Some days slight nausea is the best choice from a menu of worse options. Today, for example, I prefer it to the Full-Blown Existential Dread. I pondered the Bang Your Head Against the Wall entree, thought for a moment of asking if I could get it a la carte, but thought better of it.
Slight nausea it is, though I’m wondering idly how much you tip for this sort of thing.
It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether your view of a situation is colored by the lens you view it through or if the situation simply is that color. The same situation can be perceived very differently by those who are in it. She was focused, direct and professional; she was hard-edged and ambitious to the edge of ruthlessness. She was pleasant and good humored; she was superficial, forced and impatient. All of the above also may be true. All of the above may also make no difference one way or the other, if her offer is of value.
I throw another style of viewing things into the mix: the wishful thinking view. A disadvantage of this style is that it is based in best case scenario thinking rather than on a practical, unemotional evaluation of actual likely outcomes. An advantage of the wishful thinking viewer, for those so inclined, is how easily it can be converted into a whip, already in hand and poised closest to where it will hurt the most.
This is not meant in any way to contradict the wise idea that it is far better to look at a thing without fear, and with compassion. It’s clearly better to be in the moment as much as possible and not distracted by the many thoughts that may be pressing their way in.
The best way to look at things is as you would like to be looked at yourself, as you would like to consistently see yourself. Hard, yes, and finding your way there without a good map or recipe, good luck. Sadly (or happily) I have no map or recipe, other than throwing things into the mix and trying to see clearly, and act accordingly, as often as I can.
A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes. Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see. When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid. When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.
I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.
I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation. If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money. But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.
Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw. A meeting was arranged. Tomorrow is the meeting.
I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis. It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively. This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.
The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate. The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make. That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed. Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do. Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play. Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.
In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams. Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.
I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation. But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program. I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do. I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.
People are doing this work here and there. A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games. Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”. Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.
Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop. Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time. Teamwork is needed in team sports and encouraged in that context. It is also necessary for animation.
Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly. We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly. Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together. It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.
Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into. Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into. Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx. Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.
The weather service had been calling for severe thunderstorms the other day, but as the sky was clear when I set out, and my errand not long, I didn’t go back for rain gear, which in retrospect was a mistake.
The walk home from the store was about 3/4 of a mile and as I hit the bridge on Broadway I saw that I was walking into a dark vault. The sky ahead was dark grey as far as I could see downtown. The entire sky, in every direction ahead of me, looked threatening as a tumor. There were virtually no places to seek shelter between where I was and my apartment, about fifteen minutes away by foot. When I got across the bridge, the first large drops fell. Within a block it began coming down with intent to drench. I made a dash and took refuge in the store attached to the car wash, the only place within several blocks to duck into. I found shelter a moment before the deluge began.
The rain came down like it was looking to flood the earth. Within minutes there was a deep lake in the street in front of the car wash. Cars passing through it sent plumes of water up over the sidewalk. I moved further into the store eventually taking a stool in the back, and I watched the rain, figuring it probably couldn’t rain that hard for much longer. It did, though.
Eventually another guy who’d taken refuge there took the stool next to mine. A moment later we exchanged pleasantries about the weather. He was a sympathetic looking man, slight and brown, looking something like Gandhi, but from the Dominican Republic, he said, his English almost completely unaccented. I’d have guessed his background was Indian, actually.
I told him this kind of summer shower usually doesn’t last very long. I recounted how I’d once been soaked in a very quick summer downpour in NYC making a sprint to beat the rain. I’d been on a bike and when I reached 8th Avenue and 47th Street the skies opened up. Instead of finding cover, I rode like mad and arrived at 47th and 9th Avenue, one block away, drenched, socks and shoes and everything in my pockets soaked, dripping wet. When I entered the place I was going, water running off me, people looked at me in disbelief. I looked behind me to discover the sun was shining brightly, the street hardly even looked wet. I’d learned from that summer shower to duck under something and wait out these flash rains.
But this one continued full-bore for over an hour, and my neighbor and I passed the time in a most pleasant and far-ranging chat while the thunder thundered and the buckets of dirty water fell. At one point an irate customer barged into the store where we were sitting and began screaming at the girl behind the counter. “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!” he screamed several times, snarling and glaring angrily between screams. He was at a loss to make the unfairness of it clear. He turned to scream at one of the African car wash attendants “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!”. As he stormed out to where he car was he shouted it to everyone a couple of times.
Evidently some terribly aggravating thing was being done to him, it was unjust, they’d lied to him and then screwed him and it wasn’t fair. That much seemed clear. But the ferocity of his screaming really was kind of amazing. It was also, I realized, the self-lacerating bellow of helplessness– they are screwing me and there’s nothing I can fucking DO ABOUT IT!
