Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

Oh OK. I get it. So we want schools to be safe, so we are going to stop paddling students in school? Wait… these stories aren’t related? Weird! I wonder why not?! The connection seems so very logical to me. Silly me… all that logic. I don’t know what I was thinking!

Both of these reports are from WREG, a local news station:

Memphis Police Launch Youth Crime Watch

(Memphis, TN, February 3, 2005) – The Memphis Police Department Juvenile Violence Abatement Project (JVAP), along with the Afro-American Police Association, announces the launch of the “Youth Crime Watch” pilot initiative, at 12:30 PM today at Mitchell High School, 658 West Mitchell Road.

The Youth Crime Watch initiative will focus on establishing and maintaining safe, secure environments for our youth in their schools, with the students taking an active role…

and

Memphis City School Leaders Look at Alternative Discipline

(Memphis, TN, February 3, 2005) – Memphis City School leaders work to move away from paddling students, but they are asking community leaders and parents for help in coming up with new forms of discipline…

Previous Comments

Here’s Dad and other doctors from the base in England at the first pig roast

I read this post this morning on Homer’s World. Homer is "A queer archaeologist living in Tucson, Arizona," and I thank him for the inspiration this morning! Here’s what I wrote (with a little more thrown in):

—

I’m reading Toast, too! I have a search set up for any blog related to "Nigel-Slater and Toast," which is how I found your blog.

I’m a big foodie, and growing up, I had an interesting experience of food. My father was raised by a Southern mom and an Italian dad in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He grew up eating Krystal hamburgers, white bread, and meat and three’s, as best I can tell. But there was definitely Italian influence… or else he educated himself. My mom was raised in Alabama and Tennessee, where the food influences were the Great Depression and Southern cooking.

My dad was the parent who really loved to cook, but he worked a lot, so my mother probably did *more* of the cooking. She used recipes and really stuck to them. If it said 1/2 cup of onion, by god, that’s how much she put in… and then there were times she went off recipe. Not in the normal way, but as a way to use up leftovers.

Leftover soup was big at my house. It wasn’t that *we* were dirt poor. It was that she was raised by parents who had experienced the Depression, so any leftovers went into a large Tupperware in the freezer, and every now and again, the whole block of frozen "stuff" would get heated up, and that was dinner. Nothing was ever wasted. Leftover soup… Blech!

The other frightening use of leftovers was sneaking them into meatloaf. "Mom, are there old bananas in here?" She would smile and try not to look guilty.

She didn’t repeat dishes very often, so it was hard to develop favorites, but I do recall a couple that I loved the most: Cauliflower with cheese sauce, Stuffed cabbage (or grape leaves or bell peppers) filled with rice and meat. Yum! She was really big into casseroles. My dad would always roll his eyes, but I always liked them.

Dad made amazing tomato-paste and meat-heavy Italian dishes. I think he might have learned them from his Aunt Ad. He was very big on meat, and he and his friends would actually cook a whole hog every year at the neighborhood picnic.

The other theme was what I called "interesting" food as a child. I specifically remember my parents taking cooking classes together. The dishes I remember best were mainly Indian, which is maybe why I love Indian food so much now.

I always had full run of the kitchen, which is probably why I’ve always had a fearlessness about cooking. I recall one time when my friend Renee and I mixed a little bit of every spice on the spice rack (there were probably 70 in all!) with water, freezing it into popsicle sticks, and telling my dad it was chocolate. I think it was the same day that we made Angel Food cake with green food coloring! Fun times!

I had a birthday party when I turned about 7 or 8 where we made pasta from scratch. We made the dough then rolled it in the pasta machine with one person cranking and the other person catching. Coat hangers hung all over the kitchen. That was a great party.

After-school snacks were of my own choosing for the most part, and I recall a strong preference for cheese toast (made with white bread or Roman Meal and those processed slices that would inflate on top of the bread in the toaster oven) and Breyer’s Chocolate ice cream.

Halloween was always a little embarrassing. The worst was the year my mother gave out sugar cane. What?!

I remember space food, but not space sticks. And I remember the dinners in a box. But the only time I ever made that was in a cooking class at this Saturday School for the Gifted I used to attend. I did think it was yummy. We never had a lot of the processed stuff around at my house, so to me, that was a huge treat! I was always very jealous of my friend Renee’s house. Her mother always kept the pantry filled with chips and cookies and lots of fun, colorful stuff you could just eat without much preparation. I thought that’s how it should be. Now, I’ve come to appreciate what I had a little more.

