Thinking of Moving

I've almost made up my mind that I want another blog site/host. But I'm a technological idiot. So, I'll be scouting around window shopping, but I have my doubts that I can actually use another site besides blogger. Any suggestions?

-- DV

Homework = Terrorism: A Vent

At least in this household it does. Whenever homework time comes around, we simply revert to describing it in Homeland Security terms. Some days we're right up there in the red, but most of the time we're on the same "watch" as the USA in general: elevated. There is significant risk of homework attacks. I would love to just be "guarded", but that's the stage I'm in when I'm sitting at my desk sipping coffee at about 10:30 thinking, hm, I wonder what homework he'll have tonight? We'll never be "low." Eh-vurr.

Dante doesn't just dislike homework. He loathes it with a burning passion. He despises it. He acts as though you're slipping hot needles under his skin while asking him to dance a jig. His reaction is very much that of a person under intense psychological and physical punishment. I've actually seen him roll around in the floor and moan like a wounded hippopotamus when asked to simply do his math problem by hand rather than with a calculator. It would be amusing if it weren't so incredibly frustrating. I'm pretty sure if given the choice to gnaw his own leg off or finish his spelling, he'd chose to lose a limb. If you think this is hyperbole, it's not. I can't possibly describe the psychotic gyrations we go into when homework happens. And homework happens Every. Fucking. Day. He also insists I sit through each and every agonizing minute of it with him. He simply won't do homework with El Hijo, for reasons I don't fully understand. Once, tired of being a combination lion tamer and suicide prevention hotline answerer, I quit on the homework. I'm not doing it anymore, this is fucking ridiculous, you do it with him. Dante then refused to communicate and wadded himself up in a ball. WTF? It's almost like I'm a security blanket. Unfortunately, I'm also the one who has to tell him to take his pencil out of his Afro and write with it. Ten million times in the next 45 minutes or more. I think at this point this ritual has become a habit now, and so he needs me as the straight man Abbott to his Costello, so he can freak out in between math problems.

This is the punishment academics get for being such good students: you give birth to one who hates anything resembling intelligence.

I'm not saying Dante isn't smart. He's very smart. He just thinks school in general is one big whack-off. On top of that, my child does not have a "relaxed" personality. He's very type-A about being physical. He's a body learner--kinesthetic. He's so fucking kinesthetic that if you ask him to stop wanging his pencil against the table at 90 miles an hour, he'll yell, MOM, if you do that I can't THINK!!! SHEWWWWWWWWWWW!, and let's loose one of those pre-teen tornadoes of exasperated air that seem to punctuate all of his sentences now. Like, GOD, Mom. We've been fortunate to get a few teachers who understand what a body learner is like. They essentially distract the snot out of him so he doesn't have enough time to dick around. When we homeschooled, I had to do things like make him do physical spelling. When we had a spelling word, I would make him jump for consonants and squat for vowels while he spelled it out loud, so "vowel" would be "jump, squat, jump, squat, jump." He loved it, but it didn't even phase him. He doesn't fall asleep at night so much as he just passes out.

Can I whine for a minute? Moving him to functional literacy is fucking hard. He is belligerently apathetic about school work. Part of the problem is that I think he's mildly dyslexic. I never was able to get him tested, because they don't test them in this district unless the problem seems severe. No opthamologist here is capable of doing the test anyway. If he has the least little struggle with something, he wants to quit immediately, and getting him to get interested in it again is like trying to beat a dead man's heart into starting again. It didn't help that he had a horrible first year school experience with a racist kindergarten teacher (fuck you, bitch). But the past is the past, and we can't keep blaming current problems on the past. We have to figure out ways to move past that.

He has to have multiple encounters with most material to get it. His spelling is probably the most black & white example of that. If we don't drill him in spelling nearly every night of the week (including Sunday), he fails. He doesn't get a B or a C on the test, he fails it spectacularly. If we drill him, he makes an A. Not a B or a C, an A. If he has a test in something, I end up making a zillion worksheets for him where I have to restate the material, draw diagrams, make true or false statements, etc in order for him to get it. I was bitching the other day that Houghton Mifflin pays people good money to make worksheets, and I've made them all for free. We studied the hell out of his introduction to government in his history class. I made so many practice tests I was ready to become an anarchist. Fuck government. He was the only kid who didn't miss a single question, so it paid off. But Jesus, I expect this to continue through high school. I expect seven more years of this.

