classes with 300-400 pages a week, but we are talking fiction…you know…plot lines.

Needless to say, I NEVER got all my reading done for that class. I took 20 hours all of my semesters at Bard (except for the first…I took 18), so not getting your reading done was a reality that couldn’t really be repaired. It was an adjustment. In high school, I read every single word of assigned reading and then some. It used to drive me crazy when I’d be sitting in on a class where I had finished the damn book and all my classmates were on chapter 3. Sooo frustrating. And all of a sudden, I get to college and spend hours upon hours at the library and still can’t manage to read anything.

But I developed a sort of system. Read the intro, first chapter, and one other chapter (the one with the most interesting title), and then the conclusion. For all other chapters, you read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. I find that doing this makes it possible for you to go into a classroom with a pretty good idea of what the book was about. But in that class, sometimes I couldn’t even find time to read the intro top to bottom. I tried really hard, because EDP was exactly up my alley and was this amazing opportunity to be exposed to what is happening right now in contemporary anthropologies. Most of the writers we were reading were fairly recent graduate (most within the last 7 or 8 years). It’s really an exciting time to be an anthropologist. And I did really well for a while. Then we read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern which I forced myself to read every last word of and I still can’t tell you what the fuck that book is about. It was translated from the French and it might as well have been French for all the sense it made. It was about pre-modernity and post-modernity and how we have never been modern, that modernity is just another act of faith and how our world requires hybrid modes of thinking…blah blah blah. I kid you not, the book had not a single proper noun in the entire thing…not one. Okay, I understood it a little better than that, but I’m not sure I saw the point. Maybe the translation was just bad. Some of the sentences had a bit of a Bablefish lilt to them.

The reason I just slipped right into history and anthropology from a heavy literature background was because I found the stories. Historiography and Ethnography are stories, crafted and highlighted in ways that create analytical meaning, but deep down, they are just stories. And I love stories. We Have Never Been Modern did not have stories. I can stomach intense theory as long as there are stories to somehow ground it. I even appreciate theory, because theory, when reiterated properly can become taken for granted and then put into practice. But I’m not sure I want to go there and I firmly believe that my broad generation (lets say born after 1970) of scholars must somehow find a way to make our work more organic and more fluid than our predecessors if we are to really make an impact. We have to be willing not only to take risks but to make our findings more accessible. But that’s another story altogether.

The point is, there is a lot of important work being done in anthropology right now, especially surrounding identity politics as they are manifested in critical environmental and rural development issues. And I have a bunch of books sitting on my shelf that haven’t been read properly. I’ve Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: and ethnography of global connection, which we read the week projects were due. I think Yuka was sad. “None of you read this, did you?”
And then there’s In Amazonia: A Natural History by Hugh Raffles, and Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (which I did actually read most but not all of, as it was my week to do a presentation). Anyway, I have lots of reading to do.

I’m going to have to go to Clemson and buy a library card so I can use their library. Maybe they’ll have a decently current anthropology section and a few periodicals of interest. I need to boost my knowledge base so that when I finally get to writing my piece for grad school, I can really show them I know my stuff. I generally disapprove of writing with other academics as your primary audience, but in this case, there is a great deal of money involved. I can be disapproving once I have my stipend. For now, we are going for impressive. I really need to learn how to speak the language. Anthropology is so focused on terminology and I don’t know a lot of it. I read these terms over and over again (neoliberalism, spaciality, political economy, political ecology, etc) and have never really had the time or energy to really find out exactly what they mean.

I think I am going to create a reading system. I tend to have 5 or 6 books floating around at any given time, none of them ever finished.

For example, right now, I literally sleep with these books in my bed (yes, yes, I have no bed partner so I find the next best thing…but my books don’t snore or hog the covers):

Mockingbird by somebody, Harper Lee’s biography….I’m about halfway through. She’s moved to NYC. This couple who kind of adopted her gave her a little envelope for Christmas with a note inside that said they would financially support her financially for a whole year so that she could write TKAM. It was pretty climactic, so I stopped reading. But I was pissed off to begin with because the guy writes in the intro “Harper Lee did not want this book to be written and adamantly refused to speak to me…but I’m writing it anyway because I want to.” I paraphrase, but it was pretty damn presumptuous.

The Essential Agrarian Reader…I’ve read the first 4 essays but honestly they’ve all said the same thing.

The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg (totally wrong spelling, but the books are upstairs and I am here)…I really like this guy and this book, but I feel weird about it, mad at it even. The day before I left for Christmas break, Jennifer got it for me. He was her professor at Harvard. She gave me the book and inside was the infamous $600 dollar gift card to the Strand. I’ve only read the first essay about January. It’s about hay bale twine.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes…I was reading this before I read People of Paper and now the momentum is gone. But after about 100 pages, I just found out that the little boy Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s really fabulous. I’m finishing it next.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban…I can’t help myself. I’m trying to get through them all before Deathly Hallows comes out in July.

Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol…I think I’m too depressed to go on.

See! I have strange bedfellows, indeed.


I think I need to limit myself to 2 at a time, one fiction and one academic…and I can’t move onto another fiction book until the academic one is finished.

And another thought of mine was to start taking advantage of Clemson and Furman when they go back in the fall. I miss lectures.

Speaking of Yuka...turns out she had a baby. It probably came out smiling.

Necessity has the face of a dog...

Tivoli

This plot was once a whaling town, you said, was filled
with men who dared to erect upon the shore
(where clots of skin and teeth and tears have built)
their village: a row of fences, windows, doors.
Perhaps a woman trembled and surveyed the long gray
shamed carcasses, blood like thick ribbons of sorrow,
hauled up to Straatsburg to be split and splayed,
tainting the rising river, the silt and stones of tomorrow.
She knows, of course, that the great desolate tail
churns the bones of Mohawk maidens at the river’s crest,
like a man’s love in her body, like a dry nail
chafing against the walls of her womb, rusting in her breasts.
And you, with your seaman’s lilt, would describe
the journey to higher ground, a home split in two,
bereaving the bedroom and the fondness inside,
leaving slanted doorways and lingering fumes of glue.
Three hundred years later, I live at this lofty address.
I live with the painted-over cracks and the leaning stairs,
unseen from the outside, hidden by morning glories and a dress
of May lilacs. But when I pull open the door it is there--
the penitent stench of adhesive. You are gone, but I am still bleeding.
It fills my shoes and I guide my breath,
the ghost of a corpse-stained river lost in my belly, needing
a way to reach over the crevasse of wrath.
They tell me this will pass, that my body will forget,
But my heart is hooked and stiffened, like the whale I never met.


This was supposed to be a sonnet, but then I forgot the rules of a sonnet and then I remembered that I always sucked at sonnets and then I remembered that I always sucked at poetry and then I remembered that I don’t care if I suck because I like writing sucky poetry.

So now that I finally convinced myself that this GS thing was the right thing to do, it’s all I want. I don’t want to send out any more applications or spend another minute of my precious time parked in front of the computer going blind at the SC Job Bank site. I could take some shitty paying job at Starbucks or somewhere like that (or maybe driving a truck for B and F) and sleep easy until August.

But here I am, just waiting, and working myself up about it. “I dropped the application at the front office on Monday…they haven’t called me….surely they should have called me by now….or did they already give it to someone else….what if I made some awful typo on my cover letter…why haven’t they called me…what if it got put under a stack of papers and is forever lost…” I hate this! And so I’m grumpy. I stare at my phone and check my email twenty times a day. I’m still sending out resumes but my heart’s not in it, and it really is a complete waste of my time. Do you know that I have sent out probably 40 applications since I have been home and have been contacted only three times. What the hell! Manners, people, basic manners! Just a little email that says “Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, we don’t want you.” I’m a big girl. I’m not gonna cry (well, I might cry, but it has nothing to do with your stupid company).

I should just be grateful that I’m not back in NYC. It was the same story there, only I was lonely, scared, and paying a monstrosity in rent. I'm so relieved to be out of there, but part of me is a little homesick. Sometimes I miss the independence, the anonymity...answering to no one in the world. And I miss "things to do." There are only a limited number of activities to occupy my time here. I'm working on Stevie's book (I'll post later), going to the Y, gardening, reading, writing, sending off resumes until I get frustrated, playing with Ialli until my chin and forearms start breaking out into hives. At night, I can go out with friends, but the days get long and boring. I'm not even sleeping very late. I wake up around 8am feeling nauseous and have to stand up and walk around. I guess it's a good habit to get into, but it makes for a long morning. And I don't want to watch TV. I have a very short attention span these days.


Here's the things I can be in Pickens County now that I am grown up and edjumacated:

Termite Technician -those termites sure are technical

Estimator- I imagine estimating how many marbles are in a jar day after day could get old.

Truck Driver- I really need to be a truck driver. They make 1000 dollars a week. But I don't know if I could pee in a bottle, at least not while driving.

Bakery Product Manager -gotta watch out for those bakery products, they need a little outside management to keep them in line

Journeyman- a noble occupation and each day is different.

Spinner- I'm good at spinning. Just yesterday I spinned around in the computer chair until I felt like I was going to be sick.

Planner- I'm also very good at planning, only it seems like my plans haven't been working out so well these days.

Inmate Labor Foreman- does this mean I get to sing sea-shanties while the inmates lay down railroads?

Fabricator- now this is something I could be really great at. I didn't know you got paid to lie.

