GRE vocab word of the day: ambivalent

Recorded some video at work today. Here's some of it:

Raneicia and Alonzo playing with magnets

Jermayne writing and reading a story about Jermayne.

And my favorite,

"Oh! You can't be doin' that junk on her phone!"

A little while before we started playing with the cameras, one of the kids told me all about how he stays with his aunt now, (and his eight brothers and sisters, and his cousins,) because his mom has been in jail in Montgomery for seven years. He's nine.

Josh had a jarring experience today. Spending so much time hanging out and having fun with these kids makes it almost harder for me to really get some of the shit they deal with.

1+1=3

Arianne, Chris, Josh, Katharine Ann and I went to New Orleans this past weekend and stayed with Arianne's brother and his roommates (pictured above after dinner Friday night.) It was very cool, lots of good food and drinking and quality hang-out time.

Anyway, back to work Monday, where we're hanging out with a bunch of kids who are all targeted, and I use that word deliberately, by an abstinence-only campaign with the slogan "1+1=3?"

Our survey asks

Was the sex education you received in school worthwhile?
... I have not had sex education in school
... No
... Yes

Occasionally, I'll be reading to a particularly talkative bunch of kids who will have a few comments to make every question or so. One time, I had a kid ask "What's sex education?" and his friend answered, "It's the 1+1=3 people." The kid who had asked the question then marked that the sex ed was useful. Next question:

Have you ever had sexual intercourse? 'Sexual intercourse' means having sex with the male penis inside the female vagina. This is sometimes called 'going all the way.'
... No
... Yes

I swear, that's how the question reads. The same kid who didn't know that the 1+1+3ers were sex education didn't know what sex is. How useful is sex ed when kids come out of it not knowing what sex is? Well, he didn't know what "male penis inside the female vagina" is, but he's not a virgin. He answered that he usually does use a condom when he has sex and that his girlfriend is on birth control. You could probably argue that the kid was fucking with me, just acting like he didn't know, but I'm pretty certain from talking with him that afternoon that that wasn't the case.

To be fair, there are a lot of various reasons why the kid might have been unaware of what sexual intercourse means. But does the mysterious add-on that happens when 1+1 have to be guilt or regret? How about 1+1+love= 3, or even 1+1+orgasm=3? No?


Yikes.

buzz kill

When I was walking through one of the public housing developments the other day, I picked up this.



It's just a busted up video game controller, yea, but it also struck me as a cool symbol for the weird kind of poverty we're dealing with down here. The neighborhoods in which we work are some of the poorest in the country, and a lot of the living conditions are pretty gross. But it doesn't look like the poverty you see on TV.

(Thanks, Josh, for the photos that I took without asking!)

Can you imagine a sappy infomercial asking for money to feed the person who lives in the photo above? Or to fund his kids' education? No way. What's depressing about this job is that sometimes I get the overwhelming sense that some of these kids just don't have a chance. That doesn't mean they're not saturated in consumer culture, though, so they still want all kinds of goofy things. I mean, of course they do. They're kids, and that's allowed. One kid waiting for his friends to finish the survey the other day drew me this.


I won't pretend to be some kind of expert on poverty; just thought I'd say something about how this stuff is a little (a lot) fucked up.

See what I mean?

We saw this in one of the neighborhoods today. Gang graffiti? Probably not. Hilarious? Yes. Good for you, Ross. Nice one.

in defense of graffiti

One of the most interesting things to me ever is when people write on things that they're not supposed to. It's using literacy to rebel, and it's cool. I mean, it's really cool when graffiti voices some kind of political dissent, but I get just as excited about kids writing on the fill-in-the-bubble surveys we're administering as I do when I hear about the "more like homeland insecurity" that Melissa saw in Atlanta.

But today I'm getting the impression that I may be in the minority on this one. When I checked my email early this morning, I was excited to see that the National Geographic Photo of the Day is this:


The caption, however, reads,

Graffiti covers the side of a ship in one of Denmark's many harbors. Vandalism is rare in this exceptionally peaceful, orderly society where a mere 2 percent of the national budget is spent on police, prisons, and courts. A common saying in the patriotic nation holds that "Denmark is a land where few have too much and even fewer have too little," a fact that they attribute to keeping the crime levels low.

giving me the distinct feeling that the caption-writer thinks graffiti is bad; it's vandalism.

Later in the morning, as I waited for my medium black coffee at Moka's, the local coffee shop, I read an article on the front page of today's paper called "Mobile's wannabe gang problem." The two images in the story are of graffiti. (I couldn't find them online, so below are my photos of the photos.)



The first one really gets me. The caption assures us that "it does not indicate gang 'turf' or a warning to rivals." Um, yea. It says love. Repeatedly the article cites the existence or lack thereof of gang graffiti as a major indicator of whether or not gangs exist in Mobile. Although school officials "have linked some fights to territorial conflicts ... school walls aren't painted with gang graffiti, and [the security director for the school system] doesn't see students wearing gang colors." Don't get me wrong, I'm not downplaying the gravity of the issue of gangs. I just don't see how graffiti and bandannas can be the only evidence available for piecing together a conclusion. The second caption above concludes that "while [the tag] appears to be gang-oriented, it is actually the painter displaying his artistic ability with a spraypaint can." While I take issue with the assumption that the tagger is male, I sort of like how Officer John Young can get down with the idea of graffiti as art. I don't even really think that the second tag is that cool per se. What I do think is cool is the way that taggers use their ability to write as a a way to inscribe public space. It's just so bold. It makes a passer-by see what the tagger has to say, even if it's unpleasant.

Anyway, the survey we're administering asks the kids

Agree/Disagree: Kids who are in a gang get respect from other kids in my neighborhood.

How much do you worry about gangs in your neighborhood?

Have you ever been involved in a gang?

Are you currently involved in a gang?

Do you hang out with members of a gang?

Analyzing this data seems to me like a more reliable source of information about the state of gangs in Mobile than looking at the graffiti and scratching our heads, no?


They published this in TIME a bit ago: