Whirled Peas

Just Five More Minutes

Some updates:

My grandmother has been back from the nursing home for about a week now, driving everyone crazy with her stubborn resolve to change very few habits that landed her there in the first place. It makes me wonder what kind of old person I will be. My son is observing all of these multi-generational dynamics firsthand, so he will have several examples on which to draw when I likely become a cantankerous octogenarian.

As for my old house, there is a clean, smooth, beautiful new sub-floor in my bathroom. And that's about it. I'm still waiting on a new ceiling in the guest bedroom, but it isn't waiting to spread yucky brown leaks over more and more tiles.

I want to take a nap. For months.

I am entirely peeved at the powers that be who extended Daylight Savings for a whole week this year. For one, it didn't even work. No one saved any significant amount of energy. So what if we had more light in the evening? We had to burn more wattage to see where the hell we were going in the morning!

My alarm goes off in the morning, I open my eyes and observe that it's still pitch black outside, I fling the alarm clock across the room, and I close my eyes.

This isn't right. Human beings should be smart enough to wake with the sunrise. Oh, but there are deadlines to meet and deals to grab on the tick of the clock, not the rotation of the earth. Thus, I have to keep waking up in the dark.

I get zero sympathy from my family on this.

My son is transitioning into hormonal stages that desperately want to turn him into a groggy teen who would rather sleep in than go to school. Contrast this with the 6-year-old who would always wake before we did and jump around by 5:30 a.m. asking, "Can I go yet? Can I go yet? Can I go yet?" (Ahem, schools, learn some biology and make the younger grades go earlier, not later. Morons.) He thinks I have it good with my alarm clock and not a parent who hollers upstairs and flicks the light.

Speaking of parents, my father is hauling his first load of dry cement before 6 a.m. in the dark and has to put up with other sleepy drivers on their morning commutes without killing any of them. My mother never sleeps and is working two jobs in the church and social justice, so she is changing people's lives by the time I hit the snooze button.

My brother is blazing his headlights on a highway long before any of them, traveling to wherever his crane is precariously perched in the region to hurry up and wait for some job site foreman to tell him where to lift a beam or a basket full of men. He's sick of waking up and going to work in the dark too, but with the dough he's earning he'll be able to retire at 35. Punk.

So, while whiny little Rebecca is complaining about her perfectly reasonable waking hour, husband Ted is snoring away happily, on a second shift work schedule that allows him the benefits of staying up all night doing whatever he damn pleases, sleeping all day for as long as he damn pleases, and getting up whenever he damn well feels like it to have as much time as he damn well needs to get ready for work.

Do I sound bitter? See, I need a nap.

Sex Ed 1-0-Whatever

My morning routine usually involves me backing my car out of my driveway, getting about four feet down the road, muttering (cursing), turning back into my driveway, and leaving the car running as I rush back into my house for something I forgot.

This morning was no exception.

But when I came back outside, I heard this weird rhythmic bumping sound emanating from my car. I walked down the driveway slowly, deciding whether I had the energy to deal with some sort of mechanical breakdown that could result in a mental breakdown. "Thump, thump, thump, thumpity-thump, thump, thump, thump ..." Sounded as if a squirrel had crawled up into my engine and got its tail caught in the fan belt. I opened the door.

Whew. I just had left the radio on and Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" was playing on WKXA, filling my speakers and vibrating my car with its double bass shuffle and three-beat tom-tom pattern. No squirrel.

(You'd better know something about Alex Van Halen's drumming before you accuse me of being too stupid in mistaking radio noise for engine trouble. Besides, I hadn't consumed any caffeine yet.)

Heading off to work, this time with my security badge, I spent my short commute contemplating lyrics such as "Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I'm hot for teacher" and "I brought my pencil, give me something to write on." (This essentially represents the bulk of the entire song.) A waste of brain cells, you might think, if it weren't for the Associated Press series running on teacher-student sex and educational system discipline lately.

Scandals erupt when teachers engage in any misconduct, especially sexual, with a student. They scar all people involved and can rip communities apart.

