The Sex Machines

A couple days ago, two videos I’d watched on one of my favorite websites, TED, and sent to my parents inspired my dad to email me with some philosophical, ponder-the-future questions, and later my mom chimed in, too. I decided to turn our exchange into a post, showing their questions and my responses, though my responses were immediate and could change with more thought or if offered slightly different questions or scenarios.  I encourage you to watch the videos below, but make sure you have half an hour because the second is about twenty minutes and it is well worth it to watch the whole thing.

Here is the first one I watched, in which we see how robots can be given human faces and programmed to imitate the facial signs of emotion:

And here is the second, where we watch how some magical wizards were able to program a computer to “have” human physiology, thereby making GCI movements and reactions in characters automatic, realistic, and sometimes unpredictable:

After the first one, I was fascinated and a little creeped out. After the second one, I was blown away, and was really wishing, as often happens when I watch videos on TED, that I were good at math and hard science… In eighth grade my algebra class made me cry, and in high school the only reason I passed chemistry was because of extra credit (which was in no way related to chemistry). In physics, I was golden until we got to projectiles and then I died.

Here are my dad’s questions, along with my responses, then some highlights of what my mom had to say, after the jump.

Masks

Those of you who know me might know that Halloween is my mother’s favorite holiday; those of you that know my mother would certainly know how much that makes sense.  Last year, as Spain’s Halloween is in its infancy and the majority of the decorations and costumes to be found here are generic and shameful, my mom sent me some fun stuff that I could bring to my class of third-graders.  Among those things were two masks, merely plastic with elastic strings attached but creatively painted and definitely creepy.  One was a Medusa with brightly colored hair-snakes and a menacing countenance, and one was an eerie, yellow monkey-ish thing.  Both fit my face perfectly, which was disconcerting.

I saved these masks and the other stuff she sent me to bring to school this year, along with new Halloween stuff she sent me last week.  On Thursday night, the 30th, I carved a small pumpkin and roasted the seeds all by myself for the first time (my pumpkin’s face came out looking mildly retarded, but that was more due to the one crappy knife I had to work with, difficult to maneuver).  On Friday morning I packed up the carved pumpkin and the seeds, some monster finger puppets, some rubbery body parts, and other assorted goodies, then remembered the masks and threw them into a pretty, reusable bag that is highly functional and very handy, as it folds up and snaps together to stuff into your regular bag, but it doesn’t have a zipper or snaps.

I hopped onto my regular train for my hour-long commute to my school, with my Halloween bag on the floor under my seat and between my feet.  My main concern was that we didn’t have too bumpy of a ride, lest my bag go flying and my homely pumpkin shatter, leaving the children on the train scarred from the Halloween Train Carnage.  Although probably only American children would be affected by that — it turned out that most of my kids had never even seen a pumpkin in real life.  Anyway, about halfway through the ride I thought I heard something hit the floor either under my seat or near me, but it sounded kind of like a ball, and I didn’t see anything rolling around, and I glanced down at my bag on the floor and didn’t see anything hanging precariously out of my bag.  We arrived at my stop, I grabbed my stuff, pushed my way through the stinky people with the bad morning breath and went up the escalator.  Nearing the top, I glanced into my bag and noticed that my masks were gone.  I felt momentarily helpless and devastated, and looked back at the train as it disappeared and I knew I couldn’t go back.

I felt like crying for a second.  But then I thought about what would inevitably happen at some point later that day.  I started chuckling to myself imagining some Spaniard (meaning someone still relatively unaccustomed to Halloween festivities) finding two strange, terrifying Medusa and monkey masks under their seat on the train.  I decided that that was well worth me losing the masks.

Has dying of old age died of science-induced obsolescence?

The past month has been a particularly brutal one for my family with the deaths of multiple members.  These deaths were a mixture of expected and kind of unexpected, and like any death, have brought about discussion, reflection, and introspection.

