Cimorene

The first time I cut my own hair I was twenty, and my mom had helped me dye my hair, which was long and curly, fire engine red with Manic Panic; but it faded, and every time we tried to reapply it would fade to orange faster and faster, and it was frizzy instead of curly.

After my dad got into the car crash that made him quadriplegic in 2003, while I was house sitting since my mother and little sister went to stay with him at the spinal rehab hospital three hours away, I was increasingly isolated and barely saw any other people from day to day, plus my untreated depression and anxiety were ballooning with practical and existential worries like whether my dad would survive. My hair became so laughably unimportant that it really was trivial, and I just wanted the icky bleach- dried stuff gone. It couldn't look any worse, and the last thing I could care about was what people might have thought about my hair.

So I just stood in front of the mirror and cut it down to the roots that were showing, more or less. It was the first time I had my hair short all over and not just in a layered bob, and it looked surprisingly good considering my state of mind. It wasn't completely even, but it looked better than a number of haircuts I had paid for over the years.

The next few times I wanted to cut it, I still didn't have any real reason to worry about it, and I'd already done it, so it just got easier. By the time I was trying to get a job again a year later, there was no real risk of unpresentable mishaps. So I just kept cutting my own hair... for the past twenty years. ( Read more... )

I grew up in Alabama from first grade on and attended public school there, a transplant from the North at the age of 7. Many people are aware that a Confederate apologism is taught about Civil War history throughout the south, one full of outright lies, the results of the same whitewashing campaign spearheaded by the Daughters of the Confederacy which erected confederate statues around the country after the Reconstruction ended in 1877.

When I was fed this bullshit at 14, I was prepared for it to be wrong, and I found that none of my classmates (about 50% southerners, the remainder being the children of transplants associated with the local university) were convinced either. I was revolted and angered at the time, but the more time passes, the worse it all looks to me - which is not usually the case since normally an adult understanding of human foibles and better empathy at least conveys some understanding of the mistakes of the adults around me, which I was fairly unforgiving of as a child. But this is different.

Here are the ( high points: trigger warning )

The more I think about it, the more unforgiveable I find the act of teaching this propaganda. I've recently started to think that each teacher who passed along these lies - which, yes, are mandated by the state curriculum, so I'll say each teacher who passed it along without making clear where it was a lie - is individually responsible for the harm they cause, and that harm is systemic. I used to make excuses for the southern system along the lines that the southern history teachers were educated in the same propaganda from childhood, but outside of the strictest fundamentalist cults, that doesn't really hold water; these are college-educated people who had to study history at a higher level (a minor concentration alongside their major in education) in order to teach it in secondary school. These are adults with adult responsibility and intelligence who live in the world and have witnessed racial injustice their whole lives, who have the ability to recognize patterns and who don't have the excuse of rejecting the reliability of facts and the knowledge of authorities. My history teachers may have been brainwashed, but I knew them and their intelligence well enough to say that if they were deceived about racial reality around them and the history of the Civil War, it's because they wanted to be deceived.

You don't have to have reason to mistrust the source in advance to reject an idea like slavery being "kind" or a "big proportion" of people being contented with it or happy about it; it's an idea that the unprepared and uneducated default human instinctively rejects. Anyone who has ever allowed themselves to be persuaded of this laughable claim has had to work hard to suppress their empathy and knowledge of other people to do so! Yet they have the shamelessness to feed this bullshit to the entire public school population and require them to learn it and recite it back for a grade.

My history teacher had her Confederate reenactor husband come to the school and give a presentation in uniform to us, showing off his Civil War memorabilia! At the time I was angry, yes, but now I can hardly believe it. I have no idea where to find her now but I've toyed idly with the idea that she and everyone like her deserve personal letters of rebuke in light of current events. I mean, I wouldn't because it would be likely fruitless and I shy from social contacts in general, but I do feel that every teacher out there in her situation owes society and their students an apology.

It's been snowing all day and all last night after raining and sleeting yesterday! I don't expect this will be the last snow of the year, given that was after Easter for the past two years (as I'm fond of complaining.

(I'd say spring flowers are one of the few things I miss about Alabama. My parents' hundred-year oak tree, now dearly departed in the mile-wide tornado a few years ago, was surrounded with hydrangea and azalea bushes big enough for me to nearly get lost in when I was about 10-12 and there was a bed of snapdragons and a bed of mixed irises and tigerlilies, plus big daffodils mixed into several of the edging beds and even a few volunteer patches of them out in the yard for a while that my dad would mow around.

