Proctored the SATs this morning.

This morning I proctored the SATs, as well as some standardized test for eighth graders that I wasn't familiar with. The parents were something else -- the mom of this girl who came late, right before testing started, demanded to know how the kids would be treated during the five-minute breaks when all the girls would head for the three stalls in the bathroom and they wouldn't be all able to go during the allotted time -- but, thankfully, since the testing site had changed on campus, for the first hour I was stationed by the doors to the old site and had to redirect people, so I missed most of it.

Interestingly, the old site was commandeered by the med school, and when I met the guy who was coming in to set up, he told me that groups of second year med students were coming in to practice breat and pelvic exams on live female patients all morning. I was like, "You mean mammograms and the [and here I put a couple of my fingers together and drew them apart as if forcing open a tight coin purse, and I made a sound like, 'ee-yerp']," and the guy was like, "Yeah," and then when I asked some more, I found out that there's this trained group of highly-paid women who go around to all the city's med schools and do two-to-three hour sessions of exams with students and make like $130-140 per session. "But do they need people for testicular exams?", I was like, and the guy then told me yes, but it also involves rectal exams, some times as many as four in a row, and that you have to know people to get in, and that beyond that they prefer really old guys since they tend to have enlarged prostates that are easier for the students to feel, so they have a select group of local old men who have the endurance for the multliple rectal exams who have been coming up and been being felt up for years now. Though, he did give me the name of a woman to contact on the off-chance they needed someone.

After this, I went back to the testing site, and encountered that mom who was bitching about the restrooms (I'm getting out of chronological order here, sorry). "And why did they change the testing site anyways?", she was asking, and so I was like, "Do you really want to know?", stressing the 'really', and when she said yes, I was like, "Med school students are giving test mammograms to women and doing the [I made prying-open-the-coin-purse motion in the air in front of me, though without the 'ee-yerp' sound] and rectal exams to men there all morning for practice, sometimes as many as four in a row to a single individual," and when she was like, "Is that all?", I was like, "No, they're having coffee and donuts first," since I the guy I had met was bringing a Dunkin' Donuts "Box o'Joe" and a big flat of donuts, too, when I met him.

Went to an Australia Day Party.

Last night I went to an Australia Day Party, hosted by an Australian who's in my program and her husband and a couple of their friends. When I went in the door, they had Australian flags everywhere, and a big plate of fairy bread (shitty white bread slathered in butter and the round sprinkles they call 'hundreds and thousands', which is the consummate kiddie-party treat in Australia), and I ate a couple of pieces of the fairy bread and had a beer and made sure everyone else tried the fairy bread too. At one point I also was in the kitchen talking with people and eating the strawberries and blueberries from the strainer that were left over from the pavlova they had made up, only to discover that they had a second pastry shell and I had eaten most of the fruit for it.

Anyhow, the Australian who's in my program is married to a rowdy Australian episcopal priest, and when the kids from next door who are like eleven and are these apathetic goth girls with dyed purple hair and black fingernails and fishnet stockings on their arms stopped by around eleven, he gave them stuff to drink, and they sat in the corner the rest of the night sipping Smirnoff Ices from the bottle, which was very atmospheric, though not necessarily what you'd expect at an Australia Day Party. The Australian who's in my program, when she found out, went to her husband and was like, "[his first name]!", and he was like, "What?", since he didn't see anything so bad in giving eleven year olds malt beverages.

Later, I was in the kitchen with him and his Australian friend and this cheery girl with big tits, and when the Australian friend asked the cheery girl with the big tits how she knew the rowdy Australian episcopal priest, she was like, "I work with [the priest's first name]," and so he was like, "Oh, so you're a priest too?", and she was like, "No, actually I run a preschool," at which point I stepped in and started addressing the friend all serious-like and was like, "She's his supplier." After that, all the conversation stopped, until the priest told me how awful that was, and the cheery girl with the big tits, who was pretty shocked, like she was running through all the kids in her class in her head and seeing awful things happen to them, asked me to leave, which I didn't; I just avoided her the rest of the night.

Barry Manilow concert two Saturdays ago.

