I never thought I'd see the day when chickens were en vogue. And yet a devoted subset of urban poultry enthusiasts has successfully lobbied for changes in zoning that allow for household chicken ownership, and I've watched dozens of people I know put on their coveralls and build a coop. In my work as a freight forwarder, I've listened to the peeping of a whole lot of baby chicks crammed in cardboard boxes and shipped through the postal system to their new, unlikely homes.
In Vermont, my friend Andrea got eggs donated from a local composting company. They took up residence at her childrens' school where they hatched and grew. Recently though, like a Christmas puppy, the question of what to do when the fun is over cropped up. She's been trying to find a home for two roosters, without success. When she contacted a local chicken rescue (I know...who knew such a thing existed) they scolded her, saying that hatching chickens in a school was irresponsible. Frustrated that her attempt to provide a rare hands-on learning experience and then deal responsibly with the outcome was met with disdain she said, "I hate to be a right-winger, but I am not making a hefty donation so 3 roosters can be free from 'opression'"
The solution then, was slaughter. Andrea's a vegetarian. I'm a vegan. Enter awkward times.
I've been on the wrong end of misconstrued written communication enough times that I hesitated before answering, then finally decided to just straight up say that I wasn't trying to be flippant, that I very seriously believe that there's an important lesson in there about where we draw the line between pets and dinner. Andrea's not the sort to gloss over uncomfortable details, and I know that she's made a study of vegetarianism and veganism. One of the reasons she's a vegetarian is that she's uncomfortable with the reality of slaughter. If she isn't vegan, nothing I say is going to suddenly change the conclusions she's drawn. And food is, I would say, one of the most personal choices we make, at least of the ones that are public. You might like kinky sex, but there's rarely going to be a gathering where you have to explain yourself. If you have unusual food preferences, people expect you to answer for them at every meal, whether in public or private.
But for her kids, who are probably vegetarian by proxy, this is the moment where the rubber meets the road. Last week, they had roosters with names and played with them and fed them. This week when they sit down at the dinner table, Smoky and Goober or whatever they're called will be the main course. I met my very first vegetarian friend in first grade. She lived in a rural area and kept chickens and ducks. She couldn't reconcile her love for the living animals with eating them, so she became vegetarian. It was, in retrospect, a pretty remarkable line of reasoning for a kid that age.
As vegans go, I'm a pretty light touch. I'd prefer to seduce you with amazing food than PETA videos. I make a distinction between industrial egg and dairy production (well, not so much dairy, since the cow almost always ends up slaughtered) and domestic by-product. The fact is that these animals are domesticated, so the option is to treat them as a commodity or as companions. I'd argue that since we're the ones who domesticated them, we have an obligation to care for their helpless selves. I still wear leather shoes purchased before I became vegan because I think the environmental cost of purchasing new (vegan products are also often synthetic) is higher than the already incurred cost of the shoes I own. I'm an advocate of considering your choices even once you've become vegan, making responsible decisions to the best of your ability rather than the making choices consistent with inherited political purity.
In general, my friends are supportive, if slightly bewildered by my veganism, but sometimes it somes out in ways that are excrutiating. I have a friend who's a cook who insists on telling me about progressive CSAs where you can contribute toward humanely raised beef and pork. I appreciate his attempt to connect with me, but I finally had to tell him that if, at the end of the day (or years, as the case may be) the animal is suddenly killed, it's not actually all that nice. If I were held hostage and my captors gave me nice living quarters and three squares a day, then killed me anyway, I'd still be dead. You can argue that animals don't have expectations about longevity or what they'll accomplish in this life, but I'd counter that the plans of people aren't necessarily so compelling that they're much better. It's a slippery slope to start weighing which lives are worthwhile and which aren't.
Americans don't eat dogs or guinea pigs. Other cultures do. It would be way out of line for me to say I have enough information to make those decisions for anyone but myself, but in my sometimes deeply judgmental mind I resent the fact that most people do the things they do without ever considering the consequences or alternatives. Whether it's going to church every week, dieting to achieve a cultural standard, or eating animals, these are choices that deserve more thought.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Say It, Don't Spray It
First, an admission: I am, or have been, a great big intellectual snobby snob snob. Surely you've noticed. I'm all running around with my big ideas and my fifty-cent words, just cracking myself up with esoteric jokes. I recently asked a clerk at Cumby's if reading the New York Times (which he was doing) for free is the coolest part of his job. I sometimes refer to said paper as "the NYT." I consider postmodernism to be one of the greatest threats to humanity.
In my defense, though, I had an epiphany several years ago that gave me some insight into myself and made me a much less judgmental person: I don't hate stupid people, I just hate people who love being stupid.
It's a well-known fact among my friends that I should not be allowed access to the local paper under any circumstances. The former journalist in me bears claws and fangs like a wild beast at front-page, above-the-fold stories detailing how hot it is, how fun a festival was, or how much kids like ice cream. The homicidal maniac in me sharpens its knives when I see Ray Routhier making every pedestrian job in the world sound like rocket science. I know, every job has it's challenges, but Ray, IT'S SO FUCKING CONDESCENDING to try to instill drama in the process of making sure there's enough pens in a hotel room drawer. I'm sure that lady has enough actual challenges in her day that wouldn't be good PR for her employer, so please, please, either tell it like it is, or stop treating the poor woman like a two-year-old who's doing a weawy, weawy good job!
But for all that, it's the letters page that threatens to put me over the edge every time. I actually really love opinion pieces and find it fascinating to get a glimpse inside the heads of people who don't think like me (it's also one of the reasons I'm addicted to reading blogs). But the requirement is that these people are at least thinking like someone not like me. In my experience, for every thoughtful, well-researched letter to the editor, there's another six that read like the verbal vomit of self-satisfied children, replete with grammar nightmares and some sort of irrelevant attack the slightly more eloquent equivalent of "...and anyone who doesn't agree smells bad and eats poop!"
I count among my very favorite people of all time a mechanic who works with me. Let's call him Mike the Mechanic, because that will be fun. He's old school, which means he specializes in mechanical repairs: nuts and bolts and oil and metal and wood and nails and putting things together and taking them apart. He takes a lot of shit behind his back because he's a simple guy who's been outrun by the complexity of the machines he cares for. It pains him to know that he doesn't always do a very good job, in part because his education ended with his training as a military mechanic in the 70s. His boss for twenty years in his current job was a delightful but eccentric old coot who didn't have the patience to bring my friend up to date on anything. He'd get frustrated by a shallow learning curve and opt to just do everything himself.
Mike's son has Asperger's, a condition that went unrecognized until the boy was twelve. Mike himself shows little glimmers of it himself along with an unacknowledged case of dyslexia. I've never met anyone who works so hard for such meager returns and it breaks my heart to hear him talk about how under-valued and ignored he feels.
What I love about Mike is that, despite deficits that he recognizes, he's a perpetual dream machine and a hungry consumer of random information.
There was a time when he came into work in the middle of the night to fuel the boats and when I got to work at quarter of five, we'd spend a quiet hour or so chatting about this and that, the politics of our workplace, the politics of the world, a foreign movie that enchanted him.
Our schedules don't line up like that anymore, but sometimes when things are quiet, he'll ask if I have a minute and we'll take in the maintenance shop. We've recently covered depression and medication (he told me he'd gone down the same road as me a few months before), French first lady and chanteuse Carla Bruni and his desire for me to use my internets skills to get some of her music for him. He's also asked me to find him an English-language international newspaper and information on schools where someone interested in mosaics might thrive, for his son. He tells me that he feels unfulfilled doing what he does and what he thinks he'd be good at. He asks me for advice about how to pursue those things.
I'm outrageously lucky to have a big cheering section that wants me to fulfill all the promise I toted around in my childhood, but in some ways none of it means more to me than when Mike says, "I never understood what you were doing here. I don't want to tell you how to do anything, but it seems like you can do anything and this place will just take advantage of that, but it's not where you belong."
There's a lot of clever, talented, artistic, wordy, and science-minded people in my life by design. Like I said, I'm an academic snob. I like people who are challenging and crazy-making and brilliant. But what I like about them, I also like in people like Mike who may not have the tools to do groundbreaking projects, but who love the fact that they exist. Who's disappointed in the way the world works and isn't satisfied to accept the explanations of pundits and politicians, but wants to (painstakingly) read as much as he possibly can about everything he can trying to find some answers. Mike isn't smart in the way we traditionally think of it, but he has the far more enlightening characteristic of curiosity.
Just for a little contrast, and to bring the conversation around to where I started, there's a fellow in Mike's department who is his dead opposite in terms of all the lovable things I've mentioned. He's also a mechanical man, but has been shrewd enough to insert himself into tasks over his head, where Mike has waited to be invited to learn. As a result, he's generally regarded as more proficient at his job. I'm not sure that's true, but what interests me more (or doesn't, as the case may be) is that he has no interest in life or the world beyond the narrow scope of coming to work, coming home, and going hunting. He's the sort of person who says in all earnestness things like, "Well, I don't know much about politics, but it seems like if they think ________ is the best way..." He makes the kind of pointless jokes intended to demonstrate that he's just a good-natured guy that actually demonstrate that he's a misogynist, racist jackass with nothing to contribute. Among my co-workers there's a running joke that they should hide the pencils when he's around me because he almost always manages to say or do something that fills me with the horrible desire to stab him with them.
