teach the children well

i am a teacher’s little girl. i am technically the child of two teachers; my mother was a kindergarten teacher by education and training, though she didn’t teach in my lifetime. daddy started in education during his first stint in college, and that’s what he went back to do when i was in sixth grade. daddy got his first classroom when i was 14 and has been teaching ever since. so i am the proud, staunchly defensive daughter of public-school teachers.

public-school teachers are among the most disrespected, despised, beaten, denigrated and demonized workers in america. republicans, corporatists and christofascists use public-school teachers as punching bags and doormats. in most school systems, except in places where unions have stood up for teachers and students, the role of teacher has been so diminished that the night assistant manager at wal-mart is more respected and trusted. it’s infuriating to watch the destruction of the public school as a reliable bulwark against the hulking corporatized idiocracy movement.

but in the last few months, there have been far too many horrifying tragedies in public schools. in particular, i’m talking about newtown, connecticut and moore, oklahoma. school communities devastated by the loss of children and teachers. death, injury, and god only knows how many psychological scars. the mind boggles; the heart breaks. not just for the loss, but for the long road to recovery for those who remain.

and you know what we kept seeing in the aftermath of those horrors? teachers. in newtown, six educators lost their lives shielding their students from bullets from an assault rifle. in moore, we’ve already seen bloodied, battered teachers carrying children out of the rubble. teachers who gave everything they had to keep those little ones as safe as they could. in a lot of cases, they succeeded.

in connecticut, the starting salary for a teacher with a master’s degree is $45,809. in oklahoma, the state-dictated starting salary is $32,000. this is the value we place as a society on the kind of love, dedication and devotion that these teachers show. i don’t know how this happened. but it’s pretty freaking sick.

teachers matter. without teachers, no one gets anywhere. you didn’t build whatever you built by yourself, folks. no one did. you know why? because you didn’t emerge from the womb with a brain full of literacy, mathematical acumen and the skill set you needed to do whatever it is you did. someone taught you. there are few, if any, autodidacts in the world. and most of us went to public school. we couldn’t all go to fancy-pants private schools like my beloved did. (i teasingly fight the class war with him on this score on the regular. it’s funny.) my life was directly shaped by amazing, generous, smart and flexible public-school teachers. i went to private school for four years: kindergarten, first grade, freshman year of undergrad and my LL.M. all the rest of my education was at state/public schools. and it made ALL the difference.

so love teachers. honor what they do. it’s the foundation of society. they care about your little snot-nosed kids. they are patient, kind, smart, dedicated people who give a lot – A LOT – of time at VERY low pay relative to the vitally important work they do. it may come to pass, heavens forbid, that those teachers the corporatists, the christofascists and their allies hate so hard and denigrate so much are the last line of defense between your precious child and the most unimaginable tragedy possible. and they will lay down their own safety – and in some cases their own lives – to do all they can to return your babies to you at the end of the school day, no matter what.

what better example can be set for your kids than that?

stiff upper lip

today is gray, blah and weird. everyone in the office is grumpy and stressed except me. this is rare. usually i’m the one who brings the righteous poutiness. but it’s a gloomy, gray, icky day inside and out. i don’t like that. it makes it hard to be a recovering pessimist when everyone else is being all pessimistic. I AM TRYING TO BE CHEERFUL FOR YOU, PEOPLE!

i had a bit of a pouty weekend, too. a bunch of friends were in vegas for the last blast of bloggers in sin city. a bunch of other friends were on the gulf for hangout fest. and i was… here. in DC. at my apartment, cleaning my bathroom. i mean, i’ve been working very hard to make the best of the consequences of my choice to commit to the metro DC area. that did NOT help. i mean, BiSC seemed amazing, looking at people’s twitter feeds and pictures. if you’re feeling less-than, BiSC people will kill that feeling in a heartbeat, because the whole concept is built on the kind of infectious support and love that makes you feel invincible. it was bittersweet watching people wrap that up without being there. not only that, there were thousands and thousands of people at a music festival on the alabama gulf coast. when you are so starved for beach exposure that you feel yourself physically craving sun, sand and salt water, that’s enough to make you just fundamentally, profoundly sad.

that double-barreled wistfulness is a lot to overcome. it put a real damper on my stubborn want to be cheerful. i really do want to feel happier. i am about ready to turn the emotional corner on this whole “you just live here now, and that’s it, so get used to the way things are” thing. but i am nothing if not an emotional sponge. and it is hard for me to stride powerfully into the abyss of a monday and declare BEGONE, YOU GRAY FUZZY SADNESSES, FOR I AM CHEERFUL TODAY! when everyone else is more bummed out than i am.

damn it all.

so i am redoubling my efforts to soldier forward. blah, you are no match for me. i am tired of being crabby about things. i am ready for the re-spawn to be complete now, thanks. i am going to concentrate on fun things. for example, i have started planning out my wedding trip. we are going to have eleven uninterrupted days of fun back home among our people and our places. i am already beyond thrilled thinking about all the things that i will eat while we’re down home. OMG, it’s going to be amazing. we will have brunch at dante’s kitchen. we will have a dinner at boucherie [KRISPY KREME BREAD PUDDING Y'ALL]. we will have lunch at mother’s and eat all the food in a five-mile radius, as we usually do. we will, if we can swing it, try to have friday lunch at galatoire’s. oh my god, that elevated my mood already.

and in a mere five days, i will be in new york city with my beloved. we will meet friends, have birthday dinners and brunches with kindreds, and generally carouse for memorial day weekend. i am pretty excited about this, to say the least. it’s going to be a good damn time. i like fun. and i should remember that when i’m bummed.

