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October 30, 2000
Mongol Citgo Gas Cap Hat
In characteristic idiosyncracy, my boss left an article about a tribe of Mongols in my box today. I admired their ponies and their social structure. The Mongols have things I want, now that the cold has made the walk between the subway and my house longer. I want a little Mongol pony, and a big Mongol hat.
While I was sick and cooped up this weekend, winter snuck up on New York. It denuded the trees in a matter of hours. When I finally came out of quarantine the whole character of the neighborhood had changed: starker lighting, leaf trash everywhere. We had a sky straight out of Ghostbusters today, grotesquely heavy with supervillain wind.
I remember now why my first winter here in New York was so rotten. I hate Northeast winters to begin with; it made living in a basement worse. I want to wear less clothing, not more. I'm already starting to crab up and hunch to keep my exposed parts from freezing. Winter magnifies my dissatisfaction with New York. I'm tired of smelling other people on the subway. I'm tired of having nothing to look at but sooty walls and elephant-hide sidewalks.
So what do I lust for out the subway window when New York gets me down? Gas stations. Especially ones with convenience stores. Why? I don't know. A gas station with a convenience store is everything wrong with the United States: soul-crushing jobs, fossil fuels, convenience culture, carcinogenic "food," isolation born of mobility, random violence, monolithic monotony of franchise after franchise after franchise, the caffeinated overwork of truckers. What the phuck is my problem? I think about escape, and what I remember is stopping exhausted in Winnemucca and Des Moines and Burlington at midnight to refuel the car. I remember tap-dancing in the little oil slicks while my posse hit the awful bathrooms and grabbed fresh Mountain Dews. It's more appealing than whatever I'm doing now. Because in New York I have my eyes forced open to institutionalized racism and the angry, uneducated people and rotten places it produces. If I was on the road, though, I'd be back out among the mesas and plains once the gas cap was back on, gliding away to someplace else.
Posted by me at 7:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2000
Today's brightly-colored amusement
Here's today's brightly-colored amusement...
Posted by me at 3:31 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2000
Like some expulsive ebola-like virus
The article containing the phrase "And I have no doubt that at least one of the people I listed will lose control of her curiosity and do the same thing I did, spreading [it] like some expulsive ebola-like virus" has been temporarily pulled.
i'm the hunter... i'm going hunting...
Posted by me at 7:14 PM | Comments (0)
Anarcho-Syndicalism
Today I am reading about Anarcho-Syndicalism. I am not reading any of the stupid manifestos, only the practical stuff. If you think anarcho-syndicalism is only about throwing rocks at policemen and staying up past year bedtime and eating only sugar, you should probably read this too.
Posted by me at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2000
Bad News For Public Everything
this blog has been brought to you by the letters L and Y.
The other day at school some of my kids were waving around a program schedule for the local PBS affiliate. I guess the administration or a teacher handed it out in an attempt to get the kids to watch more Sesame Street. Heaven knows they need it; even sounding out words is a foreign concept to most of my third-graders. Few of them understand about silent Es.
We all lost when PBS took the Electric Company off the air. (I realize it's a little late to mourn a show which ended production a year before I was born. Still I persist: wonder why Johnny can't read? They took Electric Company off the air, ya dumbass! Wonder why our prisons are so full? No Electric Company!) Its phonics approach was the next step after Sesame Street. I think now that it was also important to maintaining an older audience-- Sesame Street is explicitly for children under six, and the kids in my class shun it as "baby stuff." I've had high hopes for Between the Lions, which looks like it's stepping in to fill this gap, but you never can tell; maybe kids feel they're too sophisticated for any educational TV.
PBS is dead, at least in the children's hours. I returned to the local affiliate today (on my sick day, as many of us do) and found that the dire bleatings from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting are true: PBS has ads. Not just the relatively innocuous message from Kellogg's at the beginning of every Reading Rainbow which made it look to kids as if it were just another foundation like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the W.M. Keck Foundation. Ads with logos for products kids can identify and ask for at the store. Ads displaying said products.
Equally unnerving are the shows which have replaced content-heavy classics like Square One and Reading Rainbow. I scarcely need to mention Teletubbies and Barney again, but there's more. I happened to land smack in two hours of cartoons, specifically Clifford the Big Red Dog and Dragon Tales. I can't see why kids would watch these shows. They're essentially the same as cartoons you'd find on a corporate network, only there's no fighting. They're insipid, full of the same heavy-handed moralizing every other cartoon throws in to make itself seem worthwhile. Actually, they're worse, because they have so little to move the plot along. They're devoid of practical educational content: no letters, no numbers, and none of the fun science or cultural enrichment PBS has managed in recent shows like The Puzzle Place, Zoboomafoo, and The Magic Schoolbus.
