If I Express It, Maybe It Gets Better

One thing good about starting back to work tomorrow after having had one of the best winter breaks ever--and this is the only good thing I have thought of so far--is that I won't have to hear every day the horrible voice of the man who lives down below me. I don't really know if he actually does live there, I don't think I have ever seen him (I only hear him), as I had originally thought who had moved in was three very ugly girls (young women). I wouldn't ordinarily think to describe anyone as ugly, and the fact that all three are grossly overweight has nothing to do with it, but when I happened to run into them waddling across the parking lot and gave them a very friendy "hello", they ignored me entirely, which in this complex (or neighborhood) could mean that they don't understand a word of English (or even have the ability to interpret a smile), or, more likely, actually are very ugly people. Their ignoring my friendly overture lifted any optimistic veil I might have had covering my eyes and I could see quite clearly that the very best word to describe all three of them was "ugly".

It must be that all three girls were moving in, they kept piling in so much junk that boxes and bean bag chairs and every other kind of assorted (ugly) junk filled up even the dining area that is easily seen from the front door. They even filled up their balcony with junk, something that is against the lease, but is something that is generally ignored elsewhere in this complex, as well. As the quality of the clientele here has diminished steadily over the months (to the extent that I feel a rush of surprise and positive energy if I happen to run into somebody here who is actually decent), so have the standards, to the extent that, apparently, there no longer are any standards at all.

The unit below me is like mine, a three-bedroom apartment, so three college-age girls commonly makes sense for that size of an apartment if one isn't a family. In fact, I have finally understood why there is so much moving in and out, which I have observed over the months and determined from some conversations I have had with those doing the moving out--they are singles who have roommates and the roommate moved away for some reason, and, since the tenant couldn't find another roommate, he or she had to move out, too. The other big reason is that if it is a couple, they break up, or get a divorce. The complex is large enough, and the relationships unstable enough, that there is a U-Haul in the parking lot almost every single weekend, including the resultant thrown-out ratty furniture crowding out my parking space...also against the lease, and also generally ignored, of course, because it is impossible to police and it seems that people have lost the ability to police themselves. Which means that I will very soon be treated to a whole forest of dead Christmas trees also crowding out my parking space. For my own (sadly) drying-up Christmas tree, I have found several places run by Los Angeles County where you can for free drop off your trees to be turned into mulch, so that's where my own will be going. By the way, a few days ago, I took to one of the county's hazardous waste disposal three bags of stuff--one filled with expired prescription medications, one filled with expired over-the-counter medications, and the third filled with old grooming products that I no longer use. Imagine, I didn't just throw all that out into our apartment's dumpsters, how weird everyone here would think I must be to not do that!

As ugly as the "three girls" were, they weren't really very noisy, which was a blessing compared to whomever lived there before, the heavy pot smokers who generated smells in addition to their constant fighting and door-slamming noise, not to mention their yippy little dog whom they would put out onto the balcony (instead of walking him like they should), which made his yapping all the more evident to my ears. I seriously contemplated dropping down some poisoned meat, and I love animals and normally would never think of such a thing, but this dog simply did not deserve to live. I prayed for these people to move out, but, you know, be careful what you wish for.

However, after a month of blissful quiet, I soon started to hear the sound of a baby or child crying. Now, this isn't minding that per se, or least, in this case it wasn't the crying itself that was bothering me, but more that it sounded like a child who was possibly being abused. I definitely couldn't hear clearly enough to make any kind of a determination on that score, nor can I explain exactly why that thought would enter my head, but somehow, this didn't quite sound like a baby's "normal" cry, but had some note to it that made me think "abuse". And with three obese ugly girls taking care of it (read: "serious emotional problems and frustrations"), abuse sure seemed like a possibility, but not enough for me to call any kind of authority, but just enough to put me into a state of constant tension whenever I would hear it.

It was soon after that that I began to hear the voice of this hideous man. Again, I don't believe I have ever seen him, but there is some evil quality to his voice that makes me want to vomit. He never seems to speak, he only seems to shout. It is impossible to understand what he is actually saying, because it is in a foreign language, so for all I know, he may be saying "Honey, do you want me to help you with dinner?", but instead it sounds like anger and bullying. I do think it is Spanish, but I have never heard Spanish sound ugly, before, so, again, I think he actually is speaking ugly, angry, bullying words. Anyway, he seriously puts me on edge and the fact that I live so close to such a horrible-sounding man is disturbing, and also a bit frightening, thus the feeling of nausea that overcomes me, as if I, myself, were the child fearing abuse.

Without knowing his story at all, what I can imagine is that he was the "lover" (using that term very loosely) of one of the ugly fat girls, who got impregnated by him and now this is the baby of the two of them, who are not married. He is probably taking no responsibility for this baby at all, but comes by periodically just for some more sex. I can't imagine anyone wanting sex with one of those three girls, whichever one it is, if any of them, but from the sound of him, he can't be too choosey. He probably hates her for her ugliness, though, and he hates her for his sexual need (a man like that doesn't take responsibility for anything, even his own desires; it is all the fault of somebody else). And so it is possible that the abuse of the baby comes from him...in fact, I have started to notice that the two sounds are now often concurrent. Again, not anywhere near enough for me to be conclusive, only negatively imaginative.

Fortunately, I really don't think he lives there, but, instead, comes loudly clomping up the stairs (also disturbing to me) and slammingly enters the door and the shouting begins until he slams the door on his way out and his hobnail boots go stamping on down the stairs and his car-sorely-in-need-of-a-muffler-repair goes booming out of the parking lot. I hate him and want him totally gone. Even if everything I have imagined is 180 degrees away from factual, the hideous sound of his voice, alone, is enough for me to want him removed to a different dimension.

I am sure that all this makes it seem that I live in a truly awful place and, of course, must want to move, myself. Well, I do want to live in a house (living here has made it very clear that I would never buy a unit in a condomium) and have no idea what my future holds, but I actually really love the apartment, itself. And unless I were a millionaire (or maybe even billionaire), I have no idea where I could go where the entire culture, itself, isn't falling apart. Fortunately, except for some noise and a certain feeling of "aloneness" (the negative aspect of "solitude"), my life here is good. There are so many neighborhoods that are much, much worse. From a middle-class point of view, this one is still pretty good. Although I will admit to being disturbed by having discovered just last week that the Spanish-language billboards are now only one major street to the north away (as you travel south from here, the neighborhood goes from middle class to some of the more upper class in the entire San Fernando Valley, but as you travel north from here, well, the billboards being in Spanish tell you what that means).

With the United States being economically more polarized than ever before in its history, and it is predicted to get only worse, the ones who are being hurt are the middle class. The rich class seems to still be untouchable, and the lower class is now the ever-increasing majority. When one reads of people moving out of Los Angeles specifically, and out of California generally, I think the ones doing that moving are the middle class. Again, the rich are still benefitting from the assets that California has to offer, and the poor somehow just keep on piling in, across the border if from no place else.

Strangely enough, I am actually liking Los Angeles more than I ever have before, but still, if I ever manage to hear of (and be convinced of) any place in the world where things are actually getting better (and by that I don't mean China, which most westerners think is the economically booming place, but I think that it is heading for a serious correction, or Africa, some countries of which actually have logged in some of the highest economic growth on the planet, meaning "up from nowhere", so...no), I would visit there to see what it was really like, and maybe even make plans to move there. However, so far, I have not heard of one hint toward anything in that regard. Instead, what I have heard of strikes me as ridiculous; mostly extremely rich Americans moving to what they believe is the real-life version of Atlas Shrugged's "Galt's Gulch", but which is located, not hidden away in the mountains of Colorado, but in southern Argentina. I say, "Argentina, you've got to be kidding me;" that's a country that seems to alternate among dictatorships, socialism, and economic collapse, which one of those cycles is the one that is supposed to be appealing? Of course, I'm not rich enough, or "mover and shaker" enough to be welcome even if it really were a genuine "Galt's Gulch" but as it is, it is a commercial real estate venture that heavily advertises its golf courses and the like and is being sold more like a billionaire's resort except not in a Caribbean paradise. So that one is a "no".

So, for now, like most everyone else, I am stuck with what we've got and attempting to make the best of it. So for me, to quote Nick Vujicic, "Attitude is Altitude".

I Brake For Lemonade Stands

I absolutely have been having the best time this Christmas season, not exactly sure why (although I have generally felt extremely good this whole year), but I think it may have something to do with my having put up a Christmas tree.

This, honestly, is the first time I have ever gotten my own tree. For most of my Christmases, I had gone to my parents’ house, which continued every Christmas (with few exceptions) as long as they were alive. This took me far into my adulthood.

For those few exceptions, I have lived in apartments that were too small to fit any but the smallest (artificial) tree, which sort of counts, but not really.

