The Homecoming Alternative

Homecoming Girl Celebrated

If you haven't read this story, I'll wait.

Done?

Here goes.  This is a bad idea.

My heart was not warmed.  Still isn't.  My reaction, then, you might ask?

"Fuck that."

Really?

Yup. "Fuck that."

What kind of jerk...

Great question.  I wondered that myself.  About myself.  Because that was what the middle of me thought of that story.  And the more I read, the more I thought about it, the more disgusted I became.

Disgusted?  With the girl?  Definitely a jerk, then.  With the town?  What's wrong with you?

More great questions.  Allow me:

Assuming you were educated in the United States during your teens, how do you remember your high school homecoming court being chosen?  By merit?  Minimum GPA, participation in clubs, volunteering, extracurricular interests, athletic prowess?  No, me neither.  It was popularity.

popularity - the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after

Somehow, the desire to preserve tradition has left generations of educators unable or unwilling to stop the process of allowing students to rank themselves on the most pointless, limiting, and irrelevant of factors.

Attractiveness, wealth (i.e. ability to own nice things, support nice parties), and the ability to speak only in words and phrases common enough not to arouse suspicion of independent thought.

As an unsupervised process, free from all faculty oversight or direction, the selection of homecoming court members usually results in nothing more harmful than an opportunity for students to determine which of their peers are most likely to acquire, at best, the most superficial acquaintances or, at worst, an unwanted pregnancy.  However, as this story indicates, a class of students with an overabundance of boredom, malice, or both can choose to do something more devious and hurtful.

At this point, when shown the intentions of their students, the teachers and principal decide to let the nominations stand.  For one of only two reasons:  either they have no idea as to the social standing of these children and don't recognize that something has gone awry.  Or, they are aware of the reasons for this girl's nomination and don't feel they have the authority step in and provide a correction.  I'm not sure which is worse, but I'm leaning towards the former.

In either case, as the underlying motivation became clear, they stuck with the course of non-interference, instead allowing the students to police themselves via social networking sites, and ultimately abrogating responsibility for a solution to the larger community.

So, following the example set by thousands of teensploitation movies and the Disney happiness factory, the citizens of this small town decided they would solve the twin problems of shyness and unpopularity with a makeover and a forced celebration.

The story went viral, first around the town, then the internet.  Offers of free dresses, dinners, limos, prettification, and even escorts all came flooding in.  Even though no one knew who this girl was.  Proof, if it is required, that this was all about our hurt feelings.  Not hers.

Well so what?  If it highlights bullying and the dangers of cliques, then good.  If people want to help her out, then so what?

Help her out.  Okay.  Who is she again?  Just a girl.  Just a student.  A victim of bullies.  Certainly not the only one at that school.  The only thing special about her situation is that we all decided to care.  Which is not to say that that is a bad thing.  But what are we doing with all of that energy, all of those resources?  Is it helpful to her situation to say that she should definitely get her hair and nails done?  Is it helpful to force the rest of her class to celebrate her, whether or not they really want to?  There is a private court of student opinion that will exist long after the dance ends.  Its easy to think that just like on TV, she'll be raised on our shoulders, a Maroon 5 song will play, and the credits will roll.  Maybe even rapidly on half the screen while the other half blares an advertisement for another show about Peri Gilpin starting a synchronized swim team in the Sudan.

Point is, pretending that simply "taking back" homecoming for all of us that have been bullied is short-sighted and reductive.  And selfish.  Her story became about all of "us" who've been subjected to the focused ridicule of our peers.

What lessons will this girl take away?  That other people have been bullied, yes.  That there is a larger community outside of the popular kids, yes.  That she is worthy of respect,  of course.  But also, that Homecoming still matters, that a true celebration of an individual's worth comes with a fancy dinner, a limo ride, and a makeover.

With all of the bullying that undoubtedly will still continue in that school, what resources will remain to help those victims?  After all the effort spent to make one child (and of course, ourselves) feel better, what do we have to say to the rest of the victims?  If the contributions and energy we're prepared to marshal in defense of the helpless is spent on one pointless event, with no larger campaign or support for all other potential victims, what do we say to the next hopeless teenager?


Too bad they don't celebrate Homecoming in Canada.

Apologies, Albert...

