I think the first time we’ve “met” it was on my old blog. It was almost three years ago. The impact of that first comment was like a stranger running into my apartment, punching me in the face and immediately running out. I staggered a bit for the rest of the day as my friends explained that you were just a Trollus Ordinarius, that there were hordes of you out there and that your sole online existence depends on the reaction of your hosts. You couldn’t see me staggering around that first day, wondering about things that you wrote, but being a perfect example of your species, you must’ve known that your comments upset me. You’ve packed your shitbomb with just enough personal detail to make me wonder if you were for real.
You waited for a bit before striking again, throwing another bomb in my direction. Thankfully, this time your message sounded familiar so I wasn’t as upset as the first time but I still spent some time wondering about people around me, trying to figure out if someone was playing a stupid prank on me, trying to stir shit.
Stirring shit – that is your aim. That’s what you trolls do.
Continue Reading To The Internet Troll »
In tenth grade I started bringing my lunch to school in a “Pigs in Space” lunchbox, a shiny black metal number with a canary yellow handle and a whole bunch of Muppets in lavender astronaut uniforms cavorting on every side. When I told a bunch of geeky-chic teenage students of mine this in 2001, they were all, “Dude! You were the shit!”
Well, no. Not exactly.
I’d spent the late ’80s trying to fit in at my Midwestern junior high, naively thinking this was possible despite copious evidence to the contrary. I had one friend, zero boyfriends, and precious few friendly acquaintances other than my teachers. The few boys who ever approached me at school dances would all turn out to be gay. I could not afford, socially speaking, to carry my lunch to school in anything other than a paper bag.
No amount of arguing or pleading could convince my parents I needed the peg-legged acid-washed Guess jeans and caramel-colored Bass loafers the popular girls wore.
Continue Reading Outside the Box »
I have a single female friend who is on the hunt for a boyfriend. Recently, while recounting her latest dating disappointment, she noted with obvious disdain that her date de jour didn’t open any doors for her, nor did he offer to pay for her dinner. “Any decent man would have done those things without me asking him to do them,” she said as though stating an immutable law of the universe.
The comment immediately riled my flaming inner feminist. Why did this stone-age attitude persist in an otherwise modern, liberated, and certainly intelligent woman? In my mind, strong, independent women should not possess such expectations, not even subconsciously. They are a throwback to the days when women were considered the weaker sex — delicate and frilly creatures that should not have to open heavy doors or trouble themselves with the complexities of a dinner bill, because that would most certainly tax their abilities. While few people still subscribe (at least openly) to such an archaic perception of women, the expectations persist either as the shell of custom or as perfunctory belief in traditional roles for men and women. I wasn’t about to let these sexist expectations persist in my friend.
Continue Reading Opening Doors »
Consumers are not only seekers of products and services, but also information. In today’s day in age where there is so much available, this connectivity influences our livelihood to our core. Online reviews and testimonials determine not only where you are willing to hang out, but whether you’d even consider such a locale in the first place. Think about the last item you purchased – or didn’t buy – online. Was there an influence from any particular review that swayed your decision?
We are relying on technology more and more every day to help us complete various tasks. For most Americans, electronic devices are part of this routine. As consumers, we make transactions and social interactions via these electronic extensions of self. We demand changes to the marketplace when old ways of doing things fail, and simply put, there is no hiding from the fact that immerging technology is forever changing the way we communicate with one another. Interacting with relevant messages in a digestible form should improve the experience, while also remaining convenient and practical.
You can now download media to your handheld device for instant gratification. This reliance, however, has only made our lives even more rush-oriented as a result.
Continue Reading Gestural Reality »
I grew up in a house of books. My mother puttered around, dusting and reorganizing, but really just making excuses to touch them. I often found my father asleep, using one of them as a pillow. I understood. I chose them over toys. Their dusty pages were my many-leveled dollhouse.
My mom says I would clutch the things before I even knew what their pages said. When I did learn to read, their words orbited always in my head. At night, I swear I could hear them chattering. Sometimes I think I became a writer because the sound grew so loud that it was the only way to empty it. Books were everything to me–the movement and the stillness of language, the pause and the stream.
And then came technology, slow at first and then suddenly. Things started changing, but we embraced the new times. Hell, we ate them up. The books were quieter, but at night I could still hear them. Even my father, who found things like can openers to be incredibly daunting, started using a computer. He couldn’t type very well, so he got a machine that he would talk into and an email would miraculously appear.
Continue Reading When Mom Learned to Text »
A river goes through a flood plain that’s been tamed. The hills are still pretty with patches of unlogged Douglas Fir, but when you look down from them you see a small town that’s mostly a strip development designed to support 50,000 people. Welcome to Springfield.
