Half Changed World

This is my favorite poem about giving thanks:

Gravy
Raymond Carver

No other word will do.  For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman.  Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going.  And he was going
nowhere but down.  So he changed his ways
somehow.  He quit drinking!  And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head.  "Don’t weep for me,"
he said to his friends.  "I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected.  Pure Gravy.  And don’t forget it."

Happy Thanksgiving.

This week, I’m writing about Jonathan Kozol’s latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  I guess I should begin by saying that I agree with probably 90 percent of what Kozol says in this book.  I agree that the inadequate education offered to the vast majority of inner-city students is a national embarassment and should be a source of outrage to all Americans, not just those whose kids are stuck attending those schools.  I think it is absurd to take the kids who come to school with the least family resources, put them in overcrowded underfunded classrooms with the least experienced teachers, and then blame them for their failure to pass standardized tests.   I share Kozol’s deep skepticism about the "scripted" teaching programs that are being offered as panaceas to lift up those test scores. 

And yet, I found myself repeatedly arguing with Kozol as I read the book.  He pushes his argument to such extremes that I couldn’t follow him all the way.  Yes, it’s terrible that kids are attending schools with asbestos coming out of the walls and stopped up toilets.  But Kozol seems to be equally outraged over kids going to classes in trailer classrooms — which aren’t ideal, but aren’t terrible, and are common in a good number of solidly middle class school districts too.  He talks about the beautiful and expensive new building provided for Stuyvesant High School in New York, while other schools in the city were falling apart, and points out that only about 3 percent of the students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.  But he doesn’t acknowledge, even in passing, that about half of Stuyvesant students are Asian, many from low-income families.

I was also frustrated that Kozol never made a clear case for why he thinks that it’s so important for black and Hispanic students to have white classmates.  He devotes a lot of effort to proving how segregated many urban classrooms are — most notably, observing that if you want to find a segregated school in America, you should look for one named after Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  But is the problem that the schools are (largely) segregated, or that they’re lousy schools?  Is integration worth fighting for in its own right, or only as a means to improving schools for poor minority kids?  Kozol clearly believes the former, but he doesn’t provide an argument for it that will convince anyone who doesn’t already share his views.

I’m actually scared that Shame of the Nation will set back Kozol’s goal of integration.  If you want to convince middle-class parents to send their kids to integrated schools, publicizing the worst case scenarios of dreadful inner-city schools isn’t the way to do it.  I’m not saying we should give up on Brown v Board of Education, but if we somehow managed to provide truly excellent public schools to all students, I think a good bit of educational and residential segregation would fade away without a massive government intervention. 

Sleepy:  My strategy of putting an 11 pm bedtime on my to-do list isn’t working very well.  I keep trying to sneak in one more thing.

Grumpy:  I hate how early it gets dark these days.  And I’m stressed about the logistics of flying cross-country with the boys.  We flew a lot with D when he was an only child, but this is the first time flying with two kids.  At least we don’t need to schlepp a car seat for D.

Sneezy:  So of course, it looks like I might be coming down with a cold.

Dopey:  This morning when I went to put my contacts in, I discovered that I had carefully put them in their case when I took them out last night, but never added any soaking solution.  I think they’ll be ok in the long run, but I definitely needed to wear my glasses today.

If you look near the top of the column to the right, you should see a little box that says BlogAds.  Right now, the only thing in it is the link to click if you want to advertise here.  In a week or so, there will be an ad for T’s video editing and transfer service.  (He edits home movies for people and records them to DVDs.  It makes a great holiday present for the grandparents.  If you’re in the DC area, he’ll even come right to your house.)  At some point, someone might even decide to pay me to advertise here.  It’s mostly an experiment at this point — I’m not desperate for the cash, but I’m interested in seeing whether this blog could even cover its costs. 

Since there’s been some controversies related to blogging and advertising, I thought I should lay my policies out for the record.

