wockerjabby

2008-09-29T20:17:00.004-04:00

for the first time since this whole financial crisis thing really got moving, I'm feeling a bit bewildered. the bailout fail is a bad thing, right? more banks are going to fail now, yes? is there something I'm supposed to be doing about it? I still came home from school today and spent twenty dollars on a ridiculously small amount of groceries (field roast and some fresh bread -- I need more tamari, but I keep forgetting). I still drop fifty dollars every week on school supplies, at least. sometimes eighty, sometimes one hundred. what else can I do? the government keeps cutting our budget. all my money, at least, is FDIC insured (for whatever that's worth). but the money my school was promised at the beginning of the year? several thousand dollars of that just doesn't exist anymore.

this isn't what I thought I would be writing about after a two-and-a-half-week silence. it probably would have been more interesting to start off with some stories from north carolina, where I spent last weekend. like how there was a billboard for a barbecue restaurant with a painting of two pigs kissing -- but not just touching snouts, like the pig equivalent of making out -- and above the painting it said, "this is why we never run out of the best bbq around!" you know what's more disturbing than suicide food? infanticide food.

(so I guess I don't feel so bad about my seven-dollar vital wheat gluten sausage.)

2008-09-11T06:12:00.002-04:00

wow, time. you blink and ten days are gone. or seven years.

so today is just another day, it seems: at six in the morning the city is humming quietly with the sounds of passing trucks, fluorescent lights, the day being switched on. from the east coast we watch the approach of another hurricane towards some people who aren't us, some place that isn't here. the top story on the new york times website is about a fashion show; my feedreader continues to deliver stories about sarah palin and the large hadron collider.

but it is still the only day of the year when it's a relief to wake up to clouds, a welcome curtain between this fragile world and the brilliant blue sky that, today, seems too sharp and painful to look at.

2008-09-01T18:34:00.001-04:00

the end of the end of summer

in my neighborhood you know it's labor day when you look out the window at six in the morning and the corners are already crowded with police officers, relaxing in the lull between j'ourvert and the west indian american day parade. all day the buildings throb with the vibrations from parade music and nypd helicopters, the trains bypass eastern parkway, and the sidwalks are littered with split-open coconut shells.

when I was running through the park this morning I realized that I haven't eaten a single cherry all summer. because I get all my produce through my farm share, and especially now that I'm the only one eating it, I haven't been buying any fruit. this year we got strawberries, blueberries, peaches, nectarines, and figs. but no cherries. no juice that stains your sundress, no pits just the right size to tuck inside your cheeks when you have nowhere to spit them out, no stems to tie in knots or crooked bracelet chains. and now the season is done.

tomorrow my life will suffer the next wave of this sea change, although the punishment will at least, this time, be welcome. after two years and two months of being an educator at large, I have a classroom again and so can re-become a teacher. it will not be like going back; I won't be called 'miss w' anymore, and that looks to be the least significant of the differences between my old school and my new one. I'm not as prepared as I wanted to be, but I'm more prepared than I've ever been. I've spent three hundred dollars on my students already, and I haven't even met them.

someday, soon I hope, I'll get my dissertation back on track. finish my pilot testing. finalize my instruments. collect some real data. write a final chapter draft. someday.

but not today. today I spent alone, five hours inside my windowless office at columbia, which will no longer be mine next week. I packed up the last of my books and recycled the last of my discarded files, the syllabi from last year's courses and the intermediate drafts of last year's irb proposals. I took down the tape left over from my posters and erased the concept map on my whiteboard, stripping away the last bits of color until the room was pale and blank like the inside of an eggshell, a world unto itself, far away from hurricanes and parades and presidential campaigns.

lately I've been listening to the matrix soundtrack a lot. grim and determined. somehow it makes me feel like I'm getting somewhere.

2008-08-28T22:37:00.003-04:00

dear barack obama,

I'm glad you are bringing up education. I have just three questions right now.

1. why do you want to hire an army of new teachers? it's not hiring the new teachers that is so difficult. it's keeping them, as you yourself have said in the past. what are you going to do to make teaching a truly sustainable career? financial "rewards" don't count. most of the teachers I know who left did so because they were fed up, worn out, and disillusioned.

2. how are you going to pay teachers more? the federal government doesn't determine teachers' salaries. more importantly, how are you going to make sure that disparities in teacher payscales are lessened, so that teachers aren't leaving the inner city for a $20k raise in the suburbs? (good luck with that one. sounds politically impossible to me.)

