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! 

It's not a homeless problem.

It's a greed problem.

What are we going to do about all these homeless people?

What are we going to do all about all of these wealthy people who don't recognize and rail against the absurdity of walking by someone laying on the sidewalk?

What in T F

Stop making phone books!  

(Make me wonder about the saturation level of the Internet.  If there are still so many folks in the States that don't have Internet access, fine, print them.  But I wonder.)

Stop watering your lawn in a drought!

And definitely stop when IT'S RAINING.

(There's something juicy in the fact that the sprinkler is on an automatic system.  Being able to keep one's hands clean of this entitled shittiness while still tangibly benefitting from it.  But who cares about having a green lawn?  Not that serious.)  

(Trying to not too be judgey-judgey but clearly failing.)

I took down almost everything I've written about the prison work.

really high anxiety level today

I took today off from the new ridiculous job I've got, thinking that I needed a day to wade through email and other errand-y type stuff, and I'm struck by how just one week of TCOB and relative inattention to my own mental health has left me feeling pretty seriously jacked up.

I thought I was getting better, but I'm really conscious this morning of how much I need to slow the fuck down if I'm going to ever get for real back to feeling like myself.  It's frustrating.

not sure what the point of this is

Things what I like:

Watching/napping through Law and Order for several hours at a time

Bad black coffee

TJ Maxx and Marshalls

Buying picture books for my brothers’ kids

Reading long books
Earnestness

My brothers’ taste in sisters-in-law for me

The Indian pizza place at the bottom of the hill I live on

Wearing my slippers to the coffee shop in the morning

The owner of this coffee shop always telling me to take my shoes off the seat, but they’re slippers

My own handwriting

Watching the fiddle be played

Talking on FaceTime

Sitting really close on the couch to any family member

When Ricky Gervais farts on Karl Pilkington and then lays on the floor laughing starting at 17:51 in this video

Sending people packages

Gold

The Memorare

When people say “Word.” And ‘Word?”

Gendered insults for dudes (e.g. quit being such a dick)

Videos of my niece and nephews doing cool things

When my roommate says things are “fantastic,” but they don’t seem fantastic to me

All cheeses

The song they sing at the beginning of Glide services

Friendship bracelets
Eavesdropping

Things what I don’t like:

The smell of drool

ROSS

My hair being wet

Frozen peas

Mingling

Those Converse shoes that are high-tops but more like boots (Ew.)

Receiving/responding to (most) email and (all) voicemail

When things end

Flying

Running

This mustache trend with all the mustache shit everywhere

Gendered insults for women (e.g. what a bitch)

When my brothers send a thousand texts about sports when I’m trying to take a nap
When people say boring, obvious things and I have to act interested

oh geez

Scraped my knees up PRETTY BAD when I fell on my face after tripping over a cord in my classroom while teaching this morning.

What my walk to school looked like today:

eeyow

I hate that feeling where I'm trying to think of something and/or anything to say, and five or ten really dumb ideas click through my brain, get evaluated and quickly rejected, and I'm thinking, "Shiiiit... we should be talking right now. This is awkward. Fuck fuck fuck." And I really hate it even more when, in a situation like this, someone else says, "Well, this is awkward," because that's one of the dumb things to say that clicks through and should be rejected because it doesn't lessen the pressure on the other person (or the rest of the group) to be socially brilliant, or even just socially adept. It just outs them as being awkward, and I don't think that's advisable in terms of creating positive vibes. You know?

riddle me this

What's up with all the gnats in Urbana? I need windshield wipers on my glasses.

"I wish I knew."

just a guess

Starting sometime this past summer, I started noticing "ROTC DISCRIMINATES AGAINST GAY STUDENTS" chalked around the quad intermittently. And today I saw this:


Looks like someone blotted out the G, Y, and S so that it looks like it says "ROTC DISCRIMINATES AGAINST A STUDENT."

I really am not familiar with what's going on behind all this, but if I had to guess, I'd say that The Second Chalker (or rather, The Blotter), is trying to tell the story that one gay person was denied admission to the ROTC program and is now being a whiner about it. Again, just a guess, based on what I've seen and heard with somewhat similar stuff.

How wack. To assert that members of the LGBT community are not discriminated against in military (and many other) contexts -- yeah right. When Cornel West was here he said something about how scoffing at political correctness only trivializes the sufferings of other people. I'd say same goes for denying the existence of systemic inequity.

Let's be real: Senator Russell is a hater.

Now, the way I understand Obama's upcoming speech to American students is that it will be a talk "on the importance of [students] taking responsibility for their education, challenging them to set goals and do everything they can to succeed," as is indicated on whitehouse.gov.

