De fence: just about everything

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap ("Health Care Bill")

2010-03-24T17:09:00.009-04:00

Yeah, that's right, I said it. I am a woman who suffers from several chronic and, well, expensive disorders. In effect, my life is a preexisting condition. I am a registered Libertatrian, for whatever that may be worth to you, dear reader. I am a woman who has lived with a working socialized medicine program. Sorry Canada, but it really can be done. And I was, for a good long while, on the side of the folks attempting to pass some form of health insurance reform in this country.

Why? Because I am privileged in being a graduate student and being forced to pay high premiums for "coverage" that takes my drug bill from nearly $3000/month to just over $150/month. Of course, the fact that my monthly earnings put me a few hundred dollars over the poverty line is pertinent to that math as well. And yet I am very aware of my privilege. I have an education (and almost a PhD), I have life experience many may not ever have the chance to get, and best, I have doctos who care, listen to me, and even when I don't fully agree with their opinions, work with me to make my life livable.

And yet...

I am very aware of the people in this country who don't have these things. I am very aware of the people who die from minor illnesses we have the technology to cure or care for. And I'm aware, on the more fiscally conservative side of my brain of the actual monetary cost of caring for these people as we currently do--via emergency rooms and urgent care centers. Worse, we not only end up paying more for their care than necessary because we force them to wait for acute situations or go to Urgent Care with minor illnesses, we create the situation in which we find many people easily and even cheaply becoming addicted to prescription drugs by depending on UC centers and finding the many available ones so overloaded that they do not have time to worry about much less deal effectively with drug-seeking behavior.

Meanwhile, people with "health insurance" go to the ER with an acute case and then get a statement for "their share" of the bill. Let me tell you about how this played out in one case I am intimately familiar with: a friend went to the ER. When he received his bill, he went over it carefully; something most people don't bother doing. What he found was an inexplicable difference between his costs, the total bill, and the amount the hospital had received. He called to find out why.

As it turns out, he was told that the hospital has a contract with the insurance company through which they can write off the majority of the bill as a loss and the insurance company pays only a minor fraction. In fact, the "insurance company" paid $41. No, there are no missing zeros there. He paid well over $500. The hospital got to write off (read tax break) about $10,000.

Imagine that. I teach writing and work as a freelance editor. This is the equivalent of my charging a client $1,000 per page, but having a contract with said client that allows her to pay me only $5 per page, after which I write off the difference as a loss on my tax statement.

If I did that, I'd be in jail. The IRS would slam me down for tax fraud faster than I could write the receipt. But, then, I'm not an insurance company. If I were, apparently I could commit insurance AND tax fraud and no one would even blink twice at the act.

So, yeah. I thought health care reform was necessary. I don't, however, think the bill that was passed can, in any manner, be considered productive reform. All the new bill does is bring more people into the fraud fold--it opens the market for hospitals to make money off tax losses and insurance companies to make money off insurance fraud at a greater level.

Worse, in the name of "political progress" the party of "change" actively considered passing the bill in a "deem and pass" move which would create deniability. Why? Because they are very well aware that they are not fixing anything. Why? Because none of the Republican ideas would have fixed anything either. In fact, the process has been on the wrong path for decades and will continue to be so until we are prepared to face the real effects and real outcomes of the system we currently have.

Here's what they did instead: They gave themselves 15 minutes to vote. According to CNN, this was so that if they hit the magic number of 216, those democrats who needed deniability for their homebase, could simply not vote. We now openly admit that our system is so messed up that we have to wheedle our way into the legislation that messes it up further. I don't know if that's progress or congress.

Health insurance in this country is neither health nor insurance. Insurance is a system in which one pays into a massive fund against major losses in case of catasrophe, not a system in which people pay into a massive fund so that they can then pay a copay and have their insurance give their doctors a write off opportunity.

With the current system, not insurance, we also have "not health." Why? Because doctors get awarded (monetarily) for performing unnecessary exams (and often in that rush fail to perform necessary ones). Why? Because in order to make money, doctors must see 40-60 patients daily, meaning that they neither spend enough time to give good care, nor have enough mental capacity to pay individual attention to each patient's needs. It's simple: even a doctor's brain is not capable of that kind of multi-tasking.

"Health reform" as it has been enacted is a dirty deed. Deem and Pass (I heard Demon Pass for a while and find it far more appropriate a term), is how one does this dirt cheap. To avoid that label, take as much time to pass as is necessary for Dems facing tough races is, well, just as dirt cheap; it just looks prettier.

Make no mistake: I think the Republican party would have made a greater mess of things had they bothered to fully participate instead of just adding an amendment here and an amendment there.

So what now?

I am quite used to the fact that I will not get what I want and the system will not be fully fixed, but I am also always happy to share what I think are good suggestions. Maybe, if we start talking about this, really talking about this, we can begin.

Here's a way to start looking at things differently: How American Medicine Killed My Father may sound like a whiny "why me" kind of article, but it isn't. It's a real, economically sound, and workable plan.

Discuss.

writers

2010-03-14T12:52:00.002-04:00

Writers are a scab-picking, zit-popping, scalp-scratching bunch who care not so much for the blood let as for the sound, the feel, the sucking away as flesh leaves itself to open a space that can only be seemingly seamless in its ease, and yet reveals the easy seams of a clean tear.

Writers dig in to the truths that are the ugliest. We write about ourselves and ourselves within others. We point the light--and even distort it for our own purposes. We bend the mind by speaking directly into the ear in ways others cannot. We change the world with little more than the electricity and force of our own selves.

And at all times, writers turn the knife inward, perform self-surgery, defend by amputation. Writers plunge their hands, elbow-deep, in the blood and let it flow over their clothes just for the pleasure of inspecting the sinew that holds the body in motion.

I failed as a writer this year because I realized fairly early on that my dream of writing a book about the year of being a mom would come at odds with my year of being a mom--in that I would have to turn the knife on me and on "my child" and on my husband, and while I could see my own blood without flinching, theirs made me cringe deeply. I must now complete the major task at hand, which requires my dissection of others' writing and lives. But then I will have to pull up my big girl panties and delve into the not-quite-a-year of not-quite-parenting. I will be honing my knife and saving up my pain meds for those around me.

Writers are a scab-picking, zit-popping, scalp-scratching bunch.

One should always pay attention to what Annie says:

2010-03-09T12:01:00.003-05:00

In my lat post I thanked Annie for reminding me of why I do this--any of "this". In her post on her blog (link here), she had mentioned reading The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion. I had been reading Fixed Ideas, Didion's brilliant explication on the matters surrounding the anti-intellectualism movement's use of 9-11-01 to keep people "not thinking" and was enjoying Didion's ability to keep the personal political and the political in personal view. I am in awe of Didion.

So, one night, at the bookstore, before my lovely honey gave me my lovely Kindle, I had nothing to read and some down-time, and went looking through the shelves. I came across Didion's "Year" and decided to pick it up. To use my teenaged daughter's terms, O-M-G! (I text such things, but actually pronounce the words when speaking.)

The Year of Magical Thinking should be required reading for everyone. The only caveat I can have in saying that is that not everyone will be ready to read it a any given age, but before one gets to the age of loss, one MUST read this book. The age of loss, I am certain, is different for all. I had a best friend in grade school who lost her mother when we were 13. Her understanding of loss began at too tender an age. I have friends who have never lost a loved one, who wander forth in a magical bubble of good health and a general sense of immortality. I envy them in some ways, but not completely.

I know those I have lost have changed my life. I also know the ways in which they died affected my life for better or worse, and I think in some cases, loss is healthy--not happy, mind you, but healthy. My grandmother had basically had enough. I am fairly certain her death was simply a matter of her feeling she was done. My uncle died after a long, drawn out illness. And yet, my loss of him was the "best" loss I've been able to experience. He gave me the gift of telling me he no longer wanted to fight the cancer. He gave me the gift of time. We had no idea of how long he would live after stopping treatment.

Elie told me on the phone that he had decided not to try the next round of experimental treatments, that he was tired, that he was through with fighting, and that he had lived a good life. I wrote him a rather long letter telling him just how much he meant to me. Reminding him of moments when he had touched my life and brought a positive light into it. Telling him in so many words how much I loved him and how much his life had impacted mine for the better. Because regardless of what, if anything, happens "after" life, I wanted him to know his impact in life had been great. I thought I was telling him how much I loved him for his sake. Boy was I wrong.

I was in London when Elie died. I received the phone call in London. I landed in Florida three hours before his funeral in New York (we Jews don't wait around to bury). I was unable to be there to talk to my aunt Judy, to share her grief and try to be of help.

But Joan Didion, and aunt Judy, made clear to me some things I would not have otherwise understood. My letter to my uncle Elie was a letter to my aunt Judy as well. My getting the chance to say goodbye was a gift to me and to Judy. I got closure, but, Judy told me, she and Elie also got a gift in knowing how their lives made mine better. "You were there before the funeral," Judy told me. That was the better thing to do.

And Joan Didion confirmed this for me. Her deep, honest, difficult grappling with grief delayed, grief doubled, helped me see that Judy and Elie benefited more from my presence before the funeral than either would have from my presence at. I do not pretend to know what a spouse goes through in cases like Joan's or Judy's. I can only know what the two have taught me. And they have taught me a great deal and taught me well.

I return, often, to the decision to send Elie a letter. It may well be one of the best decisions I have ever made. Uncle Elie told me, after I left the US Naval Academy that I was not a failure, that I would find my way, that I would become who I was meant to be, and that my purpose in life would be a great one. He believed in me more than I did. He made clear to me that there was hope. I cherish his memory and try to keep him in mind when I think I can't--because he said I can, and he meant it.

Joan Didion and Judy Cassorla are two of my heroes. I am in awe of their strength.

Thanks to Annie

2010-02-24T20:42:00.003-05:00

So, thanks to Annie, I must confess and submit. For I have promised in public and I have tried and failed and I have not written in so long that the last thing up here is Spain, which I haven't been to in over a year.

Now that we didn't visit, of course, as Karma or Dogma or Momma would have it, J's dad ended up hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism. The pure hell of that week and half after he found out--because his family didn't tell him; he found out by accident when he called his dad's cell--is only one of the many scars I bear this spring.

Xrays tomorrow or the next for the Left Knee and the Right Foot will show "If this is a disease process or degenerative" because my sed rate is below normal and if you didn't need any vowels to read that, you know too much about pain. Of course she said degenerative as though it were a throw-away word; as though then it wouldn't hurt as much. She had to. Because if it is degenerative she can't do as much.

In the meantime I should be proud of myself for getting the Rx Companies to help pay the $2000+ per month I would otherwise spend on my meds (like I have that kind of money). I was let down by the woman on the other end of the phone who while activating my card asked, "Do you have your medications delivered to your home?" And clearly didn't even break a smile when I replied, "No, I actually drive down to the street corner." She asked which pharmacy I used. I refrained from correcting her; the proper term, of course, being discopharmacologist. I answered her questions. I was polite. It was a near relief to only deal with a machine when activating the second Rx help card. My insurance has improved this year. Just enough that I can't get the really expensive shit I put in my body for free and can't afford the co-pay. And believe me, I put some expensive poison in this body.

Meanwhile I've been promising myself I'd keep a daily journal this year of magical parenting so I could write about it and I would be honest and a real writer. And I haven't. I can't. I don't have the time. I don't have the energy. I am not entirely sure I will ever have the honesty.

Instead I read for exams--which would be a noble excuse if it were true nearly as often as it should be or if I had done nearly as much of it as I need to have done by now. I take the kid to school. I pick her up. I watch trashy and fun TV with her. I go shopping, I cook, I take the dogs to the vet, I work at BAM, I teach Hebrew School, I worry. I nap. I nap a lot. I cannot but nap. And I do read. But not enough.

And so here I am posting to all the world, sadly knowing it will not read and still fearing it might. I might even manage some more. Soon.

Just a "drunk injun" issue...

2009-03-11T11:34:00.005-04:00

You're not likely to have seen this show; we miss a lot by having several thousand channels and none of them international. But if you're curious about an interesting case of a native man in Canada (it's a neighbor country), and the sentence he got of "spiritual work" after he let his children die--while on an alcohol bender--start looking: RightGirl's Blog, and the original story.

I'm sending you to RightGirl for two reasons. First, she seems to have sounded off rather loudly on this, and second, she's how I learned about it. She even got into an interesting fight on Canadian TV (Yes, they even have TV) with a talking head over her use of the terms "drunken injun" and "sweatlodge justice."

Check it out; it's a fun fight.

But it's problematic. Deeply so.

First, Wendy Sullivan, AKA RightGirl, and Micheal Coren, AKA the talking head, are fighting over the same side. He thinks its terrible, but she shouldn't be allowed to use words like "injun," and she thinks it's terrible and that she should be allowed to use any words in the lexicon. They're the perfect picture of the right and left of modern Western politics. The right is mad about intellectual language (and with it intellect, though they have plenty) and the left is mad over the intelligent use of language (which is what got them beat up from 1994-2009, and what got them the election in 2008).

Both sides are wrong.

What's really at stake here? The story is simple. A native man got drunk and "lost" his daughters in a snowstorm. They died. He was sentenced by a judge, but his tribe wanted to use a sentencing circle to sentence him apart from the criminal system. Sullivan and Coren both think it's abominable that tribal justice might rule over the judicial system, but Coren thinks we should say that without making fun of a system our forefathers helped ruin.

Heaven forbid we should have satire and learn to laugh at our problems--or learn to fix them.

My first issue with the argument is that it was entertaining mindlessness under the guise of debate. I don't mind entertaining mindlessness; I watch plenty of it. But it pisses me off when we pretend it's anything but mindless.

Sullivan, rightly, says that any person who wishes to be part of the system, must live by the laws and justice of that system. What she's not saying is what lies under that. The "Indian affairs" systems at work in the US and Canada are not viable. They are a form of oppression in the guise of emancipation. "Do whatever you like on the Res. But the Res is where we get to keep you infantile in our minds and social order."

Whereas the rest of our society is based on the mutual agreement that laws rule, and that all citizens, to hold that title, must live under that rule. We pretend that "the nations" have autonomy on the tiny, shrinking, tracts of land we "gave" them, but once we've marginalized them to those tracts, we get frustrated when they don't want to live under our rule.

Hell, I wouldn't either.

The reservation system is flawed and damaged and damaging, and it's time we faced it--as adults. That is what Sullivan should have been saying.

As for Coren, he's pissed that Sullivan went for the punchline instead of the argument. But he is stuck in the same TV, soundbite, three seconds to say it, format she's in, and he seems to not know what it is that's really pissing him off.

Let me help: Coren is peeved that the system we set up to make up for our forebears' mistakes has instead broken things further, and he doesn't know how to suggest we fix it, because he's afraid to say it's broken. So, because of misguided and misplaced guilt, Coren is afraid that we'd only break it more if we tried to fix it.

But what about the negligent-drunken-murderous-"injun"-father?

By now, you've read the story. Pauchay's tribe wants to sentence him to do "spiritual work" for three years, rather than jail for three years. Sullivan is angered because to her this is not punishment.

But is she sure?