hmm. maybe this is what the man is always talking about when he gives me a laundry list of little nice things to try to cheer me up when i have the gray fuzzy sadnesses. maybe it’s more important to pay attention to the happy things rather than fuss about the sads. i’m pretty awful at that, i won’t lie. but just the act of focusing on the wedding trip, the new york trip, and the lazy magnolia southern pecan that will be mine in a mere few months made me feel better, even as i am surrounded on all sides by angry, cranky, frustrated underlings. so BEGONE, fuzzies. you will not bother me today. stiff upper lip and all that. i WILL turn the corner.

dammit.

re-spawn

i have been a fussy little [occasional] blogger these days. part of the fussiness is directly related to my damn job. the job is pissing me off these days. no, i will not say why. i will also say that there are many things at the job that are good. but you can tell when i’m cranky at work when i start calling it “the job.” like it’s a living, breathing, annoying-ass entity, getting in my way and being a bastard. so there’s that. damn job. hmph.

i am also in a coming-to-terms cycle. i think gamer people have something called “re-spawning.” my best conception of re-spawning is that in those god-awful first-person-shooters that the man likes to play on our big shiny 67-inch HD television, which are unspeakably violent and dizziness-inducing (i do NOT do well with first-person perspective in combat scenes), you come back to life when you die. you show up at given points along the way, sometimes with less of your stuff. right after you re-spawn, you’re a little weakened until you get all the stuff you had back.

this is sort of what happens to me when i have to come to terms with something i don’t like. and while i understand that it makes me really rotten company for a little bit when it happens, i REQUIRE a period of recovery. ever since the whole hey, i think i need to end my marriage and god, is that going to suck thing, i really feel like i’ve got a little piece of myself rattling around loose inside. i no longer feel 100% held together. and i can’t figure out what it is about divorcing, finishing law school, etc. that could’ve done that to me. but here we are. it comes out in weird ways: i was NEVER, EVER a movie cry-er (with the exception of malcolm X, that is). and ESPECIALLY not in public. i still don’t like to show negative emotion in public. the worst fights the man and i have ever had have generally come as a result of him pushing me into more negative-emotion territory in front of others than i am willing to get into.

but now? good lord. i tear up at the weirdest things. i cried like a baby at the end of brave. (i mean, i guess that trigger is pretty easy to place, if you know me and have seen the movie.) but the point at which i knew something fundamental had changed in me is when i lost it completely at the end of beasts of the southern wild. i love that movie for about a thousand reasons, and god did i cry. my daddy saw it at a different time and place than i did, and he told me he cried too. (THAT one was a KING-HELL shock; that made a grand total of two times ever i’d even heard of tears from daddy as a grown-up. he’s not one of those stoic dudes, but tears aren’t his thing.) but that is not my style at all.

or is it? i am just a lot more sensitive than i used to be, on a lot of fronts. and when confronted with large, definitive disappointments or losses, which of course has not happened at all in any way lately, ahem, it takes a lot, lot longer than it used to take to get back to normal again. and in the re-spawn period, i am almost physically sensitive to bad things. little slights get big. small stupidities loom very large indeed. i walk around in a very tender mood until the pieces settle back into their loose stack again.

do other people react this way? i don’t know. and frankly, i’m not sure i care. one of the other things that happens during the re-spawn is that i get really selfish and petulant about the way i feel. it’s almost like i have to build a fake shield around myself, made of loud, pouty bravado, until the soft places toughen up again. that doesn’t usually take long – a few self-indulgent days of fussing and eating comfort food, and i’m generally back to fighting form.

but it’s just so WEIRD. i’m not 100% thrilled about this new emotional reality. i have always been kinda proud of how i got through the tough stuff without it denting the ol’ stiff upper lip armor. that is clearly not the case anymore. things just get to me more now. maybe it’s age. maybe i’ve run through my life’s complement of effortless IDGAF snap-back. i don’t know. and these days, being outwardly emotionally messy appears to be the norm. i don’t like it, though. that’s all i know. i’d like to be more like my old self again, my tougher, happier, less touchy self. i’d like to stop re-spawning and just, y’know, absorb these things like a grown-up.  sigh.

i wish that i knew what i know now

grown is a weird place to be. i have probably been getting this message from adults all my life, who are now snickering blithely to themselves at my supposed deep self-discovery. i mean, really – it’s not like anything any one of us is realizing, feeling, etc. about aging is uncharted territory. that’s the most human thing of all: everything feels original and new to you, but you also realize that you are basically repeating the pattern of maturity that every other person older than you has repeated for the entirety of human existence.

so in other words: congratulations. you’ve unlocked the answers to a question that literally anyone else older than you could’ve just told you.

but ANYWAY. the obvious lesson of growing up, the one my parents figured out before me, and so on, and so on, and so on, is that you cannot be anything you want to be. that one is a lie on several levels. first off, there are the serious socioeconomic and institutional barriers to mobility that are very true and very real. lottery mentality notwithstanding, americans, we are one of the LEAST socially mobile societies on the planet. even jeb freaking bush acknowledges that the gap exists, even though he refuses to understand what that means.

but even if you can get a little bit higher than where you started from, that’s not the ticket to whatever you want to be. choices have consequences. once you pick a path, a whole lot of doors slam shut behind you and triple-lock. you can’t go back from a lot of choices. and that’s not something we discuss with kids as they’re growing. we don’t want to restrict imagination, squash dreams, etc., etc., etc. and that’s an understandable impulse. but at the same time, we expect a 16, 17, 18-year-old kid to make serious choices with SERIOUS consequences for her future, and more often than not, we don’t give them anywhere near enough information to make the choice well.

