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.

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?

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)

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!

My school in particular has more (pointless) meetings than any business or organization I’ve ever seen.  My teacher once asked me, “Do you think Obama has as many meetings as we do?”  And yet, no one ever has any idea what’s going on, and there is zero communication between the government people and the school administrators and the teachers.  No decisions seem to be made, no resolutions are found, no terms are met, and there is lots of mindless blabber and bickering.  (This is what I can piece together from teacher accounts of meetings and from the fact that they go into meetings to solve a problem and the problem never gets solved; We language assistants are never included in the staff meetings, and this past year were never even included in bilingual meetings, despite being an integral and government-appointed piece of the bilingual program.)

While my school has nothing of the sort, my boyfriend’s school (and therefore, I assume, some other ones) had a class specifically for immigrant students to help them learn the language, culture, and to adjust, and it was mandatory to stay in the class for several months.  Something like this is essential, especially when these kids are plopped into bilingual schools and are having to deal with a whole set of problems in addition to adjusting to the country’s native language and culture.

My school has the most ridiculous, the laziest, the most good-for-nothing social workers/counselors/whatever I’ve ever encountered.  Not only was one of them far too old to so much as eat without getting half of her food all over her face (which was filled with Botox or some other filler), and the other liked to bop around the school in sheer white pants and a black thong, but I’ve never seen people in their field seem so wholly uninterested in what they were supposed to be doing.  Support for our special-needs students or students having problems at home was sporadic if existent at all, incomplete, half-hearted, and a total failure.

While still not the healthiest thing out there, lunchroom food served to the kids is a lot better than the processed pancakes, sausages, corndogs, and strange square pizza that didn’t even taste like pizza that I remember from my childhood cafeteria.  At this school, kids have seats, tablecloths, and plates and silverware at the table, and are served their food, rather than going through a line to get it.  Also, they don’t choose what they eat.  They are served a whole meal and are urged by the monitors to finish it (sometimes with threats of punishment).

Some kids are naturally really awesome, some are naturally pretty boring, and some are naturally really shitty.

A lot of people at my school –Spanish colleagues included– get very frustrated by the misuse of resources (like us assistants).  As far as I know my school has more money than my boyfriend’s, and we had a substantial library of English resources, tons and tons of new reading material and science books all the time, and three capable assistants, but none of these things were used very wisely.  Conversations with Spanish teachers affirmed that our school has lots of great things or at least access to great things that other schools don’t, but just has no idea how to use them.

One resource that’s lacking is technology.  It’s probable that there are schools in Madrid with few to no computers at all, but for a school that has computers, has the ability to upgrade them, and has no problem buying a new laminating machine TWICE when people can’t figure out how to work the one we have, the state of operating systems and Internet in our school is sad.  They toot the computer lab so that classes come down to use it, but then you pair up sixteen kids on computers and set them up to use the Internet for what should be a fun, educational activity, and the Internet won’t work on most of them, and half of the computers will barely even run, and the entire hour is a bust.

As there are very few Spanish kids in a lot of these inner-city schools, some of those Spanish students have Spanish parents that get all hoity-toity about being Spanish.  I’m not supposed to meet with the parents at parent-teacher conferences, which is unfortunate because I would love to let them know that most of the immigrant kids who already had to learn a second language are way better at English than their pure-blooded child.

I suspected and then was told by other Spanish teachers that the public school system doesn’t care much about the arts.  Art classes, as I’ve mentioned a few times in various posts, are pretty pathetic, and supplies don’t amount to much more than popsicle sticks and construction paper.  Many schools have their art classes taught by teachers that teach other things and for whatever reason are teaching one or two hours of art.

There’s much more affection between teachers and kids than what we’re used to.  There are lots of hugs, which is nothing new to us (twenty kids wrapping themselves around your legs… or torso, in my case, since they’re almost as tall as I am), but as Spain is a kissing culture, it’s normal on a birthday or after receiving a present from a student to give a kiss on each cheek.  (I heard my coordinator saying that you even have to be careful about that, as you would expect to hear in the States, but she’s the only person I’ve ever heard express that opinion.)

