This Is The Way The World Ends...

So I'm on BART, and there's a couple, some older than me, on a date, and the woman is talking about how her son is all obsessed with how the world is supposed to end in 2012.

"Why 2012?" asks the man. She shrugs.

"Mayan calender," I say. They look at me. "The Mayan calender ends in 2012."

"Do you think that means the world will end then?" the man asks.

"No," I say. "I just know a bit about it because I taught high school. I think they just calculated one cycle after another, but you can only get so far ahead, and the Spanish came in the fifteenth century, and after that, the social infrastructure that supported calculating the calender and recording the calculations was destroyed. Anyway, Harold Camping says the world is going to end May 21, this year."

"My God, that's just a couple of days," the woman says. "Really?"

I show them the poster behind us. I explain that Camping has previously floated one end of world date in 1994. I explain that there's a conflicting group that believes it's May 21 next year. I discuss the Rapture, the various biblical prohibitions against this sort of nonsense...

"You sound really smart," the woman says.

"I wish I was smart about astrophysics or something," I tell her. "Theories about the world ending aren't very useful. Sooner or later, they all get disproven."

Surviving On My Own Terms

Today, I mostly stared into space. I have things to do, I just didn't do them. And then, while rummaging through a box, looking for some spare printer paper, I found a holy card, given to me at a funeral at the beginning of the school year.

I met this woman only once or twice. Our only connections were these: I had taught her son at St. Dympnha's for a quarter, when his regular English teacher was on maternity leave, and we had met in a few planning meeting at St. Attracta's, where I went to work this fall, and she was also employed.

She killed herself the night before school began. It seems ridiculous to say that perhaps my tenure at St. Attracta was cursed--it seems like a pathetic attempt to make drama out of someone else's tragedy--but I will remember always meeting the principal at the door of that first school day, and the words tumbling out of her mouth. I didn't remember who this woman was, at first. I was surrounded by her grieving friends, people who had worked with her for many years. I was responsible for children who'd known her their whole lives.

I have no idea, finally, exactly what pushed her past breaking. She'd struggled with depression for years, a bad, deep, depression that put her in the hospital at one point. It seemed terrifying to me that she did it the night before school started. Was it an attempt not to start the school year, not to begin anything she didn't plan to finish? Was it coincidence? Was the thought of being surrounded by the children again too much? She loved her job, I was told. The kids said they could see when the depression began to get the better of her...she stopped laughing, she stopped playing with them on the playground.

The first year I taught, I was so overwhelmed that I had no idea what was going on around me, but I did notice in February when I got an e-mail saying that one of the eighth-grade English teachers was taking the rest of the year off for health reasons. I barely knew this woman. I assumed she was getting cancer treatment, or going for back surgery. It was the next year that I learned that a combination of terrible job circumstances forced on her by the administration had pushed her depression and other heath issues to the point that, on Valentines' Day, she ended up in a locked psychiatric ward. A forty-year teacher, this woman. An acknowledged giant at what she did.

She came back in the fall to finish off her last year before retirement, and when people asked how she was, at the staff meeting in the fall, she smiled and said, "I'm on three very powerful psychoactive medications, thank you, so I feel fine."

This last winter I was so deep under the depression that I stopped eating. I have never stopped eating in all my life. I lost fifteen pounds. I had them to spare, but it was deeply frightening. I eat when I'm sad, I don't fast. I was so deeply stressed that I was responding to stress in ways I had never done before.

And I thought of them, the woman who killed herself, the woman who was hospitalized.

I told everyone, and laughed, that I quit because I didn't want to end up in the psych ward like my old coworker. But it was deeper than that. I was afraid I wouldn't be hospitalized, that I wouldn't break, that I would become sicker and sicker but never let go of the rope, never give up, and let my self-loathing take over from the inside out, while I kept going to school every day, and pretending I could get the situation under control.

I was pretty sure that something horrifying would happen if I tried to do that until summer.

It's really hard for me to remember how important it was to let go, to let myself find a place to hide and heal. I'm scrabbling for work right now, and my finances are just a mess. It's easy to tell myself that I should never have left a perfectly good job. (Perfectly good=pays the rent).

But I was in serious emotional and physical danger, and I could not stay. I had to start over. I had to be serious about my own survival.

The woman who killed herself left behind a sixteen year old son, one of the best kids I have ever met.

The woman who had the breakdown retired to the Russian River with her husband and took up flyfishing.

And I am going to go on to the next thing, and thank God for the strength to get myself out of harm's way.

Apricots, Poetry and Children

A little late, but this appealed to me:

A Newborn Girl at Passover
by Nan Cohen

Consider one apricot in a basket of them.
It is very much like all the other apricots--
an individual already, skin and seed.

Now think of this day. One you will probably forget.
The next breath you take, a long drink of air.
Holiday or not, it doesn't matter.

A child is born and doesn't know what day it is.
The particular joy in my heart she cannot imagine.
The taste of apricots is in store for her.

Copyright © 1998 by Nan Cohen

We're Not Kidding About Lacking Partners For Peace

I have been looking for a while for a simple pendant shaped like the State of Israel. It's harder than you might imagine. There are a bazillion chais and chamsas and magens david and the like out there, but relatively few Israel-shaped objects, or stylish Israeli flag jewelry.

I wonder if part of the lack might come from our ambivalence, our never-ending debate, about what the borders of the state really are, or will be, or should be. The most aesthetically attractive candidate I have found on my hunt is the piece above, by Israeli jewelry artist Elanit Leder. It's very pretty, I think. Of course, as observant readers will note, it's missing something--two somethings, in fact--all of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Look at it. Look, especially, at that vulnerable, breakable-looking little strip of land between the West Bank and the water. Let me think about this. Deep breaths.

The thing is, you see, I'm on record tentatively supporting a two-state solution. I feel that a two-state solution should in an ideal world be entirely unnecessary, since Jordan and Egypt should have provided full citizenship and equality for their nationals displaced from the land they found themselves no longer occupying after '67--but it seems fairly clear that now that they've had a while to think about that, the answer is still "NO," or, as it tends to come out when people are being emphatic in Arabic, "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!" So perhaps a Palestinian state is something we're going to eventually have to have, because this is far from an ideal world.

Elanit Leder, the designer of this piece, has discussed what its borders mean to her. “Practically, it’s Israel,” she said, “because I cannot go to Gaza and Chevron, and I can’t go to Ramallah. This is the safe Israel for me, so to call it. … This is the Israel that we practice.”

Maybe it would be OK for me to wear the Israel that we practice?

But here's the thing--I go looking for the linking piece of this, the Palestine-shaped charm necklaces out there. There are more of them than there are Israeli ones, for whatever reason. And they have an interesting consistency to them, for maps of a still-hypothetical nation:

Oh, yes. They're not kidding, here and at our demonstrations here in San Francisco, and abroad, when they chant "From the river to the sea."

At the discussion of Elanit Leder's piece in the Forward above, "Steve" got a little insistent with some people:

What my left wing friends often fail to recognize is that while they may make a distinction between say Chevron and Tel Aviv, the other side (the enemy, thank you) does not. Ask the Palestinian types which part of the country should be for the Jewish State. Let me know what they say.

His language offends "Pontigo":

people who say enemy must believe in war, and war isnt the solution for the state of israel.

"Steve" responds: So.. whats the answer to my question? What exactly is the map for the Jewish State that the, uhm, other side, has in mind?

I wish I had a snappy answer for Steve. But as an honest left-winger, I think we both know what the answer is.

Senate Democrats To Obama: Warn the PA

I'm tempted to snark, and say that this can't possibly be the case, since so many people have told me that the Democrats simply hate Israel...but I'll stop there. Hamas remains the spanner in the works of peace for the foreseeable future, and everyone knows it.

Casey, Menendez and Colleagues Call for Evaluation of U.S. Relations with Fatah-Hamas Government, Possible Suspension of Aid to Palestinian Authority

Friday, May 6, 2011

WASHINGTON, DC— U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) today sent a letter to President Obama asking him to evaluate the U.S. relationship with the Palestinian Authority and consider taking stronger measures in condemnation of the recently formed Fatah-Hamas unity government. In the letter signed by 27 Senators, the Senators urged the Administration to stand by its refusal to work with any Palestinian government that includes Hamas and consider cutting aid should the U.S. designated terrorist group remain in the government. Preconditions in U.S. law prevent aid from being provided to a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, unless the government and all its members have publically committed to the Quartet principles.

“It is imperative for you to make clear to President Abbas that Palestinian Authority participation in a unity government with an unreformed Hamas will jeopardize its relationship with the United States, including its receipt of U.S. aid. As you are aware, U.S. law prohibits aid from being provided to a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, unless the government and all its members have publically committed to the Quartet principles. We urge you to conduct a review of the current situation and suspend aid should Hamas refuse to comply with Quartet conditions,” wrote the Senators.

