Is it wrong to covet a traitor's socks?

I ask you.

(Other musings--probably not including this one--on the new film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will be up on my academic blog within the week. If you don't know where, like Smiley, you could painstakingly find out.)

But many, many sarcastic bonus points to the alumnus with whom I saw the film (along with his wife; both of them were only slightly older than my parents and both were, I hasten to add, very good company) who hesitantly asked me over drinks afterwards, "So Haydon was...a switcheroo?" At first I thought he meant double agent and assumed that he'd drifted off towards the end. And then I realized.

Never let it be said that I'm not up on all the unexpected and outdated euphemisms.

In Which I Am Roland Pryzbylewski

When I came up to Chicago I left my Wire DVDs behind. The Wire would be too intense, I assumed, in my pre-arrival scared out of my wits state, to rewatch any portion of during my time working at the Center.

Time passed, and I started feeling nostalgic for the crew. I wanted to see what my new perspective would bring to, say, Season Four, which has a focus on schools and students and what works and what doesn't. So when I went home for my birthday, I returned to Chicago with the fourth season DVDs under my arm.

Last night I watched episodes two and three and was struck by how much made sense to me now. The collared shirt uniforms in different colors signalling different grades. The teachers who shut the place down just by walking into the room, as opposed to teachers who yell into the void.

The hairline class differences, compounded by middle school and magnified by poverty.



The first time I watched this scene (and, indeed, the entire third episode which, directly or indirectly leads up to this moment) I didn't connect sudden violence with longstanding dynamics between the characters; I thought of it more as a standalone bullying incident. Now, though, it's part of a longer trajectory, and the treatment one girl gets at the hands of the other is wrapped up in Dukie and how his classmates say his clothes smell and they don't want to sit next to him and how one of his friends(?) wordlessly hands him a bagged lunch on the way to school on the first day even though he gets left out on the curb when the rest of them get invited inside by a third friend's mother.

There's a girl in my class who smells a little bit, and her siblings smell a little bit and she wears a uniform even when the other students change out of theirs. It's interesting because she's at the Center during the afternoon but she attends the same school that the kids who are at the Center during the evening attend. The afternoon kids always seem a little intimidated of the evening kids, and they mask it with comments, usually ones about how they smell or how they dress or how they're "neighborhood kids" even though practically everyone is relatively local. Still, it's obvious that there are distinctions that I've only recently stumbled upon, and that in the minds of middle schoolers have taken up a huge amount of significance.

In the evenings I have two sets of sisters with one younger brother who are my go-to people if I want to get anything done. One set attends during the afternoon as well and their mother is a staff person at the Center. The other set of sisters live a couple houses down and their mother comes in with them as a parent volunteer. They can't stand each other. Or can they? Two weeks ago, the oldest sister from one set almost got in a fist fight (which yours truely had to break up with slightly more success than Mr. Prez) with the younger brother from the other set. Yesterday, the other oldest sister was seen encouraging the other younger brother on his artwork. Who knows. Maybe they see a little too much of themselves in each other. I know how that goes, and I suspect you do too.

The kid you can rely on. The one about to go off the deep end. The smiling entrepreneur. The self-appointed boss. The actual boss. That kid: the kid who, no matter how dire the home lives of all the other students, is the one you would never, ever choose to go home with at the end of the day. The kid who might be okay. They're all characters on The Wire, but I know one of each--at least one of each--in real life too. And, yes, that's intense, but it's also made me appreciate that what I'm seeing is not just in my imagination.

The teacher who's born to it. The teacher at the end of their rope. The teacher who's just in it for the paycheck. The teacher who might be okay. I know those people too.

Thoughts Upon Watching The Good Wife

I wonder if what Kalinda has is, in fact, mad swag. I wonder if my coworkers would accept this as my target form of swag. Baseball bats and thigh-highs aside, I think it's something I could aim for.

The Talk

I spent Thursday morning hormonally angsting about how I thought Tinker, Tailor was coming out on the 9th (i.e. yesterday) when in fact it's coming out on the 16th (a week from yesterday). Throughout the whole drive to work I attempted to explain to myself that I was not really as upset as I felt, but sometimes the mind and the body are painfully difficult to separate. Arrival at work brought some relief, as I spent the first few hours chatting with M, the teacher I work with the most, and eating the extra garlic bread the kitchen had prepared. Then I went on walkover to get the kids at school, returned to the Center and then, mid-thawing out, was frogmarched along with the girls in the class into the next room.

It was in this state that I was prevailed upon to give a portion of The Talk.

No, thank God, not that portion of The Talk, but another more simply biological one about which, and in order to keep this blog as friendly as possible for my diverse audience members, I will insert a warning here:

YES, I AM ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT IT. IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH, LEAVE NOW AND COME BACK WHEN I ONCE AGAIN START TALKING GUNSHOTS AND SOCIETY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ IT, BUT THIS IS TRAGIC/HILARIOUS AND HAS TO BE RECORDED FOR ALL TIME.

All right. For those of you still with me, this is what happened: after the Wednesday discovery of a cleanliness problem in the women's bathroom during the evening Youth Program and subsequent lecture all the girls endured, it was proposed that the same thing could easily happen with our School Age classroom. Thus it came to pass that, once we were next door and safely cocooned from male ears, M said, "Does everyone know what a period is?"

I remember at that age hardly being able to think the words without blushing bright red and fighting an urge to flee the room. Yet, all these girls nodded calmly, and a few even raised their hands to comment. Okay, okay, I thought, so what if I have always had libertine ideals and a puritanical gut; the teacher version of myself is calm, cool, and collected and, indeed, tough. So at certain points in the subsequent conversation I chimed in. That's when the inner conflict really began.

