I'm coming home to you.
Soon. Very soon.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Thursday, December 27, 2007
For you, my heart bleeds...
No, not really.
OMG! Suburban schools have different grading standards and don't all give students the same amount of credit for AP and IB hurting little Johnny and Susie's chances at merit scholarships at prestigious universities. That's like, totally unfair.
Give me a break. The real disparity and unfairness is between filthy rich suburban schools who can actually offer AP and IB classes, and poor schools in the inner cities where you're lucky if they actually manage to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the poor schools in rural areas, where maybe they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic very well, but there's no resources available for advanced classes.
Yeah, it's really a tradegy that Johnny or Susie didn't get extra GPA points for their AP classes. It's not like a county or two over, or in the inner city, there are kids who aren't being taught to read, or graduating without being able to make change for a dollar. Oh, wait, nevermind, it is.
Thank god, I'm from a family of inveterate geeks!
OMG! Suburban schools have different grading standards and don't all give students the same amount of credit for AP and IB hurting little Johnny and Susie's chances at merit scholarships at prestigious universities. That's like, totally unfair.
Give me a break. The real disparity and unfairness is between filthy rich suburban schools who can actually offer AP and IB classes, and poor schools in the inner cities where you're lucky if they actually manage to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the poor schools in rural areas, where maybe they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic very well, but there's no resources available for advanced classes.
Yeah, it's really a tradegy that Johnny or Susie didn't get extra GPA points for their AP classes. It's not like a county or two over, or in the inner city, there are kids who aren't being taught to read, or graduating without being able to make change for a dollar. Oh, wait, nevermind, it is.
Thank god, I'm from a family of inveterate geeks!
Monday, December 24, 2007
Wake Up! Time for the sex talk!
First comment, Whithorne Middle School has real DJs at their dances?! Us kids at the unloved stepchild of the Maury County School system had to make do with having the Student Council and friends haul in what CDs we had, and dragging Cousin Eric's speakers and player down the hill to the school. A real DJ? At 300 dollars a pop? That's . . . there have to be better uses for that money -- get creative!
Yes, I know that I'm overlooking the fact that Hampshire has somewhat older kids, somewhat better equipped to collectively disc jockey a school dance than a middle school does. But I'm all for unit schools anyway.
Okay, so, what's the occasion? Apparently, some parents were offended by lyrics they overheard while waiting to pick their kids up from the dance and with the normal wisdom shown by the powers that be in Maury County, the director of schools is contemplating suspending dances at middle schools.
Yeah, so, I might be wrong, but I think the song in question "Get Low" is kinda passe. I believe I remember it from my high school days . . . and four years does seem to make all the difference as to what's cool in the musical tastes of pre-adolescents. Seriously, you hadn't already heard this song enough to be offended by it? I'm not questioning whether the song is offensive or in bad taste -- the lyrics make my feminist skin crawl. And, actually, I'm not the most sensitive flower in the field. There would literally be no way to edit these lyrics. Of course, you also can hardly understand them -- with the exception of "My BALLS" being yelled at points, which is probably where the offense was taken.
But, no one remains innocent forever, and while the school should have guidelines for the music played at school-sponsored dances, you can't escape "Get Low" -- believe me, I tried for most of my junior and senior years of high school.
But then what offends me about the song was probably not the parental objections. The Herald article doesn't mention people being offended by misogyny and the abject objectification of the female body. Just offense at mention of genitalia and explicitives. So, they'd probably also object to The Dresden Dolls, without distinguishes between the two. (No, I wouldn't play most of the Dresden Dolls' catalog at a middle school dance, in part because they wouldn't get it.)