I think I would like to either be a journeywoman or a fabricator. They sound nice. Although I think maybe you'd eventually get tired of journeying and fabricating things.

My mama always said life was like a box of Maura.

Which movie was this quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Listen to them. Children of the Maura. What music they make.

Which movie was this quote from?

Get your own quotes:

First rule of Maura Club is - you do not talk about Maura Club.

Which movie was this quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Gaaah! Google reads my email!

and gives me appropriate ads on the sidebar on each thread. I am forever amused and sometimes frightened.

ex: this from a series of emails between me and a friend

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or this one...

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sometimes they make me bite my lip...

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More about...
Baby Sleep Night »
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Poems »
Baby not Sleeping »


can you guess what I was talking about in this one?

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And what the hell is Gyrotonic center?

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This was a long series of emails about the shithole in Harlem I was living in

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there is a crack in everything

2 dreams.

1) J, Leah, and that guy I met at Lucas’s party (I can’t remember his name to save my life, but Leah thought we were going to fall in love...the Carson McCullers and Thomas Wolf fanatic who spent 5 years in Camp Lajeune as a Marine before spending his education money to come to Bard...wait....why didn’t we fall in love?) were hiking in this place. I’d be more specific, but it is just this place in my dreams. It’s some sort of park or trail or something, but I’ve never seen it before in real life, but I go there time and time again in my dreams. I know the layout of it perfectly: the steepness of the trail, the water crossings, the big shallow lake at the end that is fed by a waterfall but looks more like a tailings dam. It doesn’t even have a name.

But anyway, we were all there just having a good time. There was a little tension between J and the ex-Marine, which was awkward, but Leah and I just trotted ahead. And then, in the middle of the path, there was this huge mound of dirt, or maybe it was a log, with ruts carved into it as stepping stones. It was probably 50 feet high. Leah just jumped right over it and so I started climbing, but right as I reached the top I became paralyzed with fear. I closed my eyes and could not open them even if I tried. I was fumbling in the dark for the next rung. The boys were down at the bottom offering their encouragement, but I could hardly hear them and the fear of falling was caught in my chest like a giant-wad of soggy paper. I finally found the handholds and pulled myself up and opened my eyes. But I wasn’t just 50 feet up, I was miles high looking down on a toxic swamp. I started to see bright lights and feel hot and clammy. Then I passed out in my dream and woke up to my real life.

2) I was working for Jennifer and Daniel again, both of them, 50/50 like the original plan. I was riding in the car with Jennifer because they were supposed to have a joint play date. When we pulled the car into the parking lot of the playground, swarms of kids were out in the middle of it, and Jennifer wouldn’t slow down. All the while, I am thinking that Stevie could be one of them and that we were going to hit her. And then I see Stevie, but she is much older (maybe 4 or 5), running in front of the car and I reach over and yank up the parking brake before we hit her. Jennifer got furious and told me that I was stepping out of my place and that she was so shaken up that she was going to have to go see the doctor. So she dumped Stevie’s diaperbag out the window and sped off. I went to find Stevie so that I could give her an earful about running out in front of cars, but I couldn’t find her, and then I realized that Daniel was the one that needed to be yelled at, so I went to find him. I didn’t find either of them.

Then I realize that, in all the excitement, I have forgotten to go to my first period class again. I rush to...get this...Liberty High, but am terrified because I realize that class has been in session for 4 weeks and I haven’t been to a single first period class. And it’s an English class to boot. I try desperately to see if I can find a guidance counselor to see if I can just drop that class instead of failing it due to absences. And then Angie Rodgers is there and I am soooo relieved. She is so understanding and says “Oh, honey, don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll get you taken care of. I know how much stress you’ve been under, bless your heart. It’s hard work being a mommy.” And I don’t correct her.

Some time passes and I am getting ready for bed, but when I walk out of the bathroom, there are three people in my bed with no room for me. One of them is Daniel, the other is Shosha, and the other I can’t see under the covers. I tell Daniel he’s got to go, and luckily my room has sprouted a daybed in the corner. He tells me I can bring Stevie to him. I lift the covers and she is laying there just looking up at me, smiling. I tell him that it isn’t safe for him to sleep with her in such a small bed, that she could die of SIDS (even though she is 13 or 14 months old). So he shrugs and turns back over. I’m so overjoyed and I try to wake Shosha, but she is out like a rock. Stevie starts to fuss and so I give her a bottle, but it is filled with pink lemonade and I worry about her sweet little teeth. And I don’t know why, but I lift my top, pull her to me, and latch her on. It hurts because there is no milk, but she just keeps nursing until I start to feel like there is big pocket of air being deflated inside, and the relief is just breathtaking.

But then, in my dream, I sobbed when I realized that it was all just a dream, that I would wake up and she would be gone.

And she was.