I have told many people that every comment I make to the kids represents in varying portions actual me, ideal me, and teacher me. The example I always give when they ask me what I mean is this:

Student: Miss [my first name], you look so pretty and skinny!
Me, first reaction: Thank you!
Still me, only the teacher takes over: Not that you have to be skinny to be pretty.
Ideal me, finally kicking into gear: Or that appearance is the most important thing about you, because it's not.
And then, finally, while the student just stand there more and more confused: You look very nice today too!

It's hard to be a person and an adult and a role model all at the same time.

It's even harder when you're talking about sometime as personal as a menstrual cycle. I flatter myself that the teacher version of me carried the day, but it was touch and go for a few minutes there. For instance, balancing, "It's perfectly natural!" with, "But it's really, really gross, so clean up after yourself. Ew," and "It's nothing to be ashamed of," with, "But you probably shouldn't tell boys, or even girls you don't trust, because you're going to get mocked." Also, "It's going to be fine," and "Accidents happen," really kept the party going. At some point I think I said, "Some people break out, some people get cramps, some people get really angry, and some people are perfectly fine." (And some people, I suppose, fight back tears over not being able to see a movie that already exists of a book that it already perfect.) The reality of preteen existence never, ever resembles any kind of ideal world, but I think that M and I did help to clear a few things up.

Then M left the room, and some girl asked how you put a pad in your underpants. So I did what anyone would do. Not betraying my calm at all, I moseyed over to the DO NOT REMOVE box, opened it up, pulled out a pair of underpants and a pad and asked for an assistant. I asked my assistant to hold the underpants up with her arms and then commenced a monologue I probably should have recorded for posterity. (Halfway through I wondered, how is this my life?) I believe it went something like this:

"All right. So you're sitting on the toilet and your underpants are, you know, in front of you. So you take this and you pull it open and you throw these parts away because you're going to use the wrapper on the next one to roll it up and you put this up there and you smooth it down the rest of the way like this. And, oh look, this one has wings. So we'll detach this and fold these under like that and voila! [<--that part is verbatim; I have no idea what I look like to them] So when you take it off you pull right here and the wings should come too and you roll it from the top or I guess some people fold and you use the wrapper from the replacement to cover it all up. Only sometimes the edges are still peeking out and that's when the toilet paper comes in. And you throw it away in that metal box or, if there's no bag in it, the regular trash can. Got it?"

"My cousin says there's another thing you can use..." began one of the younger girls.

Oh Lord. Ideal me ran for the hills. "Ask your mom."

And Not Just Today

Today I'm thankful for: purpose; perspective; the complicated siren call to service; the return of my artistic muse; those corner guys who called me beautiful lady; those girls who talked with me about the economy; my great apartment in my amazing neighborhood, where I can go and be as sane and quiet as possible; my insane, loud job, without which I would be lacking in several life skills and this great city experience; my coworkers for embracing my sudden, inexplicable arrival with the promise of swag; my three closest friends, not a single one of whom lives closer than 700 miles but whom I've already gone to for humor and support via the internet; the internet; the fact that my mother just gave me her library password so that I will not be deprived of ProQuest, Project Muse, and JSTOR for the first time in nine years; the friends I'm with in Chicago, and our mighty adventures with wine cupcakes, and song; my German posse at home, the best dysfunctional double date ever; Five Guys, Dippin' Dots, Art Mart, Amy's Bread, Witherspoon Bread Company, Ann Sather's, and the Four Winds Pizzeria; coming full circle with service and with Tales of the City; Dido Twite, George Smiley, Mary Ann Singleton, and Jane Eyre; Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, and Donald Maclean; roommates who carried me through every emotion known to man and made everything hilarious, life-changing, and suggestive; Princeton; John Banville; the British Library; "plans to give you hope and a future"; chocolate chip cookies; Paris and Breil, the gay pride parade, and perfect moments of harmony; introspection, supervised and unsupervised; using a machete to carve out my place in the world.

My parents. I knew I was lucky before--I would compare them to almost everybody, and almost everybody would come up short--but what I've noticed recently is that my parents know me better than anyone else on this planet. They are interested in 95% of what comes out of my mouth, or they at least fake it with reassuring ease. In the words of my senior thesis acknowledgements, the writing of which led me to burst into tears in Small World Coffee, "I was encouraged to pursue my interests. I was never scolded for making fiction my primary means of understanding the world. I was never pushed to be something I am not. They dragged me through museums. They played me Frank Sinatra. Through a long process of editing and revision they made me who I am today."
I've seen good parents and I've seen bad parents. I've seen parents who care about their kid(s) just as much as my parents do, who also have the resources to back it up, who care about education, who care about what their kid wants to do. Somehow, though, my parents are the best. I'm pretty sure it has to do with a high-wire combination of emotional honesty and shot-from-the-hip, weird jokes. I don't know how I got dealt this hand, but I am so thankful I that was. I like who I am and every day I like who I am a little more, and a lot of it comes down to this.

It Works Here, Too

Palling Around

If I wasn't on an FBI list before...
(See? Even when I'm not writing about spies, I'm writing about spies.)

The point is, once upon a time in high school I read this book called A Hope in the Unseen. Perhaps you've read it. It's been on my mind a lot this year, for obvious reasons, but most recently because there was a college friend of the main character whose parents were former members of the Weather Underground. I had never heard of the Weather Underground; my mother had to explain it to me. Now, I didn't think much about this character or his parents until the notification for this week's seminar got sent out and I learned that the Fellows would be hearing from Bill Ayers. The penny dropped. The college friend in A Hope in the Unseen? His kid.

Princeton has been responsible for the tightening of so many of my degrees of separation. (But, I have to say, I'd come as close to Obama as I will likely ever get before I palled around on Wednesday morning. Iowa City is a magical place.)

