It has been a few days since I last wrote and I have a very good reason.
Wedendsday 12/20: trip to the hospital for a routine fluoroscopy. Routine or not, it still kind of sucked and ate up most of the day. I missed the office Christmas pot-luck too. Bah...
Thursday 12/21: Oral surgery. Thanks to the fantastic sedatives prescribed by the surgeon, I don’t remember any of this entire day except determining with Owen that Sam should see the doctor again because of some troubling, possible ear infection behavior. I was to learn that I was, indeed, correct and that Sam currently has bilateral ear infections. This brings the total ear infections since September to 6 (and don’t forget the Strep, Bronchitis and Pink Eye) and we now have to take Sam to see an ENT. Word on the street is that he may be a candidate for ear tubes. While I hate this for him, I would rather that than the constant ear infections we now struggle with.
Friday 12/22: To the U.P. for Christmas. There is no internet at the cabin and we were extremely busy hanging curling ribbon and Christmas bulbs from my mom’s eggbeater collection which hangs from the rafters. Also had to decorate all the antlers with garland.
Saturday 12/23: Christmas #1 with my family. Much hustle and bustle beginning way to early and going way too late. Thanks to everybody for all the fantastic gifts! They included a set of stainless silverware (they all match now!) and a new Kone (I think that’s how you spell it) that allows me to say to Sam: “No, sweetie, you can’t go into the kitchen until I Kone up the cereal you daddy spilled this morning.” Face it, you’re jealous. I asked for a dust buster because I thought I would be more likely to vacuum if I didn’t have to haul out the big one every time. I also got all the good period dramas so, if you feel like a little Jane Austin love-fest, come to my house!
Sunday 12/24: Christmas #2 with Owen’s family. Again, more thanks for more fantastic loot! Included: a family-sized George Foreman Grill and a VCR/DVD burner. This is too cool as we have been using a pencil-box sized DVD player I got free from Quill and have been afraid would die any minute. Also, now I can watch DVDs in bed, which I have not been able to do for almost 3 years. It’s the best when you’re sick, which I seem to be all the time.
Monday 12/25: Christmas morning brings with it a pile of goodies from Santa to Sam. Sam was actually very excited and played with all his new toys as long as could be expected when he hadn’t napped in 3 days. Had Cajun food for lunch and then Chinese for dinner. Now that’s something! All in all it was a low key day that we were all very ready for.
Tuesday (today): Went to the doctor to have strange rash examined that had appeared on Saturday. After looking for lesions in my mouth to make sure I don’t have Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (OMG – disgusting!), he determined that it is an Amoxicillin allergic rash and I now have one more thing to add to my list of drug allergies, almost all of which were discovered this year. The list also includes: morphine, codeine and whatever the hell they put in my drip after my surgery that kept my blood pressure so low that I passed out when I got out of bed. I am thinking I better find out the name of that one.
We received a call at my office today from a woman who was looking for some help. Her story broke my heart, and has put a lump in my throat that I cannot easily swallow away.
She is living in a motel room with her three children, girls, ages 1, 2 and 3. During the day, they go with her to the daycare where she works. She also works at a restaurant in the evenings. I have no idea who keeps the children then. She called us because the children have no coats, and it is 13 degrees out today. She has run out of diapers. For dinner, her children eat cold ravioli from a can and, sometimes, the leftovers she brings home from the restaurant at night. Sometimes she also buys them ramen noodles, though I don’t know how they cook them. The children are under-sized and malnourished.
The family cannot be “adopted” for Christmas because they have no home, and not even a car, to hold any gifts. They cannot receive any fresh fruits, veggies or meats from the food pantry because they have no place to keep them. Even if she had the money, she could not rent out an apartment because she can’t move further than walking distance from her two jobs.
The next time you think you have it hard, please remember this woman, and remember how lucky you really are. It’s the holiday season and, if you are in any position to share any of what you have with others, I strongly urge you to. This woman’s story is not as unique as we would wish it was, and her family’s struggles will continue long after we put away our Christmas trees for the year.