(Daffodils are kind of a traditional Easter flower here in the warmest SW corner of Finland - the archipelago -, but it's too cold for them to actually bloom before Easter unless they're grown indoors in pots, which kind of gives the lie to the whole 'symbol of the awakening spring around us' idea, if you're using artificially grown ones because there in fact is no spring awake around you yet except crocuses and brave grass stems. Also the ones for Easter are very tiny, which makes an even more comically bitter contrast to the size and lushness of daffodil blooms that I associate with the season from Alabama.

(I don't prefer floral landscapes or gardens to green ones, but when it comes to flowers, I strongly prefer big tropical flowers to others. This is an unfortunate preference to have in Finland.)

Speaking of gardens, MIL wants to construct scarecrows this summer. I've never been a party to this before, but doesn't making scarecrows' clothes out of actual fabric then result in that fabric mildewing from the rain? If the scarecrow is in your cornfield, fine, you probably don't see it that often. But if we're talking a little kitchen garden and it's much closer to home, it seems to me that it would be more logical to create the appearance of humanity with weather-safe materials of some kind. MIL and Wax both seemed to find this question bizarre and suggested you could undress the scarecrows for the rain and dress them again later? But that seems like an awful lot of trouble to be always remembering, doesn't it, particularly if it's going to rain frequently? Does anybody have scarecrow wisdom to share, or am I going to have to research this and probably end up on a deep dive into whatever corner of the internet contains fanatical scarecrow-making fandom?

Called my mom for Mother's Day this morning and got through on only the second try! Cell service in Tuscaloosa has improved mightily 1½ weeks after the record-breaking mile-wide tornado wedge that leveled enormous portions of the city. I wasn't able to give her anything particularly wonderful but she gifted me with this amazing Alabama/Tornado anecdote:

One of Dad's attendants' brothers was in Holt, a rather more rural part of Tuscaloosa County, walking around shortly after the tornado hit, looking to help people. He came to a house that was basically gone and where in order simply to reach it he had to shove and hack his way through a lot of debris. He found two dudes in the yard reclining in lounge chairs with cans of beer while an entire deer, cut into thin pieces, cooked on a fire they had built.

He asked them if they needed anything, and they replied, "We've got beer; we've got a doe smokin'; we're fine."

Also a lot of tornado-damage-centric updates, to wit:

• Temporary cell towers have been raised, which aren't as good as service was before, but are better than the mostly-non-service they had a week ago.



• ( Electricity: yes )



• Cable and internet still out.



• ( Roof: tarped, yard: paths cleared )



• ( Lost trees ;_; )



• ( Friends and connections in Tuscaloosa )



• The wheelchair van's lift was damaged, and so was the body, but not the chassis or the inside. It's at the garage and apparently the repairs are a bit time-consuming, but whatever, at least the rest of the city is basically at a standstill rn so my dad isn't missing much except work.



• The attendant who was with my parents when the tornado struck (and saw it coming because he slipped out of the relatively-safest hallway to look out the kitchen window, and saw "the twister coming and the transformers blowing up") lost his car. Specifically, a tree crushed it in my parents' driveway. For some reason his insurance refused to cover it so my parents have in the hope that the federal assistance stuff will later reimburse them. His brother has also been helping drag shit out of their yard pretty tirelessly. People are really great.



• My parents live on 13th Street, which I saw namechecked erroneously elsewhere on a linked-to lj post as "not there anymore" (for the record, they're far from the only people on this street who are still there, even if a significant portion of the houses further down it are gone). If you've been following the news, you've seen photos of what used to be a Hobby Lobby and/or Big Lots (same shopping center) at the end of said street. They went for a walk while they were talking to me and walked by a number of neighbors out in their yards, including two different ones with chainsaws trying to hack up fallen trees.

Which Alabamian malapropronunciation is funniest?

On one hand, I am very interested in the things I'm learning about special education and pedagogical methods. On the other hand, much as I appreciate sharing the classroom entirely with mature adult women in a variety of ages who are serious about this, every now and then I am still (in a disturbing flashback to secondary school) plagued by other people's slowness or incompetence.

For example, this week out of 5 short presentations on alternative pedagogical methods by my classmates, two talked for twice as long as I had done in mine while failing to present both the central tenets of the philosophy and what the method actually does, which are kind of the essential parts. It seems fairly basic and hard to mess up, but the girl who talked about Steiner schools babbled for a good five minutes about organic food, but at the end of her three-page powerpoint outline, we had learned nothing about what goes on in a Steiner classroom and the lecturer had to take over and give a mini-talk about it. The woman who covered Vygotskij gave an excellent summation of how his methods are applied, but failed to include the key concepts related to his theories.