I'm intrigued that a person speaking for the political right would find "spiritual work" not to be punishment. My father, a rabbi, likes to say that the truest hell of the atheist is to find his soul returned to G-d. Seems to me, the truest punishment for what Pauchay did, is to force him to soberly face the heinous nature of his own act. "Spiritual Work," one might say, would be the toughest sentence in this equation.

Three years in a cell block with felons who make an art of denial of their crimes, who will teach this man new and more interesting ways to waste his life, who are more likely to cause him physical damage and harden his mind against his own guilt than to help him see and feel it in full, will leave him an ex-con, not a better man.

Time to face yet another truth; our justice system is just as broken as our system for natives (or aboriginals, as I believe every other culture in the world calls them). Instead of dealing with the problems caused by criminals in our society, we lock them away and hope that years of socializing with each other will not make them recidivists. Might as well kill them all to begin with, since we're sentencing them to life without parole from felony. And sentencing ourselves to a more criminal and violent, recidivist filled, society. Maybe we could learn a thing or two and reconsider the Bentham Panopticon model of "justice."

Let me make this simple: Western "justice" and the "reservation" systems both suck! It's time to stop fearing fault and start finding solutions. It's time to leave off the childish blame game and start earning all our places at the adults' table. We are all (and I do mean all) complicit.

Done.

Now let's do some spiritual work and find a solution.

Here's an idea...

2009-03-10T14:51:00.002-04:00

We should sell BO memorabilia to raise the $ Trillions it'll take to get us out of this mess.

One thing that seems to not get mentioned by ANYONE on either side is that this is NOT BO's mess! If you're going to blame the top uns, and the Right certainly seems hell bent on it--because there's little else they can do, other than grab as much for themselves as possible--at least blame the right one; the one who's been supporting a $10 million/mo. war, off the books, for the last, oh, 6 years. You got it; Bushy! More likely his #2, also known as puppetmaster, Cheney. Doesn't really matter, does it? What's important is ow to fix it.

And that's the sticker, isn't it? Economists are yelling spend more, and all at once, or spend nothing and cut more rich people's taxes so they can let it piddle down to the poor (am I sounding biased?). Politicians are yelling--mostly mindless sound and fury on BOTH sides, signifying nothing. And the media is looking for the worst case scenarios to make it all look wonderfully dramatic. Is anyone doing anything "constructive"? BO, just might be. Though I'm not sure I believe it's as bad as it looks.

I know people all over this country. I don't know folks who have to go to soup kitchens. I know folks who are tightening their belts, but even the folks I know who own businesses--those entrepreneurs in the most trouble--who are doing okay. The restaurants in my town are still crowded on Saturday nights. None of us are happy about our grocery bills, but none of us are dying of starvation in dust bowl huts, either. Can anyone put a reality check on this? It seems to me, the only folks who have the chance of doing that (the media, the politicians, the economists) have the most to gain; they're keeping their jobs by telling us how bad it is.

Is ANYONE interested in the truth?

Seems to me the truth is the economy sucks, but fear-mongering sucks worse! It sucks the little left of the economy down the drain! It sucks the energy out of people who would otherwise be motivated to change things. It sucks the life out of us all. Can we just stop it? We can, and then we can sell BO memorabilia AND "I survived the depression" buttons.

But Wait! There's More!

2009-01-27T22:40:00.004-05:00

"you, too, can own a piece of history..."

It's the start of at least three different sales pitches for things I could buy to prove I was alive this year. Of course, since I can't buy back my ballot (to prove I voted one way OR the other), and because I didn't spend thousands to millions of dollars to freeze my ass off watching the speech and parade and instead watched from a wonderfully warm home, it's mandatory that I buy something. It would be, well, UNAMERICAN not to.

In fact, I sit here, watching these commercials for things I will NEVER buy, regardless of how I voted, what I wanted for the electoral outcome or how I feel about BO's presidency (and let's remember he has four long years to make mistakes in), and kicking myself in the ASS for not having thought to get in on the action.

Has BO helped the economy? No just yeah, but Hell, yeah! As we southerners like to say. BO has provided job security for all the people at the non-US mints, every T-shirt printing company in the world and several music folks as well. He's probably also ensured jobs for anyone involved in the selling of these items (ma & pop stores ought to stock up) and anyone related to those folks should also be seeing black. So, in much the same way the Bushy ensured bill collectors would never be out of jobs (and people with better jobs would become bill collectors after talking to a few), OB has already produced a crop of new rich folks.

And that's a damned good thing if you ask me, because it would be downright unamerican to be alive in this moment in time and not own a "Kennedy Half Dollar of Barack Obama." Sadly, I must defer the purchases until I have a paycheck not already owed to others, and until I figure out what the hell a Kennedy half dollar of BO actually is.

How UNAmerican of me.

(Allcaps and non caps intended.)

Executive orders

2009-01-22T11:29:00.003-05:00

Rick Sanchez, of CNN, is making happy sounds via Twitter because BO signed an executive order banning torture. Why am I unhappy?

It used to be understood. It used to be unspoken. When I was in the Navy (for two blinks of an eye), we spoke with hatred and intense disapprobation about countries that tortured. We thought of them as animals.

And so, today, BO signed a piece of paper that says the US will not, may not, must not, partake in torture. Apparently, when Maj. Gen Paul Eaton along with several other retired generals of the US armed forces told Bushy that the US shouldn't torture, that we NEVER get anything good from it, that it's not just nasty, inhuman, illegal behavior, but against everything we stand for as a country and a leader, that didn't quite get through. How anyone could stand by Bushy after he okayed torture is beyond me. Apparently it was beyond many Americans--many of whom had to live through it themselves (like Mac did).

But what does it say about us as a people that two hundred plus years after we started this experiment of a country in which people were supposed to be free, innocent until proven guilty, of equal worth, and inherently trying to do better than what came before us (The British Empire, The Roman Empire, Etc.,) we finally get around to writing down that torture is not in our national arsenal of behavior--and are forced to do it because there are leaders among us who think it should be.

I am not ashamed that BO signed it, but I do have to say that it comes late and short. That there are men and women who have suffered at our hands. And that whether they are or were terrorists is beside the point; we are supposed to be better than that.

When we take on our enemies' worst traits, we become our enemy. We cannot suspend our greatest values as a nation in order to defend the nation; for when we suspend our values, we are no longer a nation.

Lots of Balls.

2009-01-21T15:08:00.002-05:00

I stayed home yesterday.

One of my profs made class optional for those who wanted to watch the inauguration, one canceled. But I didn't stay home because of BO. I stayed home because of Status Hemiplegic Migraine. Seriously cool shit, man. NO headache--just unbearable pain and weakness on the left side of my body...for five days. And believe me, by Tuesday, I was ready for change.

Of course, I'm not writing just to tell you what it feels like to have half your body in a migraine--though, overall, I'd say, Not Fun. I am, of course writing because yesterday we got change. I think most of the country and world was ready for change. Even if the change we got is not to everyone's liking, we were all, as a friend of mine (Girl) on the Right so well put it, sick of the same set of ugly errors (http://rightrants.today.com/2009/01/21/new-media-vs-old-farts/).

Me? I'm on the fence. I'm rather fond of much of what BO had to say yesterday. In fact, I think there were three things he said that are most important:

1) Taking away our rights and the rights on which our democracy was built WILL NOT make us more secure. Rather, it is a manner of playing into the hands of terrorists. Israelis have known this for years. We like to put it this way: "The day you don't get' on a bus is the day the terrorists win."

Why? Because their first and most important aim is to "change" our way of life. If they can make us afraid to talk on the phone, they have already won. If they can make us fear our government because being critical of it is "unpatriotic" and a great way to get a free tour of Gitmo, they've won because they've made us into them.

In that, The Bush administration may have had its greatest failing. It used the terror attacks of 9/11 to perpetrate an 8 year terror campaign on us all. They kept us wrapped and warped in their color codes. They made us take off our stupid shoes in public! (I say this having flown in and out of Israel many times; shoe removal IS NOT a security measure, it's a make-you-feel-like-we're-doing-something-when-we-aren't measure!).

2) BO also said that government MUST conduct its business in the open, with full disclosure. It's about bloody time. It may not really happen, since we really do have ops all over the world, keeping dictators in our pockets, controlling economic movements and generally being sneaky and rather black crow-ish from spy-vs-spy, but bringing back what little sunlight we had on government's doings and maybe adding in some more would be lovely! The laundry might even dry!

3) Finally, BO pointed out that the way out of a financial crisis wasn't to stop spending money on anything, but to take measure of everything and stop spending money on the things that don't work, while creating (and continuing the funding for) things that do. That means the billions of dollars that go each year to programs that have spent decades proving they do not work may no longer be spent on those programs. What an idea! It's called cutting back on wasteful spending. There's not a Democrat or Republican left in this country who would recognize that if it knocked on the door and asked to come in.

Can he do it? No, he can't. And he's said as much. He's pointed out that no single politician or group thereof can make any of this happen. That's why he's regularly asking for our help. So, to change the question; can it be done? I think it can. In the words of Miracle Max, "It'll take a miracle." but after the beautiful water landing in NYC last week, I believe in miracles (again).

I also believe that careful scrutiny, healthy skepticism, and willingness to do what each of us believes we can and must for the greater good, will get it done.

On this note, I want to emphasize one thing in particular. The Obama administration should not be carefully watched for the first 100 days to see how its stated mission is progressing: it should and every administration should be watched for the next 4 years to see how its stated mission is progressing--and how it is going about the business of meeting said mission.

Skepticism is healthy until it leaves you on the sofa waiting for someone else to do the work. Government help is healthy until it encourages you to sit on the sofa and wait for government help. Change is reality. And sometimes, it can be good.

Why being pro-Israel is neither anti-Palestinian nor anti-peace.

2009-01-08T20:45:00.004-05:00

Actually, I’m anti-Piece, which is what seems to be the version being sought by Hamas in the ME. I am pro-Israel only partly because I was born there and had the privilege of living there as an adult as well--the other part is that it's the right thing to do for the world, but keep reading. Israel is a wonderful place. In addition to the wonderfully cosmopolitan feel of Tel Aviv, the artsy feel of Haifa, and the humbling feel of Jerusalem, Israel is packed full of little towns, kibbutzim (communal living), villages, and every other arrangement you can think of.

I lived in Tel Aviv for a part of the time I was there as an adult (in the late ‘90s). Tel Aviv has been called the New York City of the ME. I now live in a little town in North Florida. I TA, I knew my neighbords. One of them taught me how to darn socks—she was a lovely old lady whose husband was in his 80s and went to work every day at a book store because he hated being unemployed and she hated having him underfoot while she cleaned the house (top to bottom daily) and cooked. She cooked as she had when her kids were at home, so she always had extra. Despite my rather “generous” build, she thought I needed feeding—and my housemates as well—so she would bring us up Shabbat dinner once a week. We would give her the fresh tomatoes we barely managed to keep alive on the balcony. But I knew my neighbors.

I’ve read blogs about how by fighting to defend their land, Israelis are creating new suicide bombers, because children who grow up in such violent environments with war all around them are bound to become violent and be suicide bombers. Of course, I grew up in such a social milieu (until I was about 7.5), and I have yet to want to strap on explosives. I have friends who grew up in it all the way through their 20s and not only didn’t want to bomb any civilians, but joined the growing peace movements in Israel

There are several peace movements in Israel. There’s Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), Dor Shalem Doresh Shalom (a whole generation demands peace) and others. I bet many of my readers didn’t know that. my generation wants peace. My father’s generation wanted peace, too, but I think they were and are mired in a different kind of thinking about it. As the children of the Holocaust adults, they see peace as a form of all or nothing survival. My generation has figured out what they would have had they not been fighting against unwarranted attacks every few months; namely that a people who have a homeland—especially a people who have had to fight so hard to gain, build, and maintain said homeland—have a moral obligation to help others to gain the same.

The Palestinians deserve a homeland. There are those who, at this point, would remind me that they make up 80% or more of the Jordanian populace. And they do. But clearly, they are not in a homeland there. Maybe they need to split Jordan (plus the West bank, but minus Jerusalem and Bethlehem) with the Hashemites. We give some, Jordan gives some, everyone helps them get started so they don’t have to lean on terrorists like Hamas and they have a chance of surviving.

But that’s my dream. No one will go for it. Still, I’d like to explain it.

First, I want to talk about Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Jerusalem and Bethlehem belong to the world, and should be open to it for all forms of visit, pilgrimage, or worship. Three major religions find import in Jerusalem, and two in Bethlehem. Yet under Arab control, these places and the holy sites within them were not open to any person wishing to visit. Under Israeli control they have been. I think history bears out the need to keep Jerusalem and Bethlehem under Israeli control.

But the settlers in the West Bank would have to move for my plan to work. Israel was given the right to hold the territories until such time as a lasting peace was negotiated. You have to agree that it hasn’t looked like it would ever happen in the decades Israel’s held the territories. But I think that if the settlers were willing to move (that is if the Israeli government were willing to tell them that they can choose to move or choose to be under a Palestinian government), that the deal I have set above might work.

The next question, of course, is the Jordan River. The West Bank is called such because it is attached to the West Bank of the Jordan River. This is a tactical issue for both sides. First, Israel controls the now trickle of a river above and below the WB. That means it could cut off water, but it also means the Palestinians could use it to advantage. I think that both sides will have to build a lasting peace and the idea that an equal tactical threat will still exist is simply going to have to be accepted. Besides, I think that if Israel takes the time and makes the effort (as does Jordan and the international community) to help set up a functional Palestine, it won’t be a problem.

But functional is the key word in that sentence. All the infrastructure in the territories that currently exists was built by Israel because every governing body the Palestinians have had (from Arafat to Abbas to Hamas) has been corrupt. Millions of international dollars have gone to bakshish and personal gain (and to pay off the families of suicide bombers!). If Palestine is thrown to the Palestinians like meat to a rabid dog, it will fall to ruin through corruption.

If, however, actual help is offered, rather than creating a Friedmanite free fraud zone (like the US haplessly created in the former USSR), there is a very good chance that Palestine would flourish. Its refugees who have fled to the US and been educated, the ones who were educated in Israel, and the ones who have managed to educate themselves in Europe could come back and help make it the cause celebre it could rightly be. Note that most Arab countries do not extend the right to education to Palestinians—because ignorant people are easier to control and the Palestinians have been an Arab pawn for decades.

Jews make up less than a percent of the world’s population and more than 19 percent of its Nobel Prize Winners. No, that’s not a sign that they have the Nobel Committee under their control. If the Palestinians were given the chance to educate their children (and their women!), imagine what they might also accomplish. Living in the desert can lead to great ability to overcome, just as it has led to great ability to defraud.

And so my pro-Israel stand is a stand for peace. It’s a stand to get the terrorists out of Gaza so they stop using Palestinians as media pawns. It’s a stand to replace the Piece process with a Peace process.

Hey, a girl can hope.

