Dear Diary

I listened to part of Prairie Home Companion today, a rebroadcast celebrating spring. I suspect that it might have been a show put together from pieces of other shows, rather than a regular rerun, because Garrison Keillor never announced the original broadcast date. One of the sections was a singer named Sally Dworsky reading from the diary of Mary Theresa Hill, the wife of railroad magnate James J. Hill, about the family's trip to Paris in the spring of 1900. Ms. Dworsky sang some of the sections from which she was reading, like one about "Papa" and their daughters going to the flower market - lovely because it wasn't a song with rhyme and meter, just simple description and music.


I was listening to this diary being read on "PHC" and found myself thinking about Mrs. Hill and her record of every day goings-on, like taking a carriage to Versailles and attending a formal but "quite pleasant" dinner party. I don't imagine that she was writing for posterity, but here were her words about a bothersome cough being read on the radio (a very, very new invention at the time), over 100 years later. She may have been writing to keep a record to tell her friends at home, or just to express herself honestly at a time when she probably wasn't able to do so with other people.


When I was in fifth grade I read Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (both, incidentally, banned at different times). I may have been an impressionable ten year old but those books have had a lifelong influence on me: I started keeping a journal, generally in black-speckled comp books like Harriet uses.


I think I had an idea that someone might read them in forty years and find out how a girl grew up in the 1980s... though I didn't report that much on my neighbors like Harriet and as it's turned out so far I haven't lived through "history being made" like Anne did. I probably also thought that I could later mine the notebooks for characters, plots, and what I later learned is called "an honest voice" whenever I started writing novels. Which was Harriet's plan, too.

FA, Far away

Two months ago I wrote about how I used to identify with being a Financial Aid Administrator. These days I feel like that is far, far away. In fact, I feel closer to my job at Letty Owings, which I left in 1998, than I do to being an FAA, even though I just left that last year.


An acquaintance of mine writes a blog called "Finding the Right College." In January I wrote a post for his blog, and I offered to write another one about how to read award letters. Finally I did, but it took me a couple weeks to actually sit down and do it. When I did, I felt like I was going into the back room in my mom's basement to get something I haven't used in a long time. I had to check FinAid because I remembered hearing that USED was going to raise the loan limit for freshmen but I haven't been paying close enough attention to the CASFAA listserv to know for sure if they did.


There is a huge student-loan scandal going on right now, and I probably was acquainted with people at at least one of the schools involved and I knew lots of people on the lender's side. I know that if I were still an FAA I would be talking about this with my colleagues every day, but I'm out of touch with all but one of my friends from what I think of as my FA days. Because I'm not an FAA now, the scandal is barely a blip on my radar screen.


At the same time, the CASFAA newsletter editor had sent out a request for news for the "Transitions" section of the newsletter. Usually these announcements are people's news about new jobs, marriages, or babies (it seems like there are a lot of people in FA, but in fact it's a small industry: If you didn't work with someone once, someone you work with now used to). I decided to send in a little announcement about what I'm doing, and I really had to work hard to come up with something that sounds like I plan to return to higher ed at the end of this "year on." What I sent in was pretty weak, but it was something.


It was hard to write the "Transitions" thing because I'm not totally sure I will return to FA. Anything can happen in a year and no one knows what's going to happen (least of all me, which is why this blog is called "Always Learning" and not, for example, "Always Right") so I'm not shutting the door in any way. Like I said above, though: FA seems far away. It feels like I'm moving in a line away from it rather than in a parabola.

Striking It Rich... And Just Striking

The big news yesterday was that by the end of the first quarter, Hillary Clinton had raised $26 million dollars and Barack Obama had raised $25 million dollars for their respective campaigns for president.


Fifty-one million dollars. $51,000,000. That's a lot of money, to buy ads, to print flyers and postcards, to pay campaign workers, to travel, and to do all the other stuff candidates do to get people to vote for them. Not only does not everyone vote for one candidate, but a lot of people just don't vote at all, wasting a lot of that money.

+++

The teachers in Hayward started striking today for better pay. What's at issue is that the teachers want a 16.84% pay raise and the Hayward Unified School District, as of this morning, was offering between 7% and 8.6%. They already gave a 16.84% raise to a couple of superintendents last year and the teachers are asking for the same amount. It should be noted that teachers pay 100% of their health benefits; a teacher I spoke with today said she spends a third of her salary on benefits for herself and her children.


It seems that a lot of students and parents are honoring the strike, with so few students and substitutes showing up at Mount Eden High that administrators tell the students to either go home or work in the school's gym. Parents saw the striking teachers at Lorin Eden Elementary and didn't drop off their kids.


I could not find out how many regular, full-time teachers are in the district, but the Hayward USD includes twenty elementary schools, five middle schools, and three high schools (as well as two adult schools and student assessment centers).


$51,000,000 divided by 33 is a little over $1.54 million dollars per school.

Corporate education

I've been following the discussion and debate about the reach of corporations into schools, ranging from Coke machines in the hallways to Channel One's commercials in the classrooms. There is certainly the position of the cash-strapped school districts, which can receive a portion of proceeds from vending machine sales, or which need "someone else" (read: fast food companies) to manage their cafeterias so they don't have to pay for workers, and sometimes need some inexpensive (free) way to engage students in learning. There are also the people who wonder about the health of the kids when they're drinking and eating food with high fat and high sugar content - food that kids would eat if they were able to leave campus at lunch, and who worry about a captive TV audience. I had heard that companies were providing classroom materials, but that they were mostly science or environment programs with questionable objectivity.


