Happy Birthday Grandma Marge

Depending on how you know me and what you know about me -- it's very likely that you'll know one of the following things:

1. I'm something of a social constructionist

2. I'm a bookworm

3. I'm a "theater person"

4. I'm a debater

But the center -- the core -- of what makes each of these things true about me is this:

I love stories.

And further:

I believe that stories make people. I believe that story-ing is the fundamental human process.

And I have to pay a great debt of gratitude to my Grandma Marge for this value.

I'm pretty sure she wouldn't call herself a social constructionist, but she's been telling stories for the last thirty three years, and given her skill, she's been doing it a lot longer.

She grew up on a farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, her family having descended from William Brewster from the Mayflower and more recently from Kaiser Wilhelm.

Half the stories she knows (and that's a "half" based on the ethos of hyperbole) she learned by peering through the register in her bedroom floor and listening to the goings on below.

She had a lot of uncles who broke the heart of their mother and her mother alike, but the drama of their lives unfolding through the register made my grandma marge a keen observer of human nature and a natural relayer of human conflict, motivation and resolution.

I don't want to tell too many of her stories here, because she's still writing her own book of stories -- Through The Register. She has an amazing authorial voice where she has an ability to condense a whole world of human action into a quick sentence. Her stories are often told quickly, but there's always a hundred layers and nuances in each one.

But I do want to honor that its her birthday and i want to affirm that the stories she's passed on to me, feel as visceral and warm as the afghans, sweaters, & mittens she's made for me. They feel like they constitute me. And since this activity which combines: history and making and imagination and drama and performance and humor and tragedy -- is the one activity that i'm most devoted to in the world....

I wanted to tell you a little bit about her.

Peace~

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a moment to celebrate
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one front burner successfully fried. eight or nine to go.

this morning i turned in my tenure and promotion folder. for those of you who know -- that thing has been consuming me for way too long. for those of you who are interested (dad) -- an online version of most of it will be available soon. (i'll post a link for you here)

i get the enjoyable privilege of chillin with my kids for the next two hours -- and we're looking forward to ex-roomates deke & kelly coming into visit with baby anna this weekend.

we've got a hopeful prospect checking out the house (we think? we hope?) on sunday...

for those of you who i owe an email or a call. let me do what i'm best at right now -- apologize:

sorry.

the truth is that the front burners are still gonna be grilling for the next two weeks. and the optimist in me says that after thanksgiving they'll be more manageable.

Realistically? look for an email at Christmas Break.

Sorry to be so *absent* when the *presence* of your life & voice in my life is gives me life and energy...

happy birthday to butch! (tho' i'm pretty sure you don't read -- maybe someone else will, though, email Butch! He's 34!)

love & peace ~

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caution, strong language follows
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Josh rants about grading and in the midst of it asks me to say something in defense of grading...

ME!?!?

I'm genuinely sorry, Josh (seriously) that you are just one more victim of the evil (i'm not being ironic, i'm ranting!) apparatus of bueracratic tool we call "grading."

Grading sucks....

School sucks....

I told a student today that I don't see my role in school as being participation in a "holy" institution.

Oh no.

take the corruption of the two party political system,

take the scavenging of Sam Walton,

take the slime of the advertising industry,

take the misogyny of Hollywood,

take the greed of Enron (and all like CEOs)

take the crusades of the church -- and NOW

you've got a more accurate view of my view of _SCHOOL._

Don't even get me started on GRADES!

Ideally, I see my role in school as being the minority dissenting vote, the prophet in his own city,

(and just so you know, I *know* that I don't live up to the beautiful martyrdom of these ideals)

BUT what is faith and truth and honesty if your front burner is school?

That grades *do* give us a chance to give our own subjective (yes, I agree, Josh, absolutely subjective) albeit, hopefully somewhat expert (and I use the term loosely) assessment of a particular performance in a particular place.

