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David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece two days ago called “The Great Divorce.” In it, he talks about Coming Apart, a book by Charles Murray, in which Murray argues that the US is increasingly a two-caste society. Brooks concedes that this argument isn’t new but, he says, “Murray provides an incredible amount of data” to illustrate his claims.

Okay, Mr. Brooks, first. Do you really need data to be convinced that the US is a society with a deep, deep fissure running down the middle, a fissure that’s looking more and more like that trench at the bottom of the ocean where various bad movies featuring Jackie Bissett and Ed Harris ended up?

If you’re a New Yorker who lives on 63rd street and the East River, the likelihood of you ever, ever stepping into a Wal-Mart other than on a whimsical Marie-Antoinette-as-milkmaid sort of errand is almost nil. If you’re a New Yorker who lives on Central Park West, perhaps facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the chances of your kids going to a school where there aren’t enough math books for everyone in the class is an impossibility.

You don’t need data to know that (although it sounds fancier if you do).

I mean, I applaud Mr. Murray for finding ways to measure the gaping chasm between “have” and “have not,” and his research challenges my own assumptions. Seems it’s the “Have” tribe who goes to church and operates out of a conservative ideology, while the lower tribe goes to church less often and is more likely to live in sin (probably because they don’t go to church).

But Brooks goes on to say that “the members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

Hmm.

1950s traditionalist values. That’s a bit tricky, isn’t it, given what those “values” included? Segregation, sexism, homophobia…Middle-class white women didn’t work; lower-class women of color had to work; men of color were called “boy; mixed-race marriages were illegal. Yes, there was perhaps an “arduous work ethic” but what, exactly, does that mean? Other social scientists have shown that people in the late 20th and early 21st century are working longer and longer hours–and are less and less able to “turn off” work, due to all those iDevices that keep us tethered to work even when we’re, you know, relaxing with a martini brought to us by either Betty Draper or our crisply aproned help. (No names needed, just “the help.” After all, isn’t that a 1950s traditionalist practice?)

Okay. Okay, so we’ll let that slide…sort of. For me, actually, the real sticking point is when Brooks calls for National Service (which, actually, I think is a a great idea but mostly because after a year of mandatory services, then when/if kids go to college, they might know why the hell they’re there, instead of just using the next four years to dick around and drink beer).

Brooks calls for a National Service Program “in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.”

Let’s overlook his assumption that we’re always going to have “the masses.” Let’s instead say to him that actually, the country already has a national program that could, potentially jam the tribes together so that they’d work together, spread out their values, learn from one another.

It’s called public school.

Thats what we want to restore. Not the fucking 1950s, for god’s sake.

Public schools. Public schools with sufficient materials for all children, with teachers who are given creative license to work with the people sitting in front of them instead of being told to treat these people like they’re widgets; public schools that have safe and inviting physical plants, regardless of whether the building is in South Harlem, Tribeca, Illinois, Nebraska, Oregon.  Public schools that haven’t been gutted by the imperious purse strings of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and others, whose ideas about testing, testing, testing, seem designed to keep “the masses” as precisely that, and whose own educations (and the educations of their children and friends’ children) contradict every single policy they want to institute.

What if a “good” elementary school were free instead of costing upwards of 36K. No, that’s not a typo, Mr. Brooks. Your own paper, in your own city, reported that private school tuitions, for first-grade, frequently starts at thirty-six thousand dollars.  Which is cheap, I guess, because the kids are obviously finger-painting with liquid platinum.

Public education is uniquely suited to building bridges between these “tribes,” but Brooks ignores that fact, perhaps because he’s been one of the cheerleaders for more, more, more testing, and more “teacher accountability” and all the things that are rendering public schools absolutely incapable of doing anything other than…teaching the test.

And you know what?

Test scores make really, really crappy bridges.

When Liam and Caleb were little, they both loved Going on a Bear Hunt. Remember that?

Going on a bear hunt.

We’re going to catch a big one.

What a beautiful day!

We’re not scared!

And then there’s the long tall grass to get through, swishy-swashy; and the mud, squelch-squerch…and pretty much every other obstacle known to human kind, each with its own sound effect.