There are a lot of teachers, particularly the older ones, who are not fans of the bilingual program.  For one thing, those that didn’t study English –and as more and more schools are made bilingual every year–  are increasingly unqualified to teach classes or teach in schools, and it would be difficult for them to learn English at their age.  What’s more, while in theory I think the bilingual program is a great idea, I find that in some schools, like mine, there is so much importance placed on it that other important things are neglected (such as being proficient in Spanish, since we’re in Spain, or telling time).

Generally in Madrid’s bilingual schools, English language, science, music, and art are all taught entirely in English.  Teachers and assistants are not supposed to speak any Spanish with the kids in any of these classes, and we assistants are actually supposed to pretend we don’t speak any Spanish.  But this can cause problems.  They’re using actual textbooks for science.  Sometimes the language is difficult.  Sometimes the kids know what something is in Spanish, and kind of know what something is in English, but don’t realize that they’re the same thing.  If it’s a bilingual school, shouldn’t the goal be to understand the subjects in both languages?

We’ll be getting a new administration next year, so I’m anxious to see what’s to come.  It’s possible that the new people will be coming from elsewhere, in which case we won’t really know what to expect, but it would be pretty difficult to be worse than this year.  For the moment, I expect next year to have an entirely different feel.

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.

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.)

And this doesn’t have anything to do with wealth or poverty.  Most of the students at my school don’t come from money, and the few who do have active imaginations are no exceptions.  Likewise, some of my students that seem to be better off have the same dearth of imagination as their poorest classmates.  I have a student who always has new clothes, but her mother wouldn’t even buy her science book and she had to get the whole thing photocopied.  (This one actually does have a rather active imagination, but it comes in the form of pathological lying, which is in a slightly different category and is not good.)  You can give a child intellectual stimulation without having an abundance of material resources to offer.  And you can do it easily.  Do you remember those commercials in the U.S. where there was a dad or a mom saying weird things like “square” and “yellow” while walking down the street, and then it turned out that they were talking to a baby and the whole moral was that you can learn from everything?  Like that.  I live in an enormous, vibrant city, full of interesting people, birds, dogs, dog poop, billboards, newspapers, posters, businesses, different languages wafting by with the wind, all of which can be fascinating to a child (and an adult).  If you can’t leave the house, inside your own home there are whole other worlds.  A hole in the wall could mean so many things; you can make forts with sheets and pillows; you can sit there not moving and just tell stories; you can talk about the day, something so basic and normal that I don’t believe many of my kids even get to do, either because they spend most of their time at home alone, or because their parents just don’t care how their day was.

I don’t pretend that every child is a brilliant thinker or artist or writer or musician or whatever, because every kid is different and some are naturally more creative than others.  But generally, it seems like most children with sufficient stimulation at home will, if given the chance, use their imagination to the extent that they are able.

Last week I got the opportunity to come up with a project for the second grade’s art class.  I immediately began thinking of something that would encourage them to use their imagination, and I was immediately brought back to one day at my middle school, M.Y.A. (now in a different building together with the elementary kids as Ann Arbor Open).  We were lucky enough to have a cartoonist —I can’t for the life of me remember his name but if anyone from my class can, let me know— come in and talk about his job and about how he created his cartoon characters.  He whipped out an easel and proceeded to scribble all over it.  Then, in a matter of seconds, he quickly turned each scribble into some form of creature.  Any kind of creature.  This was more than a decade ago, and I remember it vividly. In fact, I still do this exercise on my own from time to time.  I decided that this was a perfect thing for the second graders to do (and I may try to do it before the year’s up with my third grade class).

