morgans_vectorized

Originally uploaded by yatima

I find these images more evocative than the original photos.

QOTD: “If you didn’t want to be associated with a bunch of sniggering, scaremongering, middle-class racists, you should have joined another political party back when you were at uni.”

Dear Australia, please vote for anyone but Howard. Thanks!

(And happy birthday, Mum. You’re wowsome.)

“This book is so great. It makes the point that human extinction is inevitable, and just another kind of death.”

“Exactly the same thing as death, since there’s no such thing as a species, just a genetic continuum.”

“Picky post-Darwinist. You know I wanna be cremated, right?”

“I’ll cremate most of you. I want to freeze your head.”

“I love you too.”

dsc_1583.jpg

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

…accompanied by Claire on keys.

Claire and I spruced ourselves up a bit, and this week’s piano recital was much less formal than last week’s – one of the students was in fact punk rock – so sartorially speaking we all met somewhere in the middle. The music was gorgeous, lots of Chopin and Beethoven and Brahms and hey! Music-knowing people of my acquaintance! Why the hell hadn’t you told me about Debussy? Well, you probably had and I didn’t pay any attention. A boy called Harrison played Debussy’s Clair de Lune, all swoony and divine, and young Miss Claire, who was worn out from the day’s shenanigans, fell asleep in my arms.

I looked into her sweaty damp face and marvelled at how dear and brilliant she is, and how very much she and her sister are the sun and anchor of my life. After the concert I carried her back to Mission Street where a greatly escalated police presence and a sizable party of Code Pink protesters marked the spot, at Foreign Cinema, where Hillary Clinton was having dinner. I thought, Good for you, lady! Have the steak, it’s excellent. Then we caught the bus home to Julia and Jeremy. Our three-week-old tradition of Sunday night roast is starting to catch on.

…although probably not in any of the ways you were hoping. From The Bone Woman:

…because the inhabitants of Srebrenica had lived under siege for several years, they didn’t have access to new clothes, so the women had repaired the same garments, month after month. Thus, they could recognize their own stitches, could describe the type of mending they did and what material they used, and remembered exactly what part they had mended. In the morgue we found that where, say, head hair was no longer present on a body, a triangular fabric patch was still holding together the inside of a trouser pocket, the color of the thread still vibrant, a beacon illuminating the varied stitchwork that could identify the man whose trousers they were.

Macabre as it is, The Bone Woman turns out to be a heartening read, if only because of Clea Koff’s sense of mission. She believes she was born to exhume mass graves and let their occupants tell their stories, and for all I know she was. I know I wasn’t. And her work is a gift to the families of the dead, who speak of: “their need to hold even just one bone if that was all that was left.”

That line cut me to the quick.

In other news of ghosts, Moira wrote to point out what I had already begun to suspect, Googling around for links. A lot of sexual abusers who claim to have been victimized as children are probably lying.

22-82% of people convicted of sexual abuse report being victims of sexual abuse themselves.

Salter is understandably dubious about any self-report of being sexually abused, querying the motivation of someone who has been convicted, or is going to court for allegations of perpetrating abuse. In support of her position, she refers to 3 studies where the reporting of being a victim of sexual abuse dropped from 67%, 65% and 61% when subjects were given immunity, down to 29%, 32% and 30% respectively, where the subjects thought a polygraph (or lie-detector) would be involved.

Round and round we go. In other other news, The World Without Us, like The Bone Woman, turns out to be not half as depressing as you would think. In fact, it’s a guilty relief.

It was like an Enid Blyton picnic: fresh coffee and champagne and orange and tangerine and apple juice, and chicken apple breakfast links and roast potatoes; Croque Monsieurs and chocolate eclaires from Tartine; waffles with maple syrup and fresh strawberries and cream; three galettes, one apple, one mixed berry and one raspberry and mango; a pumpkin cake that Heather and Gilbert brought from Patisserie Philippe; and the rest of the cupcakes, with birthday candles and singing.

For a blog whose main purpose is Blessings, Quantification Of, Yatima has been very whiney of late. So let the record show that after a tiring and unpromising day, tonight was great. Bob called and we chatted, then Salome called and asked if she could come over. This is the advantage of having her live one minute’s walk away. Jeremy made a yummy dinner and we all ate and talked. Claire and Milo had a bath together. Now Jeremy is putting Julia to bed and Claire is practicing her piano, on the electric keyboards, with headphones on.

ETA: Now she is playing the piano with her feet.

I can has cupcake?

Originally uploaded by yatima

My shoulder’s a bit better today, by which I mean I can move it without wanting to throw up or cry. Progress!

