that's right, it's Tuesday

Anna bought me a new ring! It's tungsten carbide, and I have an urge to try and scratch it up, but it's tungsten carbide, so intellectually I understand that's not going to accomplish anything except to maybe scrape some chunks off a masonry wall somewhere.



It has a sort of One Ring vibe to it. It's heavy for its size (see: tungsten), about the same shape, polished to an unbearable shininess, and impervious to scratching. (You can, however, break one with a pair of Vise-Grips.)

The three of us went to Six Flags Great America on Sunday, a nice old-school nuclear family outing. I can't remember the last time I went to an amusement park, let alone one that is now located in the forest of Silicon Valley corporate office buildings (you pass by McAfee and Adobe on the way there, for example). When Anna was a kid (back before television), Great America was in the middle of nowhere.

Despite the constant music and barker announcements on the speakers, it was more or less the same noise I remember from places like Riverside Park (now also absorbed by Six Flags). The new thing is apparently to have TVs everywhere, which is what drove Anna and J away from Marine World in Vallejo. Anna's grandmother bought the 3 of us season passes to Great America, so we can go a few more times this year.

We went on a rollercoaster! It looked pretty mellow, but it wasn't particularly, and then afterward we noticed it's called "Psycho Mouse" and it's rated a 4/5 on the intensity scale they provide. And I took J on the go-cart track, which was pretty awesome not only for him enjoying going fast, but also for me to remember how to properly apex corners. Sadly, the guy in front of me started driving like a loon to make it fun for his kid, and there wasn't room or horsepower to pass him, so I had to slow down.

And I am working! So much working. But it's fun. And I'm motorcycle shopping. And Anna is graciously assembling our wedding and somehow taking care of all of us while still getting some work done. And nothing is available for rent, and house prices are going down, so maybe we should just buy a house.

So, yeah. It's a little busy.

art envy

One of our favorite blogs is by Tiffany Ard, who runs the excellent Nerdy Baby online store (if you want to get the house 6-year old a present, I recommend a framed copy of this poster, and let me know so I don't buy another one). She writes wonderfully about running her business and homeschooling her two kids. Her kid dialogue is especially awesome.

I was especially struck by this post showing the materials she made up for some of her lessons. I have this sting of envy because she's an Artist, and part of me always wanted to be, and I'm not, really.

Artists have this flow of ideas that I always covet. They just...create things, with ideas that come from somewhere inside them. I had a flow like that as a kid--show me a normal 7-year old who could possibly not spew out a world of ideas as they happen--but then it sort of dried up as I got older. I'm not sure why: one could blame school for crushing my creativity, but the truth is I don't think that's what happened. Plenty of kids around me became Artists. I think it's more that as I reached 6th-8th grade, I started to shut down emotionally as my friends and I grew in different directions and I lost them. And I'm just not really an Artist: my big gift is to understand the world, to learn stuff and find connections and patterns and things in common. Mostly I'm reading books or learning how to do something: ride a motorcycle, make books, make jewelry, shoot a bow and arrow. When I actually make something beyond the process of learning it, it's not the inexorable need from within that most Artists seem to have. I don't even make stuff because it's fun (even though it is). I make stuff in response to a need I have. I'm an Engineer. I solve problems.

(Usually causing more problems in the process. But hey, you wanted cable in the apartment, you said it was really important, and you did not say I couldn't drill through the outside wall to do it.)

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of understanding this and accepting it. We are simultaneously infinitely malleable--I have little patience with people saying they're too old to learn something or too old to change--and we are also who we are. I doubt I'm going to be an Artist, or a world-class musician, or any number of other things. I do want to learn to draw, so a drawing class is on 2011's to-do list (as it has been for every year except 2010). I've mostly accepted I'm not an Artist, but there's a part of me that at least wants to know a technique for making art.

It's amazing to think of everything about me that's changed over time: my experience of the world is completely different from 5 years ago. And yet, we were visiting my parents last month and looking at my baby book, and so much of what was true at age 2 is still very true now (in particular, I talk with a big vocabulary and I have a tremendous lack of moderation around grapes).

Everything changes, and yet...some things persist, in some form or another.

