Compare and Contrast

Today, I tutored a four-year-old child who asked me to help her draw a dolphin like the one in the book we had read . Then, she told her mother that she wasn't ready to go home yet, so we all sat down together for a moment longer.

Today, a four-year-old child was separated from her mother by a man with a gun. They weren't given a moment for explanations about where they would go.

Today, the mother of my four-year-old student took a photo of a library list of recommended books that I showed her. She asked what I thought about her daughter's phonemic awareness. I talked to her about brain development and readiness to learn.

Today, a four-year-old child couldn't understand the language of her prisoners. She had no idea when she would be allowed to see her mother again.

In two days, I leave for a short vacation. Before that, I'll bring my dog to board at the place where he's boarded since he was a pup. When we arrive, my dog will greet the people who take him back to the kennel with a song as he leans into their legs and rubs his head against them. They'll sink to their knees to say hello. He'll lie down in a kennel padded with blankets, toys, and a dog bed. Later, he'll run with other dogs and play with his keepers twice a day. He'll eat his usual expensive food and any treats I leave with him. I'll find new photos of him leaping in the air with friendly dogs on my Facebook page.

In two days, a Senator might get inside the warehouse to see that the four-year-old child who was separated from her mother is being contained by a chain-link enclosure with concrete floors. There is a bed but no mattress. The 'blankets' given to the children are made of plastic and foil. What is she eating? Is she allowed time outside the kennel to stretch, exercise, and see the sunshine? She might be allowed to watch a television through the chain-link fence. Is there anything else to play with, to comfort her?

On our trip, no one at TSA will question my son's right to stay with us. They'll ask him some question about where he wants to go and we'll move together through the line without fanfare. The worst thing that might happen is that I lose the salad dressing for my salad because it's in an unmarked container. My husband and my son will tease me for making it from scratch again. It might take us twenty minutes to get through the line. While we wait for our flight, my son will dig through his big backpack full of games, books, and movies to keep him occupied on the airplane. He'll get to sit by the window and look out.

For as long as forty-five days, the fate of the four-year-old child will hang in the balance. During that time, permanent damage will happen to her brain affecting her ability to learn and her ability to cope with minor disturbances in her life. She might develop PTSD, anxiety, depression.

I read once that most Germans couldn't imagine the atrocities that were happening to Jewish children as long as their own lives seemed so ordinary. This is the crossroads at which we wait.

My life in my neighborhood is ordinary, calm, loving, cheerful.

People in my country are being forcibly separated from their children because they had the audacity to come here and ask for asylum. They are not told where their children will go or when they might see them again.

It makes me feel sick to my stomach to think I could condone this by continuing to live my quiet life. My silence could condone it. I won't condone it, but am I doing enough to fight? Am I speaking out, acting out, protesting loudly enough? What am I willing to give up to make my stand?

What are you willing to do to stop this madness?

Thank you for listening, jules

Concentration Camps for Children

Have you all thought enough about children in cages yet?

Boy, when Nick was in fifth grade and the subject of camp came up, I worried, first of all, if he could fall sleep in those saggy and screechy bunk beds they always seemed to have at camp. I remembered camp nights. The first night, I woke up every single time I or anyone else shifted and those ancient springs shrieked flat, plastic mattresses into my ear.

What I've forgotten until I think of it now is that by the second night, my brain adjusted to the nighttime sounds of thirty-two girls sleeping, of the rusted springs groaning under me, and of the questionable springs stretching over my head from the girl who nabbed the top bunk. I slept just fine. The daytime was a joy, running through green leaves in the woods, following trails, looking for paw prints not already trampled by sneakers.

Outdoor school was a joy. Outdoor school made learning so easy. I loved outdoor school, even though the bed sounds remained shockingly loud as I fell asleep at night in my own cozy sleeping bag.

So, when it was Nick's turn, the first thing I wondered about was that sound and if he would sleep.