I feel embarrassed complaining about this while various friends are having real health crises, but not embarrassed enough not to complain about it. My shoulder is fucked up and it hurts a lot. Claire snuck into our bed on Monday night – I know, I know – and I ended up falling asleep with my left arm hoiked up over my head. Now every time I breathe it feels like getting stabbed.

Respect to my perky crip girl homies who put up with this sorta shit day in day out. Pain isn’t character-improving. It just sucks. I have been impossible to live with all week.

I expected to catch flack for editing those bitter ex-church posts last week, but it came from a direction I wasn’t expecting. That hurt, too. I had three reasons for changing the entries. One is that I got off my ass and called David to get Ann’s number, then called Ann and chatted to her for a while. We were best friends as children and I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly twenty years. On the off chance that she Googles me, I didn’t want her to end up face to face with that.

The second reason is that a few days later even I didn’t agree with what I had written. David’s father’s crimes have nothing to do with David’s ministry now, and to drag them into a discussion of what David is doing amounts to an ad hominem attack. I still disagree with the position he took on the smoking ceremony, so I left that in. Of course to me there’s no difference between the various invisible superheroes in the sky. I imagine if you still believe that some are real and some are not, it changes your perspective.

The third reason I changed it is also embarrassing. Many abusers are themselves survivors of abuse. I’ve known this for decades, but it took me until Monday night to make the connection that Vic himself may have been a survivor of abuse. So here’s me carrying on this great crusade for years, imagining that I was standing up for the little children, completely overlooking the fact that he was a little child once, and chances are no one ever stood up for him.

That hurts, too. When it hit me I just started crying, in the middle of explaining it all to Salome. That was on Monday night. Maybe God smote me in the shoulder. It’s just the sort of thing He would do.

So there is truth and the central importance of truth and the need to tell it, to tell stories honestly, to not lie, ever, about anything. This is a given. But there is also the need to be kind. The Dalai Lama says “My religion is kindness,” which seems to cover it, pretty much. Or Primum non nocere. And sometimes these two imperatives are hard to reconcile. Is it even possible to tell the truth and be kind? I don’t know. But I know I have to try.

Happy birthday, little daughter. You are the joy of the world in toddler form. I love you so much I don’t even mind when you wipe your snotty nose on my favourite shirts. You’re the reason I get up in the morning. I mean that literally: with you standing there yelling “I WANT LECHE. I WANT DORA,” who can possibly sleep in? It’s like living with a bouncy little white dwarf star on legs.

I thought that lightning could never strike the same place twice. I was wrong. I can’t imagine my life without you. Thanks for everything, Miss Jules.

Gorged on genre in the wake of the workshops. I loved the coincidence engineers and the ranids in Bear’s Undertow. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War scratched that old I-read-Heinlein’s-juveniles-when-I-was-a-juvenile itch. Steve Gould’s Jumper is a kickass boy coming-of-age story, and there’s a World Trade Center scene that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, because it was published in 1992.

I liked The Hallowed Hunt even better than some of the Miles Vorkosigan stories, but it’s getting harder for me to ignore the messed-up sex politics in Bujold’s work. Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book, on the other hand, has five or six brilliantly drawn female characters who get to do just as much as the men, even when they’re stuck in the fourteenth century. This was my favourite of this clot of reading. It’s a bit impenetrable at first in its attention to detail and insistence on the present tense, but the work pays off in spades in the last third. The fates of various characters hurt me a lot. I can already tell it’s going to be a reread.

Now I am reading Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman, which has given me an idea for a new short story called “Externalities.” The main disadvantage of this book is that it’s difficult to read over a lunch of Wolfgang Puck roast chicken, because the clinical descriptions of saponification and the white fatty liquid that pours out of corpses in a particular state of decomposition take a lot of the savour out of the meat.

Next up: King Leopold’s Ghost and The World Without Us. Because apparently I am hell bent on feeling bad.

…about dinosaurs.”

“Okay. Once there were some dinosaurs. On the moon! And then they pooped. There was dinosaur poop on the moon!”

“You said poop!”

“Poop on the moon!”

“Pee on the stars! Poop on the moon!”

A woman I vaguely know has been teaching at the Community Music Center, so tonight I dragged Claire along to a recital by her students. The first thing that happened was catastrophic status anxiety, mine. Claire and I had turned up in our customary jeans and scuffed boots, ironic tees and hoodies. The other kids were all in velvet dresses, white tights and patent leather mary janes.

I kinda wished I had brought Quinn along, just so I could watch her turn into the Hulk at the sight of all that naked privilege on display.

I also felt very small and shabby and besmirched with soy sauce from our sushi dinner. And then I looked at Claire and saw that she was totally punk rock, which made me feel much better.