When loved ones die, even those who are quite old, we want to know why.  Knowing can be difficult, because in some cases the death could have been prevented, or you wonder if it could have been; you wish you had known, you would have bugged him more about drinking or smoking or his cholesterol, or nagged her more about taking her medicine.  My grandmother had numerous health problems, which grew worse during the last few years, but as I was growing up and she was already well into old age, she was supremely fit, swam several times a week, had a healthy diet, and climbed ridiculously non-regulation stairs up to her apartment on a daily basis.  She was in her nineties when she died three weeks ago, and upon her death, in the conversations that arise from grief and from memories and from the need to have both meaningful and pleasant conversations in a time of heartache, my father and I attempted to hash out a line between her symptoms — between those of senescence and those of illness.  The more we talked, the more we came back to the idea that people no longer want to accept old age as a cause of death; that our scientific and technological progress, combined with our natural curiosity and need to know and categorize, necessitates an exact cause of death —whatever it was that caused the heart to permanently cease beating at that exact moment— regardless of whether or not it gives the most accurate picture of why death has occurred in general.

I’ve been scanning current obituaries for Detroit and from the New York Times, and for those remembering people of age 79 or older, a specific cause of death, frequently cancer, is usually given.  I found one in the NYT, for a man who was 93 –one year older than my grandmother– that did say he died of natural causes; ditto for one in Detroit Free Press of a former cop, 94.  But another in the NYT, of a man who was 102, gave cancer as the cause of death.  At 102?  Are they sure?  It’s not impossible; people do live to be 115.  But at 102, isn’t it possible that the cancer was secondary, if not in this particular person than in others?  Is the idea that sometimes we just die of natural causes, even if we do have other health problems, something that was reserved for a more primitive people without the know-how to find an exact cause of death?  Is the idea becoming too folksy for a culture with our scientific and technological knowledge?  It’s as if we’ve convinced ourselves that if it weren’t for things like cancer, we would all live to be 120, if not forever.

Out of the health problems from which my grandmother suffered, any or all of them could have been a key factor in her death — that is, her death in the moment that it happened.  Elderly people do die of things that, if absent, would likely have allowed their host to live longer.  But even people in their nineties (or eighties, or even seventies, if we’re going by reported life expectancies) in optimal health probably won’t be around for more than a few more years.  Because we age, and we die.   Our bodies can only last for so long.

So, the question at which my dad and I arrived was this: Isn’t there be a point where a cause of death may really be just secondary, a side effect of old age?

Recent intriguing searches

Here is my latest gathering of interesting searches that lead people to my blog:

• two best friends that are girls that are (for some reason WordPress cuts off long searches; I just really want to know what the rest of it says…  Lovers?  Popular?  Sluts?  Ugly?  What is it???)

• “mischa barton” stigma “pretty people” (this just makes me laugh because if the person searching is thinking that Mischa Barton falls under the category of People Who Are Stigmatized For Being Pretty, I’m going to have to disagree)

• hi rest girl (Um…  Hello.  What is a “rest girl”?  Or are they looking for “hi-res girl”, and in that case, is this ANOTHER sketchy, pornographic search that leads people to my site?)

• “richard karn” shirtless (again, my mother?)

• raped girls video free (this had three recent views, and as you’ll recall I’ve noted this one in previous posts about searches.  SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.)

• campbell brown, thigh-high boots (Campbell Brown kind of annoys me so I don’t really want to see her much at all; although this might make her more interesting; also, I searched this to see what came up, and there was nothing, so I’m curious to know whether the person searching had heard that there were pics of her in thigh-high boots, or if he or she was just hoping that much)

• should women ever wear overalls (this brought them to my site because of this post; while I’m sure some girls actually can pull them off, I think if you’re asking, the answer for YOU is no)

• update girls (fascinating… an update on ALL girls?  What girls?  I need to know)

• jews in Spain in 2009 (someone bound to be disappointed when they find out that there are but two)

• girls for meddle (please explain, I don’t understand)

• black salesman spain (another person bound to be disappointed, unless they consider the illegal street vendors salesman, in which case, go downtown to Sol and you shall be satisfied)

• i like mean girl (she naughty, she love you long time; or possibly they meant Mean Girls, which led them to this post so possibly they’re looking for fellow Mean Girls lovers?)

