Visit Problems

Sunny's bio grandma -- I should really give her a blog nickname, I'll use NN for now -- is a very nice person, but rather difficult to talk with, as I've mentioned before.

NN was originally going to visit us in the last week of August.  She's never left her home state before and is terrified of flying.  Her first plan was to drive.  Then she had another plan to go in September instead along with a friend of hers who could do the driving.  Now the friend has been laid off and can't take the trip.  So she's going to see the doctor to see if she can fly... no, she's just going to get into the car and drive by herself... no, she's going to follow my suggestion and take the train... no, she's just going to get in the car and tough it out and keep driving and Jesus will protect her...

I just keep responding to all this with short emails: "I'm sure whatever you decide is fine!  Hope to see you soon!"

My mother calls her, sympathetically, "a bit of a lost soul". NN has had a lot of traumatic things happen in her family, but I've seen other people get up and keep going from them, whereas she seems to have retreated from life and wrapped herself up in grief.  My mother is ten years older than her, but looks ten years younger, is ten times more active and ten times less concerned about her age.

We talked about it the other night and decided that there was a large possibility NN would never come at all.  So maybe in the next email I need to figure some way to give her a graceful out.  I'm upset more on Sunny's behalf than my own, because he's been looking forward to her visit.

We might be visiting there anyway later in the year.

A Japanese Man Who is Even More Eccentric than My Dad

This video is an absolute must-watch.  He sort of reminds me of Billy Corgan, something about the forehead...

The Kennedy Bill?

A message from Stephanie Taylor at BoldProgressives.org:

Thanks for signing our petition asking the Senate to pass "The Kennedy Bill" for health care reform. We'll deliver all signatures next Monday to Senate offices in Washington DC. In the meantime, can you share with your friends?

If you're on Facebook, click here to share.

If you're on Twitter, click to automatically Tweet this message: Tell senators: Pass "The Kennedy Bill" and nothing less http://bit.ly/LN5bb @BoldProgressive #Kennedy #hc09

Or simply forward the below email to your friends.

Thanks for being a bold progressive,
--Stephanie Taylor, PCCC co-founder

---

Hi. I just signed this petition to honor Ted Kennedy, which will be delivered to senators on Monday:

"Ted Kennedy was a courageous champion for health care reform his entire life. In his honor, name the reform bill that passed Kennedy's health committee 'The Kennedy Bill' -- then pass it, and nothing less, through the Senate."

Kennedy's bill includes a public health insurance option, and it would be an honor to Kennedy's memory if it passed the Senate. Will you sign the petition? You can sign here.
Thanks.

I hope this happens.  Kennedy would have wanted his death to help pass healthcare reform.

Today I thought about the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which Kennedy supported, that destroyed the old system of racist, anti-Semitic immigration quotas.  Without it, American society today would not be as enriched with diversity.  And my father would not have his green card.  That's just one of the many good things Kennedy accomplished. 

The End of Our Long Back-to-School Nightmare?

Sunny had a five-star day yesterday, the first one he's had since beginning the behavior chart. I think it's also the first time he got the "No Backtalking" star. To clarify, we define backtalk as saying "NO I WON'T" when asked to do something like brush his teeth or set the table. Light arguing and bargaining attempts don't count as backtalk.

We gave him a ton of praise and lots of well wishes that he could earn the same number of the stars today.

I think his ability to bring himself back down from a rage has improved. I had to hold him down on Sunday night, but I was able to let him back up again after only half a minute of holding. The difference was that as soon as I had him down, instead of raging and screaming, he took a series of long, deep breaths.

Ojiichan arrived on Monday, and will be staying with us for the next two weeks. He brought Sunny a new Hawaiian suit (matching shirt and shorts in a loud polyester flower print) for Sunny's Hawaiian suit collection. Sunny loves these suits, and I can't stress enough how striking he looks in them!

We've signed Sunny up for afterschool care. He likes it, and it gives Guy a nice break. Instead of picking up Sunny at 3pm, he's got a couple extra hours to get stuff done. I think between that and our new no-homework-at-home regime, we'll have the structure that Sunny needs. His behavior often falls apart on the weekends when he gets bored, so that's something we need to work on more. Soon enough we're going to have structure up the wazoo. Weekdays: chess club, gymn lessons, tutoring, therapy. Weekend: swimming and/or hip-hop dance lessons, church.

Also, I just had a great conversation with my cousin. She called me up and we talked about some of the communication problems we've been having. Her issue was that my mother had told her that we had been talking about her situation, so my cousin wanted to hear what I had to say directly. So I cleared everything up... I told her, I would love to have told her these things directly, in fact that would be my usual mode, but I didn't want to upset her because I knew she was very sensitive about being judged, and I didn't want to make her feel worse, but if she was ready to hear, I was ready to talk. And I was just concerned she was spending too much time wrapped up in other peoples' problems instead of working on her own.

She told me she didn't see it that way: she could detach enough from the drama, and her circle of friends from Alanon was really supportive, and her sponsor didn't encourage codependency, and so on. She was happy and felt like she was finally starting to get a grip on her life. But she could see why my mother and I might think the way we did. I responded saying that the fact that we were even having this conversation showed that she was doing really well.

I didn't say this, but I still don't agree 100% with the path she's on. But it's her path, and if she's doing well on it, great. I totally meant what I said about her conversation with me showing that she's improving in confidence.

I explained to her that I'm a really blunt, judgemental person, and to look at how often I tell other family members what to do. I just gave my father a lecture last night for drinking a glass of wine... what did he think he was doing, giving himself cancer! I'll often tell people, you should do such and such. But if they don't do it, or tell me to butt out, I don't get mad. I'm judgemental but I'm not a control freak.

She says she wants to be able to talk more, without any awkward silence between us. So I'll open up more, and she'll tell me what her boundaries are instead of assuming that I can read her mind. I told her that's a great idea and I'd be happy to do that.