For the past couple of years, I have been spending the few days immediately surrounding Christmas at the house of my brother and his wife. But they do not decorate for Christmas (but my brother’s wife does the most marvelous COOKING, plus they are a blast to visit, so I am definitely NOT complaining!) I think my brother had his fill of Christmas decorating, because the brunt of that effort our mother put HIM to, mainly because he was always able to get to their house many days before the rest of us were able to make it (remember that our mother had multiple sclerosis which made her bed-ridden, so she could no longer do the decorating herself, which she sorely wanted to do). So HE was one who assembled their large (artificial) Christmas tree, put on all the lights and decorations, and did all sorts of other decorating until the rest of us got there to help. I swear, our mother wanted every inch of their house decorated for Christmas, right down to things hanging on every doorknob, dozens of needle-pointed Christmas theme pillows on all the furniture, and Christmas-oriented hand towels in the all the bathrooms. There wasn’t a square foot of wall space that didn’t have something Christmasy hanging there. And, oh yes, there were Christmas coasters and Christmas barware (you drank VERY well at our parents’ house…my father seemed to stay planted at the bar the whole season, and you WILL partake! Hey, my arm doesn’t need twisting; and if you were a friend of theirs, yours didn’t, either!).

I don’t want to make it look like the rest of us were slackers…at least, not me, anyway, because since our brother was the one who had put most of it all up, the rest of us were the ones who had the job of taking it all DOWN. I think I would rather decorate than undecorate, but that’s how it was and I’m not complaining…I wish we could still do it, parents and all (but if they have a way of checking in on me, they already know that they are thoroughly IN me).

But lately I have felt that something was missing Christmas-spirit-wise and realized that now that I live in a place large enough to easily fit a full-sized, cut Christmas tree, that was what I wanted. And I’ve been able to enjoy it ever since Thanksgiving, and will continue to do so up to New Year’s.

I pretty much knew where I would go buy my tree, a place that is normally a strawberry farm near where I live, one of the very few farms still remaining in the San Fernando Valley (which, once upon a time, was completely agricultural, but Los Angeles spread and spread and spread). They always fill up an immense lot with beautiful trees.

Since I figured I’d have to somehow get it home, myself, and I really wasn’t into getting involved with tying it onto the roof of my car or some such (guaranteed that it would slip off before I got to the next block), I felt that I’d have to get one small enough that it would either fit into the trunk of my car, or maybe my backseat (uh oh, tree needle city!).

However, fortunately, they had signs everywhere on the lot advertising that they would deliver (for a reasonable fee), and when I checked on it, I learned that they would actually deliver whatever tree I bought that very day (THAT sold me)! Good thing, too, because I saw that the four-foot trees just weren’t going to cut it, I wanted something at least my height or it wouldn’t satisfy my desires.

The truth was that every single tree they had was full and beautiful and perfectly shaped. They were all lined up in perfect rows by the species, starting with the least expensive ones, the Douglas Firs, and going up from there to the most expensive, which were Noble something…but I actually liked the Douglas Firs the best, so I picked out a 6 ½ foot one that seemed to call out my name (like a puppy in a pet shop), so that’s the one I bought. The woman who rang up my sale was a jolly elf, laughing and full of cheer and so happy that I was happy, so the entire purchasing experience was a delight.

And the delivery occurred without a hitch, with two people who carried my tree up to my apartment on the third floor and set it down in my living room right where I wanted it. Immediately, the whole house smelled like I was camping in an evergreen forest (which I now have a yearning to go do some weekend!), a feeling that has not diminished. It is such a grand atmosphere to come home to after work.

I had in my storage unit (sadly, not yet emptied out…one of the projects I hope to work on this winter break) some Christmas decorations that I got from my mother’s collection after both parents had died (most of which she had made), but that storage unit is so solidly packed that I was unable to find that box or those boxes; it would have required emptying the whole thing out, and I had neither the room nor the time to deal with that. So I realized that I had to buy some new decorations and strings of lights, with the idea of leaving some room my mother’s things for NEXT year. (Didn’t quite work out that way…it was hard to estimate and what I bought was enough to fill up my whole tree.)

Shopping for Christmas decorations (at Target) was another joy. Families were there in all of the aisles and I could hear the excited voices of children that filled up my heart. “Oh Mommy, look at THIS, can we buy this, can we, please?” So sweet. Of course, I loved buying things for my own tree, but I truly loved being there among the families who were buying things for THEIR tree. I kind of feel like I am with them, even if I am not. But I would share in the fun with them and would laugh and joke with them, and everybody seemed to enjoy this sense of shared happiness. Why not do that?

Back at home, I put on some good music that I could sing along with as I worked, and I truly did have a blast decorating the tree, which ended up requiring four strings of lights (I had to go back to buy two more strings; two just wasn’t enough!). My heart just soared. I knew that probably no one else was ever going to see this (my apartment really isn’t quite yet ready for “prime time”, as I say, so I have not yet gotten into entertaining mode), but it is actually okay to simply treat ones self, in fact, that is now one of the main lessons that I like to share (to whomever will listen to me if the subject comes up)…you MUST treat yourself and not deny yourself because “it is only you”. So, please, do things for YOU. Yes, do things for others, but don’t leave yourself out. Make your life beautiful.

Here are some pictures of my tree, which I realize probably looks pretty pedestrian as Christmas trees go, I guess, and pardon some of the nearby junk (more winter break projects!), but I love it, and it looks so pretty in the evening when the white lights buried in among the feathery green branches are twinkling (hard to properly photograph THAT effect), so it’s all good.




And now that “I am participating”, I have been appreciating the Christmas decorations that everybody else has done, some of which is mind-blowingly spectacular, and some of which is simple yet still wonderful, and I am thankful for their efforts since it seems that they are communicating a certain feeling out to the general public (I, too, have some external decorations, a garland of purple lights along my balcony railing along with a Christmas snowman wind sock blowing in the breeze out there; for some reason, I am the only one in this immense apartment complex who has any external decorations). Much fewer people out in the community compared to previous years have decorated, though, which is troublesome (Increased unemployment? Continuing economic crisis?). I think there was more decorating for HALLOWE’EN (which I also did, mostly as an advertisement to the kids out there on the street that there was candy to be gotten at my house; that’s where the purple lights came from, which I bought at a Hallowe’en store—I figured I could use purple for Christmas, too, which I couldn’t do with orange as that would obviously be left over from Hallowe’en; those were the only colors sold at the Hallowe’en store. But purple is good.).

Decorating has been very sparse at work, too (absolutely nothing in the school’s reception lobby). This year, there was no “Secret Angel” festivities (gift-giving that would go on for a whole week and that usually garnered ever-increasing office decorating), but the woman who normally organized that didn’t want to do it this year, and another person who volunteered to take her place lived, according to many complaining people, “too far away” (okay, so she wasn’t a five minute drive down the hill...!). The kind woman who volunteered ended up with only six participants besides herself (with me being one of them), so she said “Let’s just do a simple gift-exchange and pot luck lunch here at work” (not a whole week of giving like we’d do when Secret Angel had twenty or thirty people participating), the kind where the first person opens their choice of wrapped gifts (NOT white elephant gifts, but something new that cost under $30), and then the second person can steal their gift or open a wrapped gift, etc. Some people hate that game (the “stealing” part), others really love it. But with us having so few people, there really wasn’t much stealing go on, but I think everybody ended up with something that they liked. Anything that anybody bought was worth having, so there really was no reason to take something from somebody else.

So that was fun, but the offices didn’t look much like Christmas (or any of the other winter season holidays).

I felt like there was a lot of generous gift-giving from our school’s parents and from some of the employees, though; I ended up with way more than I had ever gotten before (boy that sounds materialistic, but that’s not what I meant; what I mean is that suddenly at the last moment, a “lot of Christmas” came out).

I couldn’t possibly afford to give gifts to every employee (there are more than a hundred), and my administrative position doesn’t really “allow” me to choose favorites, so I had started the habit of giving gifts to those who chose to give gifts to me. Again, in a way, there’s something not quite right about that, but I honestly haven’t figured out a way around it, because I am constitutionally unable to simply receive gifts without giving anything in return. Fortunately, it’s usually the same people who give to me each year, so I already put them on my shopping list at the beginning of the season. However, there are often surprises; this year there were five surprises. I had prepared for these surprises by already having on hand something nice but generic to give in those cases, but some people fooled me by not giving me a small loaf of homemade nut bread or something like that, but really giving me something amazing and that took specific thought. So THEN I really had to SCRAMBLE to get them something somewhat equal in thought to what they had given me, which can be extremely hard to do at the last minute. Thursday evening, I spent several hours at Pier 1, which was an appropriate store for one of those who had given me a spectacular gift and which I figured might have something good for the others. I kept finding things that I wanted for myself, actually, but for the most part I stuck to my plan of finding things for the people who had surprised me.