You can't even say PBS cartoons are better because they're not glorified excuses to promote toys. Every PBS show has its own clothing/toy/dinnerware/workbook/potty chair line now. Clifford the Big Red Dog is a particularly obvious ploy on the part of my former employer Scholastic Books to get kids to buy their products. The Children's Television Workshop has started letting Sesame Street property be used for the most rigid, uneducational toys imaginable. My roommate recently came home from her job at CTW with an Ernie doll who snores, yawns, says "I'm sooooo sleepy!", and is equipped with a device which makes his stomach rise and fall as if he's "breathing." ("It looks like he has a b0ner," Jacob said. I put Ernie face-down for some Muppet-humping action.)
In fact, Sesame Street is so awash with merchandising I'm about to stop claiming its influence on my success in education. I'll have to point to the other formative influences of my early television-watching years. "Wow, you're smart-- scary-smart. You've just nailed your tenth triple-word-score-with-a-fifty-point-bonus in a row. To what do you attribute your inspiring quickness with letters?" "Well, I think I'd have to give the most credit to that great educational TV my mother let me watch when I was small: Happy Days, the Carol Burnett Show, and all those Richard Simmons workouts."
What's to be done about public broadcasting? Those who used to defend it as a zone free of commercial content have turned tail or turned coat, I guess. While PBS is encroached upon by the smiling faces of corporate salesmen, Pacifica Radio edges daily closer to being sold up the river by its board. In some ways, I see this as just desserts. I feel Pacifica often preaches to the converted, as so many leftist organizations do. But Pacifica is in an unusual position many on the left are not: it is sitting on a veritable media gold mine. In Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, Pacifica owns one of the strongest broadcast signals on the dial, able to reach millions. (Not that it matters in Los Angeles, what with the bloody San Gabriels getting in the way...) If Pacifica's not gonna do it right, the IMC should get to. Or a coalition of pirate radio broadcasters. Or the local school board, or something.
Ugh. I break my head and sicken my body over these things. Is a subscription model really sustainable? Does taking grants from foundations restrict you just as much as taking ads? Could we take ads from only good people? Why don't people want what's good for them? Is it right to use demographics to convince them that educational, informative content is good for them, or is that exploitative?
* * * *
Hmmm. Who knew that Yahoo had sections for consumer opinions of everything from MTV to Macy's? (If that link doesn't work, try going to Yahoo and doing a search for "consumer opinion.")
Posted by me at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)
Now this is ridiculous.
Posted by me at 4:21 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2000
Jonathan Saves The Day
I am amazed at the capabilities of certain people to completely revive my faith in the beauty of a given day. In this case I am thinking of an eight-year-old. Jonathan, one of my third graders, is tiny for his age, with a crooked grin and glasses. He always wears a sweater vest over his uniform shirt. His hair, when I rumple it, is sticky to the touch. He has decided my name is "Ms. Android"-- he didn't misunderstand; he's joking. He pretends to cry when I won't pay attention to him. He smiles at me winningly when I frown. Sometimes he tells me he thinks my shoes are ugly, and I shouldn't wear them. Every now and again he renews his investigation into my heritage. Some days he asks me if I am Puerto Rican; other days he wonders if I am Dominican. (My ancestors are mostly English; I have blue eyes and untannable skin.)
Jonathan has a way of grimacing and twisting his fingers that made me think he was developmentally disabled at first, but my last suspicions of this were completely blown away as I watched him do his times tables today, with an alacrity I have never seen among his peers. Not only does he understand that multiples are the same as multiple additions, and have the lowest numbers memorized-- perhaps two of the other twenty kids can do this-- but he also understood perfectly when I showed him that digits of nine-multiples always add up to nine! Then he picked up the idea that 3x7 is the same as 7x3. I'm not sure kids his age are supposed to be able to do this. If this falls under the concept of reversability, I believe Piaget said it's not a concept kids get until later.
"I want to get all my work done now so I can rest at home," Jonathan told me, and stood by the platform in the play yard for fifty minutes with his workbook out. I wish all the kids would say that. I told the program director we wouldn't be seeing Jonathan anymore. I'm going to get him early admission at MIT.