So there it is. Several years ago I put the brakes on my unreasonable expectations of people's knowledge base and shifted my animosity to people who just don't give a fuck. I recognize that this is a heavy declaration, but I think that there's literally nothing more offensive to me than people who are closed to inquiry. It's a simple thing. We live in a shrinking world and our survival depends on our ability to understand things beyond what happens to us individually. Plus, and this comes out of the depths of my own fucked up depressed-person's nihilistic worldview, but what on earth keeps you going if you have no interests outside of the six things you currently know??? Shit, that's dark, but I'm not really joking.
Anyway. I've (mostly) learned to let spelling and grammar stuff slide. I've (mostly) learned to be respectful in debates with people who just don't know better. I'm trying to be a more open person, and if you want to meet me halfway, broaden your horizons.
In my defense, though, I had an epiphany several years ago that gave me some insight into myself and made me a much less judgmental person: I don't hate stupid people, I just hate people who love being stupid.
It's a well-known fact among my friends that I should not be allowed access to the local paper under any circumstances. The former journalist in me bears claws and fangs like a wild beast at front-page, above-the-fold stories detailing how hot it is, how fun a festival was, or how much kids like ice cream. The homicidal maniac in me sharpens its knives when I see Ray Routhier making every pedestrian job in the world sound like rocket science. I know, every job has it's challenges, but Ray, IT'S SO FUCKING CONDESCENDING to try to instill drama in the process of making sure there's enough pens in a hotel room drawer. I'm sure that lady has enough actual challenges in her day that wouldn't be good PR for her employer, so please, please, either tell it like it is, or stop treating the poor woman like a two-year-old who's doing a weawy, weawy good job!
But for all that, it's the letters page that threatens to put me over the edge every time. I actually really love opinion pieces and find it fascinating to get a glimpse inside the heads of people who don't think like me (it's also one of the reasons I'm addicted to reading blogs). But the requirement is that these people are at least thinking like someone not like me. In my experience, for every thoughtful, well-researched letter to the editor, there's another six that read like the verbal vomit of self-satisfied children, replete with grammar nightmares and some sort of irrelevant attack the slightly more eloquent equivalent of "...and anyone who doesn't agree smells bad and eats poop!"
I count among my very favorite people of all time a mechanic who works with me. Let's call him Mike the Mechanic, because that will be fun. He's old school, which means he specializes in mechanical repairs: nuts and bolts and oil and metal and wood and nails and putting things together and taking them apart. He takes a lot of shit behind his back because he's a simple guy who's been outrun by the complexity of the machines he cares for. It pains him to know that he doesn't always do a very good job, in part because his education ended with his training as a military mechanic in the 70s. His boss for twenty years in his current job was a delightful but eccentric old coot who didn't have the patience to bring my friend up to date on anything. He'd get frustrated by a shallow learning curve and opt to just do everything himself.
Mike's son has Asperger's, a condition that went unrecognized until the boy was twelve. Mike himself shows little glimmers of it himself along with an unacknowledged case of dyslexia. I've never met anyone who works so hard for such meager returns and it breaks my heart to hear him talk about how under-valued and ignored he feels.
What I love about Mike is that, despite deficits that he recognizes, he's a perpetual dream machine and a hungry consumer of random information.
There was a time when he came into work in the middle of the night to fuel the boats and when I got to work at quarter of five, we'd spend a quiet hour or so chatting about this and that, the politics of our workplace, the politics of the world, a foreign movie that enchanted him.
Our schedules don't line up like that anymore, but sometimes when things are quiet, he'll ask if I have a minute and we'll take in the maintenance shop. We've recently covered depression and medication (he told me he'd gone down the same road as me a few months before), French first lady and chanteuse Carla Bruni and his desire for me to use my internets skills to get some of her music for him. He's also asked me to find him an English-language international newspaper and information on schools where someone interested in mosaics might thrive, for his son. He tells me that he feels unfulfilled doing what he does and what he thinks he'd be good at. He asks me for advice about how to pursue those things.
I'm outrageously lucky to have a big cheering section that wants me to fulfill all the promise I toted around in my childhood, but in some ways none of it means more to me than when Mike says, "I never understood what you were doing here. I don't want to tell you how to do anything, but it seems like you can do anything and this place will just take advantage of that, but it's not where you belong."
There's a lot of clever, talented, artistic, wordy, and science-minded people in my life by design. Like I said, I'm an academic snob. I like people who are challenging and crazy-making and brilliant. But what I like about them, I also like in people like Mike who may not have the tools to do groundbreaking projects, but who love the fact that they exist. Who's disappointed in the way the world works and isn't satisfied to accept the explanations of pundits and politicians, but wants to (painstakingly) read as much as he possibly can about everything he can trying to find some answers. Mike isn't smart in the way we traditionally think of it, but he has the far more enlightening characteristic of curiosity.
Just for a little contrast, and to bring the conversation around to where I started, there's a fellow in Mike's department who is his dead opposite in terms of all the lovable things I've mentioned. He's also a mechanical man, but has been shrewd enough to insert himself into tasks over his head, where Mike has waited to be invited to learn. As a result, he's generally regarded as more proficient at his job. I'm not sure that's true, but what interests me more (or doesn't, as the case may be) is that he has no interest in life or the world beyond the narrow scope of coming to work, coming home, and going hunting. He's the sort of person who says in all earnestness things like, "Well, I don't know much about politics, but it seems like if they think ________ is the best way..." He makes the kind of pointless jokes intended to demonstrate that he's just a good-natured guy that actually demonstrate that he's a misogynist, racist jackass with nothing to contribute. Among my co-workers there's a running joke that they should hide the pencils when he's around me because he almost always manages to say or do something that fills me with the horrible desire to stab him with them.
So there it is. Several years ago I put the brakes on my unreasonable expectations of people's knowledge base and shifted my animosity to people who just don't give a fuck. I recognize that this is a heavy declaration, but I think that there's literally nothing more offensive to me than people who are closed to inquiry. It's a simple thing. We live in a shrinking world and our survival depends on our ability to understand things beyond what happens to us individually. Plus, and this comes out of the depths of my own fucked up depressed-person's nihilistic worldview, but what on earth keeps you going if you have no interests outside of the six things you currently know??? Shit, that's dark, but I'm not really joking.
Anyway. I've (mostly) learned to let spelling and grammar stuff slide. I've (mostly) learned to be respectful in debates with people who just don't know better. I'm trying to be a more open person, and if you want to meet me halfway, broaden your horizons.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Ain't No Makin' It
Several years ago during yet another half-hearted stab at making a college degree a priority, I took a course called "Poverty in America." It's a drab title, which is a real disservice to the class behind it, which was one of the most engaging I've ever taken and shaped the way I interact with the world. In true University of Southern Maine fashion, the class has been discontinued.
I'll admit that I registered for the course because I wanted a class with economics professor Bob Jordan. A commuter at the ferry service I work for and the father of a high school classmate, he's quite possibly the most delightful man you could ever hope to meet. He's a quirky guy with the kind of outlandish enthusiasm for life that makes even your run-of-the-mill optimist seem like a jaded crank. He's lavish but absolutely genuine with compliments, a Ford (as in the cars) enthusiast, and eager to hear what's happening in your life whether it's the first or millionth time he's chatted with you. There's a contingent that doesn't know what to make of his relentless positivity and writes him off as a little loony, but I'm here to assure you that he's smart as a whip and totally guileless -- that that's hard for people to believe strikes me as a devastating commentary on a culture steeped in cynicism. I'm certainly not immune to cynicism, but I find Bob absolutely inspiring.
About a decade ago, his oldest son, a former high school hockey star and all-around golden boy died of a drug overdose at one of his father's rental properties. He was schizophrenic and delusional. Bob speaks frankly about it when the subject comes up as it often does in the context of poverty and homelessness. That any parent lives through that is a small miracle. That Bob not only survived, but survived in tact is a big one.
The class was co-taught by Bob from the economics department and Don Anspach from sociology. Hilariously, Don was the cold, hard numbers man in the outfit and referred to Bob's optimistic outlook as the "red shoes" approach to problem solving. As in Dorothy's ruby slippers, click your heels and make a wish. They were a lively duo, and in their different ways, fierce advocates of class equality and active in pursuits aimed at eliminating poverty.
The class was both sprawling and intimate and clearly an eye-opener not just for people who'd grown up in comfortable circumstances, but for people who'd grown up poor. Sitting in a college classroom taking a shot at social mobility via education, many of them hadn't considered the implications of poverty beyond simple material deprivation. It was heartbreaking and inspiring to watch earnest kids (they were, by and large, freshmen, teens) with a lot of drive realize that in a number of meaningful ways, the deck was stacked against them, that their academic education was only one piece of the puzzle -- although many of them were street smart in the traditional sense, they started to recognize that they were relatively naive when it came to being Wall Street smart. It's a painful truth that attainment these days isn't as easy as working hard and getting ahead. My Fair Lady is a silly musical romp, but Professor Higgins is a pretty good representation of middle-class culture and its obsession with the superficial symbols of success.