She also told me she wasn't angry about my decision not to let her drive Sunny. She was mad at the situation, and her car crashes, but not mad at me. I was relieved.

Anyway, I feel like we've made a breakthrough in our relationship, and I'm very happy about that.

The War Against the Chtorr! Review!

Since my review of The Steel Remains seemed to get a good reaction, I'll review another piece of interesting, sexually innovative, ultraviolent fiction that readers here might not have encountered otherwise.

There are four War Against the Chtorr books: A Day for Damnation, A Matter for Men, A Rage for Revenge and A Season for Slaughter. They came out in the 1980s, and I believe they're all currently out of print. However, they were fairly popular when published, so used copies are easy to find from Amazon.com or other sources.

I read two of these books when I was much younger. I thought they were great, but really disturbing. Recently, I decided to hunt down and read or reread all four of them. That's what I've been doing this last weekend instead of reading The Nurtured Heart (I could not imagine a more diametrically opposed book!) Though, oddly enough, there is a major adoption connection.

David Gerrold, the author of the War Against the Chtorr books, is perhaps best known as the screenwriter of the classic "Trouble with Tribbles" Star Trek episode. He's had a long involvement with Star Trek. His original science fiction is uneven, not consistently bestselling, but often shockingly good. He's won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In a total departure from his usual genre work, he recently published a quasi-memoir called The Martian Child, an account of adopting an older special needs child from the foster care system, describing his experiences as a single gay adoptive father.

I respect David Gerrold for his talent and tenacity. He deserves some kind of lifetime achievement medal, perhaps entitled "Heroic Resistance in the Face of Unending Multimedia Homophobia". His creative output has been subjected to decades of de-gaying. For example, in 1987, Gene Roddenberry had promised to break the final social frontier and actually have gay people in the Star Trek universe. He asked David Gerrold to come back and write a gay-themed episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gerrold wrote one. Then everyone chickened out and decided not to produce it. Gerrold quit in protest. Here's a good summary of the depressing controversy.

In 2007, The Martian Child was made into a movie starring a John Cusack. And they turned the father heterosexual. How insulting! The movie still wasn't a box-office success. I have not seen nor read The Martian Child, but after doing this research, I think I'll go ahead and order the book.

Back to the Chtorr. These books, on first glance, appear to be run-of-the-mill military science fiction. Space marine stuff. I normally cannot stand this subgenre of science fiction; it's only one step above video game novelizations in terms of formulaic dreariness. In fact, there's probably a lot of overlap between military science fiction and video games and video game novelizations. The Chtorr book covers feature space mariney people with big guns shooting at giant caterpillars, cheesy alliterative titles and a surplus of exclamation points. If you're serious about good science fiction, however, you might want to give them a second look.

The premise of the series is that the Earth is being colonized by alien lifeforms. There are no humanoids in spaceships involved. Instead, the invasion happens from the bottom up, starting at the unicellular level. Alien spores are presumed to have ridden in on meteorites. The first sign is a wave of plagues that kills three-quarters of humanity. The survivors have to deal with ecological infestations of increasing complexity and virulence. The most deadly life form is the Chtorran gastropede or "worm", an only semi-intelligent, huge, toothy caterpillar-looking monster that likes to eat its prey alive. As someone who has read a lot of armchair evolutionary biology (mainly Gould and Dawkins) the biological/ecological imagination of the series seems convincing and compelling to me, though a real biologist would probably find a ton of impossibilities.

The book is told from the point of view of Jim McCarthy, a young man who starts off the first book as part of an army group trying to research an infested area. Jim would have been in college studying biology if national emergencies hadn't funneled everyone his age into the army.

The infestation presents a scientific, economic and political puzzle as much as a military one. How is it possible to attack the Chtorrans without also destroying the native Earth ecology? In a political climate where American imperialism is distrusted by all other nations, how is the world going to form the necessary cooperative efforts? Since 75% of the world has died off, and there are a lot of commodities lying around waiting to be reclaimed, what happens to inflation? The series is marked by a refusal to paper over any of these problems in order to get the plot moving faster.

But the plot does move fast. Really fast. There's a ton of action. The worms are scary. They are not an absolute evil; in fact, the scientific component of the plot relies on trying to understand their unique motivations. By the second book, we're introduced to humans who are capable of cooperating with the worms, and we start to put the ecological puzzle pieces together, and things get really scary from that point.

Jim McCarthy is always getting into horrendously dangerous situations and then fighting his way out using incredible bravery and resourcefulness. But in all other areas of life, he's a hot mess. He's massively insecure about his sexuality. He's prone to fits of rage and despair, and when he can't take it anymore, he gets really high, and then he passes out. Every fifty pages or so he screams, collapses into sobbing, or faints, in reaction to miscellaneous (often self-inflicted) emotional trauma. His main love interest (he's bisexual) is his commanding officer, a woman who's taller than him, older than him and vocal in her irritation about having to act as his mother figure. He's a rather unique hero for a fast-paced military science fiction story, to say the least.

The third book, A Rage for Revenge, is the most disturbing, because a major theme involves traumatized children and the horrible things that can happen to them. After I finished rereading it I did some research on it and stumbled across a very illuminating comment by Gerrold.

Hanley: Now, what year did you take the EST training?
Gerrold: May of ‘81.
Hanley: And what impact did that have on your writing?
Gerrold: The most immediate impact was I got the definition of bullshit which is anything that you use to avoid accountability. So it’s rationalization and lies and excuses and justification and explanation. I was struggling with the Chtorr at that time, and I went through the manuscript with a big black marker and crossed off every sentence that was an explanation or a justification or a rationalization, every sentence that wasn’t experiential. And the book got cut way, way down, but what was left was really compelling reading. So right there I got a very clear sense of communication – that it’s about creating an authentic experience. I wanted people to feel it. I wanted them to experience it. So the most immediate effect was what I now call experiential writing. In the process of writing, I am creating experience. First, I create experience for myself then I find the words that would evoke it for the readers.

