bugsii

Yesterday in my Ed Philosophy class, we were talking about a court case from the 60s where this woman was on unemployment and refused to take any job that required her to work on Saturday.  She was a Seventh Day Adventist and they celebrate the sabbath on Saturday.  She was going to stop receiving unemployment because she had refused possible jobs, but she sued because she was basically saying that if she were forced to take a job that required her to work on her sabbath, then that was a infringement on the free exercise clause.  The courts were on her side in this case.  Since then, there have been a few more cases reversed this and then called it into question again.  But, what this made me think (and this is sort of a stupid tangent) is, what if no one worked the weekend, ever?  I know most of us don’t, but what if no one else did either?  So then we couldn’t really go anywhere or do much.  What would we do?  We’d kind of have to stay home, cook for ourselves, hang out, maybe go to a park, watch movies… it sounds kind of awesome.  It would be like Christmas day, when everything is shut down, but every weekend.  I wonder if it would make the week too busy though, like if we would have to cram our grocery shopping in in the evening or whatever.  I don’t know.  It’s not a profound thought, I know, but it’s fun to think about.

At ODE we receive an email everyday with all the news clips from around the state that have to do with education.  Today, there was a story about how the state is considering allowing school districts to make up snow days online.  There have been lots of stories about this lately.  People are sort of excited about it, but there was one article where a state congresswoman said, “Hey, what about the kids without computers at home?”  This is always something that’s hard to keep in mind when you start to get excited about the capabilities of technology, but it’s a huge problem.  So, here’s my solution (and it’s not really a new one).  Every kid should be handed a laptop in Kindergarten.  They should get free maintenance, upgrades, replacements, etc. all the way through twelfth grade.  It’s just too big of a disadvantage not to have access to a computer at home.  Oh, and there should be free wireless EVERYWHERE.  What do you all think?  One laptop per child?  (Say yes.)

This morning, Dan and I got up and went to Stauf’s for awhile.  I worked on school stuff, and Dan was doing his regular work.  Around lunch time we came home.  I did a bit more work, then needed to run to to campus to drop off some papers and work out.  There’s this one street on campus, where there are lots of crosswalks and yield signs.  It’s right in the middle of campus, so there are always students criss-crossing the street and, as a driver, it is very slow going.  Over time, I’ve noticed that there are three types of street-crossers.  The typical street-crosser looks up at the car to make sure the car is going to stop and then sort of half waves and hurries across the street.  A second type of street-crosser, the passive aggressive type, just walks right out into the street, sometimes on a cell phone, sometimes not, almost challenging you to hit them, but still walking briskly and in a hurry.  The third type is my favorite type.  They stare at the ground, and walk slowly across the street, barely realizing that they are standing in a place of some danger, a place where walkers really don’t belong, a street (!).  The one I saw today was so slow about her pace, that I thought that she might actually enjoy being in the street.

I started to think about these three types of street-crossers.  I think I’m mostly the first; when I was younger I was the second, but never have I been the third.  Although I kind of like the idea of the third.  It reminds me of this quote from Gloria Anzaldua:

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a state of constant transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

The street is a borderland of sorts, a place dividing up where “pedestrians” walk.  The street is a place where pedestrians shouldn’t be, or should only be for a short amount of time in certain places (crosswalks).  The street is only safe for cars, not people.  Even the term pedestrian is sort of strange.  One who travels on foot… we’re all really pedestrians, but we are restricted in this space made for one who travels by car.  The arbitrary boundary of the street is constantly in transition, cars coming and going, people hurrying or putzing through the crosswalks, some even darting, forbidden, outside of the designated crosswalks.  So, those ones who don’t acknowledge that they are in a borderland, who wander freely, enjoy the forbidden nature of the street, a place that’s not for people on foot, I kind of like them.

One time when I was walking downtown, there was a man, clearly out of his mind, who began to play a sort of hopscotch in the middle of High Street.  He was jumping on one leg, trying not to land on any cracks.  Cars started coming, but he paid no attention.  It could have been ugly, but instead, cars slowed to a stop, watching, in awe.  It makes me wonder what we’re so afraid of, in those borderland spaces.  What happens if we stay in the borderland for awhile, disregarding rules of typical behavior?  What if we discovered that instead of getting hurt, you might find that you change the borderland in an unexpected way?  What if the borderland changed you?

So, I finally left the house today after two lovely days all snowed in.  I was going to take a picture of the snow piled on my car, but was feeling cold and lazy.  Instead, you can visit this blog and see some cool snow figures some students made around campus.  Awesome right?