A proud Euskarian name, brought in all likelihood, albeit piecemeal, from the Celtic tribes from northern Europe.  surviving the linguistic influences of Gascony and Aquitani tribes from the time of Ptolemy, it hitched a ride on some of the earliest seafaring vessels departing from Europe.  Landing at last on the island now known as Hispaniola, manning ships of Cristobal Colombo, and then establishing itself amongst the Taino peoples.  Intermingling with the bloodlines of a native population possessed of such distinguished persons as Anacona of Xaragua, a warrior queen who resisted the waves of conquistadors.  Maintaining its singular dignity, this family name flourished for another several centuries before producing a prodigious baseballing set of genes, whose scion escaped with his mother for the shores and opportunities of the US.  The man carrying this name rose quickly through the farm system, in spite of being drafted 402nd overall in 1999 by the St. Louis Cardinals.  Named rookie of the year in 2001, he achieved unparalleled fame, honoring his namesake forbears by becoming a nine time all star in Major League Baseball.  An historic name, now inscribed on bedroom posters and finding its way into thousands of packs of baseball cards, collected and sold the world over.

One pack of which was purchased for my five-year-old nephew, who just so happens to be learning to read.  A name for the centuries, nay millenia, waiting patiently in a stack as a young man sounds out the words that describe careers, lifetimes of achievement.  And then, finally....

"Al...Albert.  Albert.  Albert.  Poo...Poo jols.  Poojols.  Albert Poo-jols."

"No Daniel.  Its pronounced 'Poo-holes.'"

A light comes on.  If there's one thing more resonant with the under-6 set than sporting achievement, its potty talk.  Adult sanctioned potty talk.

"His name is poo-holes?  Albert Poo-holes?"


"Yes, Daniel.  That man's name is Poo-holes."

Cackling ensues, and a proud line of warriors and sea-faring adventurers dims slightly.

"Poo-holes, Poo-holes!  Allllbeeert POO-HOLES!"

"POO-HOLES!"

Sorry, Albert.

My first lifetime, in 4 seasons: Winter

I'm swaddled in winter wear.  Over-bundled unto immobility.  Winter after Christmas is a much more serious affair than before.  The sky is much too close to darkness for me to only now feel as if dinner should be soon.  I think I should smell something, but its too cold for a window or door to be cracked.  I'm in my front yard close enough to the house to tell, but the scent of salty mucus in the scarf drawn tight across the lower half of my face would block it anyhow.  My playmates have gone home for dinner and my sister has gone as well, leaving me alone.  The front porch light sconces are out, twin dusted bulbs alone like light house keepers, wrapped in a few filaments of spent spider threads, cold-cracked with a parcel of moth husks to mark time.  The sun was a small, glowing egg yolk sliding behind the tree line at the end of our cul-de-sac, dragging its watery orange silk with it, leaving me very alone in the snow brightened front lawn.  My eyes picked out the shapes our daytime trees, rendered now in an indigo palette, the ones like our christmas getting snagged and tugged out of form by the same jangly wind that was pulling water out of my eyes.  Not afraid, really, but more out of instinct i ran towards the two yellow beacons that were the prismatic windows of our front door.  Taking a straight line across the lawn, i could hear the pop of each step as i broke through the crusted snow over my own snotted breathing.  Perhaps the awkward snowsuit, or just the unpracticed gait of a five-year-old was to blame, but i lost my footing and went down in a heap.  A different pop, underneath the tumult of my collapse, was clearly audible.  In children my age, the doctor would later say, they're called greenstick fractures.  Because children's bones splinter like a honeysuckle twig.  It ached.  Funny-like.  I didn't cry out.  I rolled over on my back, my little greenstick held across my chest, breathing to myself.  Fast at first and then slower.  And slower, still.  And then only quietly, my mouth tasting of saliva, but warmer, like batteries.  The sky, darker now, was cold-washed with clouds, framed by the hood of my snowsuit, the few stars shattered by the water filling my eyes.  I blinked them dry and listened to the trees, just out of sight.

The Train Pulleth into the Station...

Not a long post.

Someone close to me is getting ready to leave...

93 years is a long time.  The Nintendo is 25 years old.  It came out when I was 10.  The stock market crashed when she was 10.  The first one, in 1929.

Decades.  9 of them.  Into the tenth.  2 kids, 7 grandchildren.  11 great-grandchildren, if my math is right.

To stand at such an angle, from such a vantage, to see clearly down 20 different paths...different circuits.

Just a thought, friends, for those for whom the train is arriving:

May we all board in a timely fashion, with a minimum of fuss, and plenty of people waving.

Second Chair

A thought today, perhaps, for those whose toil goes unnoticed or seen and unheralded.

I have never had a haircut i like.  Ever.  It isn't that I'm unhappy.  That ship left port a long time ago.  Rather, I just don't care.  I say what I want and something else happens.  Sigh, smile wanly, pay with tip.  Repeat.  This has been my routine for decades.  I once paid a lot for a haircut.  Somewhere with fancy mirrors, washbowls for shampooing, and 60 dollar scissors.  Same result only poorer for the effort.