3. if you mean it when you say that you are going to improve assessments and get rid of the kinds of tests that require filling in bubbles... can I help?

in all seriousness,
rabi

2008-08-25T10:49:00.003-04:00

apparently this summer is the time for breaking things. not just hearts and promises, but tangible, physical things like windows and refrigerators and computers.

in march, two months before my applecare warranty was due to expire, I took my powerbook to the genius bar for a checkup. one of the usb ports was acting a bit weird, but mostly I wanted to make sure there weren't any serious issues waiting to be discovered. the genius (that title is supposed to be ironic, right?) ran a hard drive diagnostic and said my computer was doing fine.

in may my computer was three years old and therefore no longer under warranty. the power cord seemed like it wasn't making a particularly tight connection anymore.

on august sixth, the power cord stopped working completely. I fretted over it a little but just started using one of the extras I had hanging around. three weeks later -- of course when I was five hours north of new york city and nowhere near anything except for a lake and some farms -- it shorted out my third and final adapter. when I got back to the city I took it to tekserve, after a futile second visit to the genius bar, where the genius said, 'yup, it's broken, but we would charge you a thousand dollars to fix it so you should probably try somewhere else first.' so at somewhere else, it will be $250 to replace the dc-in thinger, but they have to keep my computer all week. also they checked out my hard drive again and now, of course, it comes back with some serious errors.

it's really a little too convenient that my computer goes from fine-and-dandy to will-inevitably-crash just as soon as it stops being free to repair it, don't you think? and the apple business model is clearly to make things so expensive to fix that you just decide to buy a new laptop instead. (would it be nice to have a new laptop? of course -- but 'nice' is not a reason to buy something that costs more than a month's worth of rent. plus I love my little twelve-inch and I'm not really looking for anything bigger. on top of that, the end of 2008 is when apple claims they will have phased out some of the more toxic stuff -- arsenic, pvc, bfrs -- from their products, so 2009 is the earliest I want to give them more money.)

so, that's eleven days without access to my own computer. right before the start of school and right when I claimed I would (no, for serious, really and truly this time,) have those first four dissertation chapters drafted and submitted. instead I am drafting yet another 'so here's what went wrong with my life' email to my committee. I did grab all my dissy documents so hopefully I can get something done on a borrowed computer, but still.

meanwhile, I will spare you the whole timeline on this one, but I am currently living without a refrigerator. this was even more inevitable than the computer's power failure, due to the landlord's insistence that as long as things were staying somewhat cold, it didn't really matter that the fridge regularly leaked giant puddles of water all over the floor. I know there are plenty of people in the world who live without electricity, much less refrigeration, and with two 24-hour supermarkets in walking distance and a drawer full of takeout menus, I'm in no danger of starving. I just feel like everything is going increasingly off-kilter at a time when I could use a little solace and stability. (let's not talk about the fact that I still don't even know where, or with whom, I will be living at the end of the year.)

I don't believe in jinxes or hexes, but if you do, you might want to stay away from me for a while.

2008-08-23T08:48:00.002-04:00

I'm having back-to-school dreams. Anyone else?

2008-08-18T15:43:00.003-04:00

for whatever reason, this last full week in august is when most teachers seem to go on vacation. including me, now that I'm a teacher again. I brought work with me, including my first two unit plans (mostly finished) and my first four dissertation chapters (mostly unfinished), in the hopes that I'll be better at writing after a morning swim in sunset lake than I was after a morning spent watching the olympics. we'll see.

I did just come in from swimming -- and trying in vain to coax my neurotic dog to dive in with me, but apparently she will only go in the water when there are no humans in the way -- but instead of working I'm busy being annoyed with john hildebrand and his stupid, stupid newsday article about how easy the regents exams are. (for those of you who are neither in education nor in new york state, the regents are our high-stakes, subject-based standardized tests for high school students. you have to pass a bunch of them before you're allowed to graduate.)

a quick recap for those of you who don't feel like clicking over: in the course of doing a story on how some people think the regents are getting too easy, hildebrand accepted a challenge from the state education commissioner to take a test himself and see just how difficult (or not) they are. he chose to take the united states history exam -- "one of the few subjects I felt pretty sure of passing," like, way to push yourself -- and wound up with a score of 97. (scores are out of 100, but do not represent a percent correct.) all that is fine. what's annoying is that, after his morning pretending to be an eleventh-grader, he returned to his job as a 47-year-old, college educated, upper middle class, white male journalist and wrote this incredibly self-satisfied story about how the test was so easy because it was full of "questions that seemed virtually to answer themselves."