The sad thing is that songs like this, Cosmogirl, television shows, and misinformation on the school bus is roughly all the sex education the kids of Maury County are getting. So, not only are they not innocent -- they have nothing with which to balance the pop culture. And the solution, dear parents and school board of Maury County -- is not to suspend school dances because of an inappropriate song, the solution is to get some real sex education. Something to counter the prevalent mythology. To teach respect in sexual situations, both for your own self and for whoever else is involved. Maybe some basic knowledge of how things work -- because I, being known as the smart kid, was once asked on the bus if you could get pregnant if you were taking birth control pills and using a condom. I was in middle school at the time! The girl asking me was, I think, a junior! Something isn't quite right with this scenario. And, this scenario is far more harmful (and objectionable) than an inappropriate song being played at a school dance.
But why would anyone think of doing a silly thing like that. Nope, no, let's bury our heads in the sand.
Yes, I know that I'm overlooking the fact that Hampshire has somewhat older kids, somewhat better equipped to collectively disc jockey a school dance than a middle school does. But I'm all for unit schools anyway.
Okay, so, what's the occasion? Apparently, some parents were offended by lyrics they overheard while waiting to pick their kids up from the dance and with the normal wisdom shown by the powers that be in Maury County, the director of schools is contemplating suspending dances at middle schools.
Yeah, so, I might be wrong, but I think the song in question "Get Low" is kinda passe. I believe I remember it from my high school days . . . and four years does seem to make all the difference as to what's cool in the musical tastes of pre-adolescents. Seriously, you hadn't already heard this song enough to be offended by it? I'm not questioning whether the song is offensive or in bad taste -- the lyrics make my feminist skin crawl. And, actually, I'm not the most sensitive flower in the field. There would literally be no way to edit these lyrics. Of course, you also can hardly understand them -- with the exception of "My BALLS" being yelled at points, which is probably where the offense was taken.
But, no one remains innocent forever, and while the school should have guidelines for the music played at school-sponsored dances, you can't escape "Get Low" -- believe me, I tried for most of my junior and senior years of high school.
But then what offends me about the song was probably not the parental objections. The Herald article doesn't mention people being offended by misogyny and the abject objectification of the female body. Just offense at mention of genitalia and explicitives. So, they'd probably also object to The Dresden Dolls, without distinguishes between the two. (No, I wouldn't play most of the Dresden Dolls' catalog at a middle school dance, in part because they wouldn't get it.)
The sad thing is that songs like this, Cosmogirl, television shows, and misinformation on the school bus is roughly all the sex education the kids of Maury County are getting. So, not only are they not innocent -- they have nothing with which to balance the pop culture. And the solution, dear parents and school board of Maury County -- is not to suspend school dances because of an inappropriate song, the solution is to get some real sex education. Something to counter the prevalent mythology. To teach respect in sexual situations, both for your own self and for whoever else is involved. Maybe some basic knowledge of how things work -- because I, being known as the smart kid, was once asked on the bus if you could get pregnant if you were taking birth control pills and using a condom. I was in middle school at the time! The girl asking me was, I think, a junior! Something isn't quite right with this scenario. And, this scenario is far more harmful (and objectionable) than an inappropriate song being played at a school dance.
But why would anyone think of doing a silly thing like that. Nope, no, let's bury our heads in the sand.
Friday, December 21, 2007
More Religious Madness in Memphis...
Just when you thought the buckle of the Bible Bible couldn't get any weirder...
I mean, we've got the Bellevue Baptist's mock calvary, Love In Action, Getwell CofC, more nutty things I could probably think of if I took the time, but the World Overcomers church has surpassed -- ah, I mean, overcome -- all previous expectations for lunacy. I mean, some literally freaky fundies. Read more at Theology and Geometry.
I mean, we've got the Bellevue Baptist's mock calvary, Love In Action, Getwell CofC, more nutty things I could probably think of if I took the time, but the World Overcomers church has surpassed -- ah, I mean, overcome -- all previous expectations for lunacy. I mean, some literally freaky fundies. Read more at Theology and Geometry.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
If I’m Going to Have Monks Coming Out of My Ears...
...I might as well play with them.
I scribbled the beginnings of this a while ago on the bus (the seven, oh, the seven) meditating on my favorite subject – gender and ascetics – and thought I would clean it up a bit and post it. However, the citations are going to be a bit hazy – given my current limited internet connectivity, and being half a world away from my library. (I rarely identify with St. Jerome – but I need to have my library, okay, man. Understand!)
