Snow Days

Of all the days to be awake at 6am, it had to be the one when it snowed and the city shut down. These are the days you're supposed to sleep in, to stay under the covers and freeze time just as the world outside has been frozen. But no, I had to wake up at 4am and struggle with insomnia until I gave up at six. I took a shower and counted down the minutes until the cafe would open and I could go sit there for awhile and let Chris sleep.

I was, when I walked in Coffy Cafe around 7:30, the only customer aside from a guy who was sleeping on a couch who may have been homeless. A young woman was the sole employee for awhile. She was friendly in that I-don't-want-to-be-here way and sort of looked at me as if I were crazy for being out in the cold, white mess. I silently agreed with her.

I like this place. The owner is a DC teacher who took the opportunity to open a business in Columbia Heights, giving us a much needed coffee alternative to the inhumanity of Starbucks, the cramped space of Tynan's, and the not-really-a-coffee-shop-ness of Panera. The cafe is decorated with blaxploitation movie posters and a few other artifacts of the sixties and seventies, and you can hear Motown or rock music for grown-ups rather than that pretentious drivel that passes for music in many similar establishments. (I'm looking at you, Decembrists.) Crepes are the main fare; it's a nice addition to a neighborhood with not enough independent food options.

You would think that having been awake in the wee hours that I would have been watching the coverage of the Mandela memorial service, but I just couldn't. I know that CNN and MSNBC and those assholes at Fox News have turned the service into some marketing spectacle, replete with flashing graphics and a few photos that they use as if Nelson Mandela had been photographed very few times in his life. I'll catch the highlights later on.

I keep trying to write something about Mandela, but everyone's doing it and far too many people are using his death to promote their own causes. Truly great men come few in a generation, and Mandela is one of a handful from the twentieth century who deserves to be exalted by the world.

This wasn't going to be a Mandela post, but here I am sitting in a coffee shop owned by an African American woman in a part of the city that was too dangerous to walk through at night even ten years ago, and I'm finding myself amazed that I find it amazing that I even have to be amazed by this. The idea that it matters what a person's skin color is to so many people in the world blows my mind, that fifteen or twenty years ago it would have been difficult for the owner of this place to get a business loan, that it still is difficult for African Americans to get loans, well, it just doesn't make any sense to a rational mind.

Nor does apartheid, the legacy of colonialism, or this global economic system we've built on the exploitation of human beings. That laws could be made banning rights for one race or another and the global community accepted it for so long, that President Reagan vetoed economic sanctions against South Africa, that Republicans continue to this day to call Mandela a terrorist for daring to fight against oppression, that black South Africans continue to be oppressed by poverty and economic inequality, that blacks in the United States are as well, that White America has developed a deep hatred for our black president because he represents a threat to white domination....none of this makes any sense to me. (Don't give me a history lesson; I'm thinking abstractly.) Apartheid happened in my lifetime - not in a history book. Some of the people who supported apartheid in the US government are still in the US government, and they're the ones who are saying negative things about Mandela when the rest of the world is celebrating his life and his accomplishments.

I mean, what does it take to realize you're on the WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY?

That people like Mandela and Dr. King and Gandhi continue to be born, that apartheid did end, that Barack Obama is President of the United States, these are all good reasons not to shrug your shoulders and say, "It's always been this way." Because no, it hasn't - these are indicators of progress, of change. Yeah, it's molasses slow and frustrating and you have to deal with the opposition nutjobs assholes who fight to keep it the way it is or even take it backwards, but it IS progress, and every little step alleviates some of the suffering of others in the future.

That's why we celebrate Nelson Mandela today on, coincidentally, International Human Rights Day, to remember, to push forward, to be inspired.

What I learned from substitute teaching, soccer, and parents

I graduated before I was able to figure out what I wanted to do as a career. That probably had something to do with the fact that the student adviser assigned to me during my freshman year was on sabbatical, and instead of finding another one I just went at it alone. I don't know if he could have helped much; I went in to school thinking I was pre-law and came out of it with a vastly different outlook on the world. I only knew that I wanted to do something "international" but had no clue how to go about doing whatever that was. I took a post-graduate program in Europe and did an internship at a peace center in Ireland, but I didn't know what was open to me career-wise. That's how I ended up in the Army - I wanted to be stationed abroad and learn a new language.

While I was trying to decide my next move after graduation, I was the junior varsity soccer coach for my high school and a substitute teacher for the schools in the county. I had been the goalkeeper coach during the summers while I was in college; it was a no-brainer for our coach to hire me as the JV coach. The JV team had never won more than a game a season up to that point; we finished 7-7 with me as coach. I feel like I knew what I was doing then. I had silly rules like no cussing unless you used foreign language words - I even taught the girls the ones I knew. Merde was a common one. No one was ever carded that year for cussing, as was the rule in Ohio.