And a final tidbit I wanted to share with you (well, Uncle Ray mostly).  If you send in a video, you have a chance to be in a commercial with Flo, the Progressive lady!  Check it out here.  I could totally see Ray on one of those commercials!

I got up and ran this morning.  Then, I got a haircut.  It had been almost four months and I thought my hairdresser might be disgusted with me, but she seemed pleasant enough.  I don’t know why I always put off getting my hair cut.  I think it might be because I think it takes too long, or maybe it’s because I think it’s kind of expensive, or maybe I just don’t care that much.  Either way, my hair felt so much nicer after having the grizzly ends chopped.  Ahh.

Afterward, I went grocery shopping and then Dan’s family dropped by to pick up our old TV.  Dan got a new one and his sister bought the (still perfectly good, ahem) “old” one.  I guess I lost that battle.  I spent the evening watching Dan calibrate the TV (well, I guess I was technically reading for class, but I looked up every now and then).  He’s the only person I know that has this calibration device that suctions to the TV and checks the levels of red, blue, and geek, I mean green.  To me, the process was tedious and incredibly dull.  Dan, on the other hand, worked intently for a few hours.  Do I need to tell you again that I have the best geek ever?

P.S. The week you give up watching TV is not the best week to get a new one. 

Dan got home tonight!  After a day spent reading, cooking, eating, reading, cooking eating, I was so glad to get out of the house and pick up my hubby!  As soon as he got in the car, I talked nonstop, and then even when we got home I chattered away until I ran out of things to say (which took awhile).  See, without TV, I’ve been reading a lot more and bored a lot more and thinking a lot more, so I’ve stored up more to talk about and since that store hasn’t been released since Monday, well, you can imagine.  I feel like I’ve been on the computer for days.  In fact, today, just to take a break, I decided to outline my paper on PAPER.  Whoa.  Check it out.  I feel like I’m getting back to my non-digital roots.

Now if I could just turn that in...

Is it just me or are flight attendants usually pretty cranky lately?  I flew home today from Arizona and was excited about a straight flight right into Columbus.  All was pretty smooth, I can’t complain too much.  But, when I got to my gate, there was a really grumpy woman manning the loudspeaker, announcing over and over again that you could only have two bags with you on the flight, and then to be extra snarky and demeaning, she would say, “1+1 is 2 NOT 3,” in this bored, sing-songy voice.  I wanted to ask her if she lived in a trashcan on Sesame Street, but I feared a random bag search or bad peanuts (turns out I didn’t need to worry about peanuts because you have to pay for ALL snacks on the plane, even on a 3.5 hour flight.  Sigh.).  Then, when we were boarding another cheerful lady barked at a guy that had an oversized bag without even looking him in the eye; another guy wasn’t sure which half of the ticket to give her and she gave Oscar a mutually grouchy/annoyed look.  When we got halfway down the port to the plane, we were informed that there was no more room in the overhead bins and any of us with two bags would have to check one piece (so apparently 1+1=1).  The people taking our bags weren’t especially grouchy, but not friendly either.  However, when I finally got on the plane and to my seat, there were PLENTY of overhead bins available.  Perplexing.  Not that I’m never grouchy because God knows I am, but it just seems to me lately that flight attendants are in especially bad moods.  I don’t know why that is.  I’m sure it’s annoying dealing with the same problems day in and day out.  I’m sure that travelers get pretty annoyingly predictable.  But, really, if you hate your job, you should look into other things and if you can’t look into other things, you should try to be content with the job you have.  It would probably be more pleasant for you if you took joy in even the repetitive tasks that start to get dull.  Being grumpy, I am sure, hurts you more than it hurts anyone else.  They should take a note from my mom who deals with the same customers day in and day out, has done so for the past 15 years, and remains a darn cheery waitress.

I remember some time in my third or fourth year teaching I learned this same lesson (though I often forget).  I would get annoyed being asked the same questions over and over again by kids, especially when I had just addressed it.  You can’t really get angry in these circumstances (kinda like the flight attendants and waitresses), but you can sort of shut off and answer the question in a tone that clearly articulates annoyance.  I started doing this more often than I would like to admit and then one day I realized that I didn’t like myself when I did that (I don’t know what brought me to that conclusion).  So, what I noticed was that if I just accepted that kids were ALWAYS going to ask questions that they just heard the answer to and they were ALWAYS going to forget homework and they were ALWAYS going to run in the hallway (etc., etc., etc., I mean, they are KIDS for crying out loud), then I could quit trying to think that if I was clear enough, or organized enough, or scary enough that I was going to change their behavior.  Instead, I tried to see the child as the little unique person that they were and respond to each situation with as much love as I could manage.  This made my day so much more pleasurable and the relationships with my students so much better, and all I had to do was let go.  Let go of the crazy idea that things could ever go exactly as planned.  So, flight attendants… let go.  And, thanks for reminding me to that I need to practice this more often in my daily life.  And, thanks for making me miss teaching again.