Before I go one word further, let me clearly state that it is criminally and ethically inappropriate for a young person to be engaged in any intimate relationship with a person who is charged with a special trust to nurture and educate and who has an imbalanced level of control over the young person.

That said, sometimes it gets lost that children are sexual creatures. They have hormones, genitals and the basest of base coding to go forth and multiply. Social constructs aside, they get crushes and hard-ons, they explode into crater-faced acne havens, they wrestle with bodily signals to have sexual contact long before we seem ready to even think about them doing so.

It is such a critical time in a human being's development, and why it is so scandalous when a teacher breaks that trust. But if we are getting a handle on how to deal with abuse, what are we doing to positively foster children through their physical sexual development? Brow-beating them into abstinence is 1) not "working" and 2) seems rather counter-intuitive.

By the time I arrived at work, I was going down in a "Blaze of Glory" with Bon Jovi and so ended my contemplations. This blog post in no means is a fully reasoned argument for revamping sex-ed in schools, or even the necessary condemnation of abusers. It is what it is, a starting point for having some conversation about it.

Do certain songs or entertainment genres glorify inappropriate sexual relationships?

Do boys and girls, or male teachers and female teachers, get treated differently in the context of sexual relationships and school discipline?

Does it matter if such relationships are consensual? Can they even be consensual? What is the age of consent?

Is there a connection or a disparity with how bodies naturally develop and when we determine are appropriate times to engage in sex? Do social or religious constructs reflect or restrain?

What do you think?

*****

If you or someone you know needs help through a sexual abuse crisis, contact Open Arms Domestic Violence & Rape Crisis Services at www.openarmsfindlay.org or call the 24-hour local crisis hotline at (419) 422-4766. Contact Findlay Police Department at (419) 424-7150 or Hancock County Sheriff's Office at (419) 424-7097.

Silver Screen Profundity

Know my favorite movie lines, know me:

ON SOCIETY:

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh** we don't need." -- Tyler Durden, "Fight Club"

"What's wrong with this f***ing country? Everybody hates everybody!" -- Pakistani proprietor in Boston, "The Departed"

"It's just black people demeaning other black people, using that word over and over. You ever hear white people callin' each other 'honky' all the time? 'Hey, honky, how's work?' 'Not bad, cracker, we're diversifying!' " -- Anthony, "Crash"

ON GOVERNMENT:

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." -- Princess Leia, "Star Wars IV"

"How do you have patience for people who claim they love America, but clearly can't stand Americans?" -- Sydney Ellen Wade, "The American President"

"So like, right now for example. The Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, 'What about the strain on our resources?' Well it's like when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I put R.S.V.P. 'cause it was a sit-down dinner. But some people came that like did not R.S.V.P. I was like totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, and squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier. And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty." -- Cher Horowitz, "Clueless"

ON TRUTH:

"Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always." -- Mahatma Gandhi, "Gandhi"

"Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth. And the truth is on your side, Bubba." -- X, "JFK"

ON PERSONALITY:

"You have a freak flag. You just don't fly it." -- Ben Stone, "Family Stone"

"I know I chatter on far too much ... but if you only knew how many things I want to say and don't. Give me SOME credit." -- Anne Shirley, "Anne of Green Gables"

"Vengeance is a lazy form of grief." -- Silvia Broome, "The Interpreter"

ON LOVE:

"Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished yet." -- Jane Smith, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith"

"[Toasting:] To wives and sweethearts ... may they never meet." -- Capt. Jack Aubrey, "Master and Commander"

"That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the f*** up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence." -- Mia Wallace, "Pulp Fiction"

"If love was a choice, who would ever choose such exquisite pain?" -- Tuptim, "Anna and the King"

ON RELIGION:

"(God) still digs humanity, but it bothers Him to see the sh** that gets carried out in His name -- wars, bigotry, televangelism. But especially the factioning of all the religions. He said humanity took a good idea and, like always, built a belief structure on it. ... I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant." -- Rufus, "Dogma"

"The Dutch don't have religion, they have cheese." -- Queen Elizabeth, "Elizabeth I"

"People want me to do everything for them. What they don't realize is that they have the power. You want to see a miracle? Be the miracle." -- God, "Bruce Almighty"

