Category Archives: Social Science

Freaky Friday? Nah.

The news will be chock full of talk about the superstition surrounding this day. Read about the history of Friday the 13th and the possible origins for fearing this date.

As for me, I embrace it. There are 13 lunar cycles in a year (I cherish the moon). A baker’s dozen means one extra goody for me. Friday is a wonderful day of the week, the start of the weekend. There is no reason to build up fear where none is justified.

Oh yes, another reason to enjoy this day? It marks the fact I’ve now been married two months.

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Go break a mirror, walk under a ladder, and cross the path of a black cat. And don’t bother throwing salt over your shoulder.

Beyond A Mere Escape

It’s that the benefits of reading extend beyond a mere escape from oneself. They linger. Reading affords one a certain detachment from life. Reading allows me, at least, to approach the events of my own life with the same mild curiosity I have toward a good novel: it’s easier not to get so invested. One could argue that film and television must do the same, but in truth, there is something different between the mediums. Books – texts – are private, personal, unique. They’re fueled and informed by whatever you’ve already experienced. Movies are public. They give everything to you. Also, television and film are almost always (and necessarily) presented from a limited third-person point of view: the nature of the stated objectivity of the camera makes anything else difficult. Books can be written from the inside, or from all sides – you get a taste of what it’s like to experience the world through the eyes and skin and past of another.

–Siona, Nomen Est Numen

Educational Conundrum

One-third of the state’s public elementary school students — that’s more than 1.5 million children — are classified as English learners.

Currently, the schools face conflicting incentives over how to deal with these students.

On the one hand, NCLB [No Child Left Behind] requires California schools to increase the number of students they reclassify from English learner to English proficient. On the other hand, the act requires all groups — including English learners — to show improvement in academic achievement. By themselves both requirements are reasonable.

Schools should strive for improvement in English proficiency as well as academic achievement among their English learners. But if students haven’t reached a certain threshold of English proficiency, they simply cannot demonstrate their full academic ability on tests that are given in English.

Under the current law, increases in reclassification are likely to cause decreases in academic test scores for English learners because the most proficient — and consequently highest scoring — students are no longer part of that group. So, with improvement required in both areas … where does the incentive lie?

And then there’s the financial lure: Schools now receive additional funding from NCLB for each English learner student they have, but once they reclassify a student from English learner to English proficient, they lose that money. So again, where does the incentive lie?

–Christopher Jepsen, ‘No Child Left Behind’ leaving English-learners behind?

Read more in English Learners in California Schools, by Christopher Jepsen and Shelley de Alth.

Family Time

The family dinner has long been an example of family togetherness. But recently, scientists have been coming up with compelling reasons — including a lowered risk of smoking, drinking and doing illicit drugs among teenagers — for families to pull up a chair around the table.

The interest in the ritual may have been spurred by concerns that the number of families who do not dine together is increasing. According to several surveys, 30 to 40 percent of families do not eat dinner together five to seven nights a week, though most families eat dinner together some days a week.

–Laurie Tarkan, Benefits of the Dinner Table, New York Times

A Secret Cry

There is a secret cry inside every heart, sometimes so deeply hidden that it may not even be audible to the person who hides it. Whether they are complete strangers or someone you think you have known all your life, if you can hear a person’s secret cry then all your defenses and criticisms crumble. You become one with them and you cannot do anything other than love them as yourself.

–Natalie d’Arbeloff, Blaugustine

Bringing Down the House

My sister-in-law sent an article to follow up on this post regarding housing in California; the quote below sums it up for me:

The San Francisco Bay area had the highest gap in the state at $92,930, where potential homebuyers had a median household income of $67,770 but needed qualifying income of $160,700 to purchase a median-priced home at $689,240.

—Majority of Californians make less than half the income needed to buy a home, Yahoo news

California: a country unto itself, where the middle class dream is ludicrous. (Heaven help you if you’re poor here.) Not yet home sweet home to me.

A New Perspective on Frustration With Inconsistency

However, for me, my frustration regarding my inconsistency or impermanence is an expression of how I suffer when I am unable to control both my situations and my self. I struggle to lock myself down in a fixed state. I imagine what qualities I would possess were I who I want to be and then I try hold that all in place in the hopes that I wonÂ’t have to wonder who I am. If I begin to doubt who I am and what makes me me, I can look to these labels that I attach to myself and feel reassured. I am a Buddhist. I am a vegetarian. I am a vegan. I am sensitive. I am someone who does yoga. I am someone with radical politics. And so on.

