A few things

Since deciding to leave Oakland and move back to Champaign-Urbana, I've been reflecting a lot on what I came here to the Bay for. Like, what did I receive here? How has this place changed me? What have I done here that's changed me? How have I been changed by what I've given?

I keep not writing about it because I keep getting stuck at wanting to be comphrensive or have some conclusion to make. Today, the women at the nail salon in my neighborhood told me they'd miss seeing me. A few of them have kids in Oakland high schools, so we often chat about district politics when I'm there. One woman put her hand on my hand and kept it there when I told her my mom is dying. I keep having moments like this where I'm overwhelmingly grateful for my community here. 

I decided then to just write in the dribbles that it comes to me. Maybe later I'll see some grand unifying theory.

So here's a list of some stuff I love that I learned about in the Bay:

-- gel manicures and pedicures (and their restorative value)

-- shiatsu massage (and how it's most effective for me if I can do an appointment a week for three weeks)

-- açaí berries

-- hiking

-- deeper knowledge of the history of the Black Panther Party

-- Bikram yoga (noted: the man is rapey and steals other people's work)

-- smoking weed

-- steak fries

-- Ethiopian food

-- I don't love the wedding dress industry but I did learn about it and got trying beautiful wedding dresses on all out of my system without having to actually get married.

-- "Tell Me When to Go," "Blow the Whistle," and "Thizz Dance"

-- burritos al pastor

-- pork buns

-- going on strike

-- emergent strategy

-- prison abolition

-- Marshawn Lynch 

-- pomegranates, persimmons, dinosaur kale, and loquats

-- LED lights

-- outsider art

-- donut shops

-- the color of Redwood bark

-- pupusas

All this stuff makes my life better. 

Delighting in the Jarlath Diaspora

A few years ago, I thought it was odd when a co-worker asked me about the St. Jarlath's t-shirt I was wearing -- Jarlath being a rarely-used Irish name, and me being related to four people who have it. Come to find out, there's a St. Jarlath's Catholic church and school in Oakland. 

This week I decided to find out why.

So I went to mass Sunday morning to see what I could see. I learned nothing about the reason for the Jarlath, but it was Palm Sunday, which I happen to love*. I left during the homily because I was bored and then to my utter delight, there was a vendor making bacon-wrapped hotdogs in the church parking lot. Not a total loss.

Later, I had a fruitless google of it while I texted with my cousin Jarlath about the failed mission -- "They are missing a trick there - the jarlaths of the world would buy some," he replied ruefully when I answered that no, they did not have any merch available. 

Undeterred (and since I'm on leave from work), I made myself an appointment at Oakland Public Library's Oakland History Center for the next afternoon. A research adventure!

--

Lately I'm more inclined than ever to follow threads that lead back to Ireland like this one. My mom is dying of colon cancer. She's receiving hospice care at home in Chicagoland, and I'm across the country in Oakland, making monthly trips back to spend time with her and processing the ocean of terror I feel about life on this planet without her. One wave that has come up is that in losing Mom, I'm somehow losing my connection to Ireland, my status as an Irish Irish-American (because American Irish-Americans are deeply embarrassing a lot of times). My little brother and I even sent in for our Irish passports; I think he senses this aspect of our loss, too.

Anticipatory grief is fun because you get this frantic and futile guilty urge to capture every bit of the utterly uncapturable. I'm on this quest to find out why a church in Oakland is called St. Jarlath's as if knowing why will save me losing Mom.

--

God smiles on librarians.

When I got to the spacious room on the second floor of the downtown branch, someone had already pulled a file of newspaper clippings related to the Catholic church in Oakland, including a photocopy of the article below which solves the mystery:

.  

 

St. Jarlath's parish opened as an offshoot of St. Anthony's, pastored by Father Peter C Yorke, proud alum of St. Jarlath's College in Tuam.

My granddad went to St. Jarlath's in Tuam, too. Father Yorke was "a labor activist and an Irish patriot," and though I don't know the family history back that far, I do know that our family home in Dunmore, just outside Tuam, had enough IRA pamphlets on guerrilla warfare in it for me to suspect that Yorke could have been a comrade of one of my great-great-greats. Mom was delighted by my findings. Me too.

---

So anyway, that's the answer: He said "it was the delight of the Catholic church to remember her glorious dead."





* On account of the props (sword-shaped palms) and a dramatic reading (with parts!) of Jesus' arrest, conviction, and execution. Palm Sunday mass is kinda like Catholic Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had dinner with friends that night, and when I told them about my providentially-timed visit, the other one who was raised Catholic gleefully raised his fist in the air and shouted "Barabas! Free Barabas!" which is from the crowd part that we get to play lolllll. Palm Sunday mass was my second favorite behind Good Friday mass because when I was a kid that's when the priest would lay face down sprawled out on the ground in the same shape as Jesus on the cross for three minutes of silent prayer at 3 pm, the scriptural hour of Jesus' death. The drama!

