For the last year plus, for the first time in my adult life, I am living the single life due to shared parenting with my ex. I was single for a short time in my early 20s, but I was a single mother to a baby whose father wasn't around (due to him running and hiding from the FBI. God, sex with men is so complicated). More and more, dating men has me wondering where women of a certain age (post-post-post adolescence) sign up for the lesbian sex. I know lots of women who switched teams (I know. I'm an asshole. I won't say it again) midstream, and they seem very happy (seriously. Why do they look so fucking happy? What do lesbians know that they aren't sharing with the straight men of the world?) I have a reputation of having grown up wild, raised by monkeys in the jungles of Iowa (hey. If 1-2 people believe it, it's a reputation). And it's true. But my version of wild was quite gender-traditional and didn't involve any of the lesbian sex I understand young women today get to experience.
My forays into the wild did include a short time as a gang member. This was the 90s, before girls became as crazy and violent as boys. It was still quite common for girls to get "fucked in" to gangs (to be clear, I was neither fucked in nor beaten in. I just showed up at the appointed time and place, one of two white girls in a group of tough black men standing in a circle with their arms crossed for the meeting). At this time, gangs from Chicago were realizing how easy drug sales in Iowa were, and the hand full of big towns close to the Mississippi were flooded with drug dealers in Illinois-plated caddys. The women followed (or led. I don't know) with their children, seeking education and housing options that were much more amenable than those in the big city.
So, my best friend and partner in crime and I were invited to join the newly established branch of the Iowa female gangsters. The Lady Gs (I actually can't remember what they were called, but I'm banking on the fact that none of you know either). Mostly my friend and I were hoping for an in to the parties where the hot guys were-- the "free" (shoplifted) alcohol and endless blunts. Instead, after our first meeting we were given our first "mission." Which was to drive the 16 year old girlfriend of the probably 30 year old gang leader to the Quad Cities (probably a four hour round trip) so she could check on his baby mama and their kids (pre cell phones and social media, this is how people got checked on. It was a different time, children).
If you can't think of a good reason not to join a gang, let this be it. Gangs (at least then) were misogynistic and firm believers in gender roles not from the 1950s, but more from the middle ages. We were seeking mayhem, violence, Banging in Little Rock, and instead we got checking on baby mamas, driving the beaten (disciplined) men to the ER for stitches, and meetings about how to bail the REAL Gs out of jail. Right away we were on our second mission-- how the fuck do we get out of this? We met with the head Lady G and explained our quandary. We wanted the men, the sex, the parties, and the drugs. We didn't so much want the involvement in federal drug trafficking. A mature and benevolent Lady Killah, the head Lady G graciously allowed our exit and still allowed us entrance to the good parties. More likely, she was thinking "these dumb white bitches are going to get someone killed."
Which wasn't totally wrong. For a very short time I dated the head of security for the local branch of the gang, a young man newly arrived from Chicago whose older brother was a big shot leader whose visits to town for meetings accorded hushed voices and good behavior. My security-dude got maybe one kiss out of me before I showed up at a party with a huge group of men from out of town, whom he allowed in because they were with me. In the confusion that followed (which I only heard because the women were quickly rushed upstairs and cordoned into a bedroom. See. Misogynistic.) guns were drawn and the situation became quite tense. Unbeknownst to me, the men were of a rival gang. To which I offer this defense: I didn't know, and they were hot.
The night ended without gunshots exchanged, and the women were eventually let out of the upstairs bedroom. The next time I saw my security-dude his lips were swollen beyond their ability to stretch (his punishment included a vicious beating from his brother and their fellows during which he couldn't defend himself. There was always a defined time or shot limit they knew before the punishment began) and I had to break up with him out of guilt or just maybe because I couldn't be with someone dumb enough to trust me.