Is it any wonder that I am then inconsistent? After all, none of these things make me who I am. I donÂ’t even make me who I am.

—Auspicious Coincidence

Why We Had A Simple Wedding

I’ve been reading about Jennifer Wilbanks, the bride-to-be who ditched her betrothed and made up a story about being kidnapped. I was agog — actually scandalized — when I read that the affair involved fourteen attendants and 500-600 guests. I did not grow up dreaming about “my wedding day.” I think it’s important to honor and celebrate commitment, but a bride need not spend her parents’ retirement to have a wedding. Nor does a couple need to spend what might be their down-payment on a house, or part of their future childrens’ college fund, to mark the occasion. The amount of money some people spend on weddings is unconscionable. Here is a well-articulated perspective from Bonnie Erbe of the Chicago Sun-Times:

Couples who truly love each other are comfortable presenting their commitment to the world through a three-day saga that doesn’t force their families into Chapter 7. When confronted with buffets including abundant portions of pate de fois gras and waterfall bouquets of Epipactis Gigantea, I do not walk around drooling like other guests.

I don my skeptic’s hat and ask first, why the gaudy display? Then I tell myself I would have been much more impressed by a small, meaningful gathering and the announcement of a large donation to a worthy charity by the couple (or by the couple’s family). The latter, to me, would denote confidence by the couple, supported by a healthy side helping of class, style and surety of purpose.

–Bonnie Erbe, Runaway bride’s plight sheds light on lavish weddings

My sentiments exactly!

Too Good Not to Post

Jack, a blogger whom I’ve read on and off for the past year, wrote something I felt compelled (again) to post at this site.

We keep ourselves stuck with how and why questions. How am I to live? How am I to get people to love me the way I want them to? How am I do get where I want to go in my career? Why am I where I am? Why do people in my world act and think the way they do?

Joseph Campbell’s spin: I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. Looking for the meaning of life is looking for the how and why. Being alive is about saying yes to what makes us feel most alive. The answer to how and why is yes.

What makes you feel alive?

–Jack, from Jack/Zen

Off the top of my head…

  • Walking and pausing to smell all the glorious roses that bloom in just about every front yard here.
  • Giving Stella a body massage and burying my face in her tummy while she purrs.
  • Drinking cold water when I’m thirsty.
  • Reading aloud to interested listeners.
  • Cooking a delicious meal, lighting candles, serving it with a glass of good wine.
  • Writing
  • Making collages, doing needlepoint.
  • Helping out at organizations that benefit others.
  • Listening to music.
  • Lying in the hammock, enjoying the breeze.
  • Clean, fresh bedsheets.
  • A bouquet of flowers on the living room table.
  • Slathering lavendar-lemon, or vanilla, or rose-scented oil on my skin.
  • Riding my bike.
  • Blowing bubbles in a park.

I’m certain I could think of more… but why waste time thinking? I do that so much already. I’d rather take a walk in the evening air.

Have a restful weekend, good readers. Or an active one, if that’s your preference! I’ll return Monday with more “good stuff.”

A Way to Have Fun While Helping

When I moved here last summer, I cast around for activities to keep me busy, since I had no job waiting. I learned of Hands On Bay Area, an organization that works with non-profit groups to coordinate volunteer assistance. What appealed to me was the opportunity to choose from an array of activities without having to commit to just one. For example, I helped out at a community center that collects donations of food and clothes for impoverished people, and then I worked at a community rose garden hoeing weeds. Last week I sorted books and affixed labels for the Bring Me a Book Foundation, and yesterday I conversed with people who are learning English as a second language. A volunteer can sign up for a project one time, or can commit to a number of project occurrences.

I enjoyed the ESL facilitation very much; years ago I did this as a volunteer at Syracuse University and UT Austin with international students. It was a wonderful exchange of ideas, culture, and friendship. When I learned that the project leader would need to find a replacement, I decided to consider it. The next step is attending a two-hour training on the duties involved; after the training I’ll be able to lead projects that appeal to me. The Book Foundation and ESL class occur on Tuesdays, and I can participate in each on alternating weeks. The pleasure in these two projects is that one allows me to indulge my librarian nature and the other my inner teacher.