this, by the way, is the genesis of all those wistful nostalgia songs like the faces’ ooh la la. y’know, i wish that i knew what i know now when i was younger…

it’s kind of cruel, if you get right down to it. sure, at the beginning, a kid has a lot of possible life choices. when you’re 17, you have a lot of forks in the road in front of you (if you were lucky enough to be one of those people who got to age 17 without getting caught in the cracks, of course - malnutrition, poverty, violence, failing schools, etc.). but once you take one of those paths, it is almost always the case that you can’t go back five years later and re-examine all of these choices. none of the choices you had at 17 will be the same when you’re 22, 25, 30, etc. things don’t change in a vacuum. if the path you’re on has turned out to be a bust, the other paths aren’t all the same.

so at age just-about-32, i’m learning something that should’ve been painfully obvious all along: thanks to the last 15 years’ worth of choices, i have committed myself to a lifetime of remaining right here in the metro DC area for the rest of my working adult life. it doesn’t matter if i like this or not, really. it is now too late. my job is here. my fiance’s job is here. he’s lived here for 15 years and likes it. he doesn’t really have the kind of job that you can do everywhere. i borrowed so much to go to school that i have to stay at a certain income level, and pretty much the only place where wages are competitive enough to service that debt is here. ergo, i will be staying here for the next, oh, say, 25 years or so. i will never live within a short drive of the gulf of mexico. my kids will consider DC to be their home.

and that’s just all there is to it. no matter what i think of it, or how much i wish it wasn’t true, it just is. i have made my bed; i will be lying in it until retirement. the man says things like, if you’re going to be miserable here, you need to tell me now, because that’s a problem that we have to solve. he doesn’t understand this issue at all. not even close. he is staggeringly unsentimental. he also doesn’t have a place he thinks of as “home.” so to him, who the hell cares where you live? and miserable isn’t the correct framework to look at this. i am not miserable. however, beloved, emotion is not binary. it is not an on-off switch that reads HAPPY/MISERABLE and that’s it. i like many things about my life here.

i also have serious reservations about a) the cost of living here; b) raising a family in this hyper-competitive, hyper-wealthy, status-obsessed environment, with a culture and an ethos COMPLETELY diametrically opposed to the one in which i was raised; c) being so far away from so many things and people i love and care about.

but i made the choice that led to these consequences. so i have no one to blame but myself for the fact that my kid will be one of those weird-ass super-jaded obnoxious northern virginia kids that i find myself surrounded by. i have no one to blame but myself for the fact that unless i want a three-hour commute every day, i will never have a house like the one i grew up in; the best i’ll get is a townhouse with a four-foot-square “yard” in front and walls shared with other families forever. i am not super happy about it. but it is my fault. so there’s no point in fighting it anymore.

when my weird-ass super-jaded obnoxious northern virginia kid is 15, 16 years old, however, i WILL be able to offer all of this to him or her as an object lesson. i mean, when i’m not getting badgered because bayleiy, connor, and all the other weird-ass super-jaded obnoxious northern virginia kids all got new BMWs because they’re so super-special. i will be able to say to that kid, be very careful when you make these choices, son or daughter. once you go there, you will never be able to go back again. make damn sure you can live with the consequences of your choices.

hmm. good advice. maybe i should’ve listened.

the freshmen

i was young and knew everything
she a punk who rarely ever took advice
now i’m guilt-stricken, sobbing, with my head on the floor…

i am now well past the old life. it ended a long time ago now. i packed nearly 13 years into a box and stored it away in february of 2011. so the fact that eeeeevery so often, i still get smacked with a GIANT CRUSHING WAVE OF GUILT is more than a little disconcerting. i mean, we are all in different places. he has his life, i have mine. we have exchanged a few tentative, cordial communications related to business we have between ourselves, and it’s nice to see the frost wear off a bit. the feelings that follow each little exchange are twofold: 1) it is so completely nice how friendly that was; 2) i really did a very bad thing to him, and it makes me sad and guilty. every time, that order. i mean, i get that this was the defining relationship of my young adulthood, and it ended really badly. but seriously, enough time should’ve passed, right?

can’t be held responsible, she was touching her face
won’t be held responsible, she fell in love in the first place

ah, were we ever smart-asses back in the day about our love. and it was a passionate, intense one, too. we got challenged a lot, in retrospect; many people thought we were crazy to be so intense about each other. we could’ve invoked that old janet jackson song, too: they said it wouldn’t last, we had to prove ‘em wrong… when we were especially young, we went through a 13-month period of being separated by 1,000 miles. getting through the distance gave that relationship a dangerously strong air of invincibility – HA! WE DID IT! WE TOLD YOU! – that just redoubled our arrogance that this. was. it.

i mean, until we broke into pieces, that is.

for the life of me, i cannot remember
what made us think that we were wise
and we’d never compromise
for the life of me, i cannot believe
we’d ever die for these sins
we were merely freshmen

god, kids are stupid. i was no different. and you’d think that now, being almost 32, i’d understand that while the end of the marriage was ugly and sad, it was also the result of the kind of childish hubris that is long, long gone. no one died. the relationship died, but the people didn’t. in a way, the freshmen in the relationship were reborn to be the adults we both needed to be. we never left the adolescent intensity behind, and in the end, it destroyed us. that’s no one’s fault, really.