Yesterday, I quit my job. I didn’t have a fit and start to scream and throw things (as I dreamed I did over the weekend). I gave my boss a dignified letter explaining that I would be leaving in the end of January to do my student teaching. And, to my amazement, my feelings after making this disclosure were completely unexpected. Of course, I expected to feel better, having finally gotten it over and done with. And to some extent, I did. But what surprised me, overwhelmingly, was the feeling of complete and utter depression and the desire to just go home and lie in bed and cry.
This made absolutely no sense to me. As some of my more long-term readers may remember, I frequently hate this job. I don’t always hate it. Some days I feel so good about what little I am able to do. And some days I am inspired by the selflessness and generosity that working here allows me to see in other people. But more often than that, sadly, I am riddled with hatred for the mundanely stupid things I must do (like change light bulbs and empty the recycling), for my micro-managing paperwork-Nazi of a boss and her/our raging Hun of a supervisor, for the way it makes me see the world and how people sometimes treat each other, for the ridiculous circus that fund-raising and donations are. I have told myself for months that I just had to hang on a little while longer and that I would soon be done with this frustrating place.
And now that the end is in sight, I just want to cry. Why?? It just doesn’t make sense. I’ve hated this job and despaired that I’d never survive until student teaching with my sanity intact. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it’s because in losing my job (or, more accurately, quitting) I am losing a little bit of how I see myself. For 2 ½ years, the person I see myself as and who I think others see me as, has been tied into this notion that I am working in a position of support for the frontlines of social change. Sure, I hated a lot of it, but change is hard, right? I am learning things and seeing things firsthand that most people will never see or learn. I guess in some ways it made me feel special to be there to lend comfort and support to survivors (if only over the phone) or to help haul donations in and out. It has given me a sense of contributing to making the world better, if only for one or two people on occasion.
And I suppose, to some extent I was fooling myself. I spent the majority of most days arguing with contractors, getting the vacuum fixed again, fighting with our house account holders at local grocery stores over the 19 cents sales tax we were inadvertently charged, getting yelled at by the secretary, trying to outsmart computers and think ahead of our computer users and/or politely explaining to angry donors why it isn’t financially responsible for a nonprofit to drive an hour away to pick up a donated mattress set (and lose money in the process) that is, in all likelihood, hollowed out and covered with pee stains and, for which, I should instead be expressing unparalleled gratitude and promising to personally come clean the donor’s entire bathroom with a toothbrush. I do know one thing, though. In our state’s current economy, I am terrified of the prospect of quitting a decent-paying job without having another one lined up. It’s going to be hard enough for us to be living on one income for 14 weeks but it will be even worse if it takes me another month or two to find another job, especially one that pays this well.
Sam is on the move! He isn’t exactly upwardly mobile (he’s still too young to walk) but he is definitely horizontally mobile. He doesn’t crawl, exactly. He does what I like to call the “wounded army crawl” meaning that he pulls himself forward with one arm while dragging the other limply along and kicking a lot with his feet. Though he started out rather slow, he has now picked up the pace and can cross a small to medium-sized room in under a minute. He gets into everything. This has lead to me surreptitiously filling a small basket with his toys and putting it in the middle if the floor while hoping aloud in a voice the neighbors must hear, “Gee, I hope nobody gets into this basket of very expensive, special items. They are extremely fragile and irreplaceable and only grownups should touch them!”
Apparently, this has also lead to a couple of new preferences. The first is that he is utterly in love with feet. According to the ladies at daycare, he will drop anything (except maybe a tuna sandwich, see below) and hit the pavement if anybody, anywhere in the room looses a shoe. He’ll cross the room in a flash and have it in his mouth before anybody knows what’s going on. He seems to have an unnatural affinity for chewing on shoes, which makes me wonder if we accidentally swapped him out, at some point, with a puppy.
