I got home late last night, after two classes in a row and the long train ride from 116th street to the middle of brooklyn. there was a big stack of mail waiting for me, including three separate tax documents and a cardboard envelope from powells containing a philosophy text I am unlikely to actually read.
and tom, who said, "there's a surprise for you in the fridge."
our fridge has been a little empty lately, what with our incessant weekend traveling and my overtime schedule at work. not that we've been living on takeout, but it's been a while since I got it together enough to buy groceries for more than one meal at a time. it turns out a bare top shelf isn't so bad: all the better to display a freshly-baked chocolate cake.
the cocoa-mocha frosting on top of the cake had vanilla-white curves swirled artfully across it. letters?
"that's a j in the middle," tom explained. "and a t and an r."
three years ago, tom came and picked me up outside my apartment and took me out to dinner at a thai restaurant near his school. it was the first time we'd ever seen each other outside of graduate school (and that one day all the teaching fellows went to the mets game together). he ate green curry with chicken and I had tofu pad khing, and we talked about teaching a little bit while he stacked up a bunch of science education books on the table for me. then he offered me a sip of his tea, and we shared a plate of coconut sticky rice. when we walked back to his jeep after dinner, climbing over piles of dirty snow to reach it, we found a parking ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. he drove me home and I went into my apartment alone and asked the internet whether or not I had just been on a date.
given that tom is now snoring next to me, on his side of the bed that used to be only mine -- and the fact that I still remember exactly what I wore to dinner that night, down to my teal argyle socks -- I think it is safe to say that yes, it was a date. our first, even though we mark our real couplehood-anniversary a little later in the calendar.
the funny thing is that both of us want to take credit for the idea of going out together in the first place. I remember when I found out I would be half a special ed teaching team that semester, it seemed like a good reason to email tom and maybe get to talk to him outside of class sometime. I will admit, though, that the thai food and the book sharing were all tom's idea. to be honest I don't think I read much from those books, but I kept them on my shelf and smiled every time I looked up at their row of blue and green spines. when tom moved in with me two summers ago, he said, "hey, I have those books too!"
the cake was amazing, soft and chocolatey and still warm enough to make the frosting delectably melty. I've been craving cake for at least a week now, so that made it even better. I had two pieces. "I need to eat the j cake on j day!" I said, and tom agreed.
as I sat on the couch with my toes tucked under tom's legs, finishing off the last bites of my second piece, I stopped licking frosting off my fork long enough to say thank you for the ninth or tenth time.
"you made me feel special," I said.
"you are special," he said, smiling.
I was going to let this one go, really. wockerjabby is not supposed to be a rant repository, nor is it supposed to be "rabi responds to the new york times." so when I read this article I grumbled about it to tom ("can polyester save the world? um, NO?") and then went along my way. but now it's a featured article on the times website, it's creeping up the most-emailed list, and I just can't ignore it anymore.
the article paraphrases a report that claims polyester is more environmentally friendly than cotton because a polyester blouse will consume less energy over the course of its lifetime than a cotton t-shirt. apparently this is because you have to iron cotton and wash and dry it at high temperatures. I have three problems with this. one is that I don't know anyone who irons their cotton t-shirts. the second is that cotton has been around since long before automatic washers and dryers, yet people somehow managed to keep it clean. my biggest objection, though, is the assumption that you can determine something's ecological footprint based solely on the amount of energy it uses.
cotton is a renewable resource. it comes from a plant. the farming practices used to grow most non-organic cotton are pretty lousy in terms of energy consumption (and pollution, ecosystem destruction, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, etc.), but the cotton itself is renewable. polyester, on the other hand, is plastic. it is made of polymer strands that were almost certainly produced from fossil fuels. as everyone hopefully knows by now, fossil fuels are created over such a long period of time that they are a nonrenewable resource. if the world starts making all its clothing from polyester, we will run out of our fossil fuels that much faster.
I think the real conclusion to be drawn here is not that we should wear polyester, but that we should look at the places where energy is used and do what we can to reduce it. that's what will bring us closer to sustainable consumption.
I am by no means perfect in this realm, in part because ethical and sustainable choices are harder to find for clothing than for food. but here is a quick overview of how I do it, in case you're interested.
1. clothing consumption
buy used clothes (planet aid is my favorite store for this), or find people who will give you hand-me-downs or do a clothing swap. don't be afraid to make alterations. of course you will probably want to buy new underwear and socks, but even recycled shoes can be okay if you know the first owner.
buy clothes made of organic natural fibers. this no longer means that you can only wear things that are that weird off-white color, by the way.
choose clothes that will last through many wearings (and choose clothes that you will want to wear for the duration of their lasting).
share clothing and other items that you don't need every day.
whenever possible, buy fair trade, sweatshop-free clothing. this can be tough for pants, but is a no-brainer for t-shirts and skirts.