And the refrain, of course is “we can’t go over it, we can’t go under it… oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”

They do get through it, find a bear, are afraid of the bear, run back through all that crap, and climb into bed with the covers over their heads.  Very satisfying. Except for the poor bear, who is left alone to wander the seashore.

I’m thinking about bear hunts these days as older son tries to adjust to his new school.  It’s his second new school in six months–not easy to do, by a long shot, I know–and he’s pretty clear that we’ve ruined his life.  I don’t have the heart to tell him that he’s only eleven. The life-ruining hasn’t even begun. Wait till he’s sixteen and I show up at some party where he’s all cool with the hair gel and the soccer jersey and then I trill from the front hall that it’s time to come home and practice the euphonium. That will be life-ruining.

He has forgotten the lesson of the bear hunt. He can’t believe that he won’t be in the middle of a rocky transition forever. As far as he’s concerned, his new school is an abysmal failure, a prison, a nightmare from which he will never, ever awake. And we’ve ruined his life.

School is stupid and British spelling is stupid and English history is stupid and oh by the way, we ruined his life.

Here’s the thing about Liam: he hates not knowing. He’s a perfectionist in pretty much everything and as a result of that (says moi, armchair shrink), when he explodes because of all the pressure he puts on himself, he explodes BIG and DRAMATICAL and WITH BAD WORDS.  Let’s keep in mind that his mamma is a card carrying member of the Good Enough Club and Husband aims for perfection but then he can’t ever remember where he put it, so we’re both quite puzzled about Liam’s need to be perfect.  Fortunately–or unfortunately–he often comes quite close: perfect report cards; chosen for this honor or that selective program or that elite soccer squad.  He works hard; he pushes himself; he’ll kill himself trying to get something right.  And also manages to be goofy and silly and dance around in his underpants to Kesha songs.

“Passionate” is the word I always use for Liam and I am reminded again, in these past few weeks, that passion is a double-edged emotion.  The highs are really, really high, and the lows are cataclysmic.  He’s in a cataclysmic low right now as he tries to suss out the new system, tries to remember that gray is now grey, and color is now colour.  There have been sinkers–not quite as epic as when we first arrived in Abu Dhabi, but close–and as usual, I try to deal with them with some ad hoc mixture of empathy, firmness, listening, berating, whispers, shouts, hugs, threats, and bribes.

Yes. My parenting has lacked consistency lately.  Thanks for that insight.  And Husband and I aren’t always on the same parenting page at the same time, which adds a whole ‘nother level of wonderfulness to the situation: he wants to cajole when I want to be firm; he berates when I want to offer hugs. I don’t know if we’re complementing each other or just muddying the already swirling waters.

I am trying to remember my own bear hunt lessons, oh yes I am. I tell myself we’ve just got to get through all this swishy-swashy grass–and my sister (so wise and yet…younger. How can that be?) reminds me (and I then remind Liam) that it won’t be like this forever. But. When your adorable boy in his navy blue blazer is whisper-screaming at you that you’re an idiot and (say it with me) you’ve ruined his life–in the elevator of our building–with other people on the elevator- AT 6:50 IN THE MORNING…well, let’s just say it’s hard to hang on.

For a brief nano-second I thought, what if I just smacked him? Just flipped his cheek with my hand to jolt him out of his hysteria?

I didn’t flip his cheek. In a triumph of will over emotion, I hugged him close and told him it wouldn’t be like this forever.

I am not sure he believes me. I am, after all, the woman who has ruined his life.

Going through it. That’s the thing that sucks, about life and bear hunts, both.

squelch-squerch-squelch-squerch…

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Blackout!

Wikipedia, among others, is staging a protest to raise awareness about two bills being discussed in the US Congress today–SOPA and PIPA.  They sound sort of like Spanish restaurants, don’t they, where you might get a sangria and some tapas?

Nope. SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA is Protect IP Act (click here for more, or here). Both pieces of legislation would allow the government to shut down entire sites if even one piece of content is thought to violate copyright–but violations don’t need to be proven to be removed. The mere allegation of violation is enough to get a site shut down.  Marvin Ammori points out that if SOPA and PIPA are passed, “aspects of the legislation would make… State Department-sponsored free-speech technology illegal in the United States.” Isn’t irony like that supposed to be solely the purview of Colbert and Stewart?