While I was at Pier 1, a woman came over to me and said, “You are a man, I would like you to answer a question for which I want an honest answer.” Uh oh. While I am always quite pleased to be a “stand in” for my gender, I sometimes wonder if I am “man enough” to do so! But anyway, she stated her problem; she had to buy several gifts for some teenage boys and some grown men, all of whom live in France, so her task was to give them gifts that they would like but that didn’t cost a huge amount of money, and that would not be very expensive to SHIP. She said that she had spent several hundred dollars just in shipping costs alone, last year, and she just couldn’t do that again. I understand her problem, because I used to give gifts to people overseas and the shipping costs killed me, so I simply stopped doing it. She then went on say that the girls and women were EASY, and she proceeded to point out dozens of things right in the vicinity of where we were standing that would work for the females, but, obviously, none of that would work for the males (and she was right about that).

Well, she gave me quite a challenge, but one that I was internally ADAMANT that I had to solve for her. It’s not often that I get to speak for all male-kind, and FRENCH ones, to boot! But gee, surely I ought to be able to figure that one out. But before she spoke, she outlined all the things she had already done BEFORE, thus instantly wiping out every idea that had immediately come to my mind. So now that I was tapped out, I kind of just stood there hemming and hawing to the extent that she decided that I was going to be no help and so thanked me for my willingness, but conceded that the task was impossible.

But it is NOT impossible, but give me some TIME, okay? I asked her if she was going to be in the store for a while longer, and she said “Yes”, that she still have some other shopping to do there, for the GIRLS.

I said, “Okay, I have to do some more shopping here, too, so let me think about it as I look around and if I come up with some good ideas, I go find you.”

She answered that that was a good idea, although I could hear the sigh in her voice that meant she never expected to see me again.

However, as it turned out, I had gotten only about two aisles away from her, when I got my answers that I was going to share with her. Fortunately, I found her nearby.

I told her that it was almost certain that the teenage boys were into video or computer games and that there would be no limit to their capacity to absorb and enjoy those. All she would have to do would be to find out from their mother (or mothers) what system they used, Playstation, X-Box, Microsoft, or whatever, because a game for the wrong system would be useless, and while she was at it, maybe she could find out what KIND of game each one liked, such as role-playing, battle games, life simulation games, building games, travelling games, violent fighting games, “Car Theft” games, sports games (basketball, football, hockey, etc.). I said that fortunately with computer games, the software standards are international, unlike, say, movie DVDs, which have to conform to a regional standard in order to be playable.

Also, computer games come on a disc, so they would be very light and inexpensive to ship.

She LOVED that idea and said that it would be snap to find out from their mothers the right system and type of game. She also seemed to know where she could find these games (I would have suggested the two places that I knew, WalMart and Fry’s Electronics, but she seemed okay on that score). I had given her THE acceptable and useful answer for the teenage boys.

As to the adult men, I said that EVERYBODY likes music, and CDs, of course, are as light and inexpensive to ship as the video games would be. Now, she might not know what taste these men have in music, or what music they may already have and what they may want, but I had a solution for that, too. I told her to go home and get on her computer and do a search for “Concord Records” (actually, when I checked it out at home afterwards, the right spot is “Concord Music Group”, but Google would send her to the right place). Concord Records would be a supplier of rare, collector, or unique artist retrospective CDS or CD sets that those in France (and in the US, as well) might not be in a position to be familiar with. I know all about Concord Records, as Hal Gaba the OWNER of that company, was on the Board of our school’s Trustees and was someone whom I personally knew (unfortunately, he died a few years ago of cancer). He, and television producer Norman Lear (his partner in that venture) bought up some languishing record companies that happened to own an incredible treasure house of classic jazz studio tapes, material that HAD NEVER EVER BEEN MADE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC, by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Theloneous Monk, John Coltrane, and dozens of others. This is stuff you really can’t get elsewhere.

I said that, stereotypically, the French have very serious artistic tastes and the French have always welcomed jazz; in fact, in the early portions of the 20th century, black jazz artists from America found a powerful welcome in France, where they did not suffer discrimination, so even if these men didn’t specifically like jazz, they would still appreciate having one of these CDs, which maybe even would open up for them an appreciation of this high quality level of jazz.

Okay, so this woman now was really excited, first the video games, and now this, yes, yes, these were the answers, and she was going home right away and search for and then log on to Concord Records. I had solved her male-gift-giving-problem! Wow, I was so happy to help!

Now, here’s something else that happened that same Thursday evening. I had left work to take to the post office some very important mailings that had to be postmarked that day (December 15 was the deadline). Instead of taking my normal route home, I took a road that went down the hill to a spot that would take me quite close to the post office that I was going to use. It was already quite a dark evening anyway, but it had been a cold, rainy day, which deepened the sense of darkness.

Just as I came to a curve in the road, I saw a bright, “glow in the dark” hand-lettered sign that said “Write Your Teacher’s Name, Unique Christmas Gifts Here!” and a young boy and his mother sitting in front of their house at a table covered with what looked like a collection of small potted plants. Now, you remember the bumper sticker that people used to have, “I Brake For Small Animals”? I think maybe there was another one that said, “I Brake For Garage Sales”. I ought to have one made for me that says, “I Brake For Lemonade Stands”, and by that I mean, generically, anything that a child or a group of children have enterprisingly got together to sell, I will pull over for and buy from them. First of all, it is such a pleasure to deal with excited children, but also, I like to support what they are doing, which I think is a valuable help for their future. I want them to know that what they are offering will have an appeal to people, even though probably a discouraging quantity of cars will simply drive on by. So, in the past, I have bought lemonade dozens of times, large pink grapefruits that kids had grown in their yard, cleverly-carved miniature pumpkins that kids were selling prior to Hallowe’en one year, and more high school car washes than I can count.

Well, I WAS on my way to buy gifts at Pier 1 (described above) after going to the post office, so this one was in all ways a no-brainer. I had to find a place to turn around, and then wound my way back to the house, and since it was a busy road with a curve, the only reasonable place to park was in their driveway, which I did. I said it was quite a dark evening, but when that boy and his mother saw me enter their driveway, it was as if a spotlight had turned on. They were so HAPPY…and remember, they HAD been sitting out in the RAIN to do this (but at the moment, the rain had blessedly stopped).

What they had for sale were potted Christmas cactuses (that’s a smart idea right there), but they were better than simply one plant potted. The boy (whose whole idea this was), had put together little artistically arranged miniature gardens with several sizes of Christmas cactuses, some of which were blooming red and some of which were going to bloom soon, and also what his mother called “Thanksgiving cactuses” that were soon to bloom white, all set with beautiful stones in a way that was what I would call “casually zen-like” (if “zen” even CAN be casual…). Also, the boy had painted the perimeter of the flower pots below the lip or rim with blackboard paint, and had “planted” in the cactus garden a nicely-made brass “wire” that held up a piece of white chalk that was inside of a carefully spiraled loop. The idea of this was that you give this gift to your teacher, for example, and you could write her name on the blackboard portion of the pot, “#1 Teacher”, or whatever you wanted, or one could write and erase their own messages, just like writing on a blackboard.

And the prices were reasonable ($10, $15, or $20 depending upon the size) and intelligently set in that they didn’t require messy change-giving. I would have bought one of them regardless, simply to support the boy’s effort, but honestly, I LOVED them, and bought one in the $15 size that already had a really nice red bloom going on and several white ones that they told me would open in about a week. At the time I figured this would be a good “generic” gift to give to someone who had surprised me on the last day of school (Friday), but honestly, once I got it home and saw it clearly in the light of my kitchen, I realized that I liked this so much that I decided to keep it for myself. Up until now, I hadn’t had any plants in my apartment, but my Christmas tree (even though it was cut and will have to be thrown out after Christmas) seems to have risen within me the desire to have a plant in the house.

It ends up that while the boy goes to a different private school from the one where I work, the mother said that they knew a family whose children had gone there, and she told me the name and I knew who they were. Also, the woman told me that her mother’s best friend is the mother of one of our substitute teachers, whom, when she told me her name, I described as “a goddess”, and absolutely IS the first substitute teacher that any teacher of ours calls when they are sick, and, in fact, that teacher is basically there on our campus every single day. So that was fun, having those connections, and I am sure the mother will mention me to those people and say that I bought one of the boy’s cactus gardens. But I hope that he sells a lot, as he should. When I told one of my friends about this at work, she loved the idea of it, especially the idea of being able to write a message on the pot, so she told me she would go down there after work to buy one, too, which I hope she did.

I had to research on-line how to take care of this cactus, and found out that unlike most cacti, this kind comes from the JUNGLE, not the desert, so it doesn’t require, or like, hot sun baking down on it, which means that it doesn’t have to be outside, but can live quite well indoors (it does like LIGHT, though). Perfect.

This morning, as I was making my breakfast, I saw that beautiful red bloom with those waiting white buds, so perfect for Christmas, and instantly this blog entry was written in my mind, so here it is, now, all ready for you.