can’t be held responsible, she was touching her face
and i won’t be held responsible
she fell in love in the first place

i can be held responsible for a lot of the reasons why the end was ugly. i did not handle it well. i have never, ever been a good break-up artist. every time i left someone in the past, i did it in the absolute most callous, awful, thoughtless way possible. in ending my marriage, i blew everything to hell. but i did not cause the divorce. nothing caused the divorce; it was the natural progression of how we got started. it was pretty much inevitable.

the guilt makes me mad. i am so freaking frustrated that i am still upset, that i haven’t managed to forgive myself for things i know i didn’t do. the main reason i chose this song for the frame story today is that final transition, nearly yelled by the singer, is the dialogue i run through in my head: I WON’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE. SHE FELL IN LOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. that’s my petulant rejoinder to my own admonition. i have the argument in my head over and over and over again. you did it. i did not. yes you did; you’re awful. no i’m not; it needed to happen.

i have to engage in some tough love here, i think. it is time for me to get down to the hard, ugly business of forgiving myself, regardless of whether he ever actually forgives me himself. own what you did; LET GO OF WHAT YOU DIDN’T. we flew too close to the sun, we let the highs obscure the lows, and we never really realized that we were probably not meant to marry. that’s all. it happens. and i need to stop beating myself the hell up. the mistakes i made as a kid have been made, and by god, they were not capital crimes. close the book. let. it. go.

we were merely freshmen
we were only freshmen…

a whole new world

we all remember aladdin, don’t we, friends? and of course, we all remember the gloriously saccharine/sugar-syrupy ballad-theme song, a whole new world. it was the go-to slow-dance song in seventh grade at azalea middle school, that’s for sure. just some treacly R&B/pop fluff, cotton candy for the ears.

but damn if i didn’t find myself humming this song this weekend.

see, the man and i have been running buddies forever. and he knows some things about the way my life used to be. one of the things he knows is that, in the old life, one of the central requests i made of my ex was to do… something. he was dissatisfied with his life, and he always had these GRAND PLANS. i’m going to do this thing. i’m going to do that thing. that’ll be fun. that’s what i want to do. and they were all good ideas that seemed like they’d make him happy.

and they never once happened. not. once. he’d get to about step three in the brainstorming process… then he’d go back to playing video games. that’s all. and no matter how many times i asked him to just do SOMETHING, it never once came to fruition. and that, more than anything else, was the central fracturing point in our relationship. in a weird sort of way, his inability/unwillingness to get out and do something was a great motivation for me to change EVERYTHING. i went to school, got my degree, lost all the weight that was bothering me [and damn if i couldn't use another huge motivator to do that again; i liked my body better when my clothes fit well and yoga wasn't a struggle] in large part to inspire him. i mean, the guy had been an athlete. a WRESTLER. there is no other sport that is more demanding, and requiring of more physical and mental discipline, than amateur wrestling. when we were in undergrad together, he had the willpower and drive to work out like that, keep his weight where it needed to be, etc. but once we got grown, that drive just winnowed away.

one of the many, many side effects of that dynamic, besides the obvious divorce thing, is that i got really accustomed to the hopes-up, let-down train in my relationship. ooh, he’s got another awesome plan; he seems so enthusiastic about it; maybe this time we’ve got something! … hmm. oh. it’s been months and we’re still researching. oh. ok. never mind. i got used to expecting that my requests would not really be honored. and it’s not like i was telling my ex that his SOMETHING had to earn money. i didn’t care. i wanted him to have something in his life to do that he loved, that made him happy, and that would be his thing, the way wrestling had been. but my wish for him to do something other than work his 7.5 hours a day, play with the dog and play video games was simply never that important to him, so it never really got done.

so here we are at marriage no. 2. the man and my ex are very different people. the man has a very unusual-looking form of ambition. he doesn’t really go around making grand plans. he throws himself into whatever is in front of him with zeal and dedication. he has purpose with his actions. i mean, after several years of being a small business owner, he had to have ambition and drive. but again, even though i know what he’s capable of, and all the choices he’s made, i had the story in my mind that when you make a request of someone, the hopes-up/let-down dynamic will be the result.

so imagine my surprise when, after a long talk about an important issue between us that’s been bugging me for awhile, i did NOT get the roller-coaster treatment. my hopes had alternated between god, i hope he took that to heart and why should i really expect anything to change? and then, without any great fanfare, he took the conversation to heart. it took me several days to notice, but there was no doubt that he heard me. it’s hard to describe how profound that realization was. he listened, he adjusted, and he did it without making it a thing.

i am not accustomed to being taken seriously when it comes to things like this. i almost don’t have a framework to take it in. we can actually make plans together. we can get issues solved when they arise. and it’s not a big deal to him to take steps to make it happen.

a whole new world indeed.

compliments

dear people of the world:
street harassment is bad. it is not complimentary, it is not nice. men in the street need to stop yelling gross things at women in the street. and if women are yelling gross things at men, that needs to stop too. but really, we all know that flipping that script is a false equivalency of the FIRST order; 95% of these inappropriate interactions are males yelling at females. just stop it. STOP IT. you don’t have the right to expect me, or any female, to look or act the way you want us to. we are not set dressing in the movie you’re directing in your head. you don’t get to pull strings. it is not a friendly thing to do to scream about a woman’s bosom across a crowded street.

men of the world who get it, you get it. and there are a lot of y’all. thanks for that; it’s nice to know that there are excellent friends and allies in the world who know the difference between being a nice person and being radically out of bounds. it’s also a little sad that it’s worthy of commendation for human beings to behave like human beings to other human beings.