Today was so great. I woke up to the beautiful Arizona sun, did some yoga in my room, read this blog and cried my eyes out: http://bandssullivan.blogspot.com/, showered, sat by the pool and read, took a walk to get coffee and read some more, talked to my sister, my mom and my cousin, and came back to the hotel to find Dan home from work.  Now, we are relaxing for a bit (like I need it) before heading out for some “authentic”* Mexican cuisine with his coworkers.

*A note on the word “authentic” since it came up in my cultural studies class a few times this quarter.  What does “authentic” Mexican cuisine mean anyway?  What does “authentic” anything mean?  Is there really an “authentic” Mexican that cooks some sort of “authentic” cuisine?  Yesterday, at the Heard Museum, Dan and I bought an angel ornament made by a Native American, and I thought it was funny because it had a tag on it that was a certificate of authenticity, which had the picture and the name of the “authentic” Native American who made it.  Can any culture really be boiled down to an “authentic” real?  Aren’t we all sort of a mash-up of some sort?

In my Visualizing the Curriculum class, we talked a lot about the ways the media use images to make us think or feel a certain way about a product or a lifestyle.  I can’t remember where I read it, but one of the articles posed the question: Who does this ad think that you are?  I think that’s an interesting question.  So, now, when I see advertisements I try to think about that question.  For example, there was a TJ Maxx commercial on television today that began with a woman saying, “I get a rush finding just the right gifts.”  Sigh.  Who does this ad think that I am?  Someone who gets a rush shopping, I suppose.  Someone who loves buying things.  And, they like to use that angle that you are buying gifts for others, but we all know that it doesn’t stop there.  Or what about that commercial for Target’s Black Friday sale?  You know the one with the lady is “training” to get the deals on Black Friday.  She was a strange, crazed woman.  Target’s sale went on for two days, so they were saying, you’re not her.  You don’t have to be her.  Well, who is her?  Or, I love the ones with “scientific explanations.”  Have you ever noticed how many times companies use the aura of science and technology to sell a product.  If they can get a doctor to give some generic explanation for why we need something, then we believe it.  Do we go do our own research?  Not usually.  Never mind that this guy (always a guy) was paid by the company and is noticeably reading his lines.  Or, what about all of the ads for pharmaceuticals?  Not only do the ads try to say that we are people that think we can cure most things with drugs, but also there’s the aura of science again.  And the one’s that get me the most right now are the ads targeting kids for Christmas presents.  Who does the ad think that your kid is?  Companies are hoping that they are easily dazzled by “stuff” and will beg you to get “stuff” until they get it.  Stuff, stuff, stuff.  Merry Christmas!

Sometimes, we are more aware of an advertisement that is trying to tell us how to be or what to like.  Sometimes, we notice what is going on, but those are the bad ads.  The good ones do it in such a way, that what they think you are seems so normal, so natural, that we scarcely bat an eye.  More than that, it starts to sink in a little.  And, we are so inundated with these sorts of messages and images, that they just sink in little by little, until we can barely tell the difference between what we want and what advertisers want us to want.  It becomes the water in which we swim.  It’s kind of scary to be manipulated in such a way that we start to desire things that are unnecessary, unhealthy, and just ridiculous (like the wrinkle cream in my medicine cabinet.  Why do I have wrinkle cream?!  I am 28!).  Or we start to desire to be something that is NOT what we would want to be, if we could just sit and think about it for a moment.  Advertisers, and the society that is being formed by them (in many ways), want us to fall asleep.  If we fall asleep, then we won’t realize the ways in which we are being manipulated.  We need to teach ourselves, and our kids, to stay awake.

I’ve been thinking about the ways people stay awake, that they reject the default.  I thought of my husband Dan and when I first met him.  He listened to the most interesting music and liked the strangest (to me) movies.  I had never thought too much about the music I listened to or the movies I watched.  I just listened to top 40 and went to see blockbusters… the default.  Why had I never thought about what I watched or listened to?  I didn’t really know there were choices.  I was being shaped by both of these media and I never chose them, they by their simple popularity, chose me.  Dan did something different.  The other day I asked him how he did it and he said that he found an independent radio station (97X, for those of you in Cincinnati, may it rest in peace), then he would find bands on there he liked and look them up online, find similar bands, talk to people that liked the same music, and find more.  It was part community and part research that led him to something other than the default.