'One item on my test, administered to last year's high school graduates, showed a news photo of a demonstrator holding a "BURN ALL REDS" sign. Who was the object of the demonstrator's wrath? the test wanted to know. One choice provided was "communists."

Duh.'

so, here's the thing. I hate the regents. like many educators, I think they measure the wrong things -- in particular, vocabulary and reading comprehension rather than real content knowledge, and superficial fact recognition rather than true understanding -- and I am all in favor of articles that are critical of the tests. but the message should be, "wow, this is what we're using to determine whether kids know what the history of their country is all about?" NOT "dude, this test was soooo easy, you have to be a total moron to fail it!" the latter statement is offensive, obnoxious, and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness. don't you think, for example, that a cartoon about "REDS" might have a different meaning to an american who lived through the cold war than it does to a sixteen-year-old kid who moved here from the dominican republic when she was in middle school? and don't you think that writing an essay might be a smidge easier for a professional journalist than it is for your average high school junior?

if you want to see the exam for yourself, it's archived on the state education department website along with all the other recent regents. hildebrand apparently took the june 2006 test. here's a sample question from that test, chosen at random. do you know the answer? do you think someone who doesn't is a moron who doesn't deserve a high school diploma?

The Panamanian revolt, the Russo-Japanese war, and the creation of the national parks system occurred during the presidency of:
(1) William McKinley
(2) Woodrow Wilson
(3) Herbert Hoover
(4) Theodore Roosevelt

in spite of my general cultural illiteracy, I was able to answer this question correctly, mostly because I know who was responsible for the national parks system. honestly, though, who cares?! this is a question for trivial pursuit or jeopardy. it is not a question for measuring whether someone understands how anything in the world actually works. what we need isn't harder tests. it's better tests -- or better assessments, if you think 'test' is a dirty word. there's an enormous difference. somehow mister I-got-a-97 seems to have missed that.

[via gothamschools.]

2008-08-14T10:29:00.003-04:00

wow. it's hard to find something to say when all you can think about is something you don't want to write about. this situation is bad for blogs and worse for dissertations. not so great for emails either.

here's a small thing that happened today. I was walking to the gym when I crossed paths with two men who were unloading crates of watermelons from a delivery truck. they were parked around the corner from their destination, a grocery store on a busy stretch of flatbush avenue, so they had to maneuver the crates around a bevy of parked cars and through a small crowd of strollers on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop. on one trip, as they hoisted their load over the curb, a single melon toppled from the crate and smashed on the concrete, splitting open to reveal its seedless red innards.

it had broken open at the feet of a father who was leaning against a nearby parking meter, with one hand holding an iced coffee and the other resting on the handle of his daughter's maclaren. he looked down at the watermelon, balanced his cup in the folds of the stroller's collapsed canopy, and reached down to grab a fistful of fruit. right out of the rind, just scooped it out with his fingers, as if he were a monkey gathering lunch from the forest floor.

it's the first time the concept of the urban jungle has seemed tangible to me.

2008-08-12T09:48:00.005-04:00

okay, here we go, in reverse chronological order.

my first and last lesson in the language of aliens (goodbye)

it was late in the year at the height
of the slow motion collision between summer and fall
when she took my hand for the last time
the trees were shrouded in tent caterpillar gauze, almost glowing
in the orange light of waning day

I was surprised; I was not used to having
my hand trapped by another
but there it was and I was being led
down a familiar path of pebbles and dust clouds

I was watching her while pretending
to stare straight ahead
her eyes were empty green and lips
parted in the manner of a sleeping child
pale and clammish like a dying feral thallid
what singular visual dysfunction could have led anyone
to believe we looked alike?

we stopped at a wide open field
there was no wind but my hair was somehow
caught in my mouth anyway
I found myself breathless and wordless
(that at least was familiar)
but there were tears in her eyes
tears! from my stoic paragon of empty
drug-induced happiness
nonono, I'm the crybaby here

something muddy and vaguely
beautiful
happened inside my head then
you were never meant to know
but I did, and I hated her for it
always running away from me, and
this time forever
you're so naive!