[Cleared out of the Drafts folder, mostly written in early January.]

Prohibition and historical perspective

I just finished reading Daniel Okrent's Last Call, which is a wonderful, wonderful book, with a brilliantly droll turn of phrase about every four paragraphs. The subtitle is The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, and the thrust of the narrative is that Prohibition altered America in ways reverberating down to the present, which we have now mostly forgotten. Some are cute, like the fact that "scofflaw" was coined by a newspaper contest to come up with a word for someone who defied Prohibition. Others are a bit more intense and immediately relevant.

For example, some of us are now, rightly, concerned with the expansion of government surveillance, unchecked by the courts; and the Fourth Amendment has been a vague shadow of its original self for a long time now: e.g. your refusal to take a breathalyzer test becomes probable cause to arrest you (or in the new strategy, there's a judge on-site to issue a warrant for a blood sample). And yet, wiretapping didn't require a warrant, from the first time the Supreme Court considered it in 1928's Olmstead v. United States, until they overturned it in 1967's Katz v. United States. Olmstead was a 5-4 ruling, and Justice Louis Brandeis's dissent is now famous, as Supreme Court dissents go, being cited in pretty much every pro-privacy decision of the past 50 years:

The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. [emphasis mine]

So this case, coming out of Prohibition, has moved along all kinds of decisions that have shaped our world, like Griswold v. Connecticut (birth control), Miranda v. Arizona (Miranda rights), Katz mentioned above, and Roe v. Wade. But it took 39 years to get from Olmstead to Katz; 39 years for the Court to decide that another area of technology was subject to rights of privacy and protection from search.

Knowing that we've had a previous period of warrantless wiretapping adds some perspective to our current one, doesn't it? Not that it's not bad, but that it's not unique: it changed once, and it can change again.

Or, take the Jones Act of 1929. This escalated most Prohibition violations from misdemeanors to felonies, maximum sentences for a first offense from 6 months to 5 years, and bumped fines from $1000 up to $10,000. Failure to report a felony also became a felony, so if you happened to see someone transporting alcohol (and it was hard not to), you were subject to 3 years in federal prison. This was part of a spasm of draconian enforcement in the years leading up to Repeal, when people refusing to acknowledge that Prohibition couldn't work focused on how weakly enforced it was, rather than how unenforceable.

On March 29, 1929, six officers, "'armed with sawed off shotguns, pistols, machine guns, bulletproof vests, and tear bombs'"

"invaded the home of Peter DeKing, a suspected bootlegger. One of them clubbed him over the head with the butt of a shotgun. As he dropped senseless, his wife Lillian sprang to his side. A blast from the shotgun killed her. When told of the atrocity, Ella Boole of the WCTU [Women's Christian Temperance Union] remarked, 'Well, she was evading the law wasn't she?" [quoted in Drug Policy and Human Nature]

In Michigan, where the state legislature had passed a stricter-than-federal enforcement law, Etta Mae Miller, mother of 10 whose husband was already in jail, sold two pints of liquor to an undercover cop, and since it was her fourth violation, she was put in jail for life.

The War on Drugs has made this sort of thing routine, imprisoning endless millions of Americans and producing locally-controlled paramilitary police forces who constantly screw up and kill innnocent people (without consequences, of course).

Photo by Flickr user kchrist/Kenn Wilson

Those right there are two officers from Bay Area Rapid Transit, the light rail system, which to my knowledge has never experienced an incident requiring machine guns. In addition to being over-armed, they're also under-supervised, as we learned with the Oscar Grant murder.

A few years ago, when I read America Afire: Adams, Jefferson, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800, I thought, "Wow, the election of 2000 looks pretty calm and civilized by comparison." For some reason I learned that we'd had worse elections, but I didn't continue on to think that we've had really bad everything at various times.

America has lots of problems right now, and lots of stuff we need to fix, and directions that we need to change. I wonder if we lived longer, long enough to see everything more than once, would we be wiser? Would we understand that the way things are, good or bad, has happened before in some form or another, and will happen again, and are going to change? Or is it a human thing, and our history would follow other cycles longer than a human lifetime? Maybe we're inherently short-sighted. Me, I'm going to relax a little bit. We've been here before, and it's lame; but it will change.

the new normal

A few weeks ago I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which is an excellent book (if a little meandering). Among other things, its detailed description of growing up in the 60s and 70s gives me flashbacks to being a kid in the 80s.

