I believe it was John Adams who said, “The older I find myself growing, the greater I notice a fundamental flaw in human beings: namely, that I hate them.”
Actually, it wasn’t Adams who said that, it was me, just now, quoting an excerpt from my upcoming three-volume memoir, “Why the Girl Who Sits in Front of Me Deserves to be Executed via Guillotine, and Other Things I Learned at a Four-Year State University.”
I started here on Monday, in the six-week summer session, and it’s been pretty nice so far – Gothic brick architecture, reasonable food court offerings, interesting professors, blah blah blah.
Two things have happened quicker than I anticipated, however: my growing acclimation to campus geography, and my growing hatred of the girl who sits in front of me in my lit class.
Now, full disclosure: I am an English major, dyed in the wool. I’m probably getting my Master’s in Library Science, but even if I don’t it doesn’t matter, because I was actually born a librarian. I just can’t help it. And after lo my many years in community college, the trenches of English education, I’m pretty ready for students who want to be in English classes. I’ve studied beside and tutored students who don’t, and it ain’t no garden of daisies.
So this girl who sits in front of me – this puffy, jiggly, collagened, pea-brained harpy – is obviously of the latter category. On Wednesday in class, in an event that I will recount with bile to my grandchildren, the young man sitting to her left leaned over and asked her opinion of the day’s readings, which are supposed to be read the night before class so that they can be discussed.
“Oh,” she said, with a laugh which I’m sure she thought was bell-like and charming, “I didn’t read them.”
“Do you want to look at them real fast?” he asked, offering her the textbook.
“Oh, no, thank you,” she said politely, again with the laugh, “this isn’t my major.”
What. The. Frak.
So that means – what? That you don’t have to TRY in classes that don’t pertain specifically to your program of study? What the hell are you, a sports management major? Not all classes are inherently interesting, say, Financial Management of Libraries (yeah, looking forward to that one). But sometimes you have to take them, and the mere fact that you find them uninteresting does not make it OK to not do your homework.
What is up with this attitude? Why are you in a 3300 level class that you don’t even care about?
Come to think about it, why are you even in college?
I’ve been a geek all my life – it’s just well-hidden because I’m bad at video games and have highly developed social skills. I have a box of DC comics from the 60s in my room (Batman and Superman); I know Tolkien’s Elvish alphabet; I adore the original Star Wars trilogy and think it’s a shame that they allowed Lucas to ruin the new trilogy; I love reading, and am, in fact, a grammar nerd; I’m halfway through watching Firefly, need to finish watching through the first season of Battlestar, and will be deeply upset if Dollhouse gets cancelled.
All this geekiness I claim on my own terms, but since Calvin and I started going out almost three years ago, he’s introduced me to even more geekiness. He’s a Marvel man, so I can add Spiderman and the X-Men to my repertoire. He’s a serious gamer (and when I say gamer, I mean FF10 gamer, not MaddenWhaterver gamer), so even though I have the dexterity only for Lego Indiana Jones, I’m aware of that universe. Calvin also plays Magic and Warhammer (he paints all his own models exquisitely.) He and I also read Watchmen together, way before the movie came out, and then we went to see the movie together, and when the four-hour extended cut DVD comes out, we will watch it again.
But the biggest and most important thing Calvin has introduced me to is Star Trek. All of it. I have seen at least ten episodes of every series, more of most, and movies 2-4 and 6-10.
And I am so excited about the new movie. Calvin and I are going to see it tomorrow, and I wanted to do something to mark the occasion. Poll time!
I was just listening to MSNBC out of corner of my ear, and I heard that there is some sort of Barbie controversy brewing. Apparently, people are upset that Barbie suddenly has tattoos.
My mom: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Me: “I have one. You got it for me. I took it to the beach for my ninth birthday.”
My mom: “I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten you that.”
Me: “Yes you did. You clipped an article out of the paper for me about the controversy after you bought the doll and told me to save it because the doll would be valuable someday.”
My mom: ” Nah.”
As evidence, I procured my Butterfly Art Barbie (I have since learned that this is the official name) from the naked
Jess the Butterfly Art Barbie, who turns 11 this year
shoebox orgy in my closet where she currently resides with her other Mattel brethren and politely thrust her and her butterfly belly tat in my mother’s face.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a gift?”