I was never good at being still
but I stayed flat-backed on that field
watching her star through the haze of my
dew-soaked eyelashes
until the spinning of my wretched little planet
carried it out of sight

we woke up thirty thousand lightyears and two
worlds apart

*

[this poem is about a recurring fantasy I had as a teenager, in which I had this soulmate/sister/caretaker who loved and understood everything about me. but she was actually an alien, and when it turned out that I somehow had the ability to read her alien thoughts (which of course no human had been able to do before), she had to leave and go back to her home in some other part of the galaxy.

in other words, "I'm so different and exceptional that no mere human could understand me, and now I'm being punished for my specialness by being left utterly alone."

a feral thallid, by the way, is a creature from magic: the gathering. just in case the whole "I wish E.T. had happened to me" vibe wasn't geeky enough.]

* * *

reflections in a black and white photograph

he sits in my mirror seat across the room
disappearing behind his curls and amulets
through the lemonscented dust and pigeonshadows
we can feel the mournful throbbing
of lost esp messages

in a dying storm of poems and notes slyly slipped
myriad scraps I kept
hidden inside a hollowed out book
we fall apart together
smothered in tranquil obscurity

in the corner, underneath her rocket cone hat
peering out with that surreptitious halfsmile
greta garbo
looks better with a mustache

*

[an entirely literal description of me sitting in my ninth grade english class. our desks were arranged in a big circle and a boy who was one of my closest friends from middle school tended to sit across from me. in sixth and seventh grades we'd spent a lot of classtime passing notes to each other, the best of which I had saved, and hidden inside an old trixie belden book. once we got to high school our lives and personalities diverged a bit, and I would often wonder what was going on with him.

as for greta garbo: that classroom was covered in posters, including this one of greta wearing an elaborate headpiece. someone had, at some point, pasted a handlebar mustache onto her upper lip. our teacher said she left it on because she thought greta garbo looked better in the mustache. so that's what that whole last stanza is about. when I was fourteen I thought it was freaking brilliant.]

* * *

skyrhyme

bleeding mindbeat burns and melts
an empty void of feeling, thought
a puzzle scattered on the stairs
hides how to find what I am not
it always seems to drift apart
before the chance to see is gone
escapes the grasp of trembling rhythms
ever pulsing through my palm
time eats stars that falling scream
the sky gets blacker by the day
in the sky I once had something
but in the end it sailed away

*

[bad rhymes; tortured syntax; mashed-up words; references to pain, blood, and loss. all that and I still have no idea what I was trying to say! do you?]

* * *

[finally, in the true spirit of the day, let's end with what I think is the Worst Poem I Ever Wrote. the other ones make me laugh at myself, but this one just makes me cringe. leave a comment if you make it to the end without gagging, unless you've gone blind from your eyeballs rolling out of your head. didn't I tell you it would be awesome?]

revelation in soap

I washed my hair
and started to cry
and I could not brush my tears away
because there were dizzysweet shampoo bubbles
all over my fingers
so they fell in miniature rain
and I could not deny them

But!
I killed the soap
It met a most satisfying demise
squashed and branded with my angry fingermarks
broken into incompletepieces
small enough to disappear into the whirlpool
under my still-dirty feet

I did not know I was so strong.

2008-08-11T09:40:00.005-04:00

here's something that could turn out to be awesome: bad teenage poetry blogging day. personally, I have enough bad teenage poetry for a whole month, although a quick survey of my oeuvre reveals that, as a poet anyway, I transitioned from bad to merely middling somewhere around the age of nineteen. (thanks, poetry workshop? or maybe just the end of adolescence.)

according to the official compendium, bad teenage poetry comes in a number of common subgenres. here are the most popular:

I am alone and no one understands my pain

more than like - love poems

life sucks and I want to die

I will never love again

pointless ramblings (I thought these words sounded good together)
I have definitely written at least a few of each, and way more than a few of some. but I think my bad teenage poetry comes in a few other flavors, especially my imagination is so much more interesting than reality and this imagery is more profound if I don't explain what it means.

so, what do you want to see?

