Think Like a Mediterranean

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had.  Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights.  Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down.  Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow.  No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible.  Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements.  I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission.  What have I done?  The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians.  What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school.  Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration.  So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month.  Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch. 

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

Softer Side of Keanu

Oh krist, now he's asking me for a copy of my Pilgrimage paper, and being all nice to me.

As Jon Stewart said to John McCain last year, "Don't make me love you!!"

How to dither-dather a woman who writes? Sincere praise on her writing and wanting a personal copy will do it every time. Yikes, I fell right into flattery pond.

So, now I have to figure out what to say to him when I walk a copy to his office.
How about, "So Keanu, how do I get an A in your class? You nit-picked my first paper, quibbled over syntax on my midterm, and took off one symbolic point from my latest paper that you actually liked. What gives? I got an A in a much harder anthropology class last term when I had to learn human genome 101 in 10 weeks. What's the deal?"

Or---just slink in and slip it into his mailbox cubby and bolt.
As a former boss lady and ex-administrator, I am just dying to tell him how to improve his teaching methods, but then the Kwan Yin compassionate lotus fairy sees him struggling and wishes I could offer some support like a colleague who's in the weeds with a group of cashier trainees. He asks the class a question on the reading assigned for that day, and there's all this restless silence in the classroom for what seems like minutes, until I can't stand it anymore and offer the answer. He turns from the board and realizes it was me. This can happen three or four times an hour, unless I just won't play along. Yesterday it was political history with the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or which earlier anti-immigrant backlash occurred with which peoples in the early 1900s. And why?

Okay, so I don't have the student loan debt load (yet), years in the field on site with a trowel, multi-degrees and office in the department, but the guy is only a year older than I am and I just can't defer to him. He's more like a neighbor standing out in front of his house with a dead smoking lawnmower and you want to just hand him a cold beer and offer your weed whacker.

One more week of classes, one last exam, then it's all just a smudge on my transcripts, how I couldn't manage an A in a class in my major that was basically writing assignments with no math or human genomes or science. Little dings, all in a row.

But he talks about his dog all the time, so I know he's not just a total creep.
One more week of watching the doe-eyed nursing student in the front row bending over in short skirts to retrieve her bookbag and looking to see if he's noticing.

Class dismissed.

Cultural Misunderstanding

Ahhhhhhh----the supreme delight and satisfaction of finishing a paper assignment. And it only took me about three hours, is a bit too long and will be tightened up tomorrow, and is absolutely true and rather funny, if I do say so myself.

My young prof asked us to write of a personal experience of having a cultural misunderstanding. My personal experience of this assignment is that it's kinda voyeristic of him to require this, but when reflecting over the last few days, I realized that most of the 18-20 yr olds in my class (and I) would have a difficult time writing of an abstract cultural misunderstanding in 3 pages. Can't really do justice to the Israelis and Palestinians in 3 pages. Or the situation with Ellis Island or First Nations. So let's keep it breezy and first hand, right? So against the advice of my pal who worked with me through this certain period of time in the 1980s, I plunged into my story of Midwest Gamine moves to South Florida and emerges from her naive realism into the diverse and much louder Southern Branch of the Gotham City Culture.

I think my pal was afraid I'd come off sounding too bitter, or bigoted, or bitchy, but I think that it's possible to write about how overwhelmed a person can feel being immersed in a totally new cultural environment, being completely ignorant of how it all works, feeling very young and inexperienced about life in general, and be honest in describing it without being any of those b-things. Plus, since it's all true, and I remember parts of it so well, there is a bit of actual recreated dialogue. The part in the bagel place changed my whole attitude about living in South Florida.

Okay, so seeing as I was the one in the minority in the BocaWorld, I get to be the one who lost her naive realistic innocence and joined the greater Gotham Culture. Naive Realism is the anthropology term for when people think that the entire world is the way that they see their own particular piece of it. That got smacked right out of me the first month I worked there. I learned a lot of things, including some bad Yiddish words I used to be able to use but have now forgotten, I learned how to give shit and got better at taking it when I had a name tag on. I also learned how to hold my own, and wished I'd have been able to learn that better in my teens instead of in my 20s and 30s.
And now I get to write about it for college credit. So so cool. And what's really funny, is that if I were even bolder and still had more of my East Coast on, I'd have included how living in Gotham Culture for so long is sometimes why the Snark Episode happened with this young prof in the first place, and also why he reacted as he did, being so West Coast as he is. But I am not so bold, at least for this graded writing assignment. Maybe sometime, since I'm staying in this department for my degree, he and I will laugh about it all.

He'll laugh reading my paper, and that's my strategy.

Everyday Anthropology

Here's a perfect example of the essential usefulness of knowing some anthropology...

Setting: backyard hot tub at dusk, sneaking in while neighbor is out of town.

Cast: half-buzzed sneaky neighbor in hot tub; one resident of house of said hot tub;

Scene: Roaring hot tub jets, growing twilight, just as a chilly sprinkle starts, house resident tentatively approaches occupied hot tub, saying name of sneaky neighbor repeatedly so as not to startle her. Finally she hears him---

Sneak: He-e-e-y, neighbor! Wow, hope it's okay, I called---

Resident: I didn't want to scare you, it's cool, did it warm up yet?

S: Yeah, it's gettin' there, almost 100 now.

R: Mind if I join you? (climbs in, resets jets, louder roaring and churning)

S: Nope, just relaxing after a long week of classes, I brought a beer, TGIF! (they laugh)

S & R don't really know each other well, they each know the owner of the house pretty well, the one who isn't there. A few moments of loud but awkward silence. They discuss Portland, other places they each used to live, until suddenly---

R: Like that place in New England, where they found that ancient place with the rocks and the coins---

S: ---and the petroglyphs---

R: Right! Like before Columbus and the Vikings!

S: I saw that show on the National Geographic channel where they think it may have been the ancient Phoenicians or even post-ice age Europeans that followed the melting ice shield to North America---

R: Yeah, I saw that, and the native peoples had European DNA before North America was colonized---

S: Like Kenniwick Man had Altaic or Ainu DNA, not recent DNA from more recent peoples in the Pacific Northwest----

R: So what about the Nazca Lines? I took one of those classes where the teacher said none of any of it was true---

S: Yeah, 'The Pseudo-sciences' myth-busting thing, like 'NO, the Aliens did NOT build the pyramids!'

R: Exactly!

R & S go on, getting redder and redder in the face in the 106 degree water for another 30 minutes.

S: (feeling faint) I think I have to get out---I'm poached. (sloshes out, grabs towel)

R: Yeah, me too, right after you. (climbs out, covers hot tub)

They stand there steaming in the dim evening, bi-pedal lobsters:

S: Great chat!

R: Yeah, good soak, this is easy to get used to.

S: I owe _____ a case of beer, for all the kind lending of the hot tub goodness. (stops herself from launching into the brewing history of the Fertile Crescent peoples)

They each drip towards their respective front doors. S drinks a large glass of water, once again grateful for the ever-readiness of Anthropological knowledge to save the day and gloss-over faux pas of all kinds, remedy social situations, and claim common interests to make new friends. S frantically searches her freezer for an ice pack, to avoid the popping of the top of her head.

curtain