“Yes. I really really wanted one. Everybody did.”
My parents bought me the Butterfly Art Barbie, which, may I point out, was sold with temporary tattoos, so that you can “have fun decorating Barbie and you with cool washable decorations!” We snapped one up right after they were released in 1998, before a panicky Mattel pulled them off shelves faster than you can say “lead-lined toys from China.”
Oh, how short the memory of the 24-hour news channels!
I named the Barbie Jess (I named all my Barbies – if I’d called them all Barbie it would have been too confusing for them) and took her with me to the beach on my ninth birthday. I wanted to emulate her, sure. I thought she was great, with her plastic feet and alluring beach-hobo lifestyle. And yet I am devoid of tattoos? How is this possible?
The truth of the matter is that Jess the Butterfly Art Barbie did not make me want a tattoo, she made me desperately want crinkly hair, a style which is
a) hard for my hair to achieve, and
b) looks awful on me.
But I kept trying for years.
Anyway, people need to calm down. If your child is looking to Barbie as her primary role model, maybe you should let
Observe Butterfly Art Barbie's huge honkin' butterfly tattoo
her read, or watch television, or leave the house. In a world in which Michelle Obama is the First Lady, Sandra Day O’Connor is appearing on talk shows, and Tina Fey exists, are girls today hard up for flesh-and-blood role models? Oh, and how about you? The kid’s mom?
Also, why are we suddenly more concerned about young girls in this country getting tattoos than about young girls in this country becoming anorexic? I think we need to worry a little more about Barbie’s impact on body image than Barbie’s impact on images on the body.
Since it only vibrated once, it was almost undoubtedly Calvin texting me. I figured this morning’s text would be something about the day-to-day operation of the Venn diagram that is our lives, pertaining to our plant or trip to the beach, but it was the other kind of Calvin text: the Kind that Keeps Me Angry/Amused About the World Around Me.
He’s a very good news source, and he knows exactly which stories will make me scream/laugh. Today was a screaming day.
So if someone jumps out of an alleyway and gives you one against your will, it’s OK, but if you make an appointment, it’s not?
Sort of. The law is 100 years old and doesn’t even make complete sense by today’s legal standards. “Seek your own” is the key phrase, but it isn’t defined.
According to Wikipedia, the law in Australia is pretty similar to the state ours was in pre-Roe – cases turn on a state-by-state basis. Abortion is the law of the land, there, in the sense that an abortion performed based upon the health risks of the mother is always legal, but each state has the right to define what that means.
Therefore, the young woman in question, who facilitated her abortion with the much vilified “abortion pill,” is in violation of the law because she based her decision to abort not on health concerns, but on the fact that she’s nineteen years old, for god’s sake. The pill, misoprostol, is essentially banned in Australia, and was smuggled in from the Ukraine.
Luckily, much of Australia seems to be with her, although most of the news stories I can find make the old mistake of saying “pro-abortion activists” are rallying. This is a label that rubs more and more on me these days, creating an emotional and political blister the size of Kansas. No one is “pro-abortion.” No one likes the idea of it. Nobody has one with relish. What I am – and what most people in the pro-choice movement are – is a person who wants control over my own life.
This story hits home with me for several reasons, not least because this girl is my age. If I were to require an abortion at this point in my life and someone were to get in my way? Oh, there would be carnage, and damn the consequences. Conservatives try to obfuscate the issue by whining about life. What about my life? I am a fully developed person, a citizen of these United States, and I have certain unalienable rights to this vessel which is my own personal body. Sure, a fetus has the potential to become a life. I am a life already.
There were several moments in Barack Obama’s campaign that made me want to vote for him twice. One of those moments was during the Saddleback forum, hosted by the Devil. The Devil asked Obama about abortion (although he did not challenge him to a fiddlin’ contest, which is a shame), and Obama responded thus:
“I believe in Roe v. Wade, and I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion, but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they — they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors or their spouses or their doctors or their family members.”
Thank god that we are not in Australia, and that this man is our president. But does anyone remember that, for a while there, we were alarmingly close to this?:
Sarah Palin and her child named after a tree or something
Q: Your stand on abortion?
A: I’m pro-life. I’ll do all I can to see every baby is created with a future and potential. The legislature should do all it can to protect human life.
