Halloween

I guess you would call the place I grew up a subdivision. It called itself the Village of Marchwood. It was a suburban housing development. It was pretty nice though. There were a lot of trees and sidewalks for just about every street. The sidewalks are crucial to a successful Halloween, at least for smaller kids. Very few residents opted out of Halloween by turning off their porch lights and generally giving off a stay away vibe. Being in your house to give out candy on Halloween seemed like civic duty. There was definitely none of the car-based trick-or-treating that you have now, where you have to drive a long way between houses just to find one with the lights on. Occasionally parents would drive kids to another neighborhood entirely and let them loose at the entrance. In Marchwood my dad and and Christal's dad would alternate years taking us when we were very small. Then we went with older kids, then by ourselves. I remember one year I was staying with my friend Megan in Westtown and we trick-or-treated in her neighborhood. We were eleven or so, so we went by ourselves.

Good Advice

Stay away from the hospital for as long as you can.

My friend Kim told me this early in my pregnancy. I was in a group of my hippie mom friends, some of whom had given birth in their homes. I had taken a childbirth class, so I knew more or less what to expect, but of course it's different for each person. I've known women who went to a hospital at the first contraction and were told to turn around and go home until the contractions got closer together. I've known women who were admitted to the hospital and strapped to the bed with a drip in their arm for hours before anything really got going. I wanted to avoid that last, if I could. I was all gung ho to have a natural childbirth. I ended up with 16 hours of unmedicated labor and a C-Section anyway. It wasn't horrible though. I didn't feel violated like some of those women in the book did by their C-Sections. The first four or five hours were at home, in my comfy rocking chair in my own favorite raunchy giant t-shirt. That made me a lot less panicky than being at the hospital, on the world's most uncomfortable beds in one of those paper gowns that snap together. We went to the hospital right about when we should have, if we'd waited much longer, we'd might have had to call an ambulance.

Injuries. My daughter is obsessed with injuries. I can only hope that means she's going to be some sort of medical professional. When she falls down or is hurt in anyway, she is more angry than anything else. She reminds me of the Russian mafia; she would pobably like to have all witnesses killed. She's taken to jumping right back up and saying, I'm ok! so that no one will have a chance to express any concern or sympathy or say anything like, "Poor Leah!" She HATES poor Leah. Lately she's been asking my husband and I about the various times we have been injured. My husband has a lot more of these stories to tell since he was a high school football player and just I have always been a cautious sort. Well, cautious but clueless. Some of my injuries have come when I was just walking along, singing a song, enjoying a sunny day, and not looking at the path ahead of me. I've been telling my daughter that story recently. When I was a freshman in college and it was a bright sunny day and I was walking along with an armfull of book and suddenly there was a large bumblebee nearby. I had a visceral reaction to the bumblebee and stumbled sideways off the concrete sidewalk and into a concealed hole in the ground. Fell headlong, threw my books forward and sprained my ankle. More later.
The rest of the story . . . So there I was, sprawled on my then not so considerable belly, trying not to cry. This guy named Andrew came by. I had met him in the greek service organization, APO, Alpha Phi Omega. Since I was allergic to all things Greek, I was creeped out even by APO initiation rituals, which were very mild and normal by Greek standards. I chickened out of joining. I think the only reason I even thought about joing was the same reason most other people thought about joining which was to meet people. But Andrew was pretty nice. So here comes Andrew, the Good Samaratin. He probably joined APO for genuinely altruistic reasons, not because he wanted to meet girls. Anyway, he sees me on the ground, not crying, and he stops to help. I asked him if he would go get Wayne, who I knew to be in the student lounge studying. Wayne told me later that he was sleeping. Wayne had joined APO two years ago, for the same reason most people join, so he knew Andrew. Anyway Andrew goes to get Wayne, Wayne arrives to save me, and I really did start crying at that point. Together he helps me hobble off to Student Health. Twenty-one years later, here we are.