I live in a country where websites, twitter feeds, and video feeds are routinely blocked for one reason or another.  It’s only when I’m in the bubble created by the university where I teach that I can access any material I want.  Does the United States really want to implement legislation that would be more repressive than the Emirates’ laws? Or China’s?

And more importantly, the next time that Caleb asks me about the Egyptian god Anubis, or Liam wants to know precisely how fast the water is rising around the Maldives, or when I want to know what a tiffin is, or if I need a giggle and want to watch Michelle Bachman try to answer policy questions…what will I do?  I mean, forget your larger political issues and pesky crap like freedom of speech.  If this legislation skates through on the rhetoric of the Far Right, then I’m going to look stupid in front of my kids.  And that just won’t do.

Today he went on a field trip, to the Hezbollah Museum.

I’ll let that sink in a bit. Hezbollah. Museum.

I’m thinking this museum will not be a big draw among the “ladies who lunch” set.

And while the ladies who lunch may not be flocking to the museum for the latest exhibits in heavy artillery, tanks, and guerilla bunkers, hundreds of thousands of other people have thronged the museum since it opened last May.

According to this article from Reuters, plans for the museum site include a five-star hotel, a swimming complex, and a cable car.  I don’t know about you, but riding a cable car in what amounts to a war zone doesn’t sound like any ride I want to take unless it’s a re-enactment at Epcot.

What are the politics of visiting this museum, I wonder. Is paying the admission fee tantamount to supporting Hezbollah?  Would it be wrong to buy a shwarma at the snack bar after you’ve made your way through the exhibits?

And what’s going to be sold in the inevitable gift shop?  T-shirts that say “Daddy went to Hezbollah and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?”  Or do you suppose someone will actually market what Liam asked for, on the morning Husband left for his trip: Can you bring me a terrorist bobble-head doll?

I don’t suppose I would win a worst-job contest–I’ve never had to muck toilets for a living or clean out the holds of fishing boats–but I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs. There’ve been a few where I just walked out the back door and kept moving and a few where I’ve been fired asked to “pursue opportunities elsewhere.”

All I’ve ever really wanted to do in my life is be a writer (seriously–I had my writer’s pseudonym picked out when I was in 4th grade–very precocious, except I pronounced pseudonym as puh-sood-oh-nim), but until  I can figure out how to “monetize” my words (as they say in the corporate world),  I’ve got probably the best job I’ve ever had, right now. Except for the small but pressing detail that most of the people I love are about six thousand miles away. But that’s why god invented skype, right?

These crappy jobs all contributed, in some long-view sense, to me being where I am now.  And as a result, that’s probably why I’m going to insist that my kids go get their own crappy jobswhen they hit working age (which, according to Newt Gingrich, is right now. I mean, Liam is eleven and has not contributed one red cent to this household yet. Slacker. I’m going to apprentice him to the school custodian, that’s what).

1. Babysitter. In high school, I babysat for a neighbor whose house was, even to my adolescent eyes, disgusting. Dirty dishes piled in the sink, overflowing garbage pail, make-up covering every surface of the bathroom counters and bureau tops.  I barely remember the girl I babysat for, but I will never forget her dog: a huge sheepdog whose fur was the equivalent of the dirty-dish filled sink. Matted dreadlocks of hair, long streams of drool sort of patted into its chin whiskers, and it stank of old food. The mother chain-smoked long skinny cigarettes and she would frequently leave one burning in the ashtray downstairs while she went upstairs to get dressed for her night out.  Of course, the smoke itself didn’t bother me because I smoked too (on the sly) and being at her house gave me the excuse I needed: I smelled like smoke because I’d been at the Ingrassia’s house. On the other hand, I was always worried the house would burn down.