Source: Q&A with Newsmax.com’s Mike Coppock Aug 29, 2008
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a nuance gap between two candidates.
I think it comes down to this: the pro-choice concept is difficult for some people to latch on to because it involves the complex task of making your own decision with no guidance from anyone else.
Think about it. Atheists make religious fundamentalists uncomfortable because we manage to operate by a moral code which we ourselves developed, free of biblical intervention. Religious fundamentalists are people who cling to the chains that bind them, who genuinely don’t know how to operate without a set of rules handed down from on high. Why wouldn’t these people want abortion legislation?
I think women who are anti-choice are that way because they are as horrified by abortion as, well, anyone. And they are even more horrified by this thought: what kind of monster am I if I decide to have an abortion? If abortion is illegal, well, congrats, you don’t have to struggle with your better angels at all. Decision has been made for you, and you have an excuse not to think about unpleasant things.
I am an inverse fundamentalist christian. I want everyone to step into the light, to see the beautiful future they can have if only they believe in it. But that future is not accessible through hate and fear. It is accessible through freedom, it is visible in the first steps taken away from dogma and puppet-strings, toward the terrifying brilliance of a world you can create yourself.
The Rick Steves thing doesn’t count, I phoned that in. But it’s just been that this last semester there hasn’t been that much to write about. Obama won the election; Sarah Palin was returned to the padded cell that is Alaska; John McCain seems to have rid himself of the Venom Symbiote; Scott McClellan revealed once and for all that Fox News was not only a Bush shill but a Bush mouthpiece, and there was Peace and Harmony Throughout the Land. Mostly. Enough.
There wasn’t much to be enraged about, really. The few rabid conservatives still showing their pasty faces were like amusing court jesters, or Vegas contortionists – a little disturbing, a little macabre, but ultimately hilarious. I mean, have you seen those people on Morning Joe? They’re a freaking laugh riot! There’s that blonde one whose father is an economist, but she doesn’t know anything about anything; and Pat Buchanan comes on sometimes to kill hippies live-on-air, and OMG, that stupid jerky one who pretends he used to be a Congressman? Joe? He’s better than Stephen Colbert.
But my ire has slowly but surely begun to rise. It all began with this Rhodes Scholar, right here:
Michelle Bachmann, fucking insane
Does anyone else remember that episode of How I Met Your Motherwhere the subplot was all about not dating girls with “crazy eyes?” That’s what Michelle Bachmann makes me think of. Crazy. Eyes. Like she wants to seduce me in an elevator and then kill my rabbit. Just sayin’.
She’s been on my radar since her fittingly disastrous Hardball appearance, when she basically suggested that we reinstate the McCarthy hearings. Every time I hear her name, it’s because she said something yet more awful. In an era of increasing globalization, ennui, and mediocrity, this woman outdoes herself every single time. A week or two ago she suggested that AmeriCore was going to turn into a “mandatory re-education camp.”
Anyway, not too long ago, Bachmann made the following statement, which, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making up:
“The Founding Fathers fought against taxation without representation.
Today we have taxation with representation.
I wonder what they’d think of that!”
(crowd goes wild)
Much as I hate to burst her crazy little bubble, I gotta say: I think the Founding Fathers would be pretty goddamn psyched about taxation with representation, considering that the right to it was what spurred them to revolution.
I don't even know what this means
But the Republican base, as usual, is much more interested in style than substance.
“Tea Parties” have “spontaneously” “sprung up” “all over the country.”
Translation: “Uninformed protests” have been “organized and publicized by Fox News” “in cities in which they could scrape up a couple hundred, or in some cases, a couple dozen, people.” (more…)
Hello, it is I, Rick Steves, your next best thing to a plane ticket. Actually, I’m even better, because your plane ticket cannot speak to you in a comforting midwestern accent, nor can it wear huge 80s aviator glasses and plaid shirts.
Welcome! To Best of Travels in Europe: FRANCE. Please indulge in this montage of French monuments set to 80s pop.
Well, hello, again, it is still me, Rick Steves. Do not fear, I am not the sort of man who would abandon you in a foreign country, and certainly not on a subway.
I am in a CAFE, a sort of French resturant where one can order caff-ay ole-ay and bag-ettes. It is often a fun activity to sit in a cafe and be stared at by disgruntled French people.