Ayers was with us to talk about education, and he did so in terms that I've come to understand over my three months in Chicago: 90 minutes more, charter, magnet, CPS, private, south side, west side, north side, New Trier, Head Start, tenure, unions... He held, obviously, very strong viewpoints. I found myself blindly agreeing with 60% of what he said, only to be brought up short by the man himself. We should question everything, and that's what's missing from under-performing schools: curiosity and dialogue. The status quo, even when it's serving you well, should be constantly reexamined. The opinions you agree with are the ones you should scrutinize the most.

Milk, he announced, was his favorite movie of the decade. Also everyone should go see J. Edgar.

I didn't scrutinize those opinions too closely.

One of my fellow Fellows brought up the idea of returning to history for good ideas in education. The example he used was Jane Addams' Hull House: working where you learned and/or lived. Ayers got very excited, and suggested that the best thing our generation could do was look forward and back simultaneously. This was obviously my favorite notion to come out of the morning: the unfortunately not universally obvious idea that progressiveness does not have to divorce itself from the past. And that, furthermore, it shouldn't. It's one thing to say "history repeats itself" and to attempt to avoid the mistakes made by our forebears, but it's another to actively reach back and salvage good ideas that, for one reason or another, never really took hold.

Holding Back and Being Alone (or: The Tragic Allure of Uptight Men)

 I'm too busy trying not to get shot. This was the answer I finally arrived at, to my satisfaction, in the bathtub, a week and a half after my best friend asked me about romantic prospects. (Never mind that my answer since second grade has been the same, people still double-check and I love them for it.) It felt good to finally come up with an answer--the truth, even--after a week of itchiness about the question. I have never been less concerned with finding someone, which is unexpected considering that with every passing week the list of friends who have been single as long as I have dwindles rapidly.

After I came up with my answer, and delivered it at rant volume to Roommate J when we Skyped (one friend is as good as another for clarification purposes), I felt better.

Then, today, I saw J. Edgar.

Unsurprisingly, I've always been drawn to characters who can't quite spit it out. There's a reason my spirit animal is Cyrano de Bergerac. The bravery required for grand declarations of love, or interest, or desire for a phone number strikes me as so immense so as to be almost unattainable. It is so much more compelling, on an entertainment level, to watch someone want to say something and fail than just say what they mean and go on with their life. There has to be conflict, and internal conflict is the best there is, on any scale.

We've established that characters unwilling to put themselves on the line are my drug. You would think, therefore, that J. Edgar would leave me with a 24-hour high. You would be wrong.

Sidebar: Once upon a time, when I was still in high school, I went to see Capote in theaters with my parents and grandparents. I walked out of the theater drained, shocked, convinced I had seen one of the most amazing, brilliant, disturbing, dark movies ever. I couldn't believe I had brought my grandparents to see it. I was shaken to the core. My grandfather's response was, "That was great! What's for dinner?" Since then I've had quite a bit more exposure to the whole In Cold Blood saga and today I would probably not be so thoroughly rocked off my hinges. Still, the fact remains that Capote was the first movie to bring to my attention that different people can have drastically different reactions to the same material depending on what they bring with them to the table.

My reaction to J. Edgar was less extreme. For one thing, it is a pretty conventional biopic. It takes a biographical outline and plugs the holes with poetic license. It's perfectly solid, and not particularly cinematically innovative. I knew more about J. Edgar Hoover going into this movie than I knew about Truman Capote in high school, and Leonardo DiCaprio is Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn't dissolve like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I knew what I was getting into. What I couldn't anticipate was how sad the movie would make me.

Part of it came down to Armie Hammer's facial expressions. This is an actor who already took me by surprise once in The Social Network; I wandered out of the theater on that occasion dazed, my extremely latent Aryan jock frat boy attraction receptors fully activated. This time his was like one big audience teleprompter: this is the emotion this scene is supposed to evoke in you, this is the exact expression you would have on your own face in this situation. It doesn't hurt that he's an incredibly good looking actor, but at least 25% of the time he's coated in truly impressive old age makeup and it still happens.

Unrequited love rocks my socks. It usually resolves itself favorably, but even when it doesn't there's usually some kind of closure. What left me upset and fidgeting on the bus today was the same genre of thing that had me crying for a solid hour after I watched the Homicide movie: missed opportunity, missed communication, unfinished business, lack of action, requited feelings that never intersect. The wrong people. The wrong era.

I treat pretty much every biopic I see as fiction. That doesn't make it better. There is no situation or emotion that exists in fiction that hasn't happened in real life first. To quote Sherlock Holmes and the Bible simultaneously, "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

I don't think this is something I've done. I don't think I've held myself back at the key moment when someone else was trying to reach out. I think my romantic desert can be chalked up to garden variety laziness and lack of opportunity. Since this is the case, most of the time I'm fine with it. Like I said, and as should be apparent if you've read even one other blog entry, these days I've got bigger fish to fry. I've never been someone who can't handle being alone. I've always enjoyed time to myself. Still, sometimes, like that woman at the end of Paris, je t'aime, sometimes it would be nice to be able to turn to someone and say, "That's nice, isn't it?"

Knowing that you have someone to turn to and speak with and nevertheless holding yourself back from it? That's tragic, and that will leave me introspecting for hours on a Saturday. What can you do but pray that you never find yourself in a position where you're at your loneliest sitting next to someone you love and who you know loves you.

But he
retreats and, fleeing, shouts: "Do not touch me!
Don't cling to me! I'd sooner die than say
I'm yours!"; and Echo answered him. "I'm yours."
--Ovid, Metamorphoses

No Acoustic Guitars, Ever

I have always had a complicated relationship with religion. I was, and am, the kind of Catholic who would never dream of sitting forward of the third row, who can't sing, who inwardly critiques 50% of every homily and who cringes every time a parish member does anything remotely resembling a testimonial.