Tomorrow it'll be two weeks since I went to go see Barry Manilow at the local arena, since he's been touring his "Music and Passion" tour around the country (isn't that great, what other perform could not only name in all seriousness their tour "Music and Passion", but also pull it off?!?!!?).

Looking back, I think my biggest memory is the glowsticks - they were being sold for ten bucks a pop and had "MANILOW - MUSIC AND PASSION" written on the side in the same font as the words appeared in in advertisments and on the giant sign suspended above the stage, and fat middle-aged women everywhere were buying them, and as the arena filled up, you could just see these specks of bright green everywhere, and the specks hopped around a bit as people cheered during all the songs, and when Barry sang "Can't Smile Without You", the specks swayed in unison back and forth as the entire crowd got into the music.

I remember, too, how before the concert began, me and my two friends I went with went to the center of the third tier and stole better seats (we had begun up on the side), and after twenty minutes I turned around to see how the seats behind us were filling up, and I saw this fat middle-aged man who was bald and had a moustache with this glowstick -- the only man I saw at the concert who had a glowstick! -- and he was shaking it back and forth in his lap to get it to light up, only it looked like he was jerking himself off hard, so I told my friends to look back and up a few rows of seats, they did and they weren't too happy.

I wanted, too, to buy a glowstick for my one friend who loves Barry and couldn't come to the concert, but I'm cheap and ten bucks was too much to pop for one -- I'm proud to say that after the concert I went down to the bottom of the tier and looked up to see if I could see any glowsticks that had fallen behind seats and no one had retrieved because they didn't want them anymore or they were too fat to bend down and get them, and I ended up finding one for free, they were so easy to see since the arena was still semi-dark and they were glowing bright green under the seats --- so I was saying to my friends after the opening act and before Barry came on (and of course before I did end up finding a glowstick for free), that I should just accost a forty-year old fat woman in the hallways and be like all suave and be like, "Hey lady, give me that glowstick, and I'll let you suck me off."

My friends weren't too happy (they're women), and one was like, "Are you really going to do that?", and I was like, "No, not now, I'll do it after the concert when they're all heated up with no place to go."

Saw Angela Davis yesterday.

So, I went to go hear Angela Davis speak last night. The hall was so crowded that I couldn't get in, but I stood out in the vestibule with a lot of other people, mostly local blacks and old white campus fringe elements, who couldn't get in and we watched through the door.

In the introduction, the introducer was like, "Back in [some year] governor Ronald Reagan vowed that Angela Davis would never teach in the California state university system again," and when she began her next sentence, "Professor Davis is now tenured at UC - Santa Cruz...", the crowd started spontaneously applauding, and this old thin white woman near me with long grey hair and a beret and crazy eyes held her hand to her mouth and shouted out, "And Ronald Reagan is dead!"

During the speech itself, in listing out the struggles of the world - racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, global warming - Angela Davis threw in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence right after talking about the struggles of indigenous peoples everywhere.

Like a third of the way into the speech, too, she talked about the nation's growing prison population and how felons are deprived of the right to vote, which affects one out of every ten black men, and then she did a mini historical retrospect where she talked about how in post-Civil War Mississippi your vote got taken away for miscegenation (a black crime) but not murder (a white crime), and then how taking away votes from felons was nothing new, since even back at the beginning of the country when you had to be a white male to vote and thus only 6% of the population could, there was a law passed to take away the vote from felons, back in 1776. "That's right," she was like, "The vote being taken away from people is a fundamental part of our nation's history, beginning back in seventeen - seventy - six," and as she said the last numbers real slowly, this black woman over on the other side of the vestibule held her hands to her mouth and yelled to up front and was like, "Lay it out, girl!"

Angela Davis also hit home on the point that the victories we want and what we're getting are two different things, and to think that all of MLK Jr's dreams were fulfilled in the Voting Rights Act, though it's significant, is to fool ourselves and betray his dream.

"End of the World".

Today I woke up humming "End of the World", and I kept wondering why, since I haven't heard the song at all lately -- in fact, I can't remember the last time I heard it at all -- and then I realized it's because since yesterday I've been getting psyched up to go hear Angela Davis give a speech on campus tonight.