I always say --

Grades are not:

a measure of your learning.
a measure of your personhood.
a measure of your potential.
a measure of your worth.
a measure of your intelligence.

They just measure how well you stack up against a particular crowd -- in a particular place at a particular time -- given some particular opinions that have trained one particular person.

Are you hearing my particularity?

BTW, Josh, this is *so* not about your experience alone -- its about my front burner. I feel keenly that I'm spending more time GRADING than doing the work that I came here to do...

Here's an article that suggests that possibly (please!?) grades could go the way of the white tiger (something I know nothing about -- the white tiger that is) (and BTW, Christian, YES, I would like such a feature in my blogging software.)...and here's a description of an alternate assessment system that seems a heck of a lot better to me...

better for students, better for later evaluaters, and (though harder) better too for teachers -- it would allow teachers to be more devoted to the process of contextualizing a student as opposed to treating them as they so often get treated...

~peace

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good weekend
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Convinced myself to honor the sabbath out of a little bit of piety and a lot of exhaustion. Slept 9 hours Friday night. (that hasn't happened in several months)

Had a great time watching and discussing Bend it like Beckham with Lynn Friday evening -- and we watched it again with the kids.

It's a perfect movie -- in that -- it works really well on this purely formulaic, popular, narrative level.

Indian girl tries to break from her parents expectations into a life full of futbol. Makes a friend, alienates community, falls in love with coach in the process and...

i won't include a spoiler on the ending...

but its perfect, too, because it also works as this really nuanced commentary on the clash between post-colonial cultural theory and western liberal feminist theory.

I mean Really Really Well.

And its so ripe with the images of globalization that it makes your head spin....professional sports, airplanes everywhere, the ephemeral presence of Beckham and posh spice, america as the "promised land", white "liberal" suburban moms who think that having "a curry" for lunch = a cultural experience...

And then the next evening we watched Whale Rider (i know, i know, we're behind the times, but we live in mideast ohio and babysitting is too expensive). And I was struck by the fact that in some ways its a very different answer to the same question...

Don't read on if you don't want a little bit of spoiling for BILB...

B/c Whale Rider asks the same question: How does a woman find her way in a culture that doesn't have room for her? How can any one person-on-the-margins balance fealty to their traditions *&* be everything that they are capable of?

But in this film -- instead of articulating the self over and against the culture -- the answer is to give all the strength that you have TO the culture -- but on your terms...

it seams together feminism and indigenous/traditional life in a much more harmonious relationship...

the role of cultural performance in BOTH is devastatingly central...can you see why i'm so obsessed with Garage sales & Tractor Pulls & Pageants & Preacher Boy Contests now?

sunday afternoons in realty

sometimes when there were three different families in the house, in the one house, too small, awkwardly furnished, cramped floor plan house, she felt as if her head were electric.

There would be moments where no one was in the kitchen. She would stand against the table, not leaning, but pressing the tops of her thighs against the curved wooden table edge. She would stand there poised and tense, waiting for the running footsteps of toddlers to come thumping back down the steps, the curious bewildered overweight and unshowered woman in the back room to come lurching down the hall, the starry eyed young couple -- (could they even be twenty?) to emerge from the basement (are they kissing down there? groping one another feeling eager and anxious and daring?). As she waited her head felt electric with plans and possibilities.

Could she keep them from following one another into a room? Down a hallway? Could she avert their gaze from the moldy trim on the floorboard across the room? She struggled to make herself guard her eyes from the greenish blackish blotches? Who were these owners? How could they miss that mold?

If she stood with her shoulder leaned forward to the frump, could she discourage her from staying, could she shoo her out? Could she creak her foot on the basement step and make the newlyweds flee in embarassment?

But whenever she started to think in these maths, she knew she couldn't count on her intuition. The young family with the toddlers seemed the most right for this house, but so far, two years in, she was finding that houses rarely fit people in the ways that she thought that they should.