The full text of the letter is here.

Denying Culture, Denying History

Getty Images. People meet to pray at a vigil honoring Ben-Yosef Livnat, murdered by PA police at the Tomb of Joseph

As for the bones of Joseph, which the people of Israel brought up from Egypt, they buried them at Shechem, in the piece of land that Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of money. It became an inheritance of the descendants of Joseph. (Joshua, 24:32)

This is the history of my people. This is the story of how they brought the remains of their ancestor home to their own land from exile, and laid him to rest. Joseph's tomb has been a pilgrimage site for Jews for thousands of years. This is our heritage, in the simplest, deepest sense. A tribal ancestor and hero lies buried there. Like Hebron, like Rachel's Tomb, this is a sacred place to Jews everywhere.

Jews have always made pilgrimages to such places. A friend once told me about her grandfather, who made an annual pilgrimage from Baghdad to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, by train. I imagine this would have been in the 1930s or early 40s. Only Muslims were permitted to actually enter the tomb, but he would go as far as he was allowed, to pray as near to the shrine as he could. Every year the man did this, at enormous expense and danger, to express his piety. This is whole history lost on people who talk big about the Middle East--a total lack of understanding of what it meant to be a Jew before Jews had a country. In Baghdad, as everywhere else in the Middle East, you were a second-class citizen. Even if you had the money for a ticket from Iraq to Palestine, and most didn't, you couldn't expect to be treated like a human being in either place. And usually, you weren't.

Jews continue to travel to Joseph's tomb to pray whenever they can. The tomb rests inside the Palestinian Authority, which has permitted it to be repeatedly vandalized, but pilgrims continue to make their way there. Often they make their way under IDF guard, by prearrangement. Sometimes worshipers, especially young male worshipers, sneak in. That's what happened on April 24, when a group of young Israeli men quietly made their way to the tomb. As they were leaving, Palestinian Authority police officers opened fire on their cars. One man, 25-year-old Ben-Joseph Livnat, a father of four, was killed.

Baz Ratner/Reuters. Ben-Yosef Livnat's funeral procession.

Peaceful civilians, leaving a place of prayer, were gunned down by armed police, murdered in cold blood, and the best excuse that could be come up with were, 'they didn't fill out the correct paperwork'. In the aftermath of the shooting, men from nearby Palestinian communities rioted and set the tomb on fire. (Again, this has happened a few time.) (In theory, Joseph's Tomb is, actually, also a Muslim holy site. How the nominal Muslims who have repeatedly vandalized it justify this to themselves is their problem.)

Another tragedy. Another murder. Another desecration of religiously and culturally sacred space.

A man who posts frequently to a blog I contribute to went a little nuts after Livnat's death, and the assault on the tomb. He said a number of things that I and the other bloggers found offensive, and was asked to tone it down. But while I was clear with him that some of the things he was saying were unacceptable, I also noticed that many other people in the group were simply shocked by his anger. Jews, like women, are not supposed to be angry. We are not supposed to feel fury when we are violated. We are supposed to consider what we did to deserve this.

Indymedia UK posted Palestine Today's comment on the incident: On the ground, Palestinian sources reported that hundreds of Israeli settlers, mostly armed, are roaming around the city of Nablus in the northern part of the West Bank. This motion by the settlers comes two days after an Israeli settler was shot dead in Nablus, believed to be by Israeli military gunfire by mistake.

The settlers was killed when a group of settlers invaded Nablus and attempted to enter the Tomb of Joseph in the city. Palestinian police tried to stop them however, the settlers pointed their guns at the police. Palestinian sources say settlers opened fire in the air to stop the settlers. Immediately a nearby Israeli military post responded to eh source of fire, which led to the settlers' death.

Both Israel and the PA are investigating the incident, but no final report has been issued yet.

So, let me see if I've got this straight--the 'settlers' invaded Nablus, tried to shoot the police, and were themselves gunned down by an Israeli military post? Oddly, that does not seem to accord with any other report, but it certainly does make it clear that the 'settlers' were entirely to blame for their own fate.

I'm angry, and I'm alienated. What is holy to me--a man's life, an ancient place of prayer--is merely a distraction to an ongoing campaign to delegitimize a nation and a people.

Jewish Schoolgirls

Beautiful little girls from the largest Jewish community outside Israel that is left in the Middle East.

(AP Photo--Wearing their Islamic style uniforms, Iranian Jewish school girls, react with joy, at the Fakhr-e-Danesh school of Iranian Jewish community, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, May 3, 2011.)

A Very Strange Blast From The Past

Those of you who recall the bad old days of the Soviet Jewry may appreciate this. It's the Russian Army Chorus. Doing "Let My People Go".

As odd as this particular rendition may seem, I love this song. It brings up so many memories of seders past.

A Chief Rebbetzin?

Over at the Jewish Chronicle of London, Sally Berkovic has an interesting concept: create a female leadership role equivalent to the Chief Rabbi.

Who would you nominate?

Louise Brooks--With Flintlocks

This picture just makes me so happy.

My grandmother once told me that right after high school she had a job at the movie theater in Fresno, CA (this would have been the late thirties, I suppose), and she bobbed her hair and dyed it dark, and wore black eyeliner and white powder, and bright red lipstick. Apparently my grandfather thought she was the chic-est thing he'd ever seen.

I said, "Grandma, you were a GOTH?"

She said, "Is that what they call it now? I was trying to look like Louise Brooks."

Rusty Sneiderman, Debbie Schlussel, Facial Topography and Reality

If you type the name 'Rusty Sneiderman' into Google, the sixth hit down is a post on Debbie Schlussel's overwrought 'conservative' blog, from November of 2010. It was in that month that an Atlanta businessman, Rusty Sneiderman, was murdered in front of a daycare center by a gunman who, at that time, was unidentified.

A police sketch artist, with the help of witnesses, produced a sketch of the killer, which you can see to your left. Debbie Schlussel, inspired by one of her readers, immediately came up with a theory, based on this sketch. She decided that the killing might have been an act of terror--a jihadi assault on a Jew.

Schlussel is careful in her piece not to say flat-out that she's sure this is the answer, but she is clearly pretty enamored of the theory. What is it based on? Glad you asked. It has to do with 'facial topography'.

Schlussel writes: As reader Joe pointed out, the guy looks like a Muslim, mostly because of his beard and some of the facial features. And the man is described as a White man. Few non-Muslim White men wear the kind of beard in the sketch. And few non-Muslim White men have the kinds of facial topography illustrated in the photo.

I'm going to jump right to the obvious heart of this--'looking like a Muslim' means 'looking like an Arab', which in this case means 'big nose and full lips', just in case you were wondering about that. As for the beard, I must confess that it brings to my mind an Amish guy in a watchcap, although the odds that an Amish person was responsible for a murder in Atlanta seemed pretty long even at the time. But Schlussel explained that it was a special Muslim-style beard, and since I am not an expert on Muslim beards, perhaps she is correct. Anyway, what other proof had Schlussel got? Let's move on.

Sneiderman, a Harvard Business School grad active in several charities, was active in the Atlanta Jewish community and was a member of Or Hadash conservative synagogue, there. Was the guy who gunned him down a Muslim? Was it religiously motivated? Police and witnesses say the execution was clearly planned and deliberately targeted Sneiderman. They believe the killer was a professional hit man. No-one said devout Sunni Muslims aren’t hit men. In fact, on 9/11 we got acquainted with 19 of ‘em. And several more since. Hey, maybe this is the one Amish guy in America who snuffs people out for a living. (He saw “Witness,” and didn’t like Harrison Ford sleeping with the Amish Kelly McGillis and turning her into a lesbian?)

OK, let me see. Sneiderman was Jewish. He was killed by someone who targeted him, and planned the killing. And we know that Muslims have, in the past, killed people. Also, the killer, as I pointed out above, was probably not Amish. With evidence like this...

I haven’t drawn any conclusions, Schlussel goes on, (this may be the funniest line in the piece, actually) and we may never know who murdered Rusty Sneiderman. It may turn out to be your average White dude hitman who has a thing for the Planet of the Ape Men. But again, look at the photo. Sure looks like a follower of Mohammed to me. Although it appears that Sneiderman and his wife were typical Jewish liberals (who generally pander to Muslims and serve as their chief apologists), that makes no difference in global jihad. Liberal Islamo-pandering Jews, like Daniel Pearl, are eagerly cut up like chickens by Muslims, in a New York minute.