The primary text for the class was a book called, Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-income Neighborhood by Jay McLeod. In it, McLeod made a study of two groups of low-income teenagers, one white, the other black, living in a public housing project. As the title suggests, he spent a bunch of time getting to know these kids and their expectations for their futures. He also detailed their home lives, school performance and general attitudes toward the world and their lives. I don't remember if it was originally conceived as a longitudinal study, but the book was originally published in 1987 and a second edition with updated information about the two groups came out in 1995.
When it came out, the book challenged expectations about race, class, and social mobility. The "Hallway Hangers," a predominantly white group were by and large skeptical of school and the larger system and generally resigned to a life of poverty, crime, and struggle. "The Brothers," on the other hand, were a group of mostly black youth who believed that if they studied hard and kept their eyes on the prize, a better life was possible. Although there was a huge gap between the aspirations, motivation and attitudes of the two groups, when McLeod returned to check in with the boys in their early-20s, he found most of them still in the same position: poor, largely option-less, still living in the projects or nearby. McLeod notes that socioeconomic factors played a role for both groups, but while The Brothers' work ethics and educational attainment left them marginally better off, the added burden of racism kept them from making real progress. It's worth mentioning that neither group believed class or race to have played a role in their circumstances, but blamed themselves for not trying hard enough to succeed.
Ultimately, McLeod concludes the achievement ideology, also known as the American Dream, whereby hard work and a good attitude are all you need to get ahead creates unfair expectations for poor kids. He posits that a messier, more realistic message combined with an education that holds up examples of people who succeeded despite wealth and power barriers is a more effective message for low-income kids. "As students develop tools of social analysis and begin to understand how class-based inequalities in wealth, power, and privilege affect them, this awareness of self in relation to society becomes a motivating force much more powerful than the achievement ideology." The achievement ideology is a tidy platitude and a fine ethos when all things are equal. When things are radically unequal, it takes an unflinching awareness of social politics to combat that inequity.
But that's a hard sell for the people holding the purse strings (often the government). I'm not trying to go all conspiracy theory, here, but let's be real: Even if you genuinely want to help people, it's an uncomfortable thing to say, "Oh, hey, you're going to have to work twice as hard as someone in my circumstances to get the same things." Whatever social progress we've made in the past several decades, we're a little Victorian when it comes to talking honestly about money and class.
And yet we can't leave well enough alone and just play dumb, we keep on picking at the scab until we're a disgusting mess.
Here's an example that fills me with rage: I hate, hate, hate the glib internet meme "first world problems," because it's crass and dismissive and highlights the ugliest face of privilege. It's a sheepish, cheapskate way of acknowledging great gifts while still failing to appreciate them. Posting a photo of starving children, a bombed out Iraqi town and then the price of gas at your local Mobil with the cheerful caption, "First world problem!" is unbelievably fucked up. Sure, suffering is subjective and measured in degrees, but if you think those relative sufferings even belong in the same sentence, I hope I never have to meet you.
And while I'm sure people who do it think it's a silly, self-deprecating joke, the truth underlying is that they have a pretty serious disconnect between those images and the fact that that is really, truly, actually someone's life. It's real, and it's everyday. Excuse the sermon, but if you can't wrap your head around how not-a-joke it is to live in starvation conditions or in a war zone, then it's for goddamn sure you aren't taking U.S. poverty, a less dramatic but still crippling condition, seriously enough.
Which is why social change is just never going to come top-down in this country. McLeod's right. Perpetuating the achievement ideology is a great way to maintain the status quo. If you tell people that they can win if they just play the game, but you fail to tell them the rules, they'll lose almost every time. Even if we could get everyone awake and aware, it's going to be a more difficult struggle than anyone imagines. As we saw in the debt ceiling standoff, politics is often a war of attrition, or more accurately, a game of chicken. And the people with the money and power have the resources to wait in relative comfort for the rest of us to flinch.
I don't think I started out intending to incite revolution, but I guess that's what I'm talking about. As previously middle class families slip farther and farther down the economic ladder, there'll be more of us at the bottom to pitch a stink. Unfortunately, we're a society fractured along so many lines, that I don't have a lot of faith that we'll hear the call to work together for mutual gain over the cacophony of superficial difference. I have a theory about the achievement ideology and the side effect of the working class devouring itself waiting for a payday that isn't coming, but that's for another time.
I'll admit that I registered for the course because I wanted a class with economics professor Bob Jordan. A commuter at the ferry service I work for and the father of a high school classmate, he's quite possibly the most delightful man you could ever hope to meet. He's a quirky guy with the kind of outlandish enthusiasm for life that makes even your run-of-the-mill optimist seem like a jaded crank. He's lavish but absolutely genuine with compliments, a Ford (as in the cars) enthusiast, and eager to hear what's happening in your life whether it's the first or millionth time he's chatted with you. There's a contingent that doesn't know what to make of his relentless positivity and writes him off as a little loony, but I'm here to assure you that he's smart as a whip and totally guileless -- that that's hard for people to believe strikes me as a devastating commentary on a culture steeped in cynicism. I'm certainly not immune to cynicism, but I find Bob absolutely inspiring.
About a decade ago, his oldest son, a former high school hockey star and all-around golden boy died of a drug overdose at one of his father's rental properties. He was schizophrenic and delusional. Bob speaks frankly about it when the subject comes up as it often does in the context of poverty and homelessness. That any parent lives through that is a small miracle. That Bob not only survived, but survived in tact is a big one.
The class was co-taught by Bob from the economics department and Don Anspach from sociology. Hilariously, Don was the cold, hard numbers man in the outfit and referred to Bob's optimistic outlook as the "red shoes" approach to problem solving. As in Dorothy's ruby slippers, click your heels and make a wish. They were a lively duo, and in their different ways, fierce advocates of class equality and active in pursuits aimed at eliminating poverty.
The class was both sprawling and intimate and clearly an eye-opener not just for people who'd grown up in comfortable circumstances, but for people who'd grown up poor. Sitting in a college classroom taking a shot at social mobility via education, many of them hadn't considered the implications of poverty beyond simple material deprivation. It was heartbreaking and inspiring to watch earnest kids (they were, by and large, freshmen, teens) with a lot of drive realize that in a number of meaningful ways, the deck was stacked against them, that their academic education was only one piece of the puzzle -- although many of them were street smart in the traditional sense, they started to recognize that they were relatively naive when it came to being Wall Street smart. It's a painful truth that attainment these days isn't as easy as working hard and getting ahead. My Fair Lady is a silly musical romp, but Professor Higgins is a pretty good representation of middle-class culture and its obsession with the superficial symbols of success.
The primary text for the class was a book called, Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-income Neighborhood by Jay McLeod. In it, McLeod made a study of two groups of low-income teenagers, one white, the other black, living in a public housing project. As the title suggests, he spent a bunch of time getting to know these kids and their expectations for their futures. He also detailed their home lives, school performance and general attitudes toward the world and their lives. I don't remember if it was originally conceived as a longitudinal study, but the book was originally published in 1987 and a second edition with updated information about the two groups came out in 1995.
When it came out, the book challenged expectations about race, class, and social mobility. The "Hallway Hangers," a predominantly white group were by and large skeptical of school and the larger system and generally resigned to a life of poverty, crime, and struggle. "The Brothers," on the other hand, were a group of mostly black youth who believed that if they studied hard and kept their eyes on the prize, a better life was possible. Although there was a huge gap between the aspirations, motivation and attitudes of the two groups, when McLeod returned to check in with the boys in their early-20s, he found most of them still in the same position: poor, largely option-less, still living in the projects or nearby. McLeod notes that socioeconomic factors played a role for both groups, but while The Brothers' work ethics and educational attainment left them marginally better off, the added burden of racism kept them from making real progress. It's worth mentioning that neither group believed class or race to have played a role in their circumstances, but blamed themselves for not trying hard enough to succeed.
Ultimately, McLeod concludes the achievement ideology, also known as the American Dream, whereby hard work and a good attitude are all you need to get ahead creates unfair expectations for poor kids. He posits that a messier, more realistic message combined with an education that holds up examples of people who succeeded despite wealth and power barriers is a more effective message for low-income kids. "As students develop tools of social analysis and begin to understand how class-based inequalities in wealth, power, and privilege affect them, this awareness of self in relation to society becomes a motivating force much more powerful than the achievement ideology." The achievement ideology is a tidy platitude and a fine ethos when all things are equal. When things are radically unequal, it takes an unflinching awareness of social politics to combat that inequity.
But that's a hard sell for the people holding the purse strings (often the government). I'm not trying to go all conspiracy theory, here, but let's be real: Even if you genuinely want to help people, it's an uncomfortable thing to say, "Oh, hey, you're going to have to work twice as hard as someone in my circumstances to get the same things." Whatever social progress we've made in the past several decades, we're a little Victorian when it comes to talking honestly about money and class.
And yet we can't leave well enough alone and just play dumb, we keep on picking at the scab until we're a disgusting mess.