I wonder where Jonathan will be in ten years. Will he be tracked into a mechanics-skills path at school? Will he join the army? Will he be so frustrated with the slowness of his peers and the ineptitude of teachers that he plays hooky every day? Or will he be like the high school volunteer at the after school program who goes to Bronx Science and hopes to get into Cornell to study computers? Will Jonathan also discover he has passions and skills for poetry or law or architecture, and follow his heart that way instead? I keep forgetting to talk to his mother when I see her... but I want her to know her child is very special, and that I would travel to the Bronx regularly, even if I didn't work there, just to make sure he gets through school and into college whole.
Posted by me at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2000
from a letter to Chase
Subject: I laughed until tears came to my eyes
(which wasn't too much of a stretch, seeing as it's one of those
perma-tear days at my house... I screamed myself hoarse at my afterschool
class of third-graders today, and then actually burst into tears in front
of them. you know there's no going back when that happens. they're
probably delighted. their new goal will be to make teacher cry everyday. i
know in some circles this is a mark of pride, making a teacher break down.
I want to only teach little nerdlings from now on, people like us who
actually LIKED reading books when we were done with our homework. There's
nothing I can do for or to these kids. I have no positive reinforcements
to give them, and likewise I don't have any way to punish them, seeing as
the program is-- how shall we say -- "ad hoc," so I don't know if I can
threaten to take away recess time, and I don't know what homework they're
supposed to be doing, and they won't even sit down when I tell them to, so I can't make them put their heads down on their desks. I don't want to tell kids what they can't do anymore. I don't want to be a police officer.
This fucking sucks. I want to show kids cool anagrams and science
experiments and weird historical facts about their neighborhoods. however,
there is no room for this in a public school, and if there was, the kids
would run screaming away from it. whoa. ok. enough rant.)
anyway, the band names really tickled me. My mother always favored "The
Pinhead Angels." Please, please tell me what "Potato Famine: A Journal of
Vegetable Youth" was going to be about?!
Myself, after reading the "Griffin and Sabine" trilogy, I had planned to
play a nasty trick on a paranoid ex-boyfriend of mine by
sending him letters which were to appear as if they'd been written by the
members of a huge travelling jam band called A Cast Of Thousands. Each
letter would be addressed to him but written as if he was a married
34-year-old man (he was 15 at the time) who the writer knew intimately. I made up cafes and opening acts and was even game to try forging bar
coasters and other restaurant memorabilia...
I'm not really sure how I got this insane creative juice from G&S.
Especially the part about it being intended to freak out my ex. He thought
Nazis were after him and once accosted a doorman under this delusion.
Freaking him out was probably not the best idea. didn't really matter,
though; I neve sent postcard one. I lost momentum trying to figure out how
to get the letters to be addressed from places all over the country.
ay, such a frustrating day. I spent all evening trying to bring a Mac
Classic and an SE back from the dead. see my spear, here I am: Quixote...
Posted by me at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2000
Pika-your-bum!
Posted by me at 9:49 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2000
Vote Bush. I mean Gore.
I first heard from Emmanuel Goldstein about this story... as he said, this is too good to be true. The Democrats and Republicans must be using the same ad agency...
Update 10/26: It was too good to be true. It was a hoax, as Catherine and Chase pointed out. too bad. At the same time, I'm glad it got play as an honest goof. I bet it wasn't. I hope rtMark awards whoever lost their job over this one a prize.
Posted by me at 9:17 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2000
From The Sick Sad World Department
I thought the headline of this article alone was revolting.
In the days of JFK Jr.'s airplane crash I stole all the signs from the LA Times newspaper bins I could around town... they read "KENNEDY CRASH" in big white letters on black. I felt bad for the survivors, so I took as many as I could in protest... I thought I might plaster some building around town with them, one where there was a story that was being under-covered in the news because of this whole damn Kennedy thing... In the end, though, I only managed to weave the signs into the bannister in my mother's apartment. Somewhere there's a great picture of that endeavor. Out of context and in concentration the words "KENNEDY CRASH" seem nonsensical. Maybe I can get Mom to send that picture to me and I'll post it...
Posted by me at 11:05 PM | Comments (1)
I Don't Want To Sleep
so here's some more classics from the CACFP vaults.
scrambles egg
cornflakes kellow
pulm
cold fish
home nad soup
gronala bars
grean salan
Feach toast
biskets
spag
spam
twigs
yely
chicken soap
carras sticks
totot
mix green sala
orka
fruit desert
bananana
burget bun
spaguettis
lectuce
tomatoe (Dan Quayle's goin' DOWN...)