Ms. Dahlke if ur nasty.

I really love my new job at Tech, but in this post I am going to tell you the thing that I don't like about it.

The adults call each other Ms. or Mr. Whatever. Like, I'm not a kid, and I think it's weird and almost... teacher-fetishy to call each other Ms. or Mr. Whoever when we're the only people in the room.

Also, a teacher that I called her first name in an email then introduced herself to me in a meeting (where everyone was going around saying their name for my benefit) as Ms. Whatever. 

Don't care for it.

learning styles

Last night Jon was saying that my thesis draws a line from students' style (as in fashion, etc.) and their learning styles. For example, one kid, a Muslim girl who wears a hijab, works within bent versions of the teacher's rules and academic expectations just like she works creatively around her hijab to achieve the look of "popularity" (read: in part, whiteness).

I usually hate when people talk about "learning styles" as if that's why meaningful academic opportunities are scarce in the hood. Because when people say "learning styles," they're talking about, "I'm a visual learner," or "I'm an audio learner." And sure, it's smart for teachers to present materials that students can access through multiple modalities -- if only because lesson planning in that way makes it less likely that they stand at the front of the room and drone on for fifty boring-ass minutes.

But Jonathan was talking about "learning styles" in terms of students' particular orientation to authority and knowledge. Students' orientation to authority and knowledge informs their identities; if your sense of yourself is that you're cool/bad, then the literacy practices you're more inclined to pick up are those associated with coolness/badness. Graffiti, rap, sagging your pants, etc. If, as was the case for me, you are a little fearful of displeasing authority figures, you're more likely to assent to the literacy practices imposed on you by the authority figure, regardless of whether or not the authority figure is legitimately authoritative.

What if we gave pre-service and in-service teachers lots of practice discovering students' orientation to power and knowledge -- practice reading the clothing, handwriting. body language, and tons of other ways that we perform our identities? What if more of us were capable of designing learning experiences that draw on the identities (and associated performances and literacy practices) of the students we traditionally fail, those students who resist authority? It's totally possible.

empty box of tampons

I don't know why I can't get over Michelle Wolf's monologue at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but I can't. It was so funny. And rad.

I particularly liked the jokes that felt like they had women as the target audience.

The "smoky eye" one. I wonder if there are a lot of men who didn't get the Maybelline reference. I mean, I've probably seen hundred of car commercials in my life, but I can't tell you the taglines of any of the major car companies. I haven't been socialized to give a shit. Most of those commercials are made for men, what with their need for speed. So I'm wondering how many men actually recognize the Maybelline tagline and how many of them don't because they tune out completely during makeup commercials.

I confess, I've bought eye shadow palettes that advertised themselves as smoky eye kits. To get the joke, you have to know (1) what the smoky eye is, and (2) you also kinda need to have some sense of how many smoky eye tutorials show up in women's magazines. Enough where it's possible to get the sense that we're all actually just on the quest for the perfect smoky eye.

The focus of the joke is Sanders' incessant lying in press briefings, not her eye shadow. But if you see how "burning facts and using the ashes as eye shadow" plays on the silly, upbeat tone of the smoky eye tutorial ("So resourceful!"), you get the added perk of a little satirical riff on women's socialization to be hyper-focused on our appearance.

A man couldn't make the eye shadow joke because they don't have to know about the work that goes into creating those sexy, smoky eyes of which they are the beneficiaries (if they are straight and buy into dominant beauty norms).

Also, the "Ivanka is as useful to women as an empty box of tampons" joke. We're the ones who know how annoying it is when you are sitting on the toilet, see that you got your period, reach into the cabinet under the sink for a tampon, and realize that the box is empty. It sucks so bad. Toilet paper wadded up to make do until you can get to CVS. That joke was for us.

All these men and anti-feminist women are crying about how she shouldn't make jokes about Sanders' and Ivanka's appearance (Oh, the diaper genie one!) as if they give a fuck about the ubiquitous reduction of women to their looks. She made no jokes about any woman's appearance. In fact, the kerfuffle over the jokes that aren't about women's appearance, but not about the ones that were actually making fun of individual men's looks, suggests that they really do equate women's value with their appearance. Make fun of Christie's and McConnell's nasty selves, and that's okay, because everyone knows that they're big, respectable men with big, respectable jobs. But if you go after a woman's appearance, you're leaving her with nothing!