But when he came home, he chattered on about finding sea stars on the beach and miniature crabs under rocks. He talked about how he was the best at orienteering and paddling because none of the other kids had done it before so he taught a dozen kids what to do once they were out of earshot of an adult. He gathered up a bunch of gravel and showed me how to clean dirty water and growled at me when I wouldn't drink the results.

I'm not a big fan of giardia and told him my filtered water needed to go through a known aperture of so many microns before I felt safe to drink it. I'm pretty sure he drank his when I wasn't looking.

For all my worrying, Nick had been fine. He'd been away from home five nights, but the camp counselors were cheerful, teachers and a nurse were available for skinned knees, the food was intended to be nutritious, and the surrounding woods seemed endless. He knew we could come pick him up any time he needed us. He knew which day he would come back home with his stories to tell.

Nick hadn't spent five days and nights corralled into a bunk room with twenty-seven other boys twenty-four hours a day. He hadn't been locked in. And he'd been eleven before he spent one night more than fifteen minutes away from home.

So, I keep imagining those kids that ICE put into concentration camps at our southern border. Were they being given decent food to eat? Why couldn't they get decent sleeping bags instead of those awful space blankets? Why weren't there mattress on the bunks? Why did they have to stay in cages inside chain link fencing? Why wasn't there carpet or at least rugs on the floors? Why weren't there comfortable chairs to sit in? Is anyone in charge of activities to engage all those young minds? Has anyone talked to them in their own language to explain what would happen to them? Are their medical needs being met? And what about the ones I saw that looked to be in diapers still? Who is taking care of them, comforting them?

Someone needs to answer for this malevolent act. 

Thank you for listening, jules

Children in Cages

This afternoon, I told Mike I was too tired after work to go protest against Immigration taking children away from their families. I was tired, but I know I should have gone anyway. I was a little afraid to show up at a detention center, but I should have gone anyway.

It's heinous to separate children from families seeking refuge. It is evil.

It will cause irreparable damage to those children. Their brain development will actually change. It will affect their ability to learn and they will be more susceptible to anxiety for the rest of their lives.

Think about this: these children are being housed in a warehouse with concrete floors and chain link fences. If you haven't looked at the photos, then close your eyes and imagine a four-year-old under a blanket that looks like it's made out of tin foil, on a narrow bed that didn't appear to have a mattress, at a place that looks like your local animal shelter. One photo showed a flat-screen TV, but the child in the foreground stood looking through fencing to see it. There were no chairs in sight.

I don't even like the idea of my dog going to a place like that and my dog is a shelter dog.

What kind of country have we become that children aren't housed with their families in ordinary rooms with normal beds and real comforters? Why can't we afford to offer them comfortable chairs where their parents might hold them?

So this morning at work, I sat with children privileged enough to afford to be tutored, children from Peru, China, Korea, and India. We had a diverse group. This afternoon, I talked with Boy Scouts, again primarily privileged enough to be driven around in new SUVs and oversized trucks by their dads. Some of them talked to me about heading to college at expensive schools across the country. They are all the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of immigrants. How do I know? With some, I have heard their family stories, recent or distant immigration from a variety of countries. With the others, I can assume they are immigrants simply because they are not Native American.

Part of my family immigrated in the 1800s. It's mortifying to admit, buy one branch of my family came from the same region as Donald Trump's. Even he is an immigrant. My sister, the genealogy buff, said some of us came over earlier than that. I like to imagine that someone in my line arrived and floated past the new Statue of Liberty in its original colors, the brown of a penny, before thirty years of New York weather oxidized its surface into the green that we see now. I like to think that someone spoke her verses in their languages, those words that read of hope for the newly arrived.

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet to raise money to fund the placement of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Even though that was her message, we haven't been kind to each wave of immigrants that has arrived. The Irish used to be considered untrustworthy. Italians were said to be unclean. I remember jokes about Polish people's intelligence. I read that the Chinese who built the railroad were considered expendable. Mexicans are but the latest wave.

