Survey Says . . .

I've just been asked (the accompanying letter says "selected," but I think we were all "selected") to complete a survey on my experiences of diversity at my school.

The questions begin innocuously, with "How much contact would you say that you had with people of the following backgrounds while at this college?" They proceed to "How comfortable would you be being close friends with the following people?" Next, "How comfortable would you be being a neighbor of the following persons?" And then, "How comfortable would you be being a roommate of the following persons?"

The trajectory of the questions suggests that they are trying to gauge where your biases lie, right? Getting closer and closer to home? How tolerant are you, really?

Then we get to the clincher question, which becomes entirely ridiculous when, as now, I will reveal the groups into which the survey categorizes people:

How comfortable would you be dating the following persons?

African-Americans
American Indian*
Asian
Chicanos
A heterosexual man
A heterosexual woman
A person with a disability
A person with different religious beliefs than your own
An individual with HIV or AIDS
An international student
An openly gay or bisexual man
An openly lesbian or bisexual woman

Given that the survey queries my comfort with various people in more and more intimate scenarios, this final set of questions is absolutely absurd. Here's what I want to know: Do I best express my tolerance for other people by dating them, for crying out loud?!?! Am I expected to?


To be perfectly honest, I would be very uncomfortable dating an openly gay or bisexual man, less because I think he'd make a bad companion (quite the contrary, based on my observation) and more because I'd be thinking, "This probably isn't going anywhere." And no, I probably wouldn't be comfortable dating an openly lesbian woman, but not because I'm particularly homophobic--does being straight mean that I'm intolerant of diversity because I'm not comfortable dating people I'm not attracted to, and I'm not attracted to women? And if I were a homosexual person, would I be considered equally intolerant because I would only be comfortable dating homosexuals of the same gender?

There is also a set of questions that ask how often I have felt discriminated against or harrassed on campus based on age, disability, socio-economic status, gender, race/ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. Fair enough question. But the clincher, again, is the follow-up, which asks: "In what form was the discrimination or harrassment expressed?" The options include "Threats of physical violence" and "Anonymous phone calls"--truly serious signals of discrimination/harrassment. But then there are also "Ignoring" and the even more ambiguous "Glances."

Okay, so truly, sometimes discrimination happens through those means--some people get suspicious glances while they shop, others get ignored by salespeople. And those are real problems. But how the heck is someone supposed objectively and conclusively to know which of the seven qualities (race, gender, disability) caused the harrassing and discriminatory "glance"?

People, please. I'm all for doing what we need to do to create an environment of social justice, but the execution of this survey seems rather suspect . . .

*I have no explanation as to why some are singular and some are plural. Perhaps they are also gauging my exclusivity in dating. Would you be more comfortable dating multiple African-Americans/Chicanos, or a single Asian/American Indian?

Boggart

My nightmares never involve monsters or blood and guts. Last night I dreamed that a bunch of people from my past paraded by me, each in a context in which it was impossible for me to talk to them. The ensuing scenes were ingenious, cinematic, sadistic.

It was wrenching, and strange. For the most part, these aren't even people that I miss or even think about, and yet I felt this sense of terrible grief, as if I were suddenly confronted with the irredeemable loss of every person that I have cared about but don't happen to see anymore. When I woke up, I was utterly exhausted and distraught.

I'm trying to figure out how to deal with such things, other than ignoring them. I know there's a school of thought that cites 2 Corinthians 10:5 and instructs us to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." But that verse seems to refer to refining one's theology (the first part of the sentence reads: "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God") rather than dealing with deeply rooted fears.

And maybe remembering our nightmares, though traumatic, offers us some advantage in our struggle to cultivate a faith rich enough to supply us with all that we need. In such dreams, our subterranean fears rupture our otherwise-smooth surfaces, exposing themselves like enemies brazenly emboldened by nightfall.

What I finally recognized by asking God what the nightmare had to teach me was a lack, something I need and now know to ask to Him to render more unshakable: a sense of the constancy and faithfulness of the friendship of Christ, and hope in the promise of an eternity where time does not limit relationships with people we love.

To Do--Done!