And if an acoustic guitar comes out, forget it.

I come by it honestly. My mother breaks out in hives when our church back home breaks the fourth wall and parades around the quad during Lent. She is also the one who described church to me as "a good time to think." To think about what? Anything on your mind. Anything else? I had to come up with that on my own. I would, however, as I have mentioned before, be forced attend years of Sunday school. In hindsight this was, I suspect, partly to get me on the communion-reconciliation-confirmation highway, which became a lot more difficult when you weren't enrolled in some kind of Catholic school, even if it was just one day a week.

Imagine my surprise, then, in high school, to find myself writing a play about priests. A play about priests that tried (and succeeded, I think) to sidestep clichés and present a multifaceted take on Catholicism. Part of this had to do with several interesting articles I had recently read, but part of it was down to the awesome priest at the church we had recently switched to who spoke in something other than a rhythmic monotone and who showed more than flashes of humor and creativity and public speaking skills and who seemed like a genuinely nice and charismatic person.

So church was very much on. And then it was off again in Princeton, where I tried a couple times to attend and failed dramatically as work piled up and as homilies failed to latch on. I also stopped writing, for similar reasons, and then was surprised when the creative writing program rejected me outright. In hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. Among other things, I had given up on "time to think."

Last night I was talking to a friend of mine about how religion is so weird, about how it's practically the last taboo subject of conversation among the people we spend time with. Or, not really. Religion in general is fine. Personal religion is out of the question. I definitely see that. One of the strangest things about my job this year is that practically everyone--if not everyone--belongs to some Christian denomination. Talking about church at work is far from uncommon. When the kids were asked to enter a holiday card design contest, they had to be reminded multiple times not to include the words "Merry Chirstmas," and even then they didn't fully understand why, or succeed in following directions.

Last night I explained to my friend that I have a Get Out of Jail Free card on both sides of the fence. To church-going people, I explain that I also go to church. To nonbelievers, I can confidently say, "But I'm really liberal." (What would I say to conservative atheists? I've never met any.) Why do I feel like I need to play such a card? The Awkwardness, the societal version and my own.

Is "time to think" prayer? Some Sundays it definitely is. Other times it really is just a running catalog of introspection. Most of the time, I'm not sure that the line between the two can be all that firmly drawn. Either way, since I started going to church again here in Chicago, I've also started to come out of my two-year writing slump (the one that plagued my existence and sort of brought on an identity crisis).

Have I reached any conclusions? No, it's just interesting. I'm not asking too many questions; I'm just writing for my life.

Paris Weighs In

My mom's been in France, doing research and madly uploading photos to Facebook for the past few weeks. She comes back to the States tomorrow, and today she went on her last walk and put up her last batch of photos. This one, she said, made her think of me. I've been getting such great compliments, recently, ones that touch me on a profound level.

And here I thought that art nouveau e-card she sent me, "Sassy, classy, and still kicking assy," was good. Either way, my mother gets me, sometimes better than I get myself. And it might be her mother-colored glasses talking, but I like what she sees. It's something to aim for, either to attain or sustain.

Holy Work

As part of the fellowship portion of my year working in Chicago, I attend weekly seminars in different nonprofits around the city. I attend with my fellow Princeton Fellows and with Fellows from U of C and Northwestern.

A couple of weeks ago we were at a competitive prep school catering solely to the students in one of the two neighborhoods my center serves. One of its founders, a former Catholic priest, spoke to us before letting the student tour guides take over. He was the best speaker we've had by far. He called us "wide-awake people," and it only took a couple minutes for me to realize he wasn't talking about the early hour. Towards the end of his remarks he reminded us (as if we needed reminding) that we wouldn't get rich doing this, and that we might not get recognition either. Instead, he said, we should remember that we are doing "holy work."

This wasn't the first time I had thought (or been forced to think) of my job in terms reminiscent of my eight years of Catholic Sunday school. I had a phone conversation towards the beginning of my time here with one of my high school friends, now teaching at a Montessori, about how I would probably learn a lot from my year but that teaching kids probably wasn't my vocation.

It was out of my mouth before I really thought it out. Luckily, she understood the term and the weight behind it.

It was true when I said it and it's still mostly true now. I don't think I can handle middle schoolers for longer than a year. I think I'm getting a crash course in special needs and mental health that I couldn't have anticipated (although despite the craziness, working these kids into my lesson planing is actually one of my favorite challenges). I think once the heat really and truly gets turned on our room is going to smell rank from November to April. I think this might not be the only time I have a lost voice and a sore throat.

Parts of it are addictive, though. Today on walkover one of my coworkers said, "You're tough. I was sure you'd be gone by now," and the other said, "I was just thinking the same thing." These are the same people who are trying to teach me some swag. I was honored (and legitimately touched) and walked around the rest of the day with an inflated sense of myself and my toughness. It's true that I've almost honed my very own Teacher Voice (the semi-parental voice that wields disappointment more lethally than threats) and that I've learned to brush off student comments about my clothes or my appearance with no more than a shrug or a quick, funny comeback. These things are addictive too because when I'm successful I'm teetering at the edge of something and not quite falling in. It's real adrenaline.

So back to "holy work." On my worst days I try not to wallow in it. (I try not to call anybody or vocalize my frustrations until I've figured out how to spin them into a good story. I drive home and I take a hot bath and I watch something on Netflix.) But it must be said that, no matter how I sell it to myself later, on those days it feels like the Peace Corps. Those are the days when this idea of "holy work," however self-aggrandizing it might seem to me on the other end, really helps. If I can put others first, even ahead of my own bad feelings, than I must be doing something good, even if it doesn't feel good. It might not be my vocation, but it's definitely not lost time either.

