Summer plans and other random things

Hi, Internet.

I haven't blogged too much this month. And if I may be perfectly honest, t's not because I've been busy with end-of-semester stuff. It's because I've been really down about a lot of things, and everything I wrote sounded whiny. So I just didn't post much.

The political climate in this country is really, really upsetting me. Earlier this month, governor of Michigan Rick Snyder declared the city of Benton Harbor to be in a state of crisis and appointed an "Emergency Financial Manager," who stripped all elected officials in BH of their duties.

Giant democracy fail, I know.

Furthermore, the Detroit Public School System sent layoff notices to every single one of its teachers. We can blame Rick Snyder's budget plan for that, too.

My mom is Canadian. She was born in Sudbury, Ontario, and moved to Detroit when she married my dad (24 years ago yesterday). So I have a lot of relatives in Canada. And one of them--my mom's older sister Kerrie, who lives in the Yukon--offered to let me come live with her for the summer.

I thought it was a pretty neat idea. And not surprisingly, I've been fantasizing about getting out of the US for a while. So Kerrie talked to a friend of hers about getting me a job. I didn't tell too many people about it, because I wasn't sure whether it was going to work out.

And in the end, it didn't work out. I'm oddly not too bummed about that though, because a fear of mine is that a summer in the Yukon would make me lonelier than I already am here in Grosse Pointe.

So, my summer looks like this:

• classes at Wayne State
  
• babysitting/searching for another job
• the release of Bonnie Jo Campbell's novel _Once Upon a River_ at Kalamazoo's Bell's Brewery in July
• my friend Rose having a baby
• Lollapalooza in Chicago with my friend Toni

That last one is sort of a big deal. The day tickets went on sale, Toni wrote on my FB Wall, telling me that I should come with her. As much as I liked the idea, I did not at first intend to say yes. Shit's expensive. Gotta plan a purchase like that in advance.

But then she followed up with a lengthy FB message, detailing how much it would cost. I appreciated the gesture and really like Toni. Besides, I wanted to go.

So I told autonomous adulthood to suck it, asked my mom to loan me some money, and bought a 3-day pass to Lollapalooza.

I just paid it off a couple of days ago, and will spend the next few months being a huge tightwad in order to be able to afford to spend three days in Chicago. But it will be a fabulous end to the summer. :)

Also: Summer would not be summer without summer reading. Recommendations? Here's a(n unrealistically ambitious) list of books that I'm thinking of reading (in no particular order):

• _Sexing the Cherry_ by Jeanette Winterson
• _The Golden Notebook_ by Doris Lessing
• _Midnight's Children_ by Salman Rushdie
  
• _Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Pursuit of Freedom_ by Pamela D. Bridgewater
• _Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those who Want to Write Them_ by Francine Prose
  
• _The Way We Lived_ by Audrey Jacobs
• _When We Were Saints_ by Han Nolan
  

And speaking of books (especially that last one): My inner 13-year-old is jumping up and down, turning blue, and squealing over and over, "AMELIA, TELL THEM YOUR NEWS!" So: I learned today that HAN NOLAN WILL BE RELEASING A NEW BOOK IN THE FALL. I love her books so much: reading her work has made me a better person. I've blogged before about how much I love her.

Anyway. This post has been all over the place. I apologize. They'll soon go back to being more focused. I've decided to participate in a 30-day blog challenge. Let's see how closely I can stick to it.

I'll leave you with a really great NYT article I read last night, which I think sums up everything that matters to me. Virginia Woolf once wrote about what it would have been like if Shakespeare had had a sister. Well, Benjamin Franklin did have a sister. Her name was Jane Mecom. And she didn't do so well.

And this is relevant today because, as the article states:

"Tea Partiers dressed as Benjamin Franklin call for an end to social services for the poor; and the 'Path to Prosperity' urges a return to 'America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government and equality under the rule of law.' But the story of Jane Mecom is a reminder that, especially for women, escaping poverty has always depended on the opportunity for an education and the ability to control the size of their families."

A few words on education

Yesterday my friend Dan (who is a student at SVSU) posted a note on Facebook titled "The Cold War of Life." It's about what he's learning at school, and how that contributes to the greater picture (which is a topic I've wanted to write about). But until I read what Dan wrote, I wasn't sure how to frame what I wanted to say.

I'll start with an excerpt from his post. It's kind of long, but I wouldn't be sharing it if I didn't think it was worth your while to read it.

I have just come to the realization that my current semester is a bit of a downer. In one class, I am learning the historical beginnings of colonization and enslavement of native peoples by capitalists, leading to the current international economy and the division of labor that exploits the weak by multi-national corporations, who use economical power to control corrupt, undemocratic, resource-rich governments. In another class, I am learning about the Cold War. Additionally, during the day, I am being bombarded by negative information whenever I try to catch up on current events. But what I thought was another internal, moral crisis actually led me back to upholding my original principles and values.

