I really should be writing right now.

Well, I guess technically this is writing, but I should not be writing on a blog, I should be working on the play.

This is a problem.

It’s not done. It’s cast, but not finished. I suppose I could call it finished, in a sense; in the sense that all the scenes are written in some form, but, in another sense….

It’s not done.

Every time I read it, I find more stuff that needs to change. The problem is, I don’t really know what it needs to change into.

There is also the small problem of the utter terror that fills me every time I think about the play. I can’t stop wondering if I have made a huge mistake, that I am doing a tremendous disservice to the kids, and that I will get laughed out of the festival. I'm glad no one told me about the fear stage.

In the “stuff that rocks” column, the kids love the play, absolutely love it.

I guess maybe that matters more than the other stuff.


Maybe.

Leaving Every Child Behind

He is exceptionally smart. He’s funny, and popular, and he can rebuild an engine in a matter of hours. He plays golf, and won contests every year of high school for the furniture he built in his wood shop class.

It’s a shame he will never graduate from high school.

HE is one of the many victims of a bill designed, ostensibly, to improve education. Naming a law No Child Left Behind implies the very best of intentions. Of course we should not leave children behind. All children are created equal, and every child deserves the opportunity for a quality education. The problem is not in these noble concepts themselves; the problem is with their interpretation. The intent has been lost in the implementation.

Equality is a matter of value, not characteristic. As anyone who has read A Wrinkle in Time can tell you, LIKE and EQUAL are not the same. All children are created equally valuable, with equal rights and responsibilities. Therein lies the fundamental problem with NCLB – it assumes all children have to same interest’s the same abilities, and the same needs. Fortunately, not all children are alike, but by ignoring that basic fact the proponents of NCLB are doing an inexcusable disservice to the very children they intend to protect, along with thousands of teachers, administrators, and parents who have to somehow find a way to push children through an educational system that has suddenly become intractable, where children who fail to fit the mold are inexorably and tragically left behind.

All children are valuable, and all children deserve an education. By destroying the ability of educators to respond to the inherent differences in children, NCLB is slowly denying more and more children that right.

He could have told you that.

Gone

After the tears are dry
and the calm
the breath
return

After the storm
emotions held in check
smiles and promises
equal parts
hesitation
and anticipation

After the goodbye


This death
with love
unfailing
gives birth to beauty
unspeakable.

Happy.

It's odd. Tonight I had a house full of people. I can remember a time in my life when that idea would have filled me with an unholy terror, and the reality was unthinkable. I remember a time when I would have been crazed thinking about how they must be judging my house, and my things, and me. I remember a time when I would never have worn the tank top and cargo pants I wore tonight, and when I would have had a fit over the fact that I did not have time to do my hair, or that I did not have makeup on to my satisfaction. I remember a time when not getting the frosting made for my cake would have been sufficient to send me into a dark depression that would have lasted for days and ruined the party I had been so excited about, and then I would have spent weeks in self-flagellation over not throwing the perfect party AND being so upset about it. Flagellation for flagellating.

None of those things happened.

The party wasn't perfect. My hair wasn't done, and when the first guest showed up it wasn't even dry. Several major items on the "to do before the party" list didn't get done. There was no frosting on the cake.

But there was no stress. I had fun. I wasn't awkward or uncomfortable. There is no dark depression, and the self-flagellation seems to be on permanent hold.

I think I am happy.

Amazing.

Melpomene and Thalia, take me away.

The ancient Greeks imagined a group of goddesses, the muses, whose realm was art -- they inspired the artist, the composer, the poet, and the writer. Artists throughout history have spoken of the feeling that their art was speaking through them, as if an outside force used their body, or words, or voice to birth something beyond the realm of average humdrum existence.

Art can take us beyond ourselves, or make us think in ways we never imagined, or move us to change ourselves. It holds the power to make us angry, or unspeakably sad, or beyond joyful.