The Greatest Generation and Public Swimming Pools

I've been meaning to post this article forever. It's from the May 25th 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Evan R. Goldstein, and here it is in full (it's short, don't worry!, and if it's too long, look at the bolded three sentences a little ways down, please):

Municipal pools arrived on the urban American scene in the last third of the 19th century. Initially intended to function as public baths - to cleanse what one newspaper editorialist deemed the "unwashed downtown youths" - these early municipal pools were primarily constructed in immigrant and working-class slums. But swimming soon caught on as a popular recreation, and cities responded by building enormous pools with sprawling sun decks and artificial sand beaches. "These mega-pools drew people from throughout the city, serving a very ethnically and economically diverse group of white Americans," says Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

But court-mandated racial desegregation in the 1950s radically altered the social landscape of municipal swimming pools, leading to the resegregation of American swimming along class lines. Today, Wiltse said in an interview, the shift away from the face-to-face interaction needed to maintain the social fabric continues in the age of MySpace and Facebook.

Jeff Wiltse, assistant professor of history at the University of Montana:

"Swimming pools are a unique public space. The interaction that occurs at pools is sustained. People typically go to a swimming pool for hours and hours; it is not like just passing someone on your way to the post office. In addition, one of the most intriguing qualities about pools is their eroticism: You're mostly undressed, other people are mostly undressed. This intimacy causes people to be very conscious about how they're interacting with others.

"Until as late as 1950, there were only 2,500 residential pools in the entire country. And they were strictly the province of the very rich. It is not until the mid-1950s that we begin to see the proliferation of backyard pools. Several factors contributed to the explosion - the prosperity of the postwar period, mass suburbanization, and a new construction method that made the building of backyard pools less expensive. But what made these private pools particularly attractive to white Americans was that they were socially exclusive. By joining a private-club pool or building a pool of their own, they could be assured that they would not have to swim with a black American, and they would not have to swim with someone who was of a lower social class.

"In the era of racial desegregation, suburban communities consciously made the choice not to build public pools but rather to let residents organize private-club pools. The reason, it is clear to me, was to exclude black people. There are pool-usage statistics that show how almost overnight, attendance at public pools after desegregation dropped by as much as 90 percent in some cities. Millions of white Americans consciously made the choice that if this pool is going to be open to black Americans I am not going to swim at it. Retreating to private pools also meant that the frequent and sustained interactions that had occurred between middle-class and working-class Americans at municipal pools dwindled.

"Robert Putnam's famous account of the collapse of community life in America in Bowling Alone (2000) is in large part a celebration of the civic engagement of Tom Brokaw's so-called "Greatest Generation." But it was precisely this "Greatest Generation" that chose not to swim with black Americans. It was this same "Greatest Generation" that began the trend of building private-club and backyard pools, which seems to me a most profound act of civic disengagement. After all, this was not only an abandonment of public space but also a turn away from public life. In this way, I disagree with Putnam's claim that racial prejudice and racial desegregation were not causes of Americans' growing civic disengagement.

"If the history of pools shows us anything, it's that face-to-face contact is critical for establishing social bonds. Face to face means that there are certain personal and social controls operating that cause people to be very conscious about how they are presenting themselves and how other people are presenting themselves to them. It really enhances the interaction. Now we have these social-networking sites online that foster non-face-to-face interaction, and you don't have that social context. I don't think online interaction fosters the same sense of empathy and understanding and commitment that occurs when you are interacting with someone physically in a public space. An important distinction between contact through the Internet and contact in person at a pool is that, in person, people have to take social convention into account, which reinforces basic standards of civility."

It's too bad content like this isn't available directly from the website. What important research.

Dance, Almodovar, and the Joy Bus.

Yesterday tango started up again. Class is held in the same building as the campus film center, and they've been having a Tuesday night Almodovar series, so just at the time that class was getting out, the audience got done watching "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" was also getting out, and I saw like every hispanic on campus I know pouring out of the auditorium -- Mexican, Spanish, you name it. They all seemed pretty happy, too.

This morning I woke up and looked out my window and saw "The Joy Bus", a white van owned by a church a few streets north of me that's painted over with slogans and has on the back, "FOLLOW ME TO THE ONE TRUE CHURCH!"