Here's an example that fills me with rage: I hate, hate, hate the glib internet meme "first world problems," because it's crass and dismissive and highlights the ugliest face of privilege. It's a sheepish, cheapskate way of acknowledging great gifts while still failing to appreciate them. Posting a photo of starving children, a bombed out Iraqi town and then the price of gas at your local Mobil with the cheerful caption, "First world problem!" is unbelievably fucked up. Sure, suffering is subjective and measured in degrees, but if you think those relative sufferings even belong in the same sentence, I hope I never have to meet you.
And while I'm sure people who do it think it's a silly, self-deprecating joke, the truth underlying is that they have a pretty serious disconnect between those images and the fact that that is really, truly, actually someone's life. It's real, and it's everyday. Excuse the sermon, but if you can't wrap your head around how not-a-joke it is to live in starvation conditions or in a war zone, then it's for goddamn sure you aren't taking U.S. poverty, a less dramatic but still crippling condition, seriously enough.
Which is why social change is just never going to come top-down in this country. McLeod's right. Perpetuating the achievement ideology is a great way to maintain the status quo. If you tell people that they can win if they just play the game, but you fail to tell them the rules, they'll lose almost every time. Even if we could get everyone awake and aware, it's going to be a more difficult struggle than anyone imagines. As we saw in the debt ceiling standoff, politics is often a war of attrition, or more accurately, a game of chicken. And the people with the money and power have the resources to wait in relative comfort for the rest of us to flinch.
I don't think I started out intending to incite revolution, but I guess that's what I'm talking about. As previously middle class families slip farther and farther down the economic ladder, there'll be more of us at the bottom to pitch a stink. Unfortunately, we're a society fractured along so many lines, that I don't have a lot of faith that we'll hear the call to work together for mutual gain over the cacophony of superficial difference. I have a theory about the achievement ideology and the side effect of the working class devouring itself waiting for a payday that isn't coming, but that's for another time.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
One Man's Crazy is Another Man's Wholesale Cultural Condemnation
I've been indulging in a meditation lately on relativism, vis a vis the world going to hell in a handbasket. We were doing okay when one man's trash was another man's treasure, but I'm talking about bigger stakes: One man's human rights (or two men's, as the case may be) are another man's abomination. One man's social responsibility is another man's wasteful spending. One man's holy war is another man's crime against humanity. You get the idea. The irony here is that everyone involved is pretty certain of their position. In the mathematics of social ideology, Perceived Objective Truth + Perceived Objective Truth = No Functional Objective Truth.
It's really not all that noteworthy. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have some kind of narrative to explain why they do the things they do, whether they're professors or garbage men or 4-years-old or schizophrenic. When confronted with the suggestion that they've acted badly, they can offer what is, for them, a perfectly reasonable explanation of why they did it. The logic may be faulty and/or the moral judgment may not sit well with a segment of the population (or in some cases, community standards), but by and large, people are doing things for a reason, and in their minds, at least, a good one.
Given that militant commitment to subjective morality is the name of the game in the twin cesspools of politics and public discourse, this headline in today's New York Times gave me pause: Lawyer Says Suspect in Norway Attacks is Insane. Gosh, lawyer, you think?
I'm not the first person to point out that the reception of this suspect relative to other terrorism suspects. I've already read a number of op eds and blog entries and facebook-repost zingers noting that the same mostly conservative, mostly Christian folks eager to define terrorism as the purview of (inherently-evil) Muslims have managed to give Anders Breivik a religious hall pass. He may be a Christian, but not a good Christian, and isn't their denunciation of his acts proof that real Christians are the standard-bearers of moral righteousness? [Insert tired argument that moderate Muslims "aren't speaking out against terrorism"]
Well, gang, I hate to bust up the xeno-/teleo-phobic party, but no. Just like I don't expect English majors to apologize for the Virginia Tech shooter because they share intellectual interests, I don't expect religious communities, nations, or other cultural subsets held together a tenuous group of shared characteristics to apologize when one of their number loses it. Whatever identifiers were in play before the attacks, there's really only one that actually defines this guy, and his lawyer hit the nail on the head. Breivik is insane. In my mind, that doesn't let him off the hook, it just means that pundits on all sides need to stop trying to make any meaningful points about terrorism, causation, religion or any other pet subject based on the actions of one cracked egg.
This guy probably had a lot of things in common with a lot of very disparate folks. Those people didn't gun down children. Let's not pretend we can extrapolate things about Christians, or, say, Norwegians, based on one who did.
Of course in the context of legal proceedings, the definition of insanity is itself a little whacked. I'm neither a lawyer nor a psychiatrist, but my understanding is that insanity, as determined by court-appointed experts, is a condition in which the perpetrator was unaware that their actions were wrong.
In my mind, this is where things go off the rails a bit: The question isn't really whether they were aware that their actions were wrong (which suggests an objective, universal standard), but whether they were aware that other people would judge their actions to be wrong. It's one of the reasons that the insanity defense is so seldom successful: no matter what deluded logic makes a person feel vindicated in committing a heinous act, most of the time they understand that their convictions are at odds with society at large.
There's a lot a wingnuts with a martyr-complex and optimistic lawyers. Generally, if someone is caught murdering people, they'll do their level best to convince a jury and the world at large that their motive excuses an act they understand is morally repugnant to pretty much everybody. It's a tiny, tiny group of people who are a) living independently in society and b) so delusional that they honestly don't understand what the problem is.
The outcome in insanity cases is a bit cockamamie as well. Pleading insanity means accepting a sentence in a mental institution regardless of the jury's findings. If you're found not guilty by reason of insanity, you are institutionalized for an indefinite sentence until it's determined that you're no longer a threat. You might also be found "guilty, but insane" in which case you will receive a sentence of pre-determined length like a regular prison sentence, but serve it in a mental institution.
Aside from the penalties, insanity has some galling semantic implications for victims' families. When someone is not guilty due to insanity, they are "not responsible" for their actions. I'm just speculating, but I bet that tidbit makes for some salty wounds.
Maybe there's a good reason to keep the definition of insanity as stringent as it is. I guess it means that if if you're willing to fess to it and receive treatment regardless of the outcome, some worthwhile goal is achieved. But, and maybe I'm crazy myself, but it seems to me that if you kill someone and believe that you were right to do it something in your brain is not okay. The DSM-IV is a wonderful, nuanced volume. Here are some of the ways the DSM-IV describes sociopathy: "failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest," "Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."
At the end of the day, this is just another weird cultural judgment call: One man's dangerous criminal is another man's dangerous mental patient. And maybe my lefty bias is showing, but if the purpose of the penal system is rehabilitation (and despite all evidence, ostensibly it is. I'm speaking now of the U.S.), then warehousing people who are, from a clinical perspective very obviously damaged in an environment where they will receive little or no treatment from overworked and under-trained staff is an embarrassment to the social ideals we purport to have. I'm not saying that we should fill psychiatric centers with violent criminals, but I absolutely believe we should be providing a whole lot of psychiatric treatment to violent criminals. Particularly in cases where there is a likelihood that the prisoner in question will re-enter society, we have an obligation to them and to the public at large to address the issues that caused them to offend in the first place. I can almost guarantee that those issues will not be that they are of a particular faith, race, gender, political party or sexual orientation. So what say we stop sniping at each other and think about how we identify actual risks, prevent actual casualties and deal with the actual, individual perpetrators instead of strawmen.
Here's where the sprawly expanses of this post comes together: In order for a society to function, there has to be some common ground. And there is but we've become increasingly fractious and fractured, so focused on the things that define us separately, and so intolerant of perceived and actual differences that we're in danger of losing our identity. It shouldn't be hard for us to agree that people who commit mass murder are sick, sick individuals. It shouldn't be hard for us to refrain from using national and international tragedy to frame pot shots at ideological opposites or to hop on a soap box on those occasions except to express solidarity with victims and their families or seek partners in working toward an end to these kinds of atrocities. Instead of chasing down metaphorical escaped horses and blaming each other for leaving the door open, we ought to agree that we all want to keep the horses in the barn and work together to make it happen.
It's really not all that noteworthy. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't have some kind of narrative to explain why they do the things they do, whether they're professors or garbage men or 4-years-old or schizophrenic. When confronted with the suggestion that they've acted badly, they can offer what is, for them, a perfectly reasonable explanation of why they did it. The logic may be faulty and/or the moral judgment may not sit well with a segment of the population (or in some cases, community standards), but by and large, people are doing things for a reason, and in their minds, at least, a good one.
Given that militant commitment to subjective morality is the name of the game in the twin cesspools of politics and public discourse, this headline in today's New York Times gave me pause: Lawyer Says Suspect in Norway Attacks is Insane. Gosh, lawyer, you think?