Art is a hard, demanding taskmaster. There is no mercy when one is in the grasp of the muses. When the urge to create arises, everything else falls away – dirty dishes are forgotten, the television is turned off, and the creative pours forth.

I understand the Greeks a little more today. I understand the possession, and the obsession, that comes inextricable with inspiration. I understand, just a little, Michelangelo beholding a piece of marble and seeing within the image of David or the Pieta. I understand, a tiny bit, the passion that created Starry Night and Handel’s Messiah.

My mother arrives in town tomorrow to see my new house and celebrate my birthday. My house is in shambles from the past few days’ unpacking efforts, the trash is full, and the sink is overflowing. And yet, I sit here and write, because I must. The muses have taken possession of my soul, and until they release me, I must obey.

I am beyond all men most blessed.

One is silver and the other gold.

When I met her, I had been 18 for about 24 hours. It surprises me that I don't remember the precise moment of our introduction, but in my defense, that day had been crazy; last minute packing, a two hour drive, hours waiting in a registration line, my parents fighting while I cried, and hauling boxes and suitcases into a tiny room, wondering where on earth I was going to fit the contents of those boxes.

She had curly hair halfway down her back, and luminous skin, crooked teeth, and parents who seemed so much nicer than mine. She taped pictures of a boy doing tricks on a bike on the wall, and she had a mickey mouse bedspread and posters. She already knew the other two girls sharing our room (yes, four girls in a room) and she had a brother who already had a year of college under his belt. I envied her confidence. She did not have a lot of stuff, and, as I would learn later, not a lot of money either, but that never seemed to be an impediment.

It was a hard year. I was not an easy person to love, and we were all so young, trying desperately to figure out who we were and where we fit. Somehow we all managed to survive, and we had lots of fun along the way, along with some moments that were not so much fun.

It is an odd practice, this matching of people at random to live together for so long.

There have been ten other roommates since that day. Nine of those ten have vanished into history. It is remarkable that of all the women who have shared my space, she has persisted in my life.

Last night I sat in my living room, amazed at how she has not changed. I watched her daughter climb in the playland at Chik-Fil-A, smiling and waving to us below, and I held her daughter's little hand in line for ice cream. I looked at photographs of her beautiful son who graced this world for only a few hours, his tiny body cradled in her arms, fighting for life. I sat in her van and listened to her talk about her grief, and how much she wants her son's short life, and her own pain, to mean something. We talked about old times, and the people we both knew, and the unresolved conflicts that had happened so long ago. We healed old hurts, and in the end, nothing mattered but the love that still holds strong between us, twelve years after that day we met.

There is a Girl Scout song whose lyrics tell us to Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold. The song is right. This woman, randomly chosen to share my room, who became so much a part of my life, is truly gold.

The real enemy

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about misogyny, and feminism, and beauty, and fashion, and fat. Not necessarily in that order. I have a lot of thoughts. This may be a series.

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly. Kind of ironic, considering I watch very little recent TV (my DVR is full of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Saved by the Bell) and rarely go to movies, but for some reason I am fascinated by it and read every issue cover to cover.

I was reading the most recent issue yesterday when something caught my attention. There was story about a movie where women were running in heels and the actor being interviewed made a comment about how hard it was for the women to keep up with the men. My thought – why should they have to?

Look at any category of fashion, and you will very quickly realize that fashion is much, much harder on women than men, and that women are much more objectified than men by clothing. Consider formal wear. Men wear suits or tuxedos. They are covered head to toe, and their shoes are comfortable. Women wear skimpy dresses that by design impede movement, not to mention breathing, and shoes that are not only uncomfortable, they are difficult to walk in (let alone run) and can actually do damage to the wearer’s feet over time.

Or consider swimwear. Men’s swimsuits are usually baggy shorts that come to the knee. Women’s swimsuits, even modest ones, are ridiculously tight and show the wearer’s entire body, with nothing left to the imagination except perhaps nipple color. Women’s swimwear is clearly not designed for swimming, it is designed to show off bodies, once again objectifying women.