One thing that's striking about the various alternative methodologies and theories (Montessori, Steiner, Vygotskij, Freinet, Reggio Emilia, John Dewey) is that they have a lot in common, and all focus on working with children's inherent curiosity and desire to learn, allowing them to direct their studies or set their own pace, and letting the teacher guide them instead of just reading textbooks out loud for them to then regurgitate in the form of a string of worksheets, unimaginative questions requiring in answer nothing but rephrased sentences directly from the book, and fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice tests (you can tell I'm still bitter: a better word might be traumatized). Practical applications, the real world, concretization... all of these are common ground probably because they're so close to the natural way children learn when given the chance, and as such are fairly obvious.

So why the persistent clinging to the "traditional" methods which are practically the worst possible way to teach anyone, not just children with alternative learning styles, learning difficulties, and above- or below-average intelligence? Why, when they've been empirically shown to suck for decades? I don't mean to imply that methods in school aren't changing, because I know that they had become more flexible already when I was in primary school compared to my mother's experiences 26 years prior (not enough to make school anything but exquisitely boring torture, but it was better than nothing), and in secondary school - in the classes aimed specifically and exclusively at "gifted" and advanced students - I was lucky to have more alternative learning methods than most, but usually on a small scale, nothing to the extent of student-directed independent studies or broad interdisciplinary theme-oriented units (with a few exceptions).

As a child I was often told by my mom that my paltry few hours a week of special "enrichment" classes, the sole interesting and exciting parts of my education (once exiled from Montessori paradise at age 6), were needed far more by my classmates who were excluded from them. It was her opinion that a determined and intelligent person can always learn if they try (projecting a bit there, Mom) and that the vast majority of "average" students are in need of help, and would be a more appropriate target for the better teaching methods and more personal attention. (I was never so self-effacing as to be able to wish to trade the saving grace of my school week away, however.) I always felt conflicted about this issue as a result, because my mom seemed to feel that I should feel guilty for benefiting above my classmates simply due to IQ testing - an arbitrary measure that doesn't actually measure intelligence blah blah Gardner being good at different things (already drummed into my head at a very early age) - and nothing to do with merit. My mom is nothing if not anti-elitist.

As an adult, though, I have seen through the conflict. Obviously there is still one considering the inadequate resources in most school systems which result in them having to undertake a kind of triage, so that it's not unbelievable that the question is either/or for "enrichment" or so-called "special education" (for learning disabilities, I mean, since provision for the physically/severely handicapped is to an extent mandated by law, and is less easily carved away - not that schools don't try. However, in my system, the physically handicapped or severely handicapped had no choice but to attend the one special needs school which was fully accessible, while children suffering from less visible disabilities like grave learning difficulties were frequently stuffed back into classes with everyone else to receive wholly inadequate help and attention and usually to fail and eventually drop out).

Morally, though, all students deserve to be taught with methods that actually are effective. Leaving aside the matter of extra resources, all children, the average, the high- and low-IQed, the learning disabled and the physically disabled, equally deserve to be taught in a way that makes learning interesting and fun, stimulates their own curiosity and motivation, and trains them to investigate and think critically - by which I mean with alternative pedagogical methods. I can't believe that there would be anything but improvement if all primary schools were Montessori, Steiner, or Freinet.

I didn't check the syllabus before taking the 1-hr trip to suburb Pargas yesterday for the weekly meeting of my course for teacher's assistants, and so didn't realize that it was, in fact, Multiculturalism (aimed at Extremely White Non-Academic People from Finland AKA A Country That's 98% Insular and Racially and Ethnically Homogenous).

I immediately correctly guessed that I should have executively exempted myself, considering that I studied Sociology through all the Bachelor's level courses and quit only when it was time to write an undergraduate thesis, and that I was raised Unitarian Universalist on my English professor grandmother's considerable collections of world folklore (not to mention educated in America where in school I learned more about world religions than the Finns, which is hilarious considering Finland has the best secondary education in the world and America places 14th) (of course, that isn't universal in the US, where considerable latitude is given to state governments, city governments, and individual schools).

When I saw the first Powerpoint slide said "WHAT IS CULTURE?" I was like, Oh shit, and started ripping up my handout to make a series of progressively smaller origami cranes, which has been my habit whenever reading a novel through a boring class isn't possible, starting in 9th grade. (I had seven at the end of the class, four of which had small allover patterns drawn in ballpoint on both sides of the paper, and the smallest of which I folded using the tip of the pen when my pinky nail could no longer fit into the folds. I threw them all away on my way out.)

(LOL. This was entirely my own fault, by the way. Some of the class probably DID need the lecture and all of the lectures are optional.)