But according to Rachel Maddow, we have never before separated immigrants and refuges from their children. She said it can take up to 45 days for these kids to be connected with sponsors because they've added this new procedure without having the logistics in place to accommodate them.

So, children are forcibly taken from their parents, babies and toddlers too, and are being housed in cages.

CAGES.

I should never be too tired to protest against children in cages. None of us should be too tired or too busy to protest children being torn from their parents' arms and put into cages.

Seriously.

Thank you for listening, jules

She Opens Her Mouth but You Can't Hear a Sound

I'm fucking falling apart.

It's because I had to get a job. I HAD a job. I HAD two jobs, cleaning up after Nick and Mike and writing. Make that three jobs. I also volunteered, for the school and for Mike's Boy Scout troop.

But we needed money. We needed money so that my son could argue about going to karate and find endless ways of getting out of going even after he insisted that he wanted to go so I paid yet another mortgage payment toward endless nagging. We needed money so that my son could join the gym and only go to it twice in a year and a half because I relied on Mike to do the nagging. I'd like to inform you that Mike failed Nagging 101. We needed money so that my son could sign up for the college credit in his German class and proceed to get a grade that was less than one half of a percentage point below, below, what was required to receive the credit.

Can you tell I'm having a bad day? Can you?

If you lived here, you'd be able to tell what kind of a day I was having by the condition of the strainer in the kitchen sink.

I usually pop that shit off the tiny screen four or five times a day into the garbage can. It's easier than being anal about what goes into the drain.

Today, it looks like someone vomited into my sink.

I repeatedly ask Mike and Nick-a.k.a, nag- to rinse their dishes so stuff isn't gorilla-glued to the plates and bowls or growing pretty pink and blue mold by the time I do my load of dirty dishes in the dishwasher at bedtime. Sometimes, they actually do it. More often than not, they stack the dishes together so that uneaten tortellini are smashed between plates and vegetables are hidden in the bottom bowl so I don't nag about eating what you serve yourself and not ruining the fucking environment by throwing out food grown in Chile, packaged in plastic, transported to Washington state, and brought home to our refrigerator.

One day, when Nick was feeling particularly entitled, he asked me why my generation "had ruined the world for his generation."

Before I knew the answer, my eyes bloated.

Did you ever feel that? Someone says something particularly obnoxious, making you personally responsible for the ruination of the entire planet, and before words reach your lips, before you even digested the nuances of his meaning, before anything, you can feel blood rush to your eyeballs and they do that little pop thing where you see a shaft of light for a second and you know some valve is going to blow if you don't open your fucking mouth.

And then you open your mouth and pabulum spills out.

"Well, I, well, I, ... well I recycle."

Then, after that someone goes back into his room with his pile of food that you just prepared for him, you begin to think of all the things you did to try to save this fucking planet.

Isn't it you who runs around the house in the morning turning off lights after you've yelled, "Turn off the lights when you leave the room," at least four times.

Isn't it you who tries to stretch every bit of food into meals and lunches so that you don't have to throw out that chicken from-when the hell did you cook that chicken? Last Wednesday?-whenever, and you end up wondering all day if Nick spent Chemistry class puking stomach acids all over his experiment because that shit had already turned?

Wasn't it you who leaped to your feet, incredulous, in a lecture hall at Bell Labs in 1988 when you'd just started contracting there and told the senior management making the presentation that planned obsolescence was a ridiculous idea, that no, customers did not feel the need to buy a new fucking phone every two years to match the decor when they redid the colors in their bedrooms and you didn't care of everyone else was doing it, it was still a fucking bad idea?

No, you didn't use the word 'fucking' but yeah, you were grateful to even have a contracting job after that lecture ended.

Wasn't it you who, and your husband, who bought a Prius before they'd proved they could go the speed limit on the highway and endured all the questions about your slow and dorky car before everybody else bought one?