Part of the terrorist event that homework has become is the fact that he hates it. But part of it is the fact that I make him learn it. It totally doesn't seem worth the hassle sometimes, but I won't let him use a calculator in math, even if he swears up and down (while rolling in the floor making hippo noises) that the teacher said it was OK. It's not about the worksheet, it's about understanding the concept, I tell him. I don't care about the concept, he says. I know, and I don't care that you don't care, I reply, you have to know it. Why?????? the hippo rejoins. Because you have to be a smart person to have a good life and to be a responsible person, is my best excuse so far. It consolidates what I believe about education. This is usually responded to with a SHEWWWWWWWWWW! I had pretty much decided I was going to rip all my hair out, and at one weak moment during a particularly frustrating math sheet, I said, You know what? I quit. This isn't worth it. You aren't looking at your paper, you don't care, and you're angry no matter what I say, and I'm tired of fighting over something as simple as adding two numbers together. Forget it, just don't turn it in. And that got a NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I care and I want to do it. Argh. What is this game we play? And just for the record, it's not that he doesn't know how to do it--he just gets easily frustrated. I've fished around enough to figure out the difference.

In the meantime, we keep "fishing for math," a math game El Hijo rigged up with a pencil, a piece of string, a magnet on the end for a "fishing pole" and a bunch of flash cards with paper clips on them. Whoever fishes for math and pulls up a card has a certain number of seconds to solve the answer. Whoever has the most number of cards wins. When JP and Batmite! were up for a visit and also played fishing with math for us (sorry guys, what a lame Friday night), he was absolutely ecstatic. You have to trick him into learning.

Another part of the problem, particularly with math, is that I have been deemed by everyone in the household as the Monarch of Math (that's what MoM stands for). I don't fucking know why. I suck at math. I live in dread of the day that Dante comes home with a math problem I can't solve. I've written notes in to the teacher before saying "Totally don't get how you find the answer for number 26." Math is NOT my strong suit. I am an English major. The only reason I know how to tip is because I used to be a waitress. I especially don't know how the hell math is being taught these days. There is some new and bizarre way of teaching kids math that I completely don't get. There have been a few times where I've simply had to teach Dante the way I know how to do something, because I just don't understand what his teacher is doing. Of course that makes him mad. But it's still the same damned answer. Although, surprisingly enough (or not), they've moved on to angles and Dante absolutely kills the angles math sheets. Maybe it's the visual thing combined with physical stuff. He explained some angle thing to me as "See? The ones like this:" and twisted his fingers up into a mishmash of gang signs that made a couple of scalene angles (I think that's what they were). The other day he was asking me about quadrilateral something or others. Hell if I know. He had his bionicle pieces (glorified legos) going "obtuse--acute--obtuse--acute" while yanking them into the correct shapes. Tonight he was blabbing about "tessellations". I had to fucking look it up. Both of them kept asking "Is this it? Is this it??" And I felt like saying: How the fuck should I know?? My most recent academic experiment was writing about Vogue in the late 1800s. There wasn't any fucking tressellaterals or whatever in that!!"

I keep digging on math, but I should be talking about English. For though Dante loathes math, he'd rather stick a rusty fork in his ear than fool with English. It figures. The one thing I could really be good at helping him with he has an unholy hatred for. The boy hates writing. He's skeptical of reading. He must absolutely be tricked into any grammar of any kind. If he had his way, he'd write in fucking hieroglyphics. Some of his writing, in fact, resembles the pictures on the sides of a pyramid. When he wrote an entire page of something relating to dogs and Christmas on his own, completely voluntarily, I nearly shit a brick. He must be tricked into reading with a combination of graphic novels and wrestling magazines. And even then, it's dicey. I brought him back a Luche Libre magazine from Mexico, and it took him a couple of weeks to say, "He-ey, this isn't English!" He was looking at the fucking pictures. When I test him for grammar, I make up elaborate written story paragraphs about the wrestlers he likes and what they do, and then I have him fix the fuck ups I intentionally make in the paragraphs. I write sentences like "Make this a possessive! 'belt of Jeff Hardy'; 'choke slam of the Undertaker'" Etc. The creativity required is taking its toll. Especially having just recovered from a history test, a science test, a spelling test and a round of grades on a report card that shows Dante is getting C's in vocab and reading.