My dad, 3/4 Jew and 100% naturally and genetically irreligious, was raised in the Ethical Culture Society and UU congregations because his parents wanted people to have dinner parties and nature hikes with, and summer camps to send their children to. My mom was raised Catholic and didn't like it, and my parents were happily sleeping in on Sunday until they moved to Alabama when I turned 6 and I was plunged head-first into the Alabama public school system, and consequently exposed to Christianity enough to notice it for the first time.

At age five, I was impressed by Buddhism and used to tell people when asked that I was Buddhist based on children's books on the subject. But everyone (everyone vocal at least) in my new school was a Southern Baptist. They were all talking about Jesus all the time, as well as telling so many stories from Bubble Camp (their accents were very thick and it was several years before I realized that "Bubble Camp" was actually Bible Camp) that I wished to take part. When people asked, I said I was Baptist for a while. Even though it was clear I didn't know what it entailed, my parents decided I needed a positive influence, so they joined the local Unitarian Universalist group - today a Congregation, back then a Fellowship - which, at the time, was renting space from the local synagogue.

For the first few years, there were few volunteers to teach Children's Religious Education (CRE), which takes place during the service for UUs and thus denies those volunteers adult company. The debate raged on the CRE Committee over which UU CRE curriculum to use: the one based on Bible stories that we did my first year, or the World Religions one. For a while I think there was a time-share policy in place, but somehow I managed to almost completely miss any Bible-story learning. Most of my childhood Sundays were given over to World Religions. I also went to the adult services because I felt like clinging to my parents' arms a fair amount in the years my mom wasn't teaching, or whenever the topic of the sermon looked interesting. The adult "sermons" were usually not actually sermons; our group didn't hire a full-time minister until I was in high school. They were generally on current events, philosophy, science, civil rights, or history, and the last quarter to half hour or so would be given over to a congregation-wide open debate.

By the end of my third year in Alabama public schools (3rd grade, 1992), I had learned all the salient features of trying to argue about religion with crazy Christians (aka the futility of arguing with trolls, even though I didn't know the word 'troll'). This isn't to say that I completely stopped, but I put more effort into, for example, contradicting the Bush Sr propaganda perpetrated by Weekly Reader and the American History propaganda about Washington and Columbus perpetrated by our textbooks, and pro-choice arguments when my 4th grade teacher tried to preach anti-abortion during math lessons, and campaigning for Clinton on the playground.

There were gay couples, Hindus, practicing Jews and recovering Christians in the congregation when we joined. Over the years, my home congregation has had a handful of practicing Buddhists and Native Americans and provided a meeting place for the local university's pagan group (my mother took me to several meetings in middle school, but they weren't as exciting as fantasy novels had led me to expect, even if I did get to jump over a burning candle). None of these acquaintances were very much more than superficial, but at least they were there. Tokenism, privilege, Nice White Ladies: it's practically my native culture. True inclusivity often (usually?) starts with the well-meaning majority being accidentally insensitive (it took my parents and the practicing Canadian Jews several years to part the fellowship from its "Thanksgiving Seder" in favor of a truly multicultural Thanksgiving that made factually correct references to Sukkot and none to Passover, which is about freedom and fighting for it, and thanks for, you know, the plagues as opposed to for the HARVEST. Although this concept was not too difficult to get across to a congregation of college-educated former Christians, they still held onto it for several years because it was "fun" and "everybody liked it").

The guest lecturer was a MA in Psychology who teaches World Religions in secondary school (hilariously - or maybe it's just me - Wax's good friend Sofia is a Doctor of Religion who teaches Psychology in secondary school). She was highly animated, and included a number of anecdotes from her international travels, so the class wasn't mind-numbingly boring, even if the only new information I learned was that no other books may be placed on top of the Qur'an (but this applies only to the Arabic; translations aren't holy); Indians throw dead bodies into the Ganges; in the Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem high-rise elevators stop on each floor automatically on the Sabbath so residents don't have to push any buttons, and men can't go before the Wailing Wall with their heads uncovered; and that Hare Krishna used to be the Swedish government's #1 Threatening Religion because they encourage people to cut off all ties.

Classy grownup sneakers for once! For those of you who like to dress your age and not like you're on your way to an emo concert or rock festival, which is generally not me (although one of my five pairs of sneakers does fall in this category...). I tend to prefer teenie shoes myself, but there's also a strong appeal in classic sophistication. For one thing, I like to, as Cher said in Clueless, wear "my most grownup outfit" when subjecting myself to the review of government agencies and, most importantly, when flying on airplanes. I think of it as a costume: a yuppie costume.




Skechers "Flair" and "Delany" by Anne Klein.