This week has been good. Last week was good. Still, when I Skyped with my best friend two nights ago and she told me awesome stories about her life in a job I would have no idea how to do (and probably wouldn't have the business mentality for anyway) in a city I still miss despite being completely enamored with this one, and about how the company car was going to pick her up and drive her to the airport to the morning, it took a lot of effort to re-affix this "holy work" ideal to my mind.

Maybe doing holy work isn't all that far removed from being a BAMF, Roommate J's favorite appellation for me in college (and the source of, actually, quite a lot of comfort). My favorite thing about being a BAMF is telling the story afterwards: THIS happened, so I did THIS, and then THAT, and what do you know. True BAMFitude is achieved only through uphill struggle. You can be a BAMF in the comfort of your college town, but you better trap a few cockroaches in mooncake boxes while your roommates are all shrieking bloody murder, you know? Put up or shut up.

You can do holy work anywhere too, but it has to cost you something.

You can put off finding your vocation to do it, and that can become part of it.

It might even toughen you up a little bit.

(Just make sure it doesn't swell your head.)

Current Reads

 
I thought that the only thing more dangerous that listening to StoryCorps while eating breakfast was listening to StoryCorps while driving somewhere. 
Both efforts pale in comparison to the sheer willpower involved in reading StoryCorps during your lunch break and attempting not to burst into tears in the corner of the staff room while everyone else watches Judge Mathis on the overhanging TV.

Living My Life By the Moscow Rules

1. Assume nothing.
2. Never go against your gut.
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
4. Don't look back; you are never completely alone.
5. Go with the flow, blend in.
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency.
8. Don't harass the opposition.
9. Pick the time and place for action.
10. Keep your options open.

Also: Channel Peter Guillam stealing files. Keep it cool, calm, and collected. Allow yourself an internal freakout, but cover with more jokes. Push the work clothes envelope.

On the Attainment of Swag

No, not that kind of swag. My dreams of being a seat warmer at the Oscars went up in smoke when I rejected my Pomona acceptance. I mean swag like swagger, and I'm talking about it because my coworkers are convinced I need it. I smile too much, apparently, and that won't get me respect, or phone numbers, but that's a different story. They've even got some of the kids in on it. Today they spent fifteen minutes brainstorming ways I could dress and carry myself in the neighborhood. (Apparently skinny jeans and some sort of non-Converse brand-name shoe is the answer. And I need to learn how to walk slower. That will be hard.)

I feel looked-after. And a little bit like I'm starring on an off-brand Bravo series.

(It's all very tongue-in-cheek, but there's something in it. So far I've been taking advantage of the protective bubble I inherited from my mother, with just a touch less of the accompanying obliviousness/myopia, and I think it'll carry me through the year, but they don't know that. What they know is that when the three of us went to pick up the kids at school today the parents let us know that we can't wait for the kids outside any more. Apparently, this happened, which sent an already combustible situation through the roof. On our way back to the Center with our 24 charter school kids, a police car driving on the fast side pulled over abruptly and let us know about the Little Village one here, five minutes before, three long blocks over, and one short block up. We tightened ranks and, for once, the kids listened and walked fast.)

(Would swag save me? Probably not. But it would help a little bit the next time one of the walkover kids turns to me, seizes my hand and, clearly freaked out, asks, "Did you grow up in a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood?" Maybe my voice wouldn't go wobbly as I said, "A good one.")

Why I Do What I Do (And How to Do It)

There's this hip-hop song on one of the four stations I constantly knob between on my way to and from work. It kind of reminds me of the Lost Generation for the vaguest of gut reasons. One of the lyrics from the chorus goes, "All I care about is money and the city that I'm from. / [...] / My excuse is that I'm young, and I'm only getting older."

I care demonstrably less about money than Drake or F. Scott Fitzgerald whoever it is rapping, and I'm not from a city, but for some reason it struck me.

At this point in my life I can't just care about anything (unless it's making it through the day alive--more on that later), but it's tempting to boil it all down to one thing. I am a storyteller first, a writer second, and a teacher last, but this year the three seem so intertwined so as to feel inextricable.My leadership abilities rest on my interest in the lives of others. Every good quality I possess stems from that curiosity: observation, concern, perception, empathy, assertiveness, bravery.

This year I am working with school children and youth from two of Chicago's most crime- and poverty-stricken neighborhoods, North Lawndale and Little Village. The neighborhood around the community center where I work is volatile, and the mood of the students I work with on any given day often mirrors the mood of the community. Getting them to write or to tell their stories is often a difficult task, because guardedness is security.

Writers draw from the world around them for inspiration. That inspiration having been taken, a writer owes something to the world in return. As a writer, I am a guest in the lives of others, and it would be impossibly rude to take without leaving behind some gift of my own.

Self-expression is essential to agency. To express yourself, you have to have an audience. To make yourself heard, you have to have already found your voice. In my work as a tutor and as a teacher, my primary goal has always been to help my students find their unique voice and provide them with attention and encouragement as they experiment with that voice.

Writing is a social act. However solitary the actual meeting of pen and paper or fingers and keys may be, the remainder of the journey is undertaken with others. A writer must have a variety of knowledge and interests, but they must also care deeply about certain things. I have chosen to care about my fellow travelers.

Yesterday was the National Day on Writing. On Twitter, people were encouraged to explain why they write in 140 characters or fewer. I write because there are stories I have to tell, and until I've told them I can't do anything else.

 

(Yesterday was also Big Block of Cheese Day. Let's solve all Chicago's problems by turning the map upside down.)