More from Heaven's Harlots: Monte Carlo days.

From Miriam Williams's Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult, pp. 144-145:

It is not possible for me to list all the men that I went to bed with during this time. Much later, when I was out of the Family and trying to get rid of what I thought were ghosts, a Christian pastor told me to name each man I had been with, or visualize him, and then cast him out of me. I found that it was not only impossible, but tiring and depressing, and I abandoned the practice of casting out demons as soon as I arrived at the Monte Carlo days in my mind. I have never regretted the decision to abandon that techinique for ridding oneself of recollections, for I found it guilt producing and totally in conflict with what I really felt for these men at the time. They were not demons, or even bad spirits that possessed me; in fact, if I believed in possession at all (which I'm not sure I do), I possessed these men with a good spirit. What I did was *in* love and *for* love, and I think that faith is what protected me from the horrors and degradation that I witnessed in all the high-class call girls whom I met during that period of time...

The men I was with were not aware of my mission, however , and they each reacted differently. Nevertheless, I could group these men into the following categories:

(1) those who simply made use of the free sex (these were the men I have generally forgotten).

(2) those who genuinely liked me or who felt a romantic inclination toward me (these are the ones I remember best).

(3) those who found my spiritual message sexually stimulating (these were the ones I recall with pity or disappointment).

(4) those few who fell sadly in love with me but not the Family.

More to come, later. I also ordered for the main library on campus the memoirs of the eldest daughter of the founder of the Children of God, who left the movement, and the memoirs of the first anti-cult bounty hunter in the U.S., a tough evangelical nicknamed "Black Thunder" (though the latter they decided not to order since it's easily available from area libraries).

Black card games.

My friend who works the main desk of the library was telling me last night how she and her sisters playing "bidwhiz" on Monday nights, and after a couple times of my being like, "What?", she slowly enunciated and was like, "Bid whist," which she told me is a black card game. She says she once met this white guy who could play it, and she told him, "You got to be either in prison or in the service," and it turns out that he had served in the army, and that's where some black guys had taught him bid whist.

This got me thinking, too, of how my one (white) grandmother would play canasta, and I play euchre. Are those white games, I wonder?

My Friday, My Saturday.

Karaoke at that one place blew hard. They had neon signs up proclaiming the city's best karaoke -- if they have to advertise it, I highly doubt it's the city's best karaoke -- and most everything sucked a lot. The room was long and the karaoke was down on one end, so no one would listen, and the song book was highly uneven, though thick, and the atmosphere was kind of tiki bar/frat bar, though with a prominent few showoffs. I would have sung "Blue Velvet", but I couldn't remember the bridge, and the rest of the stuff I was thinking of -- "Nothing but a Heartache", "Believe Me", and a couple other things I'm thinking of right now -- they didn't have, and the wait for a song was over an hour (this despite that some people they were letting go twice already, doing it based on order of slips and not the more-democratic 'everyone goes once before anyone can go twice' style of karaoke hosting I love and respect!), so I just grabbed a friend and ended up leaving. The worst part was that usually no one is up for going out for karaoke, and like eight people I invited all showed up, so I felt really guilty for all the awfulness and blowing hard, since I had gotten them involved in it, though since there was too much inertia to move the group, I had no compunction about cutting my losses and leaving them to cut their own throats and go stew in the awfulness more.

On Saturday at the local CVS I complimented the black counterwoman on her vintage Obama button, which she wore above this other button that had a minimalist cartoon cross on it and written around it the motto "TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED!" She said that years ago she gave twenty cents to a homeless man who came in the store to buy something and was short of change, and he was so thankful, he was like, "I have to give you something," and he pulled out an Obama button and gave it to her, which she's kept in her jewelry drawer ever since. She said she took it out a few months ago and started wearing it for the presidential campaign, but then she lost it somewhere in the store and it hadn't turned up in Lost and Found, so she was bummed, but then one day when she was telling her one coworker that doesn't work too often about how she's been trying to support Obama, her coworker was like, "Wait, let me give you this," and she pulled out from her coat pocket the very same Obama pin the lady had lost, and told her that she had found it on the floor of the store and had been wearing it on and off, but she should wear it since she works the counter more often and more people will see it if she wears it and not her. Personally, I think I liked the "TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED!" button a little bit more than the vintage Obama button, though they were both cool.