Wasn't it you who has kept that Prius even though it's scraped on three sides, even though your husband redesigned the bumper last New Year's Eve, even though the dog chewed up half of the floor mat on the rear passenger side, and even though fur is still embedded in the upholstery right after you vacuum it? Isn't it you that still has that Prius even though your husband has had four or five other cars-you've lost count-and your son gets a newer car than you because he refuses to drive such a dorky car that 'only old women drive' and even though it's growing moss and maple seedlings in the cracks and crevices?

Wasn't it you who dragged his ten-year-old butt to pick vegetables at the local CSA farm for two or three years before you realized you were the only one in the house that even attempted to eat all those vegetables and you threw too much of it away every week?

Wasn't it you who insisted that paper towels were 'special' and for all but the dirtiest jobs, the family could use hand towels instead? Didn't you nag until everyone did it?

Wasn't it you who nagged everyone to keep at least a few grocery bags in their cars so that no one had to come home with new plastic even though you were the only one who ever shopped anyway?

Wasn't it fucking you?

But the boy was in his room with the TV on and didn't hear a word you just yelled. If a mom nags in her kitchen and no one is

Thank you for listening, jules

My Little Corner of the World

So, was I really going to spend the whole time here talking to you about how I couldn't maintain the plans I made to save the world from climate change? About how I failed my New Year's resolution so we were all going to die?

The other day, I had to correct a student who made fun of a tiny sculpture another student made out of a kneaded eraser I let him use.

The kneaded eraser is like a fidget spinner, allowing a kid to manipulate something with his left hand while he completes his work with his right hand. It's better though, because it actually functions as an eraser and allows for bits of creative endeavor in the form of sculpture. I love handing a kid a kneaded eraser to work with when they can't sit still and focus. It's all about focus.

There was one kid for whom it didn't work because he didn't need a fidget and could focus already and he got distracted from his work by playing with the thing. I'm learning to hand out the kneaded erasers judiciously.

So, back to the student who made fun of the other kid's tiny dinosaur sculpture.

"That's a terrible dinosaur," she said looking over her shoulder, away from her work. "It doesn't even look like a dinosaur."

I think she was aggravated because I'd given her the kneaded eraser that she'd dirtied the time before and she wanted the clean one. I looked at her until she made eye contact with me.

"Please don't make judgments regarding someone else's artwork. People are where they are in there work and moving forward from there, not from where someone else thinks they should be."

"Why not?"

"Because I want you to use compassion?"

"You can't change the world."

"I can work to change my little corner of the world and in it, I want people to express compassion for each other."

And then she went off on a rant about how her life didn't contain any compassion so why should she give any to anyone else? It made me sad. I neglected to point out that she currently held my pastels in her hand and was working on my toned and textured paper even though she was there, ostensibly, to learn her math facts. That was compassion, wasn't it? I had figured that if I could teach her to focus for longer and longer periods at a time, that was as important a lesson as any. But instead of lecturing her, I let her rant while I thought of my own corner of the world and what I needed to do with it.

I did want a freer sense of learning than I had seen in the rest of the world around me, one with less judgment and more encouragement. I wanted an environment in which students found curiosity and the love of learning instead of the drudgery of worksheets and learning to the test.

And I still wanted to do my part to save the world from climate change. But what was that role? Believe it or not, I've been thinking about climate change almost daily since I last wrote to you.

In his book, The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell stated that we do ourselves and nature a disservice by mentally separating ourselves from the natural world. We are not separate. He wrote that where people have integrated themselves into the scenario, the local environment around them had become more beautiful even if it is urban. An urban setting is often thought of as separate from nature. Don't think of cities as apart from nature, he said, but find a way to foster nature within them and they become better habitat for animals and people. At least, I think that's what he meant.

I loved his book.

But I read it two or three pages at a time just before I fell asleep every night. I can't entirely say that he wrote everything I believe he wrote or if my mind just took a line or two and dreamed on it and turned it into something else every night.

Either way, I loved his book. I plan to read it again. I don't do that very often.