Posted by me at 2:15 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2000
Laabsta.
I just figured out what the "Blog This!" function of Blogger does. So in the future, you'll be seeing a lot more things like the Unofficial Lobster Camera Image Archive here...
Posted by me at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2000
What's For Lunch
Every once in a while at work I volunteer to help check the menus we get from child care providers in compliance with the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program, or CACFP. The basic idea of the CACFP-- at least the part I deal with-- is that the government reimburses day care providers in low-income areas for the food they provide their preschool wards. Makes sense: you pay for school lunches, might as well support younger children too.
What doesn't make so much sense is that to do this, the government has decided that each provider must report on exactly what each child has eaten at every single meal. (Well, I guess it's really that or average out the cost of food provided, which doesn't work for our operation because our community's math skills are so poor that it would ostensibly mean more work for us every month.) The mind-numbing amount of red-tape-riddled paperwork this produces has really made me reconsider the time I spend laughing at my libertarian friends.
Each snack is supposed to consist of fluid milk or fruit/vegetable and starch or meat; each meal needs fluid milk, two fruit/vegetable options, starch, and meat. Regulations on what can and can't be provided are mostly sensible, though there are a few stipulations that baffle us (for instance, potatoes must be counted as a vegetable, not a starch). There's not too much room for Reaganesque fakery; ketchup can't be counted as a vegetable, though spaghetti sauce can. Meat alternates like nuts and beans are mostly allowed, but tofu is unclaimable. The guidebook takes into account an interesting range of food possibilities, from possum to plantains to Spam, marking the latter (along with Pop Tarts and other prepackaged crap) with little frowny faces to guide providers towards more enlightened feeding habits.
I get great amusement out of correcting the menus. The spelling employed is truly outlandish. I'm touched and a little concerned by the painstaking way in which providers record the brand names of certain foods-- "Trisquit Crackers" and "Hebrew National 100% Beef Hot Dogs." (Screw the people who raise their eyebrows at my lack of political correctness. The enjoyment I get out of seeing written English destandardized has no connection whatsoever with stigmatizing people for their lack of education. It worries me that children are being left daily with people who regularly spell "potato" the way Dan Quayle does, but I know it's better than nothing, and I'd rather see these providers given further access to education than snatch the impressionable bairns from their care.)
So I provide these entertaining outtakes for the entertainment of my mother and Xephreniaq, as usual, adding a sympathetic tip of the hat to Glyph and Bonnie. This is the other side of government bureaucratese. (I regret I lost an earlier list, it was much better than this one.)
strableris
beef strew
CottaCheesse
tomate souce
pork shop
sag (meaning "spaghetti")
brand muffin
beef meat
canltop
mcain/cheese
noddles soup
bake chickens
spinah
spinanah
fluffy pancakes
pepper stake
akaTomates
collard flour
turkey parts
chicken charms (Nat actually knew what this was, so it must be something I just don't know about)
smother stake
prum fruit
kingomboo
crockers
pind butter
God fish ("She's really religious, so I'm not laughing," says my co-worker of the woman who wrote this in for her meat portion. "She might do a heebie-jeeebie on me. He was probably on her mind at the time.")
pin salmon fillete
cantolop
milk villia
caurifrower
raisecake
chicken pitties
orage
Frenh Toate
kaboom
crest bread
Posted by me at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
Carolyn Chute Has A Posse
Today while I was stitting in a meeting of New York's IMC Print team, one of our geeks wandered over and slipped a xeroxed booklet into my hands. This is something my friend over there produced, she said to the few loose tendrils of my attention; it may not mesh with your politics but I think you'll like it. I flipped through the 'zine distractedly, unable to focus on the xerox-eroded photographs and the print team's plans at the same time. I didn't realize what I'd been handed until I closed the 'zine again and noticed that a handwritten caption on the cover identified the woman shown there with a flag and a bandanna-tied head as Carolyn Chute. Then I zeroed in on the title: "Carolyn's Chuting Edge: The 2nd Maine Militia Goes To Philly."
Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Alibris callously lists its subject matter as Fiction Poverty), has apparently formed her own militia, or maybe two of them. By various accounts they are called the "Second Maine," "Wicked Good," or "Border Mountain" Militias. I went to check up on this story, and found these two articles.