Sometimes I’m amazed at how clearly metaphorical my dreams are, how appropriate and meaningful. I don’t make this shit up, I swear. In fact, I don’t even realize how striking and significant they are until I start to write them down. People are always shocked when I tell them about a dream, both at the content itself and the fact that I remember it so clearly.

Sometimes they scare me. About two weeks before Leah came to the city and told me that Jarod had been killed, I had this crazy dream that I just couldn’t shake. Leah and I were on a playground and I was so worried about her. I expected to find her in shambles, bruised and battered. But she was completely healthy, glowing even. She had this wooden box that she opened up and inside was dust and clean white bones. She said, “these are the bones that Jarod broke.” Upon waking, I thought that she meant that they were her bones that he had broken in her. When she told me, as we sat on a couch at the abandoned Lex and 38th Starbucks at 10:30 pm, all I could see was his bones in that box.

I don’t know why I remember them so vividly, when sometimes I can’t even remember really basic things in my childhood or even in the more recent past. Whole chunks of time seem to be missing in my memory.

But I have a love/hate relationship with my dreams. I find them interestingly productive and amusing at times. But when they are particularly traumatic (or wonderful), I can’t seem to be able to separate them from my waking life.

I woke up aching for Stevie.

Excuse me, is there a problem back there? Don't make me pull over this car!

I'm swimming in debt because of this? If only I had read this article before I went to the ER.

"Ulcers are areas of weakness or "depressions" that develop in the wall of the stomach or intestines, causing pain or discomfort. In a few cases they can bleed, tear open, or cause a blockage due to inflammation. Symptoms can include mild to moderate pain when the stomach is empty or after eating spicy or acidic foods, and sometimes severe localized abdominal pain (sometimes mistaken for appendicitis or ovarian cysts).
If the ulcer is in the first part of the intestines, then it is called a Duodenal Ulcer. There are over half a million new cases diagnosed each year and up to 4 million people have a flare up of the disease each year. About 1 out of every 15 people will at some time in life have an ulcer. Ulcers are found in the intestines 5 times as often as they are in the stomach. Duodenal Ulcers usually occur in younger people. It is still not clear what role stress plays in the development of ulcers, although approximately 2 out of 3 patients treated for Duodenal Ulcers report high levels of anxiety or stress upon the onset. Alcohol and diet are not felt to play a very important role in the formation of ulcers. Some ulcers are caused by an organism called Helicobacter pylori, some are due to medications, and a few are caused by intestinal cancer. Therefore, treatment and long-term outcome depends on the cause of the ulcer."

There. Mystery diagnosis solved. I diagnosed myself. That will be $4000 dollars please, made out to Dr. Capps. No, you can't do a payment plan.


In other health news, by royal decree, all women should start using the Diva Cup. If I was blond and obnoxious, I would do an infomercial right now. 10 times less messy than anything else and best of all, you can cross off TSS from your "Man, that is scary as shit" list. And, you do save money. I haven't bought a tampon in 2.5 years!!! (Just thought I'd do a little product placement...maybe they'll send me a check)

See this woman.



She loves her Diva Cup. In fact, she's thinking about buying two more and making a nice pair of earrings. She's also on crack.

the smoke hidden deep in your throat when you whisper my name

You could sniff my hair right now and get cancer.

Boy do I ever miss New York bars. I think I just smoked a half-pack of unfiltered cigarettes and now my throat is burning and my eyes are bloodshot and I smell awful. I managed not to cry into my drink, which is an accomplishment. I think every time I’ve gone out with friends since January, I’ve ended up sniveling in my beer. A glass of wine before bed has a mild sedative effect (without having to take a Benadryl) but any more than that and I just get weepy these days.

I miss the Black Swan, mostly its smokelessness and the Fosters on the tap. I took three senior research seminars my last year at Bard (very small, stressful classes) and we’d sometimes hang out at the Swan on the weekends, listening to music and playing slap card games in the back room until we got tired or remembered the shitload of work waiting for us in the morning and we’d mosey on back to our dilapidated old Tivoli shacks. Good times.

Easley bars are just depressing. 1) I can’t breathe, which always puts a bit of a damper on things. 2) It’s one thing when a bunch of stupid college kids are drunk out of their mind, but when the age range of completely sauced ranges from about 16 to 65, it’s just sad. 3) The music is worse than awful. Actually, tonight was supposed to be Karaoke night, which I’m usually game for given the appropriate level of mild inebriation. I do a pretty good Karaoke version of “Did I Shave My Legs For This.” (Or once, I did Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.”) However, the machine was broken and so all there was to do was listen to other people talk about their tanning beds and boob jobs. Though I will say that bars in the South are infinitely better for unemployed, broke girls like me. Sure you can buy me a drink.