1)  There was a huge kerfluffle over the summer about an ad that TBS ran on Kos’ blog for The Real Gilligan’s Island.  Several people thought it was sexist and offensive, and complained to Kos about it; he dismissed their concerns in terms that were pretty condescending and obnoxioius.  If you ever see an ad here that ticks you off, please let me know.  I don’t promise I’ll yank it, but I do promise to take your comments seriously.

2)  More recently, Tim Kaine pulled an ad that he had run on Steve Gilliard’s blog after Gilliard portrayed Michael Steele as a minstrel (eg in blackface).  Gilliard went ballistic, and Kos backed him up, arguing that this has a "chilling effect" on bloggers’ self-expression.   I agree with Ezra Klein that they’re delusional if they think politicians (and other advertisers) aren’t going to steer clear of controversy like that.  I promise that I’m never going to censor my posts for fear of scaring advertisers, or say nice things about them because they bought an ad.  Trust me, it costs a lot more than $10 a week to buy me off.

Finally, a question about the visuals.  That right-hand column is getting awfully long, as I add more and more features to it.  Should I switch to a 3-column format, which looks a bit more cluttered, but doesn’t require as much scrolling to see all of the links?  Or are you all reading via bloglines and don’t care?

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have had recent stories about "Article III Groupie," a gossipy blog about judges, supposedly written by a female lawyer at a big NY firm, but actually written by a bored male prosecutor.

A tip of the hat to Judge Posner, who last year suggested that the supposed author might be a fiction.

"I have a theory that the author is not a she, but a he," Judge Posner told The ABA Journal eReport. "The thing is exaggeratedly feminine and constantly drawing attention to her gender."

It reminded me a lot of the fake Harriet Miers blog that got a lot of attention when she was the nominee.   It showed her as obsessed about her appearance and everyone’s opinion of her, and generally sounding like someone out of Sweet Valley High.  I don’t see anyone making those sorts of jokes about even equally mediocre male candidates, even though in real life, it was Michael Brown who was busy sending email about where he got the suit he wore on TV during the midst of the Katrina crises.

Another famous fictional blog is Anonymous Lawyer.  It’s written from the supposed POV of a hiring partner in a big firm, but was actually started by a 3rd year law student.  He fooled a good number of people though. 

I was absolutely flabbergasted yesterday afternoon when I heard that the House had voted down the conference agreement on the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill.  This is just unheard of — apparently it is the first time the Republican leadership has lost a floor vote since they took over control of Congress in 1994.

This doesn’t mean that they win on every issue (althoug they often do), but that they usually have counted votes well enough to know whether a bill will pass, and don’t bring it up for a floor vote until they know that it will get through.  (That’s why the big budget reconciliation bill wasn’t brought up last week– they negotiated behind the scenes until they had made enough changes to get the 217 votes they needed.)  And since they control the Rules committee, they can prevent Democrats from offering amendments that might peel Republicans away.  So this was pretty shocking.

It’s hard to know what made 21 Republicans finally stand up and oppose the appropriations bill.  There seem to be three main explanations flying around:

• The Republican leadership is arguing that it’s because they didn’t include any earmarks in the bill, funds reserved for projects in individual members’ districts.  They’ve long been used as a way to sweeten the pot for a waivering representative.
• Another story is that it’s because Tom Delay isn’t the Majority leader, and that Blunt isn’t as successful at keeping the party members in line as he was.  It’s certainly hard to imagine that Delay wouldn’t have counted votes more accurately.
• The version that has Democrats humming under their breath is the possibility that it’s because of the President’s growing unpopularity.  TAPPED points to a post from Mark Schmitt at The Decembrist, written last Friday:

"A great deal of Bush/Rove/DeLay’s success over the past five years has come from pushing through party-line votes as if they were confidence votes in a parliamentary system. Many of the votes pushed through with massive arm-twisting and unprecedented procedures, such as the Medicare prescription drug bill and the 2003 tax bill, were sold on the basis that the president needs the victory. You may not think this is good policy, wavering Republicans were told, but if the president wins, he gets reelected and we all win; we lose, and our whole edifice of power collapses.

