People Are Strange

I was supposed to meet my two fellow teacher-trainers at their hotel for bit of coffee and strategizing before descending upon the trailer (sorry: portable) where the training session was to occur. They were nowhere in sight. I sought out the dining room and ensconced myself with a free USA Today (is there any other kind, really?) to wait.

Something was...off...but I couldn't quite figure out what, or why. Something was happening out on the periphery of my vision, and some part of my brain was monitoring it enough to know that it was somehow askew. So I put down the rag and paid attention to my surroundings. There was a gaggle of middle-aged Church Ladies milling around a table. They had those Church Lady hats and purses, and grimly out-of-fashion clothing. But something was odd. They had forearms the size of tree trunks. And the voices coming out of them were deeper than seemed right. I looked around the room and realized (yes, I had completely missed it while walking in), that the hotel was hosting a "Gender Issues" conference. I was surrounded by transvestites.

Now, I lived in New York City for a decade, and I had an apartment on Christopher Street for the first few of those years, deep in the heart of Greenwich Village. I worked in the theatre for years. I have seen my fair share of transvestites. When the Gay Pride parade passed down my street each year, it was made clear to me that I had a moral obligation to throw open my doors and let pretty much anyone hang out on my fire escape to watch the parade go by. Which I happily did. And let me tell you, the transvestites that marched by during those parades were fine. I mean, supermodel beautiful...especially when compared with what I was seeing in this hotel lobby.

Here in the Southwest, apparently, the class of trannie one gets is a bit lower down in the pecking order. There were no supermodels here. What we seemed to have were a bunch of bankers and car salesmen--dumpy, round, balding, and gruff...and dressed up in the frumpiest, dowdiest outfits you could imagine--things I didn't think were actually still available for sale. These were not men trying to look like Whitney Houston; these were men trying to look like Grandma.

My fellow trainers were completely freaked out by the whole thing, and made lots of unfortunate and very old jokes (later on, out of earshot) about pronoun confusion. Which was too bad, really, because there was nothing threatening about any of this. It's either something you feel the need to do or it's not. It either goes along with being gay or it doesn't. It's playing dress-up. And ok, I'm sure there were people at that hotel for the Gender Issues conference who had serious and profound issues--issues that have made life difficult and painful for them. But is it the gender issue itself that has made life painful, or is it everyone else's reaction to it, day after day? Is it everyone pointing and chuckling and saying, "look at the freak"?

All I'm saying is, ultimately, who's to say who's a freak? And who really cares? Oh, I know it's easy to think there's an actual "mainstream" out there--but only if you don't look very hard. There are a lot of folks able and willing to conform to the norm at the surface level. But the surface level is just window dressing. Underneath that, we are not all made to factory spec. We are not robots.

And what a vast and strange array of non-robots we really are.

We recently moved Thing 1 to a Jewish Day School, after homeschooling him for a year (and that, after a disastrous first half of first grade at an allegedly progressive private school). We chose the school because of the Jewish education aspect of it, which we liked a lot, but also because the class size was very small, which Thing 1 needed.

One of the fascinating things about this school is that it caters to all denominations of Judaism. There are Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Chasidic kids and parents (and teachers) milling around the courtyard each morning. And they all talk to each other and they all get along. They have made a safe space at this school (a very rare and magical place) where the denominations can come together and just be Jews together. And these are groups, in case you're not up on your internecine Jewish squabbling, that Do Not Get Along out in the world. I've gone into shops in New York City where the owner refused to shake my hand or look my wife in the face--possibly because she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I've gotten in arguments with people over who should rightfully be considered a Jew in Israel--or have the right to perform weddings and bar mitzvahs. The acrimony can be palpable.

But not here. Here in the school courtyard, you can see Social X-Ray women in high fashion and women in plain skirts and kerchiefs around their heads; men in perfectly ordinary suits and men with tzit-tzit fringes hanging out over their belts; the beardless and the bearded. And here they're just parents. They talk to each other. They invite each other home for dinner. Their kids play together in the afternoons. I look around in the mornings, when we're all dropping off our children, and I think, "we can all get along--any group of us--if we'll just let each other be."

