Give Us All Some Breaks

I've talked about my admiration for The Oxford American a few times before on this blog and on Humid City. I am in awe of its history, of the content and contemporary talent it's been able to amass over the years, of how it has become the Southern magazine that has been able to rise above the trials of scrambling for another publisher, the tribulations of having had a substantial amount of money embezzled out from under it by a former employee, and the hassles of having to relocate to Conway, Arkansas (as a former boyfriend's magnet from Conway once proclaimed, the OA's home these past few years is "halfway between Pickles Gap and Toad Suck," which could be construed as being pretty damn hillbilly Southern - don't strain your ears too hard listening for the banjos).

Problem is, I think, after all this time, OA editor Marc Smirnoff needs a break from writing the editorials in his own magazine. A big break. Just before this year's Southern Music Issue, too many of his blatherings of late have left me with a feeling that he was simply rambling in a head-scratching way. What was the point? At least the music issue kept him fairly focused...and then this takedown of Garden and Gun magazine comes down the pike. There's a degree to which it was written to reassure himself of the rightness of the mission he embarked on in founding the OA in the first place - and I don't dispute the rightness of that mission - but I do question the vitriol Smirnoff pours into his diatribes against G&G, throwing in references to its larger-than-OA's subscription numbers and its luring Roy Blount Jr. away from his regular column in the OA, then circling back to a salient, important point about glossy, good-looking magazines like G&G leaving the thorny subject of race out of their focus on surface matters and a literal whitewashing of what the South is really like. It all makes me grateful that Smirnoff only really vents his spleen like this in print once every 20 years - and it saddens me that it takes his being vehemently against something to light writing fires like this under his butt. At least the content of OA overall hasn't suffered...

_______________________________

Via Twitter, something else to think about:

Andre Perry

finished up meeting with technology leader who flatly said there is too much politics and drama in #publicschools for to include his child

 Let's first get one thing straight: if you become a parent, and you care, there's going to be a certain amount of politics and drama involved in damn near anything you do for your children, whether it's which school you will have them attend, which extracurricular activities they'll be involved in, even - to a certain extent - which friends they have. It's why any decision to even have a child should not be taken lightly.

Now that that's out of the way, let's discuss perception vs. reality...and not just in New Orleans public ed, though the decision by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to back diverting public money to vouchers for private schools is bad enough. 

While I was up in New York celebrating my grandfather's 90th birthday, my grandma, a longtime teaching veteran in her neighborhood public school, was appalled at the massive, splashy teacher ratings article published in the Rupert Murdoch-run New York Post this past Saturday that was erroneous and mean-spirited. Check the criticism of it here and the stuff the numbers don't say. My husband took one look at the numbers and, statistician and high school alumnus that he is, assumed that the standardized test scores students got were attributed to their homeroom teachers, which, in lots of cases, are not the teachers doing most of the instruction for the tests. Also, if all you've been teaching as a public school instructor is English, what's the point of giving you a math score? These teacher numbers ending up saying little more than, "You teachers are the bad people ruining our schools, and even if these numbers are completely, utterly wrong, at least they will be on record and someone will deny you a job shaping young minds because of them."

Grandma had a few questions about charter schools for me and how they operate in New Orleans. I had to tell her about the charters' semi-autonomy and how it doesn't help them pay for things like busing kids to their schools. I'm glad I hadn't heard about Lafayette Parish's lunch program payment woes before I talked with her. The trends in public education right now are for the state to assume less responsibility for educating the children that live here, and that usually means the few dollars that were going to education in the first place are being cut to fractions of cents. When even Leslie Jacobs is questioning the ultimate efficacy of voucher programs, not to mention whether voucher students will be subject to the same state testing despite their private school attendance, one has to wonder.

So yes, there is a lot of drama and politics involved in public education these days, because so many want to fix it so damned badly. If Bobby Jindal and the lege in Baton Rouge have their way, even more drama and politics above and beyond tuition payments and possible beefs with teachers and administrators over the direction of your child's education and well-being will be seeping into the private schools. 

I wonder how that tech leader Andre Perry spoke to will like them apples?