• going fishing boat (what?  I searched this and these words appear in “ocean-going fishing boat”, which means that the person searching either doesn’t understand that “ocean” is part of the title, or maybe that they’re looking for a boat with one of those signs that says “Gone Fishin’”)

• harassment by neighbors in spain (I can’t say if this is common as I’ve never had to deal with it, but good luck trying to get anything done about it)

• “leave a comment” “url” entertainment sa (I don’t understand; my favorite part is the quotation marks around two things that practically every site on the Internet contains)

• gay “overalls” (best search ever)

Teachers like Botox, too

And so year one teaching in Madrid has ended.  I covered some topics that were important to me on here, although I didn’t write about my experiences in the school nearly as much as I’d planned.  Luckily I’ll be there next year, too!

Below are some rambling thoughts about this year, and some things I’m looking forward to or thinking about regarding the year to come.  You’ll find that most are complaints, and I’m afraid that simply reflects the reality that I’ve found to be the Spanish public education system and especially my own school, but I will try to include good things, too:

I can say that I ended up blown away by the differences between the Spanish public school system, especially my school in particular, and the American school system in which I was raised.  But whenever I talk to people about this I always preface what I’m saying by acknowledging that there are plenty of terrible schools in the U.S., and there are plenty of districts, particularly in inner cities and areas with large numbers of immigrants, that do not handle public education very well.  Of course I can only speak from my own experiences, but lots of people I know come from education systems similar, at least in their structure, to my own.

I recall many of my teachers in the States spending long hours at home planning activities, making things, grading things.  I recall many of my teachers in the States getting to school well before the kids, and it was normal to drive by my school in the evening and still see some cars in the parking lot or some lights on while a teacher was still working on something.  There are always exceptions, but I can’t say the same for Madrid.  Generally, teachers seem to arrive with the kids and leave with them whenever possible, unless they have a meeting with parents (and if the parents decide to show up).  Most lesson planning seems to be done during the rare free hour during the day, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of long-term activity planning or larger-scale, more complex projects.

I haven’t come across an elementary school that does a yearbook!

Classy tools and morons

Why don’t you like Sarah Palin?  People are ALWAYS asking me this.  (Not really.)  There are lots of reasons, but this thing with David Letterman has really awakened the semi-dormant disgust that I felt toward her all during the latter end of the presidential campaign.  Last night, I saw this (I saw it on Huffington Post, but can’t seem to embed from there):

First of all there’s a semantics issue: Letterman did not call her slutty.  He referred to her look.  Not the same thing.

Anyway here in Madrid I don’t watch our 24-hour news channels, and until I watched this I had no idea who Contessa Brewer was, but I might kind of like her, and I know I like her more than Campbell Brown, who kind of gets on my nerves because she’s alright but I don’t understand why everyone loves her so much.  (Although I was listening to a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! from winter on my iTunes last night and she was the celebrity guest and I have to say that I have a little more respect for her now.)  This Ziegler douche clearly needs a swift kick in the nuts, but I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble.

So then this morning Huffington brought me this:

I wish Letterman hadn’t been so nice, but I SUPPOSE if he REALLY wants people to understand that he doesn’t think raping 14-year-old girls is funny, then it’s okay.  That aside, there are two things about this that really piss me off, and that show Sarah Palin as the vacuous carcass of ridiculousness that I believe her to be.

First: Ziegler went for the sexism angle when Brewer addressed the “slutty” thing and he was all, ‘I dunno, you’re the female, you tell me!’  Look, I would never dare say that there is no sexism in the media, but not every single thing ever said about a female politician is sexist, and just because the word “slutty” is used does not make the statement inherently sexist.  If comedians and entertainers and journalists can endlessly poke fun at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and every one else whose personal shenanigans get brought into the spotlight, then Sarah Palin is fair game.  She wants to be a politician, and she clearly likes the attention, so she can’t be okay with all the other politicians and public figures getting made fun of and then whine when it happens to her.  And if we can all happily make fun of Phil Spector’s terrifying face/hairpieces and Michael Jackson’s disconcerting physical appearance, and Donald Trump’s hair, and Angelina Jolie’s lips, and Pamela Anderson’s boobs, and Larry King’s age, and if we can obsess over what Michelle Obama is wearing every second of the day, then we can make fun of Sarah Palin’s clothes.  Either we’re equal, or we’re not.