Some Middle East History -- edited

2009-01-06T23:11:00.002-05:00

This was passed on by a friend whose house was missed by 1 km this morning: “how would you and yours feel if, after 2000 years, your biggest, greatest enemies were patently favored and GIVEN a vast tract of land by the victors of WW1 and WW2, and became your most hated neighbors again---weren't jews kicked out of the "promised land" after ... Read Morelosing war upon war to Muslims?...yes, holocaust and all...but that does not mandate nor equivocate into nation-building status in same place they were defeated year prior...just think about NativeAmericans taking this country back, and sending caucasian-based peoples and others back to their regions of origin...i just ask that we all think about that, and why would folks want to live amongst those that truly despise them?...that's stupid, beyond insane...just my opinion...”

It’s an interesting question at least in part because of the incorrect premise(s) it’s based on. First, let’s be clear, like many peoples, the Jewish homeland (the last iteration of it before the modern one, was tromped and those citizens were exiled by Romans, not Arabs. Why is that important? For starters, because it takes away the simple and simplistic “2000 years” the Arabs supposedly had control of Israel and freedom from Jews. The Jews, along with the Arabs, were repeatedly kicked into and out of the Middle East by the Roman Catholic Church, the Moors, themselves, the Turks, and then the European countries and the US after the world wars. So, to answer the question, we need to look at history.

There has never been a time when Jews did not live—en masse, in large groups, in enclaves—in what is currently called Israel, as well as all over the Middle East in Arab and non-Arab countries. There has never been a Jew-free M-E. That is deeply important; The Middle East is not the Arab world with a few infidel intruders. Bear in mind that Islam is only 1400 years old, and the "arabs" were simply a lose aggregate of tribes interacting both positively and through war throughout the region. That, at the very least removes one of the claims above.

Next, we must deal with more recent history: Let’s go back to before WWI. The Ottoman Empire owned/ran/governed (however you wish to term it) pretty much all we no recognize as the Middle East. They governed in much the same way all the previous empires had of that particular area, with a sense of benign neglect until there were political or monetary needs for there to be something other than benign neglect. But in addition, they allowed what Shariah calls for—the protection of all the People of the Book; and that, folks means Jews AND Christians. Much like in the Golden Age of Spain, in which non-Muslims lived under greater taxation and somewhat harsher rules but with a great deal of freedoms, primarily religious freedoms, the Ottoman Empire seems to have not had it out for anyone except the Armenians—and that’s modern history’s first true holocaust for those of you who think it was WWII.

While Mustafa Kemal Pasha, aka Attaturk, ran things, he allowed Jews (and Christians) to purchase land, and the many Jews who had been in the land for generations as well as the many who had migrated from Russia in the first Zionist wave of the late 19th century, began buying land, sometimes having to do so several times over to overcome the great amount of bakshish and corruption that abounded.

Then came WWI. The victors took apart the Ottoman Empire and out of a colonial sense of general superiority, split the countries (with no regard to tribal histories or land claims) into “protectorates”—these were the countries we now call the Middle East, but with the European countries charged with “bringing them into the modern world” by the League of Nations (a forerunner of the UN). The near-century of warfare between Iran and Iraq is partly the outcome of this colonialism, BTW, as was all the infighting between all the Arab countries that has happened since and was only “solved” or brought to less obvious struggle with the advent of OPEC. (Hmmm…) But on with the story of Israel.

As early as the beginning of the British mandate of “Palestine,” promises were made; to everyone but the Palestinians—who were not a recognized ethnic or tribal group at the time. In fact, the Jews residing within the boundaries of the Mandate referred to themselves as Palestinians. The Brits gave all of the Mandatory area east of the Jordan river to a Bedouin tribal leader who named himself King, thus creating the “Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan” which later became Jordan. This tribe, the Hashemites, made up less than 20% of the population of that tract of land. This was a gift in thanks for their help in the Arabian Wars (think Lawrence of Arabia). The land of Israel was promised to the Jews (See The Balfour Declaration). Jordan, after these promises were filled, would agree to oversee what is now the West Bank. Gaza along with the Sinai desert belonged to Egypt.

All this means that the whole idea of the Jews having been somehow “gone” and then somehow “forced onto the Arabs” is a lie. It’s also a problem, because it hides the fact that the Jews were promised the land they had repeatedly bought long before Hitler came along with his final solution. It wasn’t until 1967, when 8 of Israel’s immediate neighbors attacked it that Israel began what is known as the occupation. Prior to that war, from the cease-fire of 1949, Jordan assumed full governmental authority over the areas of Judea and Samaria, (now referred to as “the West Bank”), but they were never considered as “occupied” despite the fact that Jordan had no legal right for that occupation which was counter to the UN Partition resolution of November 29, 1947. Israel never relinquished administrative authority over the land from which it had been attacked; Sinai, Golan, Gaza, and the West Bank. In exchange for peace, it gave Egypt back Sinai—they didn’t want Gaza. In the early ‘80s, after an Egyptian-born man by the name of Yasser Arafat attempted an assassination of King Hussein of Jordan and a coup of the Hashemite Kingdom in the name of the Palestinians, he was exiled to the West Bank—they hadn’t wanted it (or him).

As for the “Occupation”—there are many people who feel this is the biggest mistake Israel has ever made. After winning the ’67 war, when suing for peace, Israel didn’t demand the right to keep the land it had conquered (as most countries do in war), but requested the right to control those areas until such time that a lasting peace were made possible by treaty. This was approved by UN mandate 221. Check it out.

Now, Israel is demanding that right again. It’s not trying to ruin Palestinian life or kill off all the Palestinians. Israel is simply trying to protect its civilians—who have the right to live in Israel without being bombed. I know very few Israelis who don’t believe in a two state solution. But I have seen films of a lot of Arabs calling for the “final solution.”

So the idea that the Jews were ever absent from their homeland is incorrect. The idea that they only got it because of the Holocaust is only partly problematic—they’d been promised it repeatedly; the Holocaust was just a wake up call to the world that it couldn’t wait anymore—or maybe, it was a suggestion that since the world hates Jews, it can give them their own place and maybe they’ll mostly go away. The idea that the Jews are simply going to disappear may be the best wish of many, but is also not going to happen. Maybe, what we need is to get the Arab world to stop holding down the Palestinians (through laws prohibiting their education or land-ownership in Arab countries). Maybe, what we need is to get the terrorists out of government in Gaza and bring in actual government. Maybe, instead of always blaming “the Jews” we can go looking for an actual solution (not a final one)—and find that people who are well fed, well housed, well educated, and whose entire citizenry have rights tend not to allow terrorists in their midst.

But what about the body count?

2009-01-02T12:10:00.003-05:00

This was asked by a person very dear to me. “But what about the body count? Why have so many Palestinians died and so few Israelis?”

It’s a question born of the sort of media coverage the Middle East has garnered for ages—as if a body count is a moral high ground. So here’s the explanation:

The body count for Palestinians, right now, is approximately 400, only 100 of which are believed to be civilians (NY Times). Israel does two things to lower the civilian casualty rates in situations like these.

First, they bomb selectively—unlike Hamas, which shoots blindly and specifically into civilian neighborhoods.

Second, they warn the civilians to get out of the way. They take the time to suggest evacuation because the Palestinians do not have an early warning system.

That’s one part. But in addition to that, Israel does have early warning and gets its civilians out of the way so fewer die. But in addition, there is the problem of a Hamas-run government.

A Hamas-run government does not have sufficient medical or infrastructural setups to take care of the people living in Gaza when there is no fighting. When there is fighting—again, started by them—they certainly have no resources. So the casualty rate goes up because civilians who could have otherwise been treated for wounds, cannot be treated by a system that does not have the goods on offer. And why not? The UN and many European countries supply the Paletinians with funding.

Much of the funding went up in secondary explosions of Rayan’s home, this week; when the munitions he was storing exploded because of the bomb dropped on his house.

This man is not just a “top leader” of Hamas; Rayan is a man who encouraged and then trained his teenaged son to become a suicide bomber (NY Times). He has also, according to the same Times report, asked Palestinians to stand on the roofs of buildings Israel was targeting (he knew which ones, because Israel lets Palestinians know where not to be!). Meir’s words ring through again.

So, the answer to the body count question is this: Israel works to keep the Israeli & Palestinian body counts low. Hamas works to keep all body counts high, but gets more mileage out of Palestinian bodies than Israeli ones. Bodies are not moral high ground. Bodies cannot remain the “scorecard” or the Palestinians will lose by winning. We must save Palestinian lives and Israeli lives by putting Hamas out of business. That is what Israel is trying to do. And instead of settling for a few more months’ quiet while Hamas buys more weapons and recruits more hungry, poor, tired, uneducated young men and women to become weapons, Israel chooses to fight for a lasting end to the violence.

A note or two on Israel; from an Israeli

2009-01-02T11:23:00.001-05:00

The world, of course, is in outrage. How dare the Israeli government bomb Gaza?

Well here’s my question; where was the world’s outrage when a bomb from Gaza landed mere meters from my best friend’s house? Where was the world’s outrage at the Israeli civilians who were being “targeted”—if one can call blind firing of rockets into purely civilian areas actual targeting—for the past month? Is it all right to bomb Israeli citizens intentionally and wrong to bomb buildings in which Hamas terrorist leaders are holed up continuing their terror after warning the civilians to leave?

Where was the world while my best friend’s been “fixing up” her bomb shelter and worrying about her sons’ day care, because it doesn’t have one? Those children are not important. Those children are being raised in a world so afraid of calling a terrorist a terrorist once he’s been elected to office, that they are being told that just as their grandparents’ generation didn’t mean a thing to the world, its generation doesn’t either.

Do not misunderstand me. I don’t think Livni & Co., are perfect, always right, or even necessarily the alabaster towers of human behavior. I am Israeli enough to criticize my Israel when she needs it, just as I’ve always been American enough to believe that criticism is the best and most important part of democracy. But how dare the world’s media use such biased coverage as to interview a Palestinian woman living in the hell that is now Gaza without talking also to an Israeli woman trying to save her kids? How can any use of force against Israel be counted and reported in said media as everyday behavior but a 5-day offensive to make that behavior stop be reported as unwarranted violence? Why must my country be asked repeatedly to be the lamb to the slaughter whenever it is faced with attack?

Because Jews only matter when someone needs a target, a lobby, a caricature. Because the world assumes that anyone living in Israel is Jewish, as opposed to realizing that there are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahai, and many others living there peacefully with each other. Because if the media focused on the reality my birthplace faces, it would have to care.

The city I was born in was bombed today. The city my best friend lives in was bombed two days ago. No one’s asked Hamas to stop killing civilians. Everyone’s asking Israel to stop defending itself. Everyone’s asking Israel to let its civilians die.

Seems Golda Meir had it right all those decades ago; “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”

I don’t think Meir thought the Arabs hated their children. I simply think that her point is that as long as one breeds hate into one’s children by hating others, one is creating for them a world of hate and pain. I’m sure Arabs love their children as much as anyone else does, but as long as their ideology allows for them to think that encouraging their children to become suicide bombers is a way to show love, there will be no peace.

(But what about the body count?) --Next

Salamanca II -- photos added

2008-12-30T16:53:00.002-05:00

But cathedrals schmathedrals.

Salamanca also has one of the oldest universities in the world. It is the oldest Spanish University. It is a university so old, and with such a deep history that it makes Harvard look like a baby school, just getting on its feet. J.’s parents studied there. The buildings are primarily close to each other, but are casually spread over the old part of the city in a way that I’m sure makes sense to someone. We walked through on a weekday, so there were plenty of students milling about (yes, on the week before Christmas), many of them American. The upper, or university schools, and the minor, or prep schools, each have a “patio.” The minor schools’ patio leads to the upper schools’ patio (which is larger, but not nearly as pretty), facing the cathedral. There are no benches, as I expected there would be—and as there are around the minor schools’ patio—but there is a statue in the center.

It feels, oddly, more like a blank spot at the center of a great deal of busy areas than a place to gather and talk, meet to go to lunch, or study before classes. The patio for the minor schools, in contrast, feels like a cloister.

In another (but close by) area, around the side of the cathedral, is a plaza called Anaya. Plaza Anaya is bordered by several schools, including (and this is largest here) the school of letters and philology. The inner courtyard is, again, much like a cloister, but on the walls are painted names, each with a similar (though there are differences) design above it. These are the names of persons who have earned their Doctoral degrees. The doctoral, in Spain, is a rough equivalent to post-doc work in the US. There is a dissertation (called a thesis) involved, much as there is in the US, but the course of studies is a little longer and comes after certain other levels of graduate degrees. Therefore, a JD, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is not a PhD, and neither is an MD. Each of these has a PhD possible in the field, but that is designed primarily for those who wish to teach rather than those who intend to practice. So, one can earn an MD, practice for some years, but if one then wants to return to academia and teach, one must take a few more courses, and write a dissertation to earn a PhD of medicine in addition to the MD. Personally, I just like the idea that one gets to leave one’s mark—name and year under the design of one’s major—after one completes this arduous task. Maybe an idea for back home… hmmm.

Both Madrid and Salamanca have street performers. One sees them more in Madrid, but the styles are very different in Salamanca. Madrid street theatre, generally consists of human statues who stand in busy areas not moving until someone throws change in their hat. These are heavily made up to look like statues—or like characters from movies, or like kids’ toys. Very few street performers in Madrid are of the street musician style. We did have one person get on a Metro with us with a CD player attached to a speaker, and an accordion, who then proceeded to play an incredibly bad version of “Autumn Leaves” at us all, but that’s about the limit of what I saw. In Salamanca, on the other hand, I saw a man sitting on a street leading to the cathedral with a guitar in his hands, playing and singing flamenco. He was an old man with a beautifully clear voice, despite the cigarette that had clearly been sitting, lit, between his lips for decades. His beard was white except where it had been stained yellow from the tobacco.

(This is the Casa de Conchas--as you can see it is covered in shells. It is the home of the theology school. There were musicians playing all up and down this street)

On another crowded street, lined with shops that tried at once to sell to the young, hip, college students and the tourist crowd, was a man singing a Flamenco song. “Sounds extremely painful,” I said to J. He replied it’s supposed to; that Flamenco is about pain. But I had meant that he was using his vocal chords badly. Of course, what do I know? Maybe that was the point.

(My favorite sign--so well said!)

Salamanca was gorgeous. The university was wonderful. The notes from dad were great. It was a very special tour. We had spent the night, and then spent the last two hours of hour last day running like crazy to fit in two convents, one of which was home to the first African Dominican nun—she’d been a princess abducted into slavery but turned down a marriage after her freedom was bought to dedicate her life—and they’re trying to have her canonized. The other was home to some stuff I honestly don’t remember and have no photos so—because we weren’t allowed to take photos. Personally, it meant little to me. I think there was an important Virgen there, but the Virgen I liked best was at the New Cathedral; her face was the most well formed face I’ve ever seen on a saint.

Also, the buildings in Salamanca almost always have fascinating and beautiful inlaid ceilings--as is true of most of the older buildings I've seen in Spain. Here are a few from Salamanca.

