Spidercamp

right on.

The editors of the New Yorker have endorsed Kerry, in a beautifully written essay. The Nov. 1 issue (with the four cardboard faces on the cover) is well worth the $4; it also includes 32 pages of photographs from Richard Avedon's unfinished portfolio, "Democracy." The editorial essay is available here, at least for now.

Humane Society - Jonathan Shute

This is a really old review, but Jon loves it and it's all still true.

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My godfather's name is Paul Pfeiffer. He is not the twerp from the Wonder Years. He lives on a hill in Wisconsin with his wife June. He used to call me Spike when I was little. He is one of my favorite people in the world.

Paul is monstrously tall, with enormous hands and feet. He walks slowly and swings his long arms like a sloth. He is gentle. He taught high school history for many years, and retired to run a bicycle repair shop out of his garage. When a little kid shows up, wanting to buy a bike for his kid sister and knowing his pocketful of change is not enough, Paul counts up the pennies, declares that the exact price, and sends the kid home with whatever he thinks his sister will like best, complete with basket, streamers, and bell. In Paul's life, kindnesses like this happen all the time; he makes them happen.

I had not seen Paul in perhaps 5 years, so I drove from Georgia to Wisconsin. I didn't call him until I got there. He recognized my voice and laughed and told me to hurry on over. I did. He fed me homemade chowder and cake. We sat in the kitchen and watched the deer in the snow in the backyard, delicately tongueing birdseed from the feeder. Paul talked and talked and I could have listened forever.

He has a warm voice, earthy and kind, like Garrison Keillor's, but without the sleepy-making. Even when I suspect he is making up the story, I do not complain, because he is a trustworthy man. His stories are always the way things should have turned out. It's a farmer's voice. He grows things. I can trust that.

This is all just to say: when I read Jonathan Shute's stories, this is what I think of, every time. It's a similarly reassuring voice. And I cannot get enough of it.

---

Jon's book is available here. Supplies are reported to be dwindling. More of his writing, attitude, and puppies are here.

yesterday's unprecedented run of assholes

I record this not out of a need to vent or the desire for sympathy, but as an exercise to remind myself not all days are so jam-packed with people like this. It's laugh or cry, and now, being tomorrow, this all seems sort of funny, which I've also got to remember.

1. My boss calls me, wants me to come in early. She's freaking out and I can't figure out exactly why. She keeps screeching "collated! it's got to be collated by 2:00!" She tells me when she'd ideally like me to be there; I glance at the clock and do the math - factoring in my commute, she's given me eight minutes' warning before I need to leave the house. I say yep, yep, sure, of course, hang up and take my sweet time. When I get to work I go ahead and lie on my timesheet because every time she calls me when I'm in my pajamas watching Dawson's Creek, I get paid a little extra. That's the rule. Just as I figured, it turns out to be about 10 minutes' worth of collation.

2. Steve the creepy bus driver asks me who I'm voting for and doesn't let me answer because he's so worked up about the election. He heard a rumor that Kerry didn't even earn those medals he threw over the fence. Bush rules! And the Jews, ha! If they're God's "chosen people" and all that, then how could the Holocaust have happened? HA HA HA HA HA I walk away.

3. standard assortment of demanding bratty children and their bratty parents. one notable winner, an adult, steps hard on my foot and favors me with a down-the-nose glance. I won't apologize but I will acknowledge you're there, servant. I'm ever so grateful.

4. We're visited by pre-inspection lady from state daycare licensing board. She's "pleased" that no one on staff is wearing jeans, which was a random fluke, and I wasn't aware I wasn't allowed to wear jeans to my job of PLAYING ON THE FLOOR WITH KIDS.

5. Our cleaning staff is made up of lovely, smiling Hispanics whose fractional English sadly does not include the word "dilute," so I haven't been able to suggest they clean the floors with anything other than straight bleach. They only go this hardcore once a week, but still, once a week I have to serve kids food and then teach them fractions in a room thick with eye-watering, faint-making fumes.

To deal with this, I have been propping the exterior doors open to get some airflow. The inspection lady tells me that this is illegal because of kids who might make a break for it. She says we should use Glade Plug-Ins instead. She recommends Gardenia.

5. My boss tells me whoops, she's an idiot and miscalculated the number of useless preschool-teacher training hours I need, and I've actually gone over. She doesn't actually mention that she's an idiot; she doesn't even apologize. Instead she chirps, Now you're overqualified! I'm kind of surprised she can pronounce that.

