Good morning. Hello. How are you? #870
Kindergarten Orientation, Contrapoints and a Live update
Good morning. Well hello, there. How are you, friend? Happy 4/20 dooood. If you have a blue checkmark on Twitter I am sorry for your loss. Assuming it actually happened. It probably didn’t.
We went to “kindergarten orientation” with Jane yesterday. School up the road. Chatham Grove. It was nice. The school is nice. It’s driveways are labyrinthine, its doors are locked. But it was nice. Jane seemed to enjoy herself. She didn’t want to go, because she didn’t want to wear a mask, but she came round on that. The school’s ventilation was actually stellar. I mean, it wasn’t during the school day so the kids weren’t there, but the O2 levels were lower than outside. Honestly if Emma hadn’t had to go through a whole thing with Jane convincing her to wear a mask, we probably would have taken em off, since there was exactly one other human being, out of maybe a hundred, wearing a mask.
I dunno. It’s weird. Masks. Public. It may seem odd to now bring up a Lollapalooza ‘92 shirt, but I swear it’s not a non-sequitur. As expected, nearly everyone in the room — and clearly every other parent — was a good decade or more younger than me. The sensation is very weird. I just see a bunch of children play-acting being adults, wearing their confusion and bravado and youth all over. There was one guy who was probably my age. Old guy, big gut, sleeve tattoos on his legs and a suspiciously new looking Lollapalooza ‘92 shirt which really is something. Eventually Emma worked up the gumption to compliment him on it. Longtime readers may recal that I’ve been burned by this before. People wear cool shirts, you think they’re wearing them as a conversation starter, but nope, no conversation. Same with this guy. A grunt, a smile, but nothing else. So, like… I’m sure I would be friends with some of these people eventually, but… it is scary. And work. And I felt like an alien.
I bring this up in the context of masks because, I mean, what are the chief complaint about masks? They’re uncomfortable. Okay, whatever. I don’t find them that uncomfortable for uses under several hours. They inhibit conversation. This is true. But none of these people want to talk! It’s just like the grocery store. No one talks to you. No one in America’s suburbs are friendly to anyone they don’t already know. No wonder they’re shooting each other in their driveways. SO I mean, why not wear a mask? Why not just avoid these weird strangers germs because you’re not gonna have to talk to them anyway.
And of course I think everyone secretly knows this is the truth: mask wearers have made the calculation that you’re not especially worth talking to, so they’re gonna wear the mask to keep themselves safe. They have opted out of the giant societal Russian Roulette, because in that instance, there’s absolutely no point joining it. And they’re not wrong! I am much, much sadder about wearing a mask, and far more likely not to wear it, when I am with a bunch of friends I want to actually speak to, rather than a bunch of babies having babies who are all wearing white and — inadvertantly, I admit — kicking up in me a bunch of past school trauma about being bullied.
[long aside here about kids and sickness and school and how it’s not just covid and we should have been doing this anyway but we don’t, Asia, etc etc]
Which is super unpleasant. I mean I have not been in a public school building in, oh, I don’t know, thirty-plus years. And in elementary school, I was not bullied at all, I was one of the cool kids before I switched districts. But nonetheless being in a school at all kicked up every anti-authoritarian instinct in me. The whole thing felt so alien and weird and wrong.
But of course, these are my emotions and this is not my educational journey, it is Jane’s, and she seemed to love it. The school is clean, the art room was amazing.
But, I mean, they have a giant TV in the front of the class room, they give all the kids fucking Chromebooks and it really did look like the teacher sits up there and plays some curriculum out of a browser while they’re all on their computers. Now, I am not an anti-screen person at all. I don’t care how much screen time Jane gets, I care what she’s doing with it. Girl has two phones, a tablet and iMac for crying out loud. But as Emma points out, imagine if you were one of those parents who cared about screen time, and you did a great job with it, then you take your kid to orientation and you’re like “oh they’re just going to learn on screens.”
To be clear, I have no problem with this but it does make me wonder why I’d bother sending her to a building that might get shot up some day to do what she can do at home.
And, like, really, probably half my feelings are probably the result of some fundamentalist plot to make me distrust public education, and a result of the lack of funding — even in a well-funded school district such as our own — where volunteers have to handle after-school care and there are only 80 slots and it’s first-come, first-served and making weird laws where the PTA can’t sell magnets at orientation but only walk us through an incredibly labyrinthine web purchasing process because of “the law.” God knows what that’s about. And I believe in public education and I ought to support it, but aren’t I supporting it more if I pay my tax bill then also foot the bill for my kid’s education so the money can go to someone more needy?
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Finished the two-hour Contrapoints video The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, where she revisits the topic of JK Rowling’s bigotry. I had not realized that Natalie, aka Contrapoints, was one of only two guests on the original Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast that represented the viewpoint that maybe Rowling is a bigot and deserves a lot of what she’s gotten and I had not realized that in the eight-episode podcast they didn’t get to a single guest disputing Rowling’s version of events until episode seven, and that the other one was a 15 year-old kid (whom Natalie contacted and he left a pretty concise comment about his views against Rowling). And I had not realized the whole thing was made by Megan Phelps-Roper. I’d strongly sensed, just from the title, that the podcast was probably waaaaay too lenient on Rowling so I’ve been avoiding it. I don’t think I can listen to seven hours of that woman.