By all means, let us interrupt our rather unsubstantiated assumption that Rusty Schneiderman was killed by a jihadi hitman by casting aspersions on the victim, his wife, 'typical Jewish liberals' everywhere, and the late Daniel Pearl. Why the heck not?

Ignoring the facial features and blaring cues in the sketch doesn’t make them incorrect. And we ignore them at our peril. As I noted earlier this year, authorities refused to put out a correct sketch of stabbing serial killer, Elias Abuelazam, a Palestinian Arab who targeted Black people for extinction. The sketch looked like your average White guy in a baseball cap, not an Arab from the Middle East. Had the sketch been accurate, Abuelazam might have been caught sooner and less people might have died at his hands. That nose on the sketch just ain’t your average White guy’s nose. Not even your average White hit man’s nose. And saying so isn’t “bigoted.” It’s intellectually honest and could help catch this murderer sooner.

Elias Abuelazam, an Israeli citizen and stark raving nutjob, did in fact get a rather bad sketch of himself put out, although I cannot say that I buy Schlussel's notion that this was done on purpose. The man in the sketch has a narrower nose and a more angular face than Abuelazam. Unfortunately, sketch artists have to work with what they have, they can't just draw a stereotypical Arab and hope it looks sort of like the bad guy. Honestly. They can't. (I know that Schlussel doesn't entirely believe this.)

(I have to add that this whole essay kind of undermines a common meme among the sort of people who think Schlussel is a deep and important thinker, namely that they can't be 'racist' because 'Islam isn't a race'. This is true, but Debbie Schlussel certainly writes as though it is.)

I will be following this story, though if the killer does turn out to be Islamic, I bet we’ll never hear about it. Schlussel concludes.

You know– it gets in the way of the “religion of peace” meme and all that.

This sort of racially confused, paranoid drivel is par for the course on Schlussel's blog, but I was interested enough to follow the story myself. A few nights ago, I Googled Sneiderman's name again, wondering if the case was ever broken.

Back in January, there was an arrest and indictment in Rusty Sneiderman's murder.

The accused's name is the decidedly Islamic Hemy Zvi Neuman.

He made a shiva visit to the dead man's family.

Oh, and he is a dead ringer for the witness sketch, minus the beard, which is believed to have been fake.

Alas, reader Joe who did in fact pick up on the Semitic features of the sketch, was close but no cigar. That's a g-g-g-g-g-great grandson of Abraham all right--but Joe picked the wrong branch of the family. An understandable error.

And Debbie Schlussel, who didn't get what she wanted out of this case, has not updated her blog to reflect this information.

I am sure that she'd insist her assumptions were quite valid. After all, there are jihadis, and they do target Jews. Therefore, making shit up out of whole cloth, insulting the victim, and feeding her followers' general sense of roiling paranoia about all things Muslim is perfectly valid.

I disagree. I would call this bigoted, dishonest, and self-indulgent in extreme. Is it really necessary to use the callous murder of a father of young children to whip up a little more self-pitying sensationalism and bigotry?

(Cross posted from The Makabit)

Obama's Iron Dome Support Saves Lives In Israel

Iron Dome, deployed earlier this month, is equipped with cutting-edge technology to stop short-range missiles--such as those that fall on Ashkelon and Sderot.

President Obama's support for this project has been extremely important. The National Jewish Democratic Council reports:

As President, in May 2010, he demanded $205 million in funding for the Iron Dome system—to help make the program a reality. The funding would be included in the 2011 federal budget. As White House spokesman Tommy Vietor put it, “The president recognizes the threat missiles and rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah pose to Israelis, and has therefore decided to seek funding from Congress to support the production of Israel’s short range rocket defense system called Iron Dome.” Thus, the United States-Israel Rocket and Missile Defense Cooperation and Support Act was sponsored by Representative Glenn Nye (D-VA) in the House and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Senate. Following almost unanimous approval by both chambers, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) said, “With nearly every square inch of Israel at risk from rocket and missile attacks, we must ensure that our most important ally in the region has the tools to defend itself.”

(Cross-posted from The Makabit)

Paxil, Rebellion, and Talkin' Bout My Generation

Allow me to discuss my experience with anti-depressants, and my current feelings about them.

I started taking Paxil back in the spring of 2006.

I started taking Paxil because work, my first teaching job, was becoming intolerable, and I was having panic attacks every time the principal walked into my room. So I took the Paxil, which smoothed my depression over work and such over remarkably, and all was well.

Well, not exactly, because the jerky, problematic arc of my teaching career continued to be both jerky and problematic, but I was very emotionally contained while several different jobs went to hell in a handbasket. Relatively speaking.

Now, I had been in therapy for a number of years, with a marvellous woman, and had gotten through a lot of stuff, and, in fact, learned quite a bit about managing my depression. My therapist never mentioned drugs, and when I brought it up once, she discussed it with me, but did not seem to think I needed anti-depressants, unless I felt they would seriously improve my quality of life. Which, at the time, I did not.

I fell a bit through the cracks with the Paxil, to be honest. It was some doctor at the ER who put me on it, and when I had to get a doctor to approve a refill a while back, she was fairly horrified that I'd just been casually left on it for four years with no follow-up. She did manage to make it seem as though it was my fault, which I resented.

I tried to get off the Paxil a couple of times, only to discover that getting off Paxil is not exactly easy or fun. I went online when I was first put on the Paxil to read up on it, and was immediately bombarded with all sorts of dreadful warnings from sites with names like paxilsurvivor and mypaxilnightmare. Most of these sites were overblown, at least from my experience, but they did warn me of some things that Kaiser failed to. One of these was 'the zaps', a sensation of electric shock that often accompanies withdrawal from the Paxil. If I hadn't know about the damn zaps, I would have thought I was losing my mind when they started. The problem with getting off the Paxil was that it could be done, but once it WAS done, I started crying again, so I went back on. And stayed on.

Paxil is just plain hard to get off of. I've been told by a couple of doctors that the intense resistance that the medical community has had to labeling it addictive is that they're not actually sure why it's physically habituating. The chemical reason for whatever leads to the zaps and such isn't clear. And so, doctors being doctors, they simply resist the idea that people are actually having symptoms. Doctors are like that.

It was this past fall, though, four and a half years after I went on the Paxil that I finally got off it, with medical assistance. This time, I got a doctor who was an actual psychiatrist, as opposed to the genprac guy who told me to go on a half dose for a week before cutting it out, and I'd be fine. We did an elaborate dance of getting me off the Paxil, and onto Prozac, and then off Prozac.

I did this for two reasons. First, and most immediately, I wanted to get pregnant, and Paxil is strongly, strongly counterindicated for pregnancy. The other reason was a little more complicated--I had had two good years at St. Dymphna's, and I expected a good year at St. Attracta's (HAH!), and I thought maybe it was time to face the world unmedicated. I thought, at the time, that if it didn't go smoothly, I could go back on anti-depressants, but it seemed worth while to experiment.

Of course, St. Attracta's was a housefire of a disaster, and after a pleasant summer and early fall, I simply detonated, and fell down the rabbit hole of my own depression. It was in those days that I ranted to a teacher blog about how miserable I was, mentioning that I was off my meds, and was roundly scolded and told to get right back on the Paxil, pronto. "You know that you need to take your medicine, so do it!" one lady snapped.

Well, on the one hand, that seemed like someone being quite concerned about my wellbeing--and it was followed by many exhortations not be ashamed of NEEDING my medication (I wasn't, but apparently even thinking that you might not need it forever was suspect), and on the other hand, I started thinking of all those movies about 50s housewives drugged out of their minds on tranquilizers. I started wondering how you told the difference between taking a medication that addressed your psychiatric needs, and taking a medication that was covering up for your actual needs in life.

And thinking this sort of thing through sensibly while you're in the grip of a crippling major depression is harder than you might think.

Anyway, I finally did something that was either eminently sensible, or completely missing the point--instead of numbing myself down further, I gave two weeks notice to the source of stress. And I immediately felt much, much better.

I've felt much, much better ever since. Even with the worry of finding money to live on, and a new job, and health insurance, and many, many other things, I'm now back on the barest trace of Zoloft, and I'm FINE.

This is not meant to be a rant against anti-depressants, because God knows, they have been there for me, and great, when I needed them. But anti-depressants are meant to balance your chemistry so you're OK, not up your tolerance so you can handle things that are by no means OK.

Most of my work life for the past five years has been by no means OK. And I am going to fight like hell to get to a place where I am OK.

Arrest In Itamar Murders

The IDF has arrested two men in their late teens in the murders of the Fogel family in Itamar. Six others are being held as accomplices to the crimes.