Invitation

It's that time of year again. The time when we are holed up in our abode on the gray brick road, pretty much paraded out - as we are only a block and a half from the parade route - but would like nothing more than to feed our friends, old and new, as they go along their merry way on Mardi Gras. For whatever reason, rabbits seem to be the thing since my last Saturday's adventures in Abita Springs (more on that soon), so here's the invite. At the very least, it provides you with a place to pee on Mardi Gras day.

You are Invited to the 6th Annual Carnival Ball of

The KREWE OF PANCAKES AND SYRUP

“the krewe with the edible doubloons”

Where: Our House (email me at liprap2@netscape.net for details)

When: Mardi Gras Day (that’s Tuesday, February 21, 2012) from 8am until noon, or whenever Leigh kicks you out

What: Pancakes, and lots of ‘em (and syrup, too)

Who: You

Why: for the fun of it

Krewe Fees: We’re supplying pancakes, syrup, coffee, milk, juice, and probably Leigh’s homemade king cake, so bring whatever else you want to share.

Honorary Krewe Royalty: King… Manny Flapjax

Queen… Belle June Waughful

Need to get in touch with us? liprap2@netscape.net

* food disclaimer: pretend you keep kosher and please bring something other than pork, shellfish, catfish, or anything that mixes milk and meat in the same dish.

“Religious” disclaimer… We started this because we like pancakes, always make too many of them, don’t want to give up our parking spots for Mardi Gras, and like company. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian tradition of observing Shrove Tuesday or “Pancake Day” by making and eating pancakes, which we didn’t learn about until a few years ago.

In the past week, I won tickets to this event and decided to drag Dan to it.

So we headed to the Quarter, where finding a parking spot we didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for was nearly a serious drag until my parking karma held against some staggering odds... Just you try to fit into a parking spot you have patiently waited for, one that is only an inch or two larger than your car, while an NOPD squad car has pulled over a cab that has been caught in the act of jumping the curb and straddling the sidewalk to try to pass you as you wait for the spot to be freed up. I did my best to head into this very tight spot without bumping the fenders of the cars in front and behind me for fear of the cop turning on me next and issuing some sort of citation after he'd finished with the cabbie. I still can't believe I did it.

What we also couldn't believe was the note the previous occupiers of our parking spot left for the car behind us, one that rudely told off the driver of the car for parking right up on the bumper of the first car. Dan yanked it off the windshield for fear of the driver returning, thinking it was we who left the note, and then deciding something bad had to happen to our car. It is a must to protect good parking karma, you see.

We headed into the king cake tasting, had a large amount of several different bakeries' worth of Carnival pastry, and then we came across Larry Ragusa. That's right.



He told us all the other king cakes were crap next to his. He then said something to me that recalled this night's experience...and something in me put on a stone face and said, okay, I'll try it.

Yes, that's a king cake with a layer of salami and olive salad in it.

Dan had a huge piece and got a baby. I had a bite and nearly gagged. "It's a muffuletta with frosting is all," Dan said. All I know is that it's one of the answers to the question of "when is a king cake no longer a king cake?"

We learned a little later that we'd been spoofed...but context is everything. The filmmakers brought the Ragusa-style king cake as a joke, but they'd put it on the table next to the Manny Randazzo's and before they knew it, the second of the Ragusa's had to be brought out. Never underestimate the omnivorous nature of New Orleanians' palates was their lesson that night.

I managed to shoe-horn the car back out of the spot (the driver of the car behind us had still not returned) and as we parked in a nice, roomy area by our curb, Dan jokingly asked me if I thought I had enough room.

"I don't know," I replied. "I think the driver of the car behind us has to learn how to park."

"HEY, no name calling." Dan said as we both giggled.

I've described this video to others before. It's a blast from my glassworking past, the film shown to us all as, first and foremost, an example of what NOT to do in a glass shop. We giggled at the pipes flying through the air, exclaimed over the lack of protective eyewear, and were overwhelmed, in the end, by the poverty that hung over each and every shop visited in Firozabad.

I can't believe it's on YouTube now.

 

The two things that distinguish most studio glass shops in modern first world countries from the times when the Romans began to gather hot glass on the ends of metal pipes and blow it into various shapes, I was told, are the usage of compressed air to cool specific areas of a glass bubble and the usage of propane torches to heat specific areas of a glass bubble. All the rest is more or less unchanged.