And that brings us to the est. Oh boy. For anyone who doesn't know what est is, I would suggest reading through these accounts at cult watch site rickross.com, starting with this 1975 article, "We're Gonna Tear You Down and Put You Back Together". Or you could just read A Rage for Revenge. In a special foreword to the book, Gerrold basically says, "yes, this book is didactic, but I swear, it's not est." It's est. The est makes it almost unreadable. However, I could not imagine the book without it. Est for these books is like libertarianism was for Heinlein. Heinlein and his approach to fictional didacticism were certainly a huge influence.

I agree with Gerrold that the est-inspired editing does make for really compelling reading. The book covers some incredibly disturbing ground: everything from the looming probable death of the entire human race to a situation in which several different authority figures articulately advocate for child sexual abuse (I almost stopped reading at this point). And these things are filtered through the perspective of a main character who's basically a walking emotional open wound. It's almost dizzying in its intensity.

Maybe it will be easier to describe if I draw a comparison. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very comparable book in terms of postapocalyptic bleakness, even though it's stocked in a totally different section of the bookstore. The author does not tell us what we're supposed to be feeling, and most of the time, the characters don't even tell us what they're feeling. It's show-not-tell, which is the most basic and primal way (though not the only one) to create an awesome story. However, the moral compass of the book is still very strong, and we, the readers, always know where we stand, what we should think, who we should judge. The boy says "we're carrying the light". This brief piece of dialogue, repeated just a few times, orients us symbolically and morally. I don't want to give away the ending, so I'll just say that by a certain point, I think it's obvious to the reader that no matter whether the boy lives or dies, he'll have won, because he represents everything that's good in humanity.

We don't get that kind of moral compass in the Chtorr books.

There are a lot of things in these books that struck me as racist, sexist, even homophobic, and hateful towards disabled people, but I'm not sure how much of that is because it's filtered through the experience of an unreliable narrator. There's little to no authorial guidance. I don't think Gerrold pulls this off successfully all the time. For example, halfway through the series he decides to make Jim McCarthy multiracial, though it seems to have almost no connection to the plot other than an excuse to use certain racial slurs. At many points, it's hard to tell whether the really objectionable stuff is there as an oversight, or if it's there on purpose, in order to bring out some kind of intense but unpleasant reaction.

Here's a fairly successful example from the second book. Jim McCarthy is taking a break between assignments. A beautiful "Chinese" woman stares at him in a restaurant and comes to sit next to him. He says something to effect of "wow, I thought all Chinese women were kind of submissive and shy -- I guess you're not!" At this point, as the reader, I'm getting angry. Stupid yellow fever... blech.

The woman reveals that she's actually hosting the downloaded consciousness of McCarthy's ex-boyfriend, Ted.

They go off to her apartment. Ted explains that in his telepathic group (it's digitally-based telepathy, not the paranormal kind) he's part of a "pool" that takes over bodies to run important assignments. He loves being in the pool, describes the process of moving from body to body, and says has no attachment left to his original body. Presumably, someone else is using it, but he doesn't care who.

Jim McCarthy then has mind-blowing sex with Ted in the body of the "Oriental Goddess". But when he wakes up, Ted is gone, and the Asian woman, who looks "mean" now, not beautiful, tells him to get out so she can take a shower, because she feels dirty. Jim asks her why she's mad, since according to Ted, she's a telepath who's transcended identity and attachment to the physical body. She says, "that's what some of you boys like to think... just get out."

I think this episode really reinforced the problematic nature of relying on Jim's experience in order to make sense of the post-Chtorr-infested world.

The really weird part is that the est-related didacticism of the books inspired this kind of experiential writing, but it also works directly against it. When Gerrold gets excited about making some point about human psychology and "commitment" and "responsibility" and "accountability", his ability to write dialogue completely flies out the window. Every lecture given by every person in the books (and there are many lectures) is given in the exact same voice as every other lecture. All of a sudden you're removed from an emotion-soaked experience into an auditorium where someone is dryly barking some psychobabble about your mental processes. It's maddening.

At this point, I should probably note that the fifth book in the series should have been published 20 years ago. Gerrold is still trying to finish it up. If you go to Amazon reviews for any of the Chtorr books, half the entries are something like "I HATE YOUR GUTS, GERROLD YOU &$#@! THERE IS A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL WAITING FOR YOU, FINISH THE NEXT BOOK OR I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FEED YOU TO THE WORMS!!!". I was rather taken aback. I mean, I'd like to see a fifth book too, but I'm not personally angry at Gerrold. He says he's been very busy being a dad and getting through his son's rough adolescence, and as someone who is in a similar situation, I sympathize 100%.

To sum it up, reading the War Against the Chtorr series is like zooming down a highway at full speed, adrenaline pumping, driving a fast, powerful, complicated race car. But the car has a major steering problem and you constantly have to jerk the wheel to stay on the road. Then at random intervals, a policeman pulls you over, waves a gun in your face and gives you a lecture about accountability, then lets you back on the highway. And you know in advance that the highway ends in a pile of dirt with an "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" sign sticking out of it.

Therapy

Therapy went fairly well this week. We're finally convinced enough to try these "Progressive Relaxation" exercises that the therapist has recommended as a daily routine.

Sunny is still up and down. His behavior was great for most of the day yesterday, but it went downhill at reading time. We'll see how his weekly behavior report at school goes today.

I got The Nurtured Heart book in the mail yesterday and began reading some of it. I really like the video game metaphor, especially since Sunny is so strongly motivated by video games.

Guy is feeling much better. In contrast, I was really irritated with Sunny yesterday, and had to work hard not to be peevish.

Disgusting Question

How do I get Sunny to stop booger-eating in public?

We've tried getting him a tissue. We've tried humor. "Do you want salt and pepper on that?"

He doesn't do it when he knows other kids will make fun of him, but he still does it in front of us.