Their faces are all over the Israeli press, but I don't want to waste my bandwidth on them. I want to post the faces of their victims. These are Ehud and Ruth Fogel, and three of their children, Elad, 4, Yoav, 11, and Hadas, who was three months old when she was murdered.

The bodies were discovered by their oldest child, 12-year-old Tamar. Two other children in the home survived the attack.

Reading the coverage of what's been learned about the attack, what stands out most clearly is the support network these men had as they went out to commit murder. They received weapons, help, advice, approval, and the silence of their community as justice came looking for them.

And the silence of the rest of the Israel-obsessed world.

Intensive Dreaming and Rebellion

I woke up late this morning, having had a long, detailed, and multi-layered dream. In the middle, I was wandering through a bizarre version of Western San Francisco that exists only in my dreams, and solving murders, but at the beginning and the end, I was being interviewed to take an administrative position at a strange conglomerate school that I often dream of, but which, in this case, was the one I quit in December. I said that I was afraid of seeing the kids, and my principal told me it would be all right, and I felt a deep sense of connection and acceptance and peace.

I'm working through some things, you know?

I also called Jewish Family and Children's Services to talk about getting counseling, and we had the usual daft conversation where they tell you what the flat rate is, and then you tell them what your income is, and they name a sliding scale, but you still have to pay more if you want a licensed professional rather than an intern. (I shouldn't bitch. I may be an intern soon.) And I told them that I would discuss the rates with my husband, and I hung up, and then it occurred to me that, rather than taking on some dutiful new weekly expense, I would rather spend the money on lipstick, and a gym membership, and burritos with friends.

This seems terribly improper to a Northern California Hippie Puritan such a myself.

Tough.

The Balabusta is going through a small out-of-sequence mid-life crisis. After years of clinging to a sheer cliff-face of various teaching jobs, I've reached a point where I want. I want to dance. I want to have children, and grow tomatoes. I want to send my books out into the world, if it means publishing them on Kindle myself. I'm fed up with being fed up. I want to take care of myself and go after the things that are important to me.

Somehow, and this may be entirely counter-intuitive, picking up another set of responsibilities I don't want--this time to a pricey therapist--just doesn't seem right right now.

I'll give it a month.

I'm letting out my inner Grace Hanadarko. Hopefully minus the binge drinking and self-endangering behavior, you know?

Things The Balabusta Is Highly Unlikely to Do For Easter

Top of the list is

1. Dye Easter eggs with natural dyes made out of regular stuff you can find at home!!!

Now, you may be saying, why not? The Balabusta has been known to aspire to be craftsy. She may, someday, want her children to experience an Easter egg hunt. Why not dye beautiful eggs with natural products found in the back of the kitchen cabinets?

Because:

a. As Storm Jameson wrote, 'life is too short to stuff a mushroom'.

b. Because you end up with eggs that look damn weird.

c And, because God intended for eggs to be colored with food coloring, or those little Pas dye packs, and dipped into the boiling water with those little wire egg-holders.

Why is the Balabusta ranting about this? No particular reason, except I happened to see this link to a Reader's Digest article about natural egg dyes, and for some reason, the idea of carefully using red cabbage (boil, then soak eggs overnight) to dye eggs 'robin's egg blue', when you can get the same result with BLUE FOOD COLORING offended me to the depths of my soul. Especially since that whole rigmarole will only get you blue eggs, so to get green, you have boil spinach or grass--I swear to God, they say grass--and turmeric for green-yellow, and red wine for purple, and 'beet juice' for pink, and every damn dye has to be boiled or soaked in a different manner. The end result of all this, mind you, is not a tapestry, it's a bowl of hard-boiled eggs which will be hidden in your shrubbery and then eaten by small children so they get some protein into them in between giant amounts of jelly bean and marshmallow.

Maybe if it were part of a home-schooling project about natural dyes or something, otherwise, I'm sorry, HECK NO.

Apparently those who have tried this experiment haven't been all that happy with it. Rebecca over at Green Baby Guide tried. She even posted the photograph at the top of this post, with the note I dyed these eggs using blueberries, chili flakes, and a leaf . . . in my imagination. Despite her best intentions--she writes--wouldn’t it be great to tint eggs without frightening chemicals and excess packaging?--apparently beets, wine, black beans, spinach and the aforementioned red cabbage all let her down. Turmeric, apparently, works great. So does coffee. Which will turn your white eggs into brown eggs.

Look, I have nothing against natural food dyes, but Easter calls for little bottles of food coloring, and a simple, child-friendly approach. Don't tell me about boiling cabbage overnight.

Decluttering Thoughts

I'm taking classes toward an MFT now, and one of the things I've been thinking about is that I might like to focus on clutter and hoarding issues.

I watched the whole first season of "Hoarders" on Netflix a little while ago, and I found myself completely fascinated. Clutter and messiness has been an issue for me my entire life, and for several of my friends. Watching the complex situations people found themselves in, and the hints at how their pasts had entrenched them in this situation was absolutely fascinating. Sad. At times, inspiring. And I was fascinated with the people who came to their aid, the movers and haulers and shrinks who waded in there and tried to throw them a rope.

So I'm going to do a little research and see if I can find out how I might be able to get into this field. I think I would be great.

Plant A Tree In Israel!!!!

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and some of their nastier friends are launching an ugly campaign against Jewish National Fund on March 30.

This is your cue to get involved. Shop for Israeli goods on March 30, and buy trees in Israel through Jewish National Fund, as many as you can. Send the certificates to IJAZN, or Jewish Voice for Peace, and thank them for inspiring your support for Israel and the Jewish National Fund.

(Cross-posted from The Makabit.)

I feel ever so much better

I'm home. I'm job hunting. And I'm not miserable.

Catching Everyone Up, Finally

OK, here it goes. I quit the job at St. Attracta's.

Mid-year.

I have never done such a thing in the years I've been teaching. Wanted to, yes, wanted to very badly, but I have never done it.

I did it. I told the principal, and I told no one else, and on the last day before Christmas break I let all the kids run out screaming, and that was it.

Now I am hunting for work, and trying to get a student loan, and taking classes for an online MFT program, and seeing what happens next.

I feel a hundred and seventy-five percent better. I had gone down into a deep, ugly whirlpool of depression, and despair at my inability to do a good job.

I quit, and I feel better.

There it is.

SantaGate

So, right here at St. Attracta, we have a major Christmastide scandal underway.

Apparently, last week, the Spanish teacher was asked by some little darling in the fourth grade if she 'believed in Santa'.

This is the point at which, in a nice Catholic school, one is supposed to smile and say "Of course I do!" But Sra. is a devout apostolic evangelical of some sort, and apparently she went into some considerable detail about how not only did she not believe in Santa, but there is only one person whom one is supposed to show worship to and expect things from, and that Christmas is about Jesus, and that belief in Santa Claus is a form of idolatry.

Now, this gets into some deep theological divides in Christianity, having to do with the veneration of the saints, and toy shopping and such, but that's sort of beside the point. The point is that the fourth graders were traumatized, and they told their parents, and their parents called the principal, and it was all fairly insane for a few days.

So, Sra. was told that while she did not have to lie and say she did believe in Santa Claus, she should not lecture the children on the subject, or say that Santa was bad. Good enough.

Yesterday, my own sixth-graders had Spanish class, and I left to go have a cup of coffee. When I returned, some of the kids were polling one another about wehter they believed in Santa Claus, but since I didn't know about the fourth-grade episode, I thought little of it.

ANYWAY, today the principal shows up, and tells me that apparently one of MY little darlings, last night, at bedtime, turns to her mother and says, "Mom, something happened today, and Sra. said not to tell anyone she said it or we'd be in trouble, but I have to tell you. She said there's no Santa Claus!"

Now, I have to say that my own feeling is that a family in which a sixth-grader believes in Santa is perhaps in need of some sharp talk from a Spanish teacher, but anyway, there were more furious phone calls, and I had to pull kids out of class to give testimony about what was said. (The witness kid I called says they were NOT told to keep the whole thing secret, and that Sra. simply said no when asked if she was a Santa believer.)

Such is life in middle school, such is life at St. Attracta.

I have some more I need to tell you about what's going on, but that will have to wait for tomorrow. 

Test

Winner's Circle

In more upbeat news, I won NANOWRIMO!

I wrote a 50,000 word, mostly coherent novel, set in the Jewish community of Winchester around 1200, in 29 days--I had thirty, but wrapped up yesterday...and I rock.

I even get a cool little doohickey! (See cool doohickey to the right.)

This was a really good thing for me to do this month. It took my mind off the problems at work, and the meds, and all that, and got me focused and working on something. And it paid off really well. I feel super-accomplished.

I am proud of me.