I was reminded of Lucinda Williams. Lucinda creates a damn good soundtrack for life’s unsavory bits: Shooting up heroin in a back alley, having lustful and/or desperate sex, sobbing down the highway in a beat-up truck after a nasty breakup, or sitting in a sad bar in Pickens County watching 50-year-old women stumble to the bathroom. I can’t imagine being happy and having Lucinda playing in the background.

“the night’s too long/ It just drags on and on/ And when it’s never enough/ that’s when the sun starts coming up/ don’t let go of her hand/ you just might be the right man”

Dr. Funk and Sexual Etiquette

The Curious Expressions that define my life….

A one horse town
To jump out of the frying pan into the fire
To have one’s heart in one’s shoes
The Amen Corner
A month of Sundays
To stew in one’s own juice
A rope of sand
To upset the apple cart
As poor as Job’s turkey
Taking a French leave
To pay through the nose
A fly in the ointment
Neither fish nor flesh

I have this wonderful treasure-of-a-book called A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions by Charles Funk, the dictionary guy. It was a Liberty High School discard back when I was 12 or 13. There were two distinct advantages to being a teacher’s kid, I found out. The first was locker cleaning day on the high school’s last day. All the students were told that anything left in the lockers was to be thrown out without remorse. This was only partially true. Usually around 4 or 5 of us teacher’s kids would have a field day with the empty and not-so-empty lockers. We found all sorts of discarded treasures. Pens and pencils galore, Trapper Keepers, key chains, scissors, comic books, calculator watches. You never knew what you’d find. Once Shosha and I found this really nice drawing set, and several times we found exacto-knife sets, back when we were in elementary school, before we worried about things like school shootings. (Except—I almost forgot this—when Brad Lay brought a loaded gun to the third grade. He was expelled and then he came back in 5th grade and I was scared shitless.)

The second (and perhaps the better benefit of the two) was library discard day during the week of in-service before school started. I just could not fathom why you would give away perfectly good books. I was in heaven. Mary Dusenberry would have this big stack of discards just sitting there like hot brownies on a platter. Shit! Free Books! I think most of the books have now been discarded from our home, but I still have two that I know of…A Hog on Ice and Children Without Childhood. I did have a copy of Thomas Wolff’s (is that the right wolf?) Look Homeward Angel, which I took home in the 7th grade because I liked the title. I remember reading the first chapter and being like “What the hell?” I still don’t think I am ready for Look Homeward Angel. My 12 year old self didn’t know what to think.

I have fond memories of the Liberty High Library. I spent a good deal of my first 2 years of high school in there, hiding away. I think I read every book on the great wall of fiction. For every 10 god-awful books, there was one really good one. On the last day of school, Shosha, Mama, and I would fill up boxes full of summer-reading. It was exhilarating.

And then there was my year as a “media research assistant” which was possibly the most enjoyable class of my Liberty career. Aside from shelving books, dusting tables, learning how to make web pages, and checking people’s books in and out, Ms. Dusenberry took advantage of my unstylish book fancy. She let me order books and Accelerated Reader tests for the system. Small wonder I had about 4,000 AR points before I left Liberty. I’d just order the tests for all the books I’d read and take them as soon as they were loaded into the system. I think my average in English III, where you got extra-credit for AR points over the required 50 per nine weeks, was a 112. Too bad they didn’t take AR for extra-credit in Chemistry or Comprehensive Health.

I made the only C of my entire life in Health. It was a nine-week ¼ credit course in Sex Ed where Coach Worley taught us about menstrual cycles, the physiology of the erection, the endless benefits of abstinence, and all the horrible STDs you could get if you did have sex. This was my downfall. The whole grade in the class was based on this multiple choice exam where you had to tell the difference between all the STDs. And of course, I didn’t study. The only things I studied for (in my entire high school career) was Biology, Chemistry, and my math classes. So when Coach Worley (or whatever book he took the exam out of) put this matching section where you had to pair the STD with the symptom, I missed everything on them. I didn’t know the difference between Gonorrhea and Chlamydia. They both itch and ooze right?

It wasn’t my fault though. They certainly didn’t teach us anything practical about STD prevention. I didn’t even know what a diaphragm or cervical cap was until they handed us this book called “Sexual Etiquette 101” at Bard orientation. I actually still have it. It’s right there next to my Modern English Usage and A Short Guide to Writing About History. Honestly…



Wow, this post went in a kind of strange direction.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants ~Omar Bradley

Pa-Pa drove Omar Bradley's car in France during WWII. Isn't that awesome!