Oh! I did not mean to confuse you with all those French words all at once. Perhaps I had better explain. I will be using lots of French phrases in this videocassette. But since you are probably too unintelligent to speak French, I will pronounce the words incorrectly in both French AND English, utilizing a special vernacular of my own devising, known only as “Frangalis.”
This sullen, excessively bearded man is my companion, Francois. He will accompany me in restaurant scenes throughout the videocassette. Francois does not respond to any of my questions in French, English, or Frangalis, so I can only assume that he is a feral man-bear.
Another thing that can be a fun activity is riding LE METRO. It is the most advanced subway system in the world – you feed your tickets through a machine that can COUNT them! Fancy that!
Sometimes, as a way to earn money, starving children will dance or sing or play instruments or rap or rob people on LE METRO. If you bring a camera crew along, the other passengers will clap and pretend to tip them. And that’s the magic and hospitality of the French people.
But we certainly can’t spend the whole day underground! We’d miss one of my other favorite activities – standing on rooftops and scanning the skyline for attractions I will never actually visit.
Look, there’s NOTRE DAME! We will not visit NOTRE DAME, for it is overrated and often crowded. And when YOU are an experienced international traveler such as I, Rick Steves, you, too, will come to consider everything overrated and abhor virtually all human contact.
I think instead we should go to Napoleon’s tomb and attempt to look somber.
Well, that was fun! But we are off to even more exciting locales. Here we are in France’s largest department store. It is so large that there is a restaurant in it, and one of my favorite things to do here in FRANCE is sit in the department store restaurant and knock back a few cold ones.
Something I like to do when I come to FRANCE is rent an apartment and buy groceries and do my own laundry and interact will REAL French people. I LOVE Parisians! They are so jolly – sometimes they will pretend that they do not speak English until more than halfway through a conversation! Then they laugh gaily, for this is a delightful game in FRANCE.
Did you know that I, Rick Steves, support marjuana legalization? I’ll bet that you did not! I bet you now think that I smoke the stuff myself. Well, you would be WRONG.
I’m sitting here listening to the Original Cast Recording (OCR) of South Pacific, and though my mind is occupied with its usual questions (why is “You Have To Be Carefully Taught” so senselessly jaunty?) I can’t concentrate on them, really, because I’m listening to Ezio Pinza belt out “This Nearly Was Mine“.
Oh, dear god. That I’d forgotten that voice…It’s like a hot bubble bath and a velvet pillow and being kissed on the ear, all at once.
I’m reminded of my minor middle-school obsession with “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers,” which was on the classic movie channel what seemed like every other day. It was really a stupid movie, on many levels, not least because of the rampant and pervasive sexism. I remember my mom begging me to change the channel when she heard the opening notes of “Bless Your Beautiful Hide.”
Her argument was:
It was heinous that
a) Howard Keel was roaming the streets looking for a wife simply because she would be a useful farming asset, and,
b) He had reduced the act to such a transactional level that he was equating this theoretical woman with livestock.
My argument was as follows:
Shut up, Howard Keel is singing.
Howard Keel. Fine lookin' man.
It didn’t matter what. In that movie he sang about raping, pillaging, kidnapping, about how annoying his wife was, and I don’t know what else. But I hung on his every word as he wove a magical web of beautiful misogyny, and I wanted nothing more than to fall into it and iron his shirts forever, as long as he would keep singing. I also caught the beginning of “Show Boat” on the classic movie channel a month or two ago, and fell under Howard’s spell as he sang “Make Believe.” Only there was this ninny of a soprano who insisted on turning it into a duet. All I wanted to hear was my Howard, and she had to be all, “Listen to how high and shrieky I am! You could totally sing this part better than me, but I’m here with Howard and you’re not, let me continue to drown him out, LALALALALALALA……”
I don’t understand why Broadway is fixated on tenors – they have been for quite awhile now. Baritones in modern musicals have been mostly regulated to villainy (see The Scarlet Pimpernel; Les Miserables; The Color Purple; Jesus Christ Superstar; Little Shop of Horrors; Seussical! The Musical; 1776; and Sweet Smell of Success, just to name a few). But after listening to Howard and Ezio for awhile, those leading tenors start to sound pretty whiny and boring.