***WARNING*** The next section has no photos--believe me, you wouldn't have taken any either.

At last, we made it to the bus station and this time didn’t wait for an invite to board the bus! Actually, this time the driver didn’t climb down, even, he just popped the doors for the baggage and waited for us. All seemed well. It was 6 pm and already dark out, but I had my book out because the lights were on and I knew I’d have a reading light once we got underway. As per the routine, of course, we had the front-row view. The driver didn’t turn on the reading lights when he turned off all the other lights and pulled out of Salamanca. (Oops! Forgot to mention, we started out a little late because a guy asked permission to go potty.) I was toying with the idea of asking him to turn on the lights, when Jaime, sounding alarmed, explained it was highly illegal to talk to the driver. We soon discovered why.

I have been in last-minute-face-off positions with oncoming traffic as I tried to pass on a two lane; deciding whether to hit the brakes or the gas can be thrilling. Unless one has neither at her disposal and is in a bus being driven by a maniac who has decided to pass a semi. This would have been enough to keep any girl from asking for her reading light. But no. Things got worse. The DVD start up happened three or more times; I’d remember if I had been planning on watching, but American comedies dubbed in Spanish ain’t my thing, y’all. As the driver attempted to start the DVD and steer simultaneously, J. & I held hands. I have arthritis. I have not been in this much pain, nor, I’m sure, inflicted as much in a long time, arthritis included!

And then we reached the first toll booth. All seemed well, and our driver was decelerating with traffic; until we got just under the little roof thingy they have on those things. He then hit the gas as if he were racing against the gate that was going up at moderate speed. We won. All three times. But I wasn’t happy about it. And none of this was the worst. No. That was reserved for Madrid traffic; it always is. Madrid traffic sucks under normal conditions. We were speeding off the highway—Spanish highways put ours to shame in the US (Surprise!)—when suddenly something small, red, and awfully car-like slowed down in front of us, apparently moving with the traffic in front of it. Our driver, however, did not.

I’ve been an EMT, I’ve been in the US Naval Academy (for like two seconds), and I’ve been through things like bus bombings in Israel. I’ve pissed my pants listening to Katyushas overhead in a sealed room while visiting a friend. I’m not easy to scare. But as I heard myself screaming involuntarily (as the driver finally decided to apply ALL the brake power available to him), I realized that a lap-belt was not going to do much of anything to keep me from heading head first through the front window. I was suddenly pissed at J. for getting the seat behind the driver’s Plexiglas.

But we made it back alive, I guess that’s good enough.

Salamanca I (With pics)

2008-12-29T11:47:00.004-05:00

We took the bus to Salamanca—for a detailed description thereof, see earlier post titled “Get on the Bus!” The bus in Spain, is a far lovelier and classier affair than it is in the US. For Greyhound trips I usually prepped by not showering for three days and practicing talking to myself while rocking back and forth. Anyone will sit next to a crazy person, and some will sit next to a stinky person; but the combination is deadly.

For Spanish bus trips (and mind you, I mean intercity), you purchase a ticket which assigns you a seat. The buses are designed with one seat on one side of the isle and two on the other. The seats recline, and have trays, like plane seats; but have more room than coach, which is how I travel. As you climb on the bus, a little holder next to the driver’s seat has plastic sealed headphones, which you are free to take on the way to your seat—and you want to do that if you want to listen to music pumped into any of 8 channels, or if you want to hear the film that’s going to play at some point.

J. & I lucked out and got the front seat both going and returning. By lucked out, of course, I mean we had my luck and as the song goes, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” The windows on long haul buses go ALL the way down. Really. Just ceiling to floor. And that means the front seat view goes all the way down. And that means that like it or not, my primary view, in each direction was the driver’s skill. The first guy wasn’t too bad. I managed to read most of the way, with the help of the overhead reading light—since we were leaving at 6 am, this was something of a necessity—and I even napped some.

When we pulled into the bus station in Salamanca, I was tired and grumpy—a result of my three hours’ sleep, and the fact that we’d been on a bus for two hours. It’s odd. I fall asleep whenever in a moving vehicle (that I’m not driving—and once or twice in ones I was). I fall asleep as soon as the plane takes off. I fall asleep when the train pulls out, or by the time the bus hits the city limit. But I always wake from these naps unrested and unhappy. We checked into the “RoomMate Vega”—a lovely hotel. We went up to our lovely room and discovered the phone didn’t work. Just for kicks I tried the WiFi—same luck. But we weren’t in Salamanca to log on, we were there to tour.

Salamanca is special; J.’s parents both studied here, at the oldest Western University (Universidad Salamanca), they met and fell in love here. And J.’s mom had grown up here as well. Because of its importance to the family, J.’s dad was nice enough to send us a planned out walking tour, with information on all the points of interest he thought we should see, so in addition to the different parts of the university where they had studied, we also saw the houses where each had lived. We walked the road (Tostado, I kid you not!) that J.’s dad walked to school every day. J.’s mom was one of the first three women to earn Juris Degrees—they’re not doctorates, here (sorry, Dassi), but they are graduate degrees—in Spain.

Salamanca, even without the family connection, is special. The buildings are gorgeous! And that’s even before one goes inside them. The stone walls are engraved with many beautiful images. Where Madrid has beautiful buildings near statues and some with statues on top of them, Salamanca’s buildings are statues.

The university and “new” cathedral are in the same plaza. I say “new” because it was completed in the 19th Century. The “new” cathedral is attached to the old by a wall, so when touring one, we were able to walk into the other.

We ended up climbing the tower, an arduous task that reminded me that fat girls may show up in art, but we don’t often show up on the tops of cathedrals.

But I did. J. did it with me.

Oddly, once we were up there, the hardest part was finding the way down. Going down was tough enough (tiny spiral staircases suck!), but actually finding the exit was a challenge in and of itself. Still, it was more than worth it. The view from atop the cathedral is, as you can see, amazing. I prefer the view of the spires, up close, that I got from climbing that high. The spires are beautiful from afar, but the detailed work that goes into building such a thing and making it beautiful from afar can only be appreciated from up close. “Yay!” for whoever built that god-awful staircase.

One last thing about this cathedral (and then maybe something about cathedrals in general). This cathedral was nearly destroyed by an earthquake in Lisbon several hundred years ago. When one climbs into the rafters (part of the maze of entrances and exits connected to the tower), one more clearly sees the cracks. We’re not talking about a minor bit of squiggly line across a wall, here. In places, the rock, easily 18 inches thick or more, has been cracked clear through and one can see the sun pouring in from the other side. Parts of this cathedral is being helpd together with metal bars that keep it in place. Lisbon, by the way, is more than 200 miles away from Salamanca. The damage here is astounding. I cannot begin to imagine the damage done to the amazing work that is a cathedral—any cathedral—closer to the epicenter.

And that brings me to cathedrals in general. As is the point of cathedrals, I’m sure, I am overcome by a sense of awe whenever I walk into one of these structures, big or small, famous or not. But my sense of awe is rarely aimed where it is intended to be. I am not in wonder of G-d’s greatness (and if you know anything about Jews, you know the way I spelled the name above indicates my general belief in that concept). I am in wonder of both the beauty of which humans are capable and the hatred and pain of which they are full. So much of cathedrals comes down to the voluntary giving of lives on a massive scale as well as the immense gifts of artistic talent poured into conveying the beliefs that built the walls. I am in awe of the human drive to religion which asks so much of those who have so little—and what does it give back? I think of the poor of whatever parish I am in and the time and money they spent giving their lives meaning through the building of this monument to their beliefs and I am angered that their beliefs asked this of them—but then I’m angered at myself. What gives me the right to deny the meaning they felt they gave their lives? Who am I to say it is inappropriate to ask such sacrifice of anyone?

So I keep going to cathedrals—and synagogues and mosques—in each of the cities J. and I visit.

Get on the Bus!

2008-12-20T05:35:00.002-05:00

Who'd have expected a Mexican standoff in Spain? Ok, so none of us were armed, I hope, but we stood in what can only be called a quasi-semi-circle, our bags in hand, staring at the bus.

The driver had opened the door, turned on the lights, opened the luggage area, and climbed down from the coach. There he stood, looking at no one and nothing in particular and sucking on the collar of his coat like a nervous five-year-old.

He looked at us. We looked at him. I turned to J. "Why are we standing? Is he going to give some sort of signal that he's ready?" J. said he assumed so. Five minutes can be a long time.

At the end of those minutes, a blond woman who'd been standing, confused alongside us, walked up to the driver and wordlessly handed him her ticket. He nodded in a practiced way and she boarded.

"What an ass wipe!" J. said.

Desde Zapateria Bush

2008-12-20T05:28:00.002-05:00

For the non-Spanish speakers among us: "From the Bush Shoe Store"

So. What's wrong with shrugging off the size10s that flew at him and laughing at it as an "act of someone trying to get attention"?

It provides empirical evidence that Bush has learned nothing from his foray into Friedman School Shock & Awe -- and from its near abject failure (nearly everywhere it's ever been used).

What's wrong with saying one is "abandoning free market ideals to preserve the free market"?

It, too, provides proof that the model (again, Friedman School Economics Free Market and no other) is what needs fixing, not the moment. If the free market as practiced by Friedmanites worked, we wouldn't be in this hell hole. We are here because they made it look pretty on paper.

It works on paper.

Humans, however, don't.

Madrid (Cont.) Day Two

2008-12-17T13:08:00.008-05:00

On day two we began by "sleeping in." We decided the night before not to set a clock, as our first day had been exceedingly full--to the point of falling asleep in the middle of a show we both thought was brilliant. "Sleeping in," though I had been blissfully unaware of it at the time of agreement, meant sleeping until "we" couldn't anymore. At about 8:30 am (Madrid time), J woke up. He couldn't sleep anymore. Therefore we couldn't sleep anymore. J is not a late sleeper, which sometimes worries me because I am nothing if not a late sleeper. I'm also an early sleeper. I'm a 24/7 sleeper except the world expects me to work and pay for food and such, so I wake up daily as my minor act of non-defiance.

By 9:30 we were on the hunt for El Templo De Debod.
This is an amazing piece of history in Spain--and the world if it bothered to learn it. After the Suez Canal was built, a dam had to also be built to protect certain parts of the flood plains from unseasoned flooding. Don't get me wrong, the Nile is known for flooding, you can set a watch by it--but all of a sudden, you couldn't set a watch by it because it wasn't doing it at the right time. This, for some reason upset the entire ecological balance of the area, not to mention the farmers--and I clearly don't mention them. All of which mattered not at all to the folks who had created the mess, at first, because, hey, we could get oil shipped across the world without having to travel all the way around Africa, and who can say no to that!?!

No one could. Why would they? If we had no Suez, the price of gas would be through the roof--and think of all the unemployed Somali pirates! Of course, worst of all is that we would have had to use our imaginations to come up with a more workable, less ecologically heinous solution, like, say, a pipeline through Israel? Okay, you're laughing, but wouldn't a shared economic interest in getting oil tot he world done a whole hell of a lot to getting people toward peace? Why, you ask? Because money is one of the best reasons for peace. It wasn't until the 20th century that we managed to make war a sound economic practice, and for more on that you can read Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine." Because regardless of what you think of her moral judgments, her historical ones are sound, and she backs them. But I'm WAY off topic here; we were talking about floods and rivers and dams and damns.

So the world, being both uneducated about the "realities on the ground" (Man! I love that phrase!) and not particularly concerned, though I blame that on the uneducated part, didn't do much of anything about the flooding being caused in parts of Egypt, Somalia and Nubia. Then someone noticed the flooding--and the creation of a rather permanent lake in a rather unhappy place--was damaging antiquities. We couldn't undam(n) the Nile, We couldn't untrench the Suez. What were we to do? A diplomat from UNESCO sent out the call for help. Among the countries that helped, was Spain. Yes, Spain, in the early 70s, under Franco, reached out and sent funding and manpower to help save these early signposts of our shared civilization.

In thanks, the Egyptian government sent the Temple of Debod. Actually, they sent what was left and copies of the carefully researched (in teams of anthropologists from the US, Italy, Spain and Egypt, to name just a few) records of what the temple had been like before a long span of time and then a short span of water had done its work.

All thanks to that, there is an incredible monument smack in the middle of Madrid. It's a few blocks to the left of the Palace--or something like that--but not easily reachable if you don't know where you're going, decide to hoof it the whole way and have a map that has no indication of North, though to its credit, every McDonald's in Madrid is carefully marked. Including the one at the Puerta Del Sol with a Walk-up Window (That's just what happens when you live in Madrid, but more on that later).

After about two hours of wandering down side streets, heading in the wrong direction, taking lovely photos of the Senate building (and some senators), talking to people who had no idea but gave us directions anyway, and watching a man let his dog crap on the front yard of a convent, a mere three meters front of the sign that showed a shadow of a dog pooping and a line through it, we did, finally, get directions from the guard at the senate who was suffering a massive nosebleed; and that got us as far as a lovely park from which the next bunch of directions (go that way a block & cross the street) brought us to an amazing oasis in the urban jungle (ok, so I love mixed metaphors, too).

So above are some of the photos, but there is no way to express the two or so hours we spent there except through the set of photos below. The Temple and its outlying arches are set on a reflecting pool, which was icy. Did I mention it''s COLD here?

As for the rest of the day, we napped, then wandered happily through a shopping mall close to our hotel--Malls are a rarity in Spain, and this one was a rarity in any case. The stores are unique, mostly concept based, and beautifully set among fun displays (though those may be space holders until they get more stores). We went into the coolest store EVER! A place that was something of a cross between the discovery store, a gardening store, a holistic medicines shop, book store specializing in photo books, and camping goods store. No, I'm not kidding.

But my favorite was this one display of a child's circus set from what must be the 50s--beautifully preserved, but clearly very old--which included a mannequin. And somehow, despite the obvious age of the piece, the mannequin was clearly a representation of Horatio Cane from CSI Miami--I knew there was something about that guy...

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about today, which was all Prado and still not enough, but we'll also be traveling to Salamanca, yay!

Madrid, Espana--Day One (well, the morning after)

2008-12-16T03:44:00.006-05:00

Day one, for normal humans, might have included a long nap. Being a little too aware of the dangers of Jet Lag, however, my partner and I decided to pack the day as fully as possible so we would not have time to give in to the time change--only to give in to Madrid...& there's a lot to give in to. We checked into the Hotel Gavinet (an interesting little place, but more about it later, but the first picture is of the Puerta De Toledo just down the block), then decided to take the Metro to the Opera station to see the Royal Palace (Palacio Real). I warn you, the photo ops were limited, so some of what I tell you'll have to use your healthy imaginations to conjure.

El Palacio Real sits directly across from the Opera Real. The Opera actually comes into this story a little later. But this palace is GOR-GEOUS! There is no photography allowed inside the palace. The palace is still in use for state functions, but when it is not being used for that, it's a museum of Spanish royal history, in a sense (The Royal Family lives somewhere else in Madrid--who knows). We opted not to pay the extra two Euros for the guided English tour. J speaks fluently, having grown up in Spain, and I can pick things up pretty well, but about two rooms in, we realized we had no idea what we were looking at (*HINT* Spend the extra two Euros; as you'll see it can be well worth it for entertainment alone).

As we wandered into the second room, the tour that had been coming up the stairs behind us caught up with us. We had already learned, from reading, that the walls were covered in silk. And by covered, I don't mean a tapestry here and there, I mean floor to ceiling wall-silk. Each room has a different color and design because, well, It's good tobe the king!, and when you're king, you don't have to Count De Monet.