I'd hate to oversimplify that time. Our memory lies, and nostalgia lurks in dark corners like a dormant virus, waiting to corrupt our experience of the present. I do think it was a less chaotic, freewheeling time, though, at least in retrospect. (Our view was just limited for how far things could go, sort of like we thought conservatism had reached its apogee of evil stupidity under Bush II, until we saw what came after.) We had reference points; not healthy or productive ones, but we knew where we stood, or thought we did, which made us feel almost as good. Our enemies and adversaries were easily-identified nation-states (remember when Libya mattered?). The order of the old world hadn't yet completely disintegrated. The nation was still arguing about Vietnam, a festival of recrimination we would continue until President Obama's election in 2008.

(Finally, no one cared what a candidate had done during the war, because mostly he was being a little kid in Indonesia.)

We had structure, we had defined roles and categories. Those are reassuring things; much like what we provide for/force upon children. The structure of the world limited and blinkered us as much as it supported. Like any culture, if you didn't fit the provided roles and categories, you were going to have trouble.

When I was a kid, if you had an earring in your right ear instead of your left, it meant you were gay. As for the kind of bizarre feminization implied at the time by having earrings in both ears...better not to speak of it. But that was it, that was the signal. I don't know if it was real or not, but in our childhood culture, it's not something anyone wanted to risk. (It could well have been real. Gay men have had to use such covert signals for centuries, to survive.) When I pierced my (left) ear in 1991, it wasn't exactly cutting edge, but it was also not universally accepted. Piercing the right ear in 1996 or so felt slightly edgy, probably the closest I've ever come to that hip state of social rebellion.

Can you imagine that kind of coded distinction from today's 10-year olds, born in 2000? They're far more likely to say "you're gay if you primarily like dating the same gender as you." It's not a thing for them. And it's not just us over-educated latte-sipping poofs in the coastal cities. This Slate article about Constance McMillen, the Mississippi high school senior who filed suit to be able to bring her girlfriend to the prom, contains this gem of a paragraph:

And Constance herself is the kind of young woman a state entirely mired in bigotry can't produce. Though she doesn't belong to a church, McMillen describes herself as an "open-minded Christian" and a strong believer in monogamy, which she expresses in a distinctly evangelical way. "Actually, I have a promise ring from my girlfriend, and I'm pretty sure that within the next year she's going to propose. Of course, we wouldn't get married until she's 18." One male student once asked McMillen's girlfriend, "How can you be redneck and gay at the same time?" which seems tantamount to proof that the woman in front of him had that figured out. McMillen would like to live in Los Angeles when she gets older, but that is due in part to many, many hours spent watching The L Word. Her girlfriend says she doesn't want to come because she can't hunt there.

Between that and a black President, no wonder the American right has completely lost its mind. Every month brings more evidence that the old world is passing away, the world of obvious enemies, and women and minorities who "knew their place." By 2050 if not before, we'll technically all be minorities. (Though probably not women. Not even in San Francisco.)

Ever since I was a kid, I have listened incredulously to my mom's stories of "dorm mothers" at all-female Smith College in the 60s, older women who watched over the students and enforced curfews and behavior. Decades before going to college, I absorbed that such a thing was absurd and impossible in my time. It only seemed more absurd when I went to college and visited Smith several times. In the 90s, at least, Smith had a circle-the-wagons mentality about men, a protectiveness of women for each other, as if the culture was dominated by 1500 of your ex-girlfriends, but only the ones who were still mad at you. Who needs dorm mothers when every girl has a posse of bodyguards (many of whom were bigger than me)?

Just as dorm mothers sound impossibly quaint to me, so must the earring-as-gay-identifier sound quaint to today's young people. It sounds quaint to me. The numbers agree: here's a breakdown of approval of gay marriage by state and age (click image for original website).