Second, and this is the worst: Have we been gossiping about Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter since September?  No.  I don’t even know what that kid’s name is.  The media frenzy has always been over Bristol.  Obviously.  (And who, as Letterman pointed out, WAS knocked up and is now an adult.)  No one in their right mind would ever think that in those jokes Letterman was poking fun at any of Palin’s children other than Bristol.  What does that mean?  It means that the only people bringing up the sex life of her 14-year-old daughter are Sarah and Todd Palin.  No one else.  Now that’s good parenting, good politics, and high class.

UPDATE:

I hate that I’m even paying attention to this, but Sarah Palin went on the Today Show this morning to talk about this “feud”.  Turn the volume down if you’re sensitive to shrill:

To be fair, the first in this post above didn’t play the A-Rod joke, and I hadn’t realized that it was Palin’s younger daughter at the game with her .  (But they look really, really similar, and if I’d seen photos in the paper I probably would have assumed it was Bristol since she’s the one in all the tabloids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others mistook her also.)   And maybe the joke was in poor taste, as Letterman has readily said.  But do you really think that the joke was making fun of Willow Palin?  Is it fair to decide that Letterman thought statutory rape is funny?  I admit that I can’t argue about this one much more because, while I can understand how some might think it crossed the line, I’m a young woman and I simply didn’t find it offensive — in the slightest.  It seems to me that the butts were: Alex Rodriguez, obviously; Bristol Palin, obviously, because she DID get knocked up as a teenager and, because teen pregnancy is generally something that is frowned upon in our culture, we make fun of it, regardless of how tasteful that is; Sarah Palin, because she and her husband exude a certain trashiness while attacking others for having a lack of class, and she would oppose an abortion even if her daughter were raped and she’s a fervent supporter of abstinence-only sex education and was so before her teenage daughter got knocked up.

Her complaints about the “slutty flight attendant” thing hold no water whatsoever.  Putting the word “slutty” before a profession doesn’t necessarily say anything about the profession itself.  Saying she looks like a slutty flight attendant, which she frequently does, just means that she looks like a flight attendant who is slutty.  It would be more insulting to flight attendants if we said that they looked like Sarah Palin, or that Sarah Palin just looked like a flight attendant, because THAT would imply that flight attendants look slutty.  The fact that “slutty” is put before something means we’re qualifying that thing, which we wouldn’t need to do if we felt that all flight attendants were slutty.  We don’t say that a scantily clad woman in cheap thigh-high boots looks like a slutty hooker, we just use “hooker” because, well, duh.  Saying that Palin looks like a slutty flight attendant isn’t sexist, it’s reality.

Ultimately, even if you do decide that Letterman’s joke really was inappropriate, doesn’t Palin’s comment about keeping her daughter away from Letterman void her complaints?  Not only did she initially imply that Letterman might be some sort of pedophile, Matt Lauer immediately gave her the chance to clarify and she didn’t budge.

Okay, hopefully this is the end, unless Letterman needs to defend himself which would be understandable.  But otherwise, please can Sarah Palin just evaporate or something now?  I’m embarrassed to have her speaking out on behalf of my gender.

Forcing creativity

Early in the year I noticed something devastating, something pervasive throughout my classes and my school: A complete and depressing lack of imagination and creativity.  In kids under the age of 12.  Which, if I’m not mistaken, isn’t that supposed to be the time when you have the wildest imagination?  I mentioned it in an earlier post, after discovering when I asked my third-graders what they wanted to be when they grew up, that no one had any interesting ideas.  Actually, they didn’t seem to have any ideas at all.