At the coffee shop I then went to to relax and drink some coffee and read some more of "Heaven's Harlots" before heading off grocery shopping, and since the place was mega-crowded, I ended up sharing a table with this chic foreign-looking girl in her mid-30s who had a fur-lined coat and thin sunglasses with neon green lenses. The girl, it turns out, was Turkish, and a friend of hers dropped by and offered me a piece of Turkish delight -- he keeps a box in his pocket on cold days to carry around with him since every time he puts his hand in his coat pocket he finds the box there and ends up thinking of Turkey and feeling warmer -- and after he left, we talked some, and it turns out that she's a marathon runner who came back after a leave of absence to finish up her history dissertation despite this inconsistent barrage of shit from her advisor. I suggested she harness the power of positive thinking and put up a sign saying "I am calm and focused" on her bathroom mirror so she sees it every morning, and by the time she left, she said she was totally going to go home and do it. I also suggested that she start wearing a pendant to ward off the evil eye, since she's been getting bad vibes from the main library on campus, and she was slightly less enthused about that idea, though she' s considering it, especially since her mom's been harrassing her lately to actually wear her evil eye pendant that she had given her and not just leave it pinned to the hallway wall facing the front door of her apartment so it confronts everyone who walks in and keeps her apartment safe.

After that when I went to the grocery store, the place was packed since the huge local grocery store just closed up and it's going to be a month until the replacement tenant moves in. The lines were forever, though I wasn't pissed -- what can you do, after all? -- and when I was up close towards the front of the line, I started looking at the persimmons nestled in boxes off to my right, and so in looking for a good one, I then turned to the mom-type woman in line behind me, who was in her late 30s with Lebanese coloring, a tasteful quilted black jacket, and a shoulder-length haircut carefully coiffed to look natural, and asked her if she knew how much they cost.

"Hmm," she was like. "I don't see the sign up."

"Neither do I," I was like. "I'm pretty curious to try one, though; I've never had one."

"To tell you the truth," she was like, "I've never tried one, either."

I then put a little joking tone in my voice and was like, mock-seriously, "I need a little more excitment in my life, I guess it's time for a persimmon." She laughed a little bit, slyly, and then reading off the advertising on the persimmon box, I was like, "You know, they're Nature's Candy, after all"

She looked at the box, too, then looked in my eyes and said slowly, also mock-seriously, "Children love them."

"They're high in anti-oxidants," I was like, too, and then improvising a little bit, I added, "Just like blueberries."

She didn't know what to say next since we had run out of taglines from the box, and since it was getting a little intense since she was still looking at me intensely, a fire behing her eyes, I kind of turned forward back into line, which sort of ended the conversation abruptly. When I left, she tapped my shoulder and was like, "Enjoy your persimmon," and gave a little upward nod while smiling to say goodbye.

That night I went to go see a documentary about the making of a Steinway piano. The theater was surprisingly packed, and before the movie began the people behind me were in their 40s were talking a bit loudly and the woman was saying something to her male friend about how she was surprised you could go to Florence and not see something (I missed what) and how that sort of thing happens a lot and she just kept going on and on and on, and since I needed to fart, I did so into my seat, and luckily it was quiet and no one heard it, but unfortunately it wasn't smelly at all, so I don't think her and her friend noticed it. During the film itself when the Steinway workers were going on and on about hand-craftmanship and how it's essential for pianos and no one does it like that anymore and then various pianists were talking about each instrument as an individual that you had to make music with, the crowd kept spontaneously being like, "Yes, yes!" and "Mmm hmmm" and "That's right!" just like in a black church, only they were a little bit more restrained in their outbursts and none of them were black, but rather just a bunch of withered old white aesthetes who tend to wear a lot of black. I really wish I could have farted more, but somehow I just didn't have it in me; I really wanted to, but somehow what I had eaten earlier had only given me enough power to summon that one, not-at-all stinky fart that I couldn't even upset the couple behind me with. I guess that's luck for you, as they say; next time I go to a documentary like that I'll have to plan ahead and eat half-cooked lentils beforehand.