This is the Springfield that inspired the Simpsons, only instead of a nuke plant, it’s a pulp and cardboard plant. Other major industries include factories for the making of charcoal briquettes and some plywood glue distilleries. In doing more campaign work, I’m assigned a solidly middle class neighborhood on the lower side. My candidate is running against the Mayor for county commissioner. The Mayor has resembled “Diamond Joe” Quimby with his inflated ego and questionable but perfectly legal real estate deals. But he doesn’t say, “chowdah” that I know of.
The Pioneer Father is in Eugene, as is Max’s Tavern. But the rest of the town is pretty much the way Matt Groening envisioned it. The arterial street one block south of Main Street has traffic lights that have been programmed for the easy transport of logging trucks carrying their single slice of old growth timber, but the last giant was logged many years ago.
Continue Reading Springfield: Anytown, USA »
When you think of first grade, what comes to mind? I remember my teacher, Mrs. D, a beloved white-haired grandma who doted on her students. The sing-song of her early grammatical lessons is triggered in my head almost every time I type. “You change the Y to an I and add ES.” It doesn’t look that poetic, but she’d write it on the board as she called out in staccato, shaking her butt to the Y and the I and most especially the ES. If I ever have occasion to write an essay about church belfries, or more likely, mass casualties (but not, sadly, monkeys or attorneys), the memory of Mrs. D will shake her butt at the chalkboard in my head for three days straight. Mrs. D helped us understand that grammar could be a game if you looked at it the right way. She was maternal but did not smother. She taught, but did not preach. I hope you had a Mrs. D in your young life that you’re thinking about right now as you recall your time in first grade.
When six-year-old Ja’Briel Weston grows up, he will likely remember first grade as defined by one moment: The day school security personnel handcuffed him to a chair.
In a lawsuit filed by attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Ja’Briel’s father alleges that he was handcuffed in two separate incidents.
Continue Reading School to Prison Pipeline »
One recent night in California, my son and I went out to dinner with close friends at a Berkeley restaurant. It was a faux diner — designed by vegans and former fern-bar denizens — with the trappings of the lefty elite: a children’s menu with béchamel-sauced “Mom’s” mac-and cheese; fresh-picked organic mesclun; butcher-paper table coverings and crayons.
I’d had an awful day. We were in the Bay Area to see my ailing parents. I’d already visited them with my eight-year-old the day before. My father, who has end-stage Parkinson’s Disease, is living in a group home; my bipolar mother is wheelchair-bound after many failed back operations.
And even so, I stumbled on a moment of grace — a very unexpected one.
I’d tried to prepare my son for his granddad’s hallucinatory confusion, his grandmother’s melodrama. My son and I had talked about death, more than once. How you talk to a child about a family member’s mental illness I have yet to fathom. Still, we’d gotten through these visits, although my son admitted the morning after that seeing Granddad had been “a little scary.”
Continue Reading Funeral for a Tablecloth »
When most people think of revolutionary movements, images of the Storming of the Bastille and the March on Washington come to mind. It takes a city to make a revolution. That’s where the people are, right? But the latest new radical movement to take Europe in its grip has sprung up in what might at first appear to be an unlikely place: a plot of land in the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania that the left-wing newspaper Junge Welt calls “probably Germany’s best-guarded potato field.”
On August 31, a group of forty anti-genetic engineering activists from England, France, and Germany met in the village of Zepkow in Mecklenburg to announce the creation of the European Field Liberation Movement (EFLM). The location was well chosen: The farm near Zepkow has been serving as a test field for a new crop of genetically modified “Amflora” potatoes developed by the BASF Group, and it was harvest time. And yet, the demonstration was over before it could begin. Acting on orders from the state government in Schwerin, the police banned all protests and created a 1000 m embargo zone around the test field.
Continue Reading Europe Says “Frankenfoods Must Die!” »
Beyond the proposed mortar of the polarizing mosque at Ground Zero lies something even more strongly woven into the foundation of America’s Christian ego and dogmatically-spirited grace: our seldom spoken-of limitations as a people.
And on a Tuesday in which the commander of ground forces in Afghanistan took the rare opportunity to voice his opinion in opposition to Florida pastor Terry Jones, who in recent weeks has taken to the social-networking airwaves in calling for a national day of protest by burning thousands of copies of the Koran, it has become abundantly clear that some are nurturing the roots of a movement dramatically juxtaposed to and in conflict with our nation’s earliest history.
To say that a Christian God is intertwined with our country’s founding is something that now most know to be a fallacy, and yet still the notion pervades and flourishes amongst even moderate evangelicals. One must remember that our founding fathers were products of the enlightenment, and many found little value for Christianity’s exclusionary hierarchy. Any thorough review of the Constitution’s explicit intentions will show a distinct mechanism by which to ensure equal footing for all religions.
Continue Reading Grace in an age of Questionable Taste »