His other new habit has lead him to become what they call a “scavenger” in daycare. He has taken to hanging out under the lunch table while the bigger kids eat bigger kid food. He lies in wait like a hyena on the prowl, watching for somebody to drop a tasty little tidbit, which he instantly snatches up in his insistent little fists and attempts to…um…gum to death. (His first two teeth are coming in now and so he’s not exactly chewing yet.) In any case, yesterday I heard that they had to pry a bit of tuna sandwich that he “rescued” out of his grubby little fists. This is undoubtedly a quality he has gotten from his father because I, personally, would rather chew on shoes than eat a tuna sandwich.
To prove that we DO actually feed him, the following is a list of Sam’s Thanksgiving Day food firsts: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, candied apple, pickled beet, pumpkin pie and cherry pie. He will also hold a green bean in his hand and chew on it, though he doesn’t ever swallow any of it.
Today I took a moment out of my lunch break to do a little Christmas surfing. My mom had mentioned that she was thinking about getting Sam a Cabbage Patch newborn for Christmas. Because I am a liberal-wacko, I am okay with this. Actually, I loved the idea. I have no qualms whatsoever about letting my little boy play with dolls. In fact, I like the idea of raising him to be loving and nurturing.
But here’s the hitch: no matter where either of us looked, all we could find was girl dolls and we were hoping to find him a little boy doll to play with. So I thought to myself that I would go straight to the source to see where I could find him a little boy doll: the Cabbage Patch Kids website. And what I found there was very disturbing in a pod-people-sci-fi kind of way. There are no boy newborns, only boy older kids! Where do the older boys come from, if not hatched in the cabbage patch like the rest of them? Oh the possibilities!
And it’s no wonder this country has issues with accurate sex education classes! This is way confusing! Girls are born as babies and grow, and boys just mysteriously appear. (Warning: sarcasm my be closer than it appears.) Perhaps this is a cleverly designed ploy of the ever-powerful male hegemony to reinforce the notion that pee does, in fact, just mysteriously appear on the toilet seat, dirty clothes do just appear on the floor and dishes do just appear in the sink. I know, I know! Boys come from the Mess Fairy, same as those other things, right?
On a more serious note, though, I am very disappointed. I had really attached myself to the idea of him having one. I suppose we could get him a different boy doll, but let’s face it, there’s just something different, something superior about Cabbage Patch Kids. Other dolls never quite measure up. Maybe he can just have a girl doll. I truly don’t know why gender is such a big issue. I guess it shouldn’t be.
Also, this reminds me of a little boy Owen used to work with at the preschool. I can’t remember his name, but he was very into cleaning and ironing in the housekeeping corner. All the other kids would be gathering for circle time and this little boy would be dust-bustering the rug or something. One day he tried to iron the wrinkles out of Mr. Owen’s forehead. While Mr. Owen didn’t mind, I daresay he has a ways to go before his ironing skills are on par with Martha.
Courtesy of Writer's Almanac...
It was on this day in 1968 that NBC executives made one of the worst broadcasting decisions in the history of network television, interrupting their coverage of a football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets in order to show the scheduled movie, Heidi, about an orphaned girl who goes to live with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps.
There was one minute left in the game and the Jets were leading by 32 to 29, when NBC went to a commercial. No televised football game had ever gone longer than three hours before, and executives weren't sure what to do. Timex had paid a lot of money to advertise during Heidi, and network executives figured the Jets would win the game anyway, so after the commercial break, the movie began.
Football fans were enraged. So many people called to complain that the NBC telephone switchboard in New York City blew 26 fuses. People were right to complain. What they missed was the Raiders coming back to score two touchdowns in the final minute, winning the game 43 to 32.
It was that game, and the storm of protest by fans, that forced TV executives to realize how passionate the audience for football really was. Two years later, networks began showing football on Monday nights as well. And because of that game, the NFL now has a contract with the networks that all football games will be shown until their completion.
Dear Anonymous person who still won’t take credit for his ideas:
I’d like to begin by thanking you for coming back to continue our discussion. It’s so nice to have a readership! However, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take issue with some of the things you mention in your most recent comment. I answer them this time because I feel so strongly about them. However, I think this will have to be the end of our dialogue because I also feel that in a publication, which is how I like to view this little blog of mine, you can beat something TO DEATH. And I think the rest of the readership gets tired of it. So I will answer you now and then this will be the end. (P.S. Text shown in purple is exact quote, copied and pasted from the comment. I refuse to take ownership of somebody else’s misspellings when I generate enough of my own.)