Since my parents built their house themselves, they are extraordinarily handy. My dad and I (believe it or not, I actually did help) insulated the attic on Black Friday. We climbed up there, and I rolled out the big pink fiberglass sheets to him, and he spread them with a tool of his own devising--a 12-foot-plus long T-shaped stick with several prongs. Although I had feared the job might take a day and a half, we were finished by 11 a.m., leaving time for my dad to prune some trees and me to bundle the branches, and then for us to take down a really hideous hex sign that was hanging sideways from one of the highest points on the outside of the house.

It is nice to get things done--it's a great feeling because with some projects, once they're done, you know that it's a permanent improvement in your living situation. It feels like such an accomplishment to know that you'll never have to look at that 80s wallpaper again, and that now every time you look around at the walls of where you live, you see the shade you selected yourself. I know it sounds cheesy to say it, but it feels really good when the house bears your imprint and you've gotten to make it into a place where you are always happy to be.

Since I moved in, I've tried to do one major project at each vacation or spare couple of weekends:

2005

September: Install new kitchen countertop (my dad did this one).
October (fall break): Take down filthy lace curtains and old rods. Strip living room wallpaper.
December (break, before Christmas): Paint living room. Hem new curtains. Hang new rods.

2006

January (break, after Christmas): Paint kitchen.
March (spring break): Refinish kitchen cabinets. Finish a dresser.
June: Strip hideous, aggressively flowered wallpaper overgrowing the entry and stairway.
August: Paint entryway sky-blue. Tear out disgusting once-green carpet from entryway.

Currently, I am working on removing the carpet from the stairs and refinishing the stairs and entry floor. Then I get to tackle my bedroom, where the walls and ceiling alike are painted a cave-like color Joan famously called "baby-poop brown." I can't wait until the whole house feels reclaimed from its temporary hideous tackiness and restored to its colonial simplicity. With each step, it breathes a little sigh of relief. :)

Three's Company

I woke up very early this morning (for me), about 5:30 or so. Lay in bed for a while and then got up to start cooking.

First, pie crust. Then coffee, bacon, and eggs as my parents got up, to have with our breakfast pastries. After we finished the dishes, my mom mixed up her legendary stuffing (the stuffing adopted by my roommates and best friends), and I prepped the turkey: butter up under the skin and all over the outside, salt on the inside, and celery, onion, carrot, and apple in the cavity. Salt & pepper all over, then set it a-roasting.

Next, cleaning the fresh green beans for the casserole, and mixing up the mushroom sauce for it. Chopping up the ingredients for broccoli-cheese soup. Thawing the corn that my dad grew and my mom froze, and they brought from NJ. Skinning and slicing the sweet potatoes for a new casserole recipe while my mom chopped up white potatoes and set them in salted water to be cooked and mashed later. Filling my grandmother's Depression-era carnival glass dishes with cole slaw, pineapple slices, and cranberry sauce.

Somewhere in there, a phone call to Julie, who was generally cheerful but momentarily dismayed as it was still unclear whether she was going to have 3 or 10 for dinner that night. I knew I was having three--my parents and me. This is the first Thanksgiving I've cooked in the new house, so it felt festive, helped along by the rare and abundant sunshine we've been enjoying here for the past few days.

While my mom and I were in the kitchen, my dad was bustling around, dismantling a large scaffolding he had built for the back of his truck to bring out an extension ladder so that we (i.e., he) can reach my attic to add more insulation. He then fixed a gutter that I had made a couple of hapless attempts at and removed the air conditioner that also requires dismantling the 6'x8' L-shaped desk he built for me when I started grad school, which blocks the window. Then, finally, with no more jobs he could do without going to H0me Dep0t, he settled in to drink a beer in his undershirt and watch football (I took a picture--the American Male Enjoys a Traditional Thanksgiving).

Suddenly, the turkey was done, and there was a bustle of mashing potatoes, whisking up gravy, and carving the bird, and then a meal in which the three of us ate probably something less than 1/4 of the food.

Afterward, I took my parents up to the church so they could meet Jodi and Lori, who were leading a meeting of the recovery ministry (I had expressed my surprise that they were planning to meet when I knew that Jodi had a crowd coming to her house for dinner, and she had said, almost meekly, "But it's Thursday, and what if somebody needs a meeting?" So there they were, so kind, so faithful.). So two of the people I'm always most grateful for got to meet two of the newest additions to that list.