2008-08-09T16:15:00.003-04:00

I'm ashamed to admit that I have no idea why russia and georgia would go to war, and that reading the news hasn't made it much clearer to me. something to do with a territory dispute, I suppose, but it must be more than that for a country as big as russia to care about, right?

you know how a lot of people claim to hate science or math, but it turns out that what they actually hate is the way they learned science or math in school? I think that's what happened to me with social studies. when I was in elementary school I liked learning about other cultures, and in sixth and seventh grade we did ancient history and I thought it was fascinating. but then between eighth grade and my junior year of high school, I took three years of american history, looked at an endless number of textbook illustrations of men in white wigs, and decided I hated the entire discipline. in twelfth grade, when most of my friends were taking AP world history, I got my social science credit from a psychobiology class. when I got to college I cashed in my AP credits from US history and psychology and never looked back. I haven't studied modern global events since I was fourteen years old.

frankly I think it has had a pretty detrimental effect on my cultural literacy. I read the newspaper, and of course I do my best to understand the issues that are directly related to my voting habits. but I think I might be closer to that stereotype of the myopic, ignorant american than I want to admit. I know where to find a lot of countries on map, but that's because I like maps, not because I have any real knowledge of the countries themselves. just now I needed wikipedia to tell me that the current president of russia is dmitry medvedev. I know more about china's gymnastics teams than I do about its government.

I mean, really, I'm not sure I can pretend to be a well-informed citizen when I don't have a damn clue about the headline at the top of the website of record. it's shameful.

2008-08-04T06:51:00.000-04:00

suddenly, I'm twenty-seven years old, and not where I expected to be. but here I am.

2008-08-02T09:24:00.003-04:00

well, this is a tiny bit embarrassing, because I truly did not write that last post to make everyone think I was going to quit the internet. it was supposed to be more of a "so what should I be writing about?" post than a "please tell me how much you love me" post. I do appreciate the response though.

so let me tell you another little brooklyn story. on the days when I work in crown heights, I walk north on from eastern parkway after getting off at kingston avenue. as you go farther up, you start to see buildings that are burned out or boarded up, adorned with the strangely elegant remains of shredded awnings and broken neon signs. on one corner there's a big brick apartment building, four lots big I think, with an abandoned nightclub on the ground floor. on one side, the second-story windows are wide open, with no glass or plastic or plywood to stop you from looking in on someone's left-behind life.

one window has a blackened curtain dangling from a corner. if you look past it you can see the opposite wall: a closet door; a wrinkled nba poster; two pieces of faded construction paper, which once upon a time might have been blue, each cut along the traced outline of a small hand. above them, the ceiling is a like a cave full of stalactites, a mess of peeling paint.

this could be a metaphor for any number of things -- windows are, after all, for seeing through -- but this time I think I'll leave that decision up to you. I'm just fascinated by that room, by its hints of children, by how it is so throughly open but reveals nothing more than a mystery.

2008-07-26T09:47:00.002-04:00

on another note, I need to decide what to do with this website. starting in september my students will know me by my incredibly googleable first name, and I think it will not be good for any of us if they spend their evenings reading about how my heart is broken. (most eleventh graders, of course, are perfectly happy to forget their teachers exist as soon as they leave the school building. but not all of them.)

I think I'm going to take down the archive link, at least for a while, and keep all the new super-personal stuff confined to my password protected livejournal. that's the extent of my plan, though. what do you think? why am I here? what do I have to offer?

2008-07-22T18:30:00.002-04:00

on the mornings that I work in bed-stuy, I walk up washington avenue to the C train. near the corner of fulton street where there are two churches across from each other (plus a western union and a bodega, of course), I always see the same man rolling his wheelchair up the street. both of his legs are amputated at the thighs, and when he leans backwards even the slightest bit, the front wheels of his chair come off the ground. he moves like this, two-wheeled, up and down the street with his chair straddling the yellow divider line painted on the asphalt. sometimes he seems to be going somewhere, wheeling with a destination in mind. other times he just spins in aimless little twirls while cars fly by on either side of him.