You say: “You may assert that certain groups of people have been oppressed throughout history, and maybe still are today; either institutionally, culturally, or on an individual basis, and I wouldn't attempt to dispute that. I do it myself. You do it. All sane human beings do it. It is an imperative of survival to make discriminatory judgement about another person's or group of persons' intentions when engaged in social transaction. If you don't you are soon extinct.”
I take issue with several things here. My first problem is that the fact that you refer to me making an “assertion” as though it were unsubstantiated fact or rumor. It is not. It is absolutely and 100% objectively true and, if you don’t agree with that notion, than I can’t hope to have an intelligent conversation with you because you are obviously incredibly deluded or you have just landed from another planet and have yet to read a U.S. history book (make that a truthful, unbiased U.S. history book). Secondly, one of the great things that separates us from the animals (besides opposable thumbs) is our ability to employ metacognition, our ability to think about how we think. Though many out there still act like it, we are not animals. We are, supposedly, highly advanced and well developed beings capable of employing rationalization to conquer the gut-reactions of base animal instinct. (This is demonstrable in that we have a criminal justice system that prohibits us from literally acting like animals to each other.) We are not in peril of extinction – far from it. And, again, if I am to suffer arguments of the impending extinction of the white, Christian masses, I must abandon any attempts at logical discourse. Long story short: We’re not animals, we’re supposed to know better.
You Say: “Life is unfair. It's a shame. What we can in an enlightened society is respect all people as individuals and judge them on their merits.”
First, I will not listen to another privileged, white male whine about the injustices of society. It’s like listening to a glutton whine about starvation. It’s bullshit. It’s easy, from your perspective, to say “Life is unfair, get over it.” Walk a mile in another person’s shoes for a week or two, brother, and then you can sing the blues with the best of ‘em. ( I suggest you do a little research on Standpoint Theory.) And secondly, if (and it’s a BIG IF) people in society WERE judged on their merits, then affirmative action programs wouldn’t be necessary. But it’s not, and you know it’s not. I know you know this because you just explained to me how it’s okay to be prejudiced. That, in fact, it is a matter of survival. Again…bullshit. If people were judged on their merits as individuals, then we wouldn’t have to make assumptions based on some perceived group membership.
You say: “The flaw is that you can not confer rights on a group, only on an individual.”
This baffles me, as a woman, since my right to vote is guaranteed under the 19th amendment which grants women, as a group, the right to vote. As much as I would love to have my name personally amended to the constitution, I don’t see it happening. And, besides, what about our basic rights as members of the human race? Laws NEVER name specific people or individuals. They ONLY apply to groups of people.
You say: “You offer many examples of discrimination and institutional oppression, yet there's no emperical data to back it up. Saying women are below he poverty line is just statistical hokum.”
If you don’t know of the vast libraries of information and resources that empirically back up my exact statements, then I’m guessing you DID, in fact, just land here in a space ship. Try looking at the U.S. Census Data, for one. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in
You say: “There's no shortage of studies showing how allowing applicants into universities they're less qualified for only increases the chances they're going to fail; wasting the time and money that would have been succesfully invested at a lesser school.”
If all public schools received the benefit of equal funding, there is no doubt in my mind that there would be a better showing, in general, by ALL college students. A recent study shows that the reasons for lower graduation rates among minority students are "many and varied," including "personal or family financial problems." (i.e. not just because they’re dumber or less appreciative). Apparently, black and Hispanic students' "comparative lack of financial resources" and the striking differences in financial assets between whites and blacks, could be at fault. And let me just clarify one thing: one cannot confer rights on groups, but one CAN summarily disparage them as intrinsically “less qualified” solely on the basis of race? Ouch. What happened to looking at individuals? Fact: people ARE NOT getting an “equal shot” if they’re not starting from the same place. In addition, it IS NOT the student’s fault when he/she is not “qualified” for higher education. It is a failure of our public education and the failure of legislators who are okay with the fact that some schools have the best of everything (i.e. swimming pools, state-of-the-art technology, bathroom doors) while others are sitting desks that are falling apart and using textbooks that are 10 years old. For you to blame the student is just plain wrong. Unless you’re going to assert that some “groups” are just inherently less qualified. At that point you become racist and/or sexist AND wrong.