My checkered history of sex with men of course includes my oldest daughter's father, Anthony (I change his name because it is my firm belief that someone who sleeps with a drunken, poor, high school dropout living in the projects cannot be expected to believe that that same girl will some day move away, get some degrees, and become a writer. He is as he was, and I am not. Fair's fair.) When we go home to visit and run into people from the old days, they see my daughter and say, "Is that Anthony's daughter? Looking JUST like him! Yo daddy is an OG for REAL, girl!" (OG in this case means Original Gangsta. At 39 and still in the game (not dead or in prison), he is a virtual grandfather of banging). I advise her beforehand to smile and nod and I'll explain later. A super star student, actress, and musician in her own right, she rarely remembers to ask and instead just accepts the praise and fame as her due.
When I first saw Anthony again after 12 years he guided my hand to his head, where the deep impression from a shovel hit during a neighborhood brawl travels from his hairline to his brow. He described the tattoos covering the multiple gunshot wounds he had, the time he almost died from a heart attack. I've been advised by people who have way more confidence in my writing than is warranted to attempt to recreate Anthony's speech in dialogue. I cannot. Having grown up in the language, I can understand (but not speak) about 25% of what he says. Often when I am with him he is on the phone with people from Chicago, discussing negotiations of moving the inter-gang gun violence from one block to the next. I couldn't tell you exactly what's happening, but I can understand the general gist of it. My daughter, who never spoke the language, cannot.
After a half hour phone conversation with her birth father I ask, "What did he say?"
She says, "yeah. No idea. I just said 'bye' when his sentences got shorter."
In school she's learning French. On visitation she's learning Chicago-land Thug-Speak. Thus far this has manifested itself in a popular hip-hop pidgin of phrases like, "You don't choose the thug life. Thug life chose me."
But to get back to the sex. Just in case my daughters stumble across this blog-- the oldest is almost 16-- my time to destroy them body and soul is ticking closed. My checkered past of sex with men leaves very little to recommend it. But how does one actually BECOME a lesbian when one is way too old to wear a t-shirt saying "I want to be a lesbian" to the bar or way too afraid to just go to Craigslist. The problem with being occasionally funny is that people think you're always being funny. But I'm dead serious when I ask my friend who recommends not knocking lesbianism before I try it, "I'm not! Where do I sign up?"
I could google it. "How does one become a lesbian?" but I'm afraid. Maybe I'm too old. I'm set in my dickish ways. I might just try the lady pond (again. I'm an asshole. I won't say it again) and not like it, and then I'm REALLY stuck if men suck AND women suck. So, while my kids spend time with their dad, I sit at home doing laundry and watching Netflix and heading to bed at 9pm, my wild days so far in the past they don't even bubble anymore. And I face the realization that all that I know and ever will know about lesbian sex I learned from Orange is the New Black.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
The Kool-aid of the Academy
My dad once said to me, "Some day you're gonna learn to keep your mouth shut and play the game." I was seven. And he was wrong. When I was in graduate school and working in a semi-professional non-academic environment to supplement my teaching stipend, I listened as my co-workers casually talked in the office and made comments about race, gender, and socio-economics that were wholly offensive and racist and moronic without fear of reprisal or even sanction. I would go to campus the next day and sit in class, listening to the discussions and think, "Dear God, you hallowed halls of higher education, hide me, hide me, hide me away from this awful world."
I couldn't imagine a life outside of academia, where, while abhorrent ideas and conversations exist, they are the minority and quickly intellectualized down. I didn't want to be forced to drink the Kool-aid of corporate America. It wasn't even that I didn't want to. I didn't believe I could. My mother used to say, as a gate against the despair each time I pursued another degree in English, "You know what businesses want? They want GOOD WRITERS!" My mother drank the Kool-aid of Procter and Gamble. Saying she drank the Kool-aid really isn't fair, though. She loved and believed in the goodness of the people of the corporation, and based on their treatment of her when she was dying of cancer, that belief was mostly warranted. P and G took a single mother, working swing shift on the Head and Shoulders line, and allowed her to move to a management position where she could use her creativity, her intelligence, her leadership skills, and travel the world, and they paid her a fair and living wage to do it.