Watch Glass India, though, and the third world seems to be still fully encased in the amber of Roman times.

Motivate Me

Locally, our alternative weekly has been mostly milquetoast on the subject of public education "reform" and privatization in the schools - cover stories in the past few months that tout an education think tank and two education reformers, one of whom got censured by the AAUP for de-tenuring Tulane faculty in the wake of the levee breaches (which was not mentioned in the current article) aren't exactly examples of a critical look at education at work. The closest the Gambit gets to any critical stance of privatization is in the publication of a two-part article by Lisa Rab on the Mavericks high schools in Florida, a series of schools that has relied on a matched set of smoke and mirrors - technology and location, all publicly funded - that have collapsed under intense scrutiny of the corruption that dogs their very existence and their m.o. Forget that the Gambit won't turn a similarly critical eye on what is happening right in its hometown...what jumped out at me from part 2 on the Mavericks schools was this:

Part of Mavericks' problem may be the teaching model: Parking troubled kids in front of a computer and hoping they'll learn — instead of watching the latest Kardashian viral video on YouTube. Research shows that for virtual learning to work, "Students need to be very self disciplined and have supportive environments," Miron says. "If they're not self-guided and self-motivated, then it's gonna be a hard match."

Yes, Louisiana does have a virtual classroom - an entire virtual school, in fact. There are good reasons to take courses online - I myself have taken some college-level courses online - but I question the level of commitment to learning kids under eighteen will have when plunked in front of a screen and keyboard. And I'm not the only one:

I’d like to consider (an electrical engineer-turned-high school math teacher's) more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.  

 “The problem is that I’ve found that all these things that are purported to improve student learning ignore the number one factor in student success, which is the student’s attitude toward learning and motivation,” wrote my new friend the math teacher.  “The truth is that if students are motivated to learn, they will learn, pretty much regardless of the specific format or technology that is used in the lessons themselves.  Conversely, if a student is not interested in learning, the details of how lessons are presented, technology, etc. don’t matter very much…the student will find whatever way is available to avoid learning…they may socialize with their neighbors, or frequently ask to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, or simply try to tune out and take a nap during class.  Thus, while we focus on how teachers teach, I’m finding that the real key to student success is not so much how you teach but how you go about motivating students to want to learn, and how the systems you use in the classroom help support and encourage students to succeed even when they are not intrinsically motivated by the subject.”  

He’s correct. In an ideal world students want to learn and teachers want to teach and the two meet in a common space where knowledge is transferred. Except how often and how well does that really happen?

Robert Cringely goes on to address the use of technology in education further in two more articles that are a good read - one of which states that for technology to really motivate the student to learn, it must function as a hired companion would, on a one-on-one responsive basis with each student. I keep imagining that kind of relationship as going something like this:

"Hello, TeacherBot, how are you today?"
"Doing fine today, Leigh. Let's talk about the effective use of titles to your posts..."
"Aw, do we have to?"
"There's nothing like an effective title to draw your readers in, Leigh. This is a learning experience."
"But...but..."
"You keep repeating a part of the mammalian anatomy. We aren't discussing that subject right now."
"Teach, if this were up for publication, then yes, I feel a title would be warranted, but I see this as more of a diary."
"Your entries are public, Leigh. Readers make quick judgments these days. A title must grab the reader and make the reader want to peruse your writing further, thus giving your work some proper attention and a chance for it to get more feedback and then more readers for your next effort."
"Oh, well, when you put it that way..."
"Leigh, it is a worthy exercise. I'd put the sarcasm away as well, if I were you."
grumble...mumble..."Okay, let me get to work..."

Ah, motivation. The Holy Grail of teaching. Motivated students will follow you everywhere and simultaneously challenge you at the same time to keep up with them and stay a few steps ahead - but only if you as a teacher are willing to go there. It is a two-way street.