Exit Strategy

It's December on Wednesday, and the new job has pretty much become a disaster.

I didn't want to leave St. Dymphna's. There's a reason I left middle school. I now remember what it was.

Today, my principal had a long talk with my class, and I had a long talk with my principal. And I'm starting to wonder if there is a way out of this before the end of the year.

I had applied to an MFT program, been accepted for the fall, and just didn't go. Because...because money, stuff, new job, whatever.

I'm trying to find out if the application is salvageable, if they can admit me for the spring.

A student loan.

A part-time job.

A way out.

I'm depressed, of course, that's part of it. I'm off the Paxil, on the Zoloft.But how do you treat depression when you spend all day, five days a week, trying to teach kids who don't like you or respect you, and have no qualms about showing it?

It's not exactly the most mental-health-friendly environment, let's put it like that.

I feel like hell. I have to go back tomorrow--thank God tomorrow is Tuesday, my easy day. I still don't know if I can face it. I still don't know if I can get through the day. And the next one. And the next one. So far so good. I haven't cried in front of them yet. Everyone else in the damn school, yes, but my students, no.

I need an exit strategy.

Here is the J's Mealy-Mouthed Take On The Assault

Read it and weep.

BTW, as a life-long human-rights activist, the Balabusta cannot but fail to be amused by JVP's wild endorsement of themselves for disrupting Netanyahu's speech in New Orleans. They unfurled a banner, yelled a slogan, and were kicked out by security. I've done that. I was doing that when I wasn't yet a bat mitzvah. Big whoop.

The kind of bravery you'd expect people who beat up middle-aged ladies to congratulate themselves on.

Jewish Voice for Whaaaa? Again?

Over at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, the irrepressible Grant Patel writes up a recent encounter between the poorly named Jewish Voice for Peace and a local pro-Israel activist who was physically attacked and continues to be attacked in words by JVP.

Here are her words. The Balabusta will add that she has met this lady many times, and that she has also seen JVP's choice of 'nonviolent' friends at a number of demonstrations. Given JVP's inability to notice threatening and violent behavior carried out by those they choose to like, I'm not surprised they also fantasize violence by those they attack.

That's all, folks.

"Jewish Voice for Peace" has issued a press release that I attacked several people attending one of their events with pepper spray. They also go on to make absurd allegations regarding my politics and intentions at the meeting.

This is completely bizarre. I am a DISABLED WOMAN (see the legal notice on my car). I carry pepper spray as my only means to defend myself. It IS true that on the evening of November 14, at a JVP meeting, I needed to defend myself. I was physically attacked.

The JVP meeting at Berkeley Senior Center was advertised to the public. I attended this meeting as an individual and not as a member of any organization, in order to deepen my understanding of their perspective on the Middle East conflict.

Ironically, a stated goal of the meeting was to HONOR activists that had recently PHYSICALLY DISRUPTED a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Perhaps I should have understood that as a warning.

THE ATTACK: Around 20 minutes into the meeting, I tried to photograph a woman speaking in support of Israel. Almost immediately, several JVP members surrounded me and tried to take my camera from me. Then they attacked me. They took hold of my arms and would not let me go. They also pushed their chests into me many times and knocked me against a wall. I yelled at them 20 to 30 times to let go of me. They refused to let go of my wrists and forearms and continued to bang their chests into me. They banged me into the wall over a dozen times. Their faces were red from hatred and exertion. As a result of their violence, my wrists and arms are bruised and I am currently suffering serious pain in my lower back. I am unable to work this afternoon and I must take medication for pain relief.

I am a large woman but I am physically frail. As I said, I am disabled.
- I see a pain management physician regularly for chronic back pain. I am unable to move without severe back pain. I have had major surgery on my back. I am unable to stand for more than a couple of minutes without unrelenting back pain and sciatica pain.
- I also have had nine surgeries on my knees which are another main source of pain.
- I have asthma, and I use inhaled steroids daily; the anti-Israel activists’ attack on me exacerbated my asthma and I had to take medicine while at the senior center.
- I also have a serious blood disorder that weakens me. I am currently under treatment by a hematologist/oncologist, and I am on daily chemotherapy.

I am 58 years old. I have a Disabled Person’s license plate for my car. I am physically incapable of overpowering or attacking anybody! The people who attacked me were physically fit and at least 20 years younger than I;

While pleading with the attackers to let me go, I tried to get away but they followed me and kept grabbing my arms. At one point they knocked my camera out of my hand. I bent down to pick it up and tried to walk away. They followed me and continued to grab my arms and shove me into the wall. They isolated me from the rest of the crowd. Because they were beating me up and because I am disabled and could not defend myself otherwise, I sprayed pepper spray into one woman’s face. As soon as I did that, they all backed off from me and let me go.

I resorted to the pepper spray because I feared for my safety and my life!!! I believe that had I not used pepper spray, I would be in the hospital today suffering far more serious injuries. Pepper spray causes extreme discomfort but is unlikely to cause permanent injury. The purpose of pepper spray is to temporarily disable an attacker, to allow time for escape. It worked.

The JVP press release is an outright lie. I cannot and did not attack anyone. I was attacked!

Depression Sucks

Friday was like an nightmare, and it all starts again tomorrow.

I seriously do not know what do. I hate this job. I absolutely hate it. It's like being back in middle school myself.

I spend my weekends crying because I have to go back on Monday.

Zoloft was mailed to me. It's still not here.

NANOWRIMO

National Novel Writer's Month begins on Monday. I plan to do NANOWRIMO, this year!

NANOWRIMO, for those of you who have not encountered it before, is an annual event where, over the thirty days of November, everyone tries to write a first draft of a novel, from soup to nuts. 50,000 word target. Many Internet forums where people post in to ask what kind of siege engines were used in the Bronze Age, and how many times a week it's really OK to feed your kids cereal instead of cooking.

Right now I feel like hell. I'm depressed, work is cruddy, and I'm not feeling really happy all around. I need a distraction. I need a project. I need something to take me out of myself that doesn't require leaving the house. NANO!!

I have three possible NANO projects in mind. YOU, being someone who reads this blog, get to vote on the project! These are the options:

1. A mystery novel set in Renaissance Florence, the sequel to the recently completed one. In this one, Ginevra's sister Anna, the nun, comes to town, and murder, holiday hilarity and multiple sets of young lovers with murky agendas ensue.

2. A mystery novel set in the medieval English Jewish community. Avigai's cousin's daughter is missing, and as she investigates, long-buried secrets from his escape from the 1190 massacre of York's Jews begin to surface.

3. A sprawly, relationship-driven, Bronze Age chick-lit novel about the women in King David's life. Nitzevet, Michal, Avigayil, Batsheva, Tamar, Avishag...the mother, the wives, the daughter...David's life is filled with women with dramatic stories. And very strong voices.

Please put in your vote for one of these options by midnight on Sunday!

Wouldn't Have Believed It If I Hadn't Seen It

So, today, one of my students dropped a bag of candy on the floor.

It was rather a big bag of candy. He likes to tote lots of it around, even when it is not about to be Halloween. He dropped it. It was an accident. 100 individually wrapped Warheads (little sour things), hit the floor.

I looked up. I said, "Oh, dear, hon, we need to pick those up." I walked toward him.

I saw several kids start to move. I thought, because I am a MORON, "Oh, they'll help."

Then they dived onto the spilled candy, pushing, shoving, screaming, and cramming handfuls into their pockets.

One boy was flat on the floor in front of me, prone, kicking his feet, and protecting his loot with his body.

These are eleven and twelve year olds from middle class families, attending a 'nice' parochial school.

The kindest thing I can say is that they looked like a group of four or five year olds after Dad or Uncle gets fed up and breaks the pinata with a couple of purposeful whacks.

It was far more remiscent of a pack of animals closing in for the kill on the Discovery Channel.

It was, to be honest, disturbing as hell.

I'm goin' back to school

Had a small realization this last week--teaching is not doing it for me. I was fairly happy working at St. Dymphna High, but I was never able to get a normal complement of classes, and frankly, every other place I've worked as a teacher, I've been sad, stressed, and miserable.

I'm done. I'll see if I can do that MFT program I applied for last year, I'm thinking about law school, but I need to do something else, something you can make a little more money at, and not have to deal with classroom management ALL GODDAMN DAY.

How can you tell?

I'm trying to figure out how you can tell if you're just chemically depressed and going through a transition to a new job, or if you actually have realized that you don't like what you're doing for a living much and should change.

Bumping Along

I'm sad. I'm now also on these alarming Vitamin D pills which I'm supposed to take once a week for eight weeks and then once a month. I told the Balebos not to be surprised if sunlight starts to come out of my ears.

But so far, just sad.