And I don't claim to be unbiased. On the contrary, I'm crazy about President Obama. I'm pretty sure I've made that clear.

That said, I think I'm being fair and rational when I say that Oklahoma's Senator Steve Russell's incendiary comments about the speech as an attempt at the Obamian indoctrination of American school children are irresponsibly hyperbolic. I don't mean that I don't I hear what he's saying; I see how a speech to children during school hours could be interpreted in that way. I really do.

But it's spoken like someone who has no idea how education works. Students' brains are not empty vessels into which grown-ups ideas are poured. In my experience, for many students, and especially students of color, Obama's political success is inspiring. Many of my students even think he is cool, if their wearing of his face on their t-shirts and shoes is any indication of such a thing. Many, but not all. And for those who don't consider him an inspiring leader or a cool guy, I'd bet that his speech Tuesday morning will give them an opportunity to practice their critical analysis skills. Afterwards, they can practice argumentation with their Obama-worshiping peers. And if that happens, that's when the learning -- for both the "believers" and "non-believers" -- will take place, not while they're listening to Obama's lecture. They've heard that "School is Cool" thing a million times. Sure, they might find it interesting to be spoken to and not about by our nation's leader, but I assure you: students are not passive receivers of knowledge. It just doesn't work that way.

Russell complained that the planned speech, "gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality." Okay, so he gets some face-time on the TV sets in the classroom as he tries to send positive and encouraging messages to our kids. Again, I really do see what he's getting at. But, again. Come on now. Obama as a concept has been a major force in pop culture for a while now. For various reasons, he has been an impressive draw for young people. Part of it, for sure is the way he's been marketed. Absolutely, he's trendy; I've already admitted my kids think he's cool. But it's fairly insulting to my own intelligence as well as insulting my students' intelligence to suggest that all of us youngens have been hoodwinked by him and his people. Y'know, it's possible that we might genuinely agree that all people who are sick deserve to be able to go to the doctor and receive quality treatment.

And finally, his claim that the speech is "is akin to something you would see in North Korea or under Saddam Hussein's Iraq" is just plain-old outrageously off. He going to speak about the importance reducing the drop-out rate. Last time I checked, we didn't invade Iraq because too many students were staying in school.

Old movies, why must you hate so?

Last night I watched An Affair to Remember on TV. I'd been meaning to watch it for a while. I generally like old movies like that, even when I don't like them, since the dialogue sounds so funny. Not funny haha, just funny odd. I think it's cool to see how different they are from movies now.

It goes like this: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr meet on an ocean liner headed back to New York from a nondescript European location. Grant is a world-famous lady-killer on his way home to marry a filthy rich heiress and thus secure his lavish lifestyle; Kerr is the poor-but-beautiful-nightclub-singer-turned-housewife-in-training of some wealthy New York businessman. Aboard, they fall in love, much to the gossipy amusement of their fellow passengers and the ship's photographer who acts a bit like a modern-day paparazzi. (Actually, they really get into one another when the ship is docked for a few hours near his grandmother's home and they go and visit her. What I want to know is where the hell they are supposed to be docked. They get there after at least one, maybe two nights aboard the ship. It's tropical, and you sort of get the sense that her late husband was some sort of colonial official. But what tropical destinations lie two-days' journey away from Europe on the way to New York City? It is a movie, I realize.) Anyway, they decide that they want to be together forever, so they vow to meet one another at the top of the Empire State Building in six months, giving them enough time to break it off with their current beaus and enough time to do some hard work and save some money on their own. When the evening of the meeting finally arrives, he's *SPOILER ALERT* there waiting, but she gets hit by a car as she's rushing up to meet him. He's humiliated; she's in the hospital, unable to walk again; they're both heartbroken. The rest of the movie sorts out whether or not they'll end up together.

That's probably when I should have turned the movie off.

See, now she has to become a teacher (Oh! The horror! What a tragedy!), so she teaches music at a Catholic elementary school. There's an unnecessarily long scene in which she's directing the choir, and all of the lovely little children are singing about resisting temptation, blah, blah, blah, and there are lots of little solos built into the oh-so-cute song so that the camera can close-in on their adorable little up-turned faces. Then, for the first time in the scene that's been going about three minutes, the camera pans over two Black children's faces just in time for them to part through the choir from the back row to the front to do some silly minstrel-like dance and sing-song verse that's totally separate from the song's melody. (Y'know, it's not unlike McCauley Culkin's little "rap" in the middle of MJ's "Black or White" video, now that I think about it.)