Even before privatization cranked into full gear here, it was tough finding motivated teachers - low pay didn't really compensate for the long hours, the many out-of-pocket expenses, and the largely inadequate facilities many teachers had in the New Orleans public schools pre-8-29-2005. The testing manias, the rage for TFA-ers over certified, diploma'd teachers, and the low pay plus little-to-no benefits make the atmosphere for motivated teachers even more stifling in the traditional public schools and the charters. A move towards Mavericks-style setups here in Louisiana would only work if the old GIGO was taken into account - that is, "garbage in-garbage out." From both the student end AND the teacher's end of the virtual classroom, if you throw garbage at each other, all that will come from it is a virtual landfill. The one-on-one via PC is not close to perfect unless embraced fully by both student and teacher...and I don't think we're even close to that situation in many of the traditional teacher-student relationships, much less the virtual ones.

I have no problems with technology being used in concert with a traditional teacher-student learning situation. Replacing the traditional entirely with technology, however, isn't feasible and should not be advisable.

There have been many hints and allegations that there might be more of a push from within the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to make entire K-12 schools virtual. Good for the students? It's probably only good for the state's coffers.

If that does actually come to pass, it would be a huge mistake atop the many others BESE is intent on making.

Update, 1:50 PM: Just to add to the tech in education debates:

From Twitter the other day:

Me: "Can we opt the kid outta the iLEAP?" Dan: "Don't think so. Property values in #nola depend on how well he does." Me: 8-P

It's not that I don't think the little guy will do well. On a personal level, I am annoyed at the miscommunication over what page he's supposed to be doing in the iLEAP workbooks and when it's due, sure. I just wish it weren't taking away the good time he spends really learning and getting enthusiastic about it - even the teacher commented on how much he enjoyed a recent lesson on volcanoes, something he'd been jazzed about when I picked him up from school one afternoon.

A recent carpool incident:
"Mom, I've got some baaaad news."
"Oh, well, what's the bad news? (aka, what iLEAP homework sin did you commit today?)"
"Well, they're having another fundraiser...next week...at the skating rink."
My 92% healed ankle throbs a little more than the dull rug-burn-under-the-skin feeling I have these days.
"Oh...uh...huh. When is it?"
"Next Thursday night."
Whew, choir practice night!
"Oh, I don't think we can go anyway, honey."

He then proceeded to read me the skating rink's liability policy, which was just what I thought - go into a crowd of people wearing your own personal set of eight wheels and break your bones at your own risk, with a "tough toenails" for emphasis somewhere in the fine print. Hey, the kid only stumbled over a couple of words. Not bad for a third grader.

One other thing I really appreciate when driving to the new location of the school? The nice man on Paris Avenue near Vista Park who waves enthusiastically at every car while walking his dog in the mornings. "Who are you waving to, Mom?" "Just wave, okay???" Thanks for the welcome, sir, whoever you are.

Fight the Bath Salts and the Suriname Toads...

...that is, SOPA and PIPA.

I'm doing this tomorrow in the hopes that the government won't be doing it to all of us permanently. Don't be surprised if you can't get to any content here. Instead, let your government representatives know what a bad idea regulating the internet to their extreme is.

New Orleans Slate tells us a story about a man in need:

Kweku Nyaawie grew up in Central Texas based mostly out of Austin. A carpenter and cabinet maker, he came to New Orleans with his brother to help out with reconstruction of homes damaged by the Federal Flood in late 2005. He saw the destruction first hand and continued to work and save his money. At some point he decided to stay. He wanted to contribute to the community, buy a house, make it a home not a speculation project and found the shotgun at 616 Port Street. It needed work, but he knew he was the guy who could do it. He looked for period architectural pieces, was painstaking in his research, checked the history of the house, delighted in knowing that he'd be the one to restore this little bit of New Orleans history with the added bonus of living in it. 

He got involved with the Community Garden Project in Treme and put his money and time into fixing the house. Long after the Poor Clares, the house had been purchased by a Mr. Frisbe, who lived there with his partner from 1977 until he passed away. His partner continued to live there until the storm. Kweku, or Ku as we all call him, bought it already needing repair in 2008. He loved working on the house and loved that it was exactly 100 years older than he was. When we moved here we knew him to say hello but never saw him because he was always at the Garden or working on that house. 