men who don’t get it, and the women who buy their nonsense: stop it. it’s stupid. you look stupid. you look mean, small, demanding, nasty. what is so damn hard about keeping that comment about that random stranger’s behind inside your head instead of out in public? quit making other people uncomfortable because you want to say something. it’s an awful thing to do.

but all i wanted to do was give you a compliment, you stuck-up bitch. god, learn to take it. you are ruining it for all the other girls who appreciate being appreciated.

this is, with varying degrees of anger/vulgarity, the response people who don’t get it seriously give. and it’s really shocking. let’s talk about it. compliment: noun. a polite expression of praise or admiration. A POLITE EXPRESSION. it is not polite to take a total stranger, who up until that moment was pretty certain she was a human being, and reduce her to her sex organs for your own amusement. that is you showing the whole world that you’re the boss of all the lady-beasts and can say whatever you want to them, because they’re only in this world for your visual delight.

in the immortal words of denis leary, i can’t believe i have to get angry about this shit! it is common sense that other people have the right to their own personal space in public. good grief.

compliments are a very nice thing. it is nice to, for example, say to a stranger in the coffee line, your watch is really nice or those shoes are super-cute. i do this often. i have a bit of a reputation in my office for my that is the cutest dress or where did you get those shoes – i want to buy them for [the man] repartee. your mileage may vary, but those at least meet the dictionary definition of compliment. i have received ONE – count it, folks; ONE – compliment in the context of a street interaction. i was walking down a street in DC that contains, in the space of three blocks, a courthouse, a homeless shelter/rehab facility, and one of the best law schools in the nation. outside of the shelter sat an old white-haired man reading a book, surrounded by his things and appearing to be in bad health.

excuse me, ma’am?

yes sir?

he smiled at me. you look lovely today. have a nice day. he went back to his book.

that was it. end of interaction. that was a compliment. and it’s the only one i’ve ever gotten on a street from a man. EVER. all other unsolicited commentary on my appearance, which blessedly is a rare occurrence, is of the street-harassment persuasion. i get the “smile; it makes you pretty!” comment a lot, because i tend to spend walking-around-alone time thinking about things. it makes me laugh now, mostly because i see and hear this video clip in my head whenever someone commands me to smile. [with apologies to my razorpig-loving fiance, who would just as soon forget that the whole john l. smith thing ever happened, thankyousodamnmuch.] it’s a nice coping strategy, really. street harassers sound about that damn unhinged anyway, hollering random come-ons at strangers.

but the fact that i have to arm my brain with a damned COPING STRATEGY to WALK THE STREETS IN PUBLIC, which is not something men have to do, is why you men who don’t get it (along with the women who enable you) need to do one thing.

STOP.

the southern thing

your soundtrack. crank it loud for this very long post.

well, well, well. look at this foolishness. turns out, 24 hours before the anniversary of the battle of the appomattox court house, a couple of royal dumbasses decided to show out about race, north/south relations and unbelievably terrible music in the form of “accidental racist.” old white people in the south occasionally refer to the civil war as the lost cause, which is their way of glorifying treason carried out in the name of making sure that the southern 1% could retain the right to outright own black people and back-door own poor white people. today, in 20-goddamned-13, brad paisley and LL cool J decided to write a new chapter in the same old lost cause story, all over paisley’s idiot assertion that flying the confederate battle flag is a perfectly innocent expression of lynyrd skynyrd fandom and not a revisionist insult to black people. and no, LL’s charming tribute to robert e. lee is not sufficient “i have a black friend” cover for what those two morons did. if “cover” was even a thing that existed.

and that’s the big freaking joke about what these idiots did. there’s a lot to unpack about being southern. and being “southern,” for that matter. there’s a difference. what paisley did is reference being “southern.” to assume that the confederate battle flag is a southern heritage symbol requires ignorance of what the confederate battle flag was, and continues to be, used to represent: the supremacy of white people, and wealthy white people at that. that’s what the battle flag stood for at the time, and that’s what it stands for now. you can’t “reclaim” it, any more than you can “reclaim” the swastika’s ancient life as a religious symbol from the fact that it was the branding statement for the summary execution of ten million-plus non-aryans during world war II. it’s gone, it’s over, and it’s never coming back. likewise, the confederate battle flag was the banner under which confederate generals orchestrated their campaign of treason motivated by their elite’s desire to own human beings, and it was the banner under which the hateful hordes of white americans perpetrated property seizures, denial of civil rights, beatings, rapes, false imprisonment, terror campaigns and murders against black americans. and it’s gone, it’s over, and it’s never coming back. all the “but i just like lynyrd skynyrd!” in the world doesn’t change that.

when challenged, many people who cite the flag as “heritage” talk about their families, and how the confederate construct is just a remembrance of how southerners value family history. so let’s talk about my family, which is as southern as it can be, as an example of that. the man’s mother’s family goes deep into north alabama’s history. his great-great-grandfather is buried in the confederate soldiers’ cemetery in warrior, alabama.  my family, as is the case for many families that go back in america that far, had people on both sides of the civil war. my grandmother loves to tout our confederate roots, as if the distant cousins who were conscripted into the confederate army were noble defenders of our genteel way of life. snort. we were broke-ass farming people. but another branch of our family fought for the union. they did so with not a small amount of distinction, as it happens.