Learning about the Cold War has taught me that it was just like life. George Kennan, writing from his insightful vantage point as a post-WWII diplomat, outlined what was to become the main American policy towards the Soviet Union for the next four decades, with an article (and a byline of “Mr. X”) called “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the magazine Foreign Policy. In the article, he notes that the Russian Revolution demonstrated the youthful impatience of revolutionaries who tried to industrialize a mostly-agrarian society too quickly. This swift change of policy and ideology led to distrust from Lenin and Stalin, on down to the peasant, and created a culture of fear and totalitarianism. Additionally, Kennan notes that because one ideology (capitalism or communism) will eventually “win” due to the fatal flaws of the other. Although Stalin believed capitalism would implode under the weight of its own greed and imperialism, Kennan believed the opposite, that communism would fall due to the rigid top-down nature of the Communist Party system and the lack of easy governmental transition upon the death of the Chairman. Kennan turned out to be right, while Stalin is remembered as a paranoid genocidal maniac and Russia is a shadow of what he knew when he lived. To meet this end, Kennan focused on a policy of vigorous “containment” toward the Russians, that if communism can be prevented to spread, the system would eventually splinter and bring change to an oppressive government that had to keep its people in with barbed wire.

Which brings me to my main point: Patience will bring change. We can respect each others’ ideologies because when it comes down to it, the truth will always come out, even under the most authoritarian of regimes, both here and abroad. When Martin Luther wrote out his complaints regarding the selling of indulgences by corrupt Catholic Church officials (which was an offense punishable by death), he had no idea that his little screed would literally change the known world. One little action propelled peasants, nations, kings, and popes into the boxing ring of competing ideologies; one spark from a lowly Catholic monk set off a cultural bonfire that led to new ideas such as national sovereignty, liberalism, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the expansion of capitalism and democracy, just to name a handful. All the previous events listed brought us to a new era of humanity, forever separating us from the base animal with violent, wild instinct.

He goes on to give other examples of how seemingly small acts by patient individuals have ultimately changed the world for the better. After he posted the note, he updated his status with a quote from an individual whose identity is unknown: "Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow--that is patience."

Reading that, I thought about how school has been making me feel lately. I love it, but feel that it needs to be a bigger part of my life, because I cannot possibly keep the experience contained to the classroom.

And yet, that's what I find myself doing. I'm a transfer student who lives with her parents twenty minutes from campus. So I often feel really lonely. The only people I spend a significant amount of time with are my parents (who didn't go to college) and the girls I babysit (they're four and seven--so it's not exactly possible to discuss my 5000-level English and women's studies classes with them).

Last night in class, my professor was talking about the importance of critical pedagogy. And my internal monologue was like, "Oh. This is why you feel so crazy and alone. Because you understand that this needs to be an ongoing discussion. And yet you feel as if the only person you have to talk to is yourself."

I got really mopey when I realized that everything I'm learning at school (and pretty much everything I believe in, for that matter) stands in direct opposition to the structure and belief system of the world in which I live. For example, we were talking in English class recently about how it's bullshit that college has basically been an unlearning of K-12's version of American history. What did we learn about Columbus? That he came over to what is now the United States and had a nice dinner with the people who lived there before he did. And what did we learn about slaves? That they were freed.

That in particular is really hard for me, because I babysit a first grader and see how that's exactly what she's being taught to accept as fact. And I feel helpless to stop it. What's the point of even teaching that? Her options are to either go to college and unlearn it all, or keep believing that forever. I have a hard time seeing how we've supposedly "come so far" as a nation when we're still teaching children this stuff, you know?

So I see a great danger in isolation: my keeping what I learn at school confined to a classroom at Wayne State; or telling first graders that what happened in the past will stay there, and has nothing to do with life as it is now.

Yesterday in class, we were talking about how Harriet Jacobs, who wrote _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl_, tried to get white women in the north to understand her perspective. And to do that, she had to try to identify with them, even though she knew that her experience was vastly different from theirs. Her audience embraced the "cult of true womanhood," believing that women should be pious, religious, confined to the domestic sphere, and above all else, completely devoted to their children.

In order to get them to sympathize with her, Jacobs had to prove that she actually fit into that very mold. She justified the decisions she made by making her audience aware of the circumstances surrounding her situation as a slave. Even though she spent seven years hiding in an attic, she explained that she still loved her children; she made clothes for them. She used these examples to explain why she should not be held to the same standard as the white women to whom she told her story (thus dismantling the idea of the "cult of true womanhood," woo hoo)!

I got home last night and started thinking about how relevant that still is, almost two hundred years later. The next book I have to read for that class is _Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty_ by Dorothy Roberts. I haven't actually opened it yet, but I don't see how it's such a dramatic shift from our discussion of motherhood in the time of slavery in the U.S. There's a blurb from Ms. Magazine on the cover: "Compelling...Deftly shows how distorted and racist constructions of black motherhood have affected politics, law, and policy in the United States." Um, black welfare mother stereotype, anyone?

And so, the helplessness. I worry that nothing will ever change or get better. I want to quit real life and devote all my time to activism. But instead I gotta be a grown up and spend my time doing my part to support the very structure I oppose. And I do that by earning money babysitting.