Colm Wlikinson: not sexy
Tenors in musical theatre were traditionally allotted “supporting actor” roles – young men who were written to be passionate, rash, and headstrong, they always fell head-over heels in love during the course of the show, and it usually ended badly.
Let’s look at The King and I,another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In the movie, Yul Brynner, an actor of extreme command and gravitas, plays the eponymous king. The king is a man of great pride, hard-won intelligence, and, not surprisingly, overblown confidence. His word is law, and he possesses an incredible magnetism, one that draws the educated, sensible, very British Miss Anna to him in a way she can neither explain nor define.
And then there is the tenor role, a young man who foolishly falls in love with Yul Brynner’s next wife. This tenor has only one duet to his name, and it’s nice, and everything, but Yul Brynner has all these crazy good songs sung not only by but about him. Yul Brynner, of course, has the tenor whipped near to death for his insolence. This is his right as a baritone leading man.
How did this happen? When did tenors begin brandishing foils and hopping about and shrieking at baritones in their silly voices (as though a baritone would ever be intimidated by such a thing)? When did the tenor usurp the baritone’s role as a mature, complex, deeply thoughtful leading man?
Let us take Colm Wilkinson as an example. Great Irish tenor, and internationally acclaimed. I grew up watching him in the 10th Anniversary “Dream Cast” concert DVD of Les Miserables. Honestly, the man is the only Jean Valjean as far as I’m concerned. But, pray, let us consider this picture of Colm performing in Canada not long ago.
He is an old man with an accoustic guitar. In Canada. It’s as though, for reasons known only to him, your grandpa decided to dress in all black and initiate a campfire sing-along.
For contrast, let’s look at Phillip Quast, who played Javert opposite Colm in the Les Mis dream cast. Javert, in typical modern musical style, is the menacing obsessive cop/stalker/revenge driven villain of the piece. This man sings a suicide song like none you’ve ever heard, musing about why Colm did not kill him when he had the chance (perhaps because Colm is a tenor? Tenors are not capable of killing anyone). Check out the video, you’ll even see Colm at the beginning. Quast is the sexy one.
He is driven, he is highly motivated, he is a man with a plan. Not for one second in the show does he waver in his duty – it would be beneath most police inspectors to pursue a petty thief and chain-gang escapee over twenty years and at least five cities, but dammit, Jean Valjean got away on his watch, and Javert will violate anyone’s jurisdiction to get him back. This is clearly above and beyond the call of duty, and, I think, deserving of a gritty Scorsese movie adaptation.
Colm, on the other hand, is sort of floating along being a reborn Christian and nice to everybody, adopting orphans, running towns and factories, saving people from the barricades, turning himself in to save an innocent man, etc.
Philip Quast: Sexy
No offense to Victor Hugo or Colm Wilkinson, but doesn’t this guy seem a little….vanilla? He would not be fun to hang out with. He’d probably just read the bible aloud, or something (“What does the Book of Job mean to you?”). Javert, though – you know he never goes home. He’s at the jail, filing his 20-year-felon-pursuit paperwork; or actively chasing Valjean; or drowning his sorrows in a local tavern with a glass of good wine, staring blankly at the wall, telling hair-curling stories to ragged seadogs and debilitating anyone who gets out of line with one punch. He’s mysterious, and badass enough to operate outside the law to serve justice. If you had a thing with Javert, you know you’d be one of many, but, oh, it’d be worth it, even when he said “I see the law being violated over there, gotta go,” ran off, and never called again.
For an odd construction in both modern and traditional baritone paradigms, look no farther than Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Both the male lead and the creepy villan are baritones. Leading man Gordon McRae (who looks like Robert Mitchum) did a phenomenal job. He also did a great job in Carousel, a charming little show about domestic violence, tackling the classic baritone marathon “Soliloquy,” which was also sung beautifully by John Raitt and Samuel Ramey for Broadway, and Frank Sinatra for fun.
Rolfe, the gangly, mailman/nazi
And what of The Sound of Music’s Captain Von Trapp and his dulcet “Edelwiss“? You know who was a tenor in The Sound of Music? Rolfe. The gangly mailman/nazi.
That makes it pretty simple, yes? Baritone or nazi? I’m going to have to go with the baritone.