I’ve seen this manifested in other ways throughout the school year.  I also mentioned in the other post that my kids lack almost any autonomy whatsoever, in part because arbitrary rules are enforced in places like art class, and they are reprimanded for drawing a cloud the wrong shape or for drawing a landscape that doesn’t totally look like a real landscape.  They have art teachers that tell them what color to use, to not draw the line like that but like this, to make the circle rounder (more round?), and the worst of all, finish or correct projects themselves if it’s not to their liking.  (Franco died nearly 35 years ago; clearly these people were born in the wrong decade.  If this intrigues you, you might like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the oppressive artistic environment of Communist Czechoslovakia is described through the experiences of one of the characters.)  Naturally, this also stifles the students’ creativity; they are prevented from using their imagination, until the imaginative parts of their brains are, I imagine (ha), dry and atrophied.  With cobwebs and tumbleweeds.  And echoes.

But of course the schools are only partly to blame.  In fact, I think in this case most of the blame is better placed elsewhere.  Because I do have a few kids with more active imaginations, and these children seem to have some things in common: They get more creative/intellectual/emotional stimulation at home, and/or they like to read.  I have one student who, despite being pesada, always blurting out unfunny tonterías in class, is provided with far more reading materials and exposure to culture than her peers.  Her annoying comments in class drive me up the wall, but I can’t say she’s not creative with them.  (She’s also Spanish, which doesn’t necessarily matter, but given the ethnic makeup of the public schools here, it could also be significant.)  I have another student, with a really crappy home life that I wish I could get him out of, who is malnourished on so many levels at home, yet loves to read and is more concerned with the world and with ultimate truth than most kids his age from any country.  (If it turns out to matter: He is half-Spanish and half-Moroccan.)

Leave me starstruck

There are people who become starstruck at the sight of any famous person.  I might expect to feel a disorienting sense of “Baah, is this really happening?”  but my brain synapses seem to reserve being starstruck for those who I really love and admire, have been following since I was a child, or just for some reason awaken a sense of awe in me.  Actually, out of the small handful of times I’ve seen someone famous (Richard Karn at Arborland when I was a kid –my mom was very excited about that one; saw Judd Nelson two days in a row in L.A. with Ashley and the second time he flipped us the bird for no apparent reason, which first offended us and then we realized that it was awesome; obviously Jeff Daniels at the Cube, which is amazing but normal if you’re in the Ann Arbor area; Monte Nagler at Briarwood Mall, which did actually bring me close to awe; the guy who played Bania on Seinfeld at a restaurant in L.A.; President Palmer in L.A. and he said something to me and Margie about smiling or being serious or something, and this may have meant more to me if at that time I’d been watching 24; also there was this guy; walked right past Hope Davis and Gwyneth Paltrow while they were shooting Proof in Chicago –Hayley stopped with her eyes wide open in the middle of the street; Ethan Hawke at a book signing in middle school –he liked my name, which maybe is a compliment but maybe not anything to write home about because at the time he was married to a woman named Uma; just the other day at Corte Inglés we were at the checkout right next to Blanca Portillo, which was pretty sweet and she’s totally normal; when I was a kid I went to a book signing and met Ray Bradbury with my mom and I think he said something to her about how she should use a different pen, but this was not as exciting to me because I was young and not the science fiction fanatic that my parents are; this is all that occurs to me right now), while they’ve definitely been cause for curiosity and excitement and I will definitely go peek if someone tells me there’s a celebrity around the corner, so far I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who’s left me really, really starstruck.  Like, struck with enough awe that my eyes might get a little wide and my jaw might drop a little and I might fumble over my words a little and I might gush uncontrollably.  Here’s who would leave me starstruck –I’m including living people only– and if you want jump on board and tell me who would leave you starstruck, go ahead…