We tried to sit quietly with the other grownups, but Claire saw that there were kids watching from a balcony up the back, so eventually we snuck up there. The view was way better. And unlike the parents, who had been looking askance at us, the other kids gave us huge welcoming grins.

I have discovered the mark of a great composer. Even when they’re being murdered by affluent ten-year-olds in uncomfortable clothes, Mozart and Beethoven sound really good.

A third of a bottle of a nice red from Corbieres. We dragged Ian out to La Provence. I had the nicoise salad and the duck, of course. Afterwards we walked to Dog Eared, where I bought King Leopold’s Ghost, The Bone Woman, a Disraeli biography, a dinosaur encyclopaedia for Claire and a Metropolitan Museum of Art ABC for Julia. The whole time, the boys talked about their Wiis. What are you gonna do.

Tomorrow: bloggity goodness! This time for sure.

…cheating on Nablopomo is trivially easy. Ethically problematic though.

Bloggity goodness to come!

My Advance Parole arrived, so I am no longer trapped in this sinking luxury liner of a nation. Yay?

Well, Internets, I’m glad you asked.

I’ve been touring San Francisco public schools for Claire’s kindergarten enrollment next year. And it’s making me crazy.

I swore I wouldn’t be that mom. I have researched the matter up the wazoo. I am a paid-up member of Parents for Public Schools. I am informed and empowered! You would be impressed by my diligent legwork! And I am going crazy.

More context than you care about: San Francisco kids are entitled to attend any school in the Unified School District, no matter where they live. What happens if too many parents request a particular school? Since 2002, the district has placed students according to a Diversity Index, aiming to mix things up as much as they can.

To grossly oversimplify, the district places all the kids who have to be in a particular class in a school – siblings who are entitled to attend the same school as their older sibling, for example. That class gets a base profile, calculated on things like race, socioeconomic background, blah. Applicants are also given a profile.

The Educational Placement Center then places the kid *most different* from the base profile in that class. Recalculate base profile, rinse and repeat. The desired upshot: classes nicely balanced out by student background.

The practical upshot: you as a parent get seven choices. You tour as many schools as you can (link to blog of another mom doing the rounds), and then you pick your seven favourites. The Educational Placement Center tries to place your kid at one of those choices. And if you’re requesting a popular school, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not you’ll get it. Crapshoot. Russian roulette. Schroedinger’s cat.

That’s the first painful thing. You tour a school like you tour a house you are hoping to buy. You imagine your future there, your kids growing up there. And then, just like when you’re buying a house, you have to accept that it’s entirely out of your hands, and you can want as hard as you like, but it isn’t going to affect the outcome.

But there’s worse! I’ve toured four schools so far, and they’re all great in different ways, and I could live with any one of them. But the school district is strapped for cash, so ALL the extras are paid for by the PTA. And that includes things you don’t think of as extras. Like the LIBRARY.

The PTAs at the mostly-Hispanic schools are raising about $40K annually. One excellent PTA raised $77K, mostly from grants.

The PTA at the white school I toured this morning raised $200K.

Like most people who earn decent money I am massively in denial about what money is and what it means. I tend to treat it as if it were just a way of keeping score in some immense and arcane game of chess or Go. People who don’t earn decent money don’t have that luxury. Especially not here in the USA, where health insurance is broken and one good illness spells bankruptcy.

When lack of money becomes a constraint on how people can express the value they place in their children – when it is a constraint on what their childrens’ futures might be – well, that’s when you realize society is hopelessly fucked up.

Let’s not even talk about what’s being spent on the Iraq war.

My kids will be alright. They have me and Jeremy going into bat for them, and they’re privileged and loved and blah blah blah. But what about everyone else’s kids? Why don’t they all get the same deal? Why doesn’t the PTA at rich school share its treasure chest with the PTA at the school down the hill? How can a kid arrive in Salome’s class in high school, functionally illiterate? Why the fuck are the socio-economic scores of the parents in some arcane game, visited upon our children?

Your net worth is not your worth. YOUR NET WORTH IS NOT YOUR WORTH.

What is the matter with us?

Oh, so my epiphany this morning. I hate the Diversity Index, right, because it makes me feel like I have no control over where Claire goes to school. (I have lots, actually, but that’s how it makes me feel.)

And I hate, hate, hate, what I will call the PTA disparity, because it’s just unfair and inefficient and wasteful of human potential and stupid and broken.

And without the Diversity Index? The PTA disparity would be much, much worse.

And that, dear Internets, is why I have been in such a vile mood lately.

…are just not worth getting out of bed for.

Trinity

Originally uploaded by mr lynch

A well-timed Flickr upload from prawnwarp reminds me why.