The Inaugural Struggle

To say I was excited is an understatement.

I had wept when it was clear Obama had actually won, with no obvious chicanery from the wingnut right.

I had groaned through each of Bush's Orwellian efforts to make us think wrong is right and right is wrong.

I had counted the days until Obama was really and truly President.

So last Tuesday, I was pumped.

First I went to our local (and only non-Walmart) grocery store to buy a Happy Inauguration cake. Call me crazy, but I had expected some red, white, and blue somethings to be available. When I asked, folks looked perplexed. But the bakery lady was happy to put sugary red, white, and blue trim around a white sheet cake for me. In the checkout line, a gentleman said, "It must be someone's birthday." I said, "Sort of. I'm celebrating the Inauguration." He responded noncommitally--a McCain/Palin supporter, no doubt.

I got to campus and began to look for a way to watch the event so that lots of us could watch together and eat cake.

Can we use the auditorium where we could project CNN on to the big screen? No, there's a class.

Can we get someone to channel the useless TVs that blare inane infobits in a constant stream in our main lobby? No, no one is answering the phone.

Can we simultaneously have all the computers in the Writing Lab on CNN (and make it a little open house at the same time)? No, we need some sort of official download something to be able to do that.

At this point, I was near tears and getting angry. I mean, this Inauguration is a big deal! Over a million people were risking hypothermia to be a part of it in Washington DC! I can't get one freaking TV to work so we can watch the first moments of Hope.

Finally, one of the fresh-faced young tutors plugged in her laptop and we were able to huddle around it and see change happen. That's the picture above. A young African-American undergraduate woman sat next to me, and we turned and smiled at each other about a dozen times. I cried more than once. And people ate cake. And it was good.

And I got joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

Blogging and the cycle of teaching

I turned in grades today. That means I finished the comments on what felt like a zillion papers and graded exams and figured out grades. It's pretty much always like this, and it's not like I'm unique or anything.

And so I've neglected this blog.

Apparently, I need a lot more uncommitted time to get myself motivated to blog. I feel a certain pressure to be clever even though I can't say I achieve it particularly often, and being clever requires some leisure.

David Hume said that to be a man [sic] of taste, one has to have the breeding, the education, the temperament or sensitivity, and the time--all the marks of an English gentleman. I think this describes something of what it takes to be a blogger of any note--without the breeding part--that's just icky. And education can be defined very broadly.

Andrew Sullivan's blog (he's my favorite gay conservative) turned me on to another blog called Daily Routines that offers glimpses of famous writers' daily schedules that allows them to be productive. All I can say is that I'm not likely to join their ranks any time soon. I am a very lazy person who would much rather read others' blogs than work on my own.

The holiday break has officially begun today (although I'll be going to meetings this week--feh!). I'm thinking about this blog and what purpose it serves for me. Maybe I just like the idea of blogging more than I like the actual production. No, that's not right. I really having blogged, looking back on what I've written. Is that enough to keep me doing this?

What, then, must we do?

I don't know what to do with the rage.

We have to provide a $700 billion dollar bailout for all kinds of financial snafus that I can only just barely begin to comprehend.

There's no real plan for what this bailout is going to involve.

CEO's of the worst institutions are still doing just fine, no real problems for them.

Our investments are--well, I can't even bring myself to look.

I don't know that this country has the intellectual capital to come up with an effective plan for somehow getting our economy to be of a more rational composition.

I'm thinking of Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt in the picture on the right) in The Year of Living Dangerously. He is in despair because he sees his country and everything he believes in chaos, run by selfish people. He types over and over, "What, then, must we do?"--a line from Tolstoy I think. Then he performs an ultimately fruitless act of protest and is killed.

OK, I'm not at that point. But I'm still left full of rage at people I don't know and will never have anything to do with but who have profitted greatly and reprehensibly from others' suffering.

I wish I could figure out a meaningful and nonviolent way to express this rage.

Jury duty

I had jury duty this past Monday. While I wasn't eager, I was resigned, but I also figured a liberal college professor wasn't going to be too high on any attorney's idea of the perfect juror.

We had to be at the county court house by 9:30. There were well over 100 of us, milling around on the 3rd floor, fanning ourselves in the unair-conditioned waiting area.

It's funny, but I had sort of dressed up--skirt, shirt, sandals with heels, make-up. Others did not feel that need. Lots of tee-shirts and flip-flops. I was sitting on the stairs, along with about 15 or so others, so I could watch the group as we waited to find out what was going to happen. I laughed aloud when I saw a woman in cropped pants and a tee-shirt that read "I have multiple personalities and none of them likes you." I had to wonder if she has picked that shirt to send a message to the attorneys so she wouldn't get picked or if it just happened to be clean and she didn't think anything about it. She disappeared after a while, so I don't know what her story was.

After about a 45 minute wait, we were herded into an air-conditioned court room where we were told what to expect. We were all selected to go through the voir dire process, and anyone who absolutely couldn't serve had to go up and tell the judge. A lot of folks lined up. Fortunately, I had brought a book (when would I not bring a book?), because this took another hour. Then we were told to come back in just under 2 hours for the voir dire.