So I saw and smelled the good possibilities of corporate work. It wasn't all bad. But it wasn't THE ACADEMY. And THE ACADEMY was where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in a place where meetings devolved into heated debates over word choice, with historical context and etymology. I wanted to be in a place that served and shaped the lives and minds of young people. Mostly, I wanted people to call me Professor in the hallways while students perched in corners discussing the readings before class.
But the truth of multiple graduate degrees in the Humanities is this: you can stay in the hallowed halls of THE INSTITUTION. But you cannot hide here. Because chances are, no one will be calling you Professor. They'll be calling you, but it will be to change a student's schedule or attend a meeting about how to properly staple-slash-paper clip petitions sent to people who actually make the decisions. The odds are much better that graduate students in the Humanities who choose to stay in higher education will end up as staff members, not faculty or members of the upper echelon (aka ADMINISTRATION).
It's taken me this long to get to the point. Which is that over the weekend I watched Happy Valley, a documentary about the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky tragedy that tried to explore how and why for so many years the crimes of Sandusky were allowed to continue. Part of that exploration includes a conversation about what Penn State Coach Joe Paterno knew and what his responsibilities were. At one point in the film, after the NCAA announces stiff penalties against Penn State for "putting football first" the team holds a rally. And the crowd holds signs and begins to chant, "85 percent! 85 percent!" which was the approximate graduation rate of student athletes under Joe Paterno's reign.
Those Penn State fans, dressed in blue and white, huddled together, cheering on these young men who would play football despite the sanctions, reminded me of how much of higher education is dependent upon the drinking of the Kool-aid in ways both different from and quite the same as, and possibly more insidious than the expectations of corporate America.
The picture that comes to mind for me is of a turtle. A big one. And on that turtle's shell is painted code words like BIG TEN! RESEARCH ONE! 87 PERCENT! FOUR YEARS! TUITION FREEZE! PEDAGOGY! And the faculty and the administration of the university stand on the back of that giant turtle, wearing spectacles and gesticulating as they discuss the important thinks they think, while grad students, maybe perched on the tail of the turtle, kneel with their chins in their hands, waiting to be offered a hand up to the shell where the big thinks happen. And sometimes the faculty and administration stop talking long enough to allow the graduate students to say something-- maybe protest the lack of soy cream cheese for the free bagels in the graduate lounge-- and the faculty nod and smile at their prodigies who will one day be the torch bearers of the big thinks of HIGHER EDUCATION, the ACADEMY, the INSTITUTION.
But the soft underbelly of that giant turtle is the staff of any large university.
I was sitting on a staircase the other day with a group of staff members, waiting to meet with new freshman orienting to the university. I mentioned to one that I had seen and admired a social media post of her the week before. I paraphrase badly and probably more with my own thoughts than hers, because the post was quickly deleted on the "advice" of more senior staff. Essentially, the post suggested that the lack of leadership and valuing of staff input made this person feel a lack of desire to come to work or enjoy her job. And she quickly told me, "I love this university. I love this job. I don't want to lose it."
The Kool-aid at the university tastes different. The flavors are unique.
Lemonade Twist: "We don't talk to the media because they twist what we say."
Cost of Living Cherry:
"We heard our students! Tuition freeze!" without mention that staff in most colleges have gone without even living wage raises for years (in fact, the raises rarely cover the rising cost of parking on campus).
We Serve Students Strawberry:
Wherein major changes to programs, pedagogy, and people's entire lives are modified or implemented wholly on the basis of what higher administration believes students (who may or may not have all the facts or the maturity and life experience to understand) and their parents (the money people) want without regard for staff, their families, or the REAL service of students and their educations.
I don't waste a lot of time in my life criticizing what I do not love. Just ask my children. I spent hours upon hours in graduate school in classes teaching pedagogical theory. I wish some of that time would have been dedicated to the facts, which are that while we're training graduate students for tenured professorship and a life of research and thinking the big thinks, the facts are that students are far more likely to end up in a staff position, adjuncting on the side, the two positions of higher education that make up the soft underbelly of the turtle that, when seen exposed to the sunlight, indicate a serious problem.