6. On the playground, after running around and becoming flushed, a seven-year old with luxurious golden curls says to me with chilling sincerity, I'm hot. Fan me.

7. The program which employs me shares parish buildings with several other organizations, one of which is the school basketball team. It is coached and supervised by various dads who are without exception jerks. Every day they try to muscle us out of our space early. Every day I tell them they cannot have the space until 6 pm. I have gone so far as to say, You can have the gym when the little hand is on the six and the big hand is on the twelve.

When I don't cave in (I never cave in) and give them the gym early, they punish me in a very retarded passive-aggressive way by allowing the basketball kids to run wild in the lobby. I have seen children jumping on our upholstered chairs, climbing on our tables, opening our desk drawers and dumping out the contents. I have seen them stealing our office supplies right in front of their coach, sometimes in front of their own fathers. Nobody seems to mind this behavior - certainly nobody ever stops it.

Except me. Yesterday I saw a boy, about nine years old, fooling around with the cleaning lady's mop bucket. He was playing with the squeezer and tipping the bucket back and forth, trying to splash filthy water on the newly-cleaned linoleum. Finally he hauled up the mop and splatted it on the floor. All this at arm's length from his father.

Well fuck that, so I ran out there and started screaming NO WAY NOT EVER, and scared the shit out of the kid. I went on for quite a while about how it's innapropriate to mess with other people's stuff and disrespectful of a nice lady who works very hard every day to make up messes made by UNGRATEFUL LITTLE KIDS LIKE YOU. I said that this behavior was wrong, even if your father is standing right there and doesn't seem to mind. DO YOU READ ME. He nodded real fast and I glared at the father, who was just starting to notice something had happened, and I glared at everybody else and stomped away.

8. my commute home took an hour. trucks tried to kill me. dinner blew. but then there were things i love, like logan, and tv. in that order, baby.

they keep telling me it's bad to have favorites

Julian, age five, has been very sick and needs his medication at four o'clock. My boss was originally in charge of this, a duty I gently took away from her because I'd like to see the kid actually get the medicine every day. (I've learned the to treat my boss like a parrot. I phrase the thing I'm going to do in the form of a question, so she can feel like she's made a decision, like a big girl. I smile and nod encouragingly the whole time I'm talking to her, then act surprised and pleased when she agrees to do what I want. "You'd like a cracker, wouldn't you? Good, good.")

So it's my cellphone that buzzes in my pocket for Julian every day at 3:50. I track him down (shrieking on the playground) and bring him back inside. We have to sit in the lobby because that's a public place; under GA's laws for after-school programs, one adult is never allowed to be alone with any number of children. I cannot hang out in a room with 10 kids because, it's assumed, I'll be raping all of them as soon as the door swings shut.

(insert diatribe on idiotic laws that only bind the law-abiding. insert fury of undergoing background checks, being fingerprinted, working spectacularly with kids for eight years, yet never attaining any measure of trust by the state of GA, while teachers, bound by mysteriously different rules, are allowed to be alone behind closed doors all day with 25 kids.)

So we sit in the lobby while Julian expertly fits together the pieces of his weird asthma medicine delivery device. I've never seen one of these before but I think it must be designed to lessen the amount of medicine delivered to his lungs all at once, while still ensuring he gets a full dose. A standard asthma inhaler fits onto the end of a 6-inch plastic tube, which connects to a rubber cup which fits over his mouth, and most of his chin, since he's so little.

Julian pulls the trigger and the tube fills with mist. It looks a lot like a bong, which would be funny if I weren't rubbing his skinny back (the knobs of his spine, the little wings) and if he weren't looking up at me with huge dark eyes above his tube of medicine, wordless, mournful.

He breathes deep a couple of times, then starts to take the thing apart. I think that's it, but he takes another inhaler out of his bag and repeats the process with that one. When he's done and has started putting everything away, it occurs to me that the medicine probably tastes pretty bad. I ask him if it's gross and he says YES! But it makes me feel better when I'm breathing so I know I have to do it.

I'm floored. I'm 28 and I'm not that mature about medicine. I sneak him a cookie for good measure and he hugs me hard and then he's back to the playground like nothing ever happened.

---

Last week Gabby was a little sad about something but wouldn't quite tell me what it was. I didn't push it. Days later, she told me it was because her birthday party would be happening the same day as a church festival. I thought she meant she was upset because she couldn't go to both things. But she was sad because her party guests would be missing the festival.

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A long time ago, she must have been about 5, I was helping Gabby with her homework when one of my co-workers busted some idiotic move across the room. Like started doing the robot or something. All the kids went nuts except for Gabby, who just looked up at me, shook her head, said, White people so crazy, and went back to her math.