I wanted them to make three scribble creatures and one book cover, from a piece of paper folded in half twice, and make a little book of scribble creatures.  We ended up not binding them and just folding them instead, but that part was secondary anyway.  We started by explaining what to do, then I drew some scribbles on the board and got the kids’ opinions on what it could be.  I felt that once they were told that it could literally be anything, and saw that I approved of anything and everything they shouted out, they were encouraged.  Getting them to do their own scribbles and be equally creative is another thing, especially for these kids who are not accustomed to scribbling, but I expected that.  One of my creatures on the sample I’d made was a green duck with yellow antennae.  One of my students couldn’t get over how weird it was and kept saying she didn’t like it and didn’t understand why it was green and why it had antennae.  It’s possible that she has some strange aversion to green birds with antennae due to a traumatic experience, and there are no rules saying that one must enjoy green birds with antennae, but I did my best to emphasize that the fact that it was an odd duck (haha, I’m full of ‘em today…well, two) was not enough to dismiss it.  (Something she should empathize with, as she’s the one of the two Jews in Spain.)

The project was as much of a success as I could have hoped for with only one day.  But will it stick?  What do these kids go home to?  To me it seems like it would be natural for a child who spends a lot of time alone, or whose parents don’t pay them much attention, to develop even an overactive imagination, and I know that to be the case with other children I’ve met in the U.S.  But if that imagination is neglected at home and stifled at school?  I don’t want these kids to think that being brilliantly creative is absolutely necessary in life, but these kids are already made to feel that they won’t amount to much, so I worry that if they don’t use their imagination to dream about their life, their future, about the things they’d like to do, they won’t even think about pursuing them, and they might not even realize that someone like them could achieve them.

Throughout the year I have tried to come up with ideas to help stimulate their creativity, with some, but limited, success.  Regina, my fabulous teacher, and I might read them a story, then give them a free-drawing assignment to depict their favorite part of the story, or an alternate ending, or whatever.  But progress is slow when we can’t be with them all day.  My hope is that one day, maybe by sometime next year, they can at the very least learn that when working with me, they are free to use their imagination and I will not give them a low grade on a writing assignment if they say they want to be an alien when they grow up or if they draw a landscape with purple grass and triangle clouds, or if they want to use their creativity to create the most realistic landscape they can muster.  Because that takes imagination too, especially when you’re only eight and still developing your motor skills.

I’ve had this post in my mind for a few months now, and have thought just as long about what its title should be.  ”Forcing creativity” doesn’t mean forcing kids to do a certain thing with their creativity; on the contrary.  I picture the imagination as a muscle that needs nourishment and needs exercise.  Some people might be genetically disposed to a well-formed one, but the rest need to develop it, and everyone needs to learn how to use it constructively (see the fourth paragraph about the pathological liar).  These kids just seem to need an extra push.

I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in environments that encouraged imaginative thinking, but my experience does bring some shortcomings.  For example, I cannot imagine any of my teachers in elementary school telling me that a picture I drew (with the obvious exception of kids drawing bloody murder scenes or other we-need-to-call-the-school-shrink things) was not acceptable, or that my dream of being an astronaut was unrealistic.  I cannot imagine my dad not asking me about what I did at school (even if, as I got older, my answer was, “Nothing.”), or my mom not  asking me what I thought about things going on in the world.  I cannot imagine my mother not reprimanding another adult for telling a child coloring to stay inside the lines; She always told me, “Fuck the lines!”  Okay, she didn’t actually use those words, but now that I’m an adult, I know that that’s exactly how she feels.

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
• 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.

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.)