In fact, she knew almost instantly when she saw a house the kind of owner or family or inhabitant that would fit that house best. Sometimes she needed to stand in the middle of the living room before the picture developed in her head -- who they were, how they would use this space.

But the other sundays had convinced her that this gift, this knack that had just maybe been responsible for landing her in this particular life, was maleformed. Families most often did not fit the houses they bought and houses did most often not fit their families. On days when lunch was sitting well and her hair did not feel too unruly and she had managed to have just exactly the right amount of coffee (3.5 cups, she knew it, but when she drank with clients or in a conversation, she just couldn't monitor it, so more often than not she ended up with a headache or feeling down), on those days, she knew that her gift was right, but people made bad decisions regarding houses because it was a practical decision. People employed criteria that were entirely heartless. And all she could see with was her heart. For her, houses and inhabitants should be love matches.

Yes, the other sundays, most sundays she spent the duration of the long afternoons all alone in the houses. She tried to take interest in the family photos, but she found them so depressing. All these children in the exactly same poses and clothing that Walmart had sold to every other mother in every other house that she waited in. She tried to take interest in the needlepoint by some or another great aunt, and then the similarities were even more frightening. Certainly everyone's rural aunts weren't swapping their patterns at walmart, but the doilies and quilts and the chintzy towels felt as continuous as the false windowpanes on the pulldown backdrops behind the pained smiles of a hundred coaxed and prodded children on a hundred walls hanging just above a hundred sofas that had gone out of style in New York three years before they had ever arrived in the show rooms here in the midwest.

During these sundays she became convinced that they filled their houses with these identical photos, these mass-marketed sofas, these carefully selected heirlooms, these silk flower arrangements, these collectibles and this high tech electronics equipment all as a strategy for survival. There had been some moment when they had recognized that this was not the house for them. (She could have told them before they ever had the house inspector come to look for traces of mice and termites that their search was misdirected.) In a panic, a concerted and controlled frenzy, they had erected these shrines. These objects when placed carefully in relationship to one another acted as shrines marking a kind of holy space that could transcend any house. The house didn't need to matter at all. So it didn't make then happy in the way they imagined it would or in the way they hoped it might. These oak dining room chairs, these carefully matched craftsman endtables, these Thomas Kincaide prints *could* reassure them that they were indeed living as well as they might.

If only the yellow pages had a section for House Purchasing Shaman. She really had no interest in being a "Realty Agent." She wanted to be a Home Selection Shaman. She could be cross referenced with Termite Inspections and Kitchen and Bathroom Contractors.

The toddlers feet started thumping on the stairs.

She stood up. She realized she had been sitting, not just leaning, not really poised anymore. And the energy that had been buzzing in her head faded across the memory of a hundred sundays before and a hundred sundays to come in silent unsellable, but ultimately sold houses.

She moved to the far corner of the living room. If she stood there in the corner with a broad smile (not too intrusive, not too warm) and an arm vaguely lifted toward the kitchen, she just knew they would move that direction. And that movement would startle the passionate duo below and possibly they would all cross paths right here in front of her. And the frump would misread the sign of her slightly uplifted arm to be a signal to her, and when she would look below her arm, she would see the grate on the fireplace and realize that it reminded her exactly of the grate over her own fireplace in her own childhood home and thirty days later, she would sit across the table from the frump, smiling (not at all intrusive, not at all warm, just trying not to be plastic), as she sorted through a stack of signing papers.

Oh this was the house for her, she could just hear the frump saying, and the parents of the toddlers, whose financing had not come through yet, would be meeting at the door of their apartment, he coming in, she exiting, shouting instructions about dinner in the oven and he must, he absolutely must have a bath tonight, and if we had a bathtub sometime in the next year, wouldn't that be a miracle.

The toddler jumped onto the landing from the stairs and stared into her eyes. He looked at her raised arm, widened his eyes, and pointed in the same direction. Happy. Mom! Dad! He called. Their feet on the stairs, and he obediently runs toward the kitchen.