I need this job. I love this job. I love my work and my students. I am the sole support for my three children, and this job makes their good health, braces, glasses, and therapy possible. You will notice there are some things I won't talk about. My involvement with athletics. I won't name names. I won't talk specifics. I won't mention actual policies. Because there are rules. There are the stated rules. Thousands of pages of them. The FERPAs and the advisory boards and the faculty rules that I am expected to know, understand, and abide by. But there are also the cultural rules. Those rules that aren't written down anywhere but we learn them and we know them because at chow time we just follow the crowd to the mess hall.
And those are the rules that concern me. Should there be rules regarding what can and cannot be spoken publicly by staff members? Of course. Students should be protected, because while they are legally adults, maturity-wise they are not, and they deserve our protection. But these academy rules that are not written down, that are passed down from administration to each new staff member through off hand comments and behaviors, these rules SHOULD be spoken. They SHOULD be written down. Because otherwise how can we discuss and shape them? We cannot. We are not invited to.
When I see a crowd of Penn State fans chanting "85 percent! 85 percent!" I understand the need to protect the underbelly facts of the academy from its fans, its public, even its students in many ways. But 85% is part of the shell. It's painted on. It's not a fact. It's a "fact." And I want to talk FACTS. I think we owe the academy we love and ourselves that.
I couldn't imagine a life outside of academia, where, while abhorrent ideas and conversations exist, they are the minority and quickly intellectualized down. I didn't want to be forced to drink the Kool-aid of corporate America. It wasn't even that I didn't want to. I didn't believe I could. My mother used to say, as a gate against the despair each time I pursued another degree in English, "You know what businesses want? They want GOOD WRITERS!" My mother drank the Kool-aid of Procter and Gamble. Saying she drank the Kool-aid really isn't fair, though. She loved and believed in the goodness of the people of the corporation, and based on their treatment of her when she was dying of cancer, that belief was mostly warranted. P and G took a single mother, working swing shift on the Head and Shoulders line, and allowed her to move to a management position where she could use her creativity, her intelligence, her leadership skills, and travel the world, and they paid her a fair and living wage to do it.
So I saw and smelled the good possibilities of corporate work. It wasn't all bad. But it wasn't THE ACADEMY. And THE ACADEMY was where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in a place where meetings devolved into heated debates over word choice, with historical context and etymology. I wanted to be in a place that served and shaped the lives and minds of young people. Mostly, I wanted people to call me Professor in the hallways while students perched in corners discussing the readings before class.
But the truth of multiple graduate degrees in the Humanities is this: you can stay in the hallowed halls of THE INSTITUTION. But you cannot hide here. Because chances are, no one will be calling you Professor. They'll be calling you, but it will be to change a student's schedule or attend a meeting about how to properly staple-slash-paper clip petitions sent to people who actually make the decisions. The odds are much better that graduate students in the Humanities who choose to stay in higher education will end up as staff members, not faculty or members of the upper echelon (aka ADMINISTRATION).
It's taken me this long to get to the point. Which is that over the weekend I watched Happy Valley, a documentary about the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky tragedy that tried to explore how and why for so many years the crimes of Sandusky were allowed to continue. Part of that exploration includes a conversation about what Penn State Coach Joe Paterno knew and what his responsibilities were. At one point in the film, after the NCAA announces stiff penalties against Penn State for "putting football first" the team holds a rally. And the crowd holds signs and begins to chant, "85 percent! 85 percent!" which was the approximate graduation rate of student athletes under Joe Paterno's reign.
Those Penn State fans, dressed in blue and white, huddled together, cheering on these young men who would play football despite the sanctions, reminded me of how much of higher education is dependent upon the drinking of the Kool-aid in ways both different from and quite the same as, and possibly more insidious than the expectations of corporate America.