But Dan's post showed me how I can, in my own little way, carry what I'm learning in school over to other aspects of my life. The other day I had a conversation with the four-year-old I babysit. She had just gotten home from ballet class and asked me why some of her classmates are boys. We had a little chat about how boys can take ballet, too. (And girls can do things that have been traditionally only associated with boys!)

That seems so insignificant, though. Maybe my talk with her won't change a damn thing. But maybe it will. And that hope is what tells me that I ought to continue to do things like that, however small and seemingly pointless. And I'll be patient. Not lazy, not passive. But patient.

Those books you read in fifth grade? They're a bigger deal than you thought they were.

Right now, I'm about 450 pages into _A People's History of the United States_ by Howard Zinn. It's been on my to-read list since my junior year of high school. And after Zinn passed away this past January, I decided that I needed to get with the program and read it already. And so, here I am.

It's making me want to throw things (which means its doing its job). Thing is, it started to make me feel so sad/angry/anxious that today, I decided to take a break and read a couple of YA books.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have a huge soft spot for YA literature. My favorite YA author (perhaps my favorite author of all time, actually) is Han Nolan, whose writing I admire because not only is she unafraid to tackle political topics, but she does so very subtly. And although she writes for a younger audience, she does not underestimate her readers. Her books have really made me a better person.

Another favorite YA author of mine is Ann Rinaldi. I started reading her books when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. She writes historical fiction, and occasionally borders on nonfiction: One of her novels, _Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbon_, tells the story of Phillis Wheatley.

Reading one of her books today, I began to think about what I read now, and how it isn't all that different from what I read when I was younger, and how all of that has ultimately played a huge, huge, HUGE role in the decisions I've made in regard to my education.

English was always my favorite subject in school. And I rocked it. At the eighth grade "graduation" ceremony, I was presented with an award from the English department (I still have the plaque in my bedroom). In high school, I took honors/AP English classes, and worked as the editor-in-chief of my school's art/literary magazine. And then I got to college, majored in creative writing, and worked as the editor-in-chief of the art/literary magazine there, too.

And then I started to question whether it was really what I wanted to pursue. It was a really difficult question to ask myself, because my love of English/writing was the one thing I had always been sure of.

I couldn't deny my other interests, though. As much as I loved most of my English classes, the best class I've ever taken at SVSU was a 100-level history class I took to fulfill a gen ed requirement. I hadn't expected to get much out of it. It was just a history of the United States, post Civil War to the present. I took it because I thought it'd be a blow off.

But it blew my mind. It made me question capitalism, which was a real ground-shaker for me, having grown up in Grosse Pointe. I got a B in the class, and I had to work my ass off for that B. I was glad to work my ass off for that B. I had so much fun.

That same semester, I took a literature course called Great Lakes Writers (also to fill a gen ed requirement, actually). I figured, "Okay. We'll read some books written by people from Michigan." And that's exactly what happened. But what I really loved about it was the that it was the first time I was conscious of putting what I read into a larger, more political context. We read _them_ by Joyce Carol Oates, which led to a discussion about social class. We read some Hemingway, and I got to rip him to shreds for being a misogynist. And to top it all off: We watched two Michael Moore documentaries. Sha-zam.

That was the best semester ever. Afterward, I went back to taking writing courses. It went well for the most part, but I couldn't shake my desire to delve into politics/history. I continued on as a creative writing major, figuring that since English had always been my favorite subject, that was the right thing to do.

It wasn't. By the beginning of my third year at SVSU, I was unhappy, mostly because I was doing well in my field, and therefore felt like it was too late to tell anyone that I didn't think it was the right field for me anymore. I lacked the ambition I'd had before, and couldn't afford that, because by that point, I was in charge of the art/literary journal.

So I kept on, and it made me crazy. My heart just wasn't in it, and it really began to show.

A lot of electives for the creative writing major are literature courses. So I wound up enrolled in quite a few of those. One class in particular was awesome: When one of my friends looked through my notes, she actually thought they were for a history class. It had the potential to surpass History 100C as the best class I'd ever taken, but by that point, I was in the midst of a full-blown freak out, and therefore, was too distracted to get much out of it.

I still love English. I love it so much that I couldn't bring myself to major in anything else once I decided to transfer to Wayne State (even though a huge reason for my transferring to a school bigger than SVSU was the chance to take more specialized classes in other fields).

But what I failed to realize--until earlier today, as I was reading YA books--is that literature is what gave me my interest in politics/history in the first place.

I didn't know what feminism was--let alone identify as a feminist--when I first picked up an Ann Rinaldi book ten or eleven years ago. But I know I loved her strong female protagonists.

And I wasn't aware of what was going around me politically--much less have an opinion about any of it--when I started reading Han Nolan's books. I just agreed with her humanism. It affected me, and stayed with me. It had a tremendous impact on my outlook.

I find this little epiphany of mine hugely comforting. It was really hard for me to accept that I might not be as in love with English as I had once been.

I still am. It's just a bigger field now, and I'm a bigger person.

Hear me roar. :-)