I hope you have a glorious Christmas, and may you thoroughly enjoy the joyfulness of the season.

"Gerry-Meandering" or Suddenly Understanding Existentialism

It's getting more and more frustrating to contend with "canned" sites on the Internet that make me feel that they don't deserve to receive my attention any more. Yeah, I guess we really are just "advertising fodder" for them all so that they can earn Google money. They just want your presence, but they're not really interested in your content. (And sites like Facebook just keep tabs on everything you do on line so that they can sell the information to the government.)

I used to love to write movie reviews for the Internet Movie Database, but normally won't do it anymore unless I am an earlier writer in the process (such as when a movie first comes out). Who will manage to read what I write when there are hundreds and hundreds of other reviews?

But I recently watched a movie that I had ordered from Netflix that really stuck with me, a movie that apparently most people hated, but that I loved. That seems to be becoming a pattern with me...a movie that most people loved, I hated, and movies that most people hated, I love. (There are exceptions to that, of course...I am not completely perverse.) Well, one example of that was the Gus Van Sant movie, Elephant, which I viewed as an outstanding work of art, but that a shocking number of people hated (and definitely failed to understand). The usual complaint from haters is that a certain movie is "boring". Well, in response to that, I would like to quote a line from a Pet Shop Boys song, which seems appropriate here: "We were never bored because we were never boring." So, these people are bored, because they are boring, which I take to mean that their mind runs along the same shallow and simple channel and so anything, such as a work of art, that doesn't run down that same shallow and simple channel "bores" them. Their mind isn't engaged, because they are unable to grasp what is in there.

So, the movie that I recently watched was also a Gus Van Sant movie, Gerry, that I also took as being a great work of filmmaking art. I had no thought of writing a review of it, though, until I saw so very MANY negative reviews of the movie on the Netflix site. I mean, many people really, really HATED this movie, thought it was the absolute worst they had ever seen. They couldn't even imagine how anyone could possibly like it, and if they did claim to like it, there simply had to be something very wrong with them. Oh yeah, projection much?

So, against my better judgment, I decided to write a positive review of the film for the Netflix site, and I don't bang these things out, I take a great deal of time with them, so imagine my dismay when I finally got it the way I wanted it, and submitted it, that the site wouldn't take it because it exceeded its 2,000 words limit. I have no idea how many words long the review actually is (they don't even extend you the courtesy of giving you a running word count to help you out), but I don't really care; if they have to put an arbitrary limit on it, then they won't get this review from me, it's that simple. I don't need them to edit, or abbreviate me. Nobody would read it, anyway, as they already have something like 300 reviews. It was just my perverse pleasure to post a good review of the film in contrast to all the bad ones, but no, they lose out.

But I had written this thing and didn't want my whole evening to have been a waste, so I went over to the Internet Movie Database to post it there (despite their also having several hundred other reviews, so, again, nobody would really read mine), only to discover that they had an arbitrary word limit, as well, even worse than the Netflix site, 1,000 words (and, again, did not offer the courtesy of providing an actual word count). I didn't even bother to check out Amazon.com (who, maybe, HAS no limit, but I don't even want to check anymore), I was so disgusted by all these sites that I decided to heck with it, I will post it HERE on my OWN site, even though of all places, this has the least chance of any that anyone will read it, especially since this isn't even a site, like Netflix or IMDB, where a person is curious about this movie and maybe wanting to read a review of it!

Oh well. Maybe somebody WILL read this and actually be interested in renting this movie and watching it. (But they'll probably hate it!)

First, though, I better explain a little bit of what the movie is about (which was not part of my original review, since that would already be explained on Netflix or IMDB). The movie is deceptively simple. Two guys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck...Casey Affleck was also one of the writers of the film), both calling themselves by the same name of "Gerry", are on some kind of a road trip, driving across the desert. After a long while of silent driving (the entire movie has no more than about two paragraphs of dialogue), they pull over and go on a little hike into the desert. There is a sign that says "Wilderness Trail", and apparently they allude to having some kind of a destination, which I am guessing is something like an interesting view point that they have decided to go look at. But they also decide to veer off the trail, either to take a short cut or they are simply interested in making their own way to the point.

They walk a while, and then become aware that they aren't really sure where they are. They have somehow lost sight of where the normal trail was, which, of course, would be totally easy to do, out there in the desert. So they deviate again in an effort to rejoin the original trail, but really, all they do is make their situation worse. As they continue to walk along, they kind of deflect from bringing into full consciousness the idea that they truly are lost. Instead of, say, sitting down and thinking the situation through logically, such as determine which directions were which, or setting up an awareness of various landmarks, they decide to split up and search for various higher grounds from which they may get their bearings, and then rejoin each other, but their plan sounds kind of vague and unclear, so, of course, this plan isn't successful but I guess there was some small victory in that at least they weren't permanently separated, which could happen, also.

This is pretty much the gist of the whole movie, they're attempting to find their way and putting a great deal of energy into the task, but their situation just continues to get worse and more desperate but without them ever actually squarely facing up to the full reality of their situation (as if to admit it would be to succumb to it). Watching this, I kept thinking of "Jews wandering in the desert for 40 years in search of the promised land", and deciding that that HAD to be a metaphor, that no tribe of people could actually manage to DO that. (FORTY YEARS?) I don't think that had anything to do with this movie, that was just what was going through my mind.

Okay, now starts the review that I tried to write for Netflix:

I'll start with my favorite scene of in the movie, which I view as "pure Gus Van Sant" just the way I like him. It was the eternally-long trudging scene, crunch crunch crunch, while they still had the energy to power forward, two vital guys, in which the two Gerries were filmed close-up on the side of their faces with one of them just slightly in front, but then he would sometimes briefly fall back, but they both nevertheless were kept right in the frame as they continued forward, for such a long time. To me, who has been an actor in films, this was the very essence of acting at its most difficult, and really shows the ability of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon to keep this up for such a long shot. It is so much easier to play a part and to naturally animate your face when you are having something to say, when there is a give and take in a conversation, but here, there was none of that, just two guys walking in a steady but desperate rhythm with various thoughts running through their head and the situation realistically playing across their faces.

I love Gus Van Sant's tracking shots, so amazingly beautiful, and the little short at the end of the DVD (if that's how you saw this movie) that showed them filming a scene with the "camera dolly railroad tracks" going almost infinitely across the white salt flats gives some hint of how this kind of camera work was achieved. But it was the actors that truly showed the magic of THEIR craft in this amazing scene. YOU think it is easy...but it's like a staring contest with yourself, and unless you are of that level, you will lose.

From Elephant I had fallen in love with Gus Van Sant's style of filming close-up to his performers' faces to the extent that you become totally smitten by their humanity, and so I was entranced by this particular scene in "Gerry", which made it anything but boring. Maybe one has to have actually acted in a movie in which a camera was held close to their face for ten minutes like that to truly understand the power of such a shot and the skill of the actor who can deal with it.

Many of the "hated the movie" reviewers couldn't believe "how stupid" these two guys must have been to "go off on a hike in a desert with no water," blah blah blah, (how easy to pass that judgment while sitting comfortably in your living room or safe in your civilized movie theater) yet it was clear to me that this was just meant to be a short hike, maybe a half-hour's walk over to a particular view point...YOU wouldn't bring along anything, either. (They were smokers, so yes, they did happen to have matches or a lighter, so at least they could make fire, but this had nothing to do with "preparation".) And how VERY easy it is to get lost if you aren't paying attention and it can happen in the dense woods as well as in a stark desert where there really is no clear trail. Or anywhere, for that matter. I submit that the vast majority of the people in the world are just as lost, they just aimlessly trudge through life without any understanding of anything at all, and when things get bad, they just keep making them worse, having no clue as to what else to do. The whole state of our country, today, is a perfect example of that (any
country...just pick one).

I also loved the cinematography, and the views of the great vistas and rolling clouds and so on perfectly reminded me of a situation I had gotten myself into, in which I was attempting to drive between Reno and Sacramento one late December evening when a sudden "Donner Party Killing" snowstorm came up that caused the closing of both I-80 and US 50 over the mountains, but I heard trucker's conversing on my CB radio, telling each other that the way was clear if one went north on 395 and then
took California 70 west over, so I tried that. Unfortunately, the blizzard overtook us all on that route, too, with snowfall shooting onto the windshield so heavy you could hardly see to drive, so all the trucks simply pulled over to the side of the highway to hunker in for the night. I could not do that in a small-sized convertible, with the closed soft top, I would probably freeze to death, so I had no choice but to soldier on, blizzard or no blizzard.

Ultimately, along California 70, I could no longer even see where the road was any more, the snow was so heavy, I was just driving across white snow through the woods in a car that was not a four-wheel drive. I understood that my situation was desperately dangerous, yet there was no solution other than to just keep on going the best I could and hope that the car didn't break down or the way become entirely impassable.