The throne room, as we learned from the "English speaking" tour guide, had new carpets put in regularly--made by the same carpet maker who'd been making the same carpets for centuries for the palace. You've gotta wonder how old this guy is. The thrones, she explained were also replaced, in this case, every time the king was. So the chairs we were looking at had the faces of the royals currently not really in charge carved into them. "But," she said conspiratorially, "They never are sitting in them." Apparently, when state functions require the use of the king and queen, the two must stand the whole time to be bowed at in the receiving line.

The next two rooms were "sitting rooms" -- and it was explained that because state functions meant everyone had to stand around a lot, one could come into either of these rooms and sit for a bit before getting back to being royal. The second room was astoundingly opulent.

Decorated in the Rococo style, (which translates roughly to "youch! that's a bit much, don't you think?") this room had embroidered silk walls with scenes depicting, well, honestly, stuff. As the guide explained, even the silks in each room have to be regularly replaced due to wear and "you will believe me when I tell you that the replacing of these embroidings was a three-year hand job!" She sounded so proud. We ditched the tour.

Out in the courtyard we got some beautiful shots of Madrid from the outer wall.

Then we realized there was no place to sit. We stumbled our way through the Royal Pharmacy--yes, just a collection of glass and ceramic jars marked with whatever vile, stenchy, "medicine" was on offer two hundred years ago. Man I'm glad to be livin in the 21st Century, where we can kill each other civilly (the armory contained large wooden horses festooned in so much silver and with knights festooned upon them that it's a wonder anyone ever died in those wars--other than the horses), and could hop in to the local Walgreens and pick up some Vicodin. Speaking of which...

We left the Palace and went to get some coffee, which is how we learned the ATM card was not working--Now THAT was a fun afternoon of international phone calls. But it's straightened out and we won't be making beds to pay off the hotel room. (HINT: Make sure your bank does not have the country to which you are traveling blocked. Also, just as a general good idea, pre-pay on things like hotel.)

We had "lunch" -- at 6 pm! Welcome to Madrid, honey -- at Comida de San Isidro, on the Calle de Toledo, the same street as our Hotel. The food was OK, but the cost was good. If you go, I recommend the Chistoras--tiny chorizo on french fries.

Then there was the Victor Ullate Ballet, Mind you, at this point, it's 8 pm, we've been up since, well, three days ago when the trip began with a too long drive to Atlanta, and have had only airplane food and airplane sleep until moments ago when we ate chorizo & blood sausage (which tastes disturbingly like falafel and has a similar texture.)

I wish we could have stayed past the intermission. It was AMAZINGly beautiful. I cannot begin to explain the talent Ullate clearly has. Genius is an insult. You should go check out the videos available through a simple google search. Sadly, we were falling asleep in our seats. I will post more on the Opera building, etc., tomorrow. URL: http://www.victorullateballet.com/index.php?lang=es&ids=293

Today we go visit an Egyptian temple, given to Spain as a gift. I'm adding one more photo here for your perusal--it's the cathedral across from the Palace.

For all you readers out there...

2008-12-09T23:31:00.002-05:00

Santa, Baby,
Leave a Kindle under the tree, for me,
Been a good reader, and so…

I probably won’t be getting a Kindle for Christmas. And I don’t just say that because I’m Jewish. I say it because the simple truth is that it’s way out of the price range of anyone I get gifts from. And, well, most people who’ve even heard of the Kindle, are early adopters, gadget heads, Oprah watchers, avid Amazon wish-list makers, writers, or insatiable readers; or some combination of all--and really, my people are all broke versions of the above description.

If you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone. The Kindle is a handheld ebook device. It is the proud production of the folks who brought us the internet book store, the small bookstore and independent bookstore marketplace, and CreateSpace, a print-on-demand client; Amazon. With Kindle, Amazon brings on what some consider the doom of the “book,” and others the liberation of the author.

Steve Windwalker is in the latter group. A self-published author, and Bestselling author in the Amazon Kindle bookstore, Windwalker has written several guides to the Kindle since its inception a year ago. He has also written Bey ond the Literary-Industrial Complex, a polemic part manifesto / part how-to guide. Windwalker contends in his book (published both electronically and traditionally through his press, the Harvard Perspectives Press) and when speaking that the Kindle is, and should be, part of an inexorable wave of change in the way books are published and sold.

In fact, Windwalker explains, the Kindle is simply the current top technology for a net-based movement that is far older. Writers have already been liberating themselves, they’re simply finding the Kindle to be the next best way of doing it.
“Amazon’s goal in creating the Kindle, wasn’t to create the best device ever; it was to create the bridge so that they would still be selling books in 2018” Windwalker said. “They’ve set the bar in terms of delivery and content. So I think when you combine that with the fact that writers are blogging and writing books online and doing all kinds of things and the whole focus of what is considered journalism has changed.”

The doomsayers, on the other hand, are bemoaning their private libraries. One anonymous poster on a writers’ listserv spoke of the Kindle as a machine that would need constant replacing and would make buying physical books obsolete, and thus create a situation in which, if one had a library at all, it was a collection of Kindles and memory cards. He then went on to describe his doomsday scene, in which the world is subjected to an electrical bomb, which would then wipe out all the Kindles, leaving all humanity without any of its published record. We would have no way to recover the glory of human publication from such a disaster as all databases would be wiped out and we will have long since thrown out our books.
The truth, always, lies somewhere in the middle.

Windwalker doesn’t represent the Kindle as the end of all books, but does see publishing in general headed in that direction. For him, all Amazon did was recognize the coming wave early enough to be the leader.
“The Kindle is not going to do this in any kind of quick time-span. But I think a lot of that kind of change never is absolute, as its heralds proclaim, but [it] is going to occur in waves.”

And perhaps the corner of possibility was turned when Oprah jumped aboard, in late October, with a show all about the device and a discount offer for her viewers. Those lucky enough to have been in the audience that day received their Kindle for free. It was under their seats. And as she breathlessly praised the device, she held it in her hands and suggested they pick it up. She explained that it naturally could store up to 200 books, had GPS and emailing as well as free blogging access, and users could even ask it questions. The entire audience was Kindled.

“And,” she mouthed with that deep excitement that has earned her a yelling satire on Saturday Night Live, “with a memory card it can even hold four th-OU-sand books. FOUR THOUSAND!”

For Windwalker, the Oprah effect is particularly fascinating.

“The interesting thing about the show was that we’ve seen for years that she can sell a $15 book, but there she was selling a $359 gadget, and by my calculations, Amazon sold about 100,000 after the show.”

Windwalker’s sales went up by about 500 percent by his own estimation before Amazon started having to backorder the device. The fascination is not just in Oprah’s ability to sell a big ticket item, it lies also in her ability to do so as the national economy tanks and many people find themselves jobless, or facing that possibility, and even those who have managed to maintain employment face grocery bills that climb on a weekly basis.

The Kindle is selling, regardless. Or, perhaps, because of. One of the arguments for the Kindle in a time of economic crisis is that Amazon’s Kindle books sell for $9.99 a piece; roughly half the price of the average book. By buying a Kindle, the argument goes, one is saving on one’s book budget.

One blogger, at thekindle.wordpress.com, suggests this logic is false.

“Truth is, you are never going to get back that $359,” The blog explains. “All the fancy projections you are hearing about how buying x books a month will get you your $395 back in a year are nonsense.”

Why? Because book lovers buy books. And when book lovers can buy books more cheaply, have ready access to them whenever and wherever they may be, and use simple, light, handheld technology to do so, they will buy more books.

Thekindle blog rather wisely suggests that if you are looking at the Kindle as an investment in lowering your book budget, either look again, or purchase a will of steal to go with it. Instead, the author suggests, you may want to look at the Kindle as a way to “get more book bang for your buck.”

Just as buying any item on sale still requires the outlay of money, buying the Kindle allows the user to then have an ongoing book sale at his or her fingertips. In this way, we are allowed to drool over the idea of the Kindle. We are encouraged to do so. But just a little more realistically. The logic of getting one’s money back is only economically sound for an item that can earn money.

But lookee-here! The Kindle can.

For writers, Windwalker says, the Kindle, in concert with CreateSpace brings the concept of the indie market to publishing. It may even remove some of the stigma associated with the vanity press—lightheartedly lampooned in Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex with a dialogue between writer and book in which the writer shyly says, “But I would never want it to get around that I was paying for it.”
And while Windwalker does posit that at this point in time self-publishing is simply easier for non-fiction and niche-based books because such books have a very clear audience and thus make distribution and marketing far easier for the self-publishing writer, that may not be a long-term actuality.

“It’s amazing that there’s so much openness in the world of Indie music and film to do-it-yourself models without stuff getting stigmatized as; ‘here’s a song by a guy who couldn’t find a label.’”

In fact, Indie music and film are heralded as the truer, less commercialized forms of art. Because there are no big dollars behind the artists, there is no pop-stigma. The pieces are looked at as thinking-people’s art. An entire cable channel is dedicated solely to the world of independent film, to match the Indie film festivals that are highly attended and covered, and most large communities or cities have radio stations entirely dedicated to Indie music. No one would suggest to Ani DiFranco that Righteous Babe Records is pointless because she built it herself.
Why, then, the taboo of the vanity press, and is the Kindle really the solution? Windwalker points to the writing cottage industry both in his book and in talking about the future of Indie publishing (whether it be Kindle or any other device that allows it to flourish). In particular, he blames the MFA and big publishing industries for perpetuating the taboo. Because so many writers make money from the teaching of writing and so many writers pay money to the cottage industry of learning to write, the supposed impossibility of being a real author is made overt and self-perpetuating. But he doesn’t see that lasting very long.

“I do think that 8 or 10 years out, it’s going to be a very different world, with respect to those things, and part of it is that technology allows change,” Windwalker said. The Kindle, for him has helped bring this about by bringing the cost of self-publishing to the ground. When he first began his publishing company, the cost of a small run of books was $3-5 thousand. “Now, the cost through Kindle is $0.”

In addition, he cites generational demands that will radically change the situation within the decade.

“It will be gradual. There won’t be any point where we can say ‘Ah the Kindle did that.’ It will occur in ways and there will be other forces, and it may not even be the Kindle. One of the things that Amazon has set itself up for with the Kindle, is that they will be very well positioned if the Kindle flames out and is replaced by an Apple device. Amazon only has to flip some switches so that that stuff is available on Amazon for the Apple device.”

Ultimately, though, Windwalker believes that the Kindle is merely a bridge to the next generation of reading and readers. And perhaps, if one takes Oprah’s view, it doesn’t matter what people use to read, so long as they read more. If nothing else, the Kindle seems to be proving that people do want to read more.

As for me, I will have to wait for Kindle 2.0, as Windwalker puts it, that will likely come in colors and have even neater features, before I can afford a Kindle 1.0—whose cost will go down drastically as did the iPod’s. Unless I can get ahold of Santa before Christmas.

why I use facebook scrabble to help me grade

2008-12-07T13:42:00.001-05:00

Wordsworth wrote (and with a name like his, how could he not?):

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
1806.

And that was two hundred years ago.

I sit here with my facbook open, my Tweetdeck running behind the scenes, but also my TwitKit on the left-hand bar of my window, and thinking about windows. There is a jungle in my back yard. I even have Ginger plants, but I use my greenpatch to "play" with plants--possibly because I was born with two black thumbs.

Don't get me wrong; I have no need, no use, no wish to return to an "earlier" or "more innocent" time. As far as I can tell, those times had high death rates from things other than murder, war and genocide. People died of appendicitis, the flu, stomach issues, even old age (that's 40 years old). And a hot shower was not really an option at any time of day.

Worse, I would not be able to keep in touch with my friends around the world by simply sending an imaginary plant.

And yet...

And yet I look at my work and wonder if I ever stop looking at my work. If I ever stop worrying about money and possessions. If I will ever stop trying to get and do more. And I doubt I will. Even for our trip to Spain, Jaime and I have itineraries, plans, museum wishes.

So the world is too much with me late and soon. But I keep finding new ways to make it more so. And I doubt it will ever work in reverse.

I keep composing, for someday I will decompose. ;)

The Last Lecture: A Study in Circulation

2008-09-28T17:14:00.005-04:00

Leah F. Cassorla

Prof. Kathi Yancey

Digital Convergence

29 September 2008

The Last Lecture: A Study in Circulation

Randy Pausch

On September 18, 2007, a professor at Carnegie Mellon gave a lecture that turned out to be a whole lot more. Though described in the press as “beloved” at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Randy Pausch was certainly as unknown as professors generally are. Even so, a crowd of 400 attended the lecture. It was recorded for the few who could not be there. Within days, Pausch’s lecture would become an internet phenomenon—a rare occurrence for any lecture. Pausch was giving his Last Lecture.

As he explained a month later on Oprah, the Last Lecture is a genre of lecture in which a professor is invited to give the talk she would give were it to be the last thing she could say to the world. It is intended as somewhat of an intellectual exercise, to allow a thinker to condense his understanding of his years in the field into one hour (or so) long speech. As the Wall Street Journal column about Pausch’s lecture said, “Dr. Pausch’s speech was more than just an academic exercise…[he] has pancreatic cancer” (Zaslow, “Beloved Professor” prs. 4). His lecture was, it turned out, the real deal. Pausch, in fact, began by showing CTs of his tumor-riddled liver and explaining the facts of pancreatic cancer; it is the fastest, most painful, and deadliest of cancers, with an average life expectancy of three to six months for most patients. Nearly a year past the original diagnosis, Pausch had just been given the three to six month prognosis when he chose to give his lecture. He told the audience he was one month into the prognosis. He went on, however, to talk about life, dreams, and having fun.

The Circulation of the Last Lecture

Pausch’s lecture was posted on the web the same day he gave it. He had asked that it be filmed so his young children would be able to view it when they got older. It was first circulated for the students who couldn’t attend. But then all 76 minutes of the lecture were uploaded to YouTube.com. YouTube is an interesting phenomenon as far as circulation is concerned. Because of its vast stores of video, uploaded by anyone who chooses to become a member, the chance of “hitting big” on YouTube are rather hit or miss. It could just as easily have been viewed on YouTube by a handful of people and stayed there in obscurity. Zaslow’s inclusion of the video in the online column on the lecture—and his inclusion of it in the follow up to the column a week later—may have also helped, but by the time Zaslow wrote his second column, he was writing as a result of the stacks of email he was receiving to pass on to Pausch.

By October 24, 2007, more than 6 million users had watched the YouTube version of The Last Lecture. Pausch was on Oprah. According to his homepage and the later book’s homepage, Pausch asked for 10 minutes of Oprah’s time to deliver a miniature version of his lecture as a precondition for appearing on her show. He got it. The Oprah Show, put the 10-minute speech on her web page. The page now also links to follow up shows, and one show in which a rabbi who comes on Oprah as a regular commentator on family and life discusses the book. Yes, the book.