I watched Silkwood last night for the first time. I mean, I knew it was going to be rough, but didn’t know just how rough. Meryl Streep + 1974 + Plutonium refinement...I certainly knew it wasn’t going to end well. But I had nightmares about it all last night. I woke up about every hour and a half in a cold sweat. In one of the nightmares, I hit two deer, a doe and a little fawn. I got out of my car and went to go survey the damage. The baby was dead and being carried off my a coyote, but the mother was writhing around, blood streaming out of her mouth, calling out with these low, mournful wails, twitching and shuddering in pain. And I stood there feeling absolutely helpless. I knew I had to kill her, but I didn’t know just how. My shoes were filled with lead and when I took them off, I just started stumbling around. I frantically scrounged around in my car for a gun, even though I knew that I didn’t have one. And then I found this kitchen knife under the seat, but my hands were useless and I kept cutting myself deep while trying to get a grip on it. I also tried to get my cell phone from the center console, but I soaked it in blood. I finally decided that I would just have to strangle her if my flayed hands would work, but when I went back outside, she was dead.

Last winter, at Bard, I was driving home to Tivoli from campus and I saw flashing lights at the intersection of Annandale Rd and 9G. I pulled up slowly thinking it was a license check (which, actually, they don’t do in NY), but then I saw this deer illuminated by his head lights. Everything went in slow motion. The police officer grabbed the deer by its hind legs as it flailed and shook and dragged it off the road into the grass. Then he pulled out his handgun and I saw the spark and the quiet pop. I’ve heard the head-rattling boom of rifles before, but that almost gentle pop in such a violent act made me lightheaded. I waited at the end of the road until he pulled off, leaving the deer there. I asked J about it because he’d once been a hunter, but didn’t find much comfort. I knew it had to happen, that it was the right thing. But the violence had been so shocking.

In Silkwood, Karen hits a deer on her way back from a shift at the plant after her second time being decontaminated. She watches the deer flailing around, blood everywhere. It’s foreshadowing her own messy end, and she sees in the deer the sheer panic that she feels. It was a powerful scene.

My other nightmare, the one I remember most vividly, was part decontamination, part job interview. It started out in a dressing room at TJMax. I was there trying on these dresses for my interview and was somehow convinced that this sheet with balloons all over it was good business attire. And soon after that, I was at my interview, except when I walked in, they told me to remove all my clothing and take a shower with this special soap, but the whole room was a shower. So I took off my sheet and stood against the wall and they turned the showers on. I washed with this soap that felt like a big wad of wet, crumbling paper pulp. When I was done, I kept trying to catch someone’s eye to tell them I was done, but no one paid me any attention. I stood there until the water went cold, icy cold, until I was reduced to tears. When they finally turned off the water, I had behaved so badly that I knew that I wasn’t going to get the job, and for some reason, that really bothered me. They told me to follow them into the exam room for a gynecological exam. It totally froze up and said that I wouldn’t do it and went to go find my sheet so I could leave, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I decided to leave anyway, and held up my hands to the radiation detectors and the siren’s started going off and I knew that I was about to die of cancer. And then I forced myself to wake up. It was around 5:15, so I got up and read some of one of Shosha’s old political theory books until I felt I could doze off again.

I’m so conflicted about nuclear energy, because it is not the environmentally-friendly solution to all our energy-crisis problems that it was promised to be in the late 60s and 70s and yet it doesn’t seem quite as ravaging and detrimental as coal mining or oil drilling. But we are still not talking sustainability . And while we know full well the environmental effects of the depletion of fossil fuels and the health effects of coal mining, the process of harnessing nuclear energy is really an inexact science at this point in its development.

Valerie Kuletz’s book The Tainted Desert changed my life. I told Andrew that he would have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. I eventually returned it to him before I graduated. I remember him taking me into his office and handing it to me, and saying, “Maura, you have to read this.” And I did. I rarely turn down such enthusiastic recommendations. In addition to really going into the nasty little secrets and details of uranium mining, production, testing, and waste disposal, she brought the concept of environmental racism/classism into light in the way that none of my other readings ever have. She talks about what it means to be a sacrificed people on a sacrificed landscape. The reason we think of nuclear energy as so clean and efficient is that we don’t live in Alamagordo, NM or on the Yucca Mountain Ute Reservation where you look outside to see the billowing smoke stacks of the Alamagordo Nuclear Laboratory or the trucks loaded with poorly-sealed canisters of plutonium-laced nuclear waste taken into the caves of Yucca Mountain. We always hear about Three Mile Island as the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. History, but that’s because the people most greatly affected by the spill were predominantly white and middle class. The largest actual spill was Rio Puerto in New Mexico (I’m thinking it was in the mid-80s), the river running right through the Navajo Rez. I can’t remember all the details, but I remember descriptions of chocolate-colored water lifting the lids off of manholes in a nearby town. Those affected were not informed of the spill (as if they had to be) until 2 days after.

I think mining may be the most environmentally detrimental and dangerous to human health. I’ve seen tailing damns, which are more like murky ponds of yellow-cake sludge evaporating and seeping waste into the air and groundwater. Not to mention the astronomically high rates of lung, liver, and bone marrow cancer among the Navajo communities that are predominantly employed by NM-based mining operations in Grant’s Uranium Belt.