I'm not the first person to point out that the reception of this suspect relative to other terrorism suspects. I've already read a number of op eds and blog entries and facebook-repost zingers noting that the same mostly conservative, mostly Christian folks eager to define terrorism as the purview of (inherently-evil) Muslims have managed to give Anders Breivik a religious hall pass. He may be a Christian, but not a good Christian, and isn't their denunciation of his acts proof that real Christians are the standard-bearers of moral righteousness? [Insert tired argument that moderate Muslims "aren't speaking out against terrorism"]
Well, gang, I hate to bust up the xeno-/teleo-phobic party, but no. Just like I don't expect English majors to apologize for the Virginia Tech shooter because they share intellectual interests, I don't expect religious communities, nations, or other cultural subsets held together a tenuous group of shared characteristics to apologize when one of their number loses it. Whatever identifiers were in play before the attacks, there's really only one that actually defines this guy, and his lawyer hit the nail on the head. Breivik is insane. In my mind, that doesn't let him off the hook, it just means that pundits on all sides need to stop trying to make any meaningful points about terrorism, causation, religion or any other pet subject based on the actions of one cracked egg.
This guy probably had a lot of things in common with a lot of very disparate folks. Those people didn't gun down children. Let's not pretend we can extrapolate things about Christians, or, say, Norwegians, based on one who did.
Of course in the context of legal proceedings, the definition of insanity is itself a little whacked. I'm neither a lawyer nor a psychiatrist, but my understanding is that insanity, as determined by court-appointed experts, is a condition in which the perpetrator was unaware that their actions were wrong.
In my mind, this is where things go off the rails a bit: The question isn't really whether they were aware that their actions were wrong (which suggests an objective, universal standard), but whether they were aware that other people would judge their actions to be wrong. It's one of the reasons that the insanity defense is so seldom successful: no matter what deluded logic makes a person feel vindicated in committing a heinous act, most of the time they understand that their convictions are at odds with society at large.
There's a lot a wingnuts with a martyr-complex and optimistic lawyers. Generally, if someone is caught murdering people, they'll do their level best to convince a jury and the world at large that their motive excuses an act they understand is morally repugnant to pretty much everybody. It's a tiny, tiny group of people who are a) living independently in society and b) so delusional that they honestly don't understand what the problem is.
The outcome in insanity cases is a bit cockamamie as well. Pleading insanity means accepting a sentence in a mental institution regardless of the jury's findings. If you're found not guilty by reason of insanity, you are institutionalized for an indefinite sentence until it's determined that you're no longer a threat. You might also be found "guilty, but insane" in which case you will receive a sentence of pre-determined length like a regular prison sentence, but serve it in a mental institution.
Aside from the penalties, insanity has some galling semantic implications for victims' families. When someone is not guilty due to insanity, they are "not responsible" for their actions. I'm just speculating, but I bet that tidbit makes for some salty wounds.
Maybe there's a good reason to keep the definition of insanity as stringent as it is. I guess it means that if if you're willing to fess to it and receive treatment regardless of the outcome, some worthwhile goal is achieved. But, and maybe I'm crazy myself, but it seems to me that if you kill someone and believe that you were right to do it something in your brain is not okay. The DSM-IV is a wonderful, nuanced volume. Here are some of the ways the DSM-IV describes sociopathy: "failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest," "Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."
At the end of the day, this is just another weird cultural judgment call: One man's dangerous criminal is another man's dangerous mental patient. And maybe my lefty bias is showing, but if the purpose of the penal system is rehabilitation (and despite all evidence, ostensibly it is. I'm speaking now of the U.S.), then warehousing people who are, from a clinical perspective very obviously damaged in an environment where they will receive little or no treatment from overworked and under-trained staff is an embarrassment to the social ideals we purport to have. I'm not saying that we should fill psychiatric centers with violent criminals, but I absolutely believe we should be providing a whole lot of psychiatric treatment to violent criminals. Particularly in cases where there is a likelihood that the prisoner in question will re-enter society, we have an obligation to them and to the public at large to address the issues that caused them to offend in the first place. I can almost guarantee that those issues will not be that they are of a particular faith, race, gender, political party or sexual orientation. So what say we stop sniping at each other and think about how we identify actual risks, prevent actual casualties and deal with the actual, individual perpetrators instead of strawmen.
Here's where the sprawly expanses of this post comes together: In order for a society to function, there has to be some common ground. And there is but we've become increasingly fractious and fractured, so focused on the things that define us separately, and so intolerant of perceived and actual differences that we're in danger of losing our identity. It shouldn't be hard for us to agree that people who commit mass murder are sick, sick individuals. It shouldn't be hard for us to refrain from using national and international tragedy to frame pot shots at ideological opposites or to hop on a soap box on those occasions except to express solidarity with victims and their families or seek partners in working toward an end to these kinds of atrocities. Instead of chasing down metaphorical escaped horses and blaming each other for leaving the door open, we ought to agree that we all want to keep the horses in the barn and work together to make it happen.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Night Owl Jamboree
We keep some pretty weird hours.
I sometimes go to work at 4:30 a.m. and sometimes at 2 p.m. B doesn't work. I've learned to be something approximating a morning person when necessary, but ultimately, given my druthers, I'd stay up all night and get a million things done. And these days I often do. It makes those early mornings a little harder to fit into my schedule without cat naps here and there, but that's the price you pay for freedom, I guess.
I've referred to the woman down the hall as Scary Neighbor, but most of the time we refer to her as Bad Nana, Mean Nana, or, if she's been particularly awful in our direction, Bitch Nana. From what I've gathered, she cares for (and I mean this in the very loosest sense of the word) her granddaughter, who is roughly 4 or 5, and, based on my interactions with her in the hallway, smart and sassy as all get out.
This makes me incredibly sad, because Bad Nana is the very last person I would put in charge of anyone's well-being, least of all a child's.
In our late night world, we make music and talk philosophy and blog and cook and generally live a happy life of creativity, terrible jokes and awesome food. And then Bad Nana came and added the hobby of listening to Bad Nana hold court among her weird harem of 20-something hoodlums and 40-something, generally intoxicated African men. In general, she has nothing good to say about any of them when they're not around. And she's got some pretty ignorant things to say about her Muslim friends, and you'll have to trust me on that, because I wouldn't repeat them for a million dollars.
This evening I decided to reclaim a tupperware container of beans that had been sadly neglected. It is a sad but true fact that vegetable proteins rot with a furious stench worthy of their animal counterparts (a word to the wise: if your tofu turns, just toss the container. Seriously. I've literally never encountered anything as foul as rotten tofu). So I dumped it in the trash and took the trash out.
Around from the back of the building came one of Bad Nana's older-type friends who greeted me with vigor and attempted to make small talk. The last time I exchanged pleasantries with one of Bad Nana's friends it ended with, "Aw, you gettin' cold over there...I see you, girl." It took me until I was in the apartment and had put the grocery bags down to realize that he was referring to my nipples at which point I considered going back outside to throw down. Instead, I adopted a policy of icy avoidance of the whole lot.
So when I found myself there with Cheery Drunk Guy, I began to consider my options. He obviously wanted to get in the building, and I, obviously, did not want to let him in behind me. Happily or not, it turned out that in his sojourn behind the building, he'd managed to wake Bad Nana. Bad Nana was not happy. And when Bad Nana ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
She stormed out the door.
"Do you know what time it is? Don't DO this to me. For real. It's motherfuckin' three o'clock in the morning...who the fuck's that? [I waved a little] Oh...For real, what the fuck do you want at motherfuckin' three in the morning?"
I was really hoping here that she'd just relent and let him in and make a path for me to scurry back to my happy little world, but instead they sat down. I was running out of ways to drag out the task of putting out the trash.
"Seriously, yo, do you know who's awake at three o'clock in the morning? Motherfuckin' crackheads. The only people awake at three o'clock in the morning are motherfuckin' crackheads. For real. I finally got to sleep after four days awake and you fuckin' wake me up..."
I finally just sucked it up and excused myself to get past them. They stayed on the steps dropping motherfuckin' F-bombs for another half-hour.
And I went back to my cocoon and made a baked tempeh salad to take to work tomorrow night while B nerded out on the new sampler we got for pennies.
The number of times the phrase, "It's a small world," has come in the past week has been astronomical. It's funny that people use it almost exclusively to demonstrate how many ties there are between disparate people at great geographical distances, or in unexpected circumstances. And I've used it a million times myself. Portland, Maine, is practically the capital of the Small World phenomenon.
It's interesting, then, that we rarely note the opposite, which is undoubtedly more common. The life that Bad Nana leads has virtually nothing to do with mine, despite our shared accommodations and physical proximity. The same could be said for Gordon, the elderly fellow who used to live across the hall and could often be found holding a sign asking for change at the corner of State and Forest, "Homeless, please help." Whatever Bad Nana thinks she knows about crackheads, Gordon was one, and he was in bed by 9 every night.
The parade of coincidence and serendipity that triggers our "Small World" excitement is definitely enthralling and more than a little magical, but I'm way more intrigued with the flip side, the people I pass on the street every day, the clerks in the store, the tenants of buildings I pass all the time that I've never met. That we are capable of encountering people all the time and know nothing about them is astounding. I think there's a sort of instantaneous, animal sorting that happens, "Like me, not like me...not...like...like...not." It's really a kind of alarmingly disengaged way to go about our lives. Because whether the assessment is "like" or "not like," the result is the same: we never really consider the people around us as distinct individuals. Unless someone is singled out for fame or infamy, we tend not to bother.
If that sounds like a judgment, it's because it is. But from a practical standpoint, I know it would take a huge amount of energy to think differently, given the number of people we encounter every day.