Barber shops usually have at least two chairs, sometimes three.  The owner has the first chair (barbershops generally aren't "investment" opportunities), and some sad lump or two in the others.  If you're second chair in a barber shop, you might be saving up for your own shop, but usually its just some guy turning toddlers' crewcuts into glasses of rye at the veteran's hall.

At the place i go now, the second chair is held by a man in his nineties named, i think, Gifas.  He sweeps up for the owner's cuts and occasionally handles the overflow on busy days.  Study the face of the second chair barber when his chair empties and client after client politely waves off his solicitations, preferring to wait for the first chair.  As perfect an expression of abject purposelessness as you will ever see.

Several weeks ago, I did not defer.  I saw the line, I had places to go.  I couldn't wait.  Gifas, I'm yours.  What do i care?  It's not as if i was going to get the cut i wanted.  In all honesty, my hair isn't easy to cut. I've got three whorls all positioned at terrible locations.  If the etymology of cowlick is to be believed, surely my infant head must have tasted like a salt block to some heavenly bovine servant.  I even have two in my beard.

Gifas wears a smock.  Like a doctor.  Or a teenager working the makeup counter.  Like all persons born shortly after the Great War, his hands shake. 30 minutes later i looked like i was only missing the neck bolts and an angry mob to corner me in the windmill.  Or like i should wear overalls with no shirt and be kept from petting rabbits.  Sigh.

So today, with a little shaggy growth to erase Gifas' efforts, I headed back to try again.  Sure enough, there was a line for the first chair.  But something happened.  The timing of the cuts worked out in my favor.  The owner's chair opened up and Gifas was still working on insuring at least a week's worth of shame for some poor 11-year-old with an impatient mother.  The owner waved me over.

Every so often we are given an opportunity.  An opportunity to...I don't know.  To be...decent.  Maybe.  Or just to do something only for the sake of another.  There was someone in line after me for the first chair.  I looked at him, then at the owner.  The moment dilated enough that Gifas shaky hands slowed to a mild tremor and he looked in the mirror at the three of us.  No, I said to the owner.  I looked at the man next to me and told him to go ahead.  I looked at Gifas in his smock.  No wrinkles there.  Ironed every morning, no doubt.  A small breakfast in a small apartment.  Several smocks hung in a closet, each an emblem of a purpose.  A reason to get up, to get out, to be needed.  Maybe the reason he's lasted this long away from the support of his kids or the state.

Thanks anyway, I said.  I'll wait for Gifas.

Stranger in a Strange Kitchen, or How I Overcame Childhood Xenophobia

strang·er  (strnjr) n. 1. One who is neither a friend nor an acquaintance. 2. A foreigner, newcomer, or outsider. 3. One who is unaccustomed to or unacquainted with something specified; a novice: a stranger to our language; no stranger to hardship. 4. A visitor or guest.

Having been one and met many, I wonder how all of us can feel so differently about the concept.  How a community or culture reacts to one, I think owes a lot to how often those within that community have allowed themselves to be seen as such, and how, in that moment, they felt.  And further, what they did about it.

I come from a family of travelers.  Not the pseudo-Roma types in the American southeast that collect down payments for un-asphalted driveways.  Rather, those that wander.  Or wonder.  Then wander.  There was a desk at my father's parents' house that I would pass as a child whenever we visited.  Stuffed as it was with yellowed grocery lists, receipts, catalogs, and filleted correspondence, it stood as an ongoing exhibit of their lives in process.  What caught the eye of a curious grandson, and many admiring visitors was the corkboard above it.  Pinned to every inch were thousands of photos, thick as fish scales.  Curling like sloughed bark, they were a record of an entire life spent in the service of, and as, strangers.  On camel back.  Under an umbrella, bizarre trees in the background.  Darker haired, tighter skinned people that looked a lot like my grandparents smiled back from dozens of photos definitely not taken anywhere in Kentucky.

Perhaps even more fascinating were the exchange students they hosted.  Its a very strange feeling as a young person to meet adults who don't speak English.  They're decidedly grown-up, yet they talk like children.  they're curious about you and want desperately to speak, but are forced to rely on broken phrases cribbed from television and meaningful eye contact.  They were friendly with my adults and were clearly vouched for by them.  And they were strangers.

As children, we are all given the same opportunities to embrace strange cultures and people.  To be clear, i am not describing a situation in which my mother and father encouraged me to speak to strangers, take their candy, or accept their rides.  I am referring instead to that rite of passage that all of us took at some point, which i am sure is not unique to American culture;  the sleepover.

I was 6.  It was Friday.  That morning, I took a letter from my mother to my teacher.  Having read it, she sent me to the office to show it to the secretary.  She read it.  Then she reached into her desk drawer, took out a slip of paper, and wrote down the information.  Then, dear readers, for the first time ever, before any of my plane tickets or Eurail passes, I was handed the most amazing billet any child may ever hope to receive;  a permission slip to ride a different bus.