Last month Guy and Sunny were driving home from school, and Guy stopped the car at a red light. A totally random woman in the car next to them rolled down her window and provided some loud commentary. "EWWWW, THAT KID GONNA EAT HIS BOOGER, EWWW, HE ATE IT, LOOK HE ATE HIS BOOGER!" Sunny was very embarrassed and stopped doing it... for a week.

When I Google "how to stop kids from eating boogers" all I get is Yahoo! Answers results. That's the site on the internet where intelligence goes to die... I'd probably get better advice asking my dog than by going to Yahoo! Answers.

Anyone know what happened to Baggage and Bug?

I just remembered I haven't seen anything new from Baggage's blog in a while. I went to baggageandbug.com and found the site was dead :-(

I hope she is doing OK.

Nazi Insult Comeback

As someone who was recently called a Nazi at a townhall meeting, watching this clip really made my day. Go Barney!

Horrendous Day Yesterday

This back to school transition sure has been tough.

Monday, the start of the second week and the first day with homework, Sunny did fairly well. He earned stars for both Doing Homework Nicely and Reading Nicely.

Yesterday, at 4pm, I got a panicked call from Guy. Sunny was screaming in the background. He'd been asked to write just one sentence, and was having a total meltdown. I tried talking to him on the phone but he just kept repeating that his feelings were hurt because dad called him a three-year-old, cry, scream, cry, cry, cry. I tried to talk Guy down, then I called my mother, who was able to come over.

Guy managed to calm both of them down a little bit. Then, once my mom was there, they tried the homework again. More crying and screaming. He eventually did it after about an hour and a half of emotional storming. At least there wasn't any hitting, although he did call Guy a bad name.

He was allowed to go out and play for a bit afterwords. Then his friend came and told us that Sunny had just called him a bad name. His friend is a LOT more honest than Sunny, so Guy believed him. Sunny was grounded from playing outside for the rest of the day, and more screaming of course resulted.

When I got home, things were better for a while. I had some quiet time with Sunny, just lying together with him in the bedroom with the lights low, and that calmed him down a lot. I cooked us dinner, and then Sunny watched a video. I carefully outlined what we would be reading tonight, and reminded him that he had lost almost all his stars for today, but he still had a chance to earn his Reading Nicely star.

It was not to be. We ended up with more crying, screaming and holding down in the hallway. I was prepared to draw the line with reading. Last week he had five out of six stars for Reading Nicely, so I know he can do it. At one point he said he was done... if I let him hold the book, he would read it. I gave it to him. He bashed me in the face with it (I'm OK). I had to hold him down for a while longer. Finally, once he was all raged out, he read the book. It took just a few minutes. Then I put him to bed.

Guy was doing well for a while with the fits, but he seems to have reverted, and did not keep control of his temper when it came to yelling. He's very depressed and demoralized.

Homework was a big issue last school year, especially anything having to do with writing. If he actually sits down and does his weekly homework packet, he would do the whole thing in fifteen minutes, but there's always some kind of emotional problem. A bad homework session goes like this: half an hour of we're not helping him enough, it's too hard, cry, we're helping him too much, he knows how to do it already, scream, cry, crawl around banging his head on the carpet, throw the pencil, scream, cry, attempt to bargain, cry some more, then three minutes of actually doing the homework, finished.

I totally gave up doing homework with Sunny because he reacted very badly to my help. Guy was able to help him through it with much less storming. But if that's changed, "holding the line" on homework will not be tenable anymore. It would make all of us too miserable and hurt our relationships.

I'm planning on holding the line on reading before bedtime. But I came up with a better solution for homework.

One potential solution would be just not doing it and letting him take the consequence. Another would be to try having "no homework" written into his 504 plan. I decided to just throw money at the problem instead. Thank goodness for our generous adoption subsidy! So I've added extra time to his weekly tutoring session, and starting next week, he's going to do all his homework during that time. His tutor charges $35 an hour, but she's an ADHD specialist and boy is she worth every penny. She can get him to do anything learning related using a magical combination of positive feedback, distraction, small food bribes and firmness. She asked me yesterday if I had any special requests about anything that she shouldn't give him during a session, and I told her, "at this point, I don't care if you give him a pink pony!"

There will definitely be a lot to talk about at therapy tomorrow.

Dekalb School Blog Charges Black Racism

I just read an interesting post at the Dekalb County School Watch: SPLOST Spending for High Schools is Racially Imbalanced. The racial imbalance is supposedly black people denying money to whites and Hispanics.

I don’t know if people in south DeKalb know or realize this, but schools in north DeKalb are totally integrated and highly diverse. Conversely, schools in south DeKalb are almost completely homogenous as they are nearly 100% African-American. Ironically, north-end schools that are integrated have been ignored as far as repairs, additions and remodeling with SPLOST dollars, except Druid Hills - which has received some remodeling to their nearly 100 year old facility - and Tucker High School, which is being torn down and completely rebuilt - but then again, Tucker is 72% African-American. That is the only school in the north end of the county to be given attention beyond the standard auditorium/career tech packages promised, some even drawn, but not yet built. Chamblee, Lakeside, Cross Keys and Dunwoody still wait for their share of SPLOST construction. Lakeside at least has architectural drawings, but those have taken years to develop. Dunwoody and Chamblee have heard rumblings, but seen no action whatsoever. Cross Keys, built in 1958, is a disaster of a building and was apparently given all of the equipment and students from the torn down HS of Technology North - but no guidance or program director. Ironically, when we voted for SPLOST 3, Cross Keys was #2 on the list of priorities - just after SPLOST 2 carry over - and well before Tucker HS.

Yes, this post is interesting, but also chock-full of racist resentment. I've been subscribing to this blog for a few months in the hope that it would actually cover real issues over ALL Dekalb's schools, but I guess not. It's another "let South Dekalb rot" person. I've unsubscribed.

