Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

I'm so sad about moving sometimes. Yesterday the terminex man didn't believe my cheerful assurances that our turkey wouldn't bite him so I had to accompany him (the man not the turkey) to our backyard as protection. To be fair, the turkey has been once again misusing his superior poultry intelligence to outwit the chickens. He has discovered that humans often have food and so have deduced that walking up to humans, cooing a few times and then staring at them with hunger in his eyes is the way to go. Now that he's around 25 pounds and taller than your average dog this is a little bit scary.
Sometime next year, after I've persuaded the downstairs vegans, I will have my own flock of golden yellow chickens. Then I will die of bird flu.

The company I work for is corporate but aescetic in that annoying left-wing, luke-warm showers kind of way. We use only donated office space, to save valuable cash for the improvished African children. The people who work out of our CT office get to work in the world headquarters of a certain evil corporation but we here in Michigan get spare cubicles in one of our high schools.
It's a magnet school that prides itself on diversity and draws from the 8 wealthiest school districts in the wealthiest county in the state (and third wealthist in the country)*. It's like a training ground for the future alphas of America.
These kids are required to choose an afterschool activity like Beginning Hindi, Scuba Diving in the Galapagos and Build Your Own Computer, costs of which range from $300-$2500. They, at the age of 15 can boast such resume builders as "month spent in South Africa with family" and "spent 2 years living in Germany" and "interned at prestigious law firm for the summer".
The weird thing is, I always felt pretty conscious of my own list of privileges, a family that paid for college, a good suburban public education, middle-class parents who help me out when money is tight. I unconcsiously but, guiltily, ranked myself amoung the alphas of the world. But spending any time with these kids just proves that I'll still, with all my advantage, never be able to compete with that kind of born and bred alpha-osity.
I dont' hold it against the kids. They are, overwhelmingly good hearted and respectful, hard workers and really want to make the world a better place. They didn't choose to be alphas. It adds a creepy tension to the cheerful rivalry my co-worker and I have over our favorite schools. The Alpha Institute is her favorite of her 4 schools and she is rooting for them. My favorite school out of my three is a in an impovished neighborhood that I love and am moving to soon. Even when we are jokingly comparing her student's 178 hours of community service to my students' 156 hours, there's this tiny unnecesary element of outrage I feel that one group of good hearted 14 year olds has as many advantages as this other equally good hearted group has obstacles.
Pulling down the self-esteem of a high school kid is easy and cruel but I want to find some way of reminding the alphas when they come together with other schools of the injustice that gives them all the things they have.


*it's the diversity claim that irks me the most. Sure the student come from many different countries but there are, at my count, 4 black students. Yeah, that's diverse.

Have you seen our mayor, internet? If not, you really need to take a look, the following anecdote is much, much less funny without being able to visualize him.
Also, do you know he refers to himself at the "hip-hop mayor"? Do you know his entourage is bigger than Britney Spears' and that he spends city money on strippers and lobster and lobster for strippers? Okay, now you do.
So this nice woman came by yesterday and internet, she had really good hair, which is the new standard by which I judge people. There is so much bad hair in the world that people who take the time to have good hair deserve a little extra appreciation. Anyway, this woman with good hair came by and explained that she had arranged a roudtable discussion between residents of Woodbridge and the mayor and council members about issues that specificly affect our neighborhood. They were good issues; development and gentrification, the role of the arts in the city, gay marriage*. But, the art gallery where she was going to have it is so totally not up to code.
So, she wanted to have it at my house. You know, the house that is just one big zoning violation wrapped in black mold wrapped in chicken poop. As cool as it would be to sit on our living room and yell at the mayor for being SUCH A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER AS TO CANCEL BULK TRASH PICKUP. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?, we told her we'd get back to her.
Oh boy, did we giggle at the thought of Kwame Kilpatrick trying to fit his massive, former linebacker self into our tiny bathroom, and wondering how many of his equally massive bodyguards it would take to just fucking break our house.
But we had to tell her no. We'd have too hard a time finding someone to babysit our illegal poultry for the evening.






*This reveals alot about the character of my soon-to-be ex-neighborhood and why it is the Dupont Circle of Detroit.

blogger, you are such a butt

I did my first 4 work-required presentations to 4 classrooms full of high school students this monday. It's a good sign, I hope, that by the fourth I was no longer paralyzed with nervousness.
I am so damn intimidated by high school students. jeebus.
Somehow, during the presentation I was making the senior physics studens the topic veered into Female Genital Mutilation. I mean, god damn. I really wanted to bring it up because it is so relevent to the work my organization does. We've built 15 schools in Mali in the past five years and I really think that advancing educational oppurtunities in areas where FGM happens is the most effect and least culturally imperialist way to stop it. The villages where we've built have 100% illiteracy rate. These are Muslim communities where no one knows how to actually read the Koran so they are open to all sorts of misonceptions and superstitions about what the Koran actually says. Now there's some 20,000 kids who are going to grow up literate and able to look at the Koran and notice that it pretty much straight out forbids this kind of mutilation of women. Plus, we require the villages to commit to educating women and men equally so a whole generation of girls are going to grow up with the tools to stop this from happening to their daughters.
Nonetheless, I will face all the tortures of hell before I will say "clitoris" in front of a bunch of 17 year olds. Damn. Fortunatly, the teacher came to my aid. She has, evidently, no such squeamishness. The 3 girls in the class were absolutly incensed and 2 of them came to the afterschool meeting I held.
Yay.