But I’ve noticed something unusual.  For all the dislike and even hostility you find here toward other races and ethnicities, regular Spaniards don’t seem to be bothered by the African salesmen.  I’ve watched black travelers sit down in the Metro and those seated next to them get up and move away.  I’ve heard plenty of derogatory comments from both Spanish youth and perpetually disgruntled senior citizens.  And yet, as far as I’ve ever seen, these men (and they are almost all men; to date I’ve only ever seen one woman, and that was yesterday) are not harassed by passersby and those who do business with them seem to do so cordially.  I’m sure unpleasant exchanges happen, but they mustn’t be too common because I’ve never witnessed it and I’ve never heard stories of them happening.  People watch where they’re walking to make sure they don’t step on the goods.  People try things on and ask how much things cost.  I’ve never seen a Spaniards tattle their location to a cop, although I feel confident that that would be more likely than a lay person choosing to harass them.  I’ve never seen a citizen take the liberty of trying to grab one to hand him over to a police officer.  People get out of their way when they come running from the cops.  There are even times when I’ve been tempted to warn them if a cop’s nearby, although it’s usually not necessary because their lookouts are such acute watchdogs.

Why is this? It can’t be a manners thing because, if you’ve ever been to Spain, you know that Spaniards don’t go out of their way to be polite.  Is it because Spanish racist talk is more fluff than truth?  Is it because they are providing goods that Spaniards want?  If they were just loitering or roaming could we expect Spaniards’ behavior to be different?

I have one other example.  There is another group of immigrants, either Portuguese or Brazilian or both, all black, that stand outside grocery stores asking for donations.  Along with making basically nothing to hand out fliers that immediately get thrown away outside the Metro, it’s probably one of the lousiest jobs there is.  Usually they’re holding an issue of the La Farola (I haven’t found a website for it), a periodical that features articles, reports, and poems by the homeless.  They stand outside the door, repeating their good-day-would-you-donate-some-money mantra, usually not making eye contact, just waiting for someone who’s feeling particularly charitable that day.  The closest supermarket to our apartment has a few regulars that are out there just about all day every day, and I occasionally give them a buck.  Partly because I know they need it and their cause is just and because that job must be really crappy, but also because after a while you start to feel awkward walking past the same guys every single day, knowing they see you stopping at the ATM and buying things, and not giving them any money.  Anyway my point is, out of all the people you could think of, the people I see give to them most frequently are… the grumpy, frequently racist old people!  Why?  Do I just happen to witness the beneficent acts of the non-racist elderly in my neighborhood?  Are they so old that they feel charitable toward anyone less fortunate, regardless of their color or ethnicity?  Maybe they’re blind and they don’t realize whom they’re giving to?  (UPDATE: I’ve found an article from 2006 from someone with a different experience than my own.  Go here.)

Regardless of the reasons, I want to think that it’s a good thing, and things may at least be going in the right direction.  Of course I don’t see the meat of what goes on in the life of an immigrant who sells goods on the street, but there seems to be at least some sort of harmony downtown between them and the cops and the pedestrians.  And if a Spanish child sees their grandparents give money to the men outside the grocery stores, maybe they will be more likely to try to make a difference when they grow up.

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)

Andrew Sullivan led me to a post on Secular Right by John Derbyshire attempting to lay out a a secular argument against gay marriage.  I was thinking of all these things I wanted to write in response, but was surprised to see that several people had already put many of my thoughts into words, so I recommend you browse their more thorough comments.  Meanwhile, here are the things that get me the most in Derbyshire’s arguments (bold words are my doing):  

There really is a slippery slope here. Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose futher redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team? Are all private contractual relations for cohabitation to be rendered equal, or are some to be privileged over others, as has been customary in all times and places? If the latter, what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status, sanctified as it is by custom and popular feeling?

