Closing Up Shop, or The Genexhibitionist Gets Dressed

I've decided that I get all the public exposure I want or need over at Suburban Guerrilla, where I post intermittently - sometimes more intermittently than others. As for my personal life, it's gone personal. If you are a friend or acquaintance and want an invitation to my private blog about my personal life or directions to other places I may be found online, please email me directly.

Otherwise, the archives are yours to enjoy.

Kids Today

Wow, two in one day! (see you in six months).

I'm posting here because there are two weeks left in the semester and it makes far more sense to be here procrastinating than it does to sit down and write all those papers.

It does. Trust me.

Writing here helps to...uh...warm up my writing muscles before diving into that paper all about the hell that was observing a 5th grade class for two days. And it allows me to vent all the things that I can't actually say in my education paper. For example, WHAT the heck happened to 5th graders?

I mean, we were no angels. But I recall long periods of sitting in a quiet classroom. I recall getting in trouble for calling my teacher by her first name, but never for acting like an orangutan in class. No one in my class would have DARED get up and wander about the room like these children do. No one in my class would have DREAMED of wandering over to another student's desk and chatting while the teacher attempted to give a lesson.

And it completely goes without saying that there would have been no rolling on the floor, crawling under desks, or ululating.

No, I am not kidding. Ululating. Or sometimes just making noises with their lips and tongues. Or if they're actually silent, it might be because they are playing with finger skateboards. And we shall not even speak of the covert in-class texting.

According to the monumentally patient teacher I observed, this particular class of 10-11 year olds has retired no less than three teachers as they terrorized their way through the grades. There are three grades remaining in that school - I wonder how many of the 6th grade teachers have recently started taking anxiety medication.

But then in the midst of all that chaos are these quiet, well-behaved, intelligent children who pay attention and seem impervious to all this. They are not unpopular for it, nor are they even particularly scorned, though perhaps they might be if any of the little narcissists took any notice of anything beyond their own noses.

And this is what was dancing through my mind as I was talking to my Russian coworker today about why it is that we have children so late in this country (to wait until 30 is evidently eyebrow-raising in Russia). We raise our children to be this self-absorbed. We think it is a right of childhood. And we indulge them in unlimited video games and television and texting, rendering them practically incapable of having a conversation, much less participating in a community.

And then one day high school is over and off they go, completely unprepared to cope in a world that does not do what they will it to do. The lucky ones will be allowed fall on their faces and begin to discover humility as they understand that reality is not so completely at their command, nor should it be. And right around then, they'll have a chance at being decent parents.

But then I wonder, how did we get this way in the first place? How did kids go from kind of obnoxious to unholy terror? When did respect go completely out the window?

And more importantly, when the hell did I start sounding like one of those old people who complains about kids today?

That said, for some screwed up reason I can't wait until my next classroom experience. I wonder what high school will be like, since that's what I plan to teach.

crocheting plastic

I was looking for one of those neat mats made from recycled plastic to use camping this summer, when I discovered this on ebay today: a rug crocheted from plastic bags. Hmm, more economical, less carbon shipping it around. Not as cool, but, well, it's to camp on. Guess it's time to crack open that "how to crochet" book collecting dust in the corner...

The Plastic Age

Ever since I read this article about the ubiquity of plastic molecules throughout the ocean, my entire relationship to consumption has changed. I cannot look at a piece of plastic without thinking of it winding up in the ocean killing creatures at every level on the food chain.

In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we published the results of our survey and the analysis we had made of the debris, reporting, among other things, that there are six pounds of plastic floating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Our readers were as shocked as we were when we saw the yield of our first trawl. Since then we have returned to the area twice to continue documenting the phenomenon. During the latest trip, in the summer of 2002, our photographers captured underwater images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colored plastic fragments in their bellies.

Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environmental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his colleagues have discovered that floating plastic fragments accumulate hydrophobic—that is, non- water-soluble—toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

The potential scope of the problem is staggering. Every year some 5.5 quadrillion (5.5x1015) plastic pellets—about 250 billion pounds of them—are produced worldwide for use in the manufacture of plastic products. When those pellets or products degrade, break into fragments, and disperse, the pieces may also become concentrators and transporters of toxic chemicals in the marine environment. Thus an astronomical number of vectors for some of the most toxic pollutants known are being released into an ecosystem dominated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pollutant-free organic fish? After what I have seen firsthand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.

I've tried hard to make choices that reduce my consumption, but the plain fact is, plastic is everywhere and it's basically impossible to avoid. If an age is defined by it's innovation and utilization of a particular material, then we are without a doubt the plastic age. I just hope it's not our downfall.

Dear Ms. Pelosi

Dear Rep. Pelosi,

I am writing to implore you to impeach.

With his latest executive order, Bush has gone too far. Again. You are in a position where you can stop him. The only way I can stop him is to implore you and the other representatives to do so. In doing nothing, you are letting down not only every of us who worked so hard to elect democrats last November, but the entire American people.

Moves like this place us closer than ever to becoming a dictatorship. The time has come to impeach, before it's too late and you no longer have the option because Congress has been dissolved by executive order. Though the thought seems far-fetched, much of what Bush has done over the past seven years has been beyond my wildest dystopian nightmares, and I no longer doubt any possibility. In fact, with the recent systematic dismantling of checks and balances, it merely seems inevitable.

Ms. Pelosi, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I'm an average citizen: a mother, a taxpayer, a homeowner, a person who is trying to make a nice life for future generations. That cannot occur unless you impeach Bush AND Cheney AND Gonzales, right away. In swearing to uphold the constitution, you owe us nothing less. I care little for excuses, or for reasons why it would endanger anyone's political career. The time for that has passed. You must decide whose side you are on. I truly hope you side with the American people.

Yours Truly,
Maya Dexter