I was kind of amazed at his ability at an early age to think critically and make his own choices.  This is not something we are taught in school, to seek out things we are interested in, to learn on our own.  That’s why I was such a good student.  I was interested not in any particular subject, but in doing well in school.  Once school was over, I sort of felt like I lost a part of my identity.  That was me; I was school (this is a continuous struggle, obviously).  This is really why I took up marathon running.  Because, while Dan had his own interests (he can fiddle with electronics from now until doomsday), one day someone asked me what my hobbies were and I realized that I didn’t have any.  I was a teacher, I had a boyfriend and a great family, I watched tv, and… I used to be a really good student.  I had just accepted all of the defaults of life and I had hardly shaped my own interests.  In fact, I had no interests.  I was asleep.

My new hobby led me to lots of new places and in some ways I think it woke me up a little (no one’s ever completely awake, I don’t think it’s possible).  It led me to learn about something I had an interest in.  I learned more about running, and health.  I began to read magazines, books, and websites.  I ran with a group and we talked, exchanged stories and information.  The crazy thing about having an interest that isn’t the default (although marathon running is becoming pretty darn commonplace) is that people, without even thinking, try to sort of beat it out of you.  This is what I first heard when I signed up, “Do you know how far a marathon is?”  “Isn’t running that far bad for your joints?”  My answers were, “Yes.” and “Isn’t sitting on your behind bad for everything?”  But, the point is that people are very uncomfortable with any thing other than what is, well, comfortable.  Being the same makes us feel like we can fit in and be part of a community.  I want to feel like I’m part of a community too, but the thing is, is that the community (you know, us Americans) has developed some very uncritical habits (thanks in part, I think to our unconscious consumption of media).

This leads me to the reason I became a vegetarian.  I became a vegetarian because, after reading Runner’s World and hearing here and there that it was a healthy way to live, I decided to read a few books on the topic and read forum posts by vegetarian communities on the internet.  I then made the decision that this was something I could do, and that I agreed with.  I didn’t think of it in this way at the time, but I was making an attempt to stay awake.  The default American diet is full of processed foods and things we don’t really need to eat, but we do because we have since we can remember and we don’t think about it.  Here again I faced some resistance because I was choosing something other than the default.  This one was much more difficult than running.  Food is part of culture and somehow me choosing not to eat certain things really offends a lot of people.  I guess if I’m not with them, I’m against them (?).  And I really don’t think that everyone should eat the way I do (I could definitely eat better, but those DQ commercials really work on me!), I just think everyone should think it over for themselves.  Just stay awake.  Don’t go into McDonald’s just because it’s there and it’s always been there and as kids we loved Ronald and the toys.  That’s called cradle-to-grave marketing.  McDonald’s has been very successful using that strategy.

I also think that very religious people are in many ways excellent at staying awake (though maybe we have different types of lenses).  Many religious people reject much of what society wants them to accept without question.  They are critical of wordly things and I think we can all agree that they get a lot of backlash too.  I can respect what they are trying to do, and I think we can learn a lesson from them in how to be critical.  For me, this is all important to consider with regard to education.  How can we make sure that students today aren’t falling asleep in the overwhelming ocean of information that is the internet and that surrounds them in their daily lives?  How can we make sure that they are thinking critically about the ways they represent themselves online?  How can we help them negotiate the world without accepting the default?  How can we make sure they consider themselves more than consumers?  How can we help them become creative, interesting, unique producers of their own identity?  Of course, this is personal too, because I still care too much about my appearance, eat Doritos like its my job, buy stupid things I don’t need, follow the herd, etc, etc.  I hear Foucault again in the back of my mind speaking of “a thousand things to do.”  Little by little, we can wake up and little by little we can reclaim that which we gave away too easily, unknowingly, or maybe that we never had… ourselves.

Dan and I got up and drove home today.  Last night was thrilling as the fire alarms went off in the hotel at 4:30 in the morning.  Right now, I am so tired I feel like I have been kicked repeatedly in both eyes.  Joy of joys.  Tomorrow, I have work and then final edits on all three finals.  Official “freedom” will come in a few days.  I say “freedom” because it’s grad school freedom, which only means that you no longer have real deadlines for a short time, but you still are responsible for feeling constantly guilty any moment that you are not working on something academic.  So, feel bad for me.  Oh, and feel bad for Dan too.  We got home at 1 and his flight left for Arizona at 7.  No relaxing for him.  This post is getting whiny and discombobulated.  Night!