At some point she says something along the lines of “the thing that I most want to impart here is this is not some capricious cancellation of Rowling because of one or two misinterpreted or vague statements. Rowling has made this the most important, organzing cause in her life, and explicitly aligns herself with several people who routinely, explicitly make death threats against the trans community.” I sense this in my personal conversations as well. So many people were huge fans of Rowling and they just absolutely do not want to cancel her. They are absolutely giving her every single benefit of the doubt. When I explain to them that I have read all of her major essays on this topic and there is absolutely no doubt about her position and that she is not just anti-trans, she is not just “expressing concerns” or “asking questions,” but that she is actively malevolent about it, taking clear joy in using her keen wit and pen to mock and denigrate these people… it’s a lot for people to take. It’s hard for people to believe. And they do not want to delve into the whole topic.
And, so, here I am recommending to you to watch a two-hour video by a transgender performance artist dressed up as an alcoholic witch, and I know most people won’t bother. And I know I sound like some sort of lunatic, but god, I don’t really care anymore. I’m so tired of mean people. I’m so tired of people expecting other people to somehow “prove” they’re worthy of basic human rights.
I suppose in a way this school stuff and this trans rights stuff is all kind of related in my head: how do we interact with society? Do we at all? Do we give up? Drop out? Move out? Fight fight fight, as Robert Smith says on an underrrated Kiss Me cut? And it reveals paradoxes in my own life. It feels like, to me, that physically, I am increasingly withdrawing from society. I am less likely to travel than I have ever been in my life. I have no passport for the first time in 45 years. Airplanes are an environmental catastrophe but even beyond that… I can’t quite explain it. And you would think that this would also make me more xenophobic, more conservative, but the opposite is happening as I get older. Natalie makes a side comment somewhere in the middle of the video about this being why she left the center and moved left: because of the center’s ridiculous “both-sider”-ism and fetishization of “rational debate” that never convinces anyone of anything anyway. That really hit home. It’s a nice, soothing two hours of hearing someone sane.
So, then, here I am, increasingly politically activist, but increasingly phsyically reclusive, and it is a weird-ass mix that I have not resolved in any way save for writing checks to forestall any close personal examination. How long can this be sustained, I do not know.
Anyway.
Small update on Live, Conrad pointed me to this crazy-ass article about Live, the band, reuniting in 2019 and then being undone by the pandemic and a con man who has town the band apart, and now Ed is touring with a bunch of new musicians as part of a negotiated settlement with the whole band, who receive royalties from Ed, because he wants to tour but doesn’t — quite reasonably — want to deal with the fucked-up drama the rest of the band got themselves wrapped up in. It is bonkers and I encourage yout to read it, but the long and the short of it for me is yes, I could maybe see Live soon, it might be at a fairgrounds or something, and it’ll just be Ed and a bunch of session guys but that is fine with me cuz Ed is the one that matters, and I say that as a band guy. Shit. Most of Live say that.
I have now rid myself of my Taylor tickets, sold them to a friend for her kid and I feel just great about it. Gave two of the Cruel World tickets to a friend for her birthday. Have one more Cruel World ticket if anyone needs it. So my shows for the summer are all regional now: Sisters of Mercy, Tears for Fears, the Cure, Mountain Goats this weekend. Still trying to make Peter Gabriel work. Sad about DM. Maybe I’ll try and make Atl or DC work in October.
Hats off to Jane for only having one small outburst at the school, one she mastered and got control of pretty quickly. She also followed the teacher around like a puppy. If I knew she was going to get that woman as her teacher I might just go for it, but as it was, 1-6 chance. Gah.
Shoegae mix for you been a couple weeks. All new stuff. Pretty much half the bands I’ve never heard before, offerings up from the Spotify algorithm gods who I am convinced are making bands up at this point but I will keep going until it has no more 2-ep bands from 2011 to serve me up. Also a track from my old Boston friend Skot, big fan of his new work it is solid.
Okay well take care. Have a good day. I am sorry for the politics but should probably warn you now that the topic list is getting pretty politics heavy so there will probably be a lot more of it tomorrow. Get it out of my system before the weekend.
i have to say i'm feeling pretty smug about my contrariness around all the harry potter stuff. ("those are children's books?" i used to say.) never got invested in the books or the movies. rowling can go get bent.
and so can absolutely every single asshole who demonizes trans people, of whom they've probably met exactly zero. go make ONE trans friend, listen to the pain and rejection they've experienced in order to live their truth, and then get back to me, you heartless piece of shit.
i don't know what to tell you about school. it's a real conundrum—especially when you consider that jane's gonna probably know more than every single kid in her class. yeesh!