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I broke the news to Gabby that it used to be illegal for black people to learn how to read. She had been learning about slavery and racism in school, sort of, and didn't get it. I told her I didn't either but she didn't really have to worry about it much these days but if somebody ever gave her trouble for being who she was, to get real loud about it, because that kind of thing is dumb. She said ok.

And I broke it to her that America has never had a black president, nor a woman. Her mouth fell open. She didn't believe me ("Is there a law or something?") and I had borrow somebody's social studies book to prove it. She looked at the rows of white guys and looked at me and said, You do it.

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I asked her once if it was weird, being the only black girl there. The school itself has a few, but she and Julian are the only blacks enrolled in the after-school program. She got very serious (though not sad) and said, Yeah. It's weird. Lonely sometimes. Like I'm different. But I'm friends with pretty much everybody so it's not a big deal.

--

It was a long time before I met their mother as the dad usually picks them up. She found me on the floor and knelt down next to me without hesitation. Parents don't do that. They've got expensive suits and attitudes. They stay standing while they tell me how perfect their kids are, or, more often, they don't say anything at all, not hello, not an introduction, not Hey how's my kid doing? How many of them don't know my name, while I know exactly which ones are alcoholics?

She knelt down to me, shining eyes, pixie haircut, and took my hand. You're Jessie. I've been wanting to meet you. The kids come home talking about you all the time.

I worry sometimes about how parents feel about my involvement with their kids and this felt like she'd made the sign of the cross on my forehead. Exhale, smile.

---

Gab was in a bad mood and twisted her pigtails around themselves until they formed two knobs on top of her head. I'm an evil scientist, she said. These are my antennas and they're got lightning going between em, see? BAD lightning.

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Julian has a bad day but I have a master weapon. He's sullen and won't talk but I whisper in his ear, aren't you going to see your Uncle Mark tonight? and he's transformed, he leaps and crows and sings the I Get To See Unca Mark song. There's a dance that goes along with this. It's pretty great.

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Dear Gabby and Julian's parents:

When everybody else is sucking and breaking my heart with the way they treat their children I can look at you and see how really easy it is to take the right approach. All you do is love the living crap out of your kids and keep them in line and act reasonably and hug them a lot and ask them how their day was.

I don't have any kids of my own so I'm wary of saying I know how to raise them right. But I have seen a lot of families in eight years and I can sure as hell discriminate between the parental approaches that result in brats and assholes and those that result in happy open-faced unafraid wonderful kids. I have a tremendous mental file of How To and How Never To Raise Kids, and you remind me every day of the benefits of doing it right.

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That's too much, so the real note home will probably read something like, Dear Gabby and Julian's parents:

When you show up everybody relaxes and says, oh, it's the nice people with the sweet kids. We don't say that about everybody but I'm so glad we can say it about you. Thanks for never treating me like the help. Thanks for saying Hi and smiling all the time. I would go to the ends of the world for your kids. I just wanted you to know.

proof

Gabby's very good about cleaning up after herself. If she spills something during snack, she gets up, gets a towel from the table, wipes it up, no big deal. Contrast this with most other kids I know, who either ignore the mess, blame someone else, refuse to clean it up, or cry.

So Gab makes a mess, takes care of it, then comes over to ask what she should do with the towel, gray now from being grubbed around on the floor. I just smile because she knows exactly where it goes. Same place every day. This is one of her famous fake questions because she only wants to come talk to me.

So I say, You should eat it. She solemnly lifts the towel toward her open mouth. She's calling my bluff, waiting for me to stop her. I don't. She stops when it's almost touching her lips and says, Do you really want me to eat it? Because I'll bite it at least, if you really want me to.

And Olivia, who's sitting nearby and listening, looks up and says, just as serious, So would I, you know.

I said nobody had to bite anything. What kids.

Later, Olivia helped me clean up a mess I'd made myself. She didn't make a big deal about it, just pitched in. I mentioned this to her dad later, who laughed and said, You won't find her doing that at home. She's just trying to impress you.

---

I just sent an email to RuPaul. What a wonderful world.

kids, kids, Elwood

Kids bitching about everything, impossible to satisfy, hating each other, insults, bile. They wanted me to organize a group activity and I let them vote and they chose kickball so I set up a game of kickball and right away it was more of the same, bickering, cheating, yelling. So I made them play silent kickball. Nobody had fun but me. That's the new rule.