All I want is for him to be literate and a registered voter. At this point, I will consider that a parenting success. I've given up on the thought of him going to college. He told me (proudly) recently, "I was the only one who didn't raise my hand when the teacher asked us whether we wanted to go to college. She asked me why. I told her I was going to the school of hard knocks instead!" Lovely.

Maybe he'll get a basketball scholarship.

-- DV

Life Rambles Part 2

The one person I can truly say I've begun to model my adult self after is Dana Nelson.



Dana is considered to be a "rock star" professor. Don't snicker. It's a legitimate term. It's a combination of being progressive, being popular, being incredibly sharp and moving the field forward. And being incredibly well connected. It means that top tier universities will pay you obscene amounts of money for the pleasure of getting you to work for them. It means you get to dictate your terms to the university, instead of the other way around, tenure or not. It also usually means you're a bit of a lightening rod, either through personality, the strength of your ideas, or how you present them (or all of the above).

I met Dana when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky. I had an English class with her, and I have to say it changed my life. It changed the way I looked at America, at the people around me in our present age, and at academia, and my place in it. She was the first one to say to me, "Have you ever thought about graduate school?" And I laughed and said no. She then said, "Why not??" She wrote me a recommendation letter that I'm positive got me into graduate school. It's sort of like having Mick Jagger say you'd make a good member of a band.

Dana was incredibly smart. She has several books out, the latest one making a bit of a splash, which for an academic is an incredible thing. No one reads our stuff except us. When one of us makes it into the mainstream, it's a Big Fucking Deal. I'll tell you about her latest thing in a minute. But what struck me about her first was the way she was so willing to share power and space. She gave space to our ideas when she could've so easily said, "You people don't know what you're talking about, shut up and listen to me." She would network you without batting an eyelash. If you said you were interested in going to such and so school, she would rattle off the names of three people she thought could help you--and she'd contact them herself, if you wanted her to. If you wanted to go into a different career, I'll be damned if she didn't know people there, too. She praised your efforts, and she made you feel like the little bit that you did was important. That really made an impression on me.

What really did it for me, though, was when I had to bring Dante to school one day. We were having major problems with his racist kindergarten teacher, a story I really don't wish to recall. But anyway, there was my barely five year old boy sitting in class with me. I warned her beforehand, and she was fine with it. When we got there, she gave him colored chalk and let him draw all over the board while we had our class discussion. She stooped down, looked him in the eye and asked his name, which he was delighted with. After a little bit, she asked him what he was drawing and he launched into some sort of wild explanation, which she praised. He was very content. Then, the fire alarm went off. The fire alarm NEVER went off in all my years as an undergrad, but the day I had to juggle a kid, my bookbag, panicked people and all that crap, the fire alarm goes off. We got up and I reached for my stuff (stuff being kid and bookbag), but Dana had already thrown my bag over her shoulder and had my kid by the hand. She waited for me, and she walked us both out. Maybe that seems like normal human compassion that everyone has, but I have to say, Dana has a sense of humanity about her that just radiates from her.

She makes you want to be a better person. She makes you want to be just like her.

One of her other qualities that I admired at twenty two years of age or so was the fact that she was so involved in the issues that were important to her. She writes a lot about American politics, about interacting within a democracy, voting issues, American history, all great stuff. But every now and then she would drop something like, "Yea, we had to be taught how to take kidney punches when we escorted women through the lines of protestors to abortion clinics." How many academics actually get out there and spend some serious hands on time with community problems? Not too fucking many. She's currently working with women in prison as well as a homelessness organization. And she still answers my emails and signs them, "Love, Dana."