A child's ticket for travel.  giving it to the strange bus driver, in the strange bus, parked in the strange location.  Then, off to the strange house, filled with strangers.  I had my friend as a guide of course.  but the trust required in such in arrangement ought not be overlooked.  Having been sanctioned by my parents, he would be my only touchstone, my only reference point, my only familiar on this expedition.

Let's be honest; i wasn't going overseas.  Yet, to a small child, it might as well have been a ticket to Zanzibar.  I'd had playdates before.  I'd been to other houses for birthday parties.  but this was different.  I was alone in my strangeness.  No other kids to share the oddness, and most importantly, no ride home when it got dark.  No festivities, no event.  No balloons or cake.  Just a whole lot of weird furniture, weird lighting, weird toys, in a weird house in a weird neighborhood.  and most of all, weird smells.   It might feel like a normal playdate.  Right up until dinner.

For those who may not think smell is important or indicative or evocative, i offer this test.  Walk through or near a grade school at lunch time and convince me you don't become nostalgic.  Bleach, fresh paint, and musty radiators will always be redolent of dorm life.  A strange house would be so firstly because of the smell.  Strange laundry.  Strange cleaning products resulting in disorienting floor-based play on an odd carpet or linoleum in a weird basement.  And it would all come to a point when the first fingers of aroma from dinner would find their way downstairs or out to the backyard.

Every new experience, every vacation always has a newness about it.  Something to remind you that you've gone beyond the familiar.  I argue that its the smell of other people's dinner that makes it real.  New ingredients, new techniques.  For me, as a child, that's when a play date become...sinister somehow.  Foreign.  Scary.  And no concession, whether in demeanor or speech, would ever be made in my direction to indicate an understanding of my apprehension.  My friend, his parents, and maybe a sibling or two, would simply slide into their strange chairs at their strange table and start eating their strange food.

As every day before it, that day would end. At a slightly later hour, maybe, but end it would.  With strange toothpaste in a strange bathroom.  And finally to bed, to be tucked into odd-smelling linens with my head pointing the wrong way with none of my stuffed animals on whom to rely, and what little light there may have been definitely in the wrong location.  It is at this moment that we become one of two very different kind of people.

When i was in Europe, those moments that still glow faintly in the dark, cold, shelved corridors of my memory share one immutable common theme; i was lonely.  Abjectly, despondently lonely.  By choice, i travelled alone.  I found friends with whom to share a day, a meal, or maybe a train ride.  But by forcing myself to wander alone, and through my stomaching and enduring, and most importantly, eventually riding out the resultant homesickness, I became self-reliant.  And confident.  I discovered that there is something valuable in the kindness of strangers, upon which i was forced to depend to overcome my loneliness.

I think our response to the novelty of a sleepover and the overwhelming panic of being, dare i say it, a stranger in a strange land, is what ultimately determines our acceptance of other people's cultures.  Even if we gave up and cried for our parents until they came and took us home, we recovered, tried again, and eventually spent the entirety of some night at a friend's house.  Sometimes the night passed slowly, tearfully.  Lonely.  We either become forever wary and afraid of other people, other cultures, only comfortable with a lifestyle that changes little.  Or we trust ourselves to other people, strangers in a strange home, to take care of us, never forgetting who we are and where we are most at peace.  But stronger, more confident, and more willing to expose ourselves to something foreign.

Always waiting on the other side, as a reward for our endurance, was a bright, cartoon-filled morning.  Greeted upon waking with a warm smile, by parents not much different, really, than our own.  In a kitchen, now filled with sunlight, that looked remarkably less strange and rather more familiar than when we were afraid.  And at a table with four legs, just like at home, with plates, not much different than ours.  Piled with pancakes.  Just like at my house.

Dude, don't forget; we're off next Monday.

Just back from vacation.  Nose to the grindstone.  No more holiday cheer.  Gray, cold, and distinctly unfestive, January waits.  The least exciting month.  Just look at the word:

                                                                            January

See?  Boring.  And yet...from out of nowhere, a co-worker or spouse or friend tells you, "Don't forget; we're off next Monday."  They will say it casually, as if they've known it all along.  "What!" you'll say.  "Why?"
Why, indeed.  How is this possible?
"We're off Monday!?"
Who has done this?  In whose honor am I to be excused from work?  Why, none other than Martin Luther King.  In addition to a lifetime of struggle for equal rights, an enduring quest on behalf of all mankind, he is apparently blessing me with both a 3 day weekend AND the subsequent 4 day work week.  God bless you, Martin Luther King.