I'm moving at the end of the month. My busy new lifestyle is no longer compatible with the inconsistent hot water, leaky roof and late night heavy metal practices that are a daily occurence at the compound. My new apartment seems so plush in comparison. I'll even have a washing machine! and a claw footed tub! and a kitchen with windows!
But, in a lot of ways, I'm just moving to much larger compound. The neighborhood I'm moving to has been Red Row for the past hundred odd years and the downstairs neighbors are a pair of anti-government militants who I tend to normally avoid because they are too cool for school. As part of my new (school) year's resolution to be more socially active I've decided to give Sid and Nancy downstairs a try. They really are good hearted kids once you get past the attitude.
Also, I've cleared it with my new roomate. She is totally down with getting some chickens.

Ug. I threw my back out Busting Blight this weekend. This job rocks, in that I get paid to do community service which I am now to busy having this job to do for free. But, I fucked up my back and I didn't even win the Michigan "Most Disgusting Thing Picked Up at a Community Clean-up Day". I was disqualified when the horrible smell emenating from the dead possum kept me from picking it up. The default winner was a social studies teacher who threw away a pair of dirty panties found on the side of the road.
We had a staff meeting on Tuesday (don't worry this relates back to the panties, I promise). All our staff meetings are done on conference call in a tiny room listening to the senior staff in Conneticut blather on about what is, I assume slightly more interesting than the average staff meeting nonsense. This week it was informing us that our corporate relationship with the Maoist rebels in Nepal was good enough that they promised to warn our groups of high school students to evacuate villages where they are about to get into firefights with the government at least 24 hours beforehand. *Yawn* Really. What do I care. I have youth to empower. Shit.
Anyway, we thought we were moderatly hot shit with the panties story. But the New York crew had their community clean-up the same weekend and one of their earnest teen do-gooders found a loaded gun. We're going to have to find a dead body next time to beat that. We should open an office in Baltimore. I've had more than one person from Baltimore tell me stories of finding multiple corpses just laying on the street.

In my enviromental planning class we've been endlessly discussing the world wide enviromental problem of hypothetical sheep. God, fucking hypothetical sheep ruin everything. The crux of conventional wisdom about hypothetical sheep is that left to our own devices and holding hypothetical land in common, we'll have no judgement at all about how many sheep are too many sheep and pretty we, and our sheep, will be wallowing in eroded mud all day long. The only solutions offered are a) have some powerful government bureacracy regulate how many sheep we can have or b) turn us all into private property owners.
I feel that this is dumb. As a bona-fide wingnut who is trying really hard to be a responsible adult I'm irritated as all get out that really smart responsible adults are convinced that too lousy solutions are all that stand between us and soil erosion. I really don't see why reasonable people can't get together and say, "you know, we have too many sheep. Let's have a bbq."
My planning class is on wednesday; on sunday I went to the barnyard meeting. Ten people in a room, not a single one of them reasonable, discussed exactly how many, totally non-hypothetical, pooping, wool producing, baa-ing, child-trampling sheep we should have. Solution: one more than we currently have.
It's really not that hard.

Oh man. This whole job plus grad school operation sucks my butt. I spent last week blowing my student loan money on coffee drinks and tofurky jerky as I dashed from work to school. Honestly, the only real problem is that my office is out on like 19 mile or some shit and I can't even tell because that far out in the suburbs they stop using perfectly civilized mile road names and started calling everything after beavers and bodies of water. Perverts.
I had a major moment of joy on thursday, where, in my new professional capacity as a youth development worker, I convinced an appalachian stripper, with promises of beer and backrubs, to abandon her breakfast of dumplings fried in raccoon fat, to give a presentation to a group of high school students. Or at least that's how I'm going to spin the story from now on. The girl in question, Erica, is our new houseguest/future housemate and when she's not snuggling with Keith or skinning roadkill or lounging around in a white lace nightgown and pig tails like something out of Tennesse Williams, is making adjustments to her car, a 1982 mercedes diesel that runs on used vegetable oil.
I think grease cars are cool and I definitly think they are way cooler than informational videos on life in rural Africa. So, using my professional contacts inside the high school I was able to get something like thirty or forty kids to come out into the parking lot and crowd around Erica's car while she demonstrated her modified engine system, totally blase about the fact that alot of the modifications were obviously duct-tape based. The high school kids let out a genuine ooooh of interest when she started the car and the smell of french fries wafted out of the tailpipe.
After we finished and were packing up to go the official high school police officers came mosying over. Before I even had a chance to really start thinking,
oh fuck we're gonna get yelled at they said they'd heard this car ran on vegetable oil and would Erica mind doing the whole demonstration over for them.
As a token of appreciationg for being the guest speaker, the high school librarian gave Erica a keychain and a pen.