Chute apparently marched mere yards away from me at the Unity 2000 protests at the Republican National Convention this year in Philly. I never knew. No fanfare announced her. The woman who brought the 'zine to the IMC says Chute was supposed to speak at the rally, but the stage-hands snubbed her.
My mother told me, when I was too little to make any sense of it, that the fictitious town of Egypt was named after the partially-unpaved road my best friend Ana lived on in Raymond, ME. I finally got around to reading The Beans the summer before I attended Bread Loaf, where Chute was supposed to be a visiting scholar that year. She didn't make it. Apparently she got sick.
The bearer and author of the 'zine who visited the IMC today told me that Chute's latest book, which is about her experience with her militias, is being held by her publisher until she agrees to having it gutted. (I can't help but wonder if she's talked to the folks at Common Courage Press about getting the book published. They're in Maine too, after all.)
She said she thought it would be wonderful if the IMC could help Carolyn out. At the moment, the author's outlet is a copying machine and a mailing list for her militia. I looked around the IMC at the six spare Performas we have left over from the latest donation, and wanted to flee town immediately to take one up to her. I wanted to dig trenches for cable if that would help get the word out. It makes me sick to think that Chute's not getting the soapbox time she deserves. She's not just another hyper-educated radical, not just another embracer of communism whose nose turns up when it comes to logging and wrestling and television, like most of my leftier-than-thou friends. I remember but can't find my favorite quote from The Beans (or was it Letourneau's Used Auto Parts?), in which a toddler from a direly poor town looked out around a better-off shopping district, and dismissed all the people there as poo. Kind of a strange quote to move me that way, but....
If you're worried about me returning to Maine to find the Wicked Good Militia, I hope to put your mind to rest with this quote from the (otherwise "gaww, ain't this broad a kick?"-toned) article the Post printed:
"If you say militia, it's almost like packaging," [Chute] says, laughing. "They're interested. They ask questions and I can throw something in about the World Trade Organization."
Despite the crap the Southern Poverty Law Center has filled my head with about militias being neo-Nazi organizations to the last heavily-armed man, I still hold on to Mike Moore's portrayal of militia folks as not so unlike you and me (if "you" were gassed in the free speech movement in the 60s and "me" and my friends travel thousands of miles to wave anarchist flags in the streets of Prague.)
Then again, I have nothing else to do when I get out of this godawful government job. Might as well go help start IMC Maine. Jen, you with me? We'll go get that Winnebago...
Posted by me at 2:23 AM | Comments (0)
October 5, 2000
Personal History: A Love Letter To Computers
Of all the mailing lists I'm on, I count Robert Weissman's corporate-watch list as the most useful. It doesn't deluge me with content, it's blazingly well-written, it's humorous, and it's packed with statistics I wish I could commit to memory (I let my inbox overflow with old messages instead). Last Friday, however, I felt a little let down. Weissman came out with an inflammatory message which warned against giving computers to children.
Unlike much of the mail Weissman sends, this one cited very few statistics, only referring to a report by a group called the Alliance for Childhood which recommends a moratorium on giving children computers until we have a clearer sense of how they damage children physically, mentally, and developmentally. Weissman felt confident enough to include a quote from the Alliance calling these "serious developmental risks."
I haven't read the report yet, and don't feel like I can until later. But I feel compelled to respond to Weissman's tone of alarm. (maybe by the time I read the report I'll want to take back whatever point I come to here...)
I was born in Maine, and lived briefly in a town half an hour west of Portland where our family friends made their own bacon and maple syrup. I did not know that computers existed until I moved to California at the age of five. The first computer I ever met was an Apple belonging to my friend Robert, probably a IIC. It lived in a niche in his family's den, near the washing machine. Robert was the kind of kid who was always being given broken or unwanted appliances by family friends-- alarm clocks, old reel-to-reels, cameras, and his favorite, vacuums-- and turning them into other things (one VCR became an ejectable pencil box). I don't think he's ever gotten into programming, but his series of Macs were resources for our creative development for years, whether they were generating title credits for one of our school video projects or helping us print out banners for our rooms.
Early computers were great resources for experimentation-by accident. The fact that they crashed and broke easily and their workings were relatively transparent was fun. Robert had a game called Grandma's House where you were supposed to decorate your grandma's two-story pad. We quickly found how many items was too many, and discovered what the computer did upon reaching that level (it made mistakes and insisted we had to take some things back.)
