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Never let it be said that I'm not up on all the unexpected and outdated euphemisms.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