• George Winston (most of you probably don’t know who he is, but I’ve been listening to him since I was a baby and I love him absolutely and forever and I would probably be speechless for a few seconds if I met him)
• John Cleese
• Tina Fey
• Christian Bale
• Bob Harper
• Rowan Atkinson
• Hugh Laurie
• Stephen Fry
• Emily Deschanel (especially if she were with David Boreanaz or with the entire cast of Bones, except then I’d be disappointed if they were just being themselves and not completely in character )
• Christopher Walken
• Rachel McAdams
• Morgan Freeman
• Bill Cosby
• Phylicia Rashad
• Scott Schuman
• Jon Hamm

• 

  Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

There are probably more.  I’ll add them as I think of them.  Because this is obviously a really deep and significant post that needs constant updating.

There are lots of Africans in Spain but no Jews, don’t let anyone fool you

Overt racism and ethnocentrism are still pervasive in Spain, especially when you compare the country to some of its European neighbors.  The country is still building itself back up since the relatively recent end of Franco’s dictatorship, and is understandably behind the rest of Western Europe in many respects.  It’s common to hear Spaniards young and old —and Spaniards who may otherwise seem quite progressive— complain about the blacks and the Africans and the Latin Americans and the Chinese and the Gypsies and assure you that there are NO Jews in Spain, goddammit.  It’s normal here for police to randomly harass an African or Latin American immigrant, as I’ve talked about in a previous post, demanding their documentation.  (It’s not always misguided, as in certain areas there are large groups of illegal immigrants that do engage in illegal activity, but the way that they get harassed when they are not doing anything suspicious is the kind of thing that sparks lots outrage in the U.S.)

Spain intercepts fishing boat with 229 African migrants on board (The Guardian)

Additionally, here in Madrid there are large numbers of African immigrants, many of whom are illegal.  A normal day downtown finds them lined up on the streets with their sheets spread out to display their various goods, from watches to jewelry to handbags to sunglasses to DVDs and CDs.  Some of these products are fake, others are real and probably stolen, all of the DVDs and CDs appear to be bootlegged.  The salesmen are crafty with their sheets: strings are attached to the corners so that when police are nearby they just pull, and up comes the sheet in the form of a sack, securing all of their goods and allowing them a quick getaway.  They always have a lookout.  I’ve never been able to tell if the lookout communicates by voice or by cell phone, but they are alert and they are fast.  A normal day downtown will also find them running in large packs, usually smiling and laughing, and often with some police officers trailing behind them, eating their dust.  Only once have I ever seen one get caught by a cop, and the moment was fleeting.  The man was slick, and quickly left his bag of goods and slithered out of his jacket and darted off shirtless, leaving the police officer with nothing but a parting gift.  The cop puffed up his chest as he walked away with the goods, but in his smile I couldn’t tell if he was happy with how things went or embarrassed that the man got away from him.  Maybe both.  Passersby examined the jacket on the ground like some sort of specimen in a museum.

The thing is, everyone knows the spots where the salesmen usually are, and if the cops really wanted to arrest all of them they could easily do it.  It almost seems that their job is more to shepherd than to catch.  They just herd them around downtown here and there, looking the other way as long as they don’t stay in the same spot for too long, and occasionally nabbing one to remind us that they’re doing their job.  (Remember that this is just one type of situation in downtown Madrid.  Immigration and illegal immigration are increasing rapidly in Spain, especially Southern Spain.  Problems arise and plenty of people are detained and deported on a regular basis.)

Funny Searches

Here are some more funny searches that lead people to my site, along with my guesses on who they might be:

• “catchy title for september massacre” (someone plotting something and his future fame along with it?)
• “girls update” (how simple and ambiguous, it’s almost poetry…  a feminist existentialist?  A horny male existentialist?)
• “slutty middle school” (a horny middle school searching for architectural porn?)
• “youtube-lesbian kombat legs” (um… ?  I searched this and didn’t find anything that seemed to really match the topic.  Given the spelling, the most common results had to do with Mortal Kombat.  If anyone could tell me what they might have been looking for, please let me know.)
• “recent creepy things in the news” (my mother?)
• “how to deal with lesbians” (hahahahaha)