Starting in second grade-- the last year we were required to wear saddle shoes to school-- we had a TRS-80 in my classroom. We wrote simple programs in Basic and Logo. Invariably, the computer in the classroom was started on some program to the effect of
10 PRINT "MICHAEL IS THE GREATEST!!!" (or "ELIOT SUCKS," or "MRS. WILSON IS MEAN," take your pick)
20 GOTO 10
at the beginning of the day and run ad nauseam, the monitor flickering beguilingly in the corners of our vision until the teacher turned it off.
About that time we began spending time in the computer lab, a blunt-cornered stucco cube in the upper-left-hand corner of the campus. My mother says that when she was a student at Poly, the building had been used for wood shop and home economics classes. The featureless main room held banks of Apple IIEs and IICs under dim fluorescent lights. There I encountered my first hydraulic office chairs, which were endless fun while we were still light enough to not be able to push them down with our weight.
My mother worked at Poly and stayed late, so my sisters and I spent as much time as we could in the lab after school. There were games on the computers, ASCII and simple graphic ones. My favorite was a horse race game; the horses were represented by asterix, and the borders of the track were equal signs. Another favorite was Super Artillery, a shot-and-trajectory game. These games were frivolous (good exercise for the junior-high students who had programmed them, I'm sure), but I think Super Artillery added to the foundations of my understanding of geometry as much as Logo did. Its challenge was its advantage. When asked to use Logo, we'd write brainless programs which filled the screen with scribbles and abandoned our turtles to their frantic running, but we would sit for the extent of our attention spans to get a trajectory right to bomb another tank.
Educational software was good back then. I haven't seen anything better since, but I haven't really been looking. Educational software didn't really need any of the improvements in graphics or interface that have come along since to do its job. (If you think about it, non-educational games didn't either. We were all as excited about Zelda back then as we are about the latest developments now. We never complained how crummy the graphics were. We never knew. You invested yourself in the little green blip, and sent it off to fight the little blue blips.)
Carmen Sandiego had me studying an atlas so assiduously that the other day I surprised myself by correctly identifying the flag of Belize. I remember a Scholastic game where you had to experiment and combine alien chemicals to create tools you needed, really a good introduction to logic problems. Even simulations of food chains and ecology had their charm. The program I probably spent the most time on was Word Munchers-- I was good at matching phonemes-- unless you count the time Robert and I logged together on Print Shop, making signs to line our rooms with.
The kids who were handiest with computers, and demanded the most time at the keyboard, tended to be the ones who had a computer at home. I was not among these. I'm not sure if that's what kept my computer skills development sluggish until high school, or whether it was lack of interest, or the bias against girls everyone talks about. We didn't get a computer of our own at home until I was in at least fifth grade, and that was a TRS-80, so outdated that the twins and I used it for about a week before returning to our Nintendo.
I did, however, have a chance to go next door and use my grandpa's Tandy every once in a while when it was deemed appropriate that I type up an assignment. (Until junior high, it was never required. I don't know if this was because the teachers thought it wasn't appropriate for us to use computers-- unlikely, there was no popular Internet to evoke fear of porn-- or whether they were paying attention to the kind of disparities the requirement might dig up. Computers were even more of a luxury then.)
Starting up Grandpa's Tandy was an event. Every component had a special plastic slipcover to remove-- the hard drives, the eight-inch floppy drives, the monitor, the printer, the keyboard. Grandpa had worked for Bendix and Caltech (I am embarrassed to say I'm not really sure in what capacity-- I think it had something to do with engineering) and this was a computer he used for work, so there were esoteric incantations he had to type before I could use the machine, unlike the child-oriented machines at school.
The monitor came on in amber and black, different from the green and black Apples and the black and white TRS 80s I worked with at school. It felt like it had a different personality. (Nowadays kids turn on their new computers to find pre-installed color schemes in fully graphic interfaces... the computers come with names like Tangerine and Bondi. I wonder if these kids will ever feel that a monochrome display has a "personality." Whither the text-based universe? Well, I guess it's not really gone... at this very moment someone is painstakingly re-creating the first Star Wars movie in ASCII pictures. I saw part of it the other day. What a labor of love.)
