182 posts tagged “qotd”

From the design to the features, what should the perfect kid-friendly laptop include? What would you leave out?
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What the hell does a kid need with a laptop?  Yeah, I know already that I am way, way old-fashioned. Maybe by "kid-friendly" they mean, like, college kids?  I doubt it.  I think college kids are nominally adults.  I am not a proponent of kids having their own computers before college, though.  I am aware that many do, but I am equally aware that while kids use computers more and more, they are becoming less and less able to, say, understand simple algebra or paragraph structure.  I know this because colleges and universities are being forced to offer more and more remedial classes to teach the shit kids didn't learn while they were surfing the goddamned internet on their stylish laptops.

I know.  I am already an old woman screaming at the kids to get the hell off my lawn.  I still care about algebra.  God help me.

If you were going to enter a competitive eating contest, what food would you choose to speed eat?

Takeru Kobayashi.  Oishii kana...?

What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.

What a strange question...

A lot of things.  There aren't many jobs here, and the Idahoan plant (it makes various processed potato products, mostly dehydrated mashed potatoes and crap like that) is about to shut down.  It doesn't pay really well, but it does employ, I dunno, perhaps half of the employed people here in town.  What does a town do when suddenly half its labor pool becomes unemployed?  The options:  Work somewhere, even at another Idahoan plant, that's further away--but there aren't a lot of jobs close by.  There's a fresh potato packing plant 17 miles away, but it pays really crappy and the hours are horrible, too.  Then there are more potato processing jobs in towns 50 miles away.  My husband works at one of those, and he freakin hates it, although it pays well and has really pretty good benefits (although no sick leave, so if you get the a really nasty virus from your KFC mashed potatoes, it's possibly my husband's fault).  He hates the commute, too, not to mention the bleedin price of gasoline.  Other options:  Move away.  Sure, but the people who worked at the Idahoan are pretty invested in this place.  Many own their own homes, and a lot of the recent Mexican immigrants who work there have a pretty good deal living in some state-subsidized apartments that just about make their lives here economically feasible.  Where to go?  Aye, that's the rub.

Then there's the weather.  God, this place has the worst weather of any place I've ever lived.  It's got the wind like Great Falls.  It's got the cold and the 6-month winter like any similar place--I lived in Montana long enough to be used to that.  There is no spring or fall to speak of (seriously, the trees go from lovely summer green to brown in less than  week).  And then the summer's are unpleasantly hot and dry.  Usually.  This summer--and last one as well, now that I think about it--are cold all through June so that you can't get your tomatoes to grow properly and you end up having bushels of green tomatoes in September.  Because of course, despite the fact that it was still frosting in June, first frost will come again around Labor Day.  Yah, good luck with those Brandywines, sucker!  So much for global warming.

It has the usual inconveniences of a town this size and this isolated, too.  It's an hour's drive to do any of the usual things--get groceries, see the doctor, maybe take in a movie--which forces you to cram all your unpleasant errands into one day if possible, which not only makes scheduling something of an art form, it makes your kids damned cranky and probably you as well.  

Besides that, it has its own sets of annoyances.  All places do, of course.  But this one is special.  I've lived in towns much smaller than this (this town has about 600 people, nearly half of whom are Mexican and most of the other half are Mormon; the town where I went to high school in southern New Mexico had only around 300 people, most of whom were Mexican but with a not insubstantial Mormon population as well) that had about 8 times the life in it.  The town where I went to high school had regular dances at the community center and rodeos and all manner of things like that.  There wasn't *always* something fun going on, sure, not like in a big city, but it wasn't bad.  There was a bar and a couple of restaurants, and one of the restaurants had a big kind of pool hall in the back where we could eat nachos (damn good nachos, too) and hang out and be stupid.  There's really nothing like that here.  There isn't a restaurant in town anymore, not since the family who ran the taco place had some kind of family trouble back in Mexico and closed down.  There's word that some Californians are planning to open a cafe here, but there is also word that they're aiming to make it a "bistro" type place, so it's anyone's guess if it will last.  The taco place did a booming business, so it's too bad about whatever happened to them.  No restaurant, no pool hall, no dancing, and certainly no large-scale drinking, as I doubt the LDS approves.