(My high school peer group were yuppies and my childhood social support network - Unitarian Universalists - were the pinnacle of earnest, mildly organic higher education liberals, so I'm pretty good at passing, though I'm natively sf geek/blue-collar Midwestern & NYC immigrant stock. It's as easy as slipping in that subtle, reassuring tinge of Alabama when I say "Ma'am", "Sir", and "Y'all" at home. I do it, too. When I feel like it. I feel far more comfortable in my Docs, striped stockings, a pair of Converse, though: feels more like truth in advertising.)

kitten_head, who I used to call my "favourite cousin", is getting married in October.

My mom is the oldest of five kids, and four of them are sisters. My mom's the only one who moved away from her blue-collar Polish Catholic Midwestern roots - all my other maternal aunts and uncles and their collective 11 children still live in the town my grandparents moved to when my mom was in high school. I am one of four girl cousins born between fall '82 and summer '83, one per sister; but I was always closest to kitten_head because her mom is closest to my mom - my favourite aunt was 2nd oldest, only 1 year younger than Mommy, and our entire childhoods, our families made sure to see each other at least twice or three times a year (in spite of the 8-11 hour roadtrips necessary).



age 4; age 5; age 12; age 14

An introverted kid more interested in the books I brought to school every day than in other children, not to mention a 2nd-generation sff fan raised firmly in the subculture that brought my parents together (the central tenet of which was calling the uninitiated mundanes. I'm not saying my subculture is necessarily more enlightened than anyone else's) and a politically-conscious liberal child raised in Alabama - well, having a best friend to call my own, a best friend I could always count on but who took up almost none of my day-to-day time - it made a huge difference in my life, and no doubt, my self-esteem. It helped me maintain the sense of not belonging to my surroundings that was so vitally important to me (and which today I maintain much more simply by living in a foreign culture where I can't understand anybody! :D Although my best friends are still in Canada & Holland...). kitten_head has never been to a science fiction convention, but she adopted her fantasy-centric reading material almost wholly from my [parents'] bookshelves (two glorious summer weeks were spent lying on beanbags in my room, passing Mercedes Lackey novels back and forth as we finished them, when we were nine and ten, after I discovered ML who was guest of honour at BamaCon; then we made Tarma and Kethry costumes out of cardboard and paper and rampaged around the house).

The point is: even though we are as different as day and night in some ways, in other ways we had an unbelievable amount in common, and, well, when someone has been your pal since before your first memory I guess it doesn't really matter how much you have in common. kitten_head has been the most significant fixture throughout my life aside from my parents. I've been planning her wedding for pretty much exactly the same amount of time I've been planning mine (we used to design costume schemes and colour schemes as we wandered the streets of Hot Springs, our traditional July 4 destination - "It'll be winter and I'll be in WHITE velvet with WHITE fur and my bridesmaids will have GREEN velvet and RED velvet...").

A few years ago I reached the Andy Hurley attitude towards the heteronormative institution of marriage, and also realised how much I would hate planning a gigantic party of that sort. But I'm unreasonably excited that kitten_head is having a Silver Screen Hollywood themed wedding in a historic theatre, with reproduction 40s dresses in black and white for the attendants. In theory, the vicarious enjoyment should be all I'd ever need, and this is as themey as my ten-year-old self could have planned. Also, I now have a perfect excuse to buy some red vintage-style heels guilt-free.

cleolinda's reaction post puts into words some of what I was feeling:

And then I was reading y'all's reactions, and I found myself unable to feel any of the same joy or excitement or jubilation. I think I was shocked, mostly. My eyes were a little wet. And the thing is, I don't think I had realized until that moment how much I had lost over the last eight years, until the moment that I got it back, and that loss was suddenly what I was aware of. I realized right then that I had lost faith in pretty much anything this country stands for.

Except for the part where she said she would've voted Republican in 2000 if McCain had the ticket, because Alabama native or not that's clearly someone inhabiting another reality than I inhabit. Clarification: a million times "hell no". I would've voted Democrat even if the candidate had been Ross Perot (D) (LOL) against Colin Powell (R), not that I could vote yet in 2000. Okay, that was the silliest thing I could think of to say and now I'm wondering if I actually would have, because Perot's crazy and reminds me of my crazy maternal granddad and I actually respect Powell, so... well, not that Perot would ever have run Democrat anyway. But, hell, I'd have voted for... for... well, for Kerry. For - I can't think of any Democratic political figures I respect less than Kerry. Hell, for... for Alabama senator Shelby, who switched party affiliations to Republican in office while I was a child and earned my undying loathing, if he had by some insane chance switched back.

BUT YOU SHOULD STILL READ THE POST.