I am STRUGGLING with, well, everything. I feel sad about struggling. I have whined too much at my teacher boards and been told to stop. I'm still sad. And frustrated as hell.

There is nothing, nothing at all, like spending ten minutes calming a class down every SINGLE time, when you know that their not calming down at once with a light ring of the chimes is a moral failing of your own. Do it over. And over. And over. And over. And over.

I wanna go back to high school.

Confession is good for the soul, they say

Today was my Weird Bullying Issues day. Won't go into too many details--just spent half the day with the Vice Principal saying, "What would you advise?" and the other half talking to weeping children who didn't think they'd get caught.

This was at the end of a week that started off very badly, after a Friday that dropped the bottom out of my newly not-on-antidepressants state and left me weeping and shaking all weekend. I came back feeling like hell, and rebuilt a little. I still don't feel great, but I'm OK.

Anyway, toward the end of the day, I caught a kid sitting at another kid's desk, going through it. The desk of the kid who's been complaining that his stuff is going missing, and junk being put into his desk when he's away from it. After I spent five minutes this morning talking about the terrible stuff that would happen to any child caught messing with another kid's desk.

I kind of leaped at him, when I registered what I was seeing and said WHATAREYOUDOING, and he started to say something, and I snapped that he was in SOMUCHTROUBLE and sent him back to his own desk...and then didn't get a chance to talk to him after school because he escaped during dismissal--so I talked to the vice principal again instead.

And I realized something.

I am being weird with the kids because being back in middle school is scaring the bejaysus out of me. The last time I was in middle school was a bad, bad year. Around January, I got a GLOWING review from my principal, and literally a week later, a parent wandered into my classroom at a bad moment, and I had a dust-up with the Education Expert, and suddenly I was persona non grata at that school.

And I am so afraid of it happening again. And when the kids misbehave, my blood runs cold, because if ANY child misbehaves EVER, I figure it's going to be 'don't let the door hit your tush on the way out' again. So I'm trying to get them behave by sheer force of will--and getting angry too easily because I'm SCARED TO DEATH.

And I can't do that. I have to teach the kids. Like they are, not like I want them to be in the future. I have to deal with their stuff now. I have to be real with them and their parents now. And if my best isn't good enough, that will have to be too damn bad. I am working hard, I'm being as sane and consistent and strict as I can manage under the new-school, wacky-talky class conditions, and I'll get better. But I can't scream DOYOUKNOWHOWMUCHTROUBLEYOU'REINMISTER at an eleven-year-old boy because I'm afraid other grownups will blame me if he does something wrong. He will, probably do something wrong. He's eleven. And human.

I will probably do a lot of wrong things too. Because I'm thirty-seven and human. I didn't handle it right today. But I need to stop being so afraid.

Also, I need to get my Vitamin D count up to at least fifty from THIRTEEN. My doctor has spoken.

Not feeling so great

Friday was the point at which my post-Paxil calmness plummeted in the face of 28 sixth graders who absolutely refused to shut up.

I cried through a three-day weekend. I went back to school today, and it was lousy, lousy, lousy.

You want to know what the lousiest part was? It was the part where I had to ring the 'attention' signal to get attention in the middle of a transition to math class.Why? Someone's backpack was missing.

So why did they ignore it? Well, it turns out that they HAD to get to math class, because Sister is 'strict'.

I, of course, am chopped liver.

Did I mention it got up to ninety-five degrees by late afternoon?

I have a headache, I want to cry all the time, I am furious with my class, and with myself, and I'm overheated. It's really, really special.

I want to be back at St. Dymphna's.

Sixth Grade Is Hard. And I'm In Mourning.

OK. My mother-in-law died today, I found out after school, so this is a day that will live in memory, but before that...

My sixth graders, who I have for English, religion and social studies, are in revolt. I started using the vocabulary book that was given to me by the school, which is rigorous but good.

They can't pass the tests. They do lousy on them. After the third one with too many Fs and no As, I decided, OK, we have to adapt. So I told them, and read them a note saying, that we would keep using the book, but we would do a unit over two weeks instead of one, taking the spelling test one week and the vocabulary the next. We would make flashcards, do word studies, more in-depth stuff. I just came from high school, where even my freshmen would look at a list, sort of shrug, and learn it. So, I tell the kids, we'll do it slow, with more care and more activities, and they WILL get better grades, and they WILL learn more.

And they exploded. Some of what came out of our impromptu class meeting:

There is not enough homework. And the homework is too hard.
Can't we go on doing a vocabulary test every week?
It's my fault for not teaching it right.
I don't make learning fun.
Ms. Fifth Grade gave them donuts for getting As on spelling tests. They need motivation. How come no donuts?
I take too long to give directions.
I don't take long enough giving directions.
They don't like the kid they're sitting next to.
If I gave examples, like about money, or fashion, they'd learn.

Then, they complained that it was the way I grade that made them get bad grades. I take off TWO points for every thing they get wrong. If I only took off one point, they'd get good grades!

I showed them the percentages on the board, and explained that I give two points for each correct answer as well, so this is having no impact on their overall grade.

A couple of them came in to talk after school as well. They're mad at the math teacher too, because he says the highest grade in the group is a C-plus, and if he gave them more time, they'd get better grades, also he canceled the test because the people who weren't ready asked for more time. And everyone is saying that they're going to have bad grades at the progress reports, and they're MAD!!!

I tried to treat their concerns with respect, and a little humor. I felt like running away and never coming back.

And then after this, while I'm brainstorming tech projects with the computer guy, my husband walks in, and I know as soon as I see his face that Tante S. is gone.

I'll feel better after I eat a lot of carbs and get a good night's sleep, and cry some more. But DAMN.

And the grief, the real grief, hasn't quite gotten through yet. And my heart is breaking for my husband, and I don't know what in God's name I can do for him.

Me, Without Paxil

So, I'm off the Paxil, and I'm off the Prozac I took to get off the Paxil, and this is me, typing unmedicated for the first time in about five years.

I took the Paxil to get through the horrible time at the first school I taught at, and, as it happens, to get through horrible times at the next two schools I taught at. I never planned to be on it for five years. I never planned to spend nearly that much of my life on antidepressants.

I feel OK.

I'm starting a new year of work. I've done a week and a half with the sixth graders at St. Attracta School, and I think it's going OK--but it's hard, it's always hard, to start off in a new setting. And on a deep, deep level, I am not convinced I can teach successfully, even going into my seventh year of it.

That said, this weekend has been a great success so far. Last night was Niamh's bachelorette party, complete with burlesque dancers, halal barbecue and champagne, and despite my terrible fears about it (the bridal shower was high stress), it went off beautifully, I think. Niamh was lovely, wearing a Statue-of-Liberty-like crown of glow-sticks, and we had a really lovely party.

On family front, stress. The Husband's Tante S., his mom's parter, is in the hospital and the doctors don't think she's coming out. It's hard. The Husband is sad, and stressed. Me too.

I don't feel depressed. I feel different. But I'm going to go on without the Paxil, and I'm going to contact my NP Ob-Gyn to get my Tay-Sachs screening done.

A Long, Good Life

On Saturday, I went to a funeral mass for the mother of a friend of my father's. SHe was eighty-nine, born in Manila in 1920. She was just about to get her degree when the Japanese invaded.

A truly remarkable life. I was able to hear much of it when my father the WWII buff and I took her out to lunch a few years ago.

Right before she died, her son and daughter-in-law presented me with one of her many statues of Mary. It now sits in my classroom, and I plan to send them photos of it in its new home with a thank you and condolence letter.

My Classroom is Gorgeous

I am tired.

There are inspiration posters attached to every object in the room, including a sandwich board on the hamster. (OK, not really. I don't have a hamster yet.)

Did Feminism Succeed? Or Not?

When you can't tell if feminism succeeded beyond its supporters' wildest dreams, or failed miserably:

I'm putting my classroom together with some help from a young lady who was in my high school freshman class a couple of years ago. She attended the school I'm working at now, K-8. She tells me that she told her best friend, a boy who was in my class, and also went through elementary school with her, to come and help out tomorrow.

In passing, I learn that he broke up with his girlfriend, to whom he had been glued for the past two years. "And he was so upset," Mary Kate continues, "and he really needed someone to talk to, and I was there for him. But I was kinda mad, like he gets a girlfriend and we never got to hang out until they broke up? Like, it's supposed to be bros before hos, sorry about my language, Mrs. Bluejeans."

It's Ten O'Clock. Do You Know Where Your Grandparents Are?

When I was a little girl, there were some things that I knew about the Japanese. I knew that they were into cherry blossoms and robots, and that their students worked harder in school than Americans, and did complicated math we had never even heard of, for example.