In one of the recent Democratic debates, one of the candidates (maybe the Alaskan guy) said that we needed to model our nuclear energy program after France’s. While I’m not convinced in the least by this, I’d kinda like to do some research on their program and see if it might change my mind. Although, I have a sneaky suspicion that France (like the U.S. in recent years) is importing their uranium from less developed nations. We are getting more and more of our refined uranium ore from places like India, South Africa, and Brazil.

I was thinking we should take the White Sands Missile Range (which is roughly the size of Massachusetts) and fill it with windmills and pave the ground with solar panels. I bet you could light up the state of NY.

The Whole Why World

The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a child named Elizabeth. "It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new things. But we don't have that," said Elizabeth. "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why world."

I’m reading Kozol again, which is, by its nature, a slow dance with despair. Shame of the Nation is about the continuous resegregation of our public schools, not only in urban settings where the problem is most visible urgent, but increasingly more so in smaller suburbs and even rural areas especially in the North. Since my 4 year stint in the north, I had suspected as much. My experience on the streets of NYC seemed to verify that suspicion.

“During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968. . . . Almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority,” and more than two million, including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest, “attend schools which we call apartheid schools” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are nonwhite. The four most segregated states for black students, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California. In California and New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.”

And I looked up the rest of that report and the next in line behind those top three were not South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama. They were Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Maryland. Only one of our dirty South states made the list. Now, I’m not one to make excuses for the South, especially it’s embarrassing history, but I will say that I am less guilt-stricken in my white skin being from South Carolina than I would be if I were from...lets say...Great Neck, NY. I’m not sure why that is exactly, but I think the resegregation of northern cities and suburbs has a hell of a lot to do with it. When I think about my high school experience, while not being delusional, I can pretty safely say that GS was more culturally and economically diverse that any other “alternative” or private high school around. I don’t have the numbers or anything, but, venturing a guess, I’d say it was about 70-75% white. SC’s population in 2006 was around 73% (used my trusty Isle / Of = Palms/ 100 method) white. Of course, things inevitably changed after I left when the school implemented a $3000 dollar meal plan, because the economic disparity between white and black or Latino, while not being as grossly pronounced as it is in NYC, is substantial to say the least. And, GS has never been able to tap into the local Latino population as it so desperately needs to in order to truly reflect the now 4.3 % of SC’s documented Latinos.

Meanwhile, I have a white friend from Oakland where the white population is only 30%, who went to a high school where, out of a 300 person senior class, there were only two black kids, 4 latino kids, and 6 asians. The black population of Oakland is 35% and the latino population is 21% and the Asian population is 14%. I was just floored by this...especially when she commented on how backwards the South is. And I have never seen as much blatant residential segregation as I did when I was in Manhattan. Once you get up to 110th street, you just stop seeing white people altogether until you get up to Ft. Tryon and the Cloisters with the exception of a few gentrified, trendy streets around 125th. And the same things happens in Brooklyn, when you walk from the Slope down to Sunset Park. Hell, I worked next to what used to be MLK High School (an almost all minority school despite its UWS location) which Bloomberg closed in 2005 due to low performance. Now the white kids are back, but the name has changed. The building is now divided into three or four competitive magnet schools where white families that can’t afford Cathedral or Ethical Culture send their kids.

I’ve come to the conclusion that contemporary racism is triggered and enhanced by money, not by some ignorant moral/ideological misconception. While I don’t doubt that the philosophical racism our nation’s historical psyche does manifest itself into today’s population, I think the real instigator is wealth. Which is why, I gather, the South has an advantage over the North. Face it, most white “upper middle class” South Carolinians are paupers in comparison with their “upper middle class” neighbors in places like Connecticut or New York. At Liberty High School, I knew of about 3 people that were considered “rich” in my eyes. And most of my peers would have probably considered me rich as a teacher’s kid, even though your typical Park Slope “Business Administration” Dad would spew his coffee all over the living room if you told him what my mother made last year. About half the kids I was close to, growing up in Liberty, were free-lunch kids. I remember staying over at my friend Sara’s house in the 5th grade, a crumbling single-wide trailer with tires holding a tarp over the roof to keep it from leaking where she lived with her mom, dad, and three siblings. It was sort of around that time period that I began to understand that my family’s financial strife paled in comparison to the poverty I grew up around, white and black.