It was our smallest Thanksgiving--we missed my sister, out in Colorado, and my grandmother who died last year, and my other grandparents who were at home in New Jersey--but somehow it was an enormously satisfying and happy one.

The Greatest Link Ever

For grammar geeks, a little humor to be thankful for.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/quoteabuse/pool/

Thanks to π for the link.

Student Writing

Last spring, I taught a pretty ordinary section of freshman composition: some very good students, some whom I'd charitably describe as "unmotivated." One of the very good students expressed an interest in majoring in English, and I invited her to take my upper-level course this fall. She hadn't had all of the prerequisites, but her essays had shown thoughtfulness and care.

And she just turned in a paper that was so good it made me want to weep, right there in Starbucks where I was sitting with my holiday-red cup of peppermint mocha, facing a stack of 14 essays and little time. Here are a couple of sentences:

In her criticism of [F's novel], H. asserts that F. portrays a world in which men and women live their lives through the exchange of dissimilar currencies. These currencies include money for men and the fulfillment of stereotypical gender roles of domesticity for women.
The death of [the protagonist's husband] thrusts [her] out of her natural state where domesticity reigns and into the apparently harsh world of the marketplace and finances. . . . Now, with a temporary adoption of the male sphere of life, [she] is one of the few who possesses both varieties of currency. She not only understands her value to her children as a mother and homemaker, but also as a financial asset in the male dominated sphere. Because she has acquired wealth in each sphere of the world, [she] is able to then choose which one she wants to dominate the remainder of her life (para. 32). Ultimately, a changed [woman] is shown at the end of the novel when F. describes her as “standing as it were on the threshold of a new epoch in her changing existence” (271). [She] returns with her children to her natural state of the domestic sphere, away from the harsh marketplace world. Having stepped out of her sphere for survival, like Mr. S., [she] ultimately knows that her comforts lie within her domestic abilities in the sphere of the home.

I wish I had been able to work with literary criticism as skillfully and gracefully as this sophomore, in her first upper-level class, when I was in college!

The Best Cheeseburger in Town

. . . is to be found in the faculty dining room at my school. It has inspired a new weekly tradition, Cheeseburger Fridays, and comes at the low, low price of $4.75 for the whole juicy, tasty meal!

Telebiography

For the 40 days of prayer and fasting, I gave up tv. I don't think of it as a fast exactly (it was kind of wimpy compared to people who were going without food for days at a time), but it was nonetheless a good discipline for me. It's actually moved me a little further toward doing what I've been lazily pondering for a while: disconnecting my satellite.

First, let me say, I really LOVE tv. I'm very selective but easily addicted, and once addicted to a series, I watch every episode, in order, and can repeat the process over and over again, taking apart the story in my mind, analyzing it, imagining more of it. Here are my past love-interests:

Kid-years: the obligatory American junior-high girl phase of watching at least part of Grease every day. And a little of Adam West's Batman (POW! KERBLAM!), the occasional Hayley Mills movie, and Christmas specials.

High school: Moonlighting.

College: the finale of the first season of Friends, with Arthur. Other than that episode, zip.

Philly: a bunch of rented movies, but I mostly just rattled around in my apartment and tried to discover my adult self (ugh).

St. Louis: X-Files, Dawson's Creek (embarrassing but true)

Chapel Hill: Dawson's Creek, Alias, Sex and the City, 24.

Currently: Lost.

And so when I say that I'm thinking of getting rid of my satellite, it's not the move of somebody who sneers at the medium. It's more that I've noticed in the past year that I've wanted to watch more and more tv--I'll be tired when I get home, and I want to sit down and watch tv, and then I can't manage to get up to do anything. Forget trying to grade or work, or even having the ambition to cook anything much, on more and more days.

I think it's that my life seems more and more full, and I had started to watch more tv to relax from it. But tv isn't really relaxing. It's an invitation to let my brain relax into a sluggish mode that's difficult to get out of, but then it's overstimulating in some weird way--maybe emotionally. Sometimes, when I've been watching a lot of tv, I feel myself growing anxious or restless, and then I just want to watch more to tune out the feeling.

During the 40 days, I was pretty busy, and I barely missed tv. But I felt way more focused and productive--in some way, it seemed as if I had more control over my own energy level, as if tv had been a hole in my gas tank. I procrastinated way less, got more done, had fewer moments of abysmal sluggishness. So, hm. It might be an interesting experiment.