Then came the summer of 2010. As Ku was riding his bicycle on Dumaine Street in the Sixth Ward, a black sedan hit him. Hard. Knocked completely off the bike, he watched as the car sped away without even checking to see if Ku was alright. He headed to his girlfriend's house battered, bruised and scratched badly. He didn't go to the ER as he thought he was just healing from some bad road rash and deep bruises. Knowing him now, my guess is that he also figured he'd just tough it out and he'd be fine. Weeks went by. His back still hurt. Months went by. His back still hurt. Then in December 2010 he realized that his legs wouldn't quite support his 6'3” frame. He headed off to the doctor but realized that he couldn't get the help he'd need here in New Orleans, he couldn't work so money was also an issue (given that the bastard who hit him took off, there was no insurance money coming in to help with medical bills), so he made the decision to move back to Austin and his family. Those of us who knew him were worried as we didn't hear from him. 

He was busy. He spent nearly 14 months in therapy and is still on crutches with his legs still unable to support him. Although he's the most positive attitude guy in the world, he's also a proud man and a man who loves his house. He is unfortunately learning the lesson many of us learned after the storm: sometimes you gotta ask for help. 

A few weeks ago he got a letter from the City. A hearing. Blight. Neighbors complaining. (We're neighbors, we couldn't figure out who would complain knowing how hard he'd worked and knowing what had happened to him.) At the hearing it was discovered that one complaint had come from a doctor (a DOCTOR? Wouldn't he know how devastatingly long spinal cord injuries can take to heal?) because some vines had overgrown the fence and were interfering with his backyard garden. (This doctor is also the owner of a lot of property on our block.) Evidently Ku's next door neighbor, an absentee homeowner and an attorney who lives in the house intermittently, wanted Ku's house demolished. Ku was given a list of things that had to be fixed or a $500 a day fine would be levied.(Although he wouldn't probably bring it up, he's one of only 2 black property owners on the four sides of this block, and some of us, though not Ku, can't help but wonder if that's a part of these complaints.) 

Ku sat in an office chair for a week sanding the front of the house in order to get it ready for painting. Stand across from it and you can see how far the outer limit of his reach is, which frankly from a desk chair is impressive. Today he's working on the bricks that front the house from the sidewalk to the base of the house. Siding needs to be replaced for sure. His brother had been able to help for a while, but we heard he recently got a job so he's on his own for the moment and his next hearing is a week from today. 

I am asking anyone out there who can help, who can climb a ladder, sand, paint, write a letter, anything that can toss a road block into the $500 buck a day fine that he can't afford, to get in touch.

Read more here. The go-to email for NOLA Slate is river.dharma@gmail.com.

Humid City Supplemental

I just realized I left an unqualified declaration in my latest post over at Humid City...that of being "fairly fortunate" thus far in navigating the current "system of schools" obstacle course that is public education in New Orleans.

To be sure, I've been called a hypocrite for my stance on charterization. My son is attending classes at a charter school. We are fortunate in that we got him into the school and, more importantly, that it is doing right by him socially and educationally. We were also benefactors of damned good timing - we managed to shoe-horn him into his current school back in the spring of 2006, when, even then, the most a parent could do was to fill out the requisite forms, attend the required classroom tour and parent meetings, "and then you pray," one mother responded when a teacher asked about the no-guarantees admissions process. It was probably the last time any parent had to deal with a waitlist for the school due to the city's population still reeling from the effects of 8/29/2005. At that time, we also benefited from the little guy's pre-K3 tuition being paid for by the state, which is no longer happening for parents with 3-year-olds in New Orleans public schools.

But our fortunate position is subject to change. Our financial status could fall away, the next teacher might be unable or unwilling to reach our son or work with us to help him realize his potential, and we might not be able to put the time and effort into all the forms, all the school visits, and all the research it would take to get our son elsewhere without further jeopardizing an already sketchy economic state. Where would we go then? What could be done for him?