There are two days that stand out as life lessons during that period - one as a soccer coach and one as a long-term sub for an 8th grade English teacher. The soccer one had to do with a girl on my team who had been caught drinking. She was suspended from sports as was the rule, but if a student underwent alcohol counseling, she could come back from the suspension earlier. This girl chose the counseling option and was in uniform for a game that was very important to me, not only because it would show the league that we were becoming a good team, but also because it was the school district where I had gone to elementary and junior high and where my mother's family had gone. I had been, prior to our move to Sidney, penciled in as the starting catcher for the softball team of that district as well as a goalkeeper for the soccer team. They were the soccer powerhouse - I wanted to do well. In the past we had been handily defeated by double digit scores in the varsity games. It had been a crowning achievement in my own career as goalkeeper to have kept them scoreless for a half during my senior year.

The girl who had been suspended was a dreadful player, and she knew it and laughed about it. My game plan that day was to keep our best players in for as long as possible, spelling them for a few minutes at a time and getting them back on the field as soon as they caught their breaths. I also used a new defense - if you have the ball on the back third of the field, just kick it out of bounds!

The strategy worked well. While we lost the game, it had been by a razor-thin margin, and we showed everyone that we'd be competing in the league for a long time to come. But it meant the girl hardly got any playing time. After the game, her father yelled at me for not playing her, claiming he had spent the money on the counseling so she could play. My family had always had issues with certain families who thought their children were better soccer players than they were. They were jealous because my sisters and I always started and accused the coach of favoritism. Now I was standing in the spot where coach had stood for eight years. Instead of looking at the counseling as a benefit for his daughter that taught the perils of teenage drinking, he saw it as a waste of money since she didn't play much. Too much partying was causing her grades to slip, which was the important issue, but he was concerned about her playing time in a junior varsity soccer game. This kind of thinking allows the continuation of the bad behavior. Parents should set an example, not cause problems. But I wonder if maybe he were having financial issues and I were just the recipient of projective behavior.

The second standout day was the last day of my stint as a long-term sub for the 8th grade English teacher. I had been happy to be assigned to the long-term position, as it meant a guaranteed wage for three months. Only I didn't make it three months. I made it maybe six weeks.

I was 22 years old, fresh out of college with all the naive idealism that age brings. I had lived in Europe, so I thought I could teach those kids about the world. I was no longer a babysitter in a classroom - I actually had to teach and make lesson plans and grade papers. The honors class I had was a breeze.

The remedial class gave me a profound sense of disillusionment from which I've never truly recovered. One of the kids was seventeen years old, just biding his time until he could legally drop out. He never did any homework, and he was absent at least one day a week, usually more. You could tell he came from a broken home and that he'd be in and out of jail for much of his adult life, as he'd already been arrested several times and jail was on occasion an excuse for his absences. But he was gifted. When he actually did the work, he knew how to express himself in ways most people don't ever grasp. That was what was so frustrating about him. I could have ignored him if he were of a lesser mind, because there was no way I'd be able to change his habits in three months. But he had such potential. What a waste.

He was just one frustration of many in those classes. I couldn't believe the number of students who never turned in their assignments. All of those people who rail against "teachers unions" and "bad teachers" have no clue what teaching in an American public school is like. Teachers are supposed to work miracles. Are they supposed to go home with the students to make sure they do their homework? This particular frustration led to my last day as a sub there. One of the students with behavioral problems refused to even get out a piece of paper and write something down to turn in after I gave him a second chance to do the assignment. I lost it. I told him I had given him extra opportunities and he just didn't care. I told him that I gave up on him. That's when he came up to the desk and acted like he was going to hit me.

I was reassigned on that day and left for Ireland a few weeks later where I'd learn facilitation skills that would have come in handy in that English class. Oddly enough, working with kids who had grown up in a conflict area was easier than what I dealt with in those English classes. Some of their issues were the same - the broken homes, the poverty, the lack of opportunities for decent employment. Those who grew up in the lower classes were the ones who clung to conflict. When Ireland's economy started to improve thanks to years of EU structural funds, conflict mitigation became more successful. The two are not at all unrelated.

The only way we're ever going to fix our school systems is to eliminate or at least alleviate the economic conditions that allow for a lack of focus and discipline and the behavioral problems that come with it. No amount of standardized testing or common core curricula are going to feed a hungry student or ease the pain of a kid who's abused. Until we fix these problems, ALL students will continue to be affected regardless of social class.

I don't dream of