my daddy had two grandfathers, both of whom i knew. one of them, my grandmother’s father, is one of daddy’s heroes. pop was a warm, generous man who died when i was a very young girl. but i remember how amazing he was. daddy tells great stories of my pop and how progressive he was. pop voted democratic not because of reconstruction, but because he believed in the new deal. pop tried repeatedly to integrate his workforce in south georgia in the 1950s and 1960s. the stories daddy tells about being part of those work crews in summer, about how the black men were treated and how pop tried so hard to stop the insanity. he didn’t get far, but he tried. and in the 1950s in south georgia, that makes you a radical. daddy’s other grandfather lived a lot longer. he was a hard, angry, and VERY conservative man. he was also an inveterate racist. my aunt told me a story about being a little girl in granddaddy’s car the first time he was pulled over by a black georgia state trooper. from my aunt’s retelling, the trooper endured an unbelievable tirade of racial invective as he quietly, professionally wrote my great-grandfather a speeding ticket. hell of a lot more grace than i would’ve shown, to be sure. granddaddy favored the n-word. he favored it a lot. he said it constantly. and if he knew it bothered you, or if you were an eight-year-old me and told him it bothered you, he’d call you an n-word-lover and say it more. he was also a total bastard who was hateful as hell to everyone except my youngest (at the time) cousin; she was a toddler and didn’t understand the hateful things he said, so she’d be loving and sweet to him.

my daddy was born in jacksonville, florida. he spent his young childhood there and in a town called albany, georgia. after seventh grade, he and his siblings moved to pinellas county, florida. when you ask daddy where he grew up, he gives pinellas county as the answer. my mother was born in atlanta and spent her early years in greer, south carolina before she moved to the same county in the late 1950s. my parents met in their adolescence in an integrated high school, one that appointed an interracial couple to be “mr. and miss largo high school” in 1970. they grew up hippies, liberals, and loud defenders of civil rights, even as my grandmother ran for school board – twice, unsuccessfully – as a staunch segregationist heavily involved in the local chapter of parents against forced busing. and yes, my grandmother is the daughter of my pop, my progressive great-grandfather. she’ll lie to you and say he was a republican; he was not. but she was, and she stood for some pretty heinous things. in fact, this article i found while googling the organization, which is a letter to the editor from a local newspaper where my family lived circa 1972, is a pretty horrifying description of exactly what she was doing.

before daddy left albany, dr. king came to town. daddy told me the story of what he remembered of the visit; he was 10 years old when it happened. he was a little kid, playing army with the rebel gray uniform his mama bought for him and generally doing as he was told. when dr. king came to town, he asked his mother, mom, who’s dr. king and why is he here? he told me, i knew something was seriously wrong when my mother could not get a sentence out about what was happening. that’s when i started asking questions, and really disliking the answers i received. my parents broke clean away from the poisonous influences in the bloodline. my mother got clean for gene after bobby kennedy died. my father sent away for mailings from the black panthers and SDS.

i was born to this southern family in princeton, new jersey. as a joke, my birth announcement featured my name – TARA! – overlaid on an outline of the rebel flag. daddy’s reasoning was, see, ’cause you rednecks keep calling her a yankee baby, because she’s born in the north, we’re going to make fun of you to all our northern friends. he included a photo of a tiny, newborn me, lying on the rebel flag my grandmother gave daddy somewhere down the line, throwing a crying fit of epic proportions. my face was red, my fists were balled up, my eyes were squeezed shut and my mouth was wide open in the classic baby-is-angry-as-hell pose. daddy enjoyed the satire: here’s this ridiculous symbol that’s been used to make others feel like property, and that my own family has used to try to instill some misplaced “pride” in a set of ideas that repulses me. here’s what i think of it: it makes my newborn baby girl cry. as it should.

what does all this genealogical rambling say? first: anyone who tells you that the confederate battle flag represents family and heritage is LYING to you. second: even if you trace your roots to the civil war, your “southern-ness” is not conditioned on whatever side your forefathers fought for.

what is being southern, anyway, this thing everyone’s supposed to be able to take pride in? duane allman used to say, i’m southern; ain’t proud of it, ain’t ashamed of it. there are a lot of fabulous features of southern life, at least life on the gulf coast: good food. warm weather. amazing music. a pleasant, laid-back pace to daily life. brilliant literature, humor, and general story-telling prowess. room to move around. the beach. and yes, the southern accent. these are unique features of my upbringing that i love. i have friends who love the iterations of these features found in their homeland. it’s 100% cool to love your upbringing.

but i believe in a mature, clear-eyed love. when you fully love someone – or somewhere – you hold your love accountable. you want the best for the things and people you love. and if you really love the south, whatever that means, you have the sense the good lord gave a grapefruit to understand what that means. i talk a lot about how it pisses me off that this country has decided that racism is a strictly southern problem. i don’t get mad because i think there’s no race problem in the south. oh, lord, do i know full well that the homeland still has a serious problem with race. no, it pisses me off because we will never get to a place where racism is a weird anomaly if we keep pretending that it hasn’t infected the entire body politic of the united states. using alabama and mississippi as a convenient scapegoat is not the answer. so if you really love the south, you do not want to keep hugging racist symbology in a weird attempt to rehabilitate it, as if nice people wearing the confederate battle flag will undo the two-pronged historical malevolence it symbolizes.

brad paisley and LL cool J have unwittingly done us a bit of a favor when it comes to pointing out how naive (at best; stupid at worst) most people are about what racism is, what racial politics were, what racial politics still are, and how people should look at these issues. america has a structural privilege problem that gets worse every day. the structural problems cut across racial, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, and geographical lines. this simpering little “gee whiz, can’t we all just wear rebel flags? I’M not racist, so i don’t mean anything bad!” trope is not helping. there’s a lot of duality in “the southern thing,” as the truckers call it. there’s a lot of good, there’s a lot of bad. i imagine that’s what it’s like in a lot of places. don’t know for sure; i’ve only ever been a southern kid. i take responsibility as an AMERICAN, not as a southern, for the racial problems we have. i was raised not to be racist. i was also raised to understand what happened in the past in AMERICA, not just in alabama.

