give and take

After my dreams of underground rock cult band fandom and starting an awesome Dischord/pre-lame-o-SubPop record label were shattered by the cold reality of lacking mad songwriting skills and business sense, I had dreams of being a high school art teacher, the kind with prints by amazing artists on the walls, a chaotic yet creative environment where awesome music would be playing at all times, where misunderstood kids could express themselves and all the other cliches brought on by even a sparse knowledge of cinema. Of course, I could've have ended up like this too, which would have been sad.

Instead, I majored in English, minored incompletely in art, and did a year of library school and get irritated when people say "Oh you must feel so accomplished to have a master's degree" because so far it's been worthless and almost kept me from getting employment in the first place.

I knew I'd get burned out if I had stayed in art school land or went into the bureaucratic hell that is education anywhere, and let the teacher side out in other areas, which has led to scam-tastic part time gigs where the pay was good but the overlords a particular kind of evil, and general volunteerism that resulted in getting profoundly burned out by being one typical naive cracker attempting to singlehandedly help an entire refugee community.

I soon realized that there were just too many people, that I was enabling instead of empowering, and that being female and unattached meant that I was still considered a rather grown-up kid who had a driver's license but ultimately wasn't taken seriously and there's a difference between helping your kid with homework and helping you with incomprehensible bureaucratic paperwork and giving you rides to places that you can walk to.

So I jumped back into tutoring realm today, doing a couple hours each month in the mornings I go to work late at a tiny charter school around the corner that works with kids that the school system has pretty much given up on. I don't believe that one system of education is the ultimate, having bounced through every educational structure available, but I like what I see here, a kind of rich creative chaos... books that are actually interesting, the basics that one needs to function, and then the good stuff I thrived on as a kid, jars with specimens of bugs and such, the walls covered with Calvin and Hobbes comics, science diagrams, masterpieces of artwork, sayings of Martin Luther King.

They do art and literature in the mornings and math/science/social studies in the afternoon and this morning, each kid got one-on-one time. The other volunteers are high schoolers from Ignatius, college kids from Oberlin, and retirees who decide to share their skills with the next generation.

He introduces me to the kids and tells them that I got arrested once which evidently establishes some street cred or something because they were all much more interested at that point. I get to work one-on-one with three kids at different levels and the see the excitement that comes when poetry isn't just something you read but something that you understand and relate to.

I pulled up pictures of fiddleheads and lichens when we talked about a nature poem, attempted to explain what being on a boat feels like when reading 'Wynken, Blynken and Nod,' told stories about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad and how it wasn't just history that happened somewhere else, that it cut through Cleveland and Oberlin too.

At the same time, it's the best feeling in the world to see one girl read a Gwendolyn Brooks poem about feeling trapped in the city and longing for the country and tell me that's how she and her mom felt when the lived in the projects around the corner, and then to struggle through names like Penelope and Agamemnon to see her get hooked on Greek mythology. I never learned this stuff in grade school until my mom taught me a few years and was stuck reading boring readers full of stupid didactic stories about not doing drugs or something.

Three hours went by like nothing and this is why I loved majoring in literature, because it encompasses everything about the world, with a creative window onto infinite cultures and perspectives and periods of time and history and science and religion of all types. Unlike people I was in grad school with, I don't think that teens need to read about themselves or Gossip Girl all the time. If you give them something more culturally rich and make it interesting, it'll be so much better for everyone.

what I see is unreal...

"You never know when those quiet ones will snap."

So says my health/gym teacher in high school after a bad moment where my clumsiness resulted in hitting a girl who was too busy singing to Britney Spears in the face with a basketball during a drill. It wasn't intentional, I promise.

At fifteen, I was already social pariah #1, but after that, even more so. There'd already been a few school shootings in the previous months and then Columbine had happened a week ago. I'd already been to the guidance office for some suspect cuts and bruises and disturbing subject matter in my artwork.

Pale kids like me who wore ball chains and necklaces with Led Zeppelin motifs, took honors classes, had no friends and listened to doomy music were suddenly potential homisuicidal maniacs waiting to have their Carrie moment.

That kind of paranoia permeated the hallways of the already volatile incubator of high school, fueled by parental anxiety, the inevitable rumor mill, absurd Principal Bureaucrats, and media hype. It got so unbearable that I dropped out to catch up on classes via homeschooling for a year before transferring to the local big public high school where I could blend in and get lost, considering that the powers that be were far more concerned about the potheads and the guys with the trenchcoats and heavy eyeliner. And obviously, I've never shot anyone. Most alienated youth haven't.