Now that my Dad is retired, I think my parents are actually cooking together more, which I love. Cooking with someone is a hard thing to do, but one of the most worthwhile ways to spend time with someone you love. Aaron and I are newbies, but we’ll get the hang of it!

Food is big with me, as you can see. I remember almost everything I’ve ever eaten. It brings me great joy.

Previous Comments

I’m here at Otherlands Coffee Shop to drink coffee and use the WiFi, as my new speedy Road Runner cable modem is, sadly, down. It was a very busy morning testing one kid at one school and doing therapy with another across town. Ah, the exciting nomadic life of an almost-School Psychologist!

I’m going to sit here until I get a spectacular cover letter written for another job possibility in Boston. I can’t believe how busy I’ve been this week. I seem to work 15 hours a day. When I do new things (like write Psych reports using new LD criteria, for example), I tend to take forever the first few times, until I’m really confident I’m doing a damn good job. I want it done correctly! Working in the schools might frustrate me if I do it long-term for a few reasons, one being that I like to do really thorough assessments, and in the schools, they want quick and dirty testing, and reports that aren’t too long. I prefer the opposite, but I will say that having to do it their way is probably really good for me. Damn perfectionism!

They have Sirius radio on. You know, the station that got Howard Stern. Anyway, it’s this 80s alt-pop hits, and I of course know every word. "Noone Is to Blame" by Howard Jones (the Howard post!). So I say that I love this song, and Aaron says, "Isn’t it ironic?" His point is that "Noone Is to Blame" and "Isn’t It Ironic?" by Alanis Morisette have similarly bizarre lyrics… Which reminds me of the worst lyrics ever written in pop song lyrics… And the winner is…

"It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife."

I mean… WHAT?! Alanis is an idiot. I’m sorry. The only reason that "You Oughtta Know" was good was Flea and Dave Navarro. The rest of her career has just been a sad fluke.

So anyway, what I was going to say about that Howard Jones song is that in high school, I have the most vivid memory of driving my boyfriend Tristan crazy with that song in the back of Algebra II class. My friend Malcolm and I were both bored out of our minds with the work our "teacher" had given us, so we were singing and living it up, and Tristan was so focused! I recall really pissing him off with it that day. Wonder how they’re both doing. Last I heard, Tristan was expecting his second child and working in a corporate law firm and Malcolm was some bigwig at JP Morgan. Go them!

OK, I’m clearly on a ramble-fest. If you read all of this. If you get even half of it, then good on ya!

Off to chart my future from the local coffee shop…

Previous Comments

All my time lately has been spent dealing with stuff. It consumes most of the hours of my day. Days were spent going through boxes, closets, and drawers at my parents’ house. When I am home in my apartment, I am usually packing. Seven years in an apartment means lots of stuff. I’m giving things away. I’ve been donating a bag of books about once a month for the last year or so to the public library. The crutches, leg immobilizer, and Cryo-Cuff from Hamilton’s knee surgery a few years ago was donated back to the health center. Massive bags of old class and teaching notes have gone to the dumpster. Files folders that aren’t beautiful and completely pristine went along with those files. I’ve been trying to make choices about what notes, handouts, etc. will be useful to me in my career. I’ve been to the Salvation Army several times recently with bags of clothes and just… things. Where did I get all of these THINGS?! A few weeks ago, I went through all of my ground spices and dried herbs. If I didn’t know what it was instantly; if it wasn’t labeled clearly; if there wasn’t a recipe I knew I used it for; if its smell was faint; if I couldn’t remember buying it (when or why)… it went in the trash. Duplicates of anything were chucked. I’ve gotten rid of most works of fiction that I have already read. The only exceptions are novels I intend to read, and there are only about 10 of those. I have kept a few books I’ve read (Bridget Jones Diary and Watermelon and Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes ) because they are my favorite trashy books! I have read them more than once already, and I intend to read them again. I think there are two fiction books I kept because of sentimental reasons: Wicked and The Magus. Still, there is so much stuff. So very much stuff.

I’ve always been drawn to books about reducing clutter. My favorite is the very strange yet very inspiring Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (the books that nearly drove Hamilton nutty! I went around the apartment for months after reading it, eyeing things of his I wanted him to throw away!). Life Laundry is one of my favorite (favourite?!) BBC America shows. Why? I grew up around stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. With my ADHD brain, stuff never really blends into the background. It makes me feel unwell. And still, I am a messy, messy person. Keeping things tidy takes enormous effort. I really try, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I come from messy stock, and “my people” hoard. It’s a hard legacy to overcome, but I’m trying.