Seriously?  Ponies and sisters?  Are people still trying to legitimately use that argument?  Incest and marrying animals?  Really?  While Derbyshire alludes to having had gay folk in his neighborhood growing up and going to school with some, does he actually know any gay people?  Several SR readers made a good point: that a major flaw in Derbyshire’s argument is that he takes for granted the “always” nature of marriage, which is a social construct and has gone through both creation and dramatic changes during human civilization, and which still enjoys an abundance of different interpretations in various cultures around the world.  A Daily Dish reader said it perfectly: “I also love the casual assertion that ‘marriage is by nature the union of a man and woman,’ as if marriage is some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon like evaporation or mitosis.“

Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.”  There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

I was raised in a town with a substantial openly gay population, we have gay family friends, I went to schools with openly gay and bisexual classmates and had classmates with gay parents, my parents are not homophobic.  There was never a time growing up where I wondered if homosexuality was weird or unnatural or simply a lifestyle choice, nor was there ever a time growing up where it made me uncomfortable.  I am wired not to be attracted to other women, but that doesn’t mean that I am wired to disapprove of or be disgusted by homosexuality.  He’s also taking a big leap with regard to what is normal in every culture.  It’s true that the more dominant cultures in the world seem to have similar views and the tendency to oppress homosexuals, but there are myriad small cultures all over the world that have differing views on gender, virginity, premarital sex, and sexuality in general.  

Also, so, what, that makes it okay?  Don’t we tout ourselves for being all highly evolved and intelligent and with a conscience?  Why should this be the time to decide to just let our “nature” take its course and deny our friends and family their deserved happiness?  And as astute commenter Joe said, Derbyshire mysteriously manages to ignore the fact that “homosexuality is also part of human nature, as well as many other species’ natures.”

If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

Like several readers who commented on the post, I understand his words (although it took me a while because, what?) but don’t really see where he’s trying to go with this.  And he says that if we all had high IQs that we might have a society that’s totally cool with gay marriage, so (1) is he saying he has a low IQ?  (2) Doesn’t that kind of imply that gay people and gay-friendly people are smarter than everyone else and therefore SHOULD get married and raise babies to make the world a better place??  And anyway, as commenter Dave says, “can’t that institution just be ‘marriage’? What need is there to refine it to ‘heterosexual marriage’?”

Let people live and love as they want.

Right…  I’m sorry, how is this a valid argument against gay marriage?  Sometimes when I listen to these people I feel like I’m playing that game where one person has a phrase but they have it in different words and the other person knows what the real phrase is, and the person keeps saying the slightly different words that sound EXACTLY the same but they still don’t get it, and you’re just sitting there like, “YES.  DON’T YOU HEAR YOURSELF?  YOU’RE SAYING IT.  WHY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF YOUR OWN MOUTH.”  (Please, if anyone, like Hayley, could remind me what the game is called, let me know because now it’s driving me crazy.)  (UPDATE: Thanks to my savior/friend Meg, who has told me that the game I’m talking about is Mad Gab.  You should all play it.  I’ve discovered that you can play it online here.)

Human nature is what it is, though, and no-one of a conservative outlook can take lightly an attempt to carry out a radical overhaul of a key human institution, in a direction pointed directly at widespread (though I think normally mild) human emotions of disdain and disgust.

Again, a little presumptuous with the whole ‘marriage has always been the same since forever’ thing.  As commenter Torrentprime pointed out, plenty of other past shifts in marriage in Western culture, like the shift from marriage for dowry or property or convenience to the choice of marriage for love, amounted to more sweeping changes to the practice as we know it than allowing same-sex couples to get married — nothing about the vow of commitment, fidelity, and love changes by allowing same-sex couples in on it.  Whether their arguments are secular or not, these odd assumptions keep coming from people like Miss California Carrie Prejean and her new sponsor, the National Organization for Marriage, who are “just here to protect marriage … who respect marriages and people who support it.”  The NOM campaign complains that their “freedom will be taken away.”  Gay marriage will, apparently, literally take away their freedom.  I’m not sure what they actually think gays want to do to marriage.  Because the ‘marriage is for babies’ argument obviously doesn’t hold.  People who “hold marriage dear to [their] heart”, like Miss California, should be happy that so many people want to celebrate love and family and commitment by getting married. They want to be able to BE MARRIED like the rest of us can BE MARRIED.