ON LIVING:

"My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage!" -- Frances Owens, "Practical Magic"

"If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn't be a human being. You'd be a game-show host." -- Veronica Sawyer, "Heathers"

"Do what you love. F*** everything else." -- Dwayne, "Little Miss Sunshine" 

"Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." -- Ferris Bueller, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

"[Last words:] By God, Woodrow, it's been one hell of a party." -- Gus McCrae, "Lonesome Dove" 

Chief Wa-Boo-Hoo-Hoo

I don't have nearly as much personal stake invested in Cleveland Indians baseball as some other folks do, but I do feel bad for fans this morning.

Cleveland dropped Game 7 of the American League Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox last night. I seriously considered giving a few friends a welfare check phone call about 10:30 p.m., when it became apparent that strategic mistakes and mound mismatches were crippling their beloved Tribe.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda. It wasn't exactly Greek tragedy, but there are a fair few folks wandering around today in a dazed funk impressive even for a Monday.

Boston, of course, is brimming with excitement. Too bad the Colorado Rockies are gonna knock your sox off.

Fall Fling

I'm one of those weirdos whose favorite times of the year are the cooler months, the stretch of days that hinge between the change of seasons.

I'm not talking outright cold. Years of eight-month-long central New York winters cured me of that. And redefined Hell in my mind, from fire and brimstone to waist-deep snow that never ever goes away.

Spring is glorious with itty-bitty buds poking out everywhere and a tingle in the air that the earth and its inhabitants are ready to get out. Before the summer sun wilts everything into a tangle of brown and a puddle of sweat, I dance with spring by taking deep cleansing breaths of the misty fresh air and padding around barefoot as soon as the threat of frostbite is over.

But I fell in love with fall a long time ago, and that romance is still my main eco-squeeze.

When the sky is a color of blue found elsewhere only in the clearest of Mediterranean bays, dotted by fire-hot white lumps of clouds pushed around by cooling breezes, I swoon.

Foliage is the aphrodisiac. The display is a little muted this year, like a dusty landscape canvas tucked away in the attic, but still enough to get me going. There is a tree at the corner of Western and Sandusky, right outside my office, that is as tantalizing as the apple the Queen offered Snow White, half innocuous green, half brilliant red. The only poison is that I might run into somebody in the intersection as I'm admiring it.

"Football weather," they say. On the best days you can still get away with a pair of shorts, or at least shoes with no socks, and cozy up with a big sweatshirt or a fuzzy sweater.

I know exactly when this time arrives because my husband's persnickety Russian Blue cat permanently attaches herself to his thigh as he sleeps. The drop in degrees is fairly imperceptible to us, but she intuitively knows when she desires more body heat. For now, she can have him. I have my own lover.

Winter is coming, and I will slip into it with gratitude for a season that has tempered my summer frolicking, purfumed my senses with cider and nutmeg, caressed me into commitment, and killed me softly into satisfied hibernation.

Crisp, spicy death. What a season.

Picture Worth About Six Words

I remember my first ultrasound for my pregnancy, and I still have the black and white screen shot the technician printed for us.

I distinctly remember walking (waddling) down the hospital hallway after the procedure and examining the picture with the father-to-be. "Congratulations," he said, examining the 4x4 scrap of film. "You're having a kidney bean."

Truer words were never uttered. Had I not actually been pregnant and gone through the procedure and someone handed me such a photo, I would have asked, "What in the hell is that?"

This is why I find it so odd that Ohio and other states are pushing legislation that would force a woman seeking an abortion to look at her ultrasound.

Looking at a kidney bean is supposed to change your mind? I don't get it. What a stupid idea.

Color Changing Crowd Control

"I had the worst day of my life today!"

This from my fifth-grader son, calling me at work to rat on himself.

He does that a lot. We don't need any other siblings in our home to be tattle-tails. Gabe does the job himself. I'm waiting for this honesty streak to fade away as his adolescence progresses, but for now he just can't wait to tell me what he's done so he can hear what I'm going to do about it.

On the Worst Day of His Life, I did very little.