Who knows if I was even driving in the correct direction any more. But there was one magical moment when I happened to look sideways into the snowy woods and was amazed at how beautiful it was, which I thought was ironic to suddenly perceive that while I was actually in the midst of serious danger. The beautiful scenes in this movie reminded me of that experience. I felt that my awareness of that beauty kept me going, gave me hope, but humans do have an amazing ability to continue when they
have to and often that dogged determination is ALL you have.

I suddenly felt in this movie a desperate fear that these guys simply would NOT make it, because it had gotten to the point where I could see no way out for them. I was actually praying out loud for them to finally stumble onto the road, because it would be INTOLERABLE if they did not make it! One might wonder why I would even care, but I consider this an example of the filmmakers' genius that I DID care, that I was made to see that their human frailty and being tired and lost and having no idea what to do about it yet still trying while there were still some twitching muscle fiber left to move them was my own, as well. I was filled with great compassion, and imagine being brought to that in a movie where "nothing" happens and it is "boring", yet few among us have any kind of life that, if seen from a distance by a stranger, is any less boring than what we were watching in this film (yet how precious it is to us).

Maybe this is why so many people hated and couldn't stand this movie; because it did not offer them the escape that they so desperately attempt to keep right in front of their face so that they won't fully get how tenuous their own situation is. Instead of a "momentary hike over to a view point," this movie rubbed their face in the hard, gritty sand of their life's actual helplessness. Just what tiny little change could occur in their life that would suddenly ruin everything? I think the nagging fear of that, whatever it is, runs very, very deep in our human nature. The truth is, we thought we'd "conquered Thebes", but maybe it'll end up we're just "rock-marooned" without a "sand mattress".

Oh well, that was my "too long for the movie sites" review, ending with some terms and situations that were mentioned in the movie, which would make some sense to anyone who sees the movie.

I decided to look up the meaning of the word "existentialism" (which I felt like this movie had to be the essence of), and lo and behold, oh wow, yes it is!

Here is what the Wikipedia says about Existentialism: "...philosophical thinking begins with the human subject--not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by...a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world." Also, the entry states that existentialists felt that "traditional academic philosophy was too abstract and remote from concrete human experience", and that "Soren Kierkegaard, regarded as the father of existentialism, maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom."

That's exactly what this movie was about. When Gus Vant Sant focused his camera on the faces of these two lost boys trudging energetically across the desert in extremely long, steady, tracking shots, he was showing the acting, feeling, living human individual, and being lost in the desert, they for sure were disoriented and confused in a world that was alien to them (meaningless and absurd). What could be a more concrete example of human experience than walking, walking, walking...I mean, mankind covered this entire earth in search of...whatever, all at first done on foot. These boys in the film were actually trying to save their life, which, again, I would say, would be an expression of passion and sincerity in a most basic way, and they certainly were faced with despair, angst, absurdity, and even boredom (walking, walking, walking)...it was BOREDOM that was most experienced by the film's viewers (those who didn't understand the richness of what this film was offering).

I think it may be too much for people to be made to experience their own desperation and so they fight to reject it. Yet it was these same people who rejected this movie who also dissed the boys for not "preparing for their trek in the desert"; yet what preparations can one make when they don't even know that they are in trouble?

Speak Out, Children!

This little entry is a result of my having finally watched a movie that I ended up detesting, which everyone else apparently loved, which is typical. The movie was Waiting For Superman, a socialist's idea of what is wrong with education in America and what they think needs to be done to fix it. Why do I say it was "a socialist's idea"? Because it was directed by David Guggenheim, the same man who directed Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which was "man-made global warming" propaganda...uh, excuse me, climate change propaganda, because, since the Earth never dangerously warmed up as it was touted it would do, it became more all-encompassing to blame mankind whether the Earth warms up or cools down.

Because it is all about laying a global blanket of government control over every single human action, and what more reason to do so than to "save the Earth"? Since there truly can no longer be a "Big Brother" to worship (since everyone knows that "Big Brother" will somehow end up participating in some kind of a sex scandal and therefore not worthy of any admiration)--unless you live in North Korea, where the "big brother" is "Ill"--it works out much better to impose a "Giant Gaia" that is blissfully free of any human foible. And this one can become quite as angry and punishing as any Old Testament God, as shown by one of the most powerful pictures I have ever seen, which I happened to come across again last night:



That's a "Thailand beach scene" from the Tsunami that occurred several years ago. At first glance, all you see in that photo is rubble, but if you zoom in, you will see the picture is also filled with human bodies. That's what can happen on Gaia, but it isn't hurting Gaia one bit, it only hurts living beings and their constructs. As for Gaia, she just keeps on going on and on, and will continue to do so eons after we are all long gone.

As I was washing dishes this morning, I realized that in America, the skill of persuasion techniques, in other words, "mass media", have been honed to laser sharpness so that there no longer is the need for any bloody conquering of the people and their freedom, like, say, in Lenin's Russia or Mao Tse Tung's China. Instead, the majority of the people are so brainwashed that no weapon needs to be drawn, they just offer up their wrists and beg to have the chains locked on. And these days, it seems that the average academic with a PhD is even spouting the same propaganda. On-line philosopher, Stefan Molyneux, whom I greatly admire, call the "academic class" the modern-day version of "the priesthood" from the Dark Ages.

But before you get to being fully propagandized by that college-level priesthood, you first have to get through elementary and high school. And thus comes in Waiting For Superman.

Now, please don't get me wrong...I am very much in favor of "education", but I am NOT in favor of "schooling". I remember back on September 11, 2001, the famous video clip of "deer-in-the-headlights" President Bush in that Florida classroom having just had news of the second jet crash into the World Trade Tower whispered in his ear. Immediately, everybody got it wrong. First, there was constant talk about "Bush reading a story about a little girl with a goat to school children." And second, there was talk all about Bush, himself, and his reaction...did he show utter incompetence instead of hopping into action ("We were being ATTACKED!"), or does the mask of his face indicate that he KNEW this was going to happen, or something else something else, yammer yammer yammer.... I say "yammer yammer yammer" because as much as people discuss these things, they will never know the actual answer, because falseness and misconceptions, whichever ones become manipulated into the mainstream, if those serve the purpose of the politically powerful and "approved historians", they will end up becoming "the truth" that will forever be taught and believed by the majority.

I very quickly understood that no matter how much "expert analysis" there was, President Bush's face wasn't going to have revealed anything to us so discussing THAT was a waste of time. But where I placed my attention was back on that first actual fact that was immediately twisted around...it was NOT President Bush reading to the children, it was the CHILDREN reading to President Bush. And how they read chilled me to the bone.

One of the things that most shocks me these days is how quickly and how bold-facedly the mainstream media will lie, even when the evidence of the opposite is right there in front of everybody's face! This is double-speak in action. Anyone who ever saw that video clip KNEW that Bush was not reading to the children, the children were reading to Bush, and yet, all you ever heard was "Bush reading a story to school children". Why am I making a big deal out of this? Why does it matter? Shouldn't it matter when you hear the news media and everyone around you parroting the same twisting of a simple fact that you saw with your own eyes? And why did they do that? I guess it was because it "softened" the President, made him more compassionate and loving (because maybe they had some understanding of what was soon going to be coming down the pike...Homeland Security, TSA, recording everybody's telephone conversations and e-mail, never-ending war with the Middle East, torture of prisoners, ever-deepening violation of the Bill of Rights); "Aw, there he was when this evil enemy was attacking us, reading a story to school children!" (and it was even a whole school of black children, which makes it even better!). Oh, what a nice President he is!

I don't mind people thinking he was a nice President, if he truly is, but let's have it be based on reality, not propaganda.

But, even worse, and this is my main point, was, as I said above, how those school children read to him. They were like Nazi soldiers goose-stepping past an Adolph Hitler with his arm held up in "Heil" pose. This is how I imagine the school children read in North Korea today. A very militarized, in unison, marching to a teacher beating a lecturn with stick (hidden message--we can beat YOU with this stick if you get out of line) form of reading, and it didn't even have to be in English, just meaningless sounds uttered on command, for there was no indication that the students had the slightest command or understanding of anything they were reading. This was really just a DRILL. They call this reading, they call this teaching, I call this boot camp for cogs in the lowest machine we've got. Yes, THIS must be the dream of the political elite for black children in school. And since white kids all want to be black, now, listening to hip hop, making up rap rhymes, calling themselves by rapper names, wearing baggy clothes falling off their butt, making gang signs whenever a photo is taken of them, they'll be the ones next up for the "military school" hopper. Well, America has no jobs for them, anyway, so why not? There's plenty of room for them in prison, where they can make license plates (California) or check the accuracy of state income tax filings (Idaho) or clean up trash along the highways (North Carolina), etc. Now THAT'S Obama's "public service work camps" for you!

