Soapbox: The Way I see Things

Sunday Sit-Down #10: Detour

Each Sunday, I’m working my way through my experiences with race. I’ll share stories and memories from throughout my life. I know I’ll encounter moments of growth that I wish I could relive. I’ll also have to think back on choices that I wish I could remake. Come join me each week.

This week, I was all set to reflect on my mindset after high school as I prepared to go to college.

This week, I was drafting in my head ways to recount how determination and idealism became my core ideals.

This week, a man killed eight people, six of them of Asian descent.

This week, the world broke open for many people I love and care about.

This week doesn’t mark some new low or new beginning or discovery. We’ve been here for generations. It’s the mark of a chronic and critical disease.

I’ve been carrying these ideas around for a few days, not really doing anything with them. I’m not quite sure where to put them or what to do with them. But I do know this:

I need to be a better set of eyes and ears for my friends, my colleagues, my students and my families.

I need to redouble my efforts to un-“other” others.

Especially my students and their families.

I need to keep reminding them that Diwali and Eid and Lunar New Year bear as much consideration as Easter,

that speaking English with an accent is a badge of honor, of persistence, of sacrifice,

that everyone deserves to have people pronounce their names correctly, and not just their English ones,

that they can write story characters beyond a white default,

that a bitmoji version of themselves doesn’t need to be blond and white to be beautiful,

that they are seen, and valued, and acknowledged, and important.

I’ve got work to do. We’ve got work to do.

Slice of Life 2021 Day 20: My Ten

I’ve been seeing folks post lists of ten, and today, I thought I’d join in the fun. Because FUN.

I’m a self-professed podcast fanatic. I’ve got dozens of ’em I listen to off and on. They keep me company on dog walks, car rides, household chores and meal prep. Some of the more soporific ones coax me to sleep at night. And while my kids give me grief over being a person who listens to podcasts, I don’t care. It’s one of my favorite ways to absorb nonfiction.

I thought I’d share ten favorites with you today. Understand that this was a TOUGH selection process. For every one I’m sharing, there are two or three just as worthy. Here goes:

This is the podcast I wish I had when my kids were young. It’s an honest, albeit expletive-laden look at parenting. Biz Ellis and Theresa Thorn of One Bad Mother know that everyone’s doing the best they can. The community is there to fight judgements and assumptions against one another as parents. And, most importantly, NO ONE is alone, no matter how dark the forest seems. My favorite episodes are the “Genius-Fail Spectaculars.”

You might have your ideas about life for incarcerated persons. Ear Hustle seeks to disrupt that. And I’ll say this. Any media project that goes inside prisons has the potential to fetishize or objectify its subjects. Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor do a remarkable job working to HUMANIZE. It’s a heartfelt and sincere examination of folks who live in prison and their loved ones, and those who have been released.

Ever wonder what it would be like if someone gave Yelp-style reviews to regular things in real-life (geese, Dr. Pepper, Teddy bears, velociraptors)? The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green is insightful, entertaining, educational, and incredibly well-written. There haven’t been many new episodes lately, but I’ve enjoyed the ones that are out there.

You may have watched episodes of Cops at some random time, and for me, I always shrugged my shoulders at the show and its display of human behavior at some of its lowest points. What I didn’t see, and what I didn’t understand, was how insidious and manipulative the show really was, especially in light of the problems plaguing law enforcement and our criminal justice system. Running from Cops was a short but highly powerful series from Dan Tyberski.

This is another podcast that hasn’t been on in a while, but I always love each episode. I’m a freelance storyteller, so shows like The Moth always get me. I’d consider Immigration Stories to be in that same vein. How it distinguishes itself is its focus on immigrants, their descendants, and those who work to support them. Nestor Gomez and Angel Ling remind us that we need to tell our stories, and we need to listen to the stories of others. It’s what makes us human.