The kids are back a few scenes later to visit their beloved teach while she rests at home (or maybe it's in a hospital?). This time, the Black boy gets to open the scene for he children by asking, "Is she going to be okay, Doc?" only to be quickly corrected by the children's accompanying priest, "Call him, Doctor!" How dare that boy not codeswitch!

I googled around a little bit looking for commentary on these ridiculous, racist, and highly removable scenes, but couldn't really find much. There were several reviewers who suggested that the scenes with the children were unnecessary inasmuch as they distract from the shmoopie love story.

And as if that shit weren't enough to make this movie a "not" for me, much of the justification for the lovers' agonizing separation after their fateful missed connection is that of course she can't tell him that she's disabled! How terrible and disgusting and unlovable! Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

tired trope, nasty clothes

and by the way

Here's the person who deleted my entry to the McAuley page.

not surprising

From Chancellor Herman's recent email about the vandalizing of an anti-racist art display in front of the cultural houses on Nevada:

We need to begin thinking of these crimes differently. First, let us not view this as happening to someone else. What threatens one member of our community threatens all of us. We are all diminished in the wake of such an act. Indeed, Illinois is diminished and that should concern our
community.

Who's we? By we-ing in a way that excludes us from the targeted "group," even, ironically, as he asks us not to do so, Herman assumes Whiteness, or at least not-American Indian-ness, of his readers. Which I guess is fair assumption since someone once told me there are 12 American Indian students at U of I.

Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni: NOT gossiping school girls

"OMG"? Seriously, Time?

good friendth

Here's a reason why Kasey's great. When I was telling her today how disappointed I was with myself for getting impatient -- extremely impatient -- with a student today, she got as irate about the student's behavior during my telling as I had gotten in the moment. I told her what happened, and when I to the part in the story at which in the moment I wanted to put my fist through the computer screen, she got super angry for/with me. It's not that her reaction made me feel justified, just human.

Here's a reason why Jessica is great. When I told her that I had to write my first discipline referral of the semester, and that one of the things that I had to write on the form was that the student went into the adjoining computer lab, raised his arms high in the air and yelled at all of the students in that class, "You are all idiots!" she about died laughing. And while in the moment part of me knew it was hilarious, the part of me that's striving for a rigorous learning environment did not. Laughing -- especially laughing that hard -- at my own failures is super useful, seriously. Laughing at funny shit like a student yelling at a bunch of people he doesn't know, "You are all idiots!" is also very fun.

seeking inspiration

The last two speakers I've seen on campus, Bill Ayres and Cornel West, both spoke in part about how defeated Dr. King was in the months before his assassination. His approval rate, they both cited, was as low as George W. Bush's was when he left office last year, largely due to his stance on the Vietnam War (anti-). The way West put it, (from my notes, so not completely verbatim,) "King knew that historically Black people were born amidst a stream of urine and feces, born amidst some serious funk. We were born in the funk of James Brown, George Clinton, and Lil Wayne. That there was slavery in that funk, and Jim Crow, and dilapidated housing, and despicable school systems, and love, and hope, and dignity. He knew that Black people would never be able to find their dignity in that funk if mainstream society insisted on deodorizing and denying the funk. He knew that his funk would be deodorized by mainstream society which doesn't want to deal with the nightside." The public misconception, West explained, about what exactly King's dream was, really got to him.

I try to remember this at times like yesterday, when in the hallway during a passing period, I took a post-it off a student's back that said, "I'm gay really gay." And one of my students who is homeless showed up for the fourth time this semester on Tuesday, promised he'd be back, and wasn't for the rest of the week. And this week when I was told that two of my students have dropped out. And when I had to deal with the return from suspension of a student who stole my wallet. And when a student in my AP prep class made fun of his brother in our co-taught class and who has a learning disablity for being "dumb." And when I had to call a parent every night to tell her that her son, who plagiarized a paper he recently turned in, was repeatedly lying to her about giving me a revised essay. It really sucks. And it's really hard not to feel ineffective.

I voiced this concern to one of the experienced teachers in the building, who compassionately told me that I was wrong, and that I was making a difference. When I talked about it with my boss, and he asked me what I was going to do about it. I really appreciated that I was able to have an honest conversation with him about it; it was definitely more productive than just acting like my inadequacies as an educator are non-existent.

Sydney, my good friend and colleague, asked me the other day if I thought that we, as teachers, would ever not have to constantly remind students that homophobic, racist, sexist, classist, etc.-ist, remarks are not allowed in our classrooms. Probably not. I went into teaching knowing that I'd probably never achieve this. I certainly didn't plan to save the world. And that's all good to know in theory. I guess I just wish I had the humility to know it in practice, and to not feel so depressingly defeated when all of my work towards that goal is not successful. It would certainly make it a lot easier to not want to cry through my lunch hour.