I can't tell whether he's fearless, totally confident that he won't get hit, or if he just doesn't care. or maybe he's being intentionally self-destructive. how many days can you spend playing in traffic before you get hurt?

people keep telling me that I'm handling things well. what with the going to work every day, I guess, although I mostly feel like a robot accessing the same subroutines over and over again. (what do you think your students learned? how can you tell? wait for silence. wait for silence. ...I'm mentoring new teachers.) when something unexpected happens I have no idea how to respond. people talk to me and I can tell they're speaking english, but I'm not sure what the words mean.

at home I feed and walk the dog, eat cucumber slices for breakfast because there's nothing else in the fridge, watch too much television, and go to bed without doing any work. I make careful stacks of all the mail that comes addressed to tom. I don't write my dissertation's introduction chapter, much less my IRB proposal. sometimes I write the letter to my advisor explaining why I haven't sent her the conference paper that's due on august first, but even that is only in my head. I water the plants in the container garden and harvest the occasional clutch of cherry tomatoes and try not to think about how delighted tom was when their flowers first turned to fruits.

so I'm not saying I'm hoping to get hit by a car. but sometimes I'm not sure if I'm handling things or if I'm just spinning my wheels in the middle of the street.

2008-07-19T09:33:00.005-04:00

dear everyone,

i'm sorry if i've been a bad friend. if i've ignored your emails, seemed unwilling to smile at your babies, if i didn't follow through on the things i promised to do, i'm sorry. if i failed to buy you a wedding present or stopped returning your phone calls, i'm sorry.

i don't want to make excuses and i hate how utterly banal this is, but i also need you to know: the boy i adore and cherish and love has ended our partnership, and i am... shattered. heartbroken; everythingbroken.

and i'm sorry if you already know this and have to keep watching me reveal it in gradually more public arenas. i'm sorry if you didn't know. i'm just so sorry that this is reality. i think some part of me is still expecting to wake up and find out that it isn't.

i am sorry that i can't explain it to you or promise that i will be fine again soon. i'm sorry that i can't even quite understand it myself and i'm sorry that i can't bear to say anything bad about thomas. i still think the world of him.

but i needed you to know. and now you do.

rabi.

2008-07-05T08:09:00.001-04:00

(my schedule is too full.)

2008-06-17T14:02:00.003-04:00

I'm sitting on the couch right now, waiting for my computer to finish running some file conversions so I can pull them up as sources in my data analysis program, listening to the little crunch and rustle noises that tiny parrots make as they shred things. poppy is on my lap, wrestling with the subscription card that fell out of the most recent new yorker. he just turned seventeen years old, which means it's been sixteen years and eleven months since he came to live with me. I was about to turn ten years old, still had my crooked pre-braces teeth, still had a giant snow white poster over my bed. (I know. what?) he was a little fledgling fuzzball, still had a black stripe across the top of his beak, still slept in a cozy corner on the floor instead of balanced one-footed on a perch.

today he is old. his feathers don't always grow in straight after a molt, and his bright green back has slowly become patched with yellow. when he perches on a shoulder or on the edge of a cereal bowl, he doesn't sit up as straight as he used to. he hunkers down on his haunches so that his tail is splayed across his back claws. he takes more naps during the day, and spends a lot of time fluffing and puffing out his feathers. he is a happy, spry old bird-man.

(he's also great entertainment for preschoolers. one night when I was babysitting I let the boys play with my phone, and they discovered this little clip of poppy playing with the drawstring on my hood. now they ask for it regularly:)

bixbite is sitting inside a box of tissues on the windowsill. small, nesty places are her heart's delight, which I guess is the bird equivalent of having a large shoe collection? she's a girly-girl bird, always finding someplace soft and dark to snug herself inside. right now she's cuddled up in the corner of the box, but she keeps stretching her neck out to nibble on the cardboard, tearing little bits off to pull inside and tuck around her breast like tiny treasures.

jasper is as antisocial as ever. while poppy and bix hang out with me in the living room, he's sitting atop a shelf in the kitchen, communing with soem pots and pans instead.

2008-06-12T22:59:00.002-04:00

in the united states, rising fuel prices have so far meant mostly that we pay more for groceries and for transportation. I will admit that, as an herbivore and a non-driver, it hasn't affected me much at all so far. cereal is a little more expensive, but now that it's summer I eat more fruit than grains. the price of my favorite soy yogurt recently went up forty cents. our electric bill is about six dollars more than it used to be, for the same number of kilowatt-hours.

in the rest of the world, things are far, far worse.

the truckdriving strikes in spain and portugal have caused an airport to run out of fuel, and markets to run out of food. people in haiti and bangladesh and egypt (and so on) are getting violent over high food prices. in manila, drivers are rioting in the streets. people are dying in the clashes between strikers and rioters and police and bystanders. farmers are fighting with riot police.

in 1999, the price of oil was sixteen dollars a barrel. SIXTEEN. five months ago it hit one hundred dollars. now it's almost one hundred forty.

is this peak oil? I don't know. but the fact that my government, and my culture, are pretending that they know for sure it isn't? waiting for the oil bubble to burst, for the economy to rebound, for prices to fall, for life to go back to normal? is scaring the wits out of me.