The red dots are people aged 18-29, and the blue dots are people over 65. It's a perfect correlation, with no exceptions: the older you are, the less likely you are to approve of gay marriage. So, it's a done deal: as my subculture started saying as America considered choosing its first post-Vietnam President, we're waiting for some people to die so life can move on. It's a harsh way to put it, but it's true. And yes, we'll still say that when we're old, even if we're the ones in the way.

There's no guarantee we won't backslide. We often think of history as inevitable, because we look at what happened, and we think. "Look! The past only happened in one way! And here's why! It had to have been that way." We're fantastically wrong: just like we don't know what will happen in the coming year or two, neither did anybody 50 or 100 or 3000 years ago. History is full of unrealized paths. Just because conservatives have eased up on hating gays in favor of hating immigrants and Muslims doesn't mean it won't come around again.

But the demographics look pretty awesome.

memory lane: cultural sensitivity

Anna countdown: 4 days.

I'm still cranky, and still recovering my strength: staying home from school today, which turns out to be just as well, since Marcela is giving a test. Status quo.

I've been watching the firestorm of protest about the Muslim community center a couple blocks from Ground Zero in New York City, which is a pretty sickening debate for someone who holds the First Amendment as a principle rather than a hidden instruction from the Framers that schools need to teach creationism. It's an obvious step for the GOP: I've said for years that the party's pillars are racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and they've recently been losing on the latter two. A recent CNN/Time poll (pdf) claims that 49% of Americans think gays "have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid," while 68% oppose the mosque.

(Does anyone else remember when (1) men piercing our ears was a big deal, and (2) you couldn't get your right ear pierced because that meant you were gay, and (3) that was bad?)

Anyway, the relevant story.

At Danger, my team named our software releases after drinks, in alphabetical order: Absinthe, Bellini, Cosmopolitan, Daiquiri, Everclear. (I didn't say they were good drinks, and we did pay the price, since the named drink was the primary beverage at the release party .) We got to K, and the logical name was Kamikaze, a potent and tasty get-drunk-fast choice of college students everywhere.

The suits on the third floor heard about it, and sent a rare dictum downstairs that we had to change the name. Why? Danger's hardware was made by the Japanese company Sharp, and kamikaze in Japanese is not a drink.

No one likes mandates from the suits (because they're almost always wrong), and in Danger's autonomous engineering department, this produced a lot of grumbling. I had the unpopular (and disagreed-with) opinion that it was actually a fine decision. The suits' job was to manage our partner relationships, and Japan, to put it generously, is still processing its World War 2 experience. As Americans, full of indelible arrogance and optimism and living in the world's most powerful nation, it's often hard for us to imagine a long-running, deeply-held sore spot, especially now that no one claims we could have won in Vietnam if only we'd tried harder.

But the sign at the border going from Chile into Argentina says "The Falklands are Argentine!", and Bolivia is still pissed at Chile for leaving Bolivia landlocked after their war 125 years ago.

At any rate, I was sad to not call it "Kamikaze," but it seemed like a fine choice to change it. Unlike Muslims in New York City, we don't actually have a First Amendment right to name our software releases whatever we want.

mid-week check-in

This morning was supposed to be mellow, with C taking a test, and while they did that, I thought I would finesse the plans for G, H, and the English Club. Except, surprise! Some of the class needed to stay in their classroom to finish the prep for their acto, and did I have stuff I could do with the remainder? Who were, of course, not quite the usual Wednesday group, so they're not all at the same place, and the chemistry was different.

Daily life here resists finding a routine.

It's not been one of those enjoying-teaching weeks, which is okay. Anna's visit made me more conscious of how much energy I'm putting into making things work as it is; which is to say, all of it. The reason I watch TV and eat cookies when I get home is because that's what I have space for. I could stand to socialize a bit more, especially with Chileans, and I need to direct some more effort toward lesson materials prep. It's especially hard to find energy for socializing, because I spend my entire day dealing with people, often in challenging Spanish, and after that I mostly want to wander off into some cool, shaded little hole and not talk to anyone.

Some things about me are changing, and others aren't. But what do I know? Someone once asked a teacher at Zen Center what happens when we sit zazen, and the teacher said, "You can't possibly know."