"And just as in a parliamentary system, that works until it stops working. And when it stops working, the government is finished. After reelection, the confidence vote argument lost some steam. Seeing Bush as a burden in 2006 rather than an asset for reelection, it loses still more."

• A final possibility is simply that, in politics as in baseball, no team is ever as good as it looks when it’s winning, or as bad as it looks when it’s losing.

It’s not clear what happens next on the appropriations bill.  The federal fiscal year started in October, so all of the programs for which appropriations haven’t been passed have been running under a "continuing resolution."  The last one expired today, but Congress passed another one to get us into December, and someone was flying it out to the President last night to get it signed. 

The catch is that the continuing resolution funded all programs at the lowest of the FY 2005 level, or the levels proposed by the House and the Senate, which means significant cuts for some programs.  The one that I’ve been paying most attention to is the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), which the House proposed to cut nearly in half.  (The conference report provided for full funding.)  Some House Republicans yesterday were threatening that they would push for a year long continuing resolution at those levels.  More likely is that Labor-HHS-Ed will get attached to the defense appropriations bill.

For once, I remembered at a reasonable hour on Thursday night that I need to make the challah dough if we want fresh challah for Friday evening.

I asked D if he wanted to help me make the challah, and got an enthusiastic yes.  So we measured out yeast, water, oil, salt and sugar, cracked in an egg, and started adding flour and stirring.  I showed him how we added flour until the dough wasn’t sticky anymore, then turned it out onto a cutting board to knead.

After a minute, D asked if he could have a turn so I let him pound the dough a bit.  "Roar!"  he said, "Stomp!  Stomp"

"Are you a monster?" I asked.

"A dinosaur.  Roar!"

I asked if I could have a turn, and folded the challah over a few times.  "Ok, you can go again. Stomp that dough." 

He banged away at it.  "Now I’m going to turn over the entire city!"  He folded it, carefuly copying my actions.  "Roar!"

1)  T got an email a few weeks ago from Netflix, notifiying us that we were eligible to participate in a settlement of a class action lawsuit.  The suit alleges that Netflix made misleading claims of "unlimited DVDs" and "one-day turnaround" and the settlement provides for a one month upgrade to the next level of service plan.  T commented that his inclination was to decline the upgrade, as he thinks Netflix has provided us with exactly what they promised. 

2)  As some of you may have noticed if you tried to comment last Tuesday, Typepad has been having some service issues.  Monday, they sent out an email apologizing for the outages, and offering compensation.  The interesting twist was that they are letting users pick what level of compensation they think is appropriate:

"We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with TypePad’s speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don’t have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation."

Users can choose between 15, 30 and 45 days of free service, or reply "I really wasn’t affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.  Thank you for the offer, but please don’t credit my account." 

I’m fascinated by the choices, and would be very interested in seeing the distribution of responses.  My guess is that most people will pick 15 days, and that more people will pick "no credit" than 45 days.

3)  Yesterday, I came home to a nice surprise — a check for almost $200 from Olympus cameras, refunding what I had paid earlier in the year for them to fix my camera.  They’ve issued a service advisory that covers faulty CCDs, and proactively identified my repair as one that should have been covered.  Hence the unexpected check in my mailbox. 

Today’s book is "It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons," a collection of essays edited by Andi Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.

This is part of her blog book tour, in which different bloggers have been writing about the book each day this month.  It’s been great fun seeing everyone’s different perspectives on the book, from Tertia writing about parenting boy-girl twins to Dawn, who asked Andi some good questions about balancing writing and parenting.  (Go to Andi’s blog for links to everyone who is participating.)