I agree on one point. Cross Keys High, which I think is the only predominantly Hispanic high school in Dekalb, has been royally screwed. Most of the Latino population in Atlanta are very new arrivals and need extra language services and supports that are just not being provided. For example, I met one woman, a Mexican immigrant, who was totally unaware that her son with a learning disability had the right to an IEP.

The educational power structure in Atlanta consists of entrenched elite white minority interests contending with newer-to-power elite black majority interests. Latinos are not even at the table yet.

Beyond the Cross Keys point, which I'll grant, all the statistics and SPLOST funding breakdowns simply obscure the fact that those high schools in South Dekalb are TERRIBLE, and the African-American parents are very, very unhappy with them.

So what if the whiter North Dekalb schools don't have a newer pool? Most South Dekalb parents would LOVE to be able get their kids into Dunwoody or Druid Hills. In fact, one of the main reasons those schools are so overcrowded is that people move to those areas in order to enroll their kids in school there.

Last year the (black) superintendent eliminated paid busing to charter, magnet, theme or out-of-neighborhood schools, as a cost-saving measure, so South Dekalb parents now have even less options for their kids to receive a quality education.

If real reform was carried out, and South Dekalb schools improved, there would be no imbalance. However, I doubt that the blogger wants to see that happen.

The serious problems in the Dekalb County School System are not rooted in reverse racism. It's an easy direction to point the finger, though. "Those minorities -- they take and take and just keep asking for more!" And if Latinos didn't happen to be convenient to the argument, they would probably be lumped in with African-Americans.

If these people are not willing to pull together with everyone else in the county, I wish they would just leave Dekalb and move to South Carolina or Cobb County or something.

I also really hate the way they appropriate the word "diversity". South Dekalb schools would be a lot more diverse if it wasn't for white flight. And Clarkston High School, one of the schools on the blog's hit list, is probably the most diverse school in the system. It's listed as 80% black, but because of its location at the center of the refugee community, that figure covers an wide array of African countries as well as native U.S. African-Americans. The other 20% is also incredibly diverse. Clarkston is an underfunded, dangerous school with substandard education known for warehousing refugee kids and graduating functionally illiterate students. I would definitely not want my son going there. But according to the blog, Clarkston gets more money than its benighted students deserve... how dare they have a new pool!

Mad at Obama

I was listening to the Countdown podcast this morning covering how Obama is backtracking on the public option for healthcare reform. This makes me so mad. In fact, I was so mad I made several wrong turns and was almost late to work. I'm to the left of Obama on pretty much everything, but I'm also a pragmatist, so I knew he was going to present only a moderate degree of improvement over Bush in areas like foreign policy and immigration and gay rights. But I expected him to fight harder over healthcare.

Hank Johnson is one of the Reps who says he is determined to vote against any bill that does not include a public option. I agree with that. The line has to be held somewhere. We've already compromised and compromised to the point that even one step more is going to mean defeat.

Restraint Addendum

In case anyone surfs in looking for restraint info based on the last post... oh boy, this is a dangerous subject.

There's a lot of controversy about the basket hold, besides the problem that I listed. If it's performed the wrong way, it could asphyxiate a child:

No Charges To Be Filed In Boy's "Basket Hold" Death
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
February 28, 2006

INGRAM, TEXAS--Criminal charges will not be filed in connection to the death of a 12-year-old boy who died after being physically restrained at a residential treatment center.

A Kerr County grand jury on February 17 found no evidence of a crime in the December 4 death of Christening "Mikie" Garcia at Star Ranch.

The Kerryville Daily Times reported that Garcia, an "emotionally disturbed" youth, died after a worker restrained the boy with his arms across his chest and his hands held behind him, in what is called a "basket hold".

The Travis County Medical Examiner had ruled Garcia's death was the result of "suffocation during physical restraint."

Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer had said the boy had been placed in "time out" after refusing to obey staff orders, but that he started banging his own head against a concrete sidewalk, "so they had to restrain him."

The "experienced" staff member, whose name has not been disclosed, then held Garcia until he stopped breathing. Attempts to resuscitate the boy were unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

There are also a fair number of cases in which children held in face-down restraint positions suffocated to death.

I'm horrified and scared by these stories. Whenever we hold down Sunny, we never do anything that could obstruct his breathing, or place pressure on his chest or stomach.

It's such a depressing subject. We were led to believe in class that "restraint is something you can rely on too much" and you should be able to "defuse the situation" first. Not being able to defuse the situation does make me feel like a failure. So I wish they had been a little more realistic on this point, and taught us good restraint technique.

However, it's good to keep in mind the principle that restraint can become a kind of addictive crutch. It starts to seem easier to go straight to Plan B instead of trying Plan A first. I hope we'll be able to phase it out soon. I really, really hate it.

Restraint Concerns: The Gruesome Details

Sunny asked me last week if he could take karate classes. He asks me this every so often. In light of his increased rate of fits recently, I had to laugh bitterly and say "hell no!" I mean, why would I pay money so he can get lessons on how to beat up his mom and dad? I'm not going to be compliant in my own ass-kicking.

I know the argument is that martial arts increases self-confidence and self-discipline. In our case, it's not a valid argument. We already have therapy appointments for self-discipline. And Sunny doesn't need any more self-confidence, he does quite well in that area already.

At the now-defunct blog Toots and Noodles (I hope the family is doing OK!) the mom probably regretted having her daughter take karate lessons, although they worked great for her son...

More bad

Toots blew up again yesterday. Was it because I told her I couldn't take her shopping when she wanted? Did she get mad when she was asked to leave her brother alone? Don't know.

Anyway, she grabbed several bottles of assorted medication, ran outside, danced around on the lawn, took some, scattered the rest of the pills across the lawn. Patrol cars and an ambulance were involved. Oh, she also used her karate skills to whack me and Lew in the head, groin and arms. Hard.

She's not in grave danger, but she spent the night in Pediatric Intensive Care.

More to come.

I don't think Sunny's issues are anywhere near as severe, but I like to keep the worst-case scenario in mind.