The gut reaction in an encounter with hagiography is a sense that early Christians (or at least those who had time and education for writing) hated the physical body, and while it’s true that the relationship of Christianity with the body is a difficult one, but it is far more complicated than a simple rejection. (Barring a handful of folks here and there, who did flatly reject the physical body.)
So, if one looks at monasticism and asceticism not as a rejection of the body, but as a rejection of social constructions placed upon the body, requirements of sexual renunciation and celibacy take on a new meaning – relating back to the construction of gender and gender roles in Early Christianity.
For example, this offers an alternative reading of the separation of male and female bodied persons into single-sex monasteries. The practice may not necessarily reinforce gender roles and boundaries. By removing the physical differentiation of sex, monasteries could also remove the temptation to attach social meaning to that physical difference. As there aren't men and women in a single sex monastery, so there aren't men's roles and women's roles within the microsociety of the monastery. Further there is evidence in the Lives and Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers that this lesson was intended to extend to the monastic’s interactions with society as a whole. (I’m thinking of the anecdote in which one of the desert mothers upbraids two monks for making her femaleness an issue – which might be in the Sayings or might have been in The Forgotten Desert Mothers, which is by Laura Swan.)
Obviously, it would be a mistake on my part to attempt to argue that everyone in Early Christianity was thinking along these lines. There’s more than enough misogynists running about through early Christianity. (Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine – I blame you three for many, many things.) And lots of ascetic hagiography is heavy on the “woman-hating” as my sister termed it after what, I suspect, will be her first and last Religious Studies class.
But we’re not talking about a monolith here. ;D And I’m fairly convinced that a decent minority of early Christians were out to overthrow gender norms.
I scribbled the beginnings of this a while ago on the bus (the seven, oh, the seven) meditating on my favorite subject – gender and ascetics – and thought I would clean it up a bit and post it. However, the citations are going to be a bit hazy – given my current limited internet connectivity, and being half a world away from my library. (I rarely identify with St. Jerome – but I need to have my library, okay, man. Understand!)
The gut reaction in an encounter with hagiography is a sense that early Christians (or at least those who had time and education for writing) hated the physical body, and while it’s true that the relationship of Christianity with the body is a difficult one, but it is far more complicated than a simple rejection. (Barring a handful of folks here and there, who did flatly reject the physical body.)
So, if one looks at monasticism and asceticism not as a rejection of the body, but as a rejection of social constructions placed upon the body, requirements of sexual renunciation and celibacy take on a new meaning – relating back to the construction of gender and gender roles in Early Christianity.
For example, this offers an alternative reading of the separation of male and female bodied persons into single-sex monasteries. The practice may not necessarily reinforce gender roles and boundaries. By removing the physical differentiation of sex, monasteries could also remove the temptation to attach social meaning to that physical difference. As there aren't men and women in a single sex monastery, so there aren't men's roles and women's roles within the microsociety of the monastery. Further there is evidence in the Lives and Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers that this lesson was intended to extend to the monastic’s interactions with society as a whole. (I’m thinking of the anecdote in which one of the desert mothers upbraids two monks for making her femaleness an issue – which might be in the Sayings or might have been in The Forgotten Desert Mothers, which is by Laura Swan.)
Obviously, it would be a mistake on my part to attempt to argue that everyone in Early Christianity was thinking along these lines. There’s more than enough misogynists running about through early Christianity. (Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine – I blame you three for many, many things.) And lots of ascetic hagiography is heavy on the “woman-hating” as my sister termed it after what, I suspect, will be her first and last Religious Studies class.
But we’re not talking about a monolith here. ;D And I’m fairly convinced that a decent minority of early Christians were out to overthrow gender norms.
And the Recommended Reading
Today's recommended reading is from Russ Adcox's Ramblings, regarding the "war" on Christmas.
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