2. clothing care
some clothes do not need to be washed every time you wear them.
if an article of clothing gets a small spot (like spilled food) but is otherwise still clean, just wash that spot by hand and let it air-dry.
wash your clothes in cold water with a gentle, eco-friendly detergent (we like 7th generation, but there are lots of options now).
if you don't have the space or patience to line-dry your clothes, try a compromise: tumble them on low heat for 20 or 30 minutes. at that point, most of our clothes are dry, and things that are still damp just need to be laid flat for a while to finish drying.
small rips and tears are easily fixed with thread, patches, and so on. one time I ripped a corduroy skirt on a splintery lab bench during the first period at school. I used duct tape on the inside to hold it together until I could sew it up. no one noticed.
3. clothing disposal
don't throw away your clothes if they are still wearable, even if they are no longer pristine. donate them or find someone who might like them.
wear something until it falls apart. just don't wear the falling-apart clothes to business meetings or whatever.
old clothes that have become truly ratty can be repurposed as household rags, birdcage covers, draft blockers, plant mats, quilt squares, art supplies... and so on.
cotton can be recycled. denim is especially good for this. see if you can find a reclamation center.
if, for some reason, you really really like polyester, clearly it's okay to wear it now and then. but please don't think that you can't wear cotton and still be green.
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25.1.07]
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hey! everyone go read this! it's an editorial by a bronx high school teacher about how ridiculous hollywood's portrayal of public education can be. tom and I read it together and laughed in agreement at every single paragraph.
ever since the publicity machine for freedom writers started chugging, I've been pretty cranky about the portrayal of schools and teaching by pop culture in general. I suppose that bit of surly philistinism is always lurking in my subconscious, but the weird media blitz around freedom writers has awakened it like nothing else in recent history. (I usually enjoy watching tv & movies about students and teachers, even while I cavil at their unrealism, but this has even made me start to dislike hilary swank, which seems unfair.)
aside from everything in that particular times piece, which describes how harmful a movie's distortion of the teaching profession can be (but really you should go read it for yourself), we've also been talking about how damaging it can be for our students to see public schoolkids portrayed that way. I am writing this without having seen freedom writers -- and I won't see it until the dvd comes out -- so if you have, feel free to correct or clarify. but: when movies portray students as damaged human beings waiting for a savior, they're not telling our kids that they can do anything if they only try. the students in those movies rarely succeed in changing their own lives, or taking advantage of their own resources. they are fetishized as diamonds in the ghetto, languishing until they can be mined and used to measure the worth of someone else's life.
a lot of our students watch those movies and want to be the ghetto kids, even when they're not. they don't see the value in their existing lives -- lives that involve more family reunions than street murders and drug overdoses -- because the movies tell them that as inner-city public school students, their value lies in the destructive chaos from which they can be saved. they would rather be refugees from a ruined world than participants in functional schools. they would rather pretend that these movies are about kids like them then make the committment to the hard work of succeeding as the kids they are.
and of course we do have some students who live in that ruined world, who can do little more than survive from day to day. I have students who've seen their friends and siblings killed in front of them or who have lost parents to drug addiction and prison sentences. many of us do. they can be hard kids to teach, but they're good kids. and what must those kids think when their teachers -- their hardworking, struggling, human, but not superhuman teachers -- fail to bring them the salvation that hollywood promises? maybe they think we, the teachers, just aren't good enough. or maybe they think they, the students, don't deserve to be saved.
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19.1.07]
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most home videos, I think, are just bad. my family inherited a camcorder when my little brother was born, in 1991 -- so the thing was about the size of a cinderblock -- and now there are a bunch of videos in my parents' basement of an infant boy doing nothing. and I think there's one really long shot somewhere in there of me and my sister counting out the value of a giant pile of loose change.
occasionally, though, a home video is so bad it's hilarious.
this isn't actually from home; tom recorded it on his digital camera while we were in belize, using the lowest resolution possible because apparently he was worried about running out of memory. I've watched it at least ten times and even though it is so pixelly it's like watching through a kaleidescope, it just keeps getting funnier.
why this is the worst/best home movie I've ever seen
[in chronological order so you can follow along]:
1. uh, nice butt shot.
2. those aren't bugs!
3. the excellent cinematography throughout... nice stone walls.
4. tom recaps what he just did three seconds previously.
5. narration worthy of a nova documentary. ("there's... something.")
6. the narrator even makes his own sound effects!
7. sites of belize: ancient mayan ruins, dylan, rabi...
8. sound that gets increasingly desynchronized with the video.
9. proof that my tendency to wave hello like a little kid is hereditary.
right now tom is sitting on the couch next to me, reminding me that I love him and therefore shouldn't be so entertained by his public humiliation. so I think you should all leave comments reassuring him that it's not embarrassing, it's just awesome.