Justification for my Fear Post, and a Probably Temporary Dearth of It

The Interrupters is a movie all the Fellows should go see, but especially my Chicago compatriots, and I'm not just saying that because 1/4 of the movie takes place in one of the neighborhoods my Center serves, or because my drive to work features in not one, not two, but three scenes.

Some of us work in very volatile neighborhoods, and the danger factor is not something we blog about on our blog for Fellows*. For the most part, this is because we are not directly affected. We're not held at gunpoint or threatened.

Nonetheless, one of the parts of my job that has been the most educational in the past two weeks is the daily walkover. We offer a service to students who attend nearby schools: staff members will go and meet kids when school lets out and accompany them back to the Center. I recently replaced a coworker whose schedule got switched around on one of these walkovers, and so every day two staff members and make the fifteen minute walk to a nearby charter school to greet the kids.

The first week of walkover was a breeze. The second week, there were three separate incidents that had the police swarming the neighborhood and had us going to our supervisor and strongly recommending that we spring for a bus. Parents offered to pass the hat. One mother decided that she was going to take off work and drive her kids to the Center every day.

Watching The Interrupters, I couldn't get the faces of the kids I work with out of my head. It was one of those viewing experiences that left me shaken and sure that someone needs to do something. I'm doing all I can at this point in my life. I'm not huge and imposing and I don't know the neighborhood inside out and I am not an organization with endless funds. Still, I'm not going to let CeaseFire out of my sights just yet.


*I freely admit that this is adapted from one of those posts. What can I say. I'm too busy boning up on my listening and observation skills to write two.

Scenes from the Neighborhood, Part 2

After a really deep conversation (completely driven by them) with two of the girls (aged 10 and 12) in the youth program about job satisfaction and how different things get important as you get older, one of them stuck her head back in the door and said, "Tomorrow, we'll talk about the economy."

"...most Chicagoans live in neighborhoods no more diverse than Ireland, Nigeria or Mexico."

"Chicago's greatest monument to segregation is a 12-foot-tall berm that carries the Burlington Northern Railroad through the Southwest Side. It separates Lawndale, a once-Jewish neighborhood that "turned" in the 1950s, from Little Village, an old Eastern European neighborhood that is now Hispanic. The Poles and Ukrainians established the tracks as a racial barrier, especially after Lawndale went up in flames following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The custom has persisted with the new residents: South of the tracks, it's 97 percent Hispanic; on the other side of the tracks, it's 89 percent black."

(I work basically nestled into that thing.)

Scenes from the Neighborhood, Part 1

Today I was called "beautiful lady" by a couple of guys standing on a corner. My coworker, who knew them (who, indeed, knows everyone in the neighborhood), told them off.
Him: Beautiful lady?!? She probably gets that all the time.
Me: (nervous laughter)
Them: (helpfully) We'll have something else for the next time we see you.
Me: I liked Beautiful Lady...

They built a Trader Joe's on Roosevelt, but that area isn't labelled

Where I live and where I work are both featured here, occupying predictably different positions.

I don't understand Chicago well enough yet to understand the geographic arbitrariness of some of this map, but I do know that as I drive to work the grocery stores disappear and the liquor stores and fast food joints take over. One of the things the center where I work does really well is snack time. Twice a week a full dinner is served at the after-school youth program, and the rest of the time the kids get a relatively healthy snack. Some of the kids get two snacks, since the school-age program which ends at 5:30 provides one as well, and at least five of the kids in the classroom where I spend most of my time stick around for the youth program as well.

I like to trash talk Wal Mart, but if they were to open a branch in North Lawndale I would have to grudgingly say something nice about them.

Roosevelt intersects with California as a boarded-up warehouse.  There’s a pothole you have to avoid, and then you’re running down south next to the park. At 19^th Street you take a right. After a few blocks, you pull up in front of one of three branches of the community center where I am working.

            

The Center was named after one of the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. When I showed up on Monday for orientation (which consisted mostly of six square blocks of forms, occasionally livened up by the seriously friendly staff members in charge of making sure I understood what I was signing) I was handed a brief article by Angela Davis. Davis writes, 

…it occurred to me that the way the memory of that episode persists in popular imagination is deeply problematic. What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased: They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.’ Another traumatic moment occurred in 1964 when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed in Mississippi. A decade earlier, Emmett Till was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. These boys, whose lives were also consumed by racist fury, still have names in our historical memory. Carole, Denise, Addie Mae, and Cynthia do not.

             

Part of my work will be an oral history project. This week I talked with Michelle, the teacher I will be working with most closely, about how we might go about it. She was very excited when I mentioned the possibility of such a project, especially when I floated the idea of one focused on the Center, which is celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year.

            

 I’m at the Center in a very vague capacity as a “School Age and Youth Literacy Specialist.” I perch in various locations around the building and do my thing. On Tuesday, “my thing” consisted of helping to inventory and organize roughly ten million books provided to teachers through a grant. Wednesday, my thing was a different thing: hanging out in classrooms and getting to know the kids I’ll eventually be working with. Thursday was more meetings and lesson planning and getting to know more about the Center as a whole. Today: more kids, ice cream, games, and teaching approximately sixteen teenage and preteen girls how to fold fortunetellers, which they called cootie catchers. Next week and into the foreseeable future, the real thing: theater and creative writing and oral history oh my!

             

We’ll see what the kids like best—I’m guessing theater, and I’m trying to plan accordingly—but I’m going to try very hard not to lose sight of history. It’s the reason any of us are doing what we’re doing right now.

             

For now, I’m looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, as I have been throughout this first (exhausting, confusing, awesome) week. I’m not sure that what I’m doing this year will be something I want to pursue for the rest of my life, but I’m trying to make everything I do meaningful, from lesson planning to helping clean the floor after snack time. The feeling of being a part of history (however minute) helps.