Here's a link to her new book stuff: Dana Nelson totally rawks. Her latest is called Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. The premise of the book is that basically democracy in America has been boiled down to voting for the President, with too much emphasis placed on that event alone, creating a sort of hero worship around the President. Given the recent rock star election, she couldn't be closer to the mark. It's a call for the people to become active citizens again. This is so incredibly important. When I asked my students why they felt so many people stayed home and didn't vote, they responded it was because they felt their vote didn't "make a difference." I asked them who else was running in this election besides the presidential candidates. Most of them couldn't name a single one. But there are so many local and state offices where their vote would make a difference, and quite frankly, where political decisions may be much more important to them. But they, too, were caught up in the spectacle that presidential elections have become. You should totally read her new book. She's been recommended as a guest on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show to talk about it. But on top of that, in the link to all the info about her interview, her book trailer, the synopsis, everything, there's this sweet, totally Dana Nelson addition. It's the top ten things you can do for democracy besides vote. She gives you practical ways of making a difference now, of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands in it again.

Over time, I feel like I've gotten even closer to Dana. It may seem silly to say this, but she's the big sister I never had. It's so weird, because she's so powerful in the world she works in. She became close to me on purpose and by her own choice, which amazed me, because she could be close to anyone she wanted to. She asks after me. She helps me. When I had that fiasco with my project, I emailed her for advice; she basically gave me the scoop on how things worked and encouraged me to fight like hell, which I did. When she came to my university to give a lecture, she asked for me and El Hijo to pick her up--that's a giant networking honor that's usually given to grad students so they have a chance for face time with Important People. El Hijo brought her to the lecture. When I saw her again after about five years, I guess, or more, she moved up to me, hugged me and kissed me, and told me to go sit down before she started crying. That night at the party with all the important faculty people, Dana stayed right with us, bragged on us, talked about my project (which was huge for me at the time), and made us feel more important than anybody else in the room. I took her to breakfast and the airport when she left. We talked about parents and death and life and work. We cried when she had to leave. She told me she was so proud of me, of the work I was doing and who I had become, and it meant something so incredibly solid to me for the first time since my dad died. I watched to make sure she got through airport security OK. She turned and blew me a kiss, and was off again.

She made me want to be the kind of teacher I try to be; somebody who's up on why it matters that you read books and process the context. Somebody who can tell you why it's important to know what democracy was like in the way back when and why it's important to think about what it has become. Somebody who makes it seem important to get involved. Somebody who shoulders your book bag and takes your kid by the hand and walks with you out of a potentially burning building.

I want to be Dana Nelson.

-- DV

Life Rambles Part 1 -- long.

Although things have been a bit hectic around here, I've had some time to sort of process my life and where it has led me, and where I think I want it to go. So, fair warning. That's what this post is about, and if that bores you, click a sidebar link. My life has always been a bit bizarre, which is what makes it also sort of interesting. I was in a band for ten years as a kid. I was a single mom at 19 years old. I was raised in a cult. The list goes on and on. But part of the problem with an abnormal life is that there aren't any real role models for success. And yeah, yeah, you have to be the change you want to see in the world, but it makes it easier if you can see somebody doing the things you want to do. When I found out I was pregnant, I was only a few months past 19 years old. When I gave birth, I turned 20 two weeks later. I decided when I found out I was pregnant, that I would keep the child--it was crystal clear to me. I also decided two other things. First, that he would never suffer for things like education or experiences because his mom was young and poor, when it wasn't his choice nor his fault. And second, that I wasn't going to give up on what I wanted out of life to be a successful parent.