The picture that comes to mind for me is of a turtle. A big one. And on that turtle's shell is painted code words like BIG TEN! RESEARCH ONE! 87 PERCENT! FOUR YEARS! TUITION FREEZE! PEDAGOGY! And the faculty and the administration of the university stand on the back of that giant turtle, wearing spectacles and gesticulating as they discuss the important thinks they think, while grad students, maybe perched on the tail of the turtle, kneel with their chins in their hands, waiting to be offered a hand up to the shell where the big thinks happen. And sometimes the faculty and administration stop talking long enough to allow the graduate students to say something-- maybe protest the lack of soy cream cheese for the free bagels in the graduate lounge-- and the faculty nod and smile at their prodigies who will one day be the torch bearers of the big thinks of HIGHER EDUCATION, the ACADEMY, the INSTITUTION.
But the soft underbelly of that giant turtle is the staff of any large university.
I was sitting on a staircase the other day with a group of staff members, waiting to meet with new freshman orienting to the university. I mentioned to one that I had seen and admired a social media post of her the week before. I paraphrase badly and probably more with my own thoughts than hers, because the post was quickly deleted on the "advice" of more senior staff. Essentially, the post suggested that the lack of leadership and valuing of staff input made this person feel a lack of desire to come to work or enjoy her job. And she quickly told me, "I love this university. I love this job. I don't want to lose it."
The Kool-aid at the university tastes different. The flavors are unique.
Lemonade Twist: "We don't talk to the media because they twist what we say."
Cost of Living Cherry:
"We heard our students! Tuition freeze!" without mention that staff in most colleges have gone without even living wage raises for years (in fact, the raises rarely cover the rising cost of parking on campus).
We Serve Students Strawberry:
Wherein major changes to programs, pedagogy, and people's entire lives are modified or implemented wholly on the basis of what higher administration believes students (who may or may not have all the facts or the maturity and life experience to understand) and their parents (the money people) want without regard for staff, their families, or the REAL service of students and their educations.
I don't waste a lot of time in my life criticizing what I do not love. Just ask my children. I spent hours upon hours in graduate school in classes teaching pedagogical theory. I wish some of that time would have been dedicated to the facts, which are that while we're training graduate students for tenured professorship and a life of research and thinking the big thinks, the facts are that students are far more likely to end up in a staff position, adjuncting on the side, the two positions of higher education that make up the soft underbelly of the turtle that, when seen exposed to the sunlight, indicate a serious problem.
I need this job. I love this job. I love my work and my students. I am the sole support for my three children, and this job makes their good health, braces, glasses, and therapy possible. You will notice there are some things I won't talk about. My involvement with athletics. I won't name names. I won't talk specifics. I won't mention actual policies. Because there are rules. There are the stated rules. Thousands of pages of them. The FERPAs and the advisory boards and the faculty rules that I am expected to know, understand, and abide by. But there are also the cultural rules. Those rules that aren't written down anywhere but we learn them and we know them because at chow time we just follow the crowd to the mess hall.
And those are the rules that concern me. Should there be rules regarding what can and cannot be spoken publicly by staff members? Of course. Students should be protected, because while they are legally adults, maturity-wise they are not, and they deserve our protection. But these academy rules that are not written down, that are passed down from administration to each new staff member through off hand comments and behaviors, these rules SHOULD be spoken. They SHOULD be written down. Because otherwise how can we discuss and shape them? We cannot. We are not invited to.
When I see a crowd of Penn State fans chanting "85 percent! 85 percent!" I understand the need to protect the underbelly facts of the academy from its fans, its public, even its students in many ways. But 85% is part of the shell. It's painted on. It's not a fact. It's a "fact." And I want to talk FACTS. I think we owe the academy we love and ourselves that.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Reawakening the Beast
It has been pointed out to me numerous times lately that I post to Facebook a lot. Like A LOT. At first I was all nobody-puts-baby-in-a-corner pissed off about it, but I have gained at least enough self knowledge to know that any time I get pissed off, it's probably about me, and it's probably (damnably) true.