And our President was there, visiting a school whose "reading program really works"! (This isn't against Bush personally; any one of them could have been there.)

So what do the makers of Waiting For Superman think "really works"? And, oh, in case you didn't get this, what "shows" what "really works" is getting better scores on standardized government proficiency tests. Shall I say that again--getting better scores on standardized government proficiency tests, in other words, how well did they learn taught "FACTS" that the government wants them to learn. There is no such thing as a government "entrepreneurial" proficiency test, or an "inventor" proficiency test, or a "thinking in a dimension so far unknown to the rest of us" proficiency test. Actually, I found myself accidentally writing "efficiency" test instead of "proficiency" test, so even my own right brain understood before my (government taught) left brain did, that that's what these tests really are, efficiency tests. How well have they learned the skills that their masters want them to learn.

Skills are for workers, whether manual or clerical and maybe even managerial. Employees.

Thomas Edison was kicked out of school because "he could not learn", which nowadays would mean "he couldn't learn skills". Yet while still a child, he made a fortune repairing an old printing press and using it to publish a newspaper while he worked in the baggage compartment of a passenger train. And then, of course, after that, he became an inventor. (There is, of course, a controversy about how much he actually invented and how he much he grabbed someone else's ball and then successfully ran with it, but then the same could be said about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or even the youngest billionaire in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.) Or, how about John Stuart Mill, who had an estimated IQ of 200 (compare that with Einstein's IQ of 160), who could not and did not learn to read until he was 12 years old. I guess you could say that John Stuart Mill would have been sent to "the drop out factory".

But where does Waiting For Superman find the kind of standardized-test-taking-skills-improvements that they think comes out of better schools? Well, schools that have better teachers, for one thing, but also schools that are closer to what I think of as the "totalitarian" ideal...schools with LONGER HOURS, schools that operate ALL YEAR ROUND, EVEN ON SATURDAYS, and STARTING KIDS OFF MUCH EARLIER (all of which, by the way, really works out for working-class parents who have to struggle to obtain a place to keep their kids during that otherwise "empty" 3:00 to 6:00 after school period). If the motivation of the state is to separate control of the children from their parents, these concepts work out really well for them. There was even an elementary school boarding school that this movie was recommending (with, good God, THREE children per dorm room), so if the motivation was to take the children away from their families, this was the ultimate!

This whole thing actually reminded me of Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel, Ender's Game, in which the Earth was eternally at an inter-galactic war and so the (global) government was breeding special "military geniuses" whose entire purpose was to be soldiers in this inter-galactic war and they took them away from their families (but it was considered an honor to be chosen), put them in a special school, and started them off with this military training very, very early. It's interesting that the Earth's enemy was a race of intelligent beings that were "ant-like", and so I saw that it must have been fitting to breed a special class of human "soldier ants" whose lives would be sacrificed for the planet in order to fight this "ant" enemy.

Because, again, none of this is to truly "educate" them, but to indoctrinate them and then train them for a specific level of task that the government wants them to willingly fill. It is NOT about these children discovering and understanding who they are and what they really want, since, of course, they have few moments to devote to that crucial discovery. No solitary time, no time to play, no summers off to explore, just drill drill drill.

Maybe people differ with me about what an education really is. I will have to use my own example, growing up and going to school. This is something I noticed when I was in high school. In almost all my classes, there was a particular girl with whom I felt I was in competition for getting the better grades. But one day my junior year in high school, I had a discussion with her that revealed to my way of thinking that she really wasn't very smart at all. In a flash I understood that she really didn't actually "know" anything, but she was extremely good at memorizing. I am terrible at memorizing, and so I very often fail to do it, so if it is a "facts" recitation that you need, I very well may come up empty. But she, on the other hand, could call up those facts in a flash, but a conversation with her will reveal that she doesn't really understand those facts at all (or draw any inferences from them), she can only parrot them back out. I learned, then, that there are two kinds of students, the "memorizers" and the "figure-outers", and so often it is the memorizers who come across as the better students. And yet, who is really more valuable in the long run are those who can figure things out, which to me means figuring out ANYTHING, regardless of subject (and, especially, cross-subject), so it really doesn't MATTER what you actually "learn", you can figure it out on your own. And, especially now, thanks to computers, facts can all be at your fingertips, but until we have highly-developed artificially intelligent computers, no machine can take the place of those who can figure things out.

So a true education needs to reward and support that kind of person...although one might argue that THEY don't really need to go to school at all. Oddly enough, even this movie, Waiting For Superman, actually graphically SHOWED what their belief is, and that is that it is the teacher's job is to fill up students' heads with facts (I think they called it "knowledge", but if it is something that a teacher can pour into a student's head, then it is "facts"), and they actually showed a cartoon of a teacher walking along school children sitting in their rows of desks, lifting up the top of their heads, and pouring in a swill of facts.

I do agree with one of the propositions of the film, and that is that truly good teachers can do a good job of helping students learn, and bad teachers can harm them, and the mediocre teachers just pass them along. It is shocking to hear the statistics of how many California high school graduates who are in the upper percentiles of California high school graduates nevertheless need up to TWO YEAR'S worth of remediation in order to actually begin college-level work. In other words, those aren't really college-level students at all, and yet the colleges have to accept them if they want to fill up all the available spaces.

However, in my view, as helpful as it is to have a good teacher, and how damaging it is to have a bad teacher, one doesn't REALLY NEED a teacher at all, except, perhaps, as a kind of sometime tutor to help a person understand something temporarily difficult. (In a way, this is the college method, whereby "school" is a giant lecture hall where some boring professor drones on and on, and the real learning is going on inside of you back in the dorm room or quiet library with all your texts, and if something isn't quite clear, you can get specialized help from your section T.A., who is a graduate student only a few years older than you are.) To me, the most important factor is the TEXTBOOK, and, my God, those seem to be so dumbed-down these days that it horrifies me even to open the pages of one. If I had to go to elementary school today and had to work my way through the thick slough of a modern-day dumbed-down textbook, I would have literally exploded with frustration. Is there any wonder that kids would rather just play video games? (But, uh oh, that's just like Ender's Game! Right this very minute, I am sure somebody is working on "educational video games"...or am I behind and everybody knows that we already have them?)

I'll have to write it again...the founders of our nation were essentially self-taught. Most of them, such as Benjamin Franklin, were apprenticed out to work before any of them would have even been in a modern-day high school. And yet, on their own, they read books that would choke a Yale graduate. And these people were able to create a nation like had never ever been made before, or since. George Washington went to school to learn only three subjects that he wanted to learn, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Surveying. What were his actual "skills"? Horseback riding and ballroom dancing. He was also, apparently, a master of fashion. But look at all his accomplishments.

I remember back to my own schooling, again, where I was good and where I wasn't so good. I already knew how to read, one of my grandmothers taught me one afternoon. I can hardly believe that it is now supposed to be so hard to teach reading. John Taylor Gatto reveals that it took explorers in Africa only 40 hours of personal contact to teach African tribesmen how to read when prior to those explorers coming there, the tribe didn't even have a written language at all! The explorers used the English alphabet to phonetically write out the spoken language of the tribe and all who wanted to obtain this "magic" completely learned how to read and write in 40 hours, tops. Yet today, in a culture surrounded by the written word, there are still high school graduates who (apparently) are accepted into COLLEGE who CAN NOT READ!

So in school I blew by Dick and Jane, which I thought were cute, kind of like comic books for morons, so the teacher would have me write stories on the blackboard for the other students to read and copy, which were more interesting.

Okay, so I was "verbal" (as they divided people up in those days), but not very "mathematical".

However, one day early in the third grade, a close friend of mine, Joan, was skipped ahead to the fourth grade. I not only missed her, but I was envious of her now skipping ahead a grade, so I told the teacher that I, too, wanted to be skipped into the fourth grade like Joan was. The teacher smiled and said, "You can't. Joan was very smart, too smart for the third grade." "Well, I am very smart, too," I said. "Yes, you are," the teacher patiently explained, "but you aren't really very good in math." And this I knew was true. So I said to her, "So, if I were GOOD in math, then maybe I, too, could be skipped into the fourth grade?" "Well, yes, I suppose you could," was her answer; "IF you were good in math like Joan is."

I took this as a promise, and I figured the only way I could obtain this achievement was to learn every bit of third grade math. So that weekend, I worked my way completely through the entire math textbook. I read every lesson, did every exercise, did all the homework, too, and graded all the self-tests, and turned them all in to the teacher on Monday morning. I told her that I had done the entire third grade math curriculum in that one weekend and if she checked all my work, she would see that I now did, indeed, know all of it.

To her credit, she did check it and reported back to me that I had, indeed, done the entire third grade math curriculum.

"Now can I be skipped ahead to the fourth grade?" I asked.

To her discredit, she simply said, "No."