Now that I listen to 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, I cannot believe how much design affects so many aspects of my life. And I cannot believe how oblivious I was to all the hidden stories around me. Curb bump-outs. Skate parks. Flags. Airline safety briefing cards. Traffic. Every episode has something new and intriguing to teach me. And most of you out there know that I. LOVE. Learning.

Being a storyteller, I have a passion for folklore. Myths and Legends satisfies me on so many levels. First of all, I get to hear stories across cultures that I’ve never yet heard. And even the stories that I’ve read, or even told, I learn something new because the host is relentless in his research. I’d also add that Jason Weiser is an exceptional writer. He craftily weaves in modern-day nuance and sensibility, all without disrupting the integrity of the stories themselves.

Here’s another short series podcast. At first glance, I supposed Dolly Parton’s America would be corny. I pictured Dolly Parton being a “Dollyland” version of amusement-park shallow. I downloaded the first episode and was captivated. Jad Abumrad explores why Dolly Parton is so popular with such a wide audience. This show is a reminder that I need to bend my perspectives, to evolve my own viewpoint and learn new things about people. For the record, I am now officially a Dolly fan.

I am a pedant. I like for things to be right. There are things people do to the apostrophe that keep me up at night. But I’ve gotten better. I generally don’t try and correct people because I figure if I know what people MEAN, then I don’t have to correct what they say or write. Still, there’s nothing like listening to Judge John Hodgman and “Bailiff” Jesse Thorn settle a good argument over absolutely nothing. Judge John Hodgman scratches that itch.

I don’t listen to many spiritual podcasts. And The Confessional with Nadia Bolz-Weber doesn’t overtly set out to be. She coaches her guests on talking about times when they were at their worst. The stories are heart-breaking and sincere, and she guides them to a bit of clarity and light with compassion and sincerity. At the end of each podcast, she offers a blessing for the guest – but I’ve found that I’ve been in need of those blessings myself.

That’s my ten (of many). I left off great shows like The Nod, The Sportkful, Soooo Many White Guys, Song Exploder, Driving the Green Book, Margaret Cho, Over the Road, They Call us Bruce and Two Dope Queens, to name a few.

Perhaps I’ve given you a solid recommendation or two, perhaps it’s just another glimpse into who I am. Enjoy.

Slice of Life 2021 Day 19: Senior Night

Today marks Day 19 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March – and beyond!

It was my son’s senior night at hockey.

This guy. He’s been skating since he was two.

*I mean…LOOK at this kid. Bro’s in the background.*

Yes, I’m a hockey mom. I have been for a long time. He started on a house league team in kindergarten. He actually played on the same team as his second-grade brother. Then my husband suggested he play travel hockey in first grade. And I’ll confess: putting my son into travel hockey at the age of six felt like a violation of everything I stood for in regard to the development of kids. I fought it with every fiber of my being, until.

Until I saw how much happiness and fulfillment hockey brought him. When he stepped out onto the ice, he looked – still looks! – joyful. Even from a hundred feet away, I can see him smiling through that cage.

Hockey has also brought him some of his darkest times. He’s fought his way through a lot. I can count at least four or five times where hockey had betrayed him in one way or another. Times any ordinary person would have shrugged their shoulders, cut their losses and moved on to another sport. Times I could have sworn he would hang up his skates and walk away.

He didn’t.

Wow, do I ever admire that guy. This one’s for him.

Sam,
your skates:
they have been
your feet ever
since the age of two
I’ve seen you glide and stride
over the past thirteen years
if anyone were to ask me
what’s your truest expression of self,
where it is that you feel the most like YOU,
I’d point them in the direction of the ice
this slippery surface that serves as solid ground
and I’d tell them this place. This place has always been home.

*This is how much we love mom taking our picture*

*Sandwiched between brother and dad. Hockey family through and through.*

*Senior night banner (see that smile on the ice? Told you!)*

Slice of Life 2021 Day 18: Crowdsourcing

Today marks Day 18 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March – and beyond!

Oh, WORDS. You are SNEAKY little devils.

You plant yourselves in one place in my life, then hop over into another before I have time to notice there’s a pattern going on.