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Erin was singing to herself and her sister Maura joined in. At first they were singing everything together but pretty soon Maura dropped back and echoed every line. It was just a camp song (The Princess Pat / lived in a tree / she sailed across / the seven seas. / She sailed across / the channel too / and brought with her / a rigabamboo.) but I'd never heard it before, and they had these perfect pure little-kid voices and were having such a simple good time about it. And they only sang it twice and then let it drop, which endeared them to me forever. Anyway I've had this dumb camp song in my head ever since. There's a shipwreck in it.

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hey logan: sugar ray.

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I imagine this is going to be passe in a couple of days: I would not bother anybody with a link to a Sarah McLaughlin video unless it were worth watching.

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I got curious, so I asked Elwood Edwards how often he's asked to say "You've buggered a goat!" etc. His prompt & very polite respose:

Yes, I am asked to make "off color" files often...and my answer is always the same: I won't do them. Not only is that my personal choice, it would be something that would haunt me forever... all it would take would be my making a raunchy or inappropriate sound file to open the flood gates.

So I just don't do them. :)

...but thanks for asking.

(The smiley is my favorite part.)

ADD seminar, as opposed to sleeping

Saturday, up at 7 to earn non-relevant teacher-training hours #7 and 8 of 10 necessary to keep my stupid job. What I don't know yet is that the whole ordeal, including commute and roadwork, will take over 6 hours. My window sticks open so I drive with freezing air blasting me right in the face. I discover my car's cd player no longer plays cds so I cannot play the disc I was saving for this drive. I drive to Alpharetta, then the outskirts of Alpharetta, then the backwoods of the outskirts. I find St. Thomas Aquinas, an enormous, multi-storied, multi-building, kinda-creepy Catholic compound. I'm a little early but it doesn't make any sense that I'm the only car in the parking lot. I roam around to figure out if I'm in the right place. I am; I find the instructor. Since I'm the first one there I am immediately her Special Helper. This is inevitably a world of shit. But she's friendly without being too cute about it, which is more than I expected, and as she's chattering to me ("Isn't this carpet crazy? I call it my crazy carpet. It's new, we had some flooding during Ivan. The whole building was shut down for two weeks, we had to cancel the auction, oh I forgot the handouts and the copier is fried, would you like some coffee, this isn't nearly enough chairs!") I realize she's just a nice lady who's nervous about her presentation. So I suck it up and smile, make signs, set up chairs, arrange cardboard deli cookies on a plastic tray. The seminar is on ADD. (I put on my robe and wizard hat.) It's so freaking dumb. The first presenter (not the same lady as above) tells us her whole life story (20 minutes) and then reads us a 12-page handout, typos and all. She does not add to these notes or elaborate on them, except for constant digressions about her brother. Her brother used to call spaghetti "psketti;" this is cited as proof that he had an auditory processing disorder. Everyone nods and writes it down. "What's the most powerful tool in the struggle against ADD? God." Um. I would have guessed patience, modern medicine, or puppy dogs before "god," but I am sitting in a church basement and I am supposed to be representing a Catholic school and I can't work up a fuss this early in the morning so I keep quiet. The speaker is a dullard but she has the best middle-aged ass I've ever seen, firm full high & round inside snazzy striped pants. It's paired, though, with unfortunate bosoms, tiny upslung nuggets. I am falling asleep so I go hide in the bathroom and take pictures of my better boobs. That's the hubris of youth talking, but it keeps me awake. At cookie break some of the ladies in pink businesswear descend on me and ask what parish I'm from and are all our kids PR2? I say, I have no idea what you're talking about, and open my book at them. They go away. Damn, how I hate ladies in bulk. If there were even one dude in this room the atmosphere would be entirely different. Not necessarily from flirtation or sexual tension, but from ladies' unwillingness to say certain things in front of men. As it is, women who met an hour ago are now showing each other where they're fat. "I just can't get rid of this tummy!" They pinch themselves and shake the fat and giggle. Back to the speeches: a desperate desire to categorize and label every possible behavior. "Oppositional defiance" ("not doing what you're told") can occur in children with or without ADHD. We (they) talk about the ins & outs of this for half an hour. I want to yell SOMETIMES KIDS ARE JUST PRICKS but I do not. There's more to the speeches but who cares. ... Quotes, from my pages of notes, minus many drawings of Abe Lincoln and robots falling down stairs: * ADD is not a death sentence. * ADD is a problem of arousal. You just have to know how to properly stimulate these kids. (I swear she says this with a straight face) * she loves the word "metacognital," she's pretty sure it exists * You're being pressured to have your kids starting to read by kindergarten. That's crazy! They're not developmentally ready! They shouldn't even have a pencil before they go to kindergarten. * When you take charisma and put it with God, it's a miracle what happens. * The higher the IQ, the easier it is to hide it. * If children wait until they're older to learn to read, it's going to be delayed.

fishpond, wacko

That fucking fishpond. It's so pretty and I'm trying not to hate it. But it causes trouble. Every moron who bumbles down to this end of the courtyard has to SAY something about it. If they were talking quietly to the fish or something I'd probably be ok with it. But it's always "Hey look, fishies!" yelled real loud at about 5 am. How fucking dumb is that. Yeah. They're fish. It's like at work when I've dumped fifty granola bars on a table and every single day some teacher walks past me and says SNACK TIME, or HEY LOOK, GRANOLA BARS, or, my favorite for hating, simply YUM. I understand that's just small talk. But what's wrong with Hello?

20 minutes before my alarm would have gone off this morning, this woman down in the courtyard was explaining a fishpond to her child, by yelling about it. WATER. WATER. WAAAAAA TER. THAT'S WATER! She was getting louder and louder about it, frustrated maybe that her infant was not responding intelligently and I wanted to open the window and yell down to her that her kid was probably not deaf but he was probably working on it and could she shut up. But then she shut up.

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Yesterday Olivia, who is four and knows most of the words to Baby Got Back, made up a song called I Am a Citizen and I Have to Tinkle.

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I placed a couple of pen pal ads on the web, because I (still) maintain that there are a handful of people out there who are interesting enough to write to, but mostly because I (still) love me some morons. Today brought me an email of "hi, i want to take you as my pal for ever and ever" (that's the whole thing. no details, no name). And another whose subject line was "taste my friendship" and which requested I send him a massage (just poor English, not naughtiness).

Yesterday I got the winner so far - a twelve-page rant on the mistreatment of American Muslims. Page one starts with the author's experience on September 11th, including the reprehensible question asked by his boss: "Are you one of those people?" - meaning terrorists. I was in this guy's corner for about thirty seconds until it became clear that he's an insane hate dervish who cannot be stopped. It was twelve pages of how much everything, but mostly America, sucks, including Abraham Lincoln (I'm wrong to like him) and American women (whores). His handwriting grows impressively scrawly - he must have written it all in one crazed spiteful sitting. Envelope covered in smily-face stickers.

"Arab dictators, despotic kings and Muslim corrupted leaders as well as Al Qaida to stage attacks so as to provide the propoganda for WAR and of course a military industrial complex that no nation wants to stand up to except IRAN - NORTH KOREA - CHINA but even they are asleep for us while we lay at the mercy of state terrorism. We await a great leader from Arabia to come back with an army and will also gather more forces just as in DUNE and we pray for him and Jesus daily to return to save us from both the staged individual terrorism / state terrorism.

Take care,
Your friend,
S.

P.S. If you write back then you are truly open minded."

Candyfreak - Steve Almond

Dear Steve:

I could tell right away that I'd enjoy it, but I had a hard time with Candyfreak, until I figured out how to read it. It didn't sit well with me after a big meal, and reading it while hungry was just stupid self-torment. I found that I best liked reading it after a modest dinner, when I had had a little while to digest and could stand to hear about delicious treats. In other words, your book works best as dessert. Nice going.

I wanted to thank you for that, and also for the bits at the end where you digress (or ascend) into personal narrative. You wrote about being overtaken by a terrible haze of grief while driving, and I found myself thinking, Oh, I hope things turn out all right for that guy. Until then I hadn't realized how much of yourself you'd put forth in the book. I'm glad to have learned so much about candy, but I'm more glad to have had the privilege of uncovering such a sneaky self-portrait.

The damn library doesn't have your other book. But I tracked down a Five-Star Bar (peanut). It rules. Thanks for that, too.

-Jessica

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Steve Almond is a writer, creative writing teacher, and frequent NPR commentator. He puts words together real good. His website is here. Candyfreak is available from Powell's here. Enjoy.

all the roads are closed, i guess it's a snow day

A small plane just crashed into a building around the corner from here. The blessing is that the crashed-into building (cruelly named Edgewood Collision) was abandoned, and no one but the pilot was killed. It did not hit the elementary school down the block. Still, the news lady need not sound so thrilled. Interviewing an eyewitness, she said, (verbatim, I wrote it down) "Have you ever seen anything like that? No? Terrible to see. Very good. Well we have reports that the pilot may not have survived! We invite anybody else who has seen a piece of this to call us up."