This is what I fear the most every day. And unfortunately, my fear is a reality for far too many. It's a reality of fewer jobs out there that will pull you out of economic dire straits and give you at least a prayer of raising a family right. It's a reality that can turn families onto or away from each other and explode in violence or pass away in a whimper of abandonment. And then the rug gets pulled out by the realities of what is ironically called "school choice." It is only choice when you can devote large chunks of your time to making sure said choice does not turn sour -  placing your child in a school that isn't even working for the children who are there, forget the ones that are coming in, is one big way all of this goes wrong. Another is when your child's special education needs get shoved aside because the school's performance numbers don't need the stress of accommodating a child that needs that extra attention. Trying to call out the state on what is required in its own laws isn't just a full-time job, it can be an exhausting obsession.

How much time do you have to devote to all of this and still raise a family again?

My family is fortunate yet I am uncomfortable in it. If the only comfort I can give a struggling parent who has been waitlisted for charters all over the place is "wait and see and keep trying," that's extremely cold. The state, with its recent election of a man younger than I to its highest education position (I told my grandmother, a veteran of teaching in Long Island, NY schools about John White's RSD appointment and she was appalled. "He's much too young and inexperienced," she said. ) is going to give too many parents positions on similar waitlists all over Louisiana, all in the name of covering its own ass when things go wrong or a charter doesn't meet expectations. The doors on fair and nearly free-with-your-taxpaying public education will be closing even faster than they already have been.

And this ranting is only from my vantage point as a lowly, imperfect parent. To get some clarification on some much greater implications of Louisiana's move towards charterization, head to G-Bitch.

Parenting Purgatories

If there's anything this past weekend has taught me, it's this...

Nothing has driven me to drink like parenthood has. NOTHING, I tell you.

It's not like one can choose the sex of their baby (not yet), but when I first found out I was going to have one, I initially thought it might be a girl. At 20 weeks gestation, I found out it was otherwise (hey, 50/50 chance). At the time, hormones amplified some of my more histrionic fixations and pronouncements, and, on observing how eager children's clothiers were to have 14-month-olds dress like J-Lo and Britney (aka, twentysomething skankdom), I was relieved that a boy was coming our way in another 20 weeks or so. "Look at this!" I'd holler, yanking my friends into the Children's Place just to show them the macrame halter tops for toddlers and shout a little more. "We used to have to scour thrift stores in our teenage years to dress like this, and now it's mainstream!!! And it's all PINK! What the hell????"

This past Saturday, I found a major downside to boys is dealing with the effects of team sports when they are no longer just a fun game. Granted, my son is most likely not going to be the next David Wright, but he likes baseball - or at least the idea of it he loves that is presented in The Sandlot. You know, the camaraderie among teammates that can possibly lead to some life lessons and lifelong friendships.

Problem is, he said something that alienated him from his teammates, caused the coach not to trust him, and I was the one chewed out for it.

I was in shock - suddenly I was a bad parent because my son said one (admittedly) dumb, selfish thing. I was made to feel smaller than small by a guy who was supposed to be a role model for 9-10-year-olds.   I was induced to worry that, because of one mistaken thing said by my just-turned-9-year-old, the kid would possibly never again have a future with his peers because he messed with team camaraderie. It still hits me even now, the dressing down I got from someone who only cared about winning (in what was supposed to be a noncompetitive off-season set of games) and not about the reasons why a kid might say such a thing. Title IX may have ensured that coaches like this appear in girls' sports as well, but there seems to be a much longer tradition of them trying to teach boys that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, and with way less panache than Vince Lombardi. Verbally whaling on a nine-year-old for such a transgression is pretty damned bad, but going after me? Yeah, that really works...Thank God I have a levelheaded spouse who put it into better perspective for me and the little guy, but being on the other end of such wrath isn't easy no matter what age you are.

And, speaking of wrath...hell hath no fury like a community deciding to go completely bonkers over school renovations. As though a lawsuit against the city over the possible traffic much-needed construction work on a neighborhood school building will bring to the streets isn't bad enough, the school's parent listserv is going up in flames over the temporary school site. As far as the temporary site goes, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was, but then I saw it when it still looked like this:

Driving out to the new campus was also mostly traffic-free despite its Gentilly location being pretty far out from where we live on the gray brick road (although I'm told that will change once UNO is back in session). It was also still a sobering drive, as the site is surrounded by mostly empty lots, some too-new homes, some still-vacant gutted houses, a small shopping center struggling to get new tenants in, and a spanking new Holy Cross school campus relocated from its flooded-out former location in the Ninth Ward and built on the grounds of the now-demolished St Francis Cabrini church. So many ghosts of recent making are still being exorcised out there. I hope the kids' presence will help it all.