Well, I chewed on him a little bit for hyperbole. First, we need to remember that the school day is not the entire day. And, in my mind, the worst day he's ever had at school was several years ago when he got tired of a classmate kicking ice chunks at him on the playground so he picked up one and threw it with deadly accuracy right between the kid's eyes and broke his nose.

That was a bad day. But a good lesson for nonviolence no matter what.

Back to this day, Gabe suffered through two dreaded "Color Changes" in class. See, each student has a small pocket on the wall filled with variously colored strips of paper. Everyone starts the day fresh on green, and with each infraction you commit you must "go change your color." Yellow means warning, orange means loss of recess, fuchsia sends you to the principal's office, red with purple polka dots gets you a one-way ticket to a Siberian boot camp for wayward boys.

Well, I think I have yellow and orange right.

At any rate, my son got his color changed on the very first day of school this year for talking. He does have a propensity for yakking to his friends during assignment time or shouting out answers without raising his hand. My husband and I decided to nip this one in the bud with severe restrictions on his audio-visual input: no TV, movies, video games, etc. This is a serious detriment to the boy who is learning French by adjusting the DVD controls because he knows the "Star Wars" dialog so well in English.

We want him to shut up in school as badly as his teachers do, and his probation is over when he can avoid any talking-related infractions over the course of a month. He earns a brief conjugal visit with the television over the weekend if he stays on green the whole week.

But then The Worst Day Ever rolled around, and Gabe immediately dialed my work number to discuss how his all-powerful judge and jury mommy was going to react and whether this would jeopardize his media addiction into the next year.

Gabe got his color changed for not putting his last name on a worksheet and some other doofus thing about not doing the morning routine in the right order.

Give me a freaking break. No, darling son, this isn't going to have any impact on your home life. If your teacher thinks the world is going to end because you're the only "Gabe" in her class and she can't grade your paper if your last name isn't on it, then that's the way the cookie crumbles at school. I want no part of that. Stop bothering me at work about it.

Sure, I want him to remember the things he's been told to do over and over. Sure, I want him to mind his teacher. But I have priorities. I'll ground him until he loses all hand-to-eye joystick coordination to try to reinforce the rules to not scream out answers so that all students have a fair chance of participating and to productively contribute to a group environment that is conducive to concentration.

The rest of it just seems an overly regimented, micro-managed way of processing these students grade after grade after grade. For three years in a row, Gabe's class mission statements have included some sort of phraseology about doing their best and following the rules so that they will be well-behaved enough for the next grade. This is beginning to bug me.

And I'm starting to care less and less about Gabe's color changes. They seem random and unyielding, a rainbow of ineffective discipline, a backwards tote board of pledges toward behavior that has very little to do with being 11 years old.

However, I haven't had to suffer through a single episode of "Civil War Journal" on the History Channel lately, or watch "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" for the three-millionth time. Maybe this is a good thing after all.

Gorey Details

Former Vice President Al Gore is giving his $750,000 Nobel peace prize winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a fledgling think tank on global warming out of Palo Alto, Calif. Gore has called ACP the planet's "PR firm."

Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. The scientific panel has explained the dry details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports every six years or so since 1990. (AP)

Gore sexed it up with "An Inconvenient Truth," an Oscar-winning documentary on his efforts to tour the world in an effort to protect it.

"AIT" must be watched. You don't have to check your ostrich-head-in-the-sand proclivities at the door to appreciate it, and you can continue to grasp at straws with the rest of the cluckers quibbling about six feet of sea level change. But you should gain some appreciation that human beings are having an out-of-balance effect on the planet.

The earth is a living thing, so therefore it will die someday. I feel that way about my son, but that doesn't mean I'm supposed to be hastening his demise.

Perhaps we need a Panel on Human Being Change.

God Forgive Me, I Think I May HATE Ann Coulter

From CBS News: Ann Coulter is stirring up controversy again. The conservative commentator said this week that the nation would be better off if all Americans were Christian and that she wants "Jews to be perfected, as they say."

Appearing on the CNBC show The Big Idea, Coulter was asked to give her version of a better America. She told the show's host, Donny Deutsch, that it would look like New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Pressed for details, Coulter said, "People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America ..."

