Interests:why? Expertise:toenail polish. huggles. big words. randomness. lullabyes. the art of being barefoot. langston hughes poems. quotations. handwritten letters. late dinners. Occupation:Teacher
I got an email today saying that I was one of the 50 chosen out of 6,000 entries to receive the camera. Hooray persuasive writing!
Today was the second day of school. Things are going well; all my plates are spinning evenly, for now at least. The best part has been that I've had several students from old classes go out of their way to come and say hi to me in my dungeon of a classroom, and most of them were from my regular sophomore classes.
She’s one of those girls—soon to be one of those women, now that she’s deciding to get an adult job—who makes a very concerted effort to appear strong and confident, but is belied by the way she carries herself: her head forward just a bit too far, shoulders slightly hunched, hands carried at waist level and clinging to themselves, the slimness of her body looking fragile instead of trim. She worked hard to look classy today, far too classy for the business of eating brunch at an IHOP, choosing deliberately a full brown linen skirt, a white sleeveless blouse with a low neckline, a necklace of green, smooth beads to bring out the exact color of her eyes. A large brown leather envelope clutch. It was an attempt at her version of seduction, or at least at making an impression, but it was too calculated to be successful.
She talked, when she talked, either about herself or him, including me when I was obviously listening, without overt effort to be discernibly friendly or unfriendly. She answered my questions, smiled a small smile now and again, refrained from being obviously snide, and was occasionally self-depreciating, with a cock of her left eyebrow in a way that almost implied she could see the humor, but not enough to laugh at it. She didn’t indulge in any polite questions in return, and she left two-thirds of her chicken sandwich untouched, dismissing both his suggestion to try the pancakes with butter pecan syrup and to save the sandwich for later.
She is moving back to Texas to take a job in the same firm her father works for, something to do with imported cheese for a local grocery store chain. She wants (I know this second-hand) to design lingerie, but is currently making no move to do so, beyond a stint at Victoria’s Secret as a salesgirl. She majored in Business Management, but as far as I know took no design courses.
She is talented enough, perhaps, to eventually make it in the fashion world, where the false front of her confidence will evolve into curt orders to her employees and where she might earn respect for her designs but not for her charm. Thankfully, in fashion, one doesn’t have to be social, if one appears to be. She reminds me, in fact, quite a bit of Anna Wintour, the “devil” editor of Vogue; they share that practiced aloofness that conceals a deep terror at the nature of the world. My first instinct is to say that she will never marry, but I think she will, late in life, and when it fails might be coerced into another, with the same end.
It is, perhaps, a cruel irony that she will design lingerie that will never, no matter how pretty or seductive, give her the confidence to be free in bed. But then again, the constant pursuit of that perfect piece will drive her design, and allow her business to be successful. She might eventually be satisfied, but not happy.
She is, in most ways, exactly what I suspected she was. She is intense; she is frigid; she is intelligent; but she is not interesting. Tragic, perhaps, but not interesting. And, most importantly, she is no threat to anything of mine.
(Another writing from the daily stuff I'm doing at SAWP)
6/18/09
I met the assistant director of our show this past Monday. He was sitting behind the sound table, skinny, glasses, large forehead, a presence that implies he thinks he’s hot shit, although if he didn’t have the attitude, you might think him ugly. I caught him watching me—checking me out in that idle way where your eyes just rest on a person when you have nothing else to stare at—several times. I disliked, or at least was suspicious of, him almost immediately. He reminded me of someone I had worked with in California, someone who was so self-aggrandizing he couldn’t see past his own penis: a talented trash of a human being. When I went up to check out the libretto, the assistant director introduced himself, asked my name, looked me in the eye and shook my hand a little longer than was necessary. I decided that it was just coincidence that he reminded me of that other person I so loathed, and wrote it off as an odd similarity in physical features—one of those brain slips that just happens.
Last night, during notes (the period of time after a rehearsal where the director sits down with you and gives feedback), the group got to talking about a past performance of the show (the director did it as a school play a couple years ago, and some of the cast is in this production as well). We got on the topic of Mortimer’s death scene, and the girl who had played it in the past started telling a story about how one night she was going around the stage, dying, and she fell on someone’s foot like she was supposed to; that particular night, however, it happened to be a chola, and she yelled out “Aw, hell naw,” apparently scarring the actress for life.
Our assistant director, sitting just to the right of the storyteller, upon the conclusion of the anecdote, said quite definitively: “I hate Mexicans.” I sat stunned for a second, my mind literally thrown off track. It has been rare, in my experience, that someone will so blatantly admit to racism without the slightest hint of shame. No one else seemed to even notice he said it; someone else on the other side was talking at the same time he was, and the conversation continued naturally as if it hadn’t even been said. I looked around the room and realized that there was no one of Mexican descent there, which again, is not what I’m used to; and I wondered, for a brief instant, if they all felt that way.
I went out to the car and saw him in the parking lot, on the phone. I almost yelled something out to him, but didn’t even know what I would say, so I got in the car and called my boyfriend. I had, by then, come up with what I might have liked to say if I could replay the moment—something like, “really? You’re just going to dismiss an entire race of people out of hand?”—but when I said it to my boyfriend, he seemed unimpressed. He made a few scathing remarks of his own about the assistant director and that sort of thinking, but none of it quite felt right to me. I hung up, dissatisfied.
I do not know if it is a peculiar habit of my own, but I often replay situations where I feel I missed an opportunity over in my head and try to come up with an appropriate response, trying them out (sometimes aloud, if I’m alone) and picturing the effect they might have had. The advantage of my mental rescripting of the situation is that if it comes up again, I will already be prepared, and given the obvious deep-seated nature of this particular attitude, I was sure that I would have a future opportunity to use my response. Instinctually, I felt that my response should be immediate, public, and scathing, but the right words just still weren’t coming to me.
Martin Luther King Jr. so famously said that he dreamed that his “children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I know that many people think that we shouldn’t judge anyone at all; perhaps this boy’s sister had been raped by a Mexican. Perhaps he had an understandable, if not good, reason to make a blanket judgment on a country of millions of people, and he should be gently and kindly instructed on the error of his ways, so that he may learn from them. There are those who feel that way, but I am not one of them, and King’s quote seems to support me: it doesn’t say not to judge at all, but to judge based on character. The assistant director’s character was clearly shown last night, and mayhaps it is my immaturity, but I felt like it needed to be addressed without any sugar coating.
I considered, as I was driving, a line something like: “You know, my students would kick your ass for that particular sentiment. In fact, I’m rather inclined to myself,” but a threat seemed like it would have the opposite effect of what I wanted, giving him a reason to puff out his chest and defend his position (and might also inadvertently give him an anecdote he would use to justify it). I also thought about saying,“I could have sworn this was 2009 in Tucson, Arizona. Are we in a time warp? Are we in living in Alabama in 1809?” but still, the impact wasn’t enough.
Finally, as I pulled into my parking space at home, it came to me, the answer that I will have ready to catch him off guard the next time he lets out any more tidbits of his moral and racist depravity, the one that will hopefully hit him so quickly that he will not be able to parry: “really? Wow. You know, most people that abysmally ignorant are at least smart enough to avoid exposing their ignorance in public, but you seem to lack even that small bit of intelligence.”