I also hope that the battles over this one school renovation being chronicled so well by a hyperlocal are not going to set a nasty precedent...but it's amazing what kinds of things can be seemingly justified by that phrase "For the children..." Trying to undo decades of damage done through neglect and outright theft from those same children should not be this fraught with insanity.

A Reassess

I sit here at my blog most times these days at something of a loss for some long-form wordiness - aka, a substantial post.

It's been like this for a while, and it'd certainly be convenient to blame the diversion of those energies to my more frequent usage of Twitter and Facebook - but then I wouldn't be on those if they didn't help serve some sort of substantial need - or, most likely, serve an addiction to feedback. What I've found through recent huge amounts of time spent on those two platforms is that human-like virtual interactions gradually grew to be something I craved through the conduit that this blog initially was. It took me about a year to get to it, but once I did, it was one hell of an interactive community that peaked at about 2008 - which was, coincidentally, when most of the New Orleans blogpocheh I'd become acquainted with on- and offline got Twitter accounts and Facebook started its many annoying revampings that only seemed to draw more people to open accounts on it. Even now, while writing this, I have windows open on my desktop to Twitter and Facebook, where I check them periodically and respond to new tweets that come up and new posts on the Facebook news feed.

The key word in that last sentence is "respond."

Most of what bloggers tend to do is respond on a much larger scale than 140 characters (Twitter) or however many characters Facebook feed posts limit account holders to. As long as our freedom to do so - in the form of free server space someplace - is still there and we've got the urge to (mostly) rant, we'll be a-posting. As this particular space comes close to it's sixth blogiversary (January 16th!), though, I wonder at the many things that can turn even the most devoted bloggers away from frequent postings...

1) Stuff happens. Paying jobs and caring for one's family take precedence of parking one's butt in front of a computer to kvetch about the news of the day. Health problems appear - never has my grandpa's adage of "If you don't have your health, what have you got?" resonated with me more personally than it has in the past year. Just leaving the house for a diversion, a respite from a need for others to communicate with us almost virtually violently at times, is more of a thing in these tough days than dwelling too hard on too many troubles that may be beyond one's control.

2) Feed readers. I don't know how many of you have put the stuff your read online regularly into feed readers, but it does render many blog stats kinda useless. As it is, I'm paying much less attention to what Sitemeter's telling me anyhow. I've never been much interested in how I can sell this corner of the interwebs, the ads in the sidebar here being more of a concession to my husband's idea that all this time I spend at the keyboard be measured in some sort of monetary way. In the four years since I threw the code into my sidebar, I think it's garnered fractions of cents. All mah internetz are not fillin mah bank account.

3) User-friendliness in commenting suffers in the face of Twitter and Facebook. I have comment monitoring up for a reason: I'm not interested in spammers. Signing in with an account to comment and typing in random characters to post said comment and prove you are not a bot and have genuine interest in a discussion of what I say pales in comparison to the immediacy of Twitter, I'll admit. Which gets me to my reassessment of this particular weblog...

I don't know what the future's gonna bring for this space. I don't know what the future's going to bring for blogging in general. It still serves a need to go long-form, but in my particular case, it feels like I've gone back to the days when this was a diary that happened to be online and happened to have a comment section for some strange reason...except now more people who are not heavily online savvy can use the internet to do a simple search and use that information for their own ends, be it in attempting to judge prospective hires or in otherwise using that stuff learned about you against you. The controversies over SOPA legislation are also hinting that future attempts to regulate and sanitize the internet for Homeland Security's pleasure are not going to abate anytime soon. A door on virtual freedoms may be closing, and who knows if, where, or when a window will open?

Then again, perhaps my pessimism is being colored by my having to currently be in the strange, sad business of pain management for my only 80% healed ankle, the insanity surrounding the renovations to my son's school, and some other strange changes in my personal life.

When all is said and done, change is the only true constant.

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So we're officially in another Carnival season in these parts...which means it's okay to have your king cake and eat it too - not to mention washing it down with some king cake vodka just to make things super-sweet.