It's got me to thinking.  I've lived in a lot of religiously oriented small towns.  The towns in Arkansas were mostly Baptist; in New Mexico, mainly Catholic.  And there was plenty of sinning.  The Baptists (at the time--by all appearances, they've lost their heads now) and the Catholics--I've attended both churches but never paid enough attention and always had a kind of inborn faithlessness--seem to have a notion that we're all sinners but God forgives.  So, we may as well sin, then.  There's a theme in country music, actually, about the sins of Saturday night getting redeemed on Sunday morning.  I can live with that kind of religion, man.  But the Mormons seem to have some idea that God actually means for them to be, like, good people and not sinners.  I just can't get on board with that kind of thinking.  The thing is that most of the ones I've known are good people--relentlessly good people, such that you feel like some kind of dirty whore just for wearing a V-neck T-shirt when you take your kid to preschool.  The local bishop, who is an incredibly nice guy, the kind of guy you think, "That's a good man, there" as soon as you meet him, works with my dad at the Forest Service, and I remember feeling a kind of low-grade shock the first time I saw him wearing his uniform shirt with the top button undone.  Normally, he buttons his shirts all the way to the neck.  He and his wife are like the poster children of niceness, and their kids, predictably, are well mannered and orderly.  I want to make cleverly ironic comments about their niceness, yet even thinking about doing it makes me feel like an asshole.  I'm so much more comfortable among the sinning set, though.  Yeesh.

There are good points about living here, too, of course.  The price of housing is very, very reasonable.  Nobody cares what you do in your backyard, whether you keep chickens or hang out your laundry or sit around in your pajamas drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and reading Richard Ford novels.  The lot sizes are generous so that, if you can ever get the damned tomatoes to grow in this weather, you can have a nice garden.  The niceness means that when you have a baby you will get presents from people you really barely know who just simply wish you well and like babies and people will bring you frozen meals so that when you're all exhausted from having a newborn you don't have to cook.  It also means that if you're of the type who still unironically says "ma'am" and "sir" (as I am and want my kids to be), nobody will look askance and make cheap jokes about you and your backwardness.  There are no metal detectors in the schools, despite the fact that nearly all the kids live in houses with guns in them and go hunting with them, and you can feel pretty safe about your kids never running into any serious crime here.  There is really no need to lock your doors, although some people do and that's OK, too.

Mmm, all things considered, though, and I hate to say this, but our tolerance for this place has just about run out.  Actually, my husband's ran out long ago.  He likes the small town vibe, but there are just too many other complications.  My son hates it because there is no ocean.  I hate the weather and the days when we have to go into "town" to do all the errands.  So, I have a feeling we aren't going to last too much longer.  My guess is that this town will not be much more than a Forest Service town in a few years.  And we'll be on to some coastal small town somewhere.

How green is your school, office, or home?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco.

I'm so sick of "green," you can't even fucking imagine.  Ooh, everyone in a competition to be the greenest act in town--mostly by buying yet more crap or jetting off to some conference somewhere.  Oh, sure, I admit I was pleased--so pleased!!--to be lectured at by Obama who thinks it's somehow appropriately green to take the helicopter to Chicago for the weekend because he's homesick.  Sure, sure...it's not your helicopter that's the problem, Mr. President. 

See, there's a lot that bothers me about this stupid "green" thing.  First, it's been turned by the capitalist machine into yet another consumerist trend.  Second, I can think of hardly anyone at all who doesn't think that it's everyone else who needs to green up, while their own habits and behaviors are perfectly OK.  I remember when Slate published that piece urging people to "date local" instead of having long-distance--and thus fossil-fuel-intensive--relationships, and people who considered themselves quite "green" (but I drive a Prius!  and have a Sigg bottle!) were all incensed that they should have to give up their weekly plane trips to wherever their companions live.  Ah, so much for green.  Nah, it's always other people who are to blame, and especially, it appears, rural people because of our silly refusal to implement public transportation or whatever.  Third, there is hardly any subject anymore about which people get more smug and sanctimonious, and it is generally the case that the smugger people are, the less I want to associate with them.  Fourth, seriously, I cannot take part in any cause that has motherfucking Ed Begley, Jr. as one of its prime movers.  Ed Norton, maybe I could get behind, because at least he's talented and I admit to finding him rather comely.  But Begley--ach. 