2008-06-10T15:00:00.003-04:00

so the news, for those of you who don't read my password protected stuff over at livejournal, is that I have a teaching job for next year. I had a lot of offers to choose from, and I weighed my options pretty carefully, which felt almost unseemly in a way. who am I, after all, to decide that a school isn't good enough for me? and yet that's what I did, over and over and over again.

the school that I chose feels like a near-perfect fit, except for the annoying commute -- it's in brooklyn, but the fastest way to get there on the subway is to go in and out of manhattan -- and the more I think about it, the more happy and excited I am. I thought I would feel more remorseful about putting my academic life on the backburner, but so far all I can think about is how much freaking fun it's going to be to finally work at a school that values the same things I do. plus, as the first-ever earth science teacher in the building, I get to buy a bunch of brand-new equipment. can you imagine? globes that aren't falling off their axes! mineral samples that haven't been worn to nubs! maybe even an overhead projector?

my students, who will be in eleventh grade, are mostly from bed-stuy and east new york. before I made my decision I spent a day tailing them through school, listening to them talk about oil spills in their science class, watching them grade each other's work in algebra, and serving as the sole audience member to several read-aloud performances of death of a salesman. they are fantastic, of course. they have already informed me that they don't want me to assign them any homework, ever.

2008-06-04T08:15:00.003-04:00

hi! I know I have a bunch of stuff to catch you all up on (though maybe it is only in my head that the internet cares about how I learned to tell the difference between the becraft and new scotland rock formations?), and I feel like I should say something about obama, but right now I'm completely preoccupied by my hatred for this pampers commercial:

(huh -- until I looked it up on youtube, I didn't know it had music or that salma hayek was the narrator. I've only seen it at the gym, where everything is silent and subtitled.)

seriously, this commercial is so distasteful to me that I can't even appreciate the cuteness of the multicultural baby parade. it's not that I object to people buying vaccines for "the world's babies in need," although if you read the fine print you will see that what you are actually buying is a tetanus vaccine for a pregnant woman, so I think the spot is deliberately misleading in that regard. and as much as I question the goodness of capitalism, I don't have anything in particular against corporate charity programs. (given that every vaccine costs all of five cents, I myself would rather give the money directly to unicef.) it's just... is it me, or is the message of the commercial, "if you buy stuff, you can be a Benevolent White Savior!"? because that's really what it looks like. which really makes me feel kind of ill.

am I overreacting? I think teachers are a bit sensitive to this phenomenon because of the whole (also stomach-turning) hollywood mythology of the young white woman who comes in and tames all the wild brown students, thereby saving their lives. but this commercial truly is playing off a nasty, self-aggrandizing story we tell ourselves. it's the same story that says international adoption is a selfless, noble thing to do, and that poverty in developing countries has nothing to do with our habits and choices here in the united states. it's not a true story, but it sounds good, I guess.

there's also something about the way "the world's (mothers) and babies in need" are dressed and filmed that feels a little exploitative. like how they are all wearing fancy native outfits, and how the mothers are only allowed to look at us from over their shoulders, while the babies can reach out to the Benevolent White Savior. it's all very fetishistic.

the song -- which is being marketed on itunes with the word "pampers" in its name -- is also terrible, but only because it is terribly vapid.

I should really stop watching television.

2008-05-18T15:23:00.002-04:00

much going on; much less motivation to write about it.