Even casual clothes betray the inequity – men’s shorts are very rarely shorter than an inch or two above the knee and are normally baggy, women’s shorts run the gamut from just below the butt to knee length, but even the knee length ones are clingy.

It would be easy to blame the fashion industry, but they aren’t the real culprits. It is an industry, and like all industries, it follows the money. Women’s clothes are what they are because women keep buying them, and criticizing anyone who doesn’t follow the rules. Which brings me to my central thesis.

The central problem facing women is not men anymore. At some points in our history, men were the issue. It was men who repressed women. But now women are repressing themselves. We burned our bras and replaced them with studded bustiers, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

It's not funny.

A young couple decides they want to get married. When they tell her parents, they are overjoyed at the news, and when the bride asks her mother if she can wear her wedding dress, the mother is thrilled beyond words.

A few months pass, and the wedding day arrives. As the bride is walking down the aisle, her lovely petite figure a vision in the white dress, the sounds of her mother's sobs fill the room. When the bride reaches the end of the aisle, she approaches her mother, concerned at the extent of her distress. As she hugs her weeping mother, she says "mom, don't think of it as losing a daughter, you are gaining a son!"

The mother looks at her daughter, and with eyes full of tears, replies, "It's not that -- I just realized, I've gained a ton!"

Ba-dum ching.

Sounds like the kind of joke you would hear in a bar, told by a frat guy trying to impress his buddies. But it wasn't. It was the opening of a sermon I heard last weekend, while visiting a church out of town.

I have never been a fan of the joke-as-sermon-opener style anyway, but this one had me floored. I just heard a fat joke? In church? I know the pastor did not mean to be offensive. At least, I hope he didn't. But he was.

There are many people who think that the fat acceptance movement is unnecessary and overblown. There are some who think that we are too sensitive, too apt to find offense when there is none, and that we are only battling windmills. But at that moment, hearing that joke, my determination to continue fighting this fight was renewed.

That pastor serves as perfect example of why fat acceptance is important. The obvious problem is that in our culture, is is perfectly acceptable to make fun of fat people. But when you break the joke down, it reveals some deeper issues. The assumption behind it is that, of course, it is perfectly normal for a woman to be so upset over gaining weight, comparing her body to the thinner one of her daughter, that she would weep over it in the middle of her daughter's wedding. It assumes that the thinner body is somehow better or more attractive. And it assumes that her reaction is so normal that anyone who hears it will understand it enough to see the humor.

There's a bigger problem here as well -- the church should be a place of acceptance. No one should be made to feel that they are inferior based on the race, their job, their education, or their body. But that is often not the case. The church is sometimes the most critical place one can be. And that is the saddest thing of all.

I wish this joke were funny, not because people sympathise with the poor woman, but because of its absurdity. I wish we lived in a culture where it was so odd for people to hate their bodies that anyone who heard that joke would laugh at the inanity of the idea. But we don't live in that kind of culture, and I fear we never will.

Until we do, it's not funny.

Unsure

It's been a while.

Every day for the past week, I have written "Update blog" on my to-do list, and every day I have sat down to look at a blank screen and tried to sort through the whirling in my mind to figure out what to say. The title of my blog means roughly "sneakily joking", but to be honest, lately I haven't felt all that funny.

The shootings at Va. Tech hit me really hard. Anytime that sort of evil manifests itself, I want to crawl into a hole somewhere and cry for a week. After 9/11 I sank into a strange sort of reverie that lasted for months and resulted in a complete change of career, one that I treasure not so much because I happen to be good at it, but because it gives me the opportunity to really touch people's lives. At the same time, it is so, so hard, and tiring, and often I wonder how long I can keep doing it. Processing my own grief while helping 90 students work through theirs, answering their questions when I have no answers for my own, all the time waiting to see if we will get worse news about students from here being victims -- it's difficult and draining and makes me wonder how I can possibly get enough rest to make up for the energy lost.