Don't get me wrong.  I hate seeing waste, whether of food or energy or whatever.  I do, and I wish Americans would be less wasteful overall.  But I can't get behind anything as groupthinky as this "green" business. 

I will wager a week's salary that that is not the answer you were expecting.

What's the biggest obstacle you've had to overcome within the last 24 hours?
Submitted by ILoveYouMr.Dragon.

Feck--scheduling.  We're way over-scheduled right now.  It's kind of a long story and with multiple complications--many of which have to do with our living in such a small town and only owning one car and having a husband who works this stupid rotating shift--but our 4-year-old is in swimming lessons every day right now and also in an art class on Wednesdays, and, see, we just had a baby...So, today, I end up trying to breastfeed in a McDonald's playland while me and the two kids are waiting for my mom to come pick us up, and then the 4-year-old gets pushed off the slide or some damn thing so I can hear him crying somewhere in the innards of the play tunnels, so I instinctively rush over there to try to find him, which makes the 3-week-old lose his grip on the nipple and blah blah blah.  It's been pretty ridiculous, but fortunately the swimming lessons are over tomorrow, and there are only two more art classes, so now we can start settling down into more of a routine where the three of us are actually home and then we can all just feed at our leisure...what was I thinking, scheduling so much crap at the beginning of June when I knew we would have a wee baby?  Oh, right...the stupid complications of living in a small town...sure.  Just glad we all survived, although I am ashamed to admit the schedule issues are related to the sudden appearance of Hot Pockets in our house.  We don't normally eat things like that; I'm a made-from-scratch kind of girl.  Hot Pockets have so much cheese, man.  So...much...cheese...

However, today, for about a half an hour, I did manage to get both kids asleep at once.  Hurrah!  And now my husband is home, and I'm trying to work, but the thought of grading a bunch of punctuation exercises is, wow, really depressing.  Really, really depressing.  Commas aren't fucking rocket science, ya know?  How can my students be this bad at using commas?  And what the fuck is going on in public high schools that these semi-literates were somehow allowed to graduate?

Oooh, I need a drink.  

We tell white lies every day, but have you ever told a big lie, and if so, why did you do it? Confess!
Submitted by Sophie.

Well, what the hell.  I guess I can talk about it, though I'm not very proud of it.  I'm a liar.  I lie all the time.  Big ones, small ones.  I lie for no reason at all most of the time.  Although I can somewhat trace the origins of this behavior, I don't really know why I do it.  I don't do it (usually) to keep myself out of trouble.  It's more like a game, like to see if anyone will notice.  Usually, people don't.  Partly, it's because a lifetime of routine practice has made me really good at it.  Partly, it's also that since I have some weird things going on with my affect--I believe I have said here before that my emotional functions are not all optimized, or something like that, and they're not; they malfunction routinely, worse than Windows even--my affect lies with me.  Er...if you see what I mean.  My affect is so good at this by now, too, that I wouldn't be surprised if I could fool Robert DeNiro's character in Meet the Parents.  And a big part of it I've come to realize is that most people won't notice most lies because most people will believe what they want to believe--and even hear what they want to hear--anyway, no matter what comes out of my mouth.

Other than my parents, though, I don't lie to people I love.  Well, sometimes I fail to tell them things which they might or might not consider important.  My mother calls these "lies of omission."  But for the most part, I think I'm pretty good with people I care about.  I try to be.  It's a little bit like breaking a lifetime bad habit, though, as if lying were some kind of narcotic.  I suppose it is, in its way, some kind of archaic defense mechanism that just became a reflex.

I try not to lie to my parents anymore, either, but of course that's where this whole business began, so it's especially hard to break that habit.  Like I said, it's usually not to keep myself out of trouble or anything, though.  It's just all very stupid. 