By this time, Pausch had asked Carnegie Mellon to not copyright the lecture. Carnegie Mellon agreed. Following a $6.7 million deal, however, Hyperion published a book version of The Last Lecture. Described as an extension of his thoughts in the original lecture, the book was written by Jeff Zaslow, the columnist who helped put Pausch on the internet stage. The book was released on April 4, 2008. Pausch was still alive. On April 11, 2008, Pausch was featured on a Diane Sawyer special. By this time, according to a USA Today story, “[b]ecause Pausch had lived longer than expected, some bloggers…claimed he [wasn’t] sick at all” (Wilson prs. 39). As a media sensation, Pausch was now also an active conspiracy theory. The book has also given birth to a website—a fairly common practice in book publishing—which includes a page of “extras” including a “lost chapter” and an “exclusive” video of Pausch discussing his book. The site also has a message board. Readers are still posting today with names and levels of ability in English that indicate readership from around the world. The media page on the site includes links to the dozens of pieces of coverage. Pausch passed away on July 25, 2008. The media page of his book includes links to media tributes and obituaries as well.

The next question, once the book was out, seemed obvious; now that Pausch had a YouTube video, an Oprah appearance, a book, a Diane Sawyer special and several news stories, would there be a movie? Pausch’s refusal can be read as a commentary on remediation and on circulation: “There’s a reason to do the book, but if it’s telling the lecture in the medium of film, we already have that,” he told USA Today (prs. 32).

In Circulation

Besides being an homage to the brilliance of his last lecture, this story is a telling description of the movement of a cultural phenomenon into and through media. This is not, however, a story of remediation, though it could be told as one, I think. It is more a story of circulation. Watching Pausch’s Carnegie Mellon lecture, his Oprah mini-lecture, and his Diane Sawyer special, one gets the same message—and in very much the same way. The text may be truncated for time, and in the case of the special, it is interspersed with interview footage, but Randy Pausch is, as many professors are, a consummate performer, and his performances contain the seed of his work throughout.

I have not read the book. It might be considered a remediation because it was written primarily by Zaslow. But when one looks at Zaslow’s columns and at the vast amounts of information on the book’s webpage, one gets the sense that Zaslow’s work was as organizer and editor more than as ghost-writer. The book, according to Zaslow, is the outcome of hours of taped interviews which Zaslow transcribed and rearranged. As such, I would argue that the book is a matter of recirculation of the lecture—a story of a boy whose parents allowed him to write math equations and draw pictures on his bedroom walls, who learned to dream and followed through on those dreams, and was now trying hard to get the world to do the same; dream, and follow those dreams—and in each version of the lecture, he also begs parents to allow their children to write and draw on their bedroom walls so that perhaps they, too, will become dreamers and professors.

In addition to the faithfulness of the many faces of the Pausch story in its different media, one must also take into consideration the speed with which the story—and its versions—spread. Within a week of delivery of his first lecture, Pausch’s video had been viewed over a million times. Within a month, he was on Oprah. The longest lag was the seven months from lecture to book. I suppose that’s a necessary outcome of pancreatic cancer. My uncle died of pancreatic cancer two years ago. His disease process lasted fewer than ten months. But the speed of movement through media also affects the way in which a story is told. There seems to be less of a “telephone” effect. The message remains what it is, or as Pausch told USA Today in refusing to create a movie version, “Besides, you lose control” (prs. 32).

Works Cited

“Confronting Death.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. Harpo Productions. Chicago. 24 October 2007. Web. 27 September 2008.

Pausch, Randy. Interview by Diane Sawyer. “The Last Lecture.” GoogleVideo. 11 April 2008. Web. 27 September 2008.

Pausch, Randy. “The Last Lecture.” YouTube. 20 September 2007.Web. 27 September 2008.

Pausch, Randy with Jeffrey Zaslow. “The Last Lecture.” Hyperion. 2008. Web. 27 September 2008.

Wilson, Craig. “Professor Pausch’s Life, ‘Lecture’ go from Web to book.” USA Today. USA Today. 8 April 2008. Web. 27 September 2008.

Zaslow, Jeffrey. “A Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime.” Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. 20 September 2007. Web. 27 September 2008.

Zaslow, Jeffrey. “The Professor’s Manifesto: What It Meant to Readers.” Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. 27 September 2007. Web. 27 September 2008.

Feeling sorry for John McCain

2008-07-20T18:19:00.003-04:00

In a way, you have to feel sorry for John McCain.

It's not that he's not qualified or even that his loss is assured. It isn't. There is a real race here, but still...

I feel sorry for John McCain because in any other election year, he would be the great reformer. His role would be of the outsider fighting Washington--and all the bad stuff that "Washington" means. And you have to feel sorry for him because had he run instead of Georgie Porgie, he would have won in 2000 and would have had a chance in 2004. --And he wouldn't have been running as the geriatric candidate.

I feel sorry for John McCain because he knows all this. He is aware that he is running against the man even the Kennedys consider to be the new JFK. He knows that race is no longer an issue. He knows that regardless of the fact that we--as a nation--know little about what Obama really stands for, we LOVE listening to him. As the leader of the Center Right Party in the UK put it this morning, "He is a great orator." And you don't get that kind of compliment from a Brit easily.

Obama is a great orator. I, for one, LOVE listening to him speak. I don't always care to pay attention to the message, and goodness knows I don't always agree, but I always listen.

In comparison, McCain is starting to sound like a pugnacious child putting up his dukes and waiting for the fight to start. His past week has been spent in trying to attack Obama--whether because he has gone to the MidEast after stating his position rather than going and then stating his position--a statement that would have more credibility if the PM of Iraq didn't agree with Obama's position.

So I feel sorry for McCain. Though I am certain that the majority of my fellow Floridians who are Democrats will vote for him--just because Obama was party to the mass disenfranchisement practiced by the DNC on the Democrats of this state--unfortunately, most of Florida's Republicans will be voting for Bob Barr.

On Obama and Elian

2008-06-22T09:49:00.002-04:00

It is impossible to tell Elian's uncle that he is wrong--it is impossible to tell any parent or avuncular or grandparent that wanting the child is wrong. And yet...

Part of the problem with politics in the US--though I'm willing to bet politics nearly everywhere--is that the pathic argument is unarguable, and so is used. It's easier to tell someone arguing logic that she is wrong than a woman screaming for her nephew. It's easier to disagree. But it's not even a matter of whether Elian's relatives are "wrong" or not. the problem is that their argument is illogical.

They may be against the people Obama is hiring--and rightly so--but to conflate that opinion with Obama being a dangerous approach to Cuban alliance, well, that's just completely illogical. But anyone who has ever attempted to use logic with an upset or emotionally involved person knows, it's impossible.

So what do we do?

The intelligent option is to walk the straight logical line and not engage. The intelligent option is to continue to act as one sees is correct and admit that the pain is real and the wishes are valid--without buying into the argument.

But intellect is anathema in US politics.

We spend hours watching our broadcast journalists discuss whether Michelle Obama wears pantyhose and why she hasn't changed her hair and how she's dressing for her visit to the view. But I have yet to hear a clear discussion of her husband's platform (you know, the guy running for office?). I've heard several reports about Cindy McCain's plagiarized cookie recipes--and trust me, as a writing teacher, I am often angered about plagiarism--but who cares? We care!

We care because it's easier to worry about Cindy's cookies and Michelle's fist-pump than it is to read through and try to make sense of the workings of government. Not only is it easier, it's expected. People who read these things are nerds. Intellect is not just unpopular, thanks to the last 8 years of anti-intellect governance and the last half century of anti-intellect "touchy-feely" movements, it is unAmerican.

And in the post-911 world, thanks to agonistic rhetoric, unAmerican is SIN!

So Elian's family will make a dent. What size dent? Who knows. Most Floridians are already so pissed at both parties that they don't feel like voting for either. Besides, most Florida Cubans are Republican and staunchly so.

But any dent is sad proof that there is no arguing with emotion. Which is fine, until the argument affects everyone's lives. It's fine, until the argument backs the anti-intellect stand.

Why I want to be a guerrilla girl

2008-05-26T18:11:00.003-04:00

How can a woman in 21st Century America look at her world and not want to create art? I must here steal a page from the article that got me started thinking about this idea these past few days as I wandered through thousands of images looking for two photos that are iconic in my photojournalist memory for why a photo needs a caption. Anne Teresa Demo quotes the Guerrilla Girls in her opening. I quote her quoting them here:

THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

Working without the pressure of success.
Not having to be in shows with men.
Having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs.
Knowing your career might pick up after you're eighty.
Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.
Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.
Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.
Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood. . . .
Getting your picture in an art magazine wearing a gorilla suit.

I have been sifting through images, as I mentioned above. I've been Googling my little heart out looking for two pictures. I started with the one I thought would be easy to find--a photo of a phalanx of photographers against a wall at an intersection in Gaza (or maybe the West Bank) points at an Israeli soldier who is pointing his gun down the street at a Palestinian. It is the emptiness of the rest of the intersection I am drawn to. Regardless, after about an hour, I half-heartedly Googled for the second photo. This has a soldier with a billy club standing over a bloody teen. The photo was run in the NY Times with the wrong caption--the caption accused (and I use that term KNOWING the way newspapers work and cutlines are written) the soldier of beating the Palestinian youth on the Temple Mount.

In fact, the soldier was protecting the AMERICAN Jewish teen from a group of Palesitinian youth who had been beating him and they were no where near the Temple Mount (a point easily deduced if one looks at the gas station sign behind the soldier; there are no gas stations on the temple mount).

Point is; I found the second picture in minutes.

Buoyed by my success, I went in search of the other photo. I need both. I must have both. I spent two hours in a fruitless quest for the rest of the Al-Dura film, but Al-Dura's assassination (in my opinion by someone other than the IDF soldiers at that intersection) happened with only three cameramen in the area, and they were by the father and son's side as the shooting continued. (Interestingly, I noticed also that they were gone when the man and boy were murdered.) There is plenty on the net about the Al-Dura shooting. That man and his son have become a point of contention and so can be found everywhere. They weren't what I was looking for.

I felt beaten again, but decided to take a short break (to go buy toilet paper) and then come back to the work. Getting back to the work, I plowed ahead with another Google search, hoping I had come up with the magical phrase to garner the right pic. [I wish, here to admit that if I had simply remembered where I'd seen the photo, this would never have happened, but how much internal citation is possible in a post-modern world?--not enough for me.]

This time I somehow managed to get pictures of unhappy babies (because that's what one expects when Googling the phrase "photojournalists crowd at intersection in Israel"). Babies held by Israeli, Palestinian, Bosnian, American, every woman ever. Babies behind fences. Babies, I say meaning any child up to, oh, military age. Babies. I feel old. Worse, I feel I have failed. I am no longer interested in the search. I am staring at the outcome of all gunfights. And I'm looking at the faces of the children who will be fed hate and jingoism.

And I feel the need to go make a better picture. I feel the need to make the piece of art that will be mechanically reproduced forever and ever and make it clear to all that this pain will not go away. I want to design the tattoo others will love enough to wear boldly on their chests. I want to make the reproduction of the hell--remediated to something more liveable. But I can't. First off, I have homework to do (like finding the stinkin' photo!). Second, I have people to interact with, responsibilities to meet, and other excuses to make.

And finally, I have made the art. I make it regularly. It always comes out wrong. I have taken the photo. I have photoshopped the images into collage. I have bricoleured (excuse my poor French spelling) the ideas into essays, blogs, emails, letters, pictures, sweaters, hats, jewelry, music. . . And as always I fail. but I have decided that I have to keep doing it. Because it's the only way to vomit out the poison I keep swallowing. It's the only way to save my life--because really, the puppies give me their love, but even that's not enough.

And so I get to keep trying to be the Guerrilla Girl I will never be.

Because Googling "soldier and photographers in Gaza" doesn't seem to be cutting it.

Poemocracy: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Postcolonial Exploitation: A Review

2008-05-26T18:08:00.000-04:00

You MUST read the Peterson review of Indie! I loved the movie & REALLY loved the truly critical review. Check it out.

Poemocracy: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Postcolonial Exploitation: A Review

The eyes that bind

2008-05-25T14:24:00.011-04:00

I'm not sure what was more interesting; wandering around the mall trying to find surveillance or being asked why I was taking pictures and what/whom I was surveying.

It started, of course, in the parking lot. The first thing my buddy on this trek (a PhD student in Spanish) said was, "Look!" She was pointing at a security SUV, excitedly.

As a Spanish PhD, of course, she has taken lit theory courses and was familiar with Foucault, but not with the many other theorists whose work I'd been reading.

But after I explained the concept of the panopticon as a prison in which all could be seen by the guard but none could see him--at least none of the inmates--she was familiar enough to jump in when I mentioned that the guard, after a point, is no longer necessary.

Internalizing forces of power, the inmates will "police" themselves. This is an even more interesting concept to me, considering that inmates are incarcerated because in the social panopticon in which we all live, they failed to police themselves. It is not that they didn't know there were rules (I speak here in vast generalizations), but for nearly all of them, it is simply that they didn't believe they would egt caught.

Did they start to believe there was no guard in the tower? Which tower? Many of us are raised with several towers. We have the parent tower (yes, I still believe my mother has eyes in the back of her head and spies in whatever town I live in), the teacher tower, the other authority tower. But we also have the God tower.

The God tower is the big eye in the sky (the one pictured is a nebula called the God's Eye Nebula--thanks, NASA, just what we needed). It's the after you die, eye, for some. It's the never forget there is a power bigger than you eye, for others. For some, it's the work to become the eye. For me, the eye is not so much an eye, but my eye. I must watch and thus be watched. But does it matter? Isn't it just as much an internalization? Isn't it just as powerful?

So what of the people who don't act as the social eye in the sky tells them to? What about those who are moved from the social panopticon to the physical one?

Did they simply believe they found the corner of their cells that the guard could not see into? Or is it simply a failure to work in metaphor? If you no longer work in the metaphor of the social panopticon, you will be placed in the real thing (again, here I do not assert that prisons are built on the model of the panopticon, only that they are built on the metaphoric model to create the physical reality of surveillance).

Or did they think at all? I don't even want to answer these questions. I simply want to raise them. If you don't pay attention to the eye in the sky, the eye in the mom-head, the eye in the teacher, or the eye in the cop/judge/system you are born into, you will be watched by the eye in the tower.

Of course, as a fan of the "DOC Block" on MSNBC, I can tell you that it doesn't matter. One simply learns to find the corners in the new cell. One simply learns to look back in other ways. Most especially true among juveniles, if MSNBC is to be believed, the prisoner will learn to look back more fully because looking down has failed. The juvenile prisoner will learn to look back because lightning did not strike--really--and any reality can be adjusted to (I have that on the word of an Auschwitz survivor).

Do you believe there are eyes watching you? Does it matter if you believe? Most people are mildly aware they are being watched. That is...when I took a pic of the camera at Starbucks, the Barista taking our order asked why I had wanted a picture of her menu. I answered that I hadn't. I was taking a picture of the camera. "Oh, ok. That makes sense," was actually her answer. It was her coworker who asked why. I told him I was doing a project on surveillance for school. They made my drink. In contrast, the cameras in the Verizon phone store look exactly the same so I didn't shoot them, but I was shooting and when the salesman helping me get my new crackberry asked what I was doing and got the full answer he said, "That's nothing."