I'm not really happy with the lesson I'm teaching this week, but I'm still dealing with the tail end of my cold, my girlfriend just left the continent, bitch and moan, bitch and moan, I haven't taken the hours to fix the lesson even though it's entirely in my power to do so. I'm short-changing both me and my students, in a way. Then again, I'm not pushing myself beyond my ability to manage my mood, and that's good for everyone, too. Is that, in fact, more important?

Ain't nothing simple, eh?

I miss aikido. I may take a bus in to Santiago on Friday afternoon, train at Aikido Hakusan, train again midday Saturday, and then come home. That somewhat optimistically assumes that after a couple months of sporadic exercise and a week of being sick, I'm in good enough shape to do consecutive two-hour classes. Aim high!

I think I'm a teacher now

I had my first good teaching day! Here's what happened.

Yesterday, I ended up with 45-minute classes instead of 90 minutes. My co-teacher and I met and talked about needs and concerns, and decided that next week we could try 60-minute classes (which I'm far more comfortable with), and we'd just consider Monday a awkward, strange mistake in the past. Yesterday's classes were okay.

I busted out the Curso Competition chart: if a class section behaves well, they get star for the week. At the end of the semester, the section with the most stars gets a "surprise". (To be determined: I'm thinking a party with cake, Heather is thinking cookies.) The class gets one warning, where I write "CLASS" on the board if they're in peril of losing the week's star. Monday's G section were bad this week, but I also forgot to tell them about the chart, so I'll offer that if they can do 4 straight good weeks, I'll give them the extra star so they can catch up.

This chart turns out to be the secret sauce. Chilean kids are competitive by default; even when you don't set something up as a competition, they really want to be first. I've been running a matching exercise this week and I've almost gotten knocked over a few times by pairs of kids running at me to show they're done. The Curso Competition combines their natural worldview with positive reinforcement, so the class polices itself: if you can get their peers to tell them to shut the hell up, instead of you, that's way better.

Anyway. After a week of teaching, I have a better sense of how to present material, how to move around the classroom and keep them working, and how to respond to the flow of the class. I'm also remembering my Performance Mode of years past (now new and improved by actually being at ease in the world), and the kids buy into it. Seriously, I've spent 5 hours doing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and the Hokey-Pokey this week. Some of them take some time, but I keep looking at them periodically and they warm up to it, and then usually start enjoying themselves. I think they respond really well to my smiling lack of shame and the fact I care about them.

And then they learn stuff! I teach stuff and they learn it! And if they're not learning it, I slow down and they learn less stuff, but they still learn it. It's amazing.

There was one girl who couldn't remember "ears". I modeled the difference between just sitting there saying "ears," and actually grabbing your ears when you say "ears," so she started grabbing her ears just like I was (it gets the whole physicality kinetic memory mumble mumble engaged). Then, when they were leaving, I was doing a "ticket-to-leave," blocking the door until they identified a body part or its name from the card I drew. I happened to pull the picture of ears for her, and she looked frustrated for a moment, grabbed her ear and then said, "Ah! Ears!" and smiled before leaving at top speed. It was awesome.

Maybe I'm over a hump, maybe not. I still have to plan for 60-minute classes next week. But I think I know what successful teaching feels like now! Sweet.

changes imminent

In the current plan, Anna will move into this apartment during the first week of February. This is not a small project, and has a pair of features, deceptively simple, yet weighty:

1. I need to have my stuff organized and packed/ready to pack for storage in the garage in the next two weeks, and
2. Prior to leaving for nine months in Chile, I'll be living with my girlfriend and (half time) her 5-year old son.

It's true, that's a big thing to add late to the mix. On the other hand, I'm spending the year in South America on a full-time volunteer job teaching, which has all sorts of nerve-wracking emotional baggage for me. Given what I'm jumping into, does it really make any sense to pretend to play it safe before I leave? There's nothing permanent to grab onto, no shelter to be had. My only hope is moving with things as they happen, creating a response moment by moment according to what's needed, and I might as well start now.

(Plus I get to see my girl more often, which is really why this seems like a good idea.)