This book changed my world view. It really made me think about how I am not just a being, but a colony of beings, including bacteria and mites, that cannot survive without the other beings around me. These include the people I depend upon, Mike, Nick, my friends, my acquaintances, and myriad people who invented the infrastructure I live within every day. I still want to thank the guy who invented guardrails.

It's not just people that I depend on.

Three Western red cedar trees hold my house in place on the steep hillside. I am grateful to these ancient beings. I sit under them and look up into their boughs. I watch how droplets of rain hang from the tips of their needles like jewels. I think of their roots, clinging to rocks and holding the earth underneath me. I foster the seedlings they plant in my flower pots. They have a network of plants and fungus that grows around them.

The greenery around me freshens the air with oxygen and I in turn breathe out carbon dioxide for them. Have you ever wondered the effects of looking at your houseplants when you water them? Do they breathe in the nice CO2 with the same joy with which I breathe in their exhaled oxygen? We are lovely together, the plants and I. We depend on each other.

But we are still exhaling too much carbon dioxide to maintain the nice balance we need. Coral reefs are bleaching. Polar ice is melting. The trees can't keep up and as an integral part of this environment, I want to keep trying to move toward a better balance.

Balance is the key to a fruitful life.

So, did you know that some bright scientist/inventor at a company called Blue Planet has figured out a way to harden concrete building materials with carbon? They're even saying it is more flexible to endure earthquakes.

I really think that Andy Weir said it right, "We need to science the shit out of this problem."

And it may be my job to tell you about these brilliant new ideas and discuss whether or not they're going to work for us.

No, I don't come up with the ideas, but I can definitely spread them and think about their consequences. Maybe that's my role in saving my little corner of the world.

And maybe I should start washing out my Ziploc bags.

Thank you for listening, jules



"

Buying Cat Litter in a Cardboard Box

This morning, I cut open a plastic package containing tortellini. I emptied the pasta into the pot of boiling water and dumped the packaging into the trash. Already, there was a plastic wrapper from a package of bacon, a large plastic container that had held four days worth of spinach, and a plug from my carton of milk.

I stood and stared at my garbage for a moment. It was 6:17 am.

"So much plastic," I said.

"Yeah," said Mike, "and most of them could package this stuff in plastic made of cellulose, stuff that would eventually break down in the landfills."

"Shit, we throw away enough to kill an animal every day."

"Cellulose, I'm telling you. It's the future."

Where are you food producers? Organic Girl? Are you in?

What about you Buttoni? We eat your tortellini twice a week. That's the weekly lives of two birds or a big fish. Can you make the switch?

Nutribiotic? Can you be a harbinger for a brighter future by switching to a more sustainable packaging?

I can't exactly boycott plastic altogether, but I'm trying. I'd really hate to lose my Organic Girl greens, but I'm already buying loose bunches of romaine lettuce more often. See, there's one thing I can do, buy less plastic.

I already buy Arm and Hammer Fragrance Free Cat Litter because it works well and it comes in a sturdy cardboard box that I can recycle every week! Go Arm and Hammer!

Thank you for listening, jules

Aliens May Be Watching Us Burn Ourselves Up

Do you remember your New Year's resolution this year?

Tell me the first feeling you had when you thought about what it was. It was failure, right? You got a heavy feeling in your gut and you felt ashamed to open your mouth. You wished you hadn't told anyone about it at all. You wished you hadn't even made a New Year's resolution.

If that's not you, then great. Now, I feel even worse. You've lost ten pounds. You're exercising every other day without fail. You're eating healthier than you ever have. You feel great. You can wear clothes that haven't fit you in ten years.

Great. Just great.

Not me. Well, I have been eating better than ever, but I'm still not losing weight. It's not fair how a body conserves more energy every single time it goes without during a diet. Fat people aren't sloppy over-eaters. They're people who have tried the hardest and  whose bodies have gone all war-mode rationing and using every single calorie to the greatest extent so they won't starve to death. Isn't that ironic? That fat people are the ones whose bodies think they are starving. Fuck.

