- Seasonal advertising

If I were selling something seasonal — turkeys, snowblowers, Christmas trees — I might buy some advertising space from the leaf bag makers and distributors. These big bulging mountains are everywhere, and they sit on the sidewalks of my town, sometimes for a week, before a DPW truck picks them up and brings them to the municipal composting pile. Meanwhile, people walk around them, or sit in their cars and look at them while stopped for a light. Brilliantly, too, I could advertise my seasonal product on something that a person would actually *buy* (5 for $2.99) and in effect subsidize the cost of the ad, and then give me free real estate for broadcasting my ad. True, the Home Depot or Agway logo is already emblazoned on the bags, but maybe it would do my product some good to be associated with such a company. Just an idea.

- It’s Sunday.

And this is rest and spirituality enough for me.

Task and tools

An unexpected fall show from the forsythia

Modest meter

- I would read a book about pencils.

For some reason, Grace, Jimmy, and I were talking about single-noun-subject books. What concrete thing interests you enough that you would read or write an entire book about it? Salt, for example.

Grace raised potatoes as a possibility.

“Pencils,” I said. “I love pencils. I would read an entire book about pencils.”

Yesterday, my library helpers found and brought this home for me. I saw the title, and my heart started to beat a little faster in anticipation. I opened to chapter one. First words: “Henry David Thoreau seemed to think of everything…” Ah, book heaven.

- Scary movie

It’s Halloween; I’m alone.

It’s a good time to watch Jesus Camp, a documentary loaned to me weeks ago by my friend David,  a fellow volunteer at GLAD.

“I heard it’s disturbing,” said Eli, when I showed it to him.

Perfect for tonight.

—–

P.S. The photo has nothing to do with the film. It’s simply a snap of the spooky moon in the sky over my house on this balmy, windy Halloween.

- Go far in friendship.

If you want to go far in friendship, you shouldn’t laugh at someone when they fall.

–said by Grace Guterman, age 9

- Feedback season

When it’s midterms for students, it’s midterms for teachers. (There’s something rather binge-and-purge about school, isn’t there?) In the past two weeks, since Columbus Day, I’ve been reading, commenting on, and grading the drafts of technical reports and scientific analysis papers, about 35 altogether. They’re long (average: 20 pages), but after the first few in a batch, I get into a rhythm. And while I don’t copy and paste comments from one report into another, I do notice similar issues and may make similar comments among reports.

I don’t claim any of the following lines as poetry. Here are some of the kinds of things I write or type in the margins.

- Learning to write: a meme

Over at digital digs, Alex Reid (someone I don’t know but whose thoughts I enjoy reading), writes about how he learned to write. While his post raises illuminating questions about a well-accepted pedagogy — that teachers’ experiences of learning to write and developing a writing practice are central to their teaching of first year composition — his post also gives me an idea for a meme.

He captures his development of a writer by describing three contradictory practices. I’m going to do the same, and then I’m going to tag four friends.

My practices?

1. The first grade I got in college was an F. The class was English 150: Critical Interpretation. The professor was Robert Polito. The assignment was to do a close reading of a Shakespeare sonnet.

- Presentation of self

Once in a while, if someone knows or notices that I wear an insulin pump, that person says to me, “Don’t you love it?”, gushing on the word love.

This happened to me recently, during my annual check-up. I was sitting on the table with a paper gown wrapped around me and talking to my doctor, whom I like, and the medical student who was observing. It was my doctor who asked the question and gushed on “love.” Clearly, even though it was an endocrinologist and not she who had prescribed it for me, she considered the pump a marvel. As miniature devices go, this one is indeed remarkable in what it can do.

Because she is a doctor, and because I feel able to speak frankly to her, I replied honestly: “No.”

Dr. H.’s lips pressed together and then broadened into a smile, which I took as a signal: Go on.

I elaborated.  “Sure, I appreciate the technology, and it’s more convenient than multiple injections, but, no. Loving it would be like being an amputee and loving a cool prosthetic leg, when what I want is my real leg.”

- Chaperone

Sign at playground, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 10.11.2009

Haight Street in San Francisco is just one long strip of shops and cafés. In America, we seem to put more energy into commercial diversity than we do into the human kind.

Along the strip, Lydia and Grace pulled me into store after store. They did not need to use physical force, like the hand yank or the extreme whine. I had already capitulated to an hour or two of shopping. If you know me, you know that’s a generous act: I dislike shopping, especially shopping without aim.

The clothing in the stores skewed to the young, or the “young at heart.” I’m neither young nor old at heart, yet in years and body I am smack between the two poles.

In one store, called X-Generation, while I waited for the girls to hunt and try on, I  wended my way through spaces between circular racks and looked at hats, scarves, and purses. The little dresses and tshirts were too skimpy for me, but hats — those are ageless, right? I tried one on, then another. I liked them, and even more importantly, they fit. I have a big Kokernak head bone, and it’s hard to find a woman’s hat sized for my head.

I turned to Grace, to Lydia, and asked, “Do you like my hat?” Both answered wordlessly, with lifted eyebrows or rolled eyeballs. I put the hat back on its hook, chastened.

- The anonymous they

Today I heard students discussing feedback that their team had received from a few instructors on a presentation. The students’ sentences uniformly began with the pronoun “they.”

They liked [such and such].

They said [so and so].

They didn’t like [such and such].

After several of those sentences, the “they” became a blur, and, even though I had a sense of who those instructor/feedback-givers were, it all started to feel vague to me. The actors — the givers or performers of the feedback — were made anonymous by the use of the nonspecific, plural pronoun.

I don’t want to shake my finger at the students. Indeed, I’ve heard teachers use the same pronoun to the same effect, referring over and over to an anonymous conglomerate of students as “they.”

They don’t do [such and such].

They seem to like [this or that].

They want [more].

This usage cloaks the identity or characteristics of individuals in a particular group. “They” also indicates that a group is not “we.”

And so, by designating an anonymous and even homogeneous them, we somehow reinforce the unity and presence of our us. There’s an implicit binary.

I have noticed that this tendency to invoke an anonymous “they” is not restricted to the realm of education. For example, after the dot-com bubble crash, I would sometimes hear people, still in great pain from having lost money and hope, rail against the violations of an anonymous They. They did this. All they wanted was that. They never told us that [something bad] could happen.

“They” is a very useful pronoun. It effectively and succinctly signifies a large group of others (in fewer letters than “large group,” or “the regulators,” or “the instructors,” or “the students in my intro psych class”), a group somehow distinct from our group. I do not think we should or even can eliminate the word from our speech.

However, when I catch myself using the pronoun “they,” I do wonder what experience or characteristics I’m trying to distance myself, and my peers, from. That’s what this use of “they” does — creates distance.

What does that distance offer us?

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Image “Liverpool Street station crowd blur” by victoriapeckham on Flickr. License via Creative Commons.