It's the instant fix. If I weren't so afraid of losing control I'd be a heroin addict. Instead, for years and years I was a compulsive eater. Nothing like insulin shots to the stomach three times a day and still sitting in the ER with blood sugars over 450 and the doctor telling you, "You'll be dead soon" to cure an addiction. Except there was no cure. I lost 100 pounds and became a compulsive shopper.
I didn't care what I bought. For a long time it was compulsive grocery shopping. When I was a teenager my friends and I shoplifted. I have visceral, physical memories of the gang of us leaving the store, turning a corner, then searching ourselves to figure out what we got. It was that quick-- the forgetting. It's not the purple lip gloss. It's the getting, and it's the having. Compulsive shopping feels like that. You buy and you buy, and then you get the reward of opening the bags or boxes and saying OH I bought THAT!
But I was destroying my children's future. So I started making lists on my phone of all the things I HAD to buy. And I add to the list, and I delete things that, when I added them I HAD TO HAVE THEM, but now I can't for the life of me figure out why.
I don't know that Facebook posting has become my replacement addiction. It doesn't feel THAT good. But there is a pleasure in it. It's not the likes. Let's be honest-- anyone with even a minimum amount of technological savvy hid me long ago. I'm the traffic accident without blood and arms flying. I'm a Facebook fender bender. I fuck up traffic, but there's little pay off. It's the spewing of words and the "post" and it's done. No thinking, no shaping, no editing (GOD I hate editing). It's the quick fix. It's my free heroin, bread, Amazon.
Michelle H (if you don't want to face facts AVOID HER. Trust me) said, "At least when you had your blog you were really writing." So here I am. I'm reawakening the blog, not as a new thing, but as a transition back to who I was always supposed to be. I've always been the little girl who was silenced who turned to writing to make her noise in the world. So I return here as a way-station back to who I was before. A writer of more than Facebook posts. A Real (capital R) writer.
It's the instant fix. If I weren't so afraid of losing control I'd be a heroin addict. Instead, for years and years I was a compulsive eater. Nothing like insulin shots to the stomach three times a day and still sitting in the ER with blood sugars over 450 and the doctor telling you, "You'll be dead soon" to cure an addiction. Except there was no cure. I lost 100 pounds and became a compulsive shopper.
I didn't care what I bought. For a long time it was compulsive grocery shopping. When I was a teenager my friends and I shoplifted. I have visceral, physical memories of the gang of us leaving the store, turning a corner, then searching ourselves to figure out what we got. It was that quick-- the forgetting. It's not the purple lip gloss. It's the getting, and it's the having. Compulsive shopping feels like that. You buy and you buy, and then you get the reward of opening the bags or boxes and saying OH I bought THAT!
But I was destroying my children's future. So I started making lists on my phone of all the things I HAD to buy. And I add to the list, and I delete things that, when I added them I HAD TO HAVE THEM, but now I can't for the life of me figure out why.
I don't know that Facebook posting has become my replacement addiction. It doesn't feel THAT good. But there is a pleasure in it. It's not the likes. Let's be honest-- anyone with even a minimum amount of technological savvy hid me long ago. I'm the traffic accident without blood and arms flying. I'm a Facebook fender bender. I fuck up traffic, but there's little pay off. It's the spewing of words and the "post" and it's done. No thinking, no shaping, no editing (GOD I hate editing). It's the quick fix. It's my free heroin, bread, Amazon.
Michelle H (if you don't want to face facts AVOID HER. Trust me) said, "At least when you had your blog you were really writing." So here I am. I'm reawakening the blog, not as a new thing, but as a transition back to who I was always supposed to be. I've always been the little girl who was silenced who turned to writing to make her noise in the world. So I return here as a way-station back to who I was before. A writer of more than Facebook posts. A Real (capital R) writer.
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