He then invited me around the corner of the desk. Luckily he was stationed at the corner computer. We're all being watched all the time, he explained. Then proceeded to tell me that every keystroke of every interaction he made on his computer was being watched by another Verizon employee somewhere. I'm pretty sure it isn't literally being watched so much as it's being logged. But the question isn't my belief, it's his. "That's also why everything is in place around here," he said and made a sweeping gesture. "The space has to be clear."

I took it to mean that the view had to be uncluttered for the cameras. But did he mean that the store had to be clean? Tony also wanted me to know the camera on my phone was "really cool." I don't use my phone camera much, so I just shrugged. But his point was well taken.

We are all aware of our presence among cameras. As my students have told me (during discussions of whether one should worry about such things), "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about." So we don't worry. But I do. Maybe because I suffer from Jewish memory. "Something Wrong" is open to interpretation and once the cameras are up, once you've signed into Panopticon Hilton, you can never leave.

We are all, also, not generally aware of the cameras' presence among us--and that's the bigger problem. Socially, though, we feel the need to respond as the family above did--we pose.

By pose, I mean we behave and "don't do something wrong," but we also pose in other ways. The mall is a perfect place to look at the gaze as complicity. There are many reasons to go to the mall. Mine was multivalent. I wanted to look at how we are looked at--that is the "project on surveillance for school" at its simplest. I wanted to go to the Verizon store and get them to sell me a Crackberry for something close to the price I could afford (nothing) so I'd have a phone that worked. Good on them the first one was just beginning to fail after two years of near constant use. I also really wanted to hang out with my PhD in Spanish friend. But some people go to get noticed, as the sign at the door to the sunglasses shop commanded. Even those who go to shop, are often going to get noticed. Their goal in buying the latest fashion is just that. To draw the gaze. The goal of the fashionist society is not to be capitalists. Capitalism is a process that helps get us noticed.

I, too, sadly, am part of this fashionist economy. I will never be fashionable. I was taught early in my teens that I was too poor, too fat, too "uncool," and too academic (read NERDY) to ever be "noticed." But I still try to look good. I still buy in and buy the latest crackberry. Heaven help me.

So, can the gaze be turned around? Of course it can. Think of the juvenile. But to what effect?

The tenement dwellers in Riis's "How the other half lives" project had little recourse--but some looked straight at him. Most notable for me, the Native American woman who smiles at the camera is looking back. The picture becomes hers. I heartily disagree that the sexuality she conveys becomes the threat inherent in the photo, though Twigg's reading is very sexually intent and so I can see how it got there. But regardless, the gaze has a decided effect.

The young woman is no longer the captive of the man who "took" her picture (possibly by surprise, as it turns out). She is the subject of the photo--she "makes" that picture. And by doing so, she has moved herself out of the position of subaltern (if only for a moment) and made herself a subject. Her race is important to the viewers--specifically to Riis's audience, but her gaze captures the viewer more than the viewer can possibly capture her representation. The mere openness to argument the photo presents has removed her from victimhood.

I think it comes to this (Sorry, but prepare for some whiplash):

The picture above is a fractal (thanks to sgeier.net) called "Eye of the Storm."

Fractals are pictures in pictures in pictures in pictures--each a reflection and building block of the rest. We are, in the panopticon within a panopticon within a panopticon. All of us the cell dwellers, all of us the guards, all of us the wardens. We all want to be seen, want to watch, and want to control the gaze when doing either.

If I am watched for my unfashionability, my misfit body, my Jewishness, my nerdiness, I am not in control of the gaze--unless I made you look. If I am watched, am I noticed?

I began to think I was going to be noticed, and was both relieved and dismayed that I wasn't.

"You know, if someone gets pissy about me taking pictures of cameras in the mall, I might end up talking to a security guard while another one calls Homeland Defense," I joked with Jen.

"I know," she answered. "I figure that's my job here. To call a lawyer."

"ACLU," I said.
"ACLU," she answered.

Benjamin would call it a Fascist State. I think I'm going to just start calling it the Fashionist State.

(God's Eye Nebula courtesy of about.com, Alien Eye courtesy of artuproar.com, hand in eye courtesy of Lions Gate film trailers "The Eye," all other images photographed at Governor's Square Mall, Tallahassee, FL)

A minor action for Tibet

2008-04-01T19:24:00.000-04:00

The people of Tibet have been under repressive Chinese rule for coming on 50 years. If you're not aware of the latest news, these historically peaceful people are beginning to riot to gain awareness of their plight--seems these days violence is the only way to get that coveted 1:40 spot on CNN (the longest broadcast spot not in a news magazine format).

I can do little, even as a freelance journalist and journalism teacher. I teach my astoundingly ignorant students. I try to write as much as I can. But I decided this time to take a page out of my father's book (Though I think he may have borrowed with citation from someone else, so I apologize for not being able to cite the original source ;). )

I've taken the time to design the .jpg attached here. Time, I jokingly say because all it is is the Tibetan national flag with the words "I am Tibet" photoshopped in. The print is light so you might be asked to explain. The print is light because I have decided to join a community that is pleading for help, but of which I am not "originally" a part.

But I would like to ask you to join as well. Print this out as a sticker, as a flyer, as a poster, as a pin, as a bumper sticker; whatever makes you most comfortable or happy. Then wear, post, bump, mail, email it. Share it with others. And when they ask why you "are Tibet" or what your message is, tell them. I cannot tell you your message. I will, however, tell you mine.

Tibetans are being "relocated" by the Chinese government. "Relocation" in my emotional and religious history is the first step to death camps. But death camps are so passe (unless you live in Africa). There really are so many better ways to truly destroy a people. Make them live somewhere outside their "home." Their children will learn Tibetan (for example) as a second language. They will learn Lhasa as a place to yearn for. They will learn Tibetan food as that wonderful stuff we can only cook when we get together. They will learn Tibetan art as something some guys in dresses do up in the mountains.

Those children's children will learn those lessons watered down even further.

Meanwhile, China is also moving Chinese (by force) into Tibet to create a Chinese popular majority in Lhasa. This helps the Chinese enforce a one china policy--which means Tibetans even in Tibet will learn Chinese before they learn Tibetan.

When the "relocated" Tibetans' childrens children return for some pilgrimage or other. When, a few generations down, someone finally decides they want to get back to "home," the "home" their grandparents ached for, talked of, wrote about, sung for, they will find the same place they left to climb the mountain.

If you don't believe this is possible--or you think I'm out of my mind--take a look around you. Israelis are unsure at times what Israel is--and fight religiously over religion. Palestinians have been taught to refuse to make peace so the Arab world can continue its hate campaign--and Israelis have been fighting back, though my generation is starting to wonder why.

Spaniards, Catalans, and Basque fight and sometimes kill each other, and harm each other's children (and always always always their own--apply that to all these fights) in a fight over who belongs where, whose land is whose, whose language is primary and whose art should be taught.

In Africa, Whites who "legally" purchased land from "illegal" colonizing forces aren't just being forced to leave the only land their families have known for generations--they're being murdered. And on the other side of that lose-lose fight, Africans who have been forced to live in an internal exile can't find the way back to their land-based traditions because they've been forced to live in ignorance, poverty, and violence for generations. AFRICA is the most resource rich continent on EARTH. It is also the poorest.

I can't fix these fights--even the one I'm part of. I ache for my Israel, even as I know it changes without me. I ache for the Palestinian friends I know whose families suffer as a corrupt Hamas and a macho-intent Israel fight each other without counting the real costs. I ache for my partner's family as they are treated poorly for being Spaniards in Catalan, and other parts of his family as they look down on the children coming out of Catalan with little or no Spanish (and little or no skills in a communication based world that doesn't use much Catalan).

I'm tired of aching.

I am all of these places.

I am all of these people.

But, today, I AM TIBET.

I ask you to join me in this quiet quest to raise some eyebrows. Maybe the force of our quiet joining of the Tibetan people will help this particular fight, this particular time, avoid immolation. Maybe it won't. Maybe it will help all of us in our own views of our own fights. Maybe it won't.

At the very least, it will help us all be teachers for a little while.

Thank you very much for having the patience to read this far. I hope you join us.

With love and wishes for peace,
Leah

My love affair with Rhapsody may be coming to an end

2008-02-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I've never had a terribly good financial head. Let's face it; I'm great at anything book-smarts related and absolutely lousy at anything street-smarts related. I suck at the non-theoretical. But at least I'm willing to admit it.

So, of course, as part of that whole growing up and turning into an adult thing, I've suddenly decided to learn how to deal with checking and savings and IRAs and 401s (and I thought they were jeans) and so on. I sometimes wonder if there're folks whose sole job is to sit in a back room trying to find a way to make it even harder to balance a checkbook (or three) while making it seem easier.

Now, I've been with my bank for a while, but recently (read a couple years ago) opened a credit union acct so I could get away from the bank because their favorite sport seems to be finding new ways to charge people like me for being money stupid. And I think they may have gotten more of my money over the years than I have. No blame here--though I am bitter and feel like blaming, I must take and own my part in this mess. I am a money moron.

Anyhow, I ended up sometimes charging one account for a recurring cost and sometimes another--depending on where the money was, of course. And so it was with Rhapsody. I've been a member of Rhapsody since its inception. I pay monthly, though I used to pay quarterly. I loved the access to so much music. Especially since I am a fan of world music (and especially Israeli music) and could get it there. I was proud to not buy into Apple's i-Tunes (has anyone but me noticed that Mac's making the same proprietary mistakes IBM made that got it out of the computer market fast?). I even recommended it lovingly to friends.

And then I decided to learn how to balance a checkbook. And found out they've been over- and double- charging me, fo MONTHS.

So I call. Henry tells me he has no record of his company cheating me out of hundreds of dollars. Gosh, can I call my bank and see if they can tell me what's up? I did. They did. We're in the process of fixing it. But in the process of gathering my proof, so my bank will believe me, I've discovered that Rhapsody has been screwing around with me on the credit union side, too! They've charged me on that account every single month they charged on the bank account. Hmmm....problem? Hell yeah!

So, of course, I will begin by calling Rhapsody again on Monday, after I talk again with my bank and make sure they're ok with that. But I'm going to have a really tough time being civil about it--because I don't believe the person hired to answer the phone for a company deserves my ire just because his or her company screwed up. I'm also going to have a tough time finding a new music service, but really, how do you stay with a music service that believes it can just take your money when it feels like it?

I know I can't.

Bye bye (or if it makes it easier for y'all to read; buy buy) Rhapsody!

Gosh, Virginia, that's a great idea! Not--Part II

2008-02-09T19:04:00.000-05:00

So what else could possibly be wrong with the $168 billion stimulus package?

Only that the checks--for as little as $300 or as much as $600 (before the $300 bonus per child is added in)--won't go out until May. The recession, however, is happening now. By May things may be different--actually, by May things will be worse if our economy doesn't pick up now.

Is congress dilly-dallying? Not really. Congress is doing what congress does best; making a lot of noise in the hopes that it will pass for governance. I'm sure there are some politicians out there whose interest is in actual governance. I'm also sure they don't last long.

Those in it for the job lose the job because those in it for other reasons are in it to get rehired. And when you spend your job time working on getting rehired, you're likely to get, well, rehired. Basically, those folks who make it far enough to have "names"--face it, most of you don't know who is in congress besides McCain, Clinton and Obama and maybe who you voted for personally--have also made it far enough to have become celebriticians.

Congress is trying to get rehired. Joe Bloe from Indiana can go home and tell folks he did what he could to save their economic lives. He can then point to himself as a good-guy and ask for his job back. And few people will ask him if he really thinks it worked. Because it won't matter if the economy rebounds. If it does, congress will take credit and if it doesn't, congress will shift blame.

And, really, $300?

No, Virginia, it isn't christmas and there is no Santa Claus.

Gosh, Virginia, that's a great idea! Not.

2008-02-08T18:47:00.000-05:00

Ok, so congress, in a tizzy, has decided to "stimulate" the economy by sending every person who pays taxes some extra cash. Too bad that won't do a darn thing for the economy.

There are a couple of interesting things one should look at in this situation. First, in my mind, is the war. Wars, as a general historical rule, stimulate economies. There is often some privation during the war, and folks sacrifice to some extent or another, but there's more building, more technological breakthroughs, more science and medicine, and more more more means a better economy--so much so that when "the boys"--and women--come marching home, the economy has to readjust because wartime jobs go away just as a massive portion of the population returns.

Not so for George W. Bush's war. His war--though one could as easily call it his father's war--has effectively shut down the economy. Somehow, that makes sense. Dubya has made his life's work to achieve what his father hadn't--probably out of some "overdeveloped sense of vengeance," I hear Count Rugen whisper in my ear. Nothing to be done for it. Dubya has set his mind against being usefully lame duck-ish and no one can deter him from making detrimental decisions until the next president takes office and makes detrimental decisions.

Seems odd, no?

A little O2, PLEASE

2008-02-06T04:07:00.000-05:00

Oh-Two! O2!

Oh how I wish I could breathe!

It started with a sinus infection. This one is not as amusing as last year's--when every time I coughed or sneezed I would pass out. Now, as always happens, I have bronchitis and it's trying to become pneumonia. I'm ready to strangle my MD. He knows this is what's going to happen. My chemo makes me very very susceptible to respiratory infections.

Meanwhile, I'm falling behind on work. I hate it when my students have to wait for me to feel better before they get their grades. So, of course, I'm up in the middle of the night, grading blogs and realize I didn't blog last week. Thank goodness they can miss a couple of weeks without really losing anything major from their grades. That means I can miss a week or two without having to change my forgiveness policy in their favor.

I sometimes wonder if my students even care that all the rules apply just as much to me as to them. I wonder if they even care about any of it, except their grades. I think I'm just feeling down right now. I'm usually very upbeat about my students and teaching.

Maybe, just maybe, a combination of no sleep (because it's impossible to sleep when you can barely breathe) and chest pain is ruining my attitude. Better stop blogging.

Oh Al!; or It's about time.

2008-01-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

So Al Gore has "changed his mind" about the whole gay marriage issue. After spending, according to CNN most of his v-p-hood fighting for the Defense of Marriage Act (an act named so as to sound benign, as though it is good for married people when in fact it is an attack on the civil rights of as much as 10% of any given population--and possibliy more in the US.

Al has seen the light, now that he doesn't have the camera lights pointing at him. Marriage, and gay marriage in particular, is not a religious, moral, ethical, or even value issue. The ability to marry--as far as any state should be concerned with it--is simply an issue of civil rights.

Marriage laws do not create, nor do they define, issues of sexuality and morality. Marriage is a set of laws pertaining to money, health, insurance and inheritance. The state has no say in who is or is not a family--take, for example, a woman living alone with her two children, or grandparents caring for their grandchildren because their children cannot. The state, in allowing marriage, simply has a say in who can be in the ICU, who gets to sign up with whom for health insurance, and who gets the house should the family member in whose name it is held should die.

Those against gay marriage claim it is a moral issue, with the now famous, "If we let homosexuals marry each other, then anyone can marry anyone or anything. Next, they'll want to marry animals, or children!" Hmm...what an odd argument. And yet, this argument is not a new one and homosexual marriage is not its first iteration or use.