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15.1.07]
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I need to get it out of my head that I'm not allowed to update my webjournal until I have the time to sit down and write out all the long stories or disquisitions that I've been rehearsing mentally for days on end. if not for stupid ideas like that, wockerjabby might be a little more lively. plus I get more tired than you might imagine of writing about everything that's wrong with the world.
(at our staff meeting on wednesday afternoon, we started talking about the different reactions kids have to things like fitness report cards and bmi measurements. somehow that led to a discussion about the pervasiveness of diet pill commercials on television, which ended when one of my colleagues swept her arm through the air overhead and said, "there are bigger problems behind all this." I said that was probably the most universally true statement I had ever heard.)
lately I've been having dreams about teaching. it doesn't take much analysis to figure out where they're coming from. I miss teaching -- my dreams often linger in loving detail over things like rubrics and unit plans -- and I really miss being with kids. through some combination of serendipity and subtle self-promotion I ended up with a full-day babysitting job tomorrow, so maybe that will be the fix I need (even if they are eighteen months and 3.5 years old, not really student-age yet) before I go back to public school in february.
I go back to graduate school next week, and I'm pretty excited about it even though this vacation has been hectic. (aren't they all? but I think it says something that tom and I are looking forward to mlk jr monday because we don't have to go anywhere.) plus I'm sure it will provide me with a whole new bunch of outrage over what's wrong with the world.
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11.1.07]
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I started an argument with my father over dinner one night last week, after he told an impassioned story about the evilness of eli lilly. I started laughing and when he asked what was so funny, I said it was a bit surreal to hear him saying all these things about the pharmaceutical industry that are so similar to my criticisms of the food industry, which I think about basically all the time but seem to be more or less irrelevant to him (largely-indiscriminate omnivore that he is). he surprised me by saying he doesn't eat at mcdonald's anymore, which I didn't know, and of course because he lives with my mom (vegan whole-foods shopper and csa member) his eating habits are probably less destructive than most americans'. but he seemed reluctant to characterize the food industry as evil rather than just generally bad, thanks to the allowances of unfettered capitalism.
it is a stupid argument, because you can't win without sounding like something of a callous asshole. ("well, who cares if eli lilly falsified their data so they could sell more drugs to innocent children, knowing that the drug practically causes diabetes? beef farming is destroying the lives of almost everyone in the country!" ...really, it's as unwinnable as the pain olympics. I should have known better.) however, I stand by my assertion that the food industry is driven by individual people who make decisions with the full knowledge of how much suffering they will cause -- to other humans, not just animals and the environment -- not simply an unfortunate lack of awareness and regulation.
read this article on america's biggest pork processing company and see if you agree. joe luter, the man who makes the decisions for this particular company, seems evil to me. in short: his pig farms (hardly out of the ordinary in this country, by the way, except for being particularly large in number) produce waste that poisons humans, decimates waterways, kills fish, and basically covers the local landscape with a layer of toxic pig shit. (page four: "Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.") when the government starts making a few feeble attempts to regulate his waste-disposal methods (basically saying, you can't just let toxic waste flow out of here unchecked), he decides to start taking over the pork industry in eastern europe. he knows that, in the process, he will be bankrupting thousands of poor farming families and causing them serious health problems. he doesn't care. he makes ten million dollars a year.
the food industry has lots of joe luters. one, at least, for every part of the gigantic machine that makes our country's meat (and high-fructose corn syrup). that's what I think, anyway.
while we were in belize, tom and I continued our adventures in local food chains by eating some line-caught snapper. (tom ordered it and I had a few bites from his plate each time, since neither my heart nor my stomach is ready to eat an entire fish.) we also ate a lot of bananas. bananas are cheap, or even free, in belize, because the plantations discard huge piles of "overripe" bananas every day. the overripe bananas are still green, but too mature to survive the boat trip to the united kingdom without getting brown and spotty. the plantation workers who are responsible for collecting and sorting the bananas (and then discarding the overripe ones) are all imported from guatemala, since the pay (apparently $13 bz a day, which is $6.50 us a day) is not good enough for even the poorest belizeans. whether or not that's evil, it's more than a little fucked up.
making ethical food choices is difficult and confusing. sometimes it seems downright impossible. I think that's the most unpleasant thing about my argument with my father. what eli lilly has done to schizophrenic patients is awful, truly, but it's not because of me, and it's not something over which I have much power. food is another story. unless I move away from the city and run my own self-contained farm -- a solution that is both impractical and completely unsustainable for the dense human population on the eastern seaboard -- I am on some level complicit in the evils of the food industry. even when I'm aware of how they are hurting me, I can't completely avoid them.
I sure do wish our country put people like joe luter in jail, though, instead of turning them into multimillionaires.
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3.1.07]
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