I'm not knocking stay at home moms or parents who give up stuff to be with their kids. I'm not saying you've made a bad choice. I'm just saying that at 19 years old, especially with all those models of teen moms around me, it wasn't a choice for me; because for us back in Podunk, Kentucky, that sort of thing leads to welfare and live-in paycheck boyfriends, no education past high school, an extra kid or two, and bad teeth. Seriously. Nobody else did it any differently than that. And the one girl whom it looked like was going to break the mold ended up in prison for prescription pill fraud just a few years later. Her sister got pregnant at nearly the same age she was when she first got pregnant, and I'll be damned if the sister didn't end up going to jail for the same reason, too. I'm the only one of my graduating teen pregnancy class, if you will, who went back to college after dropping out once (a few of them made it to college, but didn't last), graduated college, went to graduate school (a major first), is not in jail, does not have outstanding warrants, does not have yet another kid, and has a successful job. With insurance. And all her teeth. I'm a fucking role model. You're laughing, but it's true. There was this other girl who got pregnant almost exactly when I did, and she got through school too. But her parents paid her way, and they had a lot of money. I did it myself. She's fat now, anyway. :p

It sucks always having to be the pioneer. And that's how I felt a lot of the time, like the one cutting through the brush for other people. I've sort of "grown into" myself and the way I approach things, but it took a while. It took a while because I didn't have a lot of external validation. There weren't many single moms in college with me, for example, or at least single moms like me. I know they were there, but they were never around, or maybe I was just working too hard at a full time job to notice. Or they were older women whose kids were in school and who decided to go back when they were 35 or 40 years old. I was twenty or twenty-one. I had a toddler. And I didn't fit in with other twenty year olds; our world experiences were just too different. And so even now after all this time, I still struggle with being a good mom and pushing forward to my own version of success. It's fucking hard. It's hard in part because I want so much. I've never really been good at narrowing down what makes me happy. "I want to be a nurse," or something like that never worked for me.

I knew I wanted a life based on doing, but also on thinking and creating. The world I inhabit now is full of artists and activists and academics, but rarely do you see one who fits the bill of all three. Or at least one who is more than myopic about the scope of his/her work. And none of that usually squares with being a mom. It has always been the pull of the domestic world against the lure and need for the external world. It's very hard to do both. At least it was and still is hard for me. I was damned determined to be both a nonprofit worker and a graduate student on top of being a Mom. So, while other GTAs were out getting shitfaced, I was cooking supper and doing homework and running laundry and grading until midnight. Every single night. All my free time was spent with reading and writing my essays, and it really used to piss me off when people would bellyache about not having enough time to get something done. What the hell were you doing all week?? I just didn't want to give up what I wanted, and I still think that's not a healthy thing to do. My life has been about finding that balance between what makes me happy and what it takes to raise a son and hold a family together. Because the two things don't always go together naturally for me. Most especially, I didn't want to ever just be somebody's mother, no matter how much I love Dante. I need my own sense of identity, and when you're a young single mom, it's too easy to get trapped in the identity of "single mom". I knew at 19 years old when I had him, that I never wanted to lose touch with the outside world, the world of doing things.

When I got to academia and activism, that kind of singular pull manifested itself again. You can come into the Masters program, but you have to choose: creative writing or academic writing. You can sort of do both, but nobody takes it seriously, because you're supposed to specialize. I understand the value in that, but it never seemed like enough for me. You're also not encouraged to do different work on the outside (unless it's a project through the university) once you're in academia, and I understand why, because the conferences and the research and the requirements of the field are difficult and time consuming. I didn't listen, of course, and I actually ended up being rewarded for not listening. But at the time, nobody else was doing what I was doing. Now, they tell the incoming people about what I did. Which is a good feeling, especially when the new people drop in for my opinion on things, because they think it matters. But I'd like to know what somebody else did every once in a while, because it would make me feel less perilous about striking out on my own. When I took my current position, which I beat out a bunch of PhDs for, I quit my nonprofit job because of the time requirements; but I can't keep activism out of education, because to me, teaching is activism. Teaching people that good writing is more about a process than a product is no different than teaching people that democracy is a process, not a destination. I also ended up being a faculty advisor for a student group, and I've had to bite my tongue not to encourage/take on another one. I've been told specifically to "teach vanilla", and I just can't do it. I'm so bored otherwise.