I’ve written a lot about the great sorting out of my parents massive home, after they have lived there for a quarter of a century. My father sent an excerpt today from advice he e-mailed to several of his friends. I will take it to heart. I’m already NOT regretting getting rid of that Bundt pan. I figured I couldn’t ever remember actually making a Bundt cake, and so it was time!

We’re off tomorrow for points Northwest, and to get away from this cabin that’s overflowing with innumerable ghost objects from the past. My advice, pick up the throwing away things pace. When you look at something, don’t think about its former value, or its value as a monument to some past moment, think of it as a “space occuppying lesion” – that’s medicalese for cancer. Only keep those objects that have a clear, and obvious, utility in your current and future life. Things are important if they are used on a daily basis. Things might be important if they are used in every week. All other things are probably not important. Redundancy is also to be heavily considered. Four can openers are only necessary if you plan frequent can opening contests. An Angel Food Cake Pan is only important if you make such cakes every week, or maybe every month. Just because a screwdriver hasn’t rusted through is no reason to keep it. One can only hold one screwdriver at a time. And people rarely read a book more than once, including classics like the Bible or Tom Sawyer. Things given to you by others are not a life sentence. “It’s the thought that counts” works both ways. Throw away the gifts, keep the thoughts. When you take down a picture, try to remember the last time you really saw it. If you can’t recall, chunk it. And then go back over the things you’ve decided to keep and relinquish 50% of them. After that, go back over the things you’ve decided to keep and relinquish 50% of them.

These are important rules. Learn them well. I think a major cause of premature death is drowning in stuff…

Now go throw something away!

Previous Comments

I have had a lifelong interest in The Wizard of Oz… Although honestly, when the Oz Convention was held here a few years ago, I learned that I, in fact, am not actually obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. Oh no. I’m far from obsessed. I didn’t know the meaning of “obsessed” until I saw these nutty Oz-heads. See some press coverage of that event here, here, and here.

A N Y W A Y, back to the subject at hand. I love Oz. My Dad read me all of the books when I was a kid. I adored the movie and ended up asking for and receiving an Oz playset for Christmas, which I actually found a few days ago when I was sorting. In the third grade, I played Dorothy in my school’s version of the play. I actually found the program for that when I was sorting, too! The theme of Oz actually came up in therapy when I began to do that thing girls do with their fathers, pushing them off a pedestal. I learned a bit late that Dad was not The Great and Powerful Oz, but the man behind the curtain, or somewhere between the two. I adored the books Was by Geoff Ryman (a man Hamilton actually knew as a child) and Wicked, the story of the Wicked Witch of the East. Both books bring these characters into a more realistic and less magical, over-the-rainbow world. The beauty and metaphor of Oz has always captivated me, and not in an oh-boy-let-me-get-the-Munchkin’s-autograph kind of way.

As I wrote yesterday’s post about home, I was reminded of the theme of home in The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy is in Oz at the end, and the Wizard has left in his balloon without her because she has run after Toto, Glinda appears and tells her that she has always had the power to get herself home. Before she leaves, the Tin Man asks her what she has learned in Oz. Her answer is something I’ve had memorized since I played Dorothy when I was 8.

It wasn’t enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, and it’s that if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard because, if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

Oh, that’s so good. And it’s how I feel now. Home is not my apartment. It isn’t my parents’ house. Salmon Rushdie wrote a beautiful essay about the Wizard of Oz and the theme of home. Remember that palaver in 1989 when he had to go into hiding because the Ayatollah Khameini had issued a fatwa on him for writing The Satanic Verses? Talking about losing your sense of home! Rushdie knew that home wasn’t present in the walls of a house. It’s something you create within yourself. Who better to speak about this than an articulate Oz freak in exile?!

In Dorothy’s Progress: The Wizard of Oz as Spiritual Allegory, the author David F. Godwin sums it up so very well that I’m just going to paste it in here:

[T]he ultimate spiritual reality lies within each individual person-in their ‘own backyard’-and not off somewhere over the rainbow. ‘The kingdom of Oz is within you.'”

I mean, what a fabulously secular and relevant lesson to reflect upon right now, when everything in my life is changing, when the physical manifestations of home are unstable. And it even reflects my Buddhist leanings. Everything I need is right here, right now. Everything is exactly as it should be.

Previous Comments