things are, on balance, much better than they’ve ever been re: race relations. but it ain’t even close to fixed. we still have a lot of work to do. and admitting that white people are still the privileged class in this country doesn’t denigrate “southernness.” and because people are people, perfect racial harmony will never 100% happen. there will always be assholes who hate other people for stupid, arbitrary reasons, such as skin color, nationality, etc. the goal is twofold: a) remove structural inequity as much as possible from the laws, customs, practices, etc. of the entire country; b) reach a place where people are permitted to walk around and not be confronted by imagery that was used to enslave and dehumanize them. like i said earlier today, there’s no “accidental anti-semite” song where some affable aryan dude is all, gee whillikers, all i wanted to do was wear this ancient religious symbol, i didn’t mean to invoke the wholesale slaughter of millions of jewish people. you’re proud of the south? great. start acting like it. shelve the hurtful, hateful symbology and help us make the south – and the whole country – a better place.

we’re known for our warm hospitality as southern folks. shouldn’t we do everything we can to make sure people feel welcomed in our presence? ditch the flag. ditch the whining. be a southern gentleman or a southern lady and create welcome for all. make the southern thing something, on its own, to be proud of.

pent up

i love spring and summer. i love the months when the sun shines powerfully, and it’s warm and beautiful outside. it’s exceedingly irritating to me that i can see the beautiful bright sun outside the windows of our office, but it’s freaking 48 degrees. but even in spite of that, seeing the sun and feeling the breeze (cold as hell as it may be) makes me feel better.

the man and i are in a grumpy patch. you know those patches where everything’s basically cool, but there’s a stretch of a few days where you fuss at each other with varying degrees of intensity seemingly every day? goes on for a week or two, then it’s over and everything’s un-grumpified? yeah, that. we also have spent a lot of time going from apartment to home parking garage to work parking garage to office to work garage to home garage to apartment with no interaction with the outside.

i don’t think those two statements are unrelated.

i have the spring fever, friends. this seems to happen to me in april. i mean, hell – three years ago, when i was new to this whole blogging thing, i told y’all how sunshine makes me feel. ‘course, that was a different place and a different lifestyle. i could stop work for a couple of hours to go run around outside. it was louisiana, so on march 31, 2010, the high was in the mid-seventies instead of the mid-forties. on april 2, 2013, i am sitting at my grown-ass adult desk at my grown-ass adult job. in baton rouge, i once made the decision on a thursday afternoon to take off for a weekend minibreak at gulf shores, complete with saturday-night hotel stay. i guess we could do that at virginia beach now or something, but it’s a lot harder.

i gotta shake the rust off, y’all. i think i spent so much of scintilla trying to dance around this sense of feeling hemmed in because it’s really true. i have a world-class case of pent-up, sluggish stir-crazy. it’s making me unattractive in a lot of ways. i’m fussy, impatient, ill-tempered. i’ve expanded at the waistline, which makes me a) bummed out, b) very low on clothes that fit right and c) uncomfortable in my own body. all of this itchy, cramped feeling means that i spill over the sides, and it’s often ugly when i do.

i have to buck up and go forth. i gotta DO stuff. i have to (sigh) go work out. i’ll feel better when i do. i really will. law school should’ve been instructive – as chaotic as 3L year was, i was remarkably even-keeled. i also worked out at least 40 minutes a day, 6 days a week for 18 months. you can cram your face full of raising cane’s chicken fingers, queso and chips, and margaritas pretty much with impunity when you do that. i have no real excuse not to. and really, after losing 50 pounds and keeping it off for about a year, i like everything about myself better when i weigh around 140 than when i’m pushing 190 like i am now. (yeah, it came back. blah.) so even though the number is arbitrary, it’s a good indicator of the fact that i should get into that damn gym and get myself back to the place where i was happier. (and seriously – i need to spend that money on debt, not new jeans.)

and beyond that, i need to roll the damn window down when i drive home. i need to get out into the air. i need to spend time doing and going. i need to stop sitting in the house all the time. and by extension, the man will have to budge – a LITTLE - from his deep and abiding love of staying inside and staring at stuff on a screen all the time. it’s obvious now that i just cannot be happy staying in the house bored as hell all the time. i need to go and do a lot. he’ll need to go and do a little. that’s fair, i think. [i REFUSE to be like those horrible women i took a hip-hop class with once who dragged their clearly unwilling and incredibly embarrassed husbands along in the name of couple time. bitches, that is not couple time - that is you treating men you're supposed to love as if they were pets or accessories with no agency or feelings of their own. NO.]

i am my own worst enemy here. i know what i need. i just haven’t done it. and everyone around me has suffered for it. mea culpa, y’all. here’s hoping that the sun, cold as it may still be, can snap me out of the funk and kick my tailfeathers out the door. this pent-up business just won’t cut it anymore.