But I guess where I'm finding myself is at a junction in the road, which is almost silly considering just how recently I took a fork in that same road. I love my job, I really do, and I'm reasonably sure I'm going to get to keep it. I probably won't be at it forever, though, and people are hinting that I should set myself up to stay in academia, which is tough to do with little more than a Masters degree, unless you just want to be a paid-per-course instructor with a crapload of classes for half the pay. You don't even get to sit in on the faculty meetings then--they don't apply to you anyway (which sucks and needs to change, but I don't have the time to work on that one). You're contract labor. I don't want to go back and get a PhD. I love the comp/rhet field, so I could probably stick it out. But I'm just not interested in more schooling; it's more that the PhD would give me a little extra punch to help me stick around. But I'm also getting more wrapped up in activism, in motivating people (students especially) to get involved, in bringing the university into the community and vice versa. I'm interested in tackling apathy, in creating opportunities for everyday democracy and activism that's based on what's going on locally rather than getting too wrapped up in national issues, and also in having a voice or an expression about those issues.

But then there's that short story collection sitting under my bed right now--twenty two of them, I think, over a year's worth of work in drafting and redrafting and a brief period of consulting with editors and mailing things out. I put it away for a while, because it needed to sit. Those stories represent one of the most important parts of my viewpoint--a different voice; not my teacher's voice or my activist's voice, but my artist's voice, which is just as important to me. Or my artist's eye in that partially finished collection of photographs I spent two or three years working on, thinking about, taping to my mirror and just looking at. I think I know what it's about now, and I need to get back to it. These things are important to me personally. But I know they could be important to other people, too, because when I gave my best friend (who, granted, could be really biased) three of my best short stories to read, she burst into tears and told me "This is what we've been waiting for. This is us, this is this place." Which was all I was trying to do, and god help me, I think she's right. It is us, and it is our place, and somebody needs to show it. Or the photo of mine we framed and gave to my inlaws, who mistook it for a regionally famous photographer's work at first, and the likes of which also sit framed in other galleries, looking like mine but from a different angle. I'm not bragging. I would do it whether anybody else wanted to see it or read it. But it feeds a part of me, and it's a way of interacting with people that I want to have, something to share, a new way of looking at things.

But where do you find the time to do all these things? That's where I find myself now. I have academic papers to write and conferences to go to. I'm not required to do it, but it's important to my career to do it. I'm spearheading a new project that's important to this university--the first of its kind. It needs to work. I've pushed my short story collection to the summer of '09, when theoretically I'm not supposed to be teaching and should have a couple of solid months to work uninterrupted. I'm not sure about the pictures. And I'm still a mom. I've spent way more time this year on homework and such than I have when Dante was even homeschooling and we were doing it all ourselves. I spend more time with him now than ever before, which is a good thing.

Somehow, all of these things need to exist in the same body and with the same level of importance and all at the same time. I'm not sure how to do that, and I don't know other people who are doing that. Sigh. But that seems to be where I'm headed, or where at least my mind wants me to go.

But right now, I have to go cook supper.

-- DV

Joe the Plumber, Meet Bob the Builder

I love the roll-your-sleeves-up-everybody attitude that Obama brings to the spotlight. I really do. I'm so about that. Just ask my students.

But can I just say that I think Obama owes somebody an apology? After all, Biden has been accused of plagiarizing parts of a speech. Obama should've known better. He owes this guy an apology:




Everybody knows what this guy's tagline is: Can we fix it? Yes, we can!

Maybe Obama is offering him a cabinet spot?

-- DV

And Now For Something Completely Different

Back to the grind again...

J--I'm sure you were the shit as a cheerleader back in Podunk High, but twirling your hair around your finger and rolling your eyes at the concept of having to read in an English class is not very popular with me. Also, hitching rides with dorm mates back to New Jersey every weekend is not considered a valid excuse to be absent, even if said ride did leave you stranded in NJ and you're not sure when you'll get back. Especially if it happened more than once. Or twice. Or six times. When you asked me the last time if absences affected your grade, I thought you were asking a rhetorical question. When you asked whether the readings were "real" or not, I'm sorry the whole class laughed at you. But you don't make any damned sense. Asking questions like "When I write my paper, does it have to be about the assignment" will only continue to get you quizzical looks from me and giggles from your classmates. My favorite part was when you asked if you repeated this class, would there be less writing and would it be "easier?" It's 101. And, No.