Thanks, DJ Soul Sister.

...The radical freedom my daughter embraced created a form of imprisonment for me. Even though Marissa assured me I had nothing to do with her choice, for that year and a half she was away, I was locked in the feeling that I had failed her. The sense of safety I had provided at home clearly hadn’t been enough. 

Or maybe my vision of her future was what she ran from. I had said, stay in school, get a job, buy a house, and you’ll retire securely, even though that hadn’t worked out for me. When she said she wanted to break free, at first I gripped tight, imposed new rules and higher expectations. I insisted that she turn away from wildness, even in this wild time. Eventually... I loosened the reins and trusted to fate. Neither approach brought her back. Marissa said she was going toward something I wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand. After a year of trying, I see that she is right. This life she and her friends led was not worse than I imagined, but it was more dangerous than I had wanted to believe. I can describe it, but understanding still eludes me. 

I read Danelle Morton's article on the eight killed in the December 28, 2010 warehouse fire and am still struggling with my reactions and the responses of others to the sympathy she exhibits for the dead and her attempts to understand why they made the choices that lead to their deaths in a fiery inferno that likely resulted from their attempts to keep warm on an icy cold night. The knee-jerk impulse for us all - myself included - is to roundly condemn these kids for being there in the first place. Raised in good homes by the families' accounts (though there may be some things they aren't sharing), who in their right minds would think that family conflicts during the teenage years could get so bad that hopping trains and engaging in Darwinian-like struggles for day-to-day survival could be a viable option?

It rid the world of some extra weight. What would kids like that ever contribute to society anyhow? Cruel, yet comforting (on some level) thoughts, designed to insulate oneself from the idea that it could ever happen to one's family. The scarier thing to contemplate, after all, is that it could and does happen indiscriminately. You could still do everything you're supposed to do as a family in rearing your kids and they could still choose that kind of life...and, short of having them committed to some sort of institution against their will, you'd be stuck in the same kind of limbo Morton describes, forced to trust fate will somehow keep smiling upon your kids as they embrace body and soul this idea of freedom that is so far outside what most of us think of when we contemplate the same thing - familiar, but far out.

I guess there are times when I could've gone the same way myself, most notably when I ran right out of grade school around 4th or 5th grade in frustration with the near-constant bullying I got from my peers and got as far as the railroad tracks down the block before realizing I'd make a terrible runaway. Any frustrations I had with my family as a teenager - and believe me, there were many - were mostly neutralized by a strong sense I had of simply tolerating it all because I'd be out of the house before I knew it. It was, in the end, the values I had and a sense of guilt over hurting my parents' feelings too much that held me out of the life of a traveler. I didn't want to do anything drastic that would kill my family emotionally. Not until I was out of their house, anyway.

I look at my son who is now halfway to eighteen and I wonder about the choices he will make, and the kind of world we currently have a hand in creating that might give him the impression that being a traveler is a good idea. Would it be in rebellion at how much we are spending our lives plugged into technology? In recoil at how much we pay and pay and pay in health care, education, and overall homage to consumerism? Or would it be as simple as we'd be cramping his style and, in the face of a serious lack of coming-of-age rituals and/or starter employment for young adults, he'd rather hop a train and squat in an abandoned home? Yes, my fears are colored by this past year's events worldwide, which constantly drive home that this world needs a lot of work. But is the best way to help it all along found in completely dropping out of it all in this way? I don't know, I can't bring myself to willingly find out, and I don't know what I'd do if my not-so-little guy decided to take that path. What I do know is that if things don't change in another nine years priority-wise for our entire country, more of our kids will head down that no-holds-barred road with only our love - if these kids even have it (horrible to contemplate, but some households are like that) - to prepare them for any uncertainties.

No one is completely blameless in any of the business that led to eight people dying in an abandoned warehouse over a year ago. At those tragic times, it is simply driven home how little control we have over the decisions of others, no matter how much we care for the decision-makers themselves. We can only lay some foundations, set some good examples, and stay alert for the possibility that these wild souls will return in one way or another - and, if they do, our doors and hearts will be open to what they bring.

X-posted at Humid City