There's something (or several somethings) swimming around in here, but the sky's pink and Bad Nana's cussing on the stoop and it's bed time.
I sometimes go to work at 4:30 a.m. and sometimes at 2 p.m. B doesn't work. I've learned to be something approximating a morning person when necessary, but ultimately, given my druthers, I'd stay up all night and get a million things done. And these days I often do. It makes those early mornings a little harder to fit into my schedule without cat naps here and there, but that's the price you pay for freedom, I guess.
I've referred to the woman down the hall as Scary Neighbor, but most of the time we refer to her as Bad Nana, Mean Nana, or, if she's been particularly awful in our direction, Bitch Nana. From what I've gathered, she cares for (and I mean this in the very loosest sense of the word) her granddaughter, who is roughly 4 or 5, and, based on my interactions with her in the hallway, smart and sassy as all get out.
This makes me incredibly sad, because Bad Nana is the very last person I would put in charge of anyone's well-being, least of all a child's.
In our late night world, we make music and talk philosophy and blog and cook and generally live a happy life of creativity, terrible jokes and awesome food. And then Bad Nana came and added the hobby of listening to Bad Nana hold court among her weird harem of 20-something hoodlums and 40-something, generally intoxicated African men. In general, she has nothing good to say about any of them when they're not around. And she's got some pretty ignorant things to say about her Muslim friends, and you'll have to trust me on that, because I wouldn't repeat them for a million dollars.
This evening I decided to reclaim a tupperware container of beans that had been sadly neglected. It is a sad but true fact that vegetable proteins rot with a furious stench worthy of their animal counterparts (a word to the wise: if your tofu turns, just toss the container. Seriously. I've literally never encountered anything as foul as rotten tofu). So I dumped it in the trash and took the trash out.
Around from the back of the building came one of Bad Nana's older-type friends who greeted me with vigor and attempted to make small talk. The last time I exchanged pleasantries with one of Bad Nana's friends it ended with, "Aw, you gettin' cold over there...I see you, girl." It took me until I was in the apartment and had put the grocery bags down to realize that he was referring to my nipples at which point I considered going back outside to throw down. Instead, I adopted a policy of icy avoidance of the whole lot.
So when I found myself there with Cheery Drunk Guy, I began to consider my options. He obviously wanted to get in the building, and I, obviously, did not want to let him in behind me. Happily or not, it turned out that in his sojourn behind the building, he'd managed to wake Bad Nana. Bad Nana was not happy. And when Bad Nana ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
She stormed out the door.
"Do you know what time it is? Don't DO this to me. For real. It's motherfuckin' three o'clock in the morning...who the fuck's that? [I waved a little] Oh...For real, what the fuck do you want at motherfuckin' three in the morning?"
I was really hoping here that she'd just relent and let him in and make a path for me to scurry back to my happy little world, but instead they sat down. I was running out of ways to drag out the task of putting out the trash.
"Seriously, yo, do you know who's awake at three o'clock in the morning? Motherfuckin' crackheads. The only people awake at three o'clock in the morning are motherfuckin' crackheads. For real. I finally got to sleep after four days awake and you fuckin' wake me up..."
I finally just sucked it up and excused myself to get past them. They stayed on the steps dropping motherfuckin' F-bombs for another half-hour.
And I went back to my cocoon and made a baked tempeh salad to take to work tomorrow night while B nerded out on the new sampler we got for pennies.
The number of times the phrase, "It's a small world," has come in the past week has been astronomical. It's funny that people use it almost exclusively to demonstrate how many ties there are between disparate people at great geographical distances, or in unexpected circumstances. And I've used it a million times myself. Portland, Maine, is practically the capital of the Small World phenomenon.
It's interesting, then, that we rarely note the opposite, which is undoubtedly more common. The life that Bad Nana leads has virtually nothing to do with mine, despite our shared accommodations and physical proximity. The same could be said for Gordon, the elderly fellow who used to live across the hall and could often be found holding a sign asking for change at the corner of State and Forest, "Homeless, please help." Whatever Bad Nana thinks she knows about crackheads, Gordon was one, and he was in bed by 9 every night.
The parade of coincidence and serendipity that triggers our "Small World" excitement is definitely enthralling and more than a little magical, but I'm way more intrigued with the flip side, the people I pass on the street every day, the clerks in the store, the tenants of buildings I pass all the time that I've never met. That we are capable of encountering people all the time and know nothing about them is astounding. I think there's a sort of instantaneous, animal sorting that happens, "Like me, not like me...not...like...like...not." It's really a kind of alarmingly disengaged way to go about our lives. Because whether the assessment is "like" or "not like," the result is the same: we never really consider the people around us as distinct individuals. Unless someone is singled out for fame or infamy, we tend not to bother.
If that sounds like a judgment, it's because it is. But from a practical standpoint, I know it would take a huge amount of energy to think differently, given the number of people we encounter every day.
There's something (or several somethings) swimming around in here, but the sky's pink and Bad Nana's cussing on the stoop and it's bed time.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
When you gotta go, you gotta go
I swore when I moved into my apartment seven years ago that I wouldn't move again unless it was into a place I bought.
It's been a promise that hasn't been difficult to keep. At the time, the rent was ridiculously low (roughly high-market for a 2-bedroom) for a gorgeous three bedroom apartment with awesome neighbors, off-street parking, a private porch, and a couple of vegetable beds at my disposal. The rent made a small jump from ridiculously low to just regular low a few years back and since then there's been one small cost-of-living increase. When I moved in with my then-fiance, we used the third bedroom as his office and eventually as the HQ for the publishing outfit we started.
Slowly, so slowly that I've been able to stay comfortably in denial about the issue, my home sweet home has become, though no less lovely, not a great fit. It's a bitch to heat, which changed the value situation when the price of oil shot up. The neighbors have changed a bunch of times and they're still nice, if a little wilder. But while they seem to have peaked out bad behavior the time they had a party with portapotties, fire jugglers and beer-pong in our quiet west end yard, even the twice-monthly 2 a.m. drum-circle/shitty Jack Johnson sing-alongs (everybody stomp, now!) are pretty obnoxious when you wake up at 4 to go to work. Then there's the matter of the landlord, a passive aggressive weirdo who spends more time puttering in our basement than at his home in Kennebunk. I digress easily and stories about this guy are such solid gold that I could write a whole post, so we'll just leave it that he's become someone pervy and paternalistic at the same time, both of which I could live without.
Plus, it seems B and I (I've just decided to call my boyfriend B here. It's short for his name, not for boyfriend, so don't barf.) have reached that point where we spend all our time in one place, and it ain't mine. It's insanely counter-intuitive, since B lives in a ghastly low-income property ("where poor people and sex offenders go to die," is how he once described it). You're going to have to take my word for it that there are legitimate reasons for spending our time there.
Thing is, those reasons have to do with it being B's home and absolutely nothing to do with the place itself. Again, I'm putting the pre-emptive kibosh on digressive rantings but between the permanent stench of beef stew, ill health and desperation and the new neighbor who triggers every long-buried bullied-nerd tendency in my body and whose friends actually make me fear for my safety, and the bed bugs that recently turned up (Guess who's insanely giant-hive-style allergic? Yay welts!) this is not a place we want to be.
So.
It's time to move. The original plan was to keep my promise re: moving before ownership. It's not just about consolidating our living arrangements -- we also rent a practice space for our band and the end game would be to make a finished-basement recording/practice space in our home because while the current bedroom-recording, frigid-bunker-with-sketchy-wiring-for-practice model has worked so far, it's cramping our style and expensive to boot. At the end of the day, buying is still where we want to go, but Scary Neighbor and Paternalistic landlord have changed the game where the timeline's concerned.
We're looking for a place for September 1. It's a little scary to me. It's been a long time since I looked for an apartment and it will be hard to give up the place I have. I worked hard to keep it from being haunted after the divorce, but I don't have the same sense of home there that I did before, and in some ways it's the last thing that links me to the person I was then. I never hold a grudge against the people I've been before but I am unapologetically nostalgic and it's hard to make clear-headed decisions about the future when those people are still hanging around.
Well, there. I've been writing blog posts all week that have been epic in scope and so radically unfocused that I had to abandon them on the side of the information superhighway. I think it's just a matter of taking a little break from thinking and writing all my big philosophical thoughts -- I was starting to feel like a bit of a pompous ass. I'm really enjoying the writing anyway, though, so maybe I'll indulge and allow myself some utterly frivolous Landlord and Scary Neighbor posts. It's gonna be so fun. Promise.
It's been a promise that hasn't been difficult to keep. At the time, the rent was ridiculously low (roughly high-market for a 2-bedroom) for a gorgeous three bedroom apartment with awesome neighbors, off-street parking, a private porch, and a couple of vegetable beds at my disposal. The rent made a small jump from ridiculously low to just regular low a few years back and since then there's been one small cost-of-living increase. When I moved in with my then-fiance, we used the third bedroom as his office and eventually as the HQ for the publishing outfit we started.