I don't lie on GinBaby either, for what it's worth.

I suppose I've told some big lies, although most of the lies I can remember telling are inconsequential, unless you buy the Kantian argument that any instance of lying degrades the ultimate truth value of language--which in a post-Derridean world seems a little goofy anyway, no?

Hmmmm...so I think the big confession here is really that I lie habitually and with little rhyme or reason.  Or I used to.  I don't do it so much anymore because when you think about it, it's a rather ridiculous habit.  I don't think there are any really big lies to confess to per se.  Seems like a bit of a letdown, no? 

If you had to teach something, what would you teach?

The fact is that I do teach something.  It isn't as easy to teach someone to do something as you might think.  It isn't as easy as being able to do that thing yourself.  Teaching is a completely separate skill.

I actually just got a real-life job teaching adult ESL here.  We've needed an adult ESL program here for a long time, but the funding for it just materialized from god-knows-where, and I was hired, despite the fact that my baby is due one week after class ends.  At the informational meeting, only 6 people showed up, and I was a little worried that it wouldn't go, but at the first class, we had 16 people and at least one more who wants to come.  All my students are from Mexico, mostly central Mexico. 

It's weird.  Not that they're from Mexico.  I mean, I grew up in New Mexico and nobody really thinks to segregate the whites from the Mexicans.  That's for a lot of reasons, a lot of things that are different there than they are up here.  In this town, the population is nearly half from Mexico, but they're recent immigrants.  Both "sides" seem to want to stop the de facto segregation (it's not a physical segregation at all--there's no "Mexican part of town" unless you count the apartments that are state-subsidized and meant to house "agricultural workers" which apparently only means "Mexican agricultural workers".  Everyone's kids go to the same school, mainly because there is only one.  But outside of school functions and the annual Easter egg hunt, the two halves of town don't interact at all.  It's creepy).  My students' main concern in coming to ESL class is that they'd like to be able to just interact and maybe even make some friends outside of their immediate social circle.  Basically they have access to all government services and so forth in Spanish, but this combined with the fact that they live among Spanish-speaking friends and family means they don't make a lot of progress in conversational English and any time they have to use English is almost panic-inducing for some of them.  From what they're telling me, I think that the government money that is currently used to translate everything into Spanish and to provide free translation services--well, at least some portion of that money would be better spent hiring more ESL teachers to provide free classes to adults who want to come and can come.  The way we're doing things right now is serving mostly to keep recent adult immigrants sidelined and pigeonholed and without much of a chance to integrate.  I keep wondering what my students do when they're faced with an emergency.  I mean, even the hospitals here have translation services, but no translation service or translated pamphlet can cover everything that can happen. 

Anyway, it's nice for me to have a real-life job and not always be sitting around my computer.  The situation in the country and certainly in the public discourse is really intolerable to me and filling me with rage and hatred and dampening my natural joie de vivre.  The computer just exacerbates the negativity.  A roomful of Mexican ladies talking about SpongeBob, though, that's a totally different story.

I'm also teaching my son the fundamentals of reading, arithmetic, and some science, mostly as it pertains to baking.  You can learn a lot of science through baking, although he still doesn't believe me that yeast are alive and that they leaven breads by eating sugars and producing, um, gaseous emissions.  I think it would help if he could really see the yeast move around some, but all he sees is the magic.

What's the strangest thing you've ever found in the street?

I don't know if this exactly counts, but one cold winter's day, a friend and I were driving to pick up another friend at the airport in Missoula, Montana.  On the way there, on one of Missoula's major roads, there was a cat.  Dead, frozen to the street.

That in itself wasn't that strange, at least not for the cold north where animals sometimes tragically freeze to the asphalt.  What was strange--kind of David Lynch or maybe Coen Brothers strange--was that a man was outside shoveling the snow off the sidewalk and decided to try to pry the cat off the street.  It was still well below freezing, so the cat had not thawed a bit.  This fine citizen started hacking at the cat corpse with the snow shovel.  To no avail.  The thing was frozen solid and remained intact and firmly attached to the road.