Something Kozol talks about in Shame of the Nation is the rubrics of value that “underachieving” schools have put into place all over the country. He describes a system of rating individual student performance in a school. Level 4 is at the top, where a student is considered proficient and up to his or her grade level in math and reading. Level 1 is where a student is placed when he or she is essentially non-functioning in their current level. While I don’t have a problem with using these levels to keep track of where a student is academically, I was just devastated when reading how these children have started to refer to themselves by level. Kozol described a little girl named Pineapple, who pointed to other children on the playground and told him what level so and so was. “Shavaun is a Level 3” not Shavaun is AT Level 3.” She is. When he asked Pineapple was her level was, she looked down at her feet and mumbled, “Oh, I’m a Level 2.” It reminds me of middle school, before the age of scanned id cards that you put your lunch money on, when lunch tickets were color-coded based on if you had full price, reduced, or free lunch. Blue for full. Gold for reduced. Red for Free.

It’s kinda scary how these places are being run. Reading about them, I was eerily reminded of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Bentham’s Panopticon. Foucault talks about the 4 characteristics of a system that can maintain institutional discipline: cellular, organic, combinatory, and the other one that I can’t remember. Cellular being a way to evenly and effectively distribute bodies, organic making sure that activities are natural to the bodies, combinatory allowing for the movement and cooperation of the bodies as a single entity, and the last one being the one I STILL don’t remember. Well these school systems, implemented for improving student performance, have completely neglected the organic. Emotion and discussion has been outlawed and been replaced by “active listening.” Creativity and analysis have been replaced by “Authentic Writing.” What the fuck is Authentic Writing? And why on God’s green earth are we using this kind of terminology around 7 and 8 year olds?

In the face of the failure of these schools due to their isolated, segregated, under-funded status, have we just given up on education? We can’t teach these kids and no one really cares so we’ll just pay lip service to public education by babysitting them for 10 years until they can drop out or move on to another panopticon...prison. Because that’s what some of these places are: prison-shaped waiting rooms, where all these kids learn is to distrust each other and themselves.

I never knew just what you wanted

St. Francis And The Sow
Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

There are precious few pictures of me from my middle school years. Those were the years that I tried so hard to be invisible. Given the choice to walk around in a cardboard box without having to communicate with anyone or anything, I would probably have taken it. But I found this one. It was taken at a wedding, I think, the summer before 7th grade. I love that kid...her shy, reluctant smile, her gentleness, her sensitivity. I wish I could tell her that. I wish she would have believed it.


I was somehow coerced into being a judge for a middle school voice competition tonight. It was so painful. The singing was pretty dismal, of course, but that wasn't why it was so excruciating. Middle schoolers just make me cringe, the girls in particular. It just hurts me to watch them trying so hard, to see what they do to themselves to stake their claim in the madhouse of adolescence. I remember the way I tried so hard and the things I did.

I stuck out at Liberty Middle like a sore thumb. If it wasn't for the generally effective social regulator built into my personality, I would have been swallowed up. I knew how to fit in just enough so that people didn't seem to mind that I was seriously strange. I made straight As without even trying and all my teachers loved me to an embarrassing degree. Well, I take that back. I had an English teacher in 6th grade who just couldn't stand me. She tried so hard to give me a B. While my peers were passing love notes and playing with their Gigapets (remember those?), I would read novels under my desk while the teacher tried to maintain order. I only really got into trouble when I was just overcome with boredom and decided to see what the other kids were amusing themselves with.

I played basketball which helped, so there were always about 15 other girls who, if for nothing else, appreciated me for my height and awkward but accurate jump shot. I also played tennis for the high school from the time I was in 6th grade and played number 1 seed, singles and doubles (which isn't saying much at all...most Liberty-ites could care less about tennis, much less encourage their kids to). So I had an "in" with the high school crowd, which I think made me more "in" with the middle school crowd. And I had musical and artistic talent that was recognized and somewhat appreciated by my fellow inmates. All in all, I should have had a relatively easy go of it, if there can be such a thing in middle school.

Looking back, Liberty Middle School should have been more aptly named Liberty Self-Hatred Preparatory School. I know it is where I honed my own distinguished self-loathing skills. I like to think I've moved on and replaced such ideas, despite having such superior training, but I'm not sure any of us ever fully recovery from our middle school trauma. But it's nice to know that not only were we never really alone in our misery, but that misery at 13 is mandatory. The problem is, when you are 13, you can't fully decipher the misery from the pretense. When you are a miserable 13yo, you think everyone else is having a fuckin' blast! In reality, everyone else is just as miserable and are hoping to God (as you are) that no one can tell.

This poem always makes me think of the process of post-middle school redemption. If we are so lucky, the people who love us try to reteach us our loveliness, reassure us of our worth. Unfortunately, some don't get that secondary education--way too many. And those of us, the lucky ones, who do receive it are forever hesitant to believe it, even if we really want to. Under the praise and appreciation of others, we still must learn to bless ourselves, love the great broken heart, know ourselves beloved. If we can do that, even a little, maybe we can call ourselves redeemed.