2. Usher at a convention center. Sometimes this was a great job, at least in the early 1980s when the rock shows would come to town. I totally got to see Loverboy, dude, and Foreigner (the “Jukebox Hero” tour? Surely you still have that t-shirt?), and of course Judas Priest. Big hair, big fun. Got to wear a cool uniform and hang with my friends who came to the shows. Of course, then they would leave for the after-party and I would be left in the arena picking up bottles and cigarettes and vomit. Lovely.  Working for the Ice Capades show, the gift conventions, and the Gospel Music Tour was hellishly boring, by comparision, but at least there wasn’t vomit in the aisles afterwards. Or at least not as much.

3. Short-order grill cook. I worked the grill every Saturday morning at the women’s college I went to, which meant I was the witness to the morning walk of shame.

(Sidebar: to appreciate the walk of shame, you need to know something about women’s colleges, or at least the one I went to, in the mid 1980s: frequently of a Friday night at our college, there would be a dance with a band, and guys would come from other schools–friends of friends, or friends of somebody’s boyfriend or brother or whatever. The conversation often went something like this (imagine loud bad 1980s music and tepid beer): “Hi, I’m Keith. Howyadoin? Is your roommate home?”  The phrase “is your roommate home” was code for: you go to a woman’s college and therefore must be horny as hell and would like to take me to bed)

Sometimes Muffy or Bitsy or Boopsy (the school was in New England; there were girls there who actually answered to these names) would accommodate Keith or whomever, and then it would be morning and there would be this…guy wedged into that hideous single bed (how did anyone have sex in college give the beds we all had?) and this guy would have to eat. So she’d bring him over to the grill and they’d order. Me? I’d be behind the grill in my Izod shirt with the Grateful Dead skeletons silk-screened on the back, nursing my own sad hangover, and wondering how to explain to Bitsy that if you try to cook an omelette on a grill with NO BUTTER it will burn.  Working the grill (with or without Bitsy’s butter habits to deal with) is ugly: the grease gets everywhere: under your nails, coated across your skin, in your nose, your hair, your ears, your mouth. It’s hot and dirty and smells bad. Now imagine doing that on three hours of sleep and a hangover.  Thank god I was only nineteen or I’d have died.

4. Cumberland Farms. Do they still have these any more? They’re like 7-11 stores or NYC bodegas: band-aids, porn, soda, coffee, condoms, newspapers. I worked the Sunday 6AM shift. That meant putting together the Sunday papers. Oh, you say, I thought the newspapers just came like that? Oh no, my dear, oh no. Some poor slob has to fold the sections, pile them together, stick in all those circulars you’re going to throw away. Not hard work but it did mean having newsprint pretty much embedded into my skin until Tuesday. In true colleagiate fashion, after a particularly long Saturday night, I may have called in sick for Sunday morning and then never gone back. Sorry!

5. Waitress, waitress, waitress. I can still sling a full tray onto my left shoulder, carry it through a crowded room, and then hand out the plates and drinks without spilling anything. It’s a very macho skill, acquired through a looong time in the food-service trenches.  All I can say is that if everyone in the world had to work in food service for a full year–either line cook, busboy, waitress, front-of-house…we would all be a helluva lot nicer to one another. Plus waitressing was the best training for being a parent I’ve ever had: Multi-tasking? yep. Being nice to idiots? yep. Cleaning up messes not your own? yep. Being asked the same idiotic questions over and over again? Oh yeah. Not getting paid what you’re worth? You bet your sweet bippy.

6. Temp secretary in any number of office buildings in Manhattan. As a graduate student, before I started teaching, I temped. Shuffled into some random office where someone showed me how to answer the phones, and then left alone. Actually, as jobs go, it was clean, air-conditioned (this was in the summer), and I had access to office supplies.  There may or may not have been petty theft during my temping time.

7. Writing coach for the Department of Labor in NYC.  Yes. True story. I spent about three months as part of a pilot project (that never took off, probably due to my own ineptitude) trying to teach statisticians at the NYC Department of Labor how to put their numbers and data into words that regular humans could understand.  I had no idea what I was doing; the bureaucrats who were working with me had no idea what they were doing there, and the whole thing was something of a fiasco. To all of you still writing passive-voice sentences comprised primarily of numbers…I’m sorry! I was finishing my master’s thesis, breaking up with a boyfriend, and living on about 10K a year, in Manhattan. None of these things is conducive to being a productive worker (although I’m not sure how you measure that fact, statistically).