Of course, I can't find that article now written by a nutrition expert at Johns Hopkins. You're going to think I'm just a fat person who made the whole thing up as an excuse. Fine. Think what you want. Diets don't work. They just don't. That's what I believe and I'm sticking to it. You can believe what you want, especially if you're a skinny-mini who has never struggled with more than four pounds from your so-called optimum weight.

Some of us haven't had it as easy as you.

I really meant to talk about my New Year's resolution today. I didn't resolve to lose weight. I won't. Not ever.

Mine was to look at my own carbon footprint and see what ways I could shrink it further, to educate myself about what is happening due to climate change, and to encourage the world to "science the shit out of that problem." Thank you Andy Weir. I love that line from The Martian.

I may not have posted in a long time. I started a new job and it required my whole brain for a while. Then, I got a cold and that saturated my whole brain for a while. And  then I felt absolute certainty that we're all going to die when the climate changes and the only animals that are going to survive are jellyfish, rats, and roaches. And hopelessness weighed my brain down and it sat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for a while where scientists have discovered that sea life there also has plastic in their guts.

Great. Just great. We're all going to die.

Eventually, a new species will reach the pinnacle of the food chain. I imagine intelligent aliens that might have been wondering about contacting us to warn us about other aliens that might come to Earth to kill us and consume all our resources. If we can't get onboard with sustainability, they won't even bother since we're killing ourselves just as efficiently on our own. Hopefully, they'll come to Earth anyway and quietly collect some monarch butterflies, the white rhino, and some of the undiscovered fungi in the Amazon that cures cancer and heart disease before it goes extinct along with all of humanity. Maybe they'll 'harvest' a few humans for their collection and plant them on a planet that could harbor our forms of life. Maybe we are an experiment in a huge laboratory. Maybe we're an exhibit in a zoo.

Okay, I'm back. It's hard to think big. It really is. There are so many possibilities I hadn't thought of, that I don't know.

But let's look at the ozone layer. The hole in the ozone is getting smaller. Did I already tell you that? I think I did. It is a tiny ray of hope for humanity. We had a problem and together, we solved it.

So, if we can beat that problem as a population, can we also work science magic on climate change as well.

The problem with my New Year's resolution is that there is no way for me to get a satisfactory outcome using a model of an independent individual acting on her own. This is a global fucking problem so there isn't going to be a single intelligent cowboy played by Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt who can solve it for us and bring Earth back to a balance that we had before the industrial revolution. (Notice that the hero is suddenly a white male in the movie. I hate when that happens. Somebody told me recently that it was a woman, Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the structure of DNA and not Watson and Crick. So maybe Sandra Bullock should save the world from climate change. What do you think?)

Climate change is something that must be achieved, not even as a nation, but as the whole of humanity working together. Humanity need to liberally fund climate change research so someone finds a way. Maybe multiple scientists can find multiple ways. Humanity needs to pull together to do what is recommended, even if it feels like we're rationing rubber for tires, sugar, and gas like our grandparents did during WW II.

You know that new movie that's coming out today, Pacific Rim? In that story, everyone in the world unites to defeat the aliens? You know how people in the movie Independence Day suddenly lost all their desire for war and started working together using their intelligence to outwit the aliens bent on genocide? That.

We need to think that way. We. All of us. Almost all countries in the world except for us have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump has no concern for our future. You can see that with the pipelines and the drilling in the Arctic circle and the reduction in National Park lands. The other country that held out for a while, Syria, joined not long ago. We're the only one that's staying out. What idiots. There are a few countries that have yet to ratify it. Did you know that technically, we're still in the Paris Climate Agreement since the first time we can withdraw is just after the 2020 election. That's cool.

At least, as a whole, humanity believes a tsunami of problems are happening regarding our climate. We  recognize it. It's a start.

But will we motivate ourselves as individuals fast enough to make global changes soon enough?

I'm seeing a whole lot of inertia, even in myself.

Thank you for listening, jules