I know.  I'm probably going to hell for laughing at such a thing, but it was funny and surreal and also awful. 

I just realized the title of this is "Finders Keepers."  If you want a hacked-at, cryogenically-preserved cat corpse, have at it, friend.

What was your major in college? Does your major apply to what you're doing in life now?

In my undergrad career, I double-majored in philosophy and linguistics with a minor in French.  Philosophy and linguistics apply to either everything I do or nothing at all, depending on how you look at it.  French applies to nothing at all, except that it allows me to say the names of Albert Camus books in French and basically pronounce them correctly.  "The Plague?  Oh, sure, you mean La Peste."  Nah, I'm not really that much of a pretentious ass, usually.

My graduate school days--aka the Martini Salad Days--were spent as a linguistics major, something I'm not sure Albert Borgmann forgives me for. 

I guess I don't use the linguistics at all anymore, and I sure as hell don't use the French, but studying philosophy is really two things.  The first and most obvious is that it is a study of philosophers and their works.  You read them, you analyze them, you grow weary of their jargon.  The second and more important is that it's a study of a way of thinking and seeing the world.  You can't really do that without reading some of the great works of philosophy, though you can get by without the Hegel, but doing just the first without the second is completely pointless.  In that sense, philosophy informs everything I do, all day everyday, because now I see the world and think about the world almost exclusively through that lens.  I have often said that philosophy was my first love, and whatever you major in later, you never really get over your first love, right?

My actual jobs are:  Parent, full-time yet seriously underpaid and probably undervalued; adjunct instructor of medical transcription, usually one course per semester; and online tutor for English grammar and composition.  Do I need a degree in philosophy or linguistics to do any of those?  No.  I do need a degree of some kind to teach and tutor, but philosophy doesn't directly apply.

Still, I can't ever not be a philosophy student again.  That will always be what I am.

It's Veterans Day! How are you going to honor the veterans today?

I really don't think anything I could do personally would be relevant given how shabbily so many of our vets are being treated by the government.  One thing I'd like to do to honor them is get inside the VA and start sending out the disability checks to those who deserve them and offer appropriate psychiatric treatment and counseling services to those that need them. 

If I lived closer, I would go to the grave of Staff Sergeant Ralph W. Robertson, USMC, whose 10 years in the Corps included two tours of duty in Vietnam.  During one of those tours, both of his parents died in a tornado in his small hometown in Arkansas.  The Corps shipped him home, gave him a week to attend the funerals and grieve, and then shipped him back to the war.  Another time, he was separated from his unit and lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia for a week or possibly more.  I don't know a lot of details because he didn't talk about it, beyond the fact that it was terror beyond words.  I spent my entire life believing that somehow I could make him better after all that, that I could offer him a child's rather stupid love as a replacement for the support he did not get from the VA, the government, or much of American society at the time.  I didn't know that there were things so horrible that maybe they couldn't ever be fixed.  I used to call him every Veterans' Day and honor our vets by loving the one of them as much as I possibly could.  I was always so sorry that it was never enough.  Sometimes I tell people that my dad was the first man to ever break my heart, and people always misunderstand.  He didn't mean to break it, and he certainly didn't abuse me or anything like that.  But watching a good man, a strong man, a man you love with all your wee heart break down as a person and finding yourself totally inadequate to help him--that will crush your heart almost beyond repair.

I'm sure if I lived in Arkansas, I would have taken my son to the grave of his grandfather he never met.  Someday, when my son's older, I'll tell him about the triangle-folded flag hanging on the wall and the picture of the man in uniform hanging next to it. 

In the end, there's hardly anything we can do to honor combat veterans that is sufficient, is there?  Giving them the medical care, disability payments, and psychiatric care they need is a good step, but in the future, I'd like to honor our vets by not sending them into poorly planned, unnecessary, and inhumane wars.  We could try not asking them to do their jobs futilely and blindly.  We could honor the sacrifices they are willing to make for us by being more honorable about when we ask them to make those sacrifices and to what ends.