Full disclosure: I went to high school years before Channel One, and anyway we only had four TV sets in the whole place. Hostess stuff was available for purchase and I usually got an apple pie three times a week. Few people ever left campus for lunch, because it was only 36 minutes long and the nearest McDonald's was 15 minutes away. When people left campus at lunch time it was to sit in someone's car and make out, smoke dope, or drink wine. I didn't do any of those things so I never left campus.


Yesterday at the library I was helping a third grader with his reading comprehension homework (the first part of which was me saying, "Settle down and read this so you don't have to do this later"). The article he was reading was about the Wham-O toy company. The first paragraph was a short overview of the company, and each following paragraph described one toy for which Wham-O is famous, without actually naming the toy. On the back side of the page, there was a message to the parent about how the purpose of the exercise was to determine if the student could figure out the main message of the article. There were also some questions the student had to answer:

What are the three toys described in the article?

What is the main thing you remember about Wham-O from the article?

What is your favorite Wham-O toy? Hint: Which Wham-O toy do you have at home?


My student had never heard of a Slip-n-Slide so I just told him the answer. I don't usually do that but it's not a very common product around here, and he knew the other two were the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. Without any prompting from me he wrote that the main thing he remembers from the article is that "Wham-O makes great toys" and that his favorite Wham-O toy is the Frisbee, "because," he said, "that's the only one we have."


It was so obvious to me that this article, probably provided free of charge to the school, was really about creating brand recognition in the 7-to-9 year old set. So now I've seen it with my own eyes.

*For the record, this student does not attend a public school.

More thoughts on the Seder

Last night's Seder plate, clockwise from left: Lamb shank; parsley; matzo; roasted egg; charoset; horseradish; an orange in the center. Manishewitz Concord Grape Wine and Kedem Grape Juice are the traditional beverages, though most people prefer a wine that isn't as sweet as Manishewitz.


Having had some time to mull over what I was feeling last night, I'm following up.


Firstly, that warm feeling was the feeling that I was sitting with Shmeen and her family even though we are a couple hundred miles apart from each other. That's community!


I've thought more about why the phrase "This is what G-d did for me when He brought me out of Egypt" (which is how I learned it, a slightly different version than the one we used last night) strikes such a chord with me. It's because it says that there is nothing between me and the Divine; that the Divine is directly interested and paying attention to my life. I call this the Universe, but the idea is the same: Wasn't it Gandhi, a Jain, who said that God is known by many names?

Passover Seder

I attended a Seder this evening for the first time in several years, and a Seder on the first night of Passover for the first time in many years.


I literally got a warm feeling thinking that as I was at the home of friends in Oakland, Shmeen and her family were doing the exact same thing we were doing: Telling the story of the Exodus. And it wasn't just us, my group and Shmeen's, but Jews all over the west coast were sitting down to the Seder. It seems that each Seder is a little different, depending on not just the kind of religious observance each group keeps, but also on the family traditions and rituals, new and old, that have become part of the Seder. Additionally, people add and subtract from their family Haggadah as they incorporate their own beliefs, practices, and parts of other Haggadot.


In the past the part of the script that has meant the most for me is in response to the wicked child or the wicked person, who asks, "What is this [celebration, story, observance] to you? [Why do you tell this story of being led out of Egypt?]" The answer is, "It is because of what G-d did for me when I went forth from Egypt." I'm not a religious person and I don't even believe in that God, but for some reason, it has always felt like the line between me and my ancestors is direct and tangible.


This evening, however, the piece that struck me was when I read (we passed the leadership around the table):

"...For it has not been just one person alone who has stood against us to destroy us;
but in every generation, groups and movements have arisen who have sought to destroy us.
In each generation, we have come together with the help of the Holy One and sustained each other and were delivered from their hands."


Perhaps because this is the first Seder I've attended that was specifically designed for a queer group, which we were, with our personal awareness of and experiences with oppression and freedom. Perhaps it was because I've read a couple of books about the Nazi era recently, about those who were not saved ("The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million") and those who were ("Schindler's List").


I will be writing more about this tomorrow when I have had some time to think all of this through.

Following up on forgetting

I received my inheritance from my grandmother with a formal note from my aunt on Thursday. It brought up a bunch of crap about how I'm angry that my aunt is angry at me and has not accepted my apologies (as I've already discussed). I'm also sad that there is someone out there who doesn't like me when I have done EVERYTHING I can think of, everything I've been trained to do, to close the loop and make it better. Part of it is also that my aunt stands between me and No and anything of my father's that my grandmother had (photos, letters, etc.) and that by all rights No and I should receive. I was talking to my mom about "the thing with my aunt" and really, her advice was to just let it go, because why would I want to fix a relationship with someone as "toxic" (her word) to me as this aunt?

Mom is right. I think I've felt upset because I've felt an obligation to this aunt because she is Dad's sister. But I'm her dead brother's daughter and who knows what she's feeling. My mother is a saint to have maintained a connection with my dad's family for the sake of No and myself, because the relationship with them was difficult for her.

Mom said that she would talk to my aunt about anything Noah and I "should" have. I think my aunt might think she should have them because he was her brother, but Mom says my aunt's mellowed as she's gotten older. Nothing in my experience as an adult leads me to think she is generous at all. But we'll see - and at least I don't have to feel responsible for that conversation.

As nice as it is that she sent our inheritances, I am more interested in photos and stuff. When I was there in '96 our grandmother gave me the yarmulke and tallit that Dad wore for his bar mitzvah, as well as a few pictures, one of which is below:


I immediately gave the yarmulke and tallis to No, even though I knew he wouldn't use them. Maybe he and KT will have a child who will choose to bar or bat mitvah and will wear them.


So I am letting go of the aunt thing. Watch me...