Fear and What to Do About It

When we were in France over the summer, Étienne, the man we stay with in the south, asked me if I was afraid. I had just told me about my work in Chicago; I had given him the Al Capone-laden spiel I developed specifically for French people, but he ignored all that and focused on what I had said about working in North Lawndale. "Are you afraid?" he asked, in French of course, and at first I wasn't quite sure how to respond.

No Americans I know would have asked me that question. Even Americans from Étienne's generation, who with age have become more nervous and wary, always greet my work explanation with an interested, "Oh. That's quite something," or a vague, "Well, good luck," or an admiring, "What a wonderful thing you're doing." I've had people ask me if I'm excited. Indeed, they mostly ask without asking: "You must be so excited!" they exclaim, as if they're informing me. You must be so excited. If not, what?

Very few people have even gone so far as to acknowledge that I might be nervous. My parents know I'm nervous; they know my face, after all, and, as Roommate J once told me, to the people who know how to read me I'm not so much an open book as a hefty tome. So my parents know, but very few others do. I'm sure all the Fellows were nervous before they started, but you won't catch them talking about it at the mixers where we're supposed to put on a professional demeanor and you won't catch them talking about it in bars where we're supposed to be impressing each other. Everyone is supposed to be so excited all the time. Sometimes they're allowed to, and, indeed, expected to be, completely stressed out.

Rarely nervous, never afraid.

I will be driving to work instead of taking public transportation. My hours are such that I would frequently be leaving after dark, and the walk to the El would have taken my half a mile through the neighborhood and under an underpass. My parents were generous enough to let me borrow/have the car, and I was fortunate enough to find housing with parking (for a fee). It was my mother's idea, but I hastily agreed. Étienne would doubtless see these logistics, this hasty agreement, as proof of my fear. Mere nervousness, he might well think, is not enough to drive someone to make alternative transportation logistics.

Maybe he's right. Certainly, right now, sitting here, typing this and thinking about this coming Monday my stomach is in knots. However it's difficult to separate all the nervous strands: the wish to do well at one's job and the worry that that won't happen, the still-a-little-vague terms of my employment and the completely unknown factor that is my boss, the fact that I've had this apartment for almost a month now and still haven't gotten a paycheck to help me out, the thought (irrational or not) that I might not make a very good teacher, the clothes, the traffic, the drive.

Yes. I admit it. I'm afraid. But of what changes minute by minute, and sometimes there are whole hours when I'm not afraid of anything. I also know that mine is a luxurious fear, that when I finish up work I can retreat to my nice studio in Lincoln Park and that, while it is still an urban environment, it is nothing compared to the places my students will spend the night.

There is nothing special about my emotions. More people feel like this, I am absolutely sure, than they will admit. It is possible that in a week or a month I will look at this blog post and laugh and shake my head with the knowledge that I had nothing to worry about. I'm excited (I must be), but I'm also scared, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, in and of itself. The problem arises when you let that fear affect what you do or don't do. You have to be on the lookout.

When I go to the dentist (not frightening in the least; merely uncomfortable), I like to pretend, while the dental hygienist is banging around in my mouth, that I am being tortured for information I will never give up under any circumstances. I pretend I'm a spy (shocking, I know) and my job and my life are on the line. Driving to work, I might pretend I'm Dido Twite, the heroine of Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles. She knows what she has to do and if she gets lost she brushes herself off and gets back on track. She finds kindred spirits in unexpected places. She always gets the job done. She doesn't really know what she wants to do with her life, but she follows the breadcrumbs from situation to situation and somehow winds up in the right place eventually.

I'm putting Dido Twite on my bookshelf alongside Mary Ann Singleton and George Smiley. She is the perfect role model. She doesn't let fear cloud her judgement, but she's not so foolish so as to pretend it doesn't exist.

My Kind of Town, Chicago Is

Just a quick update before my battery runs down: I have arrived! The internet has yet to make its presence known at my abode, so updates may be few and far between. I did venture forth to, at long last, do my duty and write on the fellowship blog. I've pasted part of it here, so you too can known what I've been doing:

My Kind of Town, Chicago Is

Frank Sinatra really knew what he was talking about.

Having one of the latest start dates, I just arrived in the Windy City on Wednesday. Since then it's been a mad dash to set up internet and activate electricity (I'm sure I'm not the only one who could now write a dissertation on the ins and outs of sitting on hold with ComEd and AT&T), get a physical with TB test for my employers (at the CVS Minute Clinic, which I had never heard of before this morning), and do the first round of groceries. Currently I am sitting in the Lincoln Park branch of the Chicago Public Library, benefiting from free WiFi after picking up my library card. One of my supervisors...just sent me a list of reading I might find beneficial before I start work a week from Monday. I must admit that I feel a little like I'm back in high school, cramming months of summer reading into the last few days of summer, but I'm also excited. I can see myself, this weekend, stretched out in a park somewhere preparing for work.

In the midst of all this, I've managed to enjoy several tranquil moments. On my first evening in town, I joined my fellow fellows and other members of the alumni community for a meet and greet picnic at Millennium Park where we were serenaded with John Adams' The Chairman Dances and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, part of the Grant Park Music Festival. I chatted and listened to music. I ate way too much watermelon.

Yesterday evening I strolled around my new neighborhood, Lincoln Park. The weather was perfect, which just enough breeze in the trees and a lot of young families wandering around and, like me, enjoying the last days of summer.

I'll be living in Chicago in a week. I've been hearing friends tell me about baking therapy for years. Finally, two days ago, I baked chocolate chip cookies. Then, yesterday, I baked banana bread. Tomorrow it might be brownies. I'm going to have to start giving some away soon, or risk showing up in Chicago ten pounds heavier with a mad case of scurvy.