Compare the above to this argument, "If we let women vote, then children will want the vote, too!" Next, Fido might ask for a seat in congress.

And yet the gay community has yet to argue for gay marriage in terms of civil rights. The argument currently in use is that two consenting adults should be allowed to pursue their lives as they wish--and they should. But until gay men and women begin to sue for the civil rights and create the next wave of the civil rights movement in this country, there will still be an extreme denial of those rights. Until those who believe in human and civil rights stand up and back our fellow humans in their right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, we will continue to agree to live in a country that claims to be progressive but is, in fact, stagnant.

On the idea of a Woman President...

2008-01-25T17:10:00.000-05:00

I said it before and I'll say it again; that we even talk about Hillary's gender and Barack's race shows the underlying (and extreme) sexism and racism still extant in this country.

Israel had a woman head of government in the 70s--Golda Meir is still revered as one of the best prime ministers in that country's history. Britain had Margaret Thatcher for 12 years! Germany has a female Chancellor right now. In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister was recently assassinated--not for being female in that closed, sexist and often extremist Muslim country, but for being anti-terror and anti-fundamentalist.

A woman head of government is not a new idea, it is not a radical concept and it is not proof of a non-sexist society. That we marvel at the possibility, that our media deigns to ask "is America ready?", that we have people who don't look past Clinton's breasts to her heart and mind is a terrifying reminder that women do not have equality in this country. People still worry about the president having PMS--we don't seem to worry about the president having an anti-intellect attitude or a chip on his shoulder about his daddy, but really, deeply, we worry about hormones?!?

And a black man as president?!? Yikes! Could it be possible that we might one day catch up to the understanding even South Africa has reached? Is there a possibility that the great United States of America might someday have the forethought and egalitarian mindset of more than half the world? How can we even begin to maintain the pretence that we have civil rights in our country when we worry about a presidential candidate's race before we worry about his platform. There are people, tell me if this sounds familiar, who don't think we're ready for an African-American in the White House--heck, it is call the White House after all.

This election, no matter how it turns out, will not prove to the world anything but how backward this country is. If we don't elect one of these two, we will face the internal and external accusations that race and gender were the cause. If we do elect them, we will revel in our own open-mindedness and pat ourselves on the back for finally catching up with a decades (and that's because I'm only considering the modern world) -old concept that all people are created equal and are endowed by their creator with...

And so while we are not all of equal talent, ability, intellect, interest or strength, we are certainly all of equal value. We will have to go through this ugly campaign, one way or another. We will have to go through the underlying meanings. We will have to face who and what we are.

I, for one, will look forward to the day when this race will become a joke. I look forward to a US in which there is no need for Black History Month, in which a women's movement is a human's movement, in which these issues are not.

On writing...still

2008-01-20T18:59:00.000-05:00

I have to sit down and work on some stories. I suppose that's what should be happening now, rather than blogging. But I must also blog, so I think, this time, I'll blog about writing.

I consider myself a writer. I work on writing. I'm trying to get published (and have been published before). I write daily (and not just emails).

Yet writing, though I find it very fulfilling, is one of the toughest things I do. There are writers who say it's the easiest thing they do. I know a few who simply plan a novel and then write it...and then publish it. I look up to these people. They make me wonder if I'm just a delusional idiot with a laptop. There are, to keep me from giving up, writers who have described writing as a form of self-sacrifice and personal torture. I look up to them, too. I know what they're writing through.

For me, it's not totally a matter of just sitting down and pounding it out nor a matter of opening veins. For me, it's a matter of forcing myself to work. I must talk myself into sitting down and starting. I have to block out all the things I'd rather be doing. I have to rid myself of the niggling need to have a cup of coffee-- only a professionally made coffee from whatever coffee vendor is the farthest from me--right now. I have to get myself comfortable enough that I have no excuse to get away from the computer. And I have to have all my other responsibilities for the day complete or the overwhelming guilt of doing something else will come smashing into me as soon as I get to the zone.

So as to be clear, I do get to the zone. Often. (That's one of the things of which I remind myself when I'm talking myself into writing.) I love the zone. I don't actually exist in the zone. Leah, as it were, disappears. The writer in me goes away. It's much like singing (when that happens in the zone). I become a simple conduit of energy. I am being told the story I am telling. It's magical.

And that's one of the reasons I admire the people who can do it for long stretches at a time and with little or no seeming conflict. I imagine they simply live in the zone. Maybe these writers have to yank themselves out of that zone to spend time with us mere mortals. Maybe their lives are all magic. This, of course, is the musing of a child. It is the little kid in me who believes that only her life is outlandish and difficult who can hold these thoughts in her head. The adult in me knows better. She's smarter and more experienced, of course. She's also completely bewildered about those magical folks who can simply float into the zone and get it done.

Guess I'll have to live in my own world of writer-ness. It'll be tough, but not as tough as it could have been.

What the heck...

2008-01-17T18:40:00.000-05:00

It started the way it always starts.

I walk into the office and sign in. A nice person in scrubs says hi and asks me to sit. I do. On infusion days, I rarely wait more than 5 minutes, so I don't bother to get interested in the TV. I'll have my own in a minute and a better choice of channels.

A---, one of my favorite people on the planet, calls me back. She weighs me. This time I asked for her to weigh me. I'd been in last week, so we didn't have to, but I've been losing weight and wanted to see where I was at. She walks me back to the room and lets me choose my chair. There's little choice, really. All three are green, somewhat comfortable and within good view of the TV--though I'm not happy that someone else is here and he's already chosen a TV channel. Poop. No choice for me.

I get over my silliness as soon as I see he's got something on I'd want to watch. I've got a few minutes before the nurse will come in, so I recline the chair and start chatting with D---. He's a nice guy. I've never seen him here before but it's 'cause he's on another type of biomed, so he only comes in every 6 months, not every 6 weeks, like me.

S---, my nurse, comes in. She starts getting the "equipment" ready.

She pulls the tray over and covers it with a blue pad. She tears open a bag of saline and hangs it on the hook near my chair. She puts the line on the tray and then goes to get the needles, tape, gauze, alcohol and other gear.

I make small talk. It works for me.

S--- talks small right back as she hooks me up, gives me my pre-infusion steroids and anti-migraine pills. She gets fluid from the bag and mixes it with the drug. I watch as she re-injects the now-fluid-drug back into the bag. She starts the line running, and turns to take notes, asking about my holiday.

And this is where this last infusion stops being like all the ones before. This is the point at which I start scratching at my very red and slightly bumpy arm.

"Oh, man, I'm itchy," I say.

S--- shoots some more steroids into the IV and slows the flow from the bag. She turns back to the charts.

When she turns back around, I am trying to remove my eardrums using only my short-clipped fingernails as tools.

We're not playing nice any more.

S--- moves quickly. Before I can really register what's happening, she has put more stuff in the lead, turned off the IV altogether and asked how I'm doing. I apologize slurrily, and announce that I think I'm falling asleep. I am. Mainlining Benadryl as a response to anaphylaxis will pretty much do that to a girl.

S--- says, "mmhmmm." and D-- laughs.

The way chemo works (whether for cancer or--as in my case--for arthritis) is that when the allergic reaction stops, the chemo starts back up. We do this as much as possible because truth is that chemo is poison, but when it goes in and slows that screamin' immune system down to a dull roar, my hands start working again and the pain level goes WAYYYYYY down.

So a few days later, I'm still tired, my body is still kind of messed up with whatever they put in me...but I managed to type all this up and my hands feel fine! :)

Reflections...

2008-01-13T20:17:00.000-05:00

So, I just spent a couple hours reading an article on reflection for class. The title, for those interested is "Silence: Reflection, Literacy, Learning, and Teaching." The author, Pat Belanoff. And I thought I'd share some of her thoughts with y'all. Me? I had problems in the reading (hence the literal two hour reading time). I had problems with the length of the work. I thought the section in which Belanoff defines every word she's using was a bit much--and a bit high school--but I kinda understand the need to look into etymological roots of words before we "invoke" their full power.

The point, though, is not the article. The point is that Belanoff argues the need for reflection in teaching. That is, she argues that we need to find a way to encourage our students to think and meditate in silence in the classroom. I like that idea. AND I think that it can be done best in an online class! Now, I have to find a way to encourage my students to do this whole reflection thing. I don't think I'll have them read the article, though. It is not too dense for them. It is not too complex for them. It's too long--and I am ashamed to say that. But, really, some editing would have been nice.

SO how does one encourage reflection in an online class? I don't know yet. But I'm working on it. I do know that in an online class, there is the time, the space, the availability for reflection.

If any of y'all have any ideas, let me know.

My "babies"

2008-01-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

So I've suggested to one of my students that a blog is a perfect place to share pics of her doggie. And that, of course, leads me to share pics of my "babies." My honey likes to point out to me that it's just as silly for me to call them babies as it is for people to dress their dogs. Worse, he says, I insist on talking to them and for them. I never thought I would be this insane.

Don't get me wrong. I always knew I was insane. I've been off for a long time. I like it that way; normal people are usually boring. But I always thought people who talked to their pets were way off. And yet.

And yet, every night, before I go to sleep, I put the babies--read dogs--up on the bed and then take each one in my lap and ask what kind of day he had. Mostly, it started as a way of calming the two so they would fall asleep faster instead of wrestling--on me. But I think i take it seriously now. Still, it must be good for them if it works. They know, when I get in bed and put them in my lap and pet them and talk gently to them that it's time to settle down. When I say "all right," they immediately get off my lap and head for the "puppy section"--read foot--of the bed and lie down. I always finish with "lie down go boom." but they usually are down by then. Still, if they're over-excited, I just have to say "lie down go boom" once or twice and they will.

I have now both admitted to my insanity and defended it. Yowza. Good thing they're so damned cute. Don't believe me? Check out the pic!

Starting the Semester

2008-01-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

I was thinking today how much I dislike the first week of the semester; I still don't know my students and they don't know me, I worry about whether my assignments are going to work, I have nightmares about showing up in class unprepared (yes, those don't go away). And then it occurred to me that new semesters are among the reasons I LOVE being a teacher.

I am one of those awful folks who get bored easily. I used to have a desk job. I worked in technical writing. I was good at it. I made lots of money doing it. The benefits were good. It made me want to jump out a window.

As a teacher (and a writer and a journalist) my life is always changing. I don't have the same thing to do day in and day out. I get to change EVERYTHING every 15 weeks when the new semester starts. If my students just had a rough group dynamic, if I was having a tough time connecting, if I had a class at one of those times of day when even the prof is asleep; no matter what may go wrong in a semester, it WILL be over in 15 weeks. Even good semesters HAVE to end. I get to rewrite my courses. I get to put new and interesting things into the syllabus. I get to incorporate what I've learned each semester--and believe me, I learn a LOT every semester.

So, for starters, I oughtta stop whining about the new semester. Yes, the first week is a bit tough and frought with danger: I might walk into class to find that I haven't put on clothes this morning (well, actually, that only happens in the scary dreams). But once that tough part is over and we all find our groove, the semester is what it is--good bad and ugly (and I do mean and).

When I was 19, I had a long distance relationship. I told B--- that I missed him and was hoping time would speed up so we'd see each other faster. I'll never forget what he told me.

"I'm hoping time drags by really slowly," he said. "I want time to slow down so that when we do see each other I don't have to beg time to stop. I figure if it's already slow, I can just let it stay that way."

It's silly. It's romantic. It's something 19 year olds and others in love say to each other. And yet...

I no longer ask for time to pass quickly. I always ask for time to go slowly. Even when things are tough--and believe me, when you're teaching full time and taking a PhD things do get tough--and I want to wish time would speed by, I remember what B--- said and change my mind, asking for time to creep.

The point, of course, is far more Zen than what one asks of time (which is kind of like talking to Santa). The point is that if one practices the oblivion one needs to get through difficulties "quickly," one will not be practicing what one needs most to fully enjoy good times: the ability to be in the moment and fully awake to life. That, of course, always leads me to the next organizing principle of my life: I always learn more from challenges than from "good times." I always grow more from the experiences I find most difficult--but only when I fully experience them.

No. I'm not a saint or a martyr. I don't live for pain. But I do recognize that living requires pain. And I do realize that in the big scheme of things, the challenges of the first week of a semester are far from painful--they're just a little discomfort on the road to better things.

Welcome to Segovia, Espania

2008-01-05T19:22:00.000-05:00

The taxi ride back to the train station at the end of a long, difficult day reminded me of the bus ride from it that morning

The train, it appears, was packed. The train station was inaugurated, I am told, 4 days before our arrival. It sits several miles outside of town. At least 100 of us disembarked. At least 100 of us tried to get on the lone bus available at the station. No one tried a taxi--because none was present and the desolation surrounding the station made the possibility of one showing up seem rather unlikely.

After 40 or so of us managed to cram ourselves into each other's personal space, the driver closed the doors.

It took about 5 minutes for us to learn that a disgruntled (non)passenger had decided to stand in front of the bus to protest the lack of buses in general and his own lack of a ride specifically. By that time, some were yelling and others laughing. None went for my idea of singing "we will rock you."

When the police car pulled up, we heaved a collective sigh of relief, thus heavily fogging the windows so that it took another 5 minutes of breath-holding--mixed with intermittent yelling at the driver to open the rear door--for us to learn that the officer had no power whatsoever to move, remove, or in any way hinder the protest or the protester who was hindering our ride.

Soon after the officer's impotence was discovered, another bus arrived. Sadly, the availability of a ride to town could not dampen the lone protester's enthusiasm for bus-stopping. It took yet another 5 minutes to get that obstruction talked into boarding the second bus (his companions who had been cheering him on seemed instrumental in this as they, like us, were freezing their proverbial buns off) so we could get underway.

The cheers, sighs, curses, and laughter the moving bus brought out in us fogged the windows back up.

There are, apparently, 2 whole bus stops in the town of Segovia. We were let off at the first...like it or lump it! The driver was having a protest of her own, it seems, and decided she had fulfilled the duties required of her by the 1.20 Euros we had each paid for the privilege. That privilege, we now realized would include walking the rest of the way to the aqueduct--where the town's flourishing tourist district begins and its flourishing bus route ends.

Thankfully, aqueducts are rather large things, and for those of us with aqueduct-recognition problems, the town fathers had seen fit to erect signs...with arrows. The arrow indicated we should turn right at the traffic circle. But we didn't. Well, we didn't turn right away.

First, we dealt with the mixed luck of finding ourselves across the street from the local police station. I call the luck mixed, for though we saw the building as an opportunity to lodge our bus complaints--many and varied by now--we were hindered yet again in our efforts. This time, the culprit was technology--sort of.

The officer at the complaints desk explained matter-of-factly that the computer system was down. When asked if the lack of a computer meant we could not complain, the officer nodded and returned to checking his fingernails for fungal outbreaks.

THEN we walked to the traffic circle and turned right and trudged toward the Roman aqueduct for which this town is famous. It was a wrong turn in the deepest way. Though we did get to the aqueduct and did spend the day in Segovia, we might have done better to turn around. The morning's events would prove an omen and a metaphor.