I’m going to stop this list at seven instead of my usual ten. After the Department of Labor gig, my work life starts to be more grownup (although frequently still crappy).  I did a long stint (like fifteen years) teaching at a conservative Catholic college (despite having never been conservative nor Catholic, myself), where more than once I realized that I’d sworn in front of a nun (she wasn’t wearing her outfit! How was I supposed to know!), and now here I am…in Abu Dhabi. Still working and still very, very nice to waitresses.

The ad is from 1981, not a year particularly celebrated for female achievement (although it was the year Britney Spears was born, so I suppose that counts for something).

I love legos and this ad only stoked my lego-love. My kids are lego freaks and over the years, my only consolation for finding those sharp-edged pieces in the couch, on the floor, embedded in rugs–on pretty much any flat surface–has been to feel all smug that my kids play with such a gender-neutral toy, a toy that is endlessly creative, blah blah blah.

Then I saw this ad on the lego page site:

If Polly Pocket mated with a Star Wars mini-fig, or if hookers gave away bobble-head doll versions of themselves…here’s what would result: chicks hangin’ at the Friends cafe.  When you click on the live screen, these figures sway back and forth, hugging each other and kissing each other on the cheeks. Maybe they’re whispering sweet nothings to one another–maybe it’s the lego version of “The L Word.”

But no. Nothing so interesting as a set of interlocking lesbians.  Instead we’re told that “Stephanie” likes planning parties; that “Andrea” thinks music puts life in full color (the only African American in the group and she’s the one telling us about music?); that “Emma” likes drawing, fashion, and make-overs. Girls who receive these sets can build a tree house, a car, an animal hospital, a beauty shop, or a cafe.  There are no intricate moving parts and when the sets are completed they look really bad dollhouses.  I imagine that completing Emma’s treehouse might not give the same sense of accomplishment as building this:

This thing swivels, jiggles, and moves; it creates destruction and chaos–and when you’re done playing with it in this form, you can take apart the pieces and combine them with any other lego pieces into any creation you can imagine. Emma’s tree house is always going to be Emma’s tree house. I suppose you could take the tree apart and stick the branches onto Mia’s animal hospital, but somehow that doesn’t strike me as satisfying.

Let’s recap, shall we? In the span of thirty years we’ve gone from celebrating a scruffy little girl’s ability to build whatever the hell she wants from a pile of multi-colored bricks to teaching girls that their strengths include parties, fuzzy animals, and make-overs.

Lego isn’t the disease, obviously, just a symptom. (In writing this post, I found out that several organizations devoted to challenging gender stereotypes are up in arms about these new girlie-gos).  Lego claims that it was just–wait for it–responding to consumer desires.  Apparently little girls only want to play with beauty parlors and kittens, so Lego made beauty parlors and kittens.

Okay. Even Lego has to make a buck, I guess (although with a lego set purchased every seven seconds or something, seems to me the company could’ve tried taking the high road). And okay, boys and girls have different ways of playing, I get that (years of watching perfectly innocent sticks become swords, guns, airplanes–pretty much anything that makes a noise or could inflict bodily harm). So yeah, maybe a seven-year-old girl wouldn’t want to build the Star Wars Death Star (and then un-make it, turn it into 85 other things, and then two years later whine “why can’t we make the deaaaaaath staaaaaaaarrrrrrr”).

And so even okay, make a “girl” Lego set. But what about a Princess Knight or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, or Wonder Woman? What about a group of girl pirates or airship captains?  If you’re going to target to girls, could you at least make your product…interesting?  Complicated? Challenging? Unusual? Little girls may want to play beauty shop, or maybe they want to imagine themselves in tree houses, but hell, couldn’t they at least get a measly multi-piece alien swamp speeder into the bargain?  Something with a little, you know, oomph to it?

Lego. I expected more from you. And so did that little girl in 1981.

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We told them yesterday that after the winter break they’re going to switch schools.

Husband and I are calling it a “mid-term correction” but the boys don’t appreciate the humor.