First attempt at banana bread. It was delicious, the circumstances notwithstanding.

Stress cookies

You're never alone with your thoughts in our kitchen.

I won't say that the baked goods fixed everything, but the technical stuff distracted me from unproductive worries and it gave me time to think about things I can legitimately take care of. If I've learned anything it's that I'm going to have to have a goodly amount of flour, sugar, baking soda, and butter stored away for my first months in Chicago.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. Where do I begin? With the fact that they got me through both finals and my first summer away from home freshman year? With the fall junior independent work I wrote on serial fiction and Tales that led my adviser to, memorably, ask me, "Would it be productive to look at gay sex?" With my crush on Brian? With my fondess for Michael and Mrs. Madrigal? With the sudden, unexpected kinship I now feel for Mary Ann, a Midwesterner who shows up in the city for the first time at the beginning of the first book and finds more than she expected?
All good places to start, but I can't quite bring myself to start anywhere but my return home after Princeton graduation, where I found some mail waiting for me. There were several touching graduation cards, the most surprising and moving of which was a generous check from my aunt and uncle in Baltimore.
Now, I have had very little to complain about this summer. I went with my parents to France and to Colorado and spent quite a bit of time in each location. That being said, the thing I had been planning to do this summer--the thing I had been planning since last November--was a trip to San Francisco to see the new Tales of the City Musical.

I didn't think it was possible. I was short on funds and seriously short on time. But then I opened the card with the check and I knew that it had to happen, because I had just been handed this great opportunity and I couldn't let it pass. It was one of those Dickensian coincidences Armistead Maupin loves.
I spotted Armistead Maupin from across a room once, randomly. Roommate J and I went on a trip to San Francisco during our intersession break junior year and we saw him eating lunch with friends. I completely chickened out and didn't go up to him and say anything. I just nodded in what I hoped was a friendly and not off-putting manner when they passed by our table on their way out. He probably gets enough people telling him how much his books changed their lives and how much their grateful to know about other people who could get by on just five good friends, etc. etc. etc. Or maybe he could have used some friendly praise. Maybe he was having a bad day and needed a pickmeup.
We'll never know.
What I do know is that within a half an hour of getting the check I had booked a trip to San Francisco: plane ticket, parking at the airport, hostel, and, of course, theater ticket. I came in under budget. Huzzah! I could eat!
(I forgot to factor in gas. How could I know that prices would come to exceed my college GPA?)
I arrived in San Francisco on a Thursday evening. I grabbed a snack, talked with my roommates in the hostel, and went to bed early. On Friday I took a very long walk. I made sure to stop by City Lights. They give the best advice.

I made it back to the hostel and showered before I met up with Y, a friend from Princeton who just started as a grad student in chemistry at Berkeley. We ate at a Greek cafe and strolled around and I gave him advice on how to make friends (invent a roommate, watch copious amount of High School Musical, talk about it to everyone...don't ask). He walked me to A.C.T. and I picked up my ticket and chatted until the last minute. Then he scampered off and I let it soak in. I had arrived!

The play was amazing. I marveled at the abilities of the cast. I laughed along with my seatmates at jokes only ready-made fans would appreciate. I pooh-poohed Brian's wig.
(At least I hope it was a wig.)
(Uh-oh.)
It must be said--and I'm not sure why this surprised me--my favorite numbers went to DeDe and Beauchamp. It had never occurred to me what fun those characters are in the first book. At first I thought they only served to buoy others' stories along, but they're a critique on the upper-crust and that's always a lot of fun.
Anyway, after the musical I went back to the hostel. By now it was something like eleven at night but I was still wide awake, and it had only a little to do with the guy playing interminable saxophone in the street outside. I lay in bed until three in the morning only to be awakened by my alarm at six. I hopped out of bed, got dressed, checked out, and hopped the BART back to the airport.
I really felt like seeing Tales of the City, which was a constant for me for most of my college career, was my final closing moment. Appropriate, since I'm moving to a city of my soon. Anyway, I got back from the trip (and the one in Colorado, which I had interrupted) and immediately packed the entire series to stick on my bookshelf in Chicago. You never know when you're going to need support and inspiration.

Yesterday, the Aged Ps and I drove up to Chicago to start the move-in process. I picked up my key and I took the first steps to getting my electricity service up and running. Strangely (or not so strangely, as my dad insisted), the electricity was already on and we got to enjoy the benefits of a wall air conditioner without paying for it. I will, however, be scrupulously honest, not to mention prudent, and call and declare myself once my paperwork goes through. I will then shell out every month like ComEd wants me to. In this area, at least, I am A Well Respected [Wom]an.
In others, I am less conservative. For instance, upon investigating my neighborhood further, these two things provided me equal joy:

The apartment itself is great. It's a studio on the fourth floor of what the incredibly helpful Apartment People representative called a two by four or something woodwork-y like that. It's a type of building that was favored by architects in the 60s, apparently.

It's a great space. The floors are hardwood, the kitchen is the perfect size, there's a bathtub, and I have more closet space than I've ever had in my life.

The only thing remaining is to make it a little more inviting. At the moment it's just white walls and empty spaces. I brought up a few things to get the party started, though, and the minute I began assembly I began to feel a little more mentally prepared for the year ahead of me.

I suspect I'm well on my way.

Welcome to the next stop. At Princeton, I learned above all how to be a BAMF instead of a rockstar. Now I'm exploring the gaps in my education and figuring out what it means, exactly, to be a city-dweller. All while tinkering with my neglected play, making friends, and trying not to eat pasta for every meal.
These are their stories.
Dun dun.