Last fall I also underwent training to be a grief counselor at the Centre for Living With Dying. I was intensely interested in the work. However, after December I took a leave. I knew that I’d be responding to death in my own life soon, and did not feel available to help others. While I hope to return to the Centre at some point, as they do profound and necessary work, I’ll wait until my heart indicates I’m ready.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying these other volunteer activities, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting new people who may, at some point, become friends.

Hope and Cynicism

Hope brings stress, because it creates desires and expectations. Some expectations and desires make me happy, but mainly they make me tense. I start to strive for something and meanwhile, I forget to live. Just feel what happens in your body when you start a sentence with “I hope thatÂ…”

If you hang on to hope, you’ll always have to wait: for the money that will make you happy, for the compliment that will make your day, for the hereafter that will bring you peace. Waiting makes you passive and keeps you from creating joy in your life.

Hoping for a better future means rejecting what is here, and this means you also reject a part of yourself. You resist something and thus push it away. You suppress yourself and keep yourself small.

–Tijn Touber, “Abandon all hope,” Ode Magazine, May 2005

Cynicism is an adjustment of expectations down. We expect the bad to continue or get worse.

When we understand cynicism from an ecological view, we realize that cynicism is an effective way to excuse ourselves from responsibility. The deeper our cynicism, the more we project responsibility for our world on other people. It works for anyone who wants to enjoy tangible and immediate relief from responsibility. So, the question is: What’s the opposite of cynicism and what kind of people seek its opposite?

My initial reaction is that the opposite isn’t a kind of hope that plays the same role of projecting responsibility on other people and conditions.

–Jack, JackZen

Oh Yes

I need to remember that life is precious and short and lovely. Funny how remembering that can sometimes lift me up and sometimes make me hopelessly sad.

–Kat, Kat’s Paws

How well I can relate to that this morning. Yesterday I got a phone call from the radiologist who did my mammogram. She’d like me to come in for another mammogram on my right breast as well as an ultrasound. They also want copies of the previous exams done, which are in Austin, so they can compare. Because I didn’t think to get copies when I moved, there will be a lapse of time between the exam and the comparison. I won’t know for awhile if anything is amiss.

In January 2003, just as my mother was beginning treatment for breast cancer, I had my own little scare. The exam I’d had in January resulted in an ultrasound, which revealed cysts “of note.” They had me back in May and one had enlarged, so a biopsy was done. It was benign. The whole experience was nerve-wracking. That was the year I turned 40, and I was suddenly brought up short by the realization that I’d entered that life stage where mortal concerns move from the abstract to the real. I struggled with a sense of tenuousness in my body, a feeling that it was betraying me. In 2004, my exam didn’t bring an alert, so I relaxed.

I’ve been telling myself since yesterday, “It’s fine, it’s nothing, these are new doctors who are being cautious, and they aren’t familiar with my history.” Yet this morning I had a minor meltdown as I prepared for the day. My thoughts ran amok and carried me into pessimism. Here’s the train of thought: “Oh my god I will have cancer and then I can’t get pregnant while I’m in treatment and I will die and then my husband will someday remarry someone younger and have children, which may all be for the best because I might be too old to conceive and certainly not energetic enough to raise a child.” Of course this was bound to put a gloomy tint to my day.

Mixed up in all this is also mourning for my father-in-law. I feel profoundly sad that, if we do end up having children, they won’t get to have relationship with him, and he won’t be around for us to enjoy his enjoyment. Then I realized that it’s only been three weeks since he died, but it really feels as though a lifetime has happened.

Meanwhile I need to summon my sanity, pull together my professional happy face, and go to work. I need to deal with insolent fifth graders. I need to conduct a staff meeting and attend to administrative details. And this evening I will be volunteering as a conversation facilitator with adults who are learning English as a second language. So I will tuck my moment of panic into a mental pocket and move forward. I’m trying to remember the wisdom from Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. I don’t have all the information yet, and there is nothing I can do at this moment to change my life situation because it’s not yet clear that this is a problem. Thus it is not real, it is not part of now.

Ah, the emotional permutations a person can experience, all before noon on a given day!