Celebration Sunday

Yesterday was Celebration Sunday at church, the end of our 40 days of prayer and fasting and the culmination of our giving campaign, where we have all been praying about how we can contribute to purchasing our building and upfitting it to include children's classrooms. I've loved how this campaign has been about becoming part of this new phase of our church life, where we actually get to become owners of a piece of land and a building where people can worship God even beyond our own lifetimes.

I've felt a sense of shared purpose in our church over the past 40 days--remarkably (for a time of fasting), it's been really joyful. Our treasurer said at one meeting that he had initially been skeptical about this idea of corporate fasting ("isn't it supposed to be just you and God?"), but that he had then repeatedly come across passages in the Bible about whole nations fasting together ("Okay, God, I get it!"). People have either chosen to fast on certain days from food, or to fast from certain things for all 40 days. I think there is something special about fasting from food entirely, but I also think that all of the little things we are giving up have been reminders to us, every day for 40 days, that we are all involved in seeking God together about our places in our church. It confers a sense of ownership to make any kind of sacrifice, however great or small, on behalf of something larger than yourself.

So, anyway, yesterday we had a big party--turkey dinner potluck, the works. The MC was back in town and we made a video to show at the service. This one was probably our first truly collaborative effort, where from start to finish we worked on it together. Which, of course, meant that it took twice as long. And had to be done under more rushed conditions than ideal. But when I look at it, it's also kind of neat to see places where each of us improved on the other's ideas, and to know that the final product is the better for it, for whatever it's worth.

growth

Absent-Minded Professor, Part III

Several months ago, I decided I wanted an iPod, spurring a flurry of consumer research. I visited the Apple store to hold the video iPod and the nano, to see which would fit more comfortably in a hand of my hand's size. I polled nano-owners to see if they wished their iPods could play video, and I asked video-iPod-owners if they used the video function. Adjusting for a set of complex variables, I settled on the nano.

But I wanted more than the small amount of memory that the first generation nanos had. So I periodically searched around for insider news leaks, etc., to see when the new ones were coming and how much memory they would hold. While I waited, I went onto the Apple site to look at the nanos and daydream about what I wanted engraved on the back, trying out different messages like "i belong to tara" the so-creative "tara's iPod."

At long last, the next generation of nanos came out. It was time for me to act! I ordered my nano with not only my email address, but also an offer of a finder's reward engraved on the back. This last addition dissolved Mr. X into a fit of giggles over my utter nerdiness, and as I defended my decision as entirely practical and forward-thinking, it dawned on me: I had ordered the iPod with an email address that didn't actually exist.

I had entered the username from one of my email accounts, and the host from another. Nice. So I had to call my alma mater and ask them to change my "permanent-for-life" alumni email forwarding address. (Permanent, that is, until you do something absent-minded enough that they ought to revoke your degree anyway.) So, when you get an email from me sometime soon with my new permanent email address, you'll know why . . .

One more

Okay, so one more strangely disturbing tactile moment. I got a haircut yesterday, and they cut it off in a braid and gave it to me. But you know, they shampoo your hair first, so my little souvenir was wet. I just stuck it into my shoulder bag when I left. Then I forgot it was in there, and I reached in for something and my fingers closed around this long damp braid, and it felt so . . . human, and sort of recently alive. Totally creepy.

Things I've Learned So Far

Here are the first six that come to mind:

1. How to have a good adult relationship with my parents. Somewhere along the line, I saw how some people both honor their parents and brush off the little annoyances that go along with family life (or any close relationships)--and everything got easier.

2. God is very kind and has infinite time to listen to my trivial prayers.

2.a. Then again, I'm the one with limited time. This present life is short, so why waste too much of it on temporary stuff?

3. It's okay to have a pet. God created the animals, and he knew there would be limited resources.

4. Wondering if somebody will call you is a waste of time. If you're a guy, be a man and call her. If you're a woman, either call him or forget about it until he shows he's a man (who likes you) and calls you.

5. Might as well wear the bikini, accept having a big moon-face, and otherwise forget about physical imperfection--it's only going to get worse from here on out. I think this is why old people always say, "What a beautiful girl" about everybody, no matter what they look like.