#scintilla13: day 16, prompt 2

[dangit! i don't want this project to be over. damn, how much fun was this? the brain trust of the scintilla project - dominique, kim and onyi - are rock-star women who have stretched my writing brain, and my writing courage, so much this fortnight. i am thrilled to have been a part, and i can't WAIT for next year!]

prompt 2: we bet there was a story you wanted to tell that didn’t line up with any of the prompts. write it anyway.
it doesn’t take much for us to be happy, really. a fast car. either bright, strong alabama sunshine or a big full moon. some rum punch in a plastic water bottle. a willing designated driver. a loud stereo. bon jovi’s slippery when wet. and off we drive to the island.

dauphin island is a barrier island in the gulf of mexico, just off the edge of mobile county. by rights, it should’ve thoroughly washed away by now. the primary geological purpose of a barrier island, after all, is to sacrifice itself to the power of hurricanes to protect the mainland. dauphin island has done this a number of times. and yet, because humans are a stubborn species, and alabamians are among humanity’s A-plus students in stubbornness, dauphin island is covered in homes, buildings, a civil war historic site (damn the torpedoes, y’all), and a marine science lab to which all mobile county public schoolchildren are taken at least once in their elementary-school lives to stare at jellyfish in tanks.

to get to dauphin island from mobile, you start in my old neighborhood and head down the aptly named dauphin island parkway. sounds pretty straightforward, right?
drive to the island
suffice it to say it’s a little wiggly to get down there. but really, that’s sort of the point. at least as far as we’re concerned.

i don’t know how this tradition got started. in the earliest days, we went down to the island because we could get away with being unsupervised. a friend’s mom had that one house; someone’s grandparents had the other. someone always had a key, and the few times we didn’t have the key, we’d just park in the driveway and walk over to the shore. the drive was ancillary; the point was to get down there to walk on the beach, sip illicit beer and be away from our parents. i walked on the beach with the boy who became my graduation-summer love. the man and an ex-girlfriend of his used to go down there to hook up in his car. [this, incidentally, is the weird part about being engaged to someone you've been friends with forever. you were either present for, helped arrange or gossiped about every single one of those sorts of moments in each other's lives. for the sake of the parties involved, i won't tell his best hook-up story from the island, but suffice it to say that a) it's hilarious and b) i just have to know that about my future husband.]

but somewhere along the line, the trip to the island became less about the destination and more about the drive. it was our own mini-road trip, taken largely on a two-lane highway through some of the finest bayfront woods the gulf coast has to offer. we started turning up the music, rolling down the windows and soaking in the feeling of going 60+ miles an hour with no restrictions and no regrets. the core group of road trippers narrowed itself down to one car full of sibling-friends, the kind who know each other’s ins, outs, ups and downs better than most blood relations do.

the vote to make slippery when wet our island-drive anthem wasn’t a vote, per se. one wild night, the girls drank rum punch while the man drove. keep in mind: open container in a moving vehicle was not illegal for passengers until the year 2000 back home. sometimes a girl forgets that. we demanded to hear “you give love a bad name.” it just sort of fits. and once we heard the song, we let the rest of the album play. everyone, the man included, belted out “wanted [WAN-TEEEED!] dead or alive.” something about the excess of big hair and loud triple-tracked guitar just fit the excess of flying down the road with nothing to think about except looking out for cops.

the drive to the island is about feeling free. it’s about being with the people you love. it’s about drinking rum and listening to loud, silly music. the quest to find some semblance of freedom in this life is the defining quest of my life. everything i have done has been designed, rightly or wrongly, to get me closer to free. [damn, did the bodeans nail it in that song, even if i hated that show.] there have been precious few times when i’ve gotten it right, found that freedom, loosened up and let it go. rob sheffield wrote in love is a mix tape, which is the love letter that i would kill to have someone write to me, about his late first wife.

she was the first person on either side of her family to go to college, and she held herself to insanely high standards. she worried a lot about whether she was good enough. it was surprising to see how relieved she seemed whenever i told her how amazing she was. i wanted her to feel strong and free. she was beautiful when she was free.

i identify with this feeling. i have high standards. a lot of times, the realities of my life - my shortcomings, my finances, my responsibilities – rise up to taunt me. i live surrounded by reminders that a) i have very little agency, b) many people have a lot more agency than i do, and c) most of the lack of agency was attained through what looks increasingly like terrible decision-making on my part, making it my fault. there’s not a lot of freedom in my life. 

there are twinkles of transcendence here and there. and, thank the gods in which i don’t believe, i have memories like this to cling to. i can see myself riding shotgun, passing the bottle of rum punch back to my best friends, laughing in the sunshine while jon bon jovi reminds us that he was shot through the heart and we were in fact to blame. maybe that’s why i love going back home to alabama or louisiana so much. here in DC, i am never free. the man thinks of DC as home. rightfully so, i guess; through a transient childhood that bounced him from arkansas to mobile to prattville to mobile in 18 years, he’s lived in DC and the surrounding environs for a steady, uninterrupted clip of 15 years this fall. 

me? nah. this isn’t home. this is where i ended up. this is work, money, hassles, traffic, crowds, idiot neighbors, dumbassed arlington county council members, etc. my man and my parents are here, so that’s nice. i love my friends here. this is a big city full of big-city things (when i have the money to do them, that is – that’s really rare these days, and DC is a cruel town in which to be strapped for cash). and there’s really no better place on paper for us to be. but it’s just… there is no freedom in the DC area.

but back home, there are back roads to drive down. there’s a gulf to stare pensively at, or to wade into, submerge and refresh. there are drive-through daiquiri shops and go-cups. there is etouffee and king cake. there are magnolias, azaleas, oak trees and spanish moss. there is sticky air and lazy magnolia southern pecan. there are the people who remember when, and who love me in spite of it all. when i go home, we load up in the car, we crank the 80s hair-band music, and we travel the back roads. it’s possible to remember when it wasn’t so hard. 

when we drive to the island, i am free. and hopefully, i am beautiful when i am free.