If it wasn't the Trenchcoat Mafia, it was Y2K and then it was 9/11. Conversations about too many guns and then not enough guns. I was a senior when 9/11 happened, and a whole new wave of fear and jingoism had swept through. The Egyptian kids who were Copt not Muslim got picked on really bad and suddenly those scary teenage metalheads who spent way too much time on the Internet and probably had the Anarchist's Cookbook on their hard drive didn't seem so bad and strange.

No one seemed to realize that Sikh turbans denoted a religion that has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. Khaled, who I sat next to in computer class (and whose dad owned the convenience store my dad delivered to) used to talk about going into the military to "blow shit up." I wonder where he is now.

So I read about these incidents that seem to grow more frequent, which have always seem to happen when crackers read too much Ayn Rand and toxic ideology on both sides and decide that the majority of people are stupid and need to be killed. Since they're usually dudes, there's usually some kind of testosterone-driven music involved but that's besides the point.

But then we go off on these tangents to find a cause but it's way more complicated than that. That combination of mental illness, general jerkitude combined with ideology and musical taste that causes one to feel superior to the masses is a combination that can't be quantified.Domestic terrorism has been practiced on all sides as it is. I look at some of the people that I deal with and wonder if they'll come in with a gun and start mowing people down.

But the whole "music made him do it?" Vladimir Putin has probably tortured people and had them murdered and he's a big fan of ABBA. Kim Jong-il's kid likes Eric Clapton but probably prefers "Tears in Heaven" to Cream. Charles Manson blamed the Beatles. Whatever.

And now, the stakes just keep getting higher. The paranoia just keeps ratcheting upward among and about lefties and wingnuts and people who listen to "heavy metal." Considering that I've got some serious love for Jesus and loud music that probably doesn't bode well.
Despite a certain individual's claims that crosshairs are actually survey markers, at least even the trigger-happy crowd is appalled as well.

On a totally unrelated but not totally tangential note, I wonder what will happen when Glenn Beck and his ilk get wind of the taqwacore scene because what's more scary than power-chord-loving nonconformist Islamic teenagers?



(By the way, part of this was filmed in a punk house/performance space in my fair city in my part of town, and the novel on which this film is based is highly recommended.)

I don't go broke, but I do it a lot...

My younger sister and I had a conversation about drugs the other day and she was shocked that I've never smoked weed because I "seem like the kind of person who would," which is something people have said to me ever since high school because I was relatively mellow, drew trippy doodles in a sketchbook, was incredibly skinny and long-haired and listened to weird music.

She hangs out with a bunch of suburban hippie and metal kids who are probably a lot like my friends at her age, who skateboard, get stoned, and listen to Black Sabbath and Sublime but she's somehow never heard of Cheech and Chong, which my dad and I introduced her to over Christmas. Kids these days.

Caffeine is my mom's vice of choice and while she swears she's not addicted, she can't go a day without her coffee. I used to make fun of her but then it became my drug of choice as well. I didn't start until I got my first and current "real grown up job" and found that I really did like the taste of black coffee.

It got to the point where it didn't matter if it was good coffee or not just as long as I had it, and I soon realized that between work, Saturday mornings with my mom, and Sunday mornings at church where there is always good strong coffee, thanks a pastor who drinks espresso by the cup and the Ethiopians, I now drink at least 2 cups a day.



"We just ran out of coffee" on my 4am day is a scary sentence to hear because if I don't have it, I'm either sleepy or cranky and can get by but it's just not the same. We put our five dollar bills together so I could make a run across the street at 7:30 in the morning to buy a pound of house blend much to the amusement of the baristas who live off our culturally acceptable addictions.

Now we're stocked up for awhile and I had this totally guilty look when the head honcho came in early while I was in the middle of my early morning coffee ritual / 15 minute break I never take.

Upon return, I was rewarded with a copy of 'Dirt' since mine disappeared around the time all the drama went down and I moved out and I drove out to the burbs to meet up with the family for my uncle's annual New Year dinner. It blew my mind again and reminded me of recording "Down in a Hole" and "Would?" off WMMS onto cassette tape, listening to the radio with my dad, and conversations with my crew of friends back in the day wondering why Layne Staley is dead and Dave Navarro is still alive.



I worried about my little sister and some of the really negative stuff she was listening to coupled with the whole unhealthy self-image propagated by girls on the Internet who think that emaciation and cutting is sexy.

Then again, my musical diet in high school was almost exclusively dead or might-as-well-be-dead rock stars, coupled with the writings of Poe and Hawthorne with most of my art done with colored pencils on black paper.

I still think that Conor Oberst and these whiny indie kids who claim Hall & Oates as their biggest musical influence ever suck, but my boomer coworkers and hipster friends think that what I like sucks too. It must be one of those generational things. Then again, my dad likes this song just as much as I do.