Slowly, so slowly that I've been able to stay comfortably in denial about the issue, my home sweet home has become, though no less lovely, not a great fit. It's a bitch to heat, which changed the value situation when the price of oil shot up. The neighbors have changed a bunch of times and they're still nice, if a little wilder. But while they seem to have peaked out bad behavior the time they had a party with portapotties, fire jugglers and beer-pong in our quiet west end yard, even the twice-monthly 2 a.m. drum-circle/shitty Jack Johnson sing-alongs (everybody stomp, now!) are pretty obnoxious when you wake up at 4 to go to work. Then there's the matter of the landlord, a passive aggressive weirdo who spends more time puttering in our basement than at his home in Kennebunk. I digress easily and stories about this guy are such solid gold that I could write a whole post, so we'll just leave it that he's become someone pervy and paternalistic at the same time, both of which I could live without.
Plus, it seems B and I (I've just decided to call my boyfriend B here. It's short for his name, not for boyfriend, so don't barf.) have reached that point where we spend all our time in one place, and it ain't mine. It's insanely counter-intuitive, since B lives in a ghastly low-income property ("where poor people and sex offenders go to die," is how he once described it). You're going to have to take my word for it that there are legitimate reasons for spending our time there.
Thing is, those reasons have to do with it being B's home and absolutely nothing to do with the place itself. Again, I'm putting the pre-emptive kibosh on digressive rantings but between the permanent stench of beef stew, ill health and desperation and the new neighbor who triggers every long-buried bullied-nerd tendency in my body and whose friends actually make me fear for my safety, and the bed bugs that recently turned up (Guess who's insanely giant-hive-style allergic? Yay welts!) this is not a place we want to be.
So.
It's time to move. The original plan was to keep my promise re: moving before ownership. It's not just about consolidating our living arrangements -- we also rent a practice space for our band and the end game would be to make a finished-basement recording/practice space in our home because while the current bedroom-recording, frigid-bunker-with-sketchy-wiring-for-practice model has worked so far, it's cramping our style and expensive to boot. At the end of the day, buying is still where we want to go, but Scary Neighbor and Paternalistic landlord have changed the game where the timeline's concerned.
We're looking for a place for September 1. It's a little scary to me. It's been a long time since I looked for an apartment and it will be hard to give up the place I have. I worked hard to keep it from being haunted after the divorce, but I don't have the same sense of home there that I did before, and in some ways it's the last thing that links me to the person I was then. I never hold a grudge against the people I've been before but I am unapologetically nostalgic and it's hard to make clear-headed decisions about the future when those people are still hanging around.
Well, there. I've been writing blog posts all week that have been epic in scope and so radically unfocused that I had to abandon them on the side of the information superhighway. I think it's just a matter of taking a little break from thinking and writing all my big philosophical thoughts -- I was starting to feel like a bit of a pompous ass. I'm really enjoying the writing anyway, though, so maybe I'll indulge and allow myself some utterly frivolous Landlord and Scary Neighbor posts. It's gonna be so fun. Promise.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Both Sides Now
[In case you're just jumping in here, this is the second of three posts on marriage. The first can be read here. The second can be read here.]
Alright, then. One more and then I'll shut about marriage. If I were writing with my journalist hat on, I would have put this right up front so you could judge whether I had a conflict of interest. Because I'm not, I didn't want you to. The truth is, I think that most readers, armed with this information ahead of time, would probably not have taken the time to read the other posts, or at the very least would have inferred certain things about my mindset and dismissed any thoughts I have on the subject as irrelevant and jaded.
I am an ex-wife.
Three years out from my divorce, I can write that phrase and although it still gives me the willies, it doesn't feel like being punched in the face anymore, and I no longer allow it to define who I am. I had been seeing a therapist for several months before I decided to end my marriage, trying to wrap my head around...well, my head and what was going on in there. I'd been very open with him, cried my way through dozens of sessions, but I remember that when I told him that I'd actually done it, told my husband that I was leaving, I was fairly matter of fact. It wasn't a casual decision. I'd weighed everything out and even though it felt unbelievably shitty and there were a million ways that I was punishing myself about it on a regular basis, I knew it was the right one. But when I'd finished explaining the basics of how I felt about it, I paused and burst into tears, "I'm going to be an ex-wife! Ex-wives are horrible!"
I was kidding, in a morbid sort of way, but it summed up not just my own self-loathing for being a failure at marriage (and the instigator of its demise) but also my certainty that the recrimination I directed at myself was only the tip of the iceberg compared to the swift and terrible judgment soon to be rendered unto me by, well, everyone in the city.
The years that have followed have been a long, torturous, fascinating lesson learning curve. For the most part, I doubt that anyone, my ex-husband included, judged me more harshly than I did myself, but there were definitely some haters. Most people turned out to be too wrapped up in their own shit to bother with mine (possibly the most valuable lesson I learned, and one that made a huge difference in this people-pleaser's life). But there was a also a large contingent who were so awkward and uncomfortable that they might as well have been judging.
It's probably apparent by now that I'm difficult to embarrass. Easy to shame, but difficult to embarrass. For pretty much everything I do or have done, I'm willing either to defend it or admit my error. And in turn, I'm game for pretty much anyone wants to tell me. In fact, I'm like a weird inverted gossip. Everybody's got something going on that makes them feel like a freakish outsider, but because we feel that way, we rarely share the information. I suspect that if everybody was more open about their lives, we'd all be shocked at how much "abnormality" we all share. Look at the Republican party. For all their judginess about each others' foibles, there's nary a one without a foible waiting in the wings. We're all killing ourselves to hide our idiosyncracies and be "normal," based on a radically inaccurate picture of what normal is.
But wait, I was talking about marriage, right? Right. Much like people are uncomfortable when someone their age dies because it brings home their own mortality, divorce makes people uncomfortable as though it were a contagious disease.
My husband was a smart, funny, talented man. He still is. He loved me, and if he feels about me like I feel about him, he still does, in a different, distant way. We spent a lot of years together. We experienced some hard and beautiful things. I'm not interested in sharing the particulars of how our relationship ended, because while I'm an open book, the co-author of this particular volume might not appreciate it. And ultimately, although there were various contributing factors, the thing that I understand now is that I do not want to married. Period.
As I talked about in the first post of this series, marriage is a powerful cultural phenomenon and most people are raised either explicitly or implicitly to expect that the end game of romantic relationships is marriage. I certainly thought so. My parents were divorced, and I had no intention of every letting such a horrible fate happen to me. In retrospect, I can see how artificial the actual, "getting married" part was relative to the actual, lovely substance of the relationship we were in, but at the time, it seemed the natural next step, a big deal, the grown up thing to do. It was all very theoretical, really. Because hey, what's the difference between the first five years you're a couple and the years you're married? A technicality, right?
Well, yes. But here's why I firmly believe that it was not my marriage that didn't work for me, but marriage in general. As a life-long people pleaser, I have an extremely difficult time protecting and cultivating my identity as an individual within the structure of a relationship. That's not to say that my partners have been monsters or bullies, but that I will, incrementally and in subtle ways, defer to their plans, prioritize our plans and goals as a couple over mine as an individual. It's not something that causes me to suffer necessarily. I don't lament these things, and I rarely notice until after the breakup, but I do it. In my relationships prior to marriage, including the years in which I was dating my future husband, I would right the ship after the initial infatuation and get back to the business of being me.
I honestly expected that getting married wouldn't really change anything except to allow him access to my health insurance, but over a short period of time I began to feel as though obligation was supplanting mutual support. We started a business together before we got married, his dream job, and I worked the day job to support it, with the expectation that when it got on its feet, I would have a turn. Again, I'll skip the details, but after we were married there came a time when I felt that our mutual life (maybe buying a house or having children, etc.) and the possibility that I might have a chance to explore my interests had been sacrificed. I take responsibility for allowing that to happen. And I know that in similar circumstances with financial and legal obligations tied to another person, I would, against my better judgment, let it happen again. People love to give the relationship advice that you shouldn't expect the other person to change, that you should go into it anticipating and accepting their faults. I would add the also seemingly obvious but often ignored idea that you should do the same for yourself.
Divorce was easily the most horrific experience of my life, and ours was relatively amicable. I think people expect that the person who does the leaving gets off easy, but I'm here to tell you it just isn't so. Both parties walk away feeling broken, disappointed, frustrated confused. It's crushing in ways you can't imagine unless you do it, and I strongly recommend you take my word for it. My husband (for the same reasons I dislike the baggage that goes with the term "ex-wife" I hesitate to use the term ex-husband. Besides which, since I will not marry again, he is the only person I could be referring to when I say "my husband") has a girlfriend he's been with for years now and is the stepdad to her children. I have been in a relationship for the same amount of time. We're both satisfied with our lives, and when we run into each other, we're glad to have a chance to catch up, although we don't go out of our ways to make plans with each other.
My boyfriend and I are in love. Both of us are personally strongly opposed to marriage, although we are equally adamant supporters of gay marriage as a civil rights issue. After three years, we don't live together, which suits us just fine as we're both fairly finicky sorts who enjoy time to ourselves. We're comfortable saying things like, "I think I need to just be on my own for a few days," and comfortable hearing it as well. We have mutual projects including a band that is his project originally but in which we are partners, and we're supportive of each others' individual ventures, and participate in them as much as we are welcome and/or comfortable doing so. I don't think it's fair to hold up any relationship against another one, but I will say that the lessons I learned in the course of my marriage and divorce have allowed me to be a better partner, both more responsible to myself and more cognizant of the health and balance of the relationship I'm in.