So, what had I learned from that experience? That a dedicated person, on their own, can actually learn an entire school year's worth of a subject that they weren't even very good in, in one weekend, and as far as how students are classified and treated in school, it is based on some irrational system that is unfair and probably political. So, in my view, from then on in school, I was on my own, to learn what I wanted at the more rapid pace I wanted and I didn't need the cooperation or help from the teachers nor must I be limited by the ceilings of their expectations. Just like the founding fathers understood, I learned that learning was an "on your own, individualized" proposition.

So in a film like Waiting For Superman, that's exactly what all those children are doing, WAITING, for that "Superman" to come in and save them, when the Superman they have been waiting for all this time is them, themselves.

I just love so much that section in Richard Branson's autobiography ( http://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/dp/0307720748/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309823086&sr=1-1 ) where he discusses the exact moment when he became the Richard Branson that he is today, billionaire founder of record companies and music stores and airlines and railroads and all-around adventurer and explorer. He was a child riding along in the car with his mother in some rural area of England when she suddenly pulled over and asked him to look around. "Do you think you could find your way home from here?" she asked. "Yes," he answered, "I can." "Prove it," she said, and indicated that he should now get out and walk home. Excited, he got out of the car and watched her genuinely drive off in a cloud of dust, leaving him there all alone. He said that at that moment, the entire world unfurled itself like a red carpet at his feet, and he knew right then that wherever he wanted to go, whatever he wanted to do, whomever he felt like being, was within his power to achieve step by step. And he has done so, over and over again.

To me, the big problem with all the people interviewed in the film, Waiting For Superman, all of whom spoke very highly of their interest in education, for themselves, for their children, or for their community, was that almost all of them could not even speak a decent English sentence. How can a person believe that they are working for education when the very sound of their communication speaks of ignorance and sloppiness, and, in fact, demonstrates the very FAILURE to learn and that this is okay? Am I being racist? Or is bad English "okay" for certain races and economic levels? Well, it is only when you expect to isolate them within a lower worker class, which is what you are doing anyway if you are only teaching them standardized skills that are useful only in a job setting. Every one of these people kept talking about "going to college," "going to college," "going to college," yet what kind of "college" are they actually going to be going to? Some of the parents (and grandparents) spoke frankly about not having had much of an education themselves for various reasons ("We were poor", "I had to go to work", "I wasn't raised by my parents", etc.) and their idea of their kids going to college is to obtain a path out of the neighborhood and the life that they are currently living. But I would think that if you wanted to get out of somewhere by wanting to get INTO some place else, then it would behoove you to thoroughly research and UNDERSTAND the rules of the world you wanted to get into. Otherwise, you or your kids would always be a stranger in a strange land, never accepted, never assimilated, and never ever belonging (and so what you will do, instead, is blame those who belong in that land as being rejecting or discriminatory, and you will demand that society change the culture that you had wanted to become a part of; in other words, make it just like the one you wanted to escape from). To his great credit, Bill Cosby has spoken much about this, and has also been soundly vilified for speaking this truth. And don't forget that others have successfully made this journey and this was leap years before Civil Rights and Affirmative Action and all the other liberal agendas that have paved the path with gold.

And nobody is REALLY helping these kids, and apparently, they will not help themselves. One little girl who was featured as being "very smart" and "gigantically motivated" kept saying (when you could understand her, which was difficult), that she wanted to be a nurse, a doctor, a veterinarian. When I would hear that, I would think, "Well, which is it, nurse, doctor, or veterinarian?" Because, you know, they're three different things. But people accept that as a definite ambition (woo, that "doctor" gets them every time...but I hate to break it to them, but thanks to Obama's health care reform, if it continues, "doctor" will become a middle class position, deep in medical school debt but earning ever-diminishing "payments" from the bankrupt government).

These families seem to view "going to college" as like winning the lottery, if you go to college, you have it made. So it was interesting that how they would attempt to get into a "better" public school (charter school, and the like) was via being accepted via LOTTERY. I wondered why the children weren't being accepted into these better schools due to merit. But oh, sorry, I forgot...the theory is that "all children are the same" and accepting by merit is to "track them", a big no no. This is that whole liberal concept of "equalizing the outcomes," which if they are all cogs in a wheel, then one cog really is the same as another. What they think is that opportunities must be equalized, forgetting the fact that, like Richard Branson, people make their OWN opportunities. (Just ask the Chinese about that, who have made a success of themselves in every culture around the world into which they have inserted themselves throughout history.) But America isn't about that, any more; instead they want to set up road blocks before the advantaged kids and provide as smooth a sailing as possible for the disadvantaged ones, which hasn't worked at all for the past 40 years. And socialism (which the majority of the voters vote for because they think this will give them an advantage) is about supporting the unsuccessful by taking from the successful. Which, of course, is like eating up all your seeds (like they did in Zimbabwe).

But the lottery method is harsh, so few available spaces in contrast to all the applicants. Like getting a job, nowadays (which is what happens AFTER you graduate from college). Only two of the students who were followed in this documentary obtained admission via the lottery, and one of them had at first been fifth on the waiting list. Did anyone wonder how he was moved ahead six spots to gain admission...I mean, if this school were so wonderful, why did the five people ahead of him choose to not end up going there? (Maybe they all moved away....)

The boy who made it into the school via the waiting list was accepted into the "Ender's Game" type boarding school (no games, no free time, total immersion in getting higher test scores on the standardized proficiency exams), and he was being raised by his grandmother, who admitted that she was, understandably, torn about this. While she wanted him to get a good education, she hated to lose him. The boy's history was that his mother disappeared soon after he was born and his father had died of a drug addiction, so his grandmother, the father's mother, willingly took him in. At the beginning of the documentary, this boy tells a story of how he wasn't very good in "maths" (or, for that matter, English), but something drove him to do better so he started going his homework and suddenly he was passing tests when he had been failing them, before. So he could hardly wait to bring home to his father his first passing math test, but his father died of his drug addiction before the boy had had a chance to show him. There was a photo of the father holding his son in his lap that kept being shown in the film, as if the boy was still living for the absent father. But instead, who really WAS there for him, was not the drug-addicted father, but the grandmother who had been raising him all these years.

There was, I feel, a pretty telling scene near the end of the documentary where the grandmother is taking the boy into the boarding school, which really is the moment of a lifetime of separation between them. They have to sign in through some kind of a guard at the entrance to the school, so already it feels like a prison. The plain rectangular dorm room with brick walls painted white has three beds in it, two in a bunkbed and one solitary twin bed. The "guard" taking the boy to the room says that since he is the first one there, he has his choice of beds. At first he picks the solitary bed, but then he decides that he prefers the top bed on the bunk. He was always a very morose child throughout this whole film, one who slurred his words and he never spoke with much enthusiasm, and this going over the threshold into his apparent chance for a better life does not make him any more enthusiastic. Frankly, he seems to be going through the motions, because while he is told that this is a great opportunity for him to have a better life, he also views it as the end of all his fun and his involvement with his friends (after all, he IS just a little boy and he shouldn't even have to face any of this). He does not mention being separated from his grandmother, the only solid adult he has ever known, and fearing that he will be homesick for her.

He had been told earlier that the students were "allowed" to decorate their one wall with posters or any pictures that they wanted, so he came prepared. He put up a colored poster of a Lamborghini, and then lay down on the bed with his head on the pillow and he reverently taped to the wall a tiny snapshot that he could see while lying down. I had hoped that it would be a photograph of his grandmother, but the camera slowly zoomed close and revealed that it was that photo of him as a baby sitting his drug addict father's lap. I felt that what that boy needed more than a special school was a father, and then I felt that he would be trapped by that need for the rest of his life; it would never be fulfilled, and his "shunning" of the grandmother, with whom there was no hugging or tearful goodbye, he merely lay there and then went to sleep with that photo of his father in front of his face, I felt that he would never open himself up to any reasonable substitute. Therefore, he would remain stuck and all the schooling in the world, good or bad, wasn't going to make any difference in his life.

I am sure it must be gigantically unfair of me to negatively judge the various children in the documentary who virtually had no advantages and didn't seem able to accept the special advantages that they did have (such as the girl whose single ghetto-based mother struggled with several jobs to earn enough money to pay $500 a month tuition at a private school for her daughter...but in the end, who, due to a job layoff, missed a final payment and therefore her child was denied the graduation ceremony) simply because you could hardly ever understand what they were saying because they mumbled and spoke very softly. But the kids at the expensive private school where I work also do that and I am starting to feel that something is very wrong about that. I have attended several classes when they are reading stories that they have written and so on, usually assignments that they do very well on and that are definitely worth sharing, which you discover when you read them yourself. But when they are standing up in front of the room or even sitting at their desks, while you are in the same intimate classroom with them, you can hardly hear them and you can not distinguish the various words they are saying. I can't imagine that the teachers can hear or understand them any better than I can and I don't understand why they allow that.