But I see you now. I see the way you’ve inched into my writing practice, my teaching practice. You can’t fool me.

Maybe I’ll explain myself.

My students have been crafting theme-driven stories over the past weeks, and most of them are in various stages of revision. I noticed that many of my students still don’t have titles, and some of them don’t even have names for their characters.

I thought that it would be good for them to have a session together where they could gather ideas and support.

Enter: CROWDSOURCING.

I started by asking if kids knew the word itself.* No one did. So we talked about an example of crowdsourcing: when zoos have contests to name baby animals. Basically, it’s using the power of the crowd to source good ideas.

I then prompted students to think about, and enter in the chat, things that they wanted to “crowdsource” from classmates. We divided up into breakout rooms. Our procedure:
-Groups would decide order for turn-taking.
-Each author gets 7 minutes for their turn.
-During that time, they crowdsource ideas for whatever they need.
-I broadcast a “switch” message after each 7 minutes.
-Groups that finish early can move on to the next writer or circle back to someone who needs more time.

After that, kids had time to go back into their work and incorporate changes. They had a great time with this! **

That’s when it hit me. I’ve been relying on the very same strategy – crowdsourcing – as well! Just this week, in my “strategies to try” post, I put out a call to my own writing community, asking for links and ideas for cool post formats. I hadn’t even realized that I was doing exactly what I was asking my kiddos to do.

Sure do love me some serendipity.

___

*One of my favorite quick assessments when I introduce a new term. I say and write the new word or phrase, then I ask for kids to give me a 1-2-3 finger response (or a number in the Zoom chat):
1: Wait — that’s a WORD?
2: Ooh – I feel like I’ve heard of that word, or I’ve heard people use it.
3: Out of my way – let me tell people what this means!

____

**Don’t tell my kids this is just a spin on offering feedback.They’re digging the new lingo!

Slice of Life 2021 Day 17: Lucky

Today marks Day 17 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March – and beyond!

You can keep your corned beef
And your cabbage
And your potatoes
And your soda bread
And your whisky

Never mind about those shamrocks
Or leprechauns
Or parades
Or wearing of the green

The luck I find
Comes to me
In tokens of love:
Reminders from friends
That I am missed
And thought of
And appreciated.

Brought to me by a friend who knows and loves me. Lucky, lucky, LUCKY me.

Slice of Life 2021 Day 16: Harvesting Ideas

Today marks Day 16 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March – and beyond!

You know, we always tell our young writers to keep track of all the great ideas they have for writing “seeds.” I’ve realized that I’ve seen some amazing ideas for cool Slice structures lately, including:

Fran Haley’s etherees
Ms. Chen’s “My Ten” post (along with her time-bending post, borrowed from Fran McVeigh)
Britt’s and onathough’s “6 words” slices
Vickie and Ravienne’s “Flashback Fridays”

Of course, I’m not going to be able to use ALL of these ideas in March, which is just fine! I just want to give these writing forms a spin whenever I can, and I’m even more excited to see how my kids respond to them.

How about you? What cool writing forms or structures have YOU seen? What are the tricks that you like so much that you’re squirreling away for another post?

Link to a cool blog format in the comments.* I’d love to develop a whole collection of new ideas I can use for future posts.

*(of course, the hipsterish buzzword I’m actually looking for is crowdsourcing, but you didn’t hear that from me)

Slice of Life 2021 Day 15: Out of Sorts

Today marks Day 15 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March -and beyond!

For the past week and a half, I’ve been feeling…OFF.

My mental magic wheel greedily spun comments, omissions, and small slights into threads – ropes! – of hurt, self-doubt and bruised ego.

I usually feel resilient. I can usually manage the “speed bumps” that life throws my way.

But lately I’ve been crabby. I’ve been overly sensitive. The tiniest nudge sends my mind into fits of perseverating.

What on earth was going on? It wasn’t the time change. It wasn’t hormones. It wasn’t the full moon. I had no way of explaining why I couldn’t get my emotional self together.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, I got myself behind a barbell for the first time in a while.