Sunny asked me when he would be old enough to take karate classes. That's a fair question. I told him I would put him in classes after he had a whole year of no violent fits with no hitting. That gave him some food for thought.

We used to take Sunny out to the car to have his fits, but now that they're shorter in duration, we've found it's easiest to just use a carpeted area inside the house. I use a restraint where he's laid on his back, and I sit with bended knees on either side of his upper thighs while holding his arms down.

I know a "basket hold" is most commonly used, but I don't see how that doesn't leave you wide open to painful backwards head-butting.

The other hold that works for us is sitting down next to him, on a couch or on a car set, in a looser hold, legs draped over his upper thighs so he can't kick out. That way, when he head-butts, he's doing it into a cushion. The only problem with this hold is that it's a bit of a struggle to keep him from biting our arms.

This Friday, Sunny had a bad fit, and I wasn't there. Guy called me as I was driving home to tell me about it. I don't think Guy handled it well, so we're talking about adjusting the "action plan" if it happens again when it's only him. I'm not blaming Guy. If it was just me alone, I might have screwed it up in a totally different way. We didn't have an argument. It was more of a breakdown and "lessons learned" session.

Guy ignored the initial stages of the fit for too long. Sunny had starting throwing things down the stairs. He should be tackled as soon as he throws the first thing. Ignoring the behavior for several minutes gave him an opportunity to build up his anger more and more, so that when the time came to restrain him, he was pumped full of adrenaline and fighting really hard. Then, once he engaged, Guy couldn't get him into restraint fast enough. Sunny bit him, then he had to hit Sunny on the arm to get him to stop biting. Luckily both of them are fine and don't have any noticeable bruises.

I couldn't figure out why Guy wasn't able to restrain him until yesterday, when Sunny had another fit (very short, thank goodness), and Guy watched the way I restrained him and figured out why he couldn't do it exactly the same way. He's just not flexible enough. He can't fully sit on Sunny's upper thighs. That gives Sunny enough wiggle room to work his knees out and lash out with his legs.

In the future Guy is going to have to stick to the couch/car seat hold.

We're also buying Sunny a punching bag and trying a new experiment: encouraging him to punch the bag in the early stages. Asking him to take a deep breath or go yell in a pillow is just not working at all. We've been asking him to do that for six months and he's never staved off a fit that way. I did not want to buy him a punching bag before, because I was worried it would teach him how to do more effective punches, but Guy thinks it's worth a try now, and I agree.

One thought I've been having lately, and it's very disturbing, is this one... what would have happened if Sunny had been adopted by a much older couple or single parent, or if they were physically less able, and could not restrain him? He probably would have been disrupted very quickly once the fits came on. Or perhaps medicated into a drooling stupor.

Looking back, I'm reasonably sure that there was a tacit conspiracy between his foster mom and the worker to downplay the potential violence of his tantrums during the matching process.

He's getting stronger every day, and we're getting older. I guess it's time to get serious about fitness, and maybe sign us up for an aikido or wrestling class.

I know this sounds awfully grim, but I'm just facing the facts. I see a lot of good progress based on the fact that his fits are getting shorter and shorter in duration.

Disaster!

Sunny just beat me at chess for the first time. All the hours I spent playing computer chess to stave off this moment... in vain. If I want to be competitive I'll actually have to study moves again.

I underestimated him and went for the quick checkmate in the beginning of the game. Mistake!

"The Miracle Noodle"

I happened to see a text ad in my Gmail this morning... "The Miracle Noodle Japanese Women Eat to Stay Thin." This stupid ad sparked my curiosity. I followed the link, and quickly discovered that the Miracle Noodle is nothing but vile konnyaku. Konnyaku has featured in this blog before. It tastes like solidified mucus.

I've never understood its popularity in Japan. My mother has a good theory, though: the Japanese palate is less sensitive to taste but more sensitive to texture. So Japanese cuisine features a lot of food items that don't taste like anything (or taste like solidified mucus) but add interesting or unique textures to the meal.

Go ahead and check them out if you're interested, I'm sure they're healthy... I eat a fairly low-carb diet, but I will definitely not be buying any Miracle Noodles.

David Scott Healthcare Town Hall Report

We went this morning, although we didn't stay for the whole meeting. It was very low key, like the Hank Johnson meeting, with no chaos beforehand. Supporters outnumbered protesters almost 10 to 1. I think the anti-reform side has lost some momentum. Also, many of them probably went to a competing rally today at Centennial Park.

From AJC.COM:
Rep. David Scott fielded dozens of questions from about 600 who showed up at Mundy's Mill High School. The event began at about 10:30 a.m. and Scott answered questions for more than two hours.

Although there were no major disruptions, both sides of the issue were clearly passionate about their views.

At times some audience members tried to shout down each other. And at other times questions or comments were answered with rounds of boos or chants of "Yes we can."

Check out my video!

Race, Choice and Consequence

Christine had a long, interesting comment on yesterday's post on race and identity. I'm not sure if we disagree or agree. I understand the point that race is not just what other people think you are.

I'd phrase it more this way. Race is first what other people think you are. If you think of the formation of racial identity as a process in time, the first step in that process is that other people assign you a race. You have absolutely no choice in this step. In the second step, you comprehend that other people are assigning you a race. It builds from there, and gets more complicated.

For people of color who are also members of a minority, the first step is often violent (emotionally), and the second step is wounding. It was definitely that way for me. I think of ethnicity and culture are positive forces that connect me to my family and my ancestry... but race was not. Race was initially a force that violently worked against my connection with ethnicity and culture. I tried to explain my Japanese heritage; they would say, "go back to China."

I later went through a third step (or maybe it was the fourth or fifth) where I accepted race and racial solidarity. In other words, since I'd been insulted for looking Chinese, I should be able to find allies among people who looked Chinese, whether they were actually Chinese-descended or not. That concept then extended to "people of color" consciousness: the idea that all people of color, while very different, have something in common because they're harmed by racial hierarchies.