Here’s the thing: the boys are at a school here in Abu Dhabi that to the eyes of jaded New York public-school veterans like us looks like paradise: lots of patios and terraces, lovely playing fields, shaded areas where kids can sit outside and study.  Classes are small (no more than 20), elementary school teachers have classroom assistants five days a week, there are computer labs, and a swimming pool.  Amazing, right? Even more amazing? The school has virtually no poverty–it’s a private school and many people have the tuition paid by their employers. No one gets free lunch because no one needs it; there are no kids bouncing around in foster care programs; no kids come to school without having had breakfast; there are almost no students with IEPs. From my perspective as a former high school teacher, teaching at this place looks like a pretty good gig, like teaching at Patio Central.

The school organized a sixth-grade week-long trip to Turkey (the 7th grade went to Capodocia, the 8th grade to Thailand)–parents had to pay for this adventure, but what an amazing experience, right?

When we started the school, our hopes were high. We knew going in that the school was not perhaps as crazy-rigorous as the Tiger Mom Academy that they went to in New York (and let me be clear: they went to TMA because we couldn’t be sure of getting a variance for Caleb to his brother’s school; Liam was enrolled at this school for 6th grade because the school goes through high school and he would be guaranteed a spot. In other words, public school pragmatism drove our decisions, not a belief that eight thousand hours of homework is a badge of distinction.)

Anyway. Off they went on the first day of school, a bit nervous with the newness of it all and…it was fine.

Fine.

Now, sometimes fine is…fine. And sometimes fine is not fine.

As it turned out, fine at Patio Central turned into dull. Boring. Homework got finished in an eyeblink; classrooms seemed devoid of  “differentiation,” or at least it didn’t happen in any way that our kids seemed to notice. (“Differentiation:” the bureaucratic way of saying give individual kids what they need to feed their minds.) Day after day, week after week…no spark, no “wow.” And we’re not saying we needed teachers to be putting on a song-and-dance revue here. We were just looking for one kid, one day, to come home interested in something other than what happened at recess. We hired a tutor to do extra math with both boys and you’d have thought we were offering to connect Caleb to a chocolate IV drip, he was that excited. When a seven-year-old boy is jonesing for a math tutor, you know that “fine” is not fine.

And yet. The boys started to make friends. Patio Central is close to our apartment. It’s an established school, been around for almost twenty years; it’s got a good reputation. It’s easy and comfortable; a little U.S. oasis in the middle of the Middle East.  Husband and I went round and round: what makes an “education?” Should we limit our definition of education to only what happens in the classroom? So okay, the classrooms weren’t hotbeds of dynamism.  Isn’t the sheer fact of living in another country an education, in and of itself?

I kept asking myself how we could ask the boys to undergo yet another change, after they’d handled this first big change so well.

And yet. We saw Caleb starting to talk about school being “lame” and saying that he didn’t need to concentrate on his handwriting or his punctuation because the teacher “didn’t care.” (And we saw no evidence to the contrary). We saw both boys getting terrific grades without really breaking a sweat, and while we are proud of the fact that despite all the changes in their lives they were able to get such excellent report cards, there’s something a little out of whack if a 6th grader can pull a 4.0 while spending maybe–maybe–30 minutes a night on his school work.

Well, yes, it’s true. My children are geniuses. They’re also magnificent humanitarians, infinitely kind to one another, and deeply concerned about the fate of the planet.

Or at least they would be, if they could stop trying to kill each other over whose turn it is to play “Age of Empires” on the computer.

On a whim last week, Husband and I went to tour the new K-12 British school that opened this fall. It’s very British, albeit housed in a brand-new sprawling faux-Spanish-tiled complex just outside of town. Kids wear uniforms; Prince Andrew visited last week. It’s got a lot to prove (it’s an offshoot of a big-name UK school) and wham, it seemed they had seats available for January; boom! the boys didn’t hate it when they went to visit!; zipzapzoop, they were admitted; and zing! the decision was made.

Because we are toys of the gods, however, on the same day that the boys got letters of admission to Neckerchief Prep, Liam made the soccer football team at Patio.  All he’s talked about from the moment he found out about Patio is making the school team…and now he was on the squad.  Now we’re supposed to say, “um, sweetie? Don’t get too attached to that football uniform…”

Argh.What do you do? What’s “best” in this situation?  People talk at business meetings about “best practices.” So what’s “best practice” here? Choose brand-new Neckerchief Prep because we think the classroom experience will be challenging and creative? Remain at Patio because, eh, it’s fine, and Liam is over the moon about being one of 5 sixth graders chosen for the middle-school squad?

Well, dear reader, Neckerchief won. We told the boys the other night and now…they’re mad. Not furious, but mad. And sad. And nervous about yet another change. Caleb said “mommy, I have a lot of feelings right now.” Fabulous that he can articulate himself but I gotta tell ya, in terms of acting on those feelings?  He might as well be Bette Davis telling us to fasten our seatbelts because it’s going to be a bumpy night.

We reassure the boys that this decision is for the best, that we know this shift will be hard but, in the long run, they will be happier at Neckerchief.

(what if we’re wrong?)

Hey! look at this cool badge! click on it and be introduced to some great writers whose work maybe you’ve missed as you search for cute cat videos and stuff: click over here and read…then come back and vote for your fave three (pick me! pick me! pick me!)

So I decided I’d go with things I remember a bit more clearly than other things…and that means (mostly) books and writers I love.  And now I must hasten to say that there are lots of things not on this list, obviously–nothing from Dracula (one of the most amazing, most bizarre novels ever to spawn an entire genre), nothing from Moby Dick (took me four times through that damn whale of a book before I appreciated its beauty and its genius), nothing from Colette (whose Claudine quartet I’ve read probably eighty gazillion times).  And nothing from the many, many writers out there in internet-land, whose wit and wisdom keep me company all the time.

Herewith, then, a list of things that, for one reason or another, are stuck in the velcro of my brain:

when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness  — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

…the time may come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy –  JK Rowling, The Goblet of Fire

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. 
 Willa Cather

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
Elizabeth Bishop – from “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore”

Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.
Willa Cather — The Professor’s House

Do or do not. There is no try.
Yoda

“Ah, this is fine,” he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words “WHY NOT?” “That’s a good reason for almost anything – a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.”
Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton

It occurs to me that he may have actually written “suck it,” and I will never know. But still…he did it in Arabic.

Linguists talk about a “critical age” for language acquisition: to become truly fluent in a non-native language, you need to start at about age six. Caleb just turned seven. Every day, he comes home from school with new words: ketab, kaluam, bata, baqara, mimha, and of course that quintessential Arabic word, sabudra, whiteboard.  (I just asked him to say all these words to me and as I typed them, going by sheer phonetics, he was correcting me: “no, that’s not a “k,” it’s a “q,” no it’s not an “e” it’s an “i.”  So that’s nice. Now in addition to kicking my ass in Monopoly, he can correct my Arabic spelling.)

Liam is also taking Arabic and it delights him. His baroque nature finds great satisfaction in the flourishes and curlicues, in figuring out that the shape of letters change depending on where the letter occurs in the word.

Yes, you heard that correctly. The letters don’t look quite the same, depending on where they occur in the word. Oh, and another thing? Vowels aren’t so much included in the word. They get added afterwards, above, if you want to. There are 14 extra-alphabetical symbols that I’m supposed to remember on top of the 28 consonants.

Liam and Caleb think it’s all fascinating, like learning a new code.  Studying a new language works for them because they have brains like this:

My brain, unfortunately, looks like this:

And just like my kids, I’m also taking Arabic. But with a rock brain instead of a sponge brain. Letters that change depending on where they’re positioned? No vowels written down? An entire second layer of meaning floating in the symbols above and below the word?  It makes my rock brain hurt.  On the first day, I didn’t even open the book the right way. Which is to say that I opened it from left to right. Fail. It’s right to left, people, right to left. The workbook is written in English, thank god, and comes with a DVD that I’m supposed to watch in order to learn an entirely new system of mouth moves. Which sounds like a porn movie but won’t be as much fun.

I’d forgotten how hard it is to learn something new. I’m not sure I even remember the last time I deliberately set out to learn some new brain thing. Learning physical stuff—kick-boxing, karate, surfing—that’s hard too, but I think that brain calisthenics are even harder, because with physical stuff, someone can at least watch you and say you’re leaning too far to the right, or that you’re doing some weird torque with your hips which is why you’re falling over.

A few weeks ago, I went to the gym for a session with a personal trainer.  He said that it was important to do different exercise routines during each workout to “confuse the body,” because then your muscles have to work harder and you see better results.  After a few sessions with him, I wasn’t magically thinner or stronger (dammit!) but my aches and pains showed me that new muscles were emerging.

It occurs to me, as I make this analogy, that my brain isn’t as fit as my body. Who knew it was possible to have swags of back fat and poochy love handles on one’s brain? It’s a medical miracle. Someone call Dr. Oz.

My brain may not know it yet, but it’s just been put on a new fitness regimen that goes from right to left. I’m going to confuse that gray matter muscle and make my brain all perky and renewed, the brain equivalent of a midwestern gymnast. Who knows. Maybe the process will, inshallah, ward off Alzheimer’s: being temporarily confused as a way to ward off further, more permanent confusion.

The second Arabic class is on Sunday.  Maybe I can get my kids to help me with my homework.

brain coral in the photo above was a gift from Nancy Horwich to Caleb, who treasures it (not knowing that it’s a metaphor for his mommy’s brain)

It’s the end of the first week for the boys in their new school and I’m in a food fight.

I’m fighting for my kid’s right to eat a Nutella sandwich.

On the first day of school (first day of second grade, new school, new country), the assistant teacher in Caleb’s classroom decided that his lunch was “unhealthy” and only let him eat the carrot sticks I’d put in his lunchbox.

His lunchbox contained: carrot sticks, small cup of pudding/yogurt, granola bar, and—here’s the crux of it—a nutella sandwich (let the jury be advised that the nutella, about a tablespoon, was spread on whole-grain brown bread).  Plus—oh the ironic horror of it all—I’d put a small bag of potato chips in his lunchbox for a “special first day treat.” Potato chips are almost NEVER in our lunchboxes.

Now is this the platonic ideal of lunchbox lunch? Do I wish Caleb were one of those kids who just LOVES broccoli and gets cravings for sushi? Well sure. Do I wish that I could send him off to luch with a cunning wee tub of hummus and some celery sticks? Absolutely.

But that’s not my kid.  Me? I’m a Michael Pollanite; I’m an Eating Animals acolyte; I think “Food Inc.” should be required viewing for all US citizens.  My kid? He spits on my desire for locally sourced organic produce, thinks that vegetables (other than tomato sauce) might kill him, never met a chicken nugget he didn’t like. Somewhere there’s a Tyson tycoon laughing at me.

So I’ve made my (relative) peace with the lunchbox. Whole-grain bread,  pretzels not chips, yogurt, granola bar, slices of apple or carrot. And either nutella or peanut butter (for the record, although nutella has more sugar, peanut butter has WAY more fat. Nutritionally they’re about equally good—or bad).  (Click here for a nutritional info on both)

But this assistant teacher has decided that Caleb’s lunch is bad. Unhealthy. And thus, of course, she is also judging me.  And thus, of course, I’d pretty much like to rip her head off.  Who does she think she is—particularly on the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL to tell a seven year old not to eat his lunch?

I sent off a shirty email to the teacher, who responded promptly and said she would talk to the assistant, so I figured everything would be fine, going forward. But then three days later, the assistant did it again.  The sandwich was deemed “dessert” and so she allowed him yogurt and pretzel sticks.

Would you like to know who came home from school utterly exhausted, crabby, and crying?

See earlier on “want to rip her head off.”  Off went another shirty email sent to the teacher, who again apologized and said she would now tell “Miss Ella” to leave Caleb alone at lunch.

It’s not like I’m sending my kid to school with candy bars and bottles of soda; he’s not standing on the playground selling crack, for god’s sake.  It’s just NUTELLA.

Here’s the thing: Miss Ella doesn’t know what she’s up against. I’ve survived seven years in the Manhattan Public Schools.

That woman is toast.

With Nutella.