At a certain point, we're all freaks. We're all weirdos. Maybe the bank president isn't wearing a dress when he comes home from work--maybe he's just playing with model trains in the basement...and slowly, painstakingly, creating an alternate universe down there, with houses, roads, cars, human figures--a whole world, taking up the entire basement. I've met such a man. You'd never guess he was playing god to his own universe in his basement. But that's what basements are for.

Or there's my cousin--a successful editor and writer, a good husband and father, a mensch in every way. He's also a nudist.

Maybe it's a passion for karaoke. Or ballroom dancing. Maybe it's a fantasy football league that's taking up way too much of someone's time. Hell, maybe it's a real football league that makes someone show up to a game in 15-degree weather, shirtless, painted green.

We are infinitely strange--that's all I'm saying. Strange in deep places or dark corners where it's most surprising. Profoundly strange. And sometimes unknowably strange. And wonderfully strange. And we should just relax and enjoy that about each other.

So quit it with the "he, she, or it" jokes, girls. It's just people. And just people is plenty weird enough.

Saturday Smile, Part II

Pearls Before Swine. What's not to like?

Saturday Smile, Part I

Arizona politics. It's not as in-your-face as New York, God knows, but the quotes can be just as quotable. If you heard our governor, Janet Napolitano, on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me last month, you know what I mean.

Here she is on illegal immigration and the much-ballyhooed Wall of Eternal Security that the administration says it's going to build on 700 miles of our southern border:

Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.

Articles We Don't Need to Finish

...or even start, to be honest. Just take a look at the title and the abstract:

Multilevel Approaches to Documenting Change: Challenges in Community-Based Educational Research

In this article, we used a multimethod, multilevel analysis to document the underlying dynamics of specific alternative learning contexts to identify generalizable principles while allowing for local variation.

Barely even English, right? And trust me, the actual text of the article is just as bad.

And this is from the online journal of Teacher's College at Columbia University—the education school of an Ivory League university.

I’ve deleted the names of the authors out of a (possibly misguided) sense of mercy. But if I had the two authors here with me…say, chained to a drainpipe, with copies of The Elements of Style stuffed and duct-taped into their mouths…by which I mean only, if I had their absolute and undivided attention…this is what I think I would say to them:

Look, I know...using jargon and ed-speak makes you feel hip and with-it and in-with-the-in-crowd, whatever in-crowd you're trying to be in with (your professors, maybe? I can’t imagine who else would want to read this crap). But we're talking about education here. Teaching and learning. If the language you use obfuscates things more than it clarifies them, isn't it by definition contrary to your alleged purposes?

I’m just asking.


The sad thing is, this article is actually trying to discuss something important (yeah, I did break down and read it…well, some of it…despite the title for this post). It’s about some real, life-or-death education issues for low-performing, minority students. You don’t need the pomp. You don’t need the lofty language. If it’s really important, Just Say It.

Searching For the Cow While Riding the Cow

This is pretty amazing stuff. A brain researcher becomes her own patient and has to study--from the inside out--what's gone wrong...using as an investigative tool the very brain that's gone wrong:

In the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life.

If you happen to find brains endlessly mysterious and strange, as I do, the video is very much worth the 18 minutes. One of the things I find most interesting about her experience is that, with the left side of the brain's silence during her stroke, she experienced a radical loss of distinction: she couldn't tell where her body stopped and the world began; she couldn't tell the difference between words and background on a card. The world stopped being a million separate and discrete things and became, for a moment, one stunning wholeness.

If you take a look at the scrap of dialogue on the left hand side of this blog, you'll see a very similar sort of thing, from more of a Zen/religious perspective. And if you look at the very bottom of the page, you'll see a quote from Walt Whitman that hints at the same thing.

"Nirvana..." says our lecturer. "I found Nirvana...but I'm still alive..."