My neighbor and I paused, exchanged philosophical looks, and I said they’d probably promised to do something like change his oil, but had run out of oil filters, and they’d kept him waiting over an hour to give him the disappointing news. He agreed it must have been something like that. As the enraged man passed us on the way to his car, still screaming, I said quietly I hoped he wasn’t going to get a gun. It was the kind of blind rage that, silly as the immediate cause for it might have seemed, if he’d been holding a gun he probably would have used it to try to discharge some rage.
My neighbor opened his eyes a little wider, and said he doubted the guy was going for a gun. I agreed that he was probably right. As it turns out, he was correct and nobody was hurt, except for the man who had been screaming. We chatted for another twenty minutes or so, as the storm continued to rage all around, until one of the workers told us apologetically that it was time to go, they were closing the store. We thanked them for their hospitality, shook hands, introduced ourselves by name for the first time, and headed off in opposite directions to get soaked.
It rained hard for my entire walk home. Luckily I’d thought to take a plastic bag to wrap my electronics in, because I and my groceries got drenched. My phone, wallet and iPod did not get wet. It poured and thundered for a couple of hours, and it was a cold rain. Actually felt a little good to be wet and shivering on a brutally humid day that had recently been about 85 degrees. Once I showered and wrung out my clothes I felt refreshed.
I don’t think anything felt very good that day to the man who’d been treated so unfairly by those otherwise decent folks at the car wash.
My boy hisses at me with surprisingly threatening teeth for somebody that small. I have tried to be an affectionate and supportive father to him, and also a friend and caretaker, but it seems to make no difference. It is a question of temperament, I suppose, his and mine, and beyond either of us to change. I know very well that I am not the only man to have had this kind of difficult situation with his kid.
There are a few factors that complicate our relationship as well, and I’m aware of these. He’s not my natural son, I had nothing to do with his coming into the world and that lack of biological connection can be a factor. I basically found him, helpless and hungry, and we adopted him. Sekhnet is very attached to him, and the two of them cuddle, snuggle, and are thicker than thieves, but he has always regarded me with some distrust. There’s another thing, and I know this adds a poignant note, and may strike some as hyperbole but I mean it literally– we are of different species. This does not affect his relationship with Sekhnet, but it seems to come into play in his and mine.
When I reach out to him he hits me. Softly at first, then with his claws unleashed. Sharp damn fingernails the wild little bastard’s got. Then there’s the hiss, resembling a cobra’s hiss more than anything else, the mouth wide open and those sharp canine teeth ready, like fangs. He will not hesitate to sink those fangs into a hand, if it comes to it. Rough little bastard, and outside of making his feelings perfectly clear by his expression and actions, he never says a word.
While walking a man paused periodically to scrawl these in a small book.
Do you hear the man on the plunging plane exhorting his fellow passengers, with no oxygen mask on himself, to put their oxygen masks on before trying to help other passengers?
In that same man’s defense: he’s excellent at several different hobbies.
Wishful thinking makes no more than a wish.
Stopping to note a thing doesn’t make it noteworthy.
I wrote to thank Florence’s children and grandchildren for a wonderful and inspiring celebration of a remarkable and brilliant old friend. I’d been moved and distracted yesterday, when I spoke briefly at the memorial, during one of the breaks in the string ensemble’s performance of some of Florence’s favorite pieces, and wanted to make sure to add these thoughts:
I had a certain reputation, I suppose, that persists to this day, as a man with a conscience who would occasionally work for free. This judge, who had seen me in action working in this capacity, had his friendly court attorney call and pitch me an easy pro bono case. Would I mind if she sent me the file? It would be a one appearance case, and the judge would consider it a great favor if I would consider it, and he would accommodate my schedule. This judge was better than most. We put the case on for a day when I was going to be in Brooklyn anyway and I appeared and met the tenant.
The tenant, who the law did not consider a tenant, was distraught, a man about my age, a combat veteran and a shell of the self he once imagined he might become. He was about to be evicted from his home, the law on the case was open and shut. It was not that he was behind in the rent, he’d been paying it all along, since he’d given up his apartment and moved in to take care of his aging mother almost two years earlier. The judge’s hands were tied. The story was rather simple and unfortunate for him, under the New York City Rent Stabilization Law.
If the tenant had been living with his mother for at least two years prior to her death, or probably also prior to a disability that necessitated admission to a nursing home, he would have had a clear legal right to succeed to the lease his mother had with the landlord, under the same terms. This is called the Right of Succession. He had given up his place and moved into his mother’s apartment to take care of her as her health deteriorated. As her dementia increased he was forced to bathe her, feed her, carry her to and from the toilet, change her diapers and calm her when she got upset. After about a year and a half he could no longer provide all the care she needed and had her admitted to the dementia ward in a public hospital not far from her apartment. The poor person’s version of a nursing home.
“I need you to visit the tenant, his mother, and come back and report to the Court if there is any chance of her moving back into the apartment to live with her son again,” I think is the mission I was given by the judge. The judge was grasping at the last straw to keep this unemployed veteran from becoming homeless because he’d done the right thing for his mother, even if for a few months less than the law required him to do it in situ in the subject premises, her rent stabilized apartment.