I’m going to start by stealing a question from Shannon, of Peter’s Cross Station, who asked "When I first heard about the project, it sounded like yet another opportunity to make stereotyped claims about gender in children. How have you been able to avoid falling into that old rut?"  Andi replied:

"Well, as I said in my original call for submissions, my whole idea with this book was to refute the gender stereotypes about boys and girls, and to explore whether or not those stereotypes really exist in actual boys and girls through essays by thoughtful writers. For the BOY book, I was specifically looking for pieces that questioned the cultural assumptions we have about boys — whether the essayists ultimately embraced the stereotypes or rejected them was not as important to me as whether or not the writers wrestled with them in the first place. So the BOY book has pieces about a mother being surprised by a son’s love, since what she experienced with her son ran counter to her expectations of what a boy would be like; about a transsexual mother grappling with how to raise her son in the face of everyone’s attitude that her mere presence tips the scale in the direction of him being gay; about a woman nurturing her son’s desire for soft, pretty things, even though a part of her wants to protect him from the harsh, messy world that will surely not be so kind; about boys who defy stereotypes, boys who fit them, and the way mothers adjust their expectations to fit the reality of who their sons are."

There was much in these essays that found me nodding my head in recognition.  I think my favorite essay was "Becoming a Boy"  in which Robin Bradford writes about how her son led her to discover the joy of "boyish" things that she had never done as a girl or woman.  Somewhat to my surprise, the essay that left me looking sheepishly around the metro rubbing tears from my eyes was "The Day He Was Taller" by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which is about her son outgrowing all his clothes and buying himself a suit.

The book is organized into four thematic sections, and I’m afraid I found the first one, about what Andi calls "boy shock" or "prenatal gender apprehension," the hardest to relate to. In response to a question from Sandra, Andi writes:

"[T]he concerns of writers in It’s a Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Some of the writers in It’s a Girl ask a similar question about raising their daughters, but what prompts that question is not the fear of an unknown gender, but of knowing it all too well."

When I was pregnant with D, we didn’t find out what gender the baby would be until he was born, and I truly didn’t have a preference.  I was under no illusion that I would understand a girl any better than a boy, or be able to provide any more guidance through the treacherous shoals of junior high school.  I may not be able to provide useful advice on whether to report a bully to the teacher or to fight back, but I can’t help with ingratiating oneself with the popular clique of girls either. I sucked at being a teenage girl when I was one; I’m pretty sure I’d suck at being one now if I were pulled back a la Peggy Sue.

It somewhat bothered me that so many of the authors were ambivalent about having sons, and none of them were univocally happy about it.  I asked Andi if she thought this might be because the project was about "women writers on raising sons," and she answered;

"I did worry that perhaps the book would be tilted too much towards the "overly articulate feminist intellectual pondering gender" because it would be written by, well, overly articulate feminist intellectuals who were concerned about issues of gender. But that’s kind of who I wanted exploring the subject — women writers….  And I think even the pieces about being apprehensive about the prospect of having a boy are ultimately about the writers coming to see how their own expectations are flawed, and how they love their child, regardless of gender…  I definitely don’t think writers value boys less. It’s about questioning the cultural assumptions we have about boys and girls and men and women. And questioning things, teasing them apart to find some kind of personal truth, is what writers do."

Given that, I was suprised to read in Andi’s own essay, "It’s a Boy!" this statement:

"We want our daughters to do everything our sons do, yet as mothers ourselves, we know the difficulties and the hard choices they will have to make when they grow up and choose to mother– the career options that dwindle; the daily balancing act that exhausts; the kinds of things our sons will never face, even as they become parents ourselves."

I wish those difficulties on my sons, because the alternative isn’t easy choices, but no choices.  Society has done a much better job of giving both girls and women the option of following either traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine paths than it has as opening up choices for boys and men.

My husband once told me that he knew he needed to get out of his job when he could look at a Dilbert cartoon and wonder where the joke was.

Lily Tomlin once said "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."  When that doesn’t sound even vaguely like a joke, you know we’re all in trouble.

Today’s evidence:

• Mr. Orwell goes to Washington.
• Pat Robertson says Dover PA "voted God out of your city."
• Morning after pill decision "unusual."
• NYTimes says Administration is hoping Katrina victims will "simply give up and go away."

Tomlin’s right.  I can’t keep up.