When I got older, I learned that Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat, and that the natural, sea-based, frugal Japanese diet allowed them to have more centenarians than anywhere else on earth, or at least more than most places.

Anyway, as far as I know, the Japanese still like cherry blossoms and technology, the exchange students I see on BART are all skinnier than I, and I'm sure that miso soup is actually very good for you as well as being delicious.

However, it also seems that the number of centenerians in Japan may be, at least in part, due to the apparent tendency of people in Tokyo to lose track of the elderly.

(Cue Ellen deGeneres. "Exercise is good for old people. My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was seventy. She's eighty-two now, and we don't know where the hell she is.")

It all started with Sogen Kato. Mr. Kato was visited by authorities with birthday wishes on what would have been his 111th, but they uncovered instead a story that seems to be wasted on Japan. William Faulkner could have done it justice. Suffice to say that Mr. Kato has probably been dead for about thirty years, and the family never knocked on his bedroom door because he was cranky about being disturbed.

All right, this could happen to any city where there are crazy eccentric families: any city. The problem is that, apparently, they've also misplaced Tokyo's oldest woman. Fusa Furuya was born 113 years ago, and was supposedly living with her daughter, 79. Daughter says they haven't been close in many years, and she thought Mom was living with her brother.

The address she had for her brother is a vacant lot.

Health Minister Akira Nagatsuma is now on a mission to track down all the other Japanese centenarians, and these two weird and high-profile cases seem to have sparked an awareness in Japanese authorities that it may not be enough to assume that elderly people are being taken care of by their families. "Understanding the whereabouts of the elderly and their situation is a very important problem," Nagatsuma told the press.

The mayor of Mrs. Furuya's supposed home district added: "We would like to confirm the security of the elderly from now on by meeting them face to face."

This seems like a good start.

Prop 8 Goes Down

And I have already gotten my first engagement announcement!

:)

Writing Again

I'm sitting down today and writing for the first time in a while...

I Am Trying So Hard To Have Patience With Bad History

Alice Walker is trying my last nerve one more time. You may recall that Alice has popped up in this blog in the past, speculating that Israeli sandals are made with prison labor and exchanging racist blessings with little old ladies.

Well, now she's written an introduction to Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi. I will probably never read this book--I imagine that fairly few people will read this book--but the introduction is so very special that I have to share a few passages with you.

Alice begins with what has become a fairly common theme in her writings about Israelis and Palestinians, the analogy that she draws between her childhood in the racist American South, and the situation of the Palestinians. She continues:

After four hundred years of enslavement followed by over a century of brutal harassment and soul thrashing by white supremacists who had all along wanted only our labor or our land (when we, African or Native American people, possessed land) this internalized self-hatred kept people of color in the United States timid and bowed down with feelings of unworthiness and shame. Like the Palestinians of the last Sixty years, since the coming of European Jews to settle in Palestine after Hitler and the Holocaust in the Thirties and Forties, or like the indigenous people of South Africa (or Africa in general) my people (African, Native American and Poor European) could not fathom, for the longest time, what had hit them. After all, who could imagine it?

Please note, once again, that for Alice, Jews living in what is now Israel before the 1930s simply do not exist, despite the fact that in 1914, say, Jews were 7.6% of the population of Palestine, and in 1922, it was over 11%. Once again, also, for Alice, Jews are 'Europeans'. The thought of proud Sephardi families tracing their lineage in Jerusalem back dozens of generations, or of Jews from North Africa and points farther east made refugees from Arab countries simply does not exist in the hypnotic historical fantasy she's engaging in here.

There you are sitting by your own fire, living peacefully with your family and clan, never having harmed anyone (for the most part), praising and worshiping your own peculiar god. In come a trickle, and then a flood of strangers. First, you feed them, offer them a seat by your fire. Let them admire your little ones. Perhaps you generously teach them how to plant whatever grows around your compound. Perhaps you give them a turkey to keep them from starving in what they persist in calling “the wilderness.” Perhaps you lend them a starter set of goats. Living in the lap of generous nature, speaking generally, there is a certain kind of greed and stinginess that is quite beyond your understanding.

And here comes the next part of the fantasy...the simple, tribal, bucolic life assumed to have happened in Palestine before the nasty (not even Poor) European Jews showed up. I think what Alice is presenting here is loosely based on the Thanksgiving story we were taught as children--if she mentioned teaching the Yahud to plant fish in the corn hills, I could be sure--but it does seem to leave out the complex history of the region, in favor of a sort of general sentimentalized fantasy about simple tribal life.

In contrast to that simple, honorable life, of course, is the 'greed and stinginess' of the European Jew, quite beyond the understanding of the innocent and naive Palestinians. Greedy, greedy Jews. Enough said.

And of course, missing from Alice's patronizing portrayal of happy rural Arabs is any understanding that these simple country folk know what Jews are. They have a long history with them. They've banned them from holy sites of their own faith, for example, and occasionally massacred them. Alice refers a few passages back to "being black and living in the United States under American style apartheid. The daily insults to one’s sense of being human. Not just the separate toilets and water fountains with their blatantly unequal lettering and quality of paint, but the apparent determination of the white population, every moment, at every turn, to remind any person of color, no matter how well spoken or well dressed, or how well educated or in what position of authority in the black community, that they were niggers, objects of ridicule, contempt, and possible violent abuse." Yes. That's what it was like to live as a Jew in the Arab world, Alice.

I'm reminded of a seder where I listened as a man told his daughters about growing up Jewish in Baghdad. "We had good friends who weren't Jewish," he said, "but you had to remember all the time that anything could happen." Then he told a story about walking to school while boys threw stones at him and called him a Jew.

But I digress, I digress from Alice's happy ahistorical history of the European Jewish Conquest of the Palestinian Tribal Lands. Let's look at the next paragraph.

Way back in Europe, though, your “guests” have come up with a plan to assuage their hunger for more: more land, more money, more crops, more food, more things to buy and sell, and drawn maps that have your “territory” on it like a large pie, and they are busy dividing up slices of it. You, sitting by your fire, your little ones clamoring for a bedtime story or another mango, date, olive or fig, are not on the map at all.

At this point, please notice, Hitler, who's been so far presumed to be these folks' reason for being here just vanishes, and the Jews morph into full-fledged European imperialist invaders. Please note, also, that I am not actually sure that mangoes were grown in Mandate Palestine. I could be wrong, and Israel does grow mangoes for export now. And this is a dumb thing to focus on. But I'm not sure about the mangoes.

Coming back to your fire, the strangers smile at you, learn your language, as if respecting it, admire your culture. But you notice they’ve brought strange gadgets that they use to measure things. At first you and your neighbors laugh: these crazy people, you say to each other, why, they would measure even the sky! But soon you do not laugh, because they have measured a road that goes right through your living room. They have destroyed all the villages on one side of yours, already. You did not know, because you couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing, and besides, you do not understand their language, though they, many of them now, certainly understand yours. Why should you learn the language of your guests, you think.For a long time it doesn’t make sense to make the effort. And when you begin to understand that your guests are your enemies, it seems horrible to you to try to learn to speak their wicked tongue.

I'm deeply intrigued by the way the whole Israeli War of Independence, especially the part where five peaceful, rustic, innocent Arab nations rolled tanks into the fledgling State of Israel, appears to simply not exist in Alice's narrative.

I'm equally impressed at her portrayal of mid-twentieth-century Palestinians as having, apparently, never seen 'measuring gadgets' before.

But mostly I'm appalled. This woman either knows nothing of the history of this conflict she opines so freely on, or she's lying about it to appeal to a certain audience, and either is shocking. Alice Walker's version of the origins of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle is historically false, bigoted against both Jews and Arabs, and based on a twee, prepackaged narrative of the invasion of indigenous lands. Epic fail.

Closets!

For the last few days, I have been moving around cardboard boxes.

A little background here: approximately five years ago, the Balabusta and her then husband-to-be moved into this apartment on the Ohlone Greenway.

Technically, it's a two-bedroom apartment, one bedroom to be used as a computer room/den sort of thing. However, for the past five years, it has been so full of boxes, hastily packed and dragged out of the last house, that it has been usable only as a place for my husband to sit at a desk in the corner, beyond the boxes, and play World of Warcraft.

Anyway, I've been pulling the boxes out, repacking them, and rearranging them, and I'm almost sure that when I'm done, all the storage crap will fit into the big closet in the computer room, and the storage unit downstairs.

We will actually have a second bedroom. It's awesome!!!

Summer in Swing--Louisiana Saturday Night

I am finally starting to relax after the Husband and I got back a week ago from visiting his family in Louisiana.