What do I mean by "allow that"?

Well, it's not that kids don't have loud voices. When I am working in my office at the school, I can hear them as plain as day out on the playground, and even at home where the walls are practically sound-proofed, I can hear them screaming in their games out on the lawn or way over at the other end of the complex beyond several three-story buildings, I can hear them in the pool. So why in a quiet classroom when they are reading a story that they wrote and that they WANT to share with others, can you not understand what they are saying?

Because I believe that oral presentation is as important as written expression, that enunciating words and speaking them loudly and clearly is as important as correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, so why do the teachers at our school or the filmmakers of this documentary let them mumble and speak so quietly that I had to put my volume up all the way to the highest level and even then could hardly hear them?

I have even shared this concern with our performing arts teacher, who is also a professional actor, but he only teaches the older kids. I have said that I think oral interpretation skills need to be taught to every grade school child, and while I was sure he would think my suggestion would be weird, I did expect him to at least think about what I said and then agree, even if he felt that such for some reason would be impossible.

But all he said was that it was "not age appropriate," that you do not get into "oral interpretation" until fifth or maybe sixth grade. Well, to hell with that, if I were a teacher, even in kindergarten, I for sure would teach those kids how, and why, to speak up. They must learn how to be heard if they ever want to get anywhere. Are their egos really that stuffed under a rock? I hardly think so. "Open your mouth and speak out! We need to hear what you have to say."

But it must be like something else that I have observed from working at an elementary school. The kids are constantly admonished to not run. And ALL they want to do is run. But instead, all they hear is "Don't run!" So what they do is hide. They run until they are seen, and then when they hear the order to stop running, they will stop, but then will start running again when they are out of sight.

Well I say that if it is in their nature to run, then run is what they should do. And they should keep on running; running, running, and running, and never, ever stop. That's WHO they are, and WHO they are matters more than any other single thing. That's maybe the ONE lesson that they truly do need, and then they will have reverence for their being and their dreams, and nothing will ever be able to stop them from bringing that into fruition.

Don't let schooling wreck their understanding of who they are. Not even in the attempt to give them an education.

Shots!

A couple of days ago (Thursday), I started my day off by getting four shots, two in each upper arm, way up into the shoulder, really. I actually had no anxiety about them, I only wanted to do what was right and healthy and I knew that whatever pain that might have been involved would only be momentary.

I was impressed by the operation of the place where I went, called "Passport Health". From my observations, it looked like a group of doctors, or maybe only one cleverly entrepreneurial doctor, alone, came up with this brilliant idea of creating a practice specializing in inoculations, mostly for travel, but a person could get there any kind of vaccination or required or recommended shot--flu shot, TB tests, children's required vaccinations prior to going to school, and so on. They, or the one doctor, had tiny little offices all over the city and wherever you lived, you would be able to find a location that was convenient to you. Not every location is open every day; the one where I went was open only two days a week. I presume that when they have busier seasons (peak travel seasons, school-starting, flu season, etc.), they may be open more frequently. The only people there this morning at the time of my appointment were me and the nurse who gave me the shots, which gave me the idea that all these satellite offices are controlled from one central office, so only a nurse to give the shots needs be in each location.

The office was decorated in a "travel" style that appealed to me; various travel posters for exotic locations, and native crafts and artifacts such as African masks or other carvings decorating the walls. In the office, which was also the injection room, there was a huge and very detailed map of the world that covered one whole wall and a third of each wall that was next to that one wall, so it was almost like a 180-degree map. I had a similar map in my bedroom growing up, which maybe helped feed my love for travel.

The nurse had for me an entire booklet custom-made for this particular trip with my name printed on the cover; a complete description of every kind of vaccination in general (what they were for, how they worked, under what circumstances you might need them, the recommended frequency of getting them, their side effects, what the diseases were like that they were to protect you from, and by what method you might happen to get those diseases (oral/fecal, body fluids, respiratory droplets, sewage, bad water, mosquitos, rabid animals, and so on). Then there was a section on Palau, where I was going, where there was even greater detail on the diseases that people get there and what inoculations were recommended for travelers going there. All this was very comprehensive and educational and useful beyond just the immediate travel needs.

Interestingly, some diseases that are "gone" in the U.S. are very much alive and quite dangerous in some other countries, such as ones that anyone my age already has an immunity to, polio, chicken pox, mumps, measles, German measles, and small pox. Based on my age, alone, the nurse knew that by law I already had had all the polio shots and a small pox vaccination, and regarding chicken pox, mumps, measles, and German measles, she asked me if I had had those in childhood (yes, I had) and therefore I was immune to them for my lifetime. I remember that in my childhood days, mothers would rush to GIVE their children those diseases when they heard that a neighbor child had any of them, because then their own children would henceforth be immune for the rest of their lifetime. Now, though, they have vaccines for children, so few of them ever have to have those disease, even the first time.

They did list one vaccination I had never heard of, one recommended for older adults to protect them from shingles. Apparently having had chicken pox does not make one immune from shingles, and the booklet said that 50% of people living up to age 85 get the disease. Really? Half? I had always considered it a rare but horrible event, but maybe as more and more peers become elderly, I will be hearing more about it. I now think I ought to consider getting this vaccination.

It's interesting that the prime time for getting vaccines is when you are very young and then when you are elderly. The very young makes sense in that if you are going to obtain a lifetime immunity, then the earlier the better. Vaccines for the elderly seem to be for diseases that occur more frequently when people are more susceptible to sickness as a whole.

So the shots I received were Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Typhoid, and the Tetanus, Diptheria, Pertussis booster that I was due for. The nurse told me that if I "didn't like needles," there was an option of getting both the Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B in the same injection, but that option cost $80.00 more. I surprised myself by saying, "No, thank you, I'll save the money and get the separate shots." And once I saw the final total for everything ($420, and none of it is covered by insurance), I was glad that I hadn't let it elevate to $500!

Whatever pain there was, 95% of it was the effect of the medication in my arm, not the needle sticks, which truly were very minor and one of them, I think it was the booster, had NO feeling of stick at all. And those that I did feel were injected so quickly that it was more like the in and outs of the needles was like your finger passing through a candle flame, too fast for the nerves to even register.

The soreness in my two shoulders, though, which continued to build up as the day continued (and I could still feel it long into the evening)...well, let's just say that I wasn't going to be doing any push-ups that night!

Due to having had these shots, I did feel out of sorts and maybe "put upon" that whole day at work. I would have been much happier just this once being left alone by all the cockroaches who continually make demands on me. It might have been better if I could have had a restfully productive day at work (which mostly means "no interruptions" and "no additional problems"), or else be able to go home early and just get into bed and read, but, no, there was no rest for the weary.

This inoculation office had "everything" to do with travel; they sold mosquito repellant (which I bought, as there were several mosquito-borne disease possibilities in the jungles of Palau for which there is no vaccine) and money belts and water purifiers and electric plug converters and any other thing a traveler could think of. They even would help you get your passport renewed or sell you temporary medical insurance for your trip. As I said, that doctor (I am pretty sure there is only one) was quite an entrepreneur, and I respect her cleverness.

I added to the mix a "diarrhea kit" that they put together all in a nice plastic carrying case, consisting of hygienic cleansing towelettes, oral rehydration salts, anti-diarrheal tablets, and six azithromycin pills prescribed by this one MD (a female). According to the booklet they gave me, if there is a chance of getting diarrhea due to a location you travel to, 50% of the travelers will get it. And just the misery of diarrhea when you are in a strange place can ruin the trip you paid thousands of dollars for.

While I was very happy to have completed this task, as I said a few paragraphs prior, I was not in a good mood at work afterwards, where it sometimes takes super-human patience to endure. So, my resistance was down. Yes, I have a "good job". The setting is wonderful, the co-workers are nice, the work isn't picking cotton or screwing on hubcaps in an assembly line or slaughtering animals in an abbattoire or rotting in a war zone somewhere. I have it quite nice, actually, but the ever-increasing workload, the constant problems flying in like a cloud of locusts from all directions, the ever-squeezing interference of government regulations and demanded compliance with draconian procedures, and due to all this, the resultant inability to meet ones own good standards anymore, is very wearing. I find myself experiencing something that I had never before experienced in my life, and that is that my brain just shuts down--it gets paralyzed. It is as if I am computer and too many concurrent operations have used up all of my RAM. It's peculiar to feel it and when I get into that "no more RAM" state and then one more demand gets put on me, I get angry. We continue to hear of the dangers of social unrest in America (which has actually already been happening in some cities) and I think anger and then physical violence results when people no longer feel that they have any other option; the threats against them become too much to bear. That "no more RAM" state is, for me, like being forced into a corner with no avenue of escape. Maybe that is another reason why I am looking forward to this trip so much; it, at least, for a brief while, WILL be an escape, and my very emotional survival depends upon it.