I think white people experience race in a much less violent manner. Though if they have loved or greatly admired people who are not white in their lives, and they become aware that other people are treating them as "white", that second step -- the comprehension of racialization -- creates a sense of melancholy and loss. It means there is something huge that will forever separate them socially from their loved ones.

There is no choice in being initially assigned a race, but after that first step, choice does come into play. I'm reminded of Sunny's friend, the older boy with Asperger's syndrome. His mother is a light-skinned African-American woman, his father is white. Their son happens to look white. While he's brilliant on many levels, I don't know if he's ever going to have the social intelligence to form a racial identity. He can barely read basic emotions like happiness, sadness, irritation or interest. He can understand that people are having these emotions if they state them, in words, clearly, but then he forgets soon after. He's probably never going to make it past the second step, even though race has played a large role in his family's history and they talk about it freely.

One example: his mother told me that when her son went through an especially difficult period as a child -- head-banging, I think -- they were taking him to the emergency room almost every week. She stopped taking him because the hospital officials looked at her, a black mother, much more suspiciously than they looked at his white father. So his father had to become the one responsible for all emergency room visits... otherwise she was worried she'd be reported for child abuse and their son would be taken away.

I'm not sure if being unable to form a racial identity means he's lucky or unlucky!

Once people comprehend the range of their assigned identity, they can choose to present themselves more as certain race than another race, deny they have a race at all, or identify primarily as people of color, or identify primarily as multiracial. There's a lot of choice involved beyond the second stage. But making these kinds of choices presumes understanding what race is being assigned to you. You have to make it past the second stage.

There's a lot of choice, but once you start to consider the sacrifices involved in making these choices, the realistic range starts narrowing drastically. Here's a few examples.

• If a white person denies they have a race, in most environments, they don't face any penalty. Many people of color will be privately irritated with them, but not say anything about it to their face.


• If someone whose racial presentation is ambiguous, possibly white, chooses to present as white -- perhaps changing their hair, changing their name, etcetera -- they will gain benefits, especially economic benefits, but possibly also lose support among people of the race who feel rejected.
  
  (The name thing is especially huge. Because I happen to have such an Anglo name, I've gotten a lot of unknown benefits from that over my lifetime. If I'd had my dad's last name, which is almost unpronounceable in English, a small but consistent percentage of people would have thought, "I don't want to call on this girl, it's too embarrassing to have to try and pronounce this name" or "she probably doesn't speak English well, I'd better not take the risk." As long as contact is restricted to the phone and internet, I totally have white privilege... something that's in marked contrast to this fascinating account: a white woman with a "black name" and her experiences of racism.)


• When Tiger Woods claimed a primarily multiracial identity and called himself a "Cablinasian", he infuriated a lot of black people. Whether people have white ancestry or not, choosing one side or even refusing to choose a side means certain consequences. Since Tiger Woods is also filthy rich, the social penalty he paid probably wasn't terribly onerous, but it can really add up for people in more normal circumstances.


• Barack Obama chose his primary identity as African-American, not multiracial. He had an ethical reason for doing so, and I don't disagree with his choice in any way. But it was also a politically convenient choice. If he had not identified as African-American, he would have alienated many of his most passionate supporters: other African-Americans. Early in the election his African-American support wasn't guaranteed, by any means; he had to work hard at it. And he would have had to work much, much harder if he'd made a Tiger Woods kind of statement. Calling himself primarily biracial would have alienated some supporters, and it wouldn't have gained him any extra gratefulness from white people.


• If you are a multiracial person with white ancestry, but you don't look white, can't make yourself look whiter, and still claim to be white... you're regarded as pathetic and potentially insane by both white people and people of color.


• If you're not instantly identifiable by race, but visibly not white, you have the dubious freedom to say almost anything you want, and strangers will believe you. For example, I once meet a Chinese-Cuban-American who used to claim he was a "full-blooded Seminole Indian" because it dramatically increased his sexual attractiveness to white women. Of course, only a few people are so sleazy, and most want to give true and ethical answers when they're questioned. Unfortunately, the multiracial person is still going to be under a constant cloud of suspicion. Often, when they answer truthfully, they will be accused of lying. "There's no way you're ___. You look more ___!" Just by existing, they confuse people. And instead of saying honestly, "I'm confused", people often react by projecting a stereotype onto the multiracial person: "They must be confused. The fault is theirs, not mine."


• If you choose not to identify as white, but look white, you will also invoke the "confused" stereotype in people. You will sometimes be accused of "passing" even though this is the opposite of your intent.


• If you look white without making any special effort, and choose to identify as white, though without denying your non-white ancestry, because that's what strikes you as the most ethical and non-appropriative choice... honestly, I don't know enough to detail what kind of consequences are involved in this case. I think this choice might have major psychological implications, but few social ones.
  

Then add to these general consequences the group-specific consequences of choice:

• African-Americans, because of the history of slavery in this country, were subjected to attempts that tried to strip away every trace of their African ethnicity: language, customs, religion. The combined ethnicity they have in the present day is inextricably tied to racial solidarity in a way that is not true for, say, a second-generation Ethiopian-American. So for African-Americans, race is like a two-sided coin: a violent force reinforcing a vicious hierarchy on one side, a positive source of common culture and heritage on the other. Rejecting race without rejecting culture is almost impossible.


• Asian-Americans have more freedom in that it's possible to identify primarily as your ethnicity and not your race... sometimes. I say I'm a Japanese-American to my friends and my family and in certain communities, and I can be reasonably sure that my statement will be accepted and understood. But in other settings, my statement is irrelevant and will be ignored. I'll be treated as an Asian. In those other settings, no one really cares about my ethnicity, and my assigned race totally subsumes it.


• Being ethnically Latino means having to come to terms with two different sets of racial rules: the white-majority U.S. rules, plus the rules of the Latino family/local culture. Sometimes a single choice will mean two entirely different consequences in each rule set.