I merely note:

1.The humidity is amazing. I got out of the car at 10 at night, and my glasses fogged over.

2. My husband comes by his hoarding tendencies honestly. He and his mother are limited in what they can do by space constraints. My grandmother-in-law has eleven acres. Enough said.

3. My new niece (age four months) is completely adorable.

4. My older niece (age 12) is also pretty cute.

5.My sister-in-law is a brave woman. She drove from Tennessee to Louisiana with a four-month-old, a twelve-year-old, a German shepherd and beagle in the car.

6. After I teased my husband on the flight about how anyone I spend enough time with turns out to be Jewish, my grandfather-in-law informed me on the first morning we were there that the Cherokee are a Lost Tribe.

7. I learned about deer whistles.

8. If I never see another biscuit, it will be too soon.

9.My MIL has adopted a baby woodpecker.

10. Family. Just...family.

Trusting My Own Judgement

Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to a barbecue at Mirele and Keyle's place, and I heard the full story of how Mirele left the school that we both worked at for a time (St. Colmcille's, remember them?)

For legal, personal, and general losh-avoiding reasons, I am not going to post the details here. Suffice to say that Mirele was wronged, and I am angry about it. Suffice also to say that someone I knew and disliked while we worked there turned out to be a much more dishonorable person than I would have imagined.

I've been thinking about her a lot, and why I disliked her then, and why I sometimes disregard my own opinions about people. I did this at Walter C. Moonbat High as well, taking people, or trying to, at their own valuation of themselves.

There's a difference between giving someone a chance, and ignoring what you know--either from experience, or on a deep gut level--to be true about them.

The Strike

Can I tell you all a terrible secret?

I graduated from Mills College in 1995.

In 1990, as some of you may recall, the Mills College board decided to admit men to the Mills undergraduate program, and the women on campus went 'on strike', and managed to force the board to reverse their decision.

When I was at Mills, tales of the strike were still fresh. "There was a revolution," one popular little handbill read, "We showed up, there was childcare, we cleaned up after ourselves, and we won. We won!"

This spring is the 20th anniversary of the strike.

I have been getting Facebook items and such, honoring, nay CANONIZING the strike and the strikers.

"I didn't really understand how important it was back then," one of my college friends comments.

This is my terrible secret: I just don't really care about the Mills College Strike of 1990.

It's not that I don't appreciate it. I think women's colleges are a fine thing. It's not that I disagree with the basic point of the strike in any real way.

I just have never been able to get nearly as starry-eyed as many, hell ALL of my Mills friends about it. It happened. I'm happy Mills is still a women's college. But the strike isn't one of my guiding stories about Woman Power. I really, truly, do not get a warm fuzzy glow just thinking about it.

Something is wrong with me.

More Than Workforce

Last Tuesday, we had a teacher inservice on revising our ESLRs--boring, irrelevent work, but it has to be done. The woman who came to talk to us about it kept referring to skills our kids would 'take with them to the workforce'. She said it, I don't know, maybe ten times.

A note on Catholic education, and, I would argue, all education: our kids are not just 'workforce'. Our kids will be lovers, spouses, parents, children of aging parents, godparents. They will be next-door neighbors and friends. They will be spiritual seekers, artists, PEOPLE. If we educate them to only be 'workforce', we're cheating them and ourselves.

Just sayin'.

Interview Down

So, the first interview of my annual job hunt is over...went well...we'll see.

It really would be nice if I could just get this one, and not have to shlep all over interviewing until July, which is what sometimes--usually--happens.

Junie B. Jones

Are you acquainted with Junie B. Jones? Junie B. ("the B stands for Beatrice. Except I don't like Beatrice. I just like B and that's all"), currently aged 6, is the star of delightful series of children's books.

She is also #71 on the most-challenged and -banned list the ALA has compiled for 2000-2009.

Junie, you see, is a darling child who tells her adventures in a unique and self-posessed voice. She sometimes misspells words, and she makes an occasional grammatical error. She runs her poor first grade teacher, Mister, "He has another name too. But I just like Mister, and that's all.") into the ground. And she sometimes disobeys her parents. There's an element in town that objects. In a serious damn way. Junie B., as I said, is #71 on the challenged and banned list. She comes in 5 ahead of The Joy of Gay Sex.

Apparently these challenging and banning people can't wait until the kids are in high school to ban Huck Finn, so they'll go after his little, suburban sister.

And don't get me going on the people who've set their sights on preventing their children from reading And Tango Makes Three. Suffice it to say that if you fear your children's purity may be damaged by a story about two male penguins hatching out an egg together, the problem is most definitely with you. Rather than with the penguins.

In Which West Virginia Kicks The Ass of the Westboro 'Baptist' 'Church'

I honestly wonder sometimes if Fred Phelps goes around with a battered yellow legal pad covered in ideas that come to him at odd moments for how to be as vile and disgusting as he possibly can. "Children's oncology ward?" his notes must read. "How to get in? Press coverage? Serial killers? Show support for serial killer? How to make sure S.K. not gay?"


Fred's latest thing was to send his followers to West Virginia to let them know that the death of 29 miners was the wrath of God on the well-known godlessness of West Virginia. They came with signs that said "Thank God For Dead Miners" and "God Hates West Virginia"

They were sent running.

This video is the best thing I have seen in ages. Favorite moments include the man in overalls shouting Bible verses at the Phelpsers, the girl yelling that she loves Catholics, and of course, the victory hoe-down.

Watch it. You'll see what I mean.

(Warning. This was done by a community news station, and the sound is a little variable.)

Back To Work Tomorrow

It's been a great vacation, but I almost feel as though I could use another one. Today is rainy, rainy rainy, and I'm sitting here doing the grading I managed to put off for a week and a half.

I'm stressed. You know? I'm just stressed. My father, thank God, is recovering nicely from his health problems, but by mother-in-law's cancer has recurred. I'm job hunting again. My husband has a terrible toothache, and needs to have a tooth pulled. My husband is still unemployed. I feel out of control. There is too much going on, no money, and not enough down time.

But I did finally get some down time, and I'm going to go back to school tomorrow with a vengeance, finish up the year, and find a job where they give me my own classroom. I have an offer of an interview, and some possibilities, and I'm just going to get through all of this.

QUIT Turns Out To Protest Gay Israeli Films

Several people came up to me as I stood in front of the Roxie Theater on 16th Street with my Israeli flag and asked for clarification--who were we? And why were we there? And who were the other people?

You have to love San Francisco. Here is what was going on...

The Roxie was showing Eyes Wide Open,a film about an Orthodox man in Jerusalem, struggling with his sexuality. This was part of Out In Israel, a month-long celebration of things LGBT, Jewish and Israeli, organized by the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco.

Now, if this had happened a month earlier, the Westboro Baptists might still have been in town, and they could have come and protested the gayness, but instead they had moved on, and the film was being protested by QUIT. That's Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. No, I did not make that up.

QUIT was there because they hate the State of Israel. They were there with pink banners, complaints about 'pinkwashing', and very creepy signs. My friends and I were there because they were there. We were showing support for films about closeted gay men in Jerusalem by holding Israeli flags, rainbow flags, and signs that were much more delightful and amusing than those held by QUIT.

I was struck, as always, by the passion and intensity of the people I find myself across the lines from at these events. The jumbled tangle of anti-Semitism and vague left-political platitudes, turned into something so irrational, heartless and strange that I can barely make out what these folks think they're doing.

The question I wanted to ask, and didn't get a chance to, was this: "Is there another country on earth, no matter what its human rights record, that you would protest gay films from?"

The answer, of course, is 'no', as one of my fellow flag-wavers said briskly. But it does highlight the unique place Israel holds in the minds of her haters--the only nation on earth with no right to even make films about its LGBT citizens, reviled by these 'activists' far more than nations that, say, just KILL their LGBT citizens.

Strange world. Queer, even, one might say.

I Can See The Hametz At The End of the Pesach Tunnel

Not a bad holiday, overall. My mother and I went to the first-night seder at the JCC, and then friends invited me to their second-night seder, and conveniently, Easter break for St. Dymphna's started on Thursday, so I have been at home, which makes eating for Pesach that much easier. My cholesterol has probably gone up a notch, but otherwise, so far, so good.

Today being Easter Sunday, the Husband has ham, and I bought him some chocolate rabbits to bite the heads off of.

Now, for a delightful Easter moment, I present the photos of the first annual wolf Easter egg hunt from Everything Wolf.

March Slog

I took Friday off. I NEVER take the day off. I'm still sick. I spent three days in bed, and I'm still sick. I'm sick, I'm miserable, no one will give my husband a job, and I'm depressed.

BLEAH!!!!!

OK, moaning and ranting over.