I'm working on getting a teaching job for next year. I considered but failed to pursue the possibility of teaching general science on a part-time basis, so I guess that means I've made my decision as far as the research assistantship goes: not a particularly high priority. I don't know how many full-time earth science positions I've applied to, exactly, but I'm in the middle of the interview process at three schools, and have been offered jobs at two others. when I write it out like that it seems like I should be able to relax about it, but I'm still feeling awfully stressed about the whole thing.

the other thing I'm supposedly working on is my dissertation proposal. I'm at that awful stage where I know ninety-five percent of what I'm going to write, and just have to sit down and write it already -- but the other five percent is taking up all my mental energy and making it hard for me to see the big picture. it's like trying to write the thousand words for a picture puzzle that's missing a handful of pieces from the middle. I'm almost positive I know what the finished puzzle will look like, and it's unlikely that any description I write will turn out to be wrong, but the little hole is making me doubt myself anyway.

on thursday I'm leaving for a ten-day geology field trip. this is a good thing, and I've been looking forward to it all semester, but the timing is... imperfect. ten days in the woods and mountains, away from wifi and cellphone signals, when I'm supposed to be sending updated drafts to my committee, and when principals are going to be telling me whether or not they want to hire me. argh.

on the plus side, our container garden is doing well despite the temperamental weather. the basil is getting bushy; the soybeans are sprouted and waiting to be thinned; the peppers have little white flowers; the yellow blossoms on the tomatoes have given way to fat green fruits; and we have four new pots of herbs growing on the office windowsill. we still need to start the lettuce. maybe our laziness will pay off when our csa farmer has harvested all his tender greens and started delivering eight ears of corn a week, and we'll still have organic salad growing on the fire escape.

2008-05-05T08:10:00.002-04:00

yesterday was sort of miraculous, wasn't it? all that forecasted rain and gloom but instead we got this lovely springy sun. thomas and I rolled out of bed and into our running shoes for a jog around the park, early enough that the morning fog still hung across the treebranches and the birds were singing to each other across the meadow. we had planned a container-gardening day, which by necessity would take place on the floor of our apartment, but when we'd counted out our already sprouted seedlings and realized that we would have space for some extra plants, tom decided we should visit the botanic garden on our way to pick up some more seeds. so we walked up crowded, sun-drenched eastern parkway to the garden, then went winding our way down between beds of velvety pansies and unruly tulips to the garden shop. back at home, having had our fill of flowers, we spread soil across the floor and set our vegetables in rows to be potted. when we put them outside, just in time to catch the last rays sunlight before the earth turned too far eastward, we found that basil plants already had a few leaves to spare. we ate them chopped and sprinkled over the gnocchi puttanesca that tom made for dinner, and even though the nighttime darkness had settled in, I myself could hardly have felt sunnier.

2008-05-04T10:42:00.002-04:00

what not to say when you're trying to get a girl's phone number

"you have a boyfriend? is it serious?"

"you're in a serious? long-term? relationship? you look like you're twenty-one!"

"so, this guy. you trust him?"

"well, I'm sort of seeing this girl, but I don't really know if we're dating."

"yeah, we played ping pong together but now she keeps blowing me off."

"see we have this whole instant message conversation, let me show you on my phone."

"yup, I have lots of girls' phone numbers. I kind of collect them. heeheehee."

"oh, this is your stop? I mean I was going to get your number too--"

2008-04-29T14:21:00.004-04:00

we're in that magical patch of our short coastal springtime when it's never too hot or too cold or too humid or too sloppy to go running. I've been doing a random five-mile circuit through prospect park three days a week, most recently skirting around the back of the rose garden before shuttling down -- literally; the park straddles the harbor hill moraine -- through the midwood and around the peninsula of the lake before returning northward via a long sprint up lookout hill. every log and rock poking out of the lullwater was transformed, shiny slick and lumpy, by the turtleshells of sun-catching red eared sliders. when the wind kicked up it sent showers of crabapple and akebono cherry blossoms into the air, pattering against my cheeks and catching in my ponytail. I don't consider myself a runner so much as someone who generally enjoys being in motion, but there's no denying that these springtime jogs are among the most pleasurable of my exercise habits.

between my runs and wednesday and friday of last week, the park completely transformed, as the trees leafed out and shed their petals. that one day of awkward in-between growth, when they're covered in splotches of wilted flowers and looking shaggy under an uneven coif of floppy new leaves, is such a tidy little adolescence, and it reminds me of what I love about teaching high school students: they're like trees at the end of april, working hard to replace their frenzied and florid blooms with green baby leaves that will unfurl to let them drink in the sunlight. after two years working only in other people's classrooms, the last of my kids are about to graduate from high school. some of my first are about to graduate from college. I can't believe we're all so old, so grown, even in this springtime stage of life.

* * *

while I'm here, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's been responding and making me think (and talk) more completely about my environmentalist outrage. it's good, and you're all great. want to come sit in on my dissertation committee meetings?