"Christian ... so we should be Christian?" Deutsch interrupted. "It would be better if we were all Christian?"

Coulter answered "Yes" once, and after being asked the same question again by an obviously surprised Deutsch, answered "Yes" a second time. When Coulter tried to shift the conversation to the diverse congregations in Christian megachurches, the show's host brought the topic back to Coulter's statements about Jews.

Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group which is publicizing the encounter, provided this transcript:

DEUTSCH: ... we should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians, then, or ...

COULTER: Yeah.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Well, it's a lot easier. It's kind of a fast track.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Yeah. You have to obey.

DEUTSCH: You can't possibly believe that.

COULTER: Yes.

"We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say," Coulter said later in the show. "That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express."

"Candidly, I had her on not to talk about politics but to talk about her brand strategy," Deutsch later told AdWeek. "Whether you like her or not, her strategy is to be extreme and that's a way to make money. But because it's her, it drifted into politics."

"I simply asked her a question, something like, 'If the world was her way, what would it look like?' And she said something to the effect that everybody would be Christians," Deutsch told AdWeek. "I was somewhat baffled and asked if that meant there would be no Buddhists or Jews and I think her words were, 'perfected' Jews [would be OK]."

*****

This is why I don't watch this crap on TV. It exists simply to get people riled up. But I can't have this blog and not make room for what this little ditty may spur in the way of conversation. (And yes, yes, we'll get to Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for peace on another post.)

Ann Coulter may be proof that Satan really is at work in the world, possessing cranky space cadets like her to propagate the kind of vile xenophobia and religious intolerance that allow so-called faithful folks to feel superior and extra blessed when really they are insecure, sniveling little wieners no more or less in need of God's grace than the next person.

Pant, pant, pant ...

It's not even about Ann, God bless 'er. We can blow off her comments as whatever she thinks is going to bring her attention and money (which is evil's M.O., btw). So she's playing a role. Big deal.

It's all of these people actually buying her books and reading her drivel and nodding their little lemming heads as they murmur, "True, true ... those silly Jews, they need to grow up and be more in tune with God like we Christians are."

If Ann Coulter and her ilk really are looking for a fast track to God, Judaism is a pretty expeditious way of getting there. FedEx's service contract has got nothin' on the covenant.

What a twerp.

Sack the Bag

The day I demanded that the grocery store bag boy remove my gallon of milk from a plastic bag, I knew I had crossed a threshold.

"Hey!" I called from the cash register, startling everybody within earshot. "Don't put that in there! It has its own handle."

I was not as kind as I usually am to people offering me a service. But I am training to be a serious eco-nut, and all fledglings take their enterprises very seriously in the beginning. I hope to temper myself in both attitude and practice so that I am not a flash in the pan, but I am growing increasingly displeased with the whole grocery store experience. The bag boy (or girl, as the case may be) is catching the tail end of my frustration built up wandering through aisle after aisle.

Packaging pisses me off. Individually wrapped things are big culprits in the "Lets See How Much Garbage We Can Possibly Create" game. There are certain chips and snacks that are not only individually packaged but then collected inside one big giant bag for your transportation pleasure.

Which the bag boy promptly places inside another bag.

This is a revolution we can easily start right in our own neighborhoods. Interrupt the conversation the girl with the spangly earrings behind the till is having with the boy covered in acne at the end of the conveyor and specify some intentions other than plastic vs. paper.

Things that already would be easy to carry from the cart to the trunk to the cupboard DO NOT BELONG inside another bag. This includes milk, juice and water jugs; six packs; bread; and anything in a net like oranges or potatoes.

(Speaking of potatoes, thanks to whatever "Pandora farmer" brought in a big bag of the little golden nuggets today and left them here at The Courier for free. Rock ON!)

When I zip into the store for one or two things -- usually forgotten things, so my irritation meter is already running high -- I don't even let the baggers get their hands on them. I stuff them into my purse.

I have dreams of a great big garden where I can grow more of my own food and shop less at the grocery store altogether. For now I'm hitting up a coworker for as many brown eggs as she can send my way, and startling my grocery store into responsible bagging practices.