Let’s bring back the days when baritones were the touchstones of musicals. Let’s write new music for them so we don’t have to keep revisiting Rodgers and Hammerstein clunkers to get our sexy baritone fix. Rodgers and Hammerstein are not the apex of musical theatre, their shows were depressing and predictable, and, as near as I can tell, a sort of “gateway” musical theatre that sucks in people who don’t know how cool Sondheim is yet.
No matter how much I love listening to “Soliloquy,” I can only sit through “Carousel” so many times.
In any relationship, it’s important to spend time together doing things you both enjoy – “Couple Things,” if you will.
Calvin and I like to paint Warhammer figurines, watch The West Wing, and yell at people on the internet.
Warhammer, for the uninitiated, is an addictive and expensive hobby which involves the acquisition and painting of small plastic and metal creatures which are totally awesome. These creatures are then assembled into armies of different point values which can square off against each other in accordance with very complicated rules which I do not understand at all (I just like the painting part).
This is the first guy I painted - a Wood Elf riding a War Hawk
The story of how I began painting “mens” as Calvin calls them, is a stereotypical one: Boy becomes mildly obsessed with something, girl, noting that boy is increasingly absorbed by said thing, begins to participate, if only to interact with him more. So now at least half of our date nights are spent sitting very happily on the floor, giving color to increasingly detailed models. The whole thing is incredibly geeky.
I will sprinkle pictures of some dudes Calvin and I painted throughout the post. They took lots of manhours, but it’s some fantastic work, well worth it.
While we paint, we like to watch the West Wing, for simple, easy-to-understand reasons:
1) It is the best show ever
2) We really, really wish that President Bartlett were the real president
3) It is the best show ever
The show follows the staff of a fictitious White House during a thoughtful, intelligent, democratic administration which, in a cruel twist of irony, mirrors the chronology of Dubya’s. Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue is without peer, witty and sparkling, and the material dealt with is more intelligent than in any other show, before or since. (more…)
My dad is a pretty cool guy. He’s dapper, charming, and polite to a fault. He comes from hardy Yankee stock, and often makes references to childhood stories that give us pause (”My father and I built that chimney,” “That reminds me of the time we put a firecracker in a fish and threw it over the bay,” “It’s no fun to wake up and find that poodles have peed in your shoes,” etc).
But, perhaps because he is one of those “liberal Yankees” we so often disparage Down Here, he has several other, more abrasive traits which I find rather endearing. He has an almost overdeveloped sense of right and wrong – if his belief in justice were any stronger, he’d have to wear a cape. This couples with the sort of tenacity rarely found outside of Christian missionaries and 19th century British colonialists to create one hell of an investigator.
He started out as a journalist, first up north, where nothing happens because it’s snowing, and then in Tampa where nothing happened because the Mob ran a tight ship. I jest, of course, he covered a murder his first day in town and eventually did an almost-award-winning series on the “Cigar City Mafia.” (If you recognize that as the title of an acclaimed book, you’re correct. If you notice that that book was not written by my dad but utilizes much of his research, you are also correct. Note I did not link to its Amazon page.)
He’s something of a folk hero even within the family, my boyfriend Calvin holding him in particular reverence. He whispers “badass,” when he hears one of the oft-retold stories of his exploits, and has said, “your dad could go to a hot dog stand and it would turn out to be a mafia hot dog stand.”
The nature of dad’s work has always made him better informed than we mere mortals, from “do not shop in that store – trust me,” to “Oh, god, it’s the former commissioner of such-and-such, I hope he didn’t see me, he’s such a jerk.” He’s always repeated to us, mantra-like, to always, always, always read the fine print, and to never, never, never, give out our personal information. In my house, much like Calvin’s house, credit card companies were at best a ravenous monster which we should trust minimally and use warily, and at worst the harbinger of the Antichrist.
Calvin’s mom, in fact, indirectly blames credit cards for all of Calvin’s childhood issues with school and society. She was a stay-at-home-mom when his older sisters were growing up, but feels Calvin lost the benefit of that because scarily mounting credit card debt required her to go back to work when he was still very small. She looks back on this bend in the road wistfully, thinking that if it had gone differently, her son would have had a better childhood and a better relationship with her.