Between the new puppy, vaccine #2, some back issues and an unexpected home quarantine, I had neglected to get physically active. Other than walking said puppy, my body wasn’t doing ANYTHING.

But after a session moving big and heavy things, It felt GOOD. REALLY good. And all throughout the rest of the day, I felt good. I felt so much better, so much more in control, so much more resilient.

This has happened to me before. I’ve felt terrible about this world and everything in it, only to feel much better once I get myself moving.

I wish this week’s me could go back to last week me mid-mind spin. I wish I could interrupt, could tell myself that all of these terrible thoughts I’m having about me aren’t ME. That I need a physical outlet so I can feel better. Sometimes, all we have to do is to identify what we’re going through, to name the monster that’s taking over. It doesn’t fix the problem, but boy does it make it more manageable.

In the meantime, if you’re one of those people who interact with me in real life, I’ll leave you with this:
1) Thank you for putting up with my being a crabby pants.
2) If I’m being a super crabby pants, you have permission to when I worked out last.
3) It will be better for us all.
4) And thank you.

Sunday Sit-Down #9: Turning Point

Every story has a turning point. There is a moment of truth, a fulcrum on which our seesaw of experience forever rests between “before” and “after.” I’ve had several such moments in my life.

The details are sketchy. There’s a chance I have some of them wrong. There’s also much more complexity to this than I can express in a single blog post, but we all know words have their limitations at times. This is one of those times.

My first moment of racial reckoning occurred in high school. It was my junior or senior year. The high school newspaper just published an issue on slang. In it was an article on Black English.

I remember holding that edition of the paper in my hands, scrolling through the articles, and reading that one with some interest. I remember the article mentioning Black English Vernacular and giving some examples of its structure. I don’t remember much about the content of the article.

I do remember that it wasn’t written by someone Black.
And it didn’t sit well.
And it brought forth a lot of anger.
So much so that the local news covered our news.
LOTS of people were talking about it.

And if you asked me how things eventually turned out, I don’t even think I could tell you.

But I do remember that being a moment of truth for me. This idea I carried in my head, the one that told me racial justice and equality were “done” once Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks took care of things? It was a lie. There was still prejudice and racism and bias and inequality. There were wounds, still seething anger across and within racial groups, and it took a high school newspaper article to puncture that boil.

It was the first time I recognized there was still work to do. That I had work to do. That there was so very much I didn’t know, didn’t understand, hadn’t bothered to see.

That was the truth I had to sit with. That I still sit with. It has shaped me, has driven me. It’s what drove me to seek the experiences I have in college (starting up on that next week!) and beyond.

And…if you’re someone I know who remembers this time, I’d welcome your memories in the comments. I keep trying to put more perspective to these events, and I could use yours.

Slice of Life Day 2021 Day 13: If Only

Today marks Day 13 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March – and beyond!

If only, last year, as we hastily made copies
and gathered books
and held cramming sessions
on how to use Google meet
we had stopped

and sat on the floor
in a circle
the kind of circle
where sometimes you pass
a rock or a stick or a trinket
and everyone takes turns
and everyone shares
for a moment

If only, last year, as we loaded backpacks
and gave high-fives
and said our “see you soons”
we treated the day
as the last day of school

with hugs
and reflections
and closure
and notes to our future selves

it might have made the missing
not easy
but easier.

Slice of Life 2021 Day 12: Filling Buckets

Today marks Day 12 of the Slice of Life challenge. Join me as I work to write every day in March,

If you’re feeling low,

And you’re wondering whether the next big gust of wind is going to guide you to shore or strand you out at sea,

And you’re wondering what, if anything, you can do to make this world feel and inch and a half better,

Follow Larry Ferlazzo’s advice. *

Have your kiddos write comments in your Zoom chat about grown-ups who’ve made a difference.

Send those comments (without names) to your colleagues.

Watch the fuel tank on your heart gradually shift from E.

*Let me know if you give this a go!