You say: “I would be so unbelievably resentful that I'm viewed as intrinsically less qualified to the degree that the government has deemed it necessary to give me special treatment.”
BELIEVE ME….those who benefit from affirmative action programs ALREADY resent our society for the endless crap they put up with in the course of trying to hack it through daily life. (Again, I refer you to an exploration of Standpoint Theory.) When it comes to getting a “break” from the government (or other affirmative action program), most people are happy for the break from the struggle. (And don’t even try to tell me how “bad” you have it. If you have a computer and time to comment on blogs, then you have no idea what “bad” is.) Affirmative action programs don’t confer low expectations on people. They acknowledge the lack of opportunity with which these people have been presented and attempt to level the playing field in light of it. And, furthermore, for you to even presume to think for these people is, to use your own words, “arrogant” and “condescending.”
You say: “How will we ever get past this nonsense until we live up to the ideals laid down by the framers that ‘all men are created equal.’?”
You will find the answer in your own quote. The framers of the constitution DID NOT include those same rights for women or people of color. At that time, in fact, people of color were not considered to be part of the human race at all, and the words you quote were not meant to apply to them. You have heard of the famous Three-Fifths Compromise, perhaps? That each slave counted as 3/5 of a “real” person? The rights set down in the constitution applied only to white men. And THAT is the source of the problems today. Those men were given privileges that women and people of color were denied. Those privileges have become so institutionalized since that time that some people fail to recognize their continued existence at all, though they are very much alive and well in our society. (Note: this writer wonders how smart it is to live up to the ideals of persons with poor grammar. But, I digress…)
You say: “I resent, however, that the support of the MCRI and proposal 2 somehow makes me a racist.”
It doesn’t necessarily make you a racist…it could actually make you sexist too. If you really weren’t either racist or sexist, then you would want women and people of color to have the same chances for success as those poor, privileged white man. If things truly were equal, then our Congress would be 51% female and would have a racial make up with proportions matching those of our population as a whole. Argue with those statistics.
“Coprophobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of feces (bowel waste). Sufferers of coprophobia experience anxiety even though they realize their fear is irrational.”
There is a rogue poop on the loose in our house. I guess that’s what happens when you have kids. I took Sam’s diaper off this morning to change him and, in addition to the daily 10 gallons of water that saturate his little size 2 diapers, there were three little bitty pebble poops, perfectly round and hard and about the size of raisins. For a second I wasn’t even sure if they were poops, and so I bent down to get a good look at them and, sure enough.
And then in a twist that perfectly exemplifies the kind of mental illness that comes with having a baby, I called Owen in to show them to him. They were so unusual! But when he got there and I held up the diaper, it was empty.
Oh shit, I thought. Where’s the shit? It had rolled off and onto the changing table. But (gasp!) there were only two! One of them got away and I couldn’t find it. Of course, in that general area there were about a million places it could have gone and so, I suppose it will turn up.
But, for now, everywhere I go, I am on the lookout for the rogue poop. I checked the cuffs of my pants and the bottoms of my shoes…under the furniture and everything. It is in hiding, waiting until Sam is playing on the floor while I put his clothes away and then it will make a sneak attack. I will either find him eating it or wearing it. And I’m already saving up my loose change for the therapy session that’s going to require.
I am also now paranoid about finding poop all over the place, such as in our waiting room at work. I saw three different phantom turds there today, all of which turned out to be some organic compound dragged in by the feet of our clients…except for one, which was a piece of orange string. That would have made an ESPECIALLY BAD turd.