The computer was capable of some pretty neat tricks. Grandpa showed me a program which would find anagrams. We'd play with this for a while, then he would leave me to write my stories. My ability to type was painfully lacking at that point, so after hunting and pecking out a few paragraphs I'd usually get Grandpa to enter the right spells to make the machine print. The daisy-wheeled printer would fill the house with ear-splitting clattering, reel out a few pages of pin-fed paper, and then it would be time to pull the plastic covers on again. I could manage the keyboard and drives by myself, but my arms were short, so my grandfather would pull the covers over the immense monitor and printer.
Typing classes began in junior high. Touch-typing proved too frustrating as the lessons sped up. I reverted to hunt-and-peck, a three-finger variation which I got proficient enough at to squeak by on tests. I felt a little inferior for not learning the skill or keeping up with my classmates, but over time I improved. The way I eventually brought my typing up to speed was hanging out in AOL chat rooms and later sending quick IMs across campus at college. With someone at the other end of the line, there was positive reinforcement for improving my skills, and no stigma. On typing tests I now score about 65 words a minute. Working on my own material, I can probably manage 120. (My mother says never to tell anyone this, or a boss will try to foist all the typing on me.) Whether my typing oddity will further or protect me from repetitive stress disorders remains to be seen.
Junior high also had us working on word processing software and databases. One of my more out-of character perversions is the love of databases I developed then. I took what I'd learned from school home with me, attempting to create a database of all model horses ever made. I remember realizing again and again that I needed new fields. The irritation of having to go back to enter more data had long-term effects. I don't think I'd touched a database since then, but when I started investigating corporate ownership of the media last September, the instincts I'd developed from my junior high data-play were so overpowering that I decided I needed to establish a database in its entirety before hunting down a single piece of data. (Leading, of course, to my getting fired. My boss had so poor a feel for databases that she'd decided to start by storing her data in Word files. We were, as one observer noted, "like oil and water.")
By high school, my parents each had a computer, a Mac and a PC. Dad's machine resided in the office at his house. Mom's was in the room between the living room, dining room, twins' room and hall, where it was easy to get distracted by passers-through or someone engaged with other media (the stereo, TV, or Nintendo). By this point I was enough in love with the machine to be able to enter its space and block everything out. I wrote poetry by collaging school papers and other detritus at random, then using the spell-check function to mutate the results. I could type fast enough to produce almost synchronous stream-of-consciousness pieces. This became an important therapeutic tool, something on the order of biofeedback: I tamed myself out of hurricane tantrums and depressive spells by cooling in the white-on-blue letters of Word Perfect.
Mom signed up for AOL, and the twins and I each got our own screen name. Though Robert and I had spent one day trying to figure out how to use a modem to contact another girl in our class, the screech of the device was a novelty, an alien song to listen to as you waited to see if your scrawny 2600-baud would perform its trapeze act correctly.
When I got to college I met boys who had been on bulletin boards for years, pulled whatever software they wanted out of the ether, and got themselves arrested for messing with school computers, but I skirted the shady parts of AOL while I was still in high school. My friend Catherine and I did have a brief spell where we amused ourselves by joining sex chats to lure men into compromising positions, then "virtually castrate" them. For the most part, though, I just looked for other kids who liked the music I did and did the same things at school. Friends with similar interests were not easy to come by at Poly. Chats were a reassuring widening of the horizon.
High school was still important to my computer development, though it was more an autodidactic process than before. I learned layout software working on the school literary magazine, picking up rudimentary knowledge of Apple networking, image manipulation, and command keys in the process. Robert was still the bellweather I looked to for computers; he always had the latest stuff, and since he worked at a computer store he knew enough to help set up and doctor my mom's machine.
I got my first computer of my own when I graduated from high school. It was a Performa 6214C PowerPC. I named it Frank, after the unseen namesake of a computer-animated short film. Though I'd been on Macs for years at that point, having one of my own was a new experience. I got to customize the look of it as I saw fit. I organized the files and got to screw around under the hood as needed.
Earlier this year a friend watched me using Frank, and pointed out that I was swirling the mouse around in circles as I waited for a website to load. "You're waiting to see when it crashes, aren't you?" he asked. I told him it was just something I did when I was bored. Then I realized he was right. I had gotten in the habit of circling the mouse from the early days of using my machine, while I was still testing how many applications I could have open before Frank crashed. My phyiscal reflexes harmonize with my machine. I could tell from the clicks Frank was making whether he was hung on a problem or still working. I've developed a Pavlovian relationship with my email and chat programs: I press a button, they deliver love from people far away.
