Archive for the General Category Today, Vogue. Tomorrow, the world. Weekend late nights are long and unfunny. Just saying. I know I write about race and class quite a bit, but that’s probably because it comes up so often in my life. Trust me, I wish that were not the case. And, yes, I have tried just ignoring it. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. Take this morning, for example. One of the parents at my kids’ school invited a group to her house so that the rising kindergartners would get a chance to mingle a bit before the first day of school. I admit that the whole thing made me a bit nervous. I live on the outer edge of their exclusive upscale neighborhood. I know that I can’t exceed the speed limit by more than 3 mph or the cops will pull me over. I know that if I take my children to play in the park there, I can be asked to leave at any time. The neighborhood association fiercely protects its borders from any encroaching threats to their property values. I understand. Just across Memorial Drive is the Dirty South. It’s all rims, grills, and baby-mamas. And me? I live smack in the middle, literally and metaphorically -a black, single, well-educated, poor, baby-laden, socially conscious, immigrant, upwardly mobile revolutionary philanthropist with bad credit. I am NPR’s Li’l Wayne album review. So, while I hesitated with that old familiar insecurity we often feel when we are asked to interact with our “social betters”, my inner Posdnous reminded me that “a diamond ain’t nothin’ but a rock with a name”. So I showed up. You have to force yourself to attend as many social gatherings as you are invited to. It’s good practice to try things you don’t think you will enjoy. Yes, I was the only black person there. Yes, I was the only poor person there. Yes, I was both the youngest and the person with the most children. I could mention how surprised some of the other parents seemed when I arrived. I could try to decode the things they didn’t quite say. That would be paranoia talking, though. Truth is, for whatever might have been in their heads, they were perfectly nice people, and everyone had a good time. Sure, I had to pretend to give a shit about camping and hiking for a couple of hours but, hey, you can’t blame white people for the stuff they like.* I hate having to admit to my social insecurity, but I’m glad I’m dealing with it. Most people I know escew the subject or excuse their behavior as normal when they avoid being the only person of their race or class in the room. If I hadn’t made the effort, my children would not have had the opportunity to spend the morning scaling a backyard tree fort with their white and asian upper-middle class school friends, blissfully immune to the irrational fear that gripped me. Sure, I could be pessimistic and assume that they, too, would eventually grow into the fear, but I honestly believe that my children enjoy a higher than average freedom. Over the summer, I tutored a kid who had been raised on the other side of Memorial Drive and whose grandmother, incidentally, is the most beautiful crackhead I’ve ever seen. He is the same age as my oldest daughter, but he is baffled by the fact that she has white friends, has been overseas, and isn’t afraid of the police. He is already intimidated by life outside his neighborhood. He’s 8. To a certain extent, I suppose this is the human condition. We are attached to the familiar, and we fear the unknown. It doesn’t have to be about race or class. It could be any type of categorization that divides us. Still, wisdom of my inner Pos granted, when we compare ourselves to others on the basis of race and class, the stakes are much higher. At the end of the play date, I shook hands with the other parents and walked to my car, pleased with my personal progress, vaguely aware that a police car had been following me as I walked my children down the block. Turns out I was blocking one of the neighbor’s driveways, and she called the police to have my car towed. I explained to her that my host had told me to park there and that I had been led to believe that she had permission to use that area for guest parking. She stopped bitching at me and walked across the street to curse out my host about how “this used to be a nice neighborhood.” My attention was trained on the steely-eyed officer who I remember because he usually follows my car when I drive down that block. He stared me down, waiting for me to leave. The other parents stood awkwardly at their cars, unsure whether or not the moment for final goodbyes had passed. I just shrugged and said, “Oh well. Figures that when you see a police car around here, they’re coming for ME.” Nobody laughed. I’m not insecure for no reason. I’m not obsessed with my place in the social mosaic. It’s just that sometimes these things do matter. No matter how much I’d like to feign obliviousness, these phantoms flash across my consciousness too often to be ignored. How could I claim a writer’s gift of observation yet fail to address the divisions that plague us? My study of race is not a masturbatory fixation. It’s social epidemiology. * By the way, in two hours, I observed examples of post #’s 1, 5, 7, 9, 19, 24, 51, 53, 62, 78, 90, and possibly 104. To be fair, I have to admit that at least 25% of the posts on that site apply to me too, including #’s 19, 46, 77 (Flight of the Conchords son WHUT!), 84, and 99. I posted a response to one of Nat’s pieces a little while ago that said accurate research is very rarely a negative. Then I read an article in The Atlantic this month about what is behind the rising crime rates in mid-sized urban areas that tested my theory. Check it out and see what you think. I still think the research isn’t negative, but this piece gave me pause. Especially since any part of it taken out of context could be used to fuel a “minorities cause crime” thesis. It’s July 2nd which means we’re half-way through the year. Perfect time for a look back at our most popular posts of the year. The musings that you our loyal fans (mostly just you Marina) thought merited the most attention. Here’s the top 5 for those of you who might have missed them:
2) Adventures in Housing: This wasn’t even my favorite of Natalie’s posts in February (that title would go to “My Gay Girlfriend“), but you loved it. Something about shit in a sink I guess. 3) It’s Good to Have Friends: Nat’s discourse on the culture shock that can ensue over confusion about just what is meant by the phrase “a buck fifty.” 4) Vulnerable is Good: Me on my soapbox about why torture is never ok and why occasionally a lot of innocent people have to die because of the nature of an open society. 5) Cock Flavored Soup, hmmmm?: The picture is the post. Leave it to Kathleen to make the top 5 with a penis reference. I didn’t plan to devote any time to analyzing the Gloucester, Massachusettes “pregnancy pact” debacle, especially since it’s questionable whether or not the sudden exponential rise in teen pregnancies at the suburban school is anything more than a cluster of teenage idiots. Frankly, I found the whole thing rather fishy. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. Having been a teenage girl, I can attest to the impressive levels of dumbfuckery that abound in high schools, especially when it comes to sex. However, I have a hard time believing that 17 girls could get along well enough to form a pact of any kind. It’s been my experience that if you put more that 4 girls together in any given situation, it will inevitably result in a cage match. In order to ensure peace among a group of young women, you pretty much have to establish a hierarchy, ranking them in order from “hot” to “fugly”. As long as the chubby one knows her place, it might be alright. In the rare case that the degree of cuteness is too close to call, start with the blonder girl and work your way down. At any rate, there’s no way that, at a coed high school, you can get a group too large to sit at the same lunch table to make major life decisions together. This is not the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Still, I do have a thing or two to say about teenage girls and sex. Entering puberty is like developing super powers. You’ve been going through life, a mere mortal child, knowing that you are just one of many, then one day, you wake up and you notice that you are capable of manipulating the minds of men. It’s impossible to control at first, so you tend to misfire - emabarrassing yourself in front of the boys you like while setting fire to the ones you don’t. When you finally do learn to focus, the power is intoxicating. Like many of our favorite mutants, you don’t start out a hero. That heat vision, that that hip-swing that freezes time - how could you not be tempted to pull a Peter Parker and use them in the selfish persuit of revenge, money, and love? Usually, a girl will realize the responsibility that comes with power before she does more than break a few hearts, but every once in a while, it’s too much too soon. These unseasoned hands foolishly unleash something too big for them to hold - they create life. Like super heroes, mothers have incredible strength and can achieve extraordinary feats, but they pay the price, sacrificing their personal lives. They have to carefully craft this public identity to protect the ones they love. They can never really relax, ever vigilant of some hurtling meteor, foreign invasion, or madvillain. That constant struggle of want-to vs. must-do is probably too almost always too much for a young girl to grasp. But when you’re 15 and you find out you can fly, you can’t really see it that way. It’s hard. It’s complicated. Adults usually aren’t helpful. In fact, most of them will only make it worse by sending mixed messages. Who do you think came up with the blondeness scale?
I mailed in my final credit card payment today. That means, for the first time since I was 20, I don’t owe any money to Capital One, Citibank, Providian, or even Discover. Now I don’t know what to do with myself. My whole adult life has been spent either going into or getting out of debt. I’m not talking about shopping sprees and gadgets. That stuff is for amateurs. I go into debt big. I start businesses and come out the other end with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I’m the guy who hears someone talk about how they’ve got to pay their $800 credit card bill and wonders what the hell they’re complaining about. The last two times I scrapped my way out of debt, I went right back into business on my next idea. But this time, I’m a little hesitant. For one, I don’t have a good idea. For two, I don’t know that I want to risk it again. Maybe this means I’m finally a grown-up. Maybe it just means I’m chicken. Who knows? I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life. I’ve done the things that people do to get rich. I’ve started businesses. I’ve worked at start-ups. Mine just haven’t worked out quite as well as the Silicon Valley types. Essentially, I’m the rule that proves just how special the entrepreneurial stories are of people like Bill Gates and Russell Simmons and proves just how rare the stock option lottery win of people like Google’s office manager are. Some things work out better than others. Which one will work is anyone’s guess. This much is certain. Debt-free is uncharted waters for me. Hell, I don’t even have a car payment at the moment. What’s going on? Freedom is a scary thing. Both China and India are working to develop their own university systems, modeled on American universities, in the hopes that they can eventually retain more of their brighter students with the promise of degrees nearly as prestigious as those issued in the U.S. While achieving that academic prowess will take some time, the less expensive option of local universities will undoubtedly sway some students. Over time, the overwhelming number of Asian students who come to the U.S. to study at universities like Georgia Tech and MIT will shrink, and the Master’s degree programs at these schools will start to feel it. This, I dare say, is an inevitability. I wonder if the U.S. public education system can provide the number of highly qualified American students needed to fill those seats. I wonder if these smart kids will be able to afford to go. I wonder if the emphasis on bringing in Asian students from overseas to stock U.S. tech schools is akin to the college basketball and football scouts’ clamoring for more black boys to stock their teams. In either case one could argue that the numbers support an intuitive sense that the students’ motivation due to cultural and social factors primes them for success in their respective fields. Or you could just write it off as a self-fulfilling myth. Eh. I suppose it will be a while before these questions ripen, and some may end up moot in the end. I just thought I’d ask. Yo… HomelessWorldCup.com . I am intuitively tempted to comment on the ludicrousness of this, but I’m guaranteed to be called elitist.
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