6. The coolest people are the ones for whom being themselves is effortless. Like Joan and Frank!

Two Gross Moments

I'm advising this week, and so far it's going well. I truly like my students this semester, so it makes it fun even though it's a lot of repeating the same stuff over and over again.

Here's how it goes. First, I give them detailed instructions about how to register so that they can get into the classes they want before they fill.

Them: "Is there going to be a reminder about this?"
Me: (Sigh) "This IS the reminder."
Them: "Um, can I borrow your pen?"
A pause. Then them: "Do you have a piece of paper?"

So, anyway, there's a lot of sharing of office supplies, which occasioned two gross moments that I wanted to share with the world.

First,I was totally distracted by the large scabrous lesions on one student's hands, which I noticed as he was brushing them across my keyboard to type in his course selections.

Then, another student, brow furrowed over what he wanted to take, put my pen into his mouth and sucked on it. To make matters worse, I later forgot which pen it was and put it into my desk with the others.

Sure, it was completely anal-retentive, but I later washed all three black pens, and disinfected the keyboard. Dr. J may be able to wrest blood-covered infants from the ooze of the birth canal, but I like my office supplies nice and clean.

Let X Equal . . .

Some of you may remember a student I once assigned the letter X in this blog. However, since he is (thankfully) no longer part of my life, I have reassigned the variable to someone who maintains staunchly that X is the coolest letter by which to be represented ("Doesn't that go without saying?" he asked me, with some consternation).

When informed that X was already taken, this person, crestfallen, selected the letter which was his actual initial, which won't do.

So from here on out, X no longer refers to the student but to somebody agonizingly difficult to please.

Harvest Party

Here's the latest video. This is the first one I did on my own.

Hi, My Name is Tara . . .

My friend Lori has always been afraid of public speaking. In school, she once took a lower grade and wrote an extra paper in order to avoid having to speak in front of people. How funny, then, and how like Him (remember Moses?) that God would choose to bless her with an astonishing preaching gift. I heard her give her testimony some weeks ago--September 14, 2006, to be exact--and it was like watching a mantle fall on someone.

It was as if we were all huddled in the alley that leads to the ice on a skating rink just before a performance, and the spotlight was there on the surface, inviting, and Lori was scared, like a cat that sees the bathwater and suddenly clings to you when you try to put it in, and she was saying, "Are you kidding? I can't even walk here on the carpet in these stupid skates!" But of course, the skates are made for the slick ice, not the soft carpet, and as she got shoved out onto it, she just slid gracefully, steadily, and easily into the place she was supposed to be.

Lori has a pretty amazing testimony, and the details are so sensational that it's hard not to want to hear them, or tell them, every time. It's all there--heroin addiction! lawbreaking! life on a razor's edge, and God rescuing her on one harrowing night when she knew she was going to die!--and yet to focus on those things seems all wrong somehow . . . because what you notice about Lori is not what she was, or even what she's been through, but the wisdom, humor, grace, strength, and kindness produced in her by her experience of the indefatigable love of God.

Going to that meeting of our church's recovery ministry and hearing Lori speak was unforgettable, and yet the evening was tinged with sadness for me too. Lori has this desire for absolute obedience, but so many of the people there were painfully and obviously ambivalent about their recovery. Lori struggles, but the biggest part of her, the part that is winning out minute by minute, desires to know God whatever the cost. I think that before, I had believed that you'd either want to be in recovery like Lori, or you'd be completely at the mercy of your addiction. I didn't really think about all the time when you'd be trying to decide, and maybe not using at the moment, but pretty actively considering using later tonight. In this respect, it seemed more like just the way we fight plain old sin--our battles are not dramatic, but petty and tedious and recursive and boring to even our best friends. Our enemy fights a war of attrition.

And so when I think about the ministry I think our church is supposed to have, it's not like we are "bringing the addicts to Jesus!" or "bringing Jesus to the addicts!" And it's not that cloying sentiment of, "Oh, when we try to bless others who are needy, we're truly blessed ourselves!" . . . . all of which smack of smarmy self-importance somehow. It's more like this very simple question, and one that's the same whether our church has people struggling with addiction or people struggling in all the suburban garden-variety ways: Are we going to be the church, really, or not?