50 Things I'll Never Do

Never be a soldier in a war.
Never skydive
Never bungee jump
Probably never mountainclimb
Never win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Math, Chemistry.
Never go on a Reality Show.
Never be in a Hollywood movie
Never have 19 children like Michelle Duggar
Never quit my job, movie to South America and become an Anthropologist.
Never eat roadkill. (Short of some sort of disaster)
Probably never move back to Pennsylvania.
Probably never be a size 2, 4, 6, 8 . . .
Never have really short hair.
Never dye my hair (short of the witness protection program)
Never get a tatoo
Or a piercing
Take up smoking

Describing My House

I suppose I know my house better than just about anybody. At least three other families have lived there since it was built in 1914, but we have lived there since 1996. I remember pretty vividly the day I went to see it when the previous owner was having an open house. The first thing I noticed was the enormous tree in the front yard. I grew up in an area with lots of very tall oak trees, and went to college in a city with wonderful wooded parks. Montgomery seemed pretty treeless to me when I first moved here. A whole different ecosystem. So the tree in the front yard of this potential house was a big draw. Also I had seen the Miyazaki movie Princess Mononoke pretty recently and one of my favorite parts featured the kodama, little spirits that inhabit big old trees in the heart of the forest. Their health was an indicator of the health of tree and the health of the forest. So the tree had a lot of signifigance to me even before I got inside the house. When I got inside the house the first thing I saw was the marble mantle over the fireplace. That evoked The Serapeum, my group of friends that met for book discussions and so much more. I had visions of a library! The walls were dark red. I was in love.
More Anon.

Free Speech at Villa

If I were in charge of my high school . . . hmmm. Well, I've been back to visit my high school a number of times since I graduated in 1987, and a lot of the changes I would have made *have* been made since then. They built that new fabulous arts center in the mid-nineties. It's central feature is a theater space and quite a lot of audience seating. I remember there were also music practice rooms, and places to do things like pottery and sculpture and painting. That was one not so great thing about Villa in the 70's and 80's. They didn't exactly have a wide variety of course offerings or extracurricular offerings. If you weren't a big sports fan, there wasn't a lot left over.

One of my friends from high school currently works at Villa as head of Information Systems. One of her jobs is to get on Facebook and make sure Villa girls aren't posting naked pictures. When she told me that it made me wonder about the rights of younger people in regards to technology. Where do the obligations of adults to protect young people in their care run into the free speech rights of young people? Does the Principal of Villa have the right to curtail free speech rights of the young people in her care just to protect the school's reputation? Well, probably, yes. It would constitute slander and slander is one of the limits of free speech.

Villa Days

I remember when I was a kid . . . Well these two blog post ideas are getting fused in my mind: the I remember when I was a kid idea and the Sir Ken Robinson talking about schools. Also my daughter is four and a half years old and next year we are going to have to figure out what we are going to do about kindergarten. So lately, I've been thinking a lot about my little private Catholic school in Pennsylvania. Instead of what would Jesus do, I find myself thinking, "What Sister Regina Noel say?" She was my high school English teacher two years out of the four. Some nuns were mean, but she was of the warm and fuzzy persuasion. It was a benefit to me to have the same teachers year after year. I had the same math teacher three years out of four, Mrs. Jean Treisbach. She was familiar with my strengths and weaknesses as a math student, to say the least! I'd probably still be back there flunking geometry if it wasn't for her. She let me take the tests over and over again. She knew I was smart in other areas. so she didn't get down on me too mush for being bad at math. She must have been quite young when I had her. She was probably in her mid-twenties. I get the alumni newsletter from Villa and she is still there. Quite a lot of my teachers are still there. Most of the younger ones anyway. It was a really good school. we complained about it alot when we were there. We were the only ones for miles around who had to wear uniforms, at least it felt that way. They were strict without being Nazi-esque. We complained about the lack of boys! It's gets to be a drag asking boys to dances. But from the mature (ancient) perspective of forty, I can see that the uniforms and the lack of boys, allowed us to learn in a secure, quiet environment without distractions. I wish there was a place around here like that for my daughter, a place that didn't cost 10,000 a year.