I have a new computer now, an indigo iMac I have christened Galataea (the name of Pygmalion's statue). She is quieter than Frank. I can't tell what she's thinking before she hangs. I don't know which application combos are toxic to her. Her display ripples strangely, and while she plays my Phillip Glass CD she is making little scrapey noises over a chainsaw-like hum. I don't know how to calm her yet.
Still, the loss of my reflexes is no bad tradeoff. Frank was so handicapped by obsolescence that I couldn't use the internet anymore. Not only that, but Galataea can store the contents of Frank's brain, plus three Zip disks, plus some four hours worth of MP3s, and she still has 17 GIGS of memory left.
Enough personification. More than having their own brains and habits, my machines store my brain. Five years of correspondance, scribblings, collages, paperwork, and more valuable products of my own head. If I lose them I will be bereft. I imagine I will feel as if I've lost my hometown, or my brain is degenerating at a Reaganesque rate, rapidly enough to notice.
You can worry about this kind of dependence if you want. I am never going to be a person who memorizes great volumes of verse (unless I land in jail for longer than I expect); I will rely on my computer to do too much memorizing for me, perhaps. Maybe people will not do that anymore. But is memorization any better? People die without committing their verses to paper, or to anyone else.
I am worried about the physiological problems this machine is causing me. I have a permanent slouch. The nerves in my hands tingle and snap. As I consider writing as a career I wonder if I should insure my wrists the way Jennifer Lopez has insured her ass. I want wrist braces. I want bionic limbs, so I can keep writing until I am eighty. While I'm at it, I'll take one of those headsets I saw MIT students wearing at the Geek Pride Festival, which project a little monitor right into your eye, ocarina-shaped keypad at your waist. I don't give a damn for things which enhance your strength, like steroids, or your kozmik sense, like shrooms, or your public image, like a monogrammed Land Rover. I want extenders on my information storage and communication capabilities.
I recently reread Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age, having read it for the first time in April. I don't reread books that quickly nowadays, but there is an idea in that book that gives me pause. A man creates a computerized book for the granddaughter of his boss, which he subsequently steals for his own daughter. This book is intended to provide growing girls with a supplement to their education, one which will guide them towards being brave, rational, free-thinking individuals with a broader range of skills than their Victorian society will provide them. Along the way a copy falls into the hands of one poor orphan, and then to a man who distributes it to thousands more orphans who are languishing in the hands of their state. The story primarily follows the first orphan, who is able to transcend her abusive family situation and is accepted into a private school as a result of what she has learned from this book, which contains as much information as a library as well as tools like a microscope and telescope. This scenario provides more than a technological solution; behind the book is a woman who teaches the orphan through the mediation of the book.
This is a fairy tale which is practically tailor-made for me, I admit. I work with a school which is 20th from the bottom of 670 New York City schools in academic scores. Some third-graders there can't read or add. You can't help but grope around for a magic bullet when you find a child who can't sound out a word on her own.
Computers have been an important force in developing my organizational and logical skills. More importantly, they have helped me learn to teach myself. So little effort needs to be made to turn a computer into a rich and appealing learning device. The more transparent its workings can be made, the better: my peers learned a lot from the days when computers were easy to break and the language that ran programs was the language you used to talk to the machine.
There is too much to be gained here to make rash proposals about keeping children away from computers. For god's sake don't install computers at the expense of teachers, but I think a better effort needs to be made to look into how the machines can be used to teach a child.
* * * *
now I need to go to bed. and also backtrack and read the article I'm ostensibly railing against. heh heh.
Let's consider this a rewrite of my Div III. As the six of you who saw it-- before I buried it sixty feet under a slab of impenetrable kryptonite in an unmarked location in the Andes-- know, my Div III consisted of a series of prejudgements and whimsical hypotheses about computer users, strung on the skeleton of about half a dozen interviews with close personal friends. I should have left my ideas where they came from: my own experience. In other words, I should have written a Division Me, or admitted was writing one.
Posted by me at 11:15 PM | Comments (2)
October 3, 2000
Best In Show
the presidential debates, 10/03/00
I'd like to ask now
why should the American public entrust
the education of their children
the stewardship of peace in Montenegro
and their golden years
should the economy fail
to you
see my
suit my haircut
years in the Ivy League a
noble tremble standing
as trained, I am
the best poodle money can buy
so you vote for me.
Rebuttal?
Don't trust
him I am
the best trained poodle
my haircut,
pompoms!
better sire and bitch see--
see--
my bike is worse than my bart.
Posted by me at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)