• Native Americans... oh boy, this most be complicated. I don't even want to go there because the rules and consequences are so mind-bending.

And then on top of these race-specific consequences, add the family-specific consequences. The mother that feels you are rejecting her if you identify strongly as a different race from her. The cousins that feel you are setting yourself up as "better than them"... and so on.

I think the process of choice in racial identity is like a feedback loop. Social acceptance/rejection influences personal choice, personal choice influences social acceptance/rejection.

Because the first steps of race are so violent, I don't want to participate in that violence by telling my son, "you are black." I don't think he has a very wide range of practical choice; I don't want to take away the small degree of choice he does have. But I don't see any realistic, positive scenario under which he rejects racial solidarity and says "I'm not black."

Right now I'm just trying to lay the groundwork for the choice he's going to start making. I want him to be aware of the depressing reality of these racial rules, but be able to consider them without fear or shame. I especially don't want him to feel that identifying as black would mean rejecting any of the people in his life that are not black... such as myself, Guy, his biological mother and his foster family.

Best Political Blog Post Title Pun of the Season

I'm still chucking over this title, hours after reading it.

I’m re-doing the den with hardwood floors and death panelling

This living will = "death panel" stuff is just unbelievable. Mind-boggling.

Personally, I wanted to get a living will and DNR order years ago. I just wasn't sure how much to trust those free forms you download from the internet, and I didn't want to pay for an expensive legal session. I joined a legal insurance organization this year, however, and I really do need to go ahead and schedule something now. Death panel, here I come.

Some Great Talks about Race and Identity, Started off by Politics

My mother and I are very political -- so is Guy, although he doesn't join groups and do stuff as much as we do -- and we talk about politics freely in front of Sunny. It's the way I was raised.

I tone down the sarcasm and dark humor a bit in front of Sunny, but other than that, the conversation stays at an adult level. Sometimes he's bored by it. Other times he's fascinated, and asks us to stop and explain something further.

He has a very active political imagination. During the election, he told me he had a nightmare where Barack Obama and Sarah Palin got in a fight, and Sarah Palin jumped out of a helicopter with a machine gun trying to kill Obama. And when we heard about the Australian fire tragedy that happened last year, killing hundreds, and I mentioned what a terrible thing it was, and that someone must have set the first fire on purpose, Sunny asked, "Was it John McCain?"

I periodically take things down to his very literal level and explain that the people we disagree with aren't bad people... it's just that we think they have bad ideas. And we also talk about the importance of getting along with people when they like different things than you, or believe different things than you.

Right now there's a lot of stuff about race in the news, and we've talked about it. The other night, he asked us "what color am I?" It's a question he's asked several times before, in different variations. I told him, "you're café." This means brown in Spanish, and it's a word he feels very positive about... he loves to say that café is his favorite color. Guy said, "your color is... beautiful!" Then I talked with Sunny and told him that if he was asking about race, race wasn't really the same thing as the color of your skin... for example, Guy and I have skin that's almost the same color, but I'm a different race than he is. I told him that race is a very complicated thing, and its hard for adults to understand, and REALLY hard for kids to understand, and sometimes people are scared to talk about it, but whenever he has any more questions, just ask us. He said, "yes, it's really complicated, and I don't understand it." He often learns by repeating something he just heard; it's like he's thinking through it out loud.

Then this morning in the car, we were listening to a Rachel Maddow podcast. She talked about the hate mail that Rep. David Scott received and how it was full of "the n-word". Of course Sunny asked, "what's the n-word?" I told him that it was a very bad insult that was sometimes used to describe black people. He asked again, "Am I black?" This time I had a better answer. I told him that much of "race" is what other people look at you and see. So you don't get to choose your race. And going by that, people would look at him as black. I told him most of his friends at school were also black.

"Is my friend [Ali] black?"
"Yes."
"Is my other friend [Ali] black?"
"Yes. And you know who else is black? Miss [K] across the street. Even though she has very light skin almost the same color as mine."
"Wow! I didn't know that. What about my friend [J], is he black"?
"Well, he looks sort of black, but he has a white mother and black father, just like your Mommy __ is white and your bio father is black, so he's also biracial. That's a word for people whose parents have different races."

I also told him that although people don't really get to choose their race, they do choose their identity. And all the different people that have loved and cared for him can be part of his identity as he grows up, so he did have some power to choose. He repeated thoughtfully, "I have the power to choose my identity."

This went so much better than last time. I think we're moving slowly along the path I outlined in the post earlier this week.

When it comes to racial identity, he has a very limited choice. He can think of himself as biracial/multiracial first and black second, or he can think of himself as black first and biracial/multiracial second. It might sound like a tiny distinction, but it can be huge. I want him to be able to decide on his own.

I made a subconscious choice, at some point when I understood my range of choices and how narrow they were, that I was Asian first, multiracial second. It's just the way the genetic dice rolled: my face looks more Asian than white, so I've always been treated as some kind of Asian. I happen to have enormous white people feet (10.5 women's, a size that few men in Japan even wear) but people look at my face first, not my feet. I'm aware that some people with the same ancestry, who look like me, have made different choices; other people with the same ancestry, who look much more white, have a different set of choices. I'm OK with my own choice.

Among all this, saying "I don't have a race," and trying to live by that statement... I don't think this is a healthy choice. Yes, race is a totally fictitious, weird concept. But if you're not white, and you reject it entirely, you make yourself psychically and socially vulnerable. Many white people won't believe you and will laugh at you and think you hate yourself. Many people of color won't believe you, and will laugh at you and think you hate yourself, and think that your choice insults them.

I've read accounts from a lot of Asian transracial adoptees who were raised along that "race-less" path, not being taught any other choices, and they're generally not too happy about it.

If you choose it freely as an adult, I think that's fine... it's just insanely difficult, and only the most eccentric and strong-willed people can manage to pull it off without being insulting.