District 9

I saw District 9 yesterday, which also happened to be my 40th birthday. I was just blown away by it. WOW! There were echos of older movies, and yet it was utterly original. At different times watching the movie, I was reminded of the original Terminator, 28 Days Later, Independence Day, and The Office TV series. And as a life-long Star Trek dork, I couldn't help but compare the first contact experiences in this movie to those of various Star Trek series. The Aliens arrive in giant spaceship that looks kind of like those that appear over major cities in Independence Day. There's no "We come in peace" or "Take me to your leader" or even "Shoot to kill" or "We will share our superior technology with you." The aliens are sick, weak, and physically repulsive to the humans. There's no kind benevolent Federation to welcome them, no Star Trek universal translator, there's only Johannesburg, South Africa, a city with it's own turbulent racial history, and limited funds like a lot of cities today. I mean, hell, our mayor just cancelled curbside recycling and parts of the school bus system, and God knows that we here in Montgomery Alabama have our own turbulent racial history. What would we do if suddenly a million refugees suddenly showed up in the airspace over the state capitol?

The director sets up the story quickly with a realistic, faux-documentary style that is reminiscent of something on the History Channel or The Office. We get "experts" telling us of how the aliens came 20 years ago and they seemed like refugees, so in an effort to help they were put in refugee camps and fed, but the camps turned into tent cities and the tent cities turned into a permanent festering slum. Attitudes that were once pretty common in South Africa became common again, but with the aliens on the receiving end of a lot of the nastiness instead of blacks. Into all this the director introduces the main character, Wickus Van De Merwe, a nerdy office worker guy in a short-sleeved shirt and a sweater vest, universal signifiers of middle management. He works for MNU, MultiNational United, a company like Blackwater. They're supposed to go in and evict the Aliens from District 9 and move them to a new camp farther away from the city. We see Wickus and a "documentary" camera crew walking through District 9 knocking on shanty doors, trying to get the aliens to sign eviction notices. He comes across pretty badly during this part, like a slightly retarded anthropologist. He talks into the camera, excited to be on TV, acting like he's a big expert on the aliens, but it's clear that he's not, and really, that no one is. At one point he sets fire to one of the shacks that is being used as some sort of hatchery or incubator for alien young. You can hear a popping sound in the background and he cheerfully explains that the sound of the alien babies dying sounds like popcorn!

Shortly thereafter we see two aliens talking in one of the shacks about an all important cannister of the fluid that must not be lost. Here comes Wickus, officiously stumbling into the middle of things. He gets sprayed with the fluid from the cannister. Things start to change for Wickus. More later.

Well, I'd have to say that Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite movies. I think you have to be a serious dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek dork to really appreciate Galaxy Quest. But that's the beauty of it, even if you don't know that much about Star Trek, it's still just a fun adventure movie. But if you love ST, then you know just exactly how funny the parody is. Tim Allen is dead on as a WIlliam Shatner/Captain Kirk-esqe guy. He basically a good-hearted, happy-go-lucky guy, and he doesn't really realize that he has a giant ego and that his ego often annoys or even really hurts the feelings of his costars, who are equally if not more talented. Alan Rickman is brilliant in the Spock-Like role. He does aggreived so well. And the parts where he declares that he's quitting or committing suicide are just hilarious. Then there's the whole discussion of the nature of stories with the child-like, incredibly literal-minded aliens, who that the Galaxy Quest show is real and that the episodes constitute historical documents. Our guys go along with it at first, but the bad guy forces them to dissolution the friendly aliens. It's a tremendously effective horrible moment. It's like telling a bunch of little kids there is no Santa Claus. It leads to one of the most heart-rending moments when the alien assigned to Alan Rickman's character is killed in action and he tells AR's c that he's just honored to have know him. Then I love the bit at the end when the teenage uber-smart dorky fans are helping the Captain and Sigourney Weaver's character through the bowels of the ship, which the kids know better than the actors because they have a more thorough knowledge of the "schematics" of the "ship." Tim Allen's character says, "It was just a chair on a set! With Christmas tree lights!"

Brand New Day.

Ok, this is really exciting. I've been wanting to do this forever. OoooooH the Power! Welcome to the first day of the rest of my blog. I'm about to have 42 young bloggers join me, give or take a few. This is mostly just to get some practice ahead of time. No more excuses. This is going to be a great year.