That I'm not cut out for marriage is fine by me. I think there are people who are suited to it, and beyond that people who thrive in that situation. Those people don't need an advocate because the world is set up to embrace them. I didn't write this series because I'm a bitter divorcee hell bent on exposing the failures of the institution that ruined me, I wrote it because I firmly believe that the divorce rate should not be as high as it is, and the corollary is that the marriage rate should not be as high as it is.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of things we'd prefer not to see so much of in our society: divorce, abortion or robbery, for example. But as much as we punish and marginalize people who are "guilty" of those activities, obsessing about the actions is an exercise in futility. These are effects, and the only way to get real results in reducing those effects is to give some serious, honest, unflinching thought to the causes. We need to re-evaluate our assumptions about marriage, get serious about sex education and de-stigmatizing contraception in places where stigma still persists and allocate at least as many resources for the war on poverty as we do for the war on drugs. We're a talk-show culture, eager to dissect transgressions against our accepted norms, but too intellectually lazy to a) stop it or b) change our conception of what the "norm" is in any given arena.
So yes, I'm an ex-wife, a current girlfriend (which, though diminuitive, is at least less de-humanizing than "partner") but more importantly a proponent of living an examined life regardless of its resemblance to cultural expectations.
Alright, then. One more and then I'll shut about marriage. If I were writing with my journalist hat on, I would have put this right up front so you could judge whether I had a conflict of interest. Because I'm not, I didn't want you to. The truth is, I think that most readers, armed with this information ahead of time, would probably not have taken the time to read the other posts, or at the very least would have inferred certain things about my mindset and dismissed any thoughts I have on the subject as irrelevant and jaded.
I am an ex-wife.
Three years out from my divorce, I can write that phrase and although it still gives me the willies, it doesn't feel like being punched in the face anymore, and I no longer allow it to define who I am. I had been seeing a therapist for several months before I decided to end my marriage, trying to wrap my head around...well, my head and what was going on in there. I'd been very open with him, cried my way through dozens of sessions, but I remember that when I told him that I'd actually done it, told my husband that I was leaving, I was fairly matter of fact. It wasn't a casual decision. I'd weighed everything out and even though it felt unbelievably shitty and there were a million ways that I was punishing myself about it on a regular basis, I knew it was the right one. But when I'd finished explaining the basics of how I felt about it, I paused and burst into tears, "I'm going to be an ex-wife! Ex-wives are horrible!"
I was kidding, in a morbid sort of way, but it summed up not just my own self-loathing for being a failure at marriage (and the instigator of its demise) but also my certainty that the recrimination I directed at myself was only the tip of the iceberg compared to the swift and terrible judgment soon to be rendered unto me by, well, everyone in the city.
The years that have followed have been a long, torturous, fascinating lesson learning curve. For the most part, I doubt that anyone, my ex-husband included, judged me more harshly than I did myself, but there were definitely some haters. Most people turned out to be too wrapped up in their own shit to bother with mine (possibly the most valuable lesson I learned, and one that made a huge difference in this people-pleaser's life). But there was a also a large contingent who were so awkward and uncomfortable that they might as well have been judging.
It's probably apparent by now that I'm difficult to embarrass. Easy to shame, but difficult to embarrass. For pretty much everything I do or have done, I'm willing either to defend it or admit my error. And in turn, I'm game for pretty much anyone wants to tell me. In fact, I'm like a weird inverted gossip. Everybody's got something going on that makes them feel like a freakish outsider, but because we feel that way, we rarely share the information. I suspect that if everybody was more open about their lives, we'd all be shocked at how much "abnormality" we all share. Look at the Republican party. For all their judginess about each others' foibles, there's nary a one without a foible waiting in the wings. We're all killing ourselves to hide our idiosyncracies and be "normal," based on a radically inaccurate picture of what normal is.
But wait, I was talking about marriage, right? Right. Much like people are uncomfortable when someone their age dies because it brings home their own mortality, divorce makes people uncomfortable as though it were a contagious disease.
My husband was a smart, funny, talented man. He still is. He loved me, and if he feels about me like I feel about him, he still does, in a different, distant way. We spent a lot of years together. We experienced some hard and beautiful things. I'm not interested in sharing the particulars of how our relationship ended, because while I'm an open book, the co-author of this particular volume might not appreciate it. And ultimately, although there were various contributing factors, the thing that I understand now is that I do not want to married. Period.
As I talked about in the first post of this series, marriage is a powerful cultural phenomenon and most people are raised either explicitly or implicitly to expect that the end game of romantic relationships is marriage. I certainly thought so. My parents were divorced, and I had no intention of every letting such a horrible fate happen to me. In retrospect, I can see how artificial the actual, "getting married" part was relative to the actual, lovely substance of the relationship we were in, but at the time, it seemed the natural next step, a big deal, the grown up thing to do. It was all very theoretical, really. Because hey, what's the difference between the first five years you're a couple and the years you're married? A technicality, right?
Well, yes. But here's why I firmly believe that it was not my marriage that didn't work for me, but marriage in general. As a life-long people pleaser, I have an extremely difficult time protecting and cultivating my identity as an individual within the structure of a relationship. That's not to say that my partners have been monsters or bullies, but that I will, incrementally and in subtle ways, defer to their plans, prioritize our plans and goals as a couple over mine as an individual. It's not something that causes me to suffer necessarily. I don't lament these things, and I rarely notice until after the breakup, but I do it. In my relationships prior to marriage, including the years in which I was dating my future husband, I would right the ship after the initial infatuation and get back to the business of being me.
I honestly expected that getting married wouldn't really change anything except to allow him access to my health insurance, but over a short period of time I began to feel as though obligation was supplanting mutual support. We started a business together before we got married, his dream job, and I worked the day job to support it, with the expectation that when it got on its feet, I would have a turn. Again, I'll skip the details, but after we were married there came a time when I felt that our mutual life (maybe buying a house or having children, etc.) and the possibility that I might have a chance to explore my interests had been sacrificed. I take responsibility for allowing that to happen. And I know that in similar circumstances with financial and legal obligations tied to another person, I would, against my better judgment, let it happen again. People love to give the relationship advice that you shouldn't expect the other person to change, that you should go into it anticipating and accepting their faults. I would add the also seemingly obvious but often ignored idea that you should do the same for yourself.
Divorce was easily the most horrific experience of my life, and ours was relatively amicable. I think people expect that the person who does the leaving gets off easy, but I'm here to tell you it just isn't so. Both parties walk away feeling broken, disappointed, frustrated confused. It's crushing in ways you can't imagine unless you do it, and I strongly recommend you take my word for it. My husband (for the same reasons I dislike the baggage that goes with the term "ex-wife" I hesitate to use the term ex-husband. Besides which, since I will not marry again, he is the only person I could be referring to when I say "my husband") has a girlfriend he's been with for years now and is the stepdad to her children. I have been in a relationship for the same amount of time. We're both satisfied with our lives, and when we run into each other, we're glad to have a chance to catch up, although we don't go out of our ways to make plans with each other.
My boyfriend and I are in love. Both of us are personally strongly opposed to marriage, although we are equally adamant supporters of gay marriage as a civil rights issue. After three years, we don't live together, which suits us just fine as we're both fairly finicky sorts who enjoy time to ourselves. We're comfortable saying things like, "I think I need to just be on my own for a few days," and comfortable hearing it as well. We have mutual projects including a band that is his project originally but in which we are partners, and we're supportive of each others' individual ventures, and participate in them as much as we are welcome and/or comfortable doing so. I don't think it's fair to hold up any relationship against another one, but I will say that the lessons I learned in the course of my marriage and divorce have allowed me to be a better partner, both more responsible to myself and more cognizant of the health and balance of the relationship I'm in.
That I'm not cut out for marriage is fine by me. I think there are people who are suited to it, and beyond that people who thrive in that situation. Those people don't need an advocate because the world is set up to embrace them. I didn't write this series because I'm a bitter divorcee hell bent on exposing the failures of the institution that ruined me, I wrote it because I firmly believe that the divorce rate should not be as high as it is, and the corollary is that the marriage rate should not be as high as it is.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of things we'd prefer not to see so much of in our society: divorce, abortion or robbery, for example. But as much as we punish and marginalize people who are "guilty" of those activities, obsessing about the actions is an exercise in futility. These are effects, and the only way to get real results in reducing those effects is to give some serious, honest, unflinching thought to the causes. We need to re-evaluate our assumptions about marriage, get serious about sex education and de-stigmatizing contraception in places where stigma still persists and allocate at least as many resources for the war on poverty as we do for the war on drugs. We're a talk-show culture, eager to dissect transgressions against our accepted norms, but too intellectually lazy to a) stop it or b) change our conception of what the "norm" is in any given arena.
So yes, I'm an ex-wife, a current girlfriend (which, though diminuitive, is at least less de-humanizing than "partner") but more importantly a proponent of living an examined life regardless of its resemblance to cultural expectations.
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