College was another well-tended expectation in both our houses. My mom came from an academic family of teachers, professors, and perpetual students, and of course, had her own Ph.D. My dad came from a family for whom immigration was no distant memory – for him, college was a way to prove himself and reach for something better than roofing, which was his father’s profession (Dad always said, “my father’s idea of power tools was two guys with shovels”).
Calvin’s parents and sisters all graduated from Florida State University, the former putting themselves through working as lab techs before a degree was required to become a lab tech. His brother-in-law is at present working on his Ph.D., and the whole family has enough Master’s Degrees between them to frighten a coal-mining town.
So Calvin and I were more than a little dismayed to learn that the Great Evil of credit cards and the Great Good of college were strolling off arm-in-arm into the sunset.
Back to my dad: He’s now a top-notch fraud investigator at a nice law firm, where his aforementioned tenacity and sense of justice can sometimes lead him to put in hours and hours of work investigating things which are clearly wrong on many levels but not necessarily prosecutable.
One such recent case involved him looking into the level of care Florida State put into handling their students’ personal information. This was of direct concern to me, as I’m in the process of giving them all of my personal information in order to apply for admittance in the future.
As it turns out, the University I’ve revered since childhood has taken to giving Bank of America their students’ names and home addresses so as to more easily market FSU themed credit cards to them.
I can’t get past how sleazy this is. It’s beyond cavalier indifference to the students’ well-being, it’s something much more sinister, much more wicked and hypocritical. To make videos alerting college kids to the dangers of credit card debt and to then turn and sell them to those very creditors?
The whole student body is so attuned to physical danger, to the big scary world outside their hometowns, a world of date-rape and bars and the vulnerability that shadows loneliness – and yet without their consent or knowledge, the digital bits and pieces that make up their very identities are being offered up to people who are infamous for trashing and erasing them.
My Dad made an attempt to interview some students on campus the other day, unimpressed by his suit, business cards, and salt-and-pepper beard, about half of them automatically assumed he was a creepy old guy who wanted to throw them in the back of a van for some nefarious purpose. Admirable caution.
But what to do when the people to whom we have entrusted our safety prove untrustworthy? When even playing it safe isn’t safe enough?
Calvin tells me that I should always operate at cop-level awareness, a hangover from his days in the local police cadet program. He has a whole color coded awareness chart, just like the Department of Homeland Security. The lowest level is white, and he says the only time I should ever be there is when I am asleep.
It is in that spirit that I’ve written this blog: awareness. We should all be looking out, looking as far ahead as we can, for ways we can get hurt. And if we see a societal problem, the least we can do is pass it on, change it if we can, or at least help others avoid it.
To learn more about the how some schools are profiting from their students’ personal info, check out this site my dad’s working on right now. And please, pass it on.
I read. No, really, like, a lot. (as clearly evidenced by the verbosity of that last sentence.)
Copyright Notice
Basically, I have dibs on anything posted here, because it is M-I-N-E mine. I am very selfish about the things I write, in the sense that I do not want other people to take things I write and do things like pretend they wrote them. If you reproduce my stuff in any way without my express permission, then I will more or less hunt you down. Fair warning.
Awards and such
I came in behind this kid who can't spell
From the O'DonnnellWeb Blog Awards, I was honored with a 1st place award for “Best Unschooling Girl Blog Among the One Blog Entered”.
From Alasandra's blog, "Best Teen Blog"
I cherish this award: I awarded it to myself on behalf of "Consent of the Governed," where I hold the complex title of "incredibly rude," "condescending," "elitist," "unmedicated," "Godwin Police," "troll." I hold this title with pride.
Do you suspect that you might be a geek,or even a Total Geek like me? Find out by taking the geek test at: http://www.innergeek.us/geek-test.html
Comments Policy
I, PenguinDust, reserve the right to blatantly censor any comment with which I do not agree or whose tenor I do not appreciate.
This may be the United States of America; but this is my own small corner of it, so I'll run it my way, thank you.
Comment if you want, but you've been warned: if you write something mean-spirited, inexplicably unkind, or something that makes me afraid of the internet, that comment will - and oughta be - deleted. Also, I prefer not to publish comments that display poor grammar.
“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
If You Were Wondering About SnookToo, find answers herein……
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