J #2: You're so cute and perky. It's a pity we only see you once every five classes. But what's best about you is the way you think on your feet. Like when I asked you point blank why you didn't turn in your midterm portfolio, and you said you did, you had put it under my office door, which was impossible, see, because there is just enough space under my new office door for a piece of paper or two. You can't get a folder under there. I even experimented after you told me that whopper, just to make sure. Nope, doesn't fit. I gave you a way out (or more rope to hang yourself with) by smiling and saying, "No problem a'tall, just print out what you have again and bring it to me. That was about three weeks ago, and nary a piece of paper yet. My favorite, though, was when you said you had been confused this whole time not only about what was due but when to even come to class, because the syllabus online seems to be different from what we're actually doing in class now. Did I change it? Um, I don't have an online syllabus. Busted again.

To the frat sacrifices: I'm pretty sure we went over the fact that rushing your first semester never goes well. I'm quite positive we talked about how it trashes your grades, and how a good chunk of people fail out of school and making it into the frat then means very little, considering they can no longer participate, you know, not qualifying to come back to college and all. I remember the eyerolling that happened then. And you all looked real cute in your business suits that this frat makes you wear, to demonstrate, you know, how you're a cut above the rest, and all. Three of you have already failed out without any chance of recovering in the next few weeks, and three more of you will fail in spite of the fact that you're holding on by the skin of your teeth. Your ties looked nice, though. I'll have fries with that.

To D: I worry about you. Especially about your ability to comprehend the basic context of where you are and what that might mean for you. I mean, when you show up to a composition class and you don't have a pencil or a piece of paper, it's a bit puzzling. Where did you think you were going today? OK, I can see maybe getting up in a rush, barely making it to class, and having to borrow supplies every now and then. But every class for the past 28-ish classes? Do you go to the grocery store and forget to bring some form of payment? Do you microwave something to eat and forget to bring a plate? Do you take a shower and forget to turn on the water?

To F: I recognized that look you were giving me today. The look that says, "Did she really do that on purpose?" Yes. Yes I did. You see, every time you fall asleep, especially after I warned you in person, "Quit fucking sleeping," I'm going to do something loud and obnoxious to scare the pee out of you. Like knock all your books off your desk accidentally on purpose. Or wang the door into the back of your chair. Oopsie. You'd have seen it coming if your eyes were open.

To B: My god, you're adorable. Sadly, I'm neither gay nor do I date students. But you keep sitting in the front row and looking at me like that. It totally helps your grade.

-- DV

Star Spangled Banner--1814 style

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!


Perhaps a bit long to sing.

I am very proud of my country right now. I'm proud because of the number of people who turned out to vote. I'm proud of my country, not so much because they picked the guy I liked, but because so very many of them came out to vote one way or another. They got involved. They gave a shit. I'm proud because Sister for the very first time voted yesterday, and was very happy with herself.

I'm proud because I heard a graceful concession speech and a powerful acceptance speech--and neither person unnecessarily bungled their words or made up new ones like "strategery." I'm proud because Obama called on everybody to roll up their sleeves and pitch in to do the work, to take care of each other. I'm proud because every person I've seen this morning who I don't know has a big grin on their face. I'm proud because me and an older black woman I've never seen before looked each other square in the eye as we were passing each other this morning and started giggling.

I'm especially proud because Dante came in my room early this morning, picked his own clothes out for school, and whispered, "Hey Mom. MOM. Did he win? Did he do it?" And when he got an answer went away whistling, made his own breakfast and got himself completely ready for school.



-- DV

My Campaign Budget is Bigger Than Yours

Virgil: Has cool campaign ad.
JP: Doesn't.



I'm DV. And I'm cooler than JP.