When we all came back, there was more waiting, but finally we were told to line up outside another courtroom where our names were called in random order and we were assigned numbers. I was #42.

The voir dire process takes forever as the prosecutor asked every single one of the 106 people there whether or not we could be impartial. It was a sexual assault case. I used to be a rape crisis counselor. I had to say no, I could not be impartial. That guy was guilty, guilty, guilty. How do I know? Because the majority of women who are sexually assaulted don't choose to press charges. If they press charges, they may drop them once they find out what an ordeal the trial is going to be for them. Then the district attorney has to feel like he has a strong chance of winning the case. And then the case has to go before a grand jury for indictment. And there was a detail of the assault that was icky and that no woman would make up. So I knew that man was guilty, without a shadow of a doubt. And there was no way I could be impartial.

I also had to say that I would never agree to a probated sentence should the guy be found guilty. Nope. Jail time for sure.

I was surprised at the number of folks who wanted to be picked for jury duty. I wasn't surprised at the number of folks that were sort of dim. My populist point of view got tested.

What I found interesting was how similar the pedagogy that attorneys have to employ is to what I do as both the prosecution and the defense struggled to frame questions that would elicit good answers without leading the jury pool to the answers they wanted.

We were dismissed at around 5:30, just in time for a powerful thunder storm. I got soaked, but I was very happy not to have to go back the next day for the trial.

However, a couple of nights later I ran into a friend who's a jury selection consultant, and he told me that the prosecutor did such a lousy job that the guy was found not guilty, so now I feel like I should have lied or something so I could have pushed to convict the man anyway. The young woman is, of course, devastated, and her family is beside themselves with grief and anger.

It ain't right.

Fear and trembling and Sarah Palin

I begin with a photo from the great Andre Kertesz to soothe me. It has two things that soothe me: one is that it's set in France, and I love France. The second is that there's someone reading on the other side of the window, and I love reading.

I need to be soothed because I'm anxious about the presidential race. I know, I know. Obama is ahead in the polls. But I don't trust McCain, the Republicans, and I've already described my terror in the face of Sarah Palin. And God help us, now she's resorted to winks and nose wrinkles. Mean girls flourished in high school and never got caught. Why should that change now? Civilization as we know it is doomed.

I watched the debate between Biden and Palin, and certainly Biden won, but this isn't UIL debate competition, now, is it? It's an ideological tug of war, and I don't have the kind of faith that can help me believe that the left will pull as hard as the right. And I know the right will do anything--and I mean anything--to get their side in the White House. I'm afraid that in a couple of weeks we'll be wishing that mud were the only thing flying.

At the end of the last presidential election, M and I escaped into books--the ripping yarns of Patrick O'Brien to be exact, and we read our way through the entire lot of them, sad to see them end.

I escaped a bit early this year into a WWII spy novel (Blood of Victory by Alan Furst--not as ripping a yarn as O'Brien, but plenty absorbing) just because I find Palin so upsetting and because I'm really worried that there's something seriously wrong with McCain. I've read that the older we get, the less our social filters work, and that's why old people can be heard to say things like "How'd you get so fat?" or "Is your friend ever going to go home?" Seeing his public performances lately, I'm thinking his filters are going fast.

I wish he could see that he's not the ideal personality type to be president (dear god, I agree with George Will about something!), but egotistical men in the military and politics are not oddities, and I can sort of understand it. But, for the life of me, I cannot see how Palin can see herself as ready to be president. I didn't even see myself as a good fit to be head of my department! And I've got the experience to do it.

I don't understand anything.

Except a good book. I need to collect a comforting pile.

What weekends could be

This weekend was a good one.

It reminds me of what weekends can be. It reminds me of weekends from my first go-round at college in Denton.

M and I, along with two friends, went to tiny Winnsboro, Texas, a town with two main streets, and not many more traffic lights. There, we were able to enjoy wine at a small winery, have a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant with a wood oven, and go to a small coffeehouse and see Ramblin' Jack Elliott himself. And we could have gone to another place in town to see more music after Ramblin' Jack's final set.

This is exactly what I want to see happen for Teenytown. And the only obstacle that I can see is money--ain't it always the case? Well, money and taste.

A good restaurant and a performance/exhibition space could make a huge difference. And I have to point out that our delicious dinner cost about half of what it would have cost at the mediocre Italian restaurant that's here in Teenytown, so the restaurant is not expensive at all. And it was beautifully appointed.

What I don't want: no more auto parts stores, no more dollar discount stores, no more metal buildings, no more antique malls, no more storage facilities.

What I want: life on the weekend that doesn't center on football, a good meal, a good glass of wine, a comfortable place to sit and talk.

Is that so much?

Calming down

Ike has passed us by. I bought ice, batteries, a couple of gallons of water, and we were ready to hunker down just in case.

Now I'm calming down. First Sarah Palin. Then the weather. I've got to calm my fears and myself. I've got to get in touch with my Big Mind and stop obsession over stuff I have no control over.

As Andrew Sullivan says, "Patience, steel, ... triumph." 'Nuff said.

Namaste.