I've been unpacking, and in the process unearthing ghosts; books that belonged to my mother or that were mine as a child, items and mementos from the long-forgotten past, memories that make me laugh or cry or shudder to think of.

Of late I have had some spiritual experiences that fall far outside my normal contexts, and it is making my head spin. My mind is at conflict with itself -- part of me wants to believe, the other part is sure I cannot. I will confess, I am jealous of those people who believe seemingly without effort, without sarcasm or cynicism or fear of losing control, the ones who follow the rules and accept without question the instruction of pastor, priest, or elder. As much as I disparage it now, I miss the stark black-and-white world of my Fundamentalist Baptist upbringing. There the definitions were easy, even if living within them was nigh impossible. Judgement is much simpler than acceptance, and condemnation much less complicated than healing.

requiem for innocence

Today in Virginia a record was broken.
Not the Olympic athlete kind, or even the pie-eating-at-the-county-fair kind.

This record must be measured on the scale of horrors,
In bodies lying lifeless
names on a list

Today the wind howls and moans outside my window,
nature mourning what man has done

Headlines proclaim "deadliest campus shooting in history"
but headlines tell half-truths,
As if it is already history,
As if the deadliest part was not yet to come

Today I marvel at the mundane,
at the people, dry-eyed, in the grocery store and driving their cars,
I marvel, and yet I am among them, dry-eyed.

Naivete is unpardonable, so I have been told,
but I am naive, I choose to be
the kind of naive that cannot fathom the depth of this darkness
the kind that is still surprised

Today is a sob, holding its breath;
And tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
All our tomorrows must grieve.

Whirling

My sister hates it when I write pseudo-intellectual gibberish, but there is too much in my mind right now, and I can only hope that by writing it all out I can find some sort of meaning...

Tonight I went to hear some very gifted artists play. One of them commented that he thinks that if the Bible were not the Bible that Christian bookstores would not sell it, because there is too much real life in it. He put so concisely an idea I have been struggling with for so long I can't remember a time when it was not somehow part of my consciousness. I have wandered through the entire path of Christian experience, from perfect Sunday school student to functional atheist to wanna-be Catholic and back again. I've pondered the great writers of the faith, and the not so great, and the outright bad and emotionally manipulative. I went to Christian college, and sat through innumerable hours of services upon services, sung along with the worship leader, all the time wondering how on earth he thought those blond highlights were a good idea, and taken so many sermon notes that I look back with shame upon the forest destruction I alone must have caused. And more often than not, it all felt like wasted and empty effort, a pursuit of something always just beyond my reach.

Jesus was all about real life. He was homeless. He lived in a desert country and probably didn't smell great most of the time. He said stuff that made the people around him mad, and he hung out with the scum -- the whores, the cutters, crack addicts, the AIDS victims and their orphaned children. Jesus knew all about real life. He knew all about little girls who were violated by fathers or uncles or older brothers, about men who beat their wives and women selling themselves for a hot meal. Jesus understood violence, and it broke his heart.

Christians seem to have forgotten about real life. We are so concerned with keeping everything sanitary, presenting a smiling face and never making anyone uncomfortable that real life has no place in our churches. We are slaves to expectation, and even when the truth has made us free we fall again into the chains of our own minds, or those our brothers and sisters lay upon us.

I usually enjoy irony, but this one stings. I stand indicted.

I feel trapped by expectations. I know I don't meet them most of the time. When I am with people I love, I always feel it a little bit -- the disappointment, the tiny current of "if only". I carry the current in me, because I know not only how often I have failed, but how often I have bowed to expectations. Only I know what lies inside me, and how much of that is never allowed to surface because of fear of what other people will think. There is nothing quite as cruel as the might have been.