The hospital was a fifteen minute walk from the court house. It was spring time, I remember pastel buds on the trees and a carpet of green buds on the shady Brooklyn sidewalks. Birds and squirrels probably went about their business on this mild and sunny day, but I didn’t notice. The man and I spoke as we walked the tree lined streets to the hospital. The conversation was somber as I explained the legal situation and he told me more about his life and limited options.
We walked for what seemed like miles inside the hospital building. The building was like something out of the Ottoman Empire, could have been hundreds of years old, with ringing corridors and a labyrinth-like structure inside. We came at last to the ward where his mother was housed, a ward he visited every day. The nurses greeted him by name, and he smiled back at them. We entered a tidy room that smelled of urine and disinfectant. He approached an old, smooth-faced woman in a wheelchair, pulled a chair next to her and leaned in to put his arm around her. Her expression barely changed as he stroked her back and called her “mommy” and kissed her. She seemed to like this, even as it was clear she had no idea who he was. He began to cry quietly as he held her, tears running down his face. There was no point asking her any questions, I’d arrived too late for that. I probably spoke to the head nurse to confirm the medical situation that was plain enough for a child to see. I said goodbye to the man, who remained with his mother, and walked back to the courthouse alone.
I got back to the court room shortly before the lunch break. As I walked in the judge nodded, raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to come forward. As I did I said “Judge, if I had a heart that could still be broken, it would be in fifty pieces right now.”
He looked at me with sympathy and said “I have no doubt of that, counselor, but I also have no idea what you’re referring to.” He had about fifty other cases before him that day and the details of the one I was there on were not something he could call to mind instantly. I refreshed his recollection and he sighed. We both knew I’d have to surrender the apartment now, and arrangements were made, either that day or on a day a week or two later, with the landlord, a very sympathetic man who owned a small building, and his attorney, who was also pleasant and respectful. I don’t recall the details now, the son probably got a couple of weeks to move out. It must have been on a subsequent court appearance, because I’m quite sure he thanked me and we shook hands.
“How can I help you?”
“Well, first, I’d like to access the remaining 5.5 ethics credits I bought from you two years ago,” I say.
“OK, so how many do you need for this cycle?” he asks, drawing his calculator close to figure his commission.
“Before we get to that, I’d like to access the 5.5 credits I already purchased from you. It says in the email you sent me just now ‘Credits Never Expire!’ and I haven’t been allowed to access the remainder of the 12 ethics credits I bought from you.”
“Well, that actually means per two year cycle, but I can see how you could read it that way.”
“It’s not possible to read ‘Credits Never Expire!’ any other way, it’s kind of unambiguous,” I say to my Dedicated CLE Manager.
“Well, in the future it will be specified more clearly what is meant, they’re going to make that more clear…”
“‘Credits Never Expire!’ with an exclamation point and the word ‘never’ in bold, they’re going to explain what that actually means?” I clarify, bitchily, “if I log on and am informed that the remaining credits I purchased, the ones that never expire, are not available to me, you would have to call that false advertising, wouldn’t you?”
At this point he realizes he’s talking to some disgruntled smart ass lawyer who will insist on the supposed plain meaning of the advertising claim that appears, in this guy’s stilted reading, not to be true. False advertising is such a harsh thing to accuse somebody of. Untruthful, or inartfully drafted advertising is not lying, per se, or if it is, why is that my problem? I don’t write the copy. I only get paid when I sell these credits to these lawyers forced to take these courses every two years. What’s he going to argue about next? Riveting Course Content!? These wildly entertaining lectures on the mechanics of legal work are not riveting enough for him? Give me a fucking break.
“Let me get back to you,” he says. “Give me five minutes to get this straightened out.” I know I should have better things to do, and many larger fish to fry at the moment, as another CLE speaker drones on in another window on this computer I’m pecking at, but I can’t help but notice that promise was made more than twenty-five minutes ago and the clock is creeping toward 5 pm on a Friday. I wonder idly what it is that he is straightening out.
“So strict!” they are thinking, “you are so STRICT!!! You really should get a life and be happier, it’s not possible to be healthy being so strict!”
I call back, am asked my name, when I give my name I’m told my Dedicated CLE Manager is assisting another customer and this friendly fellow walks me through the log-in and assures me that my 5.5 credits have been restored. I can’t see them until I try to use them, he tells me, but my account at least is not showing up the way it did when last I checked. Thanks all around and I get on to other things. A moment later the phone rings. My Dedicated CLE Manager, apparently having asked his colleague “did the asshole sound mad?” He got the all clear, we had a pleasant 20 second chat, told each other to take care and on with the rest of today’s fun already in progress.
“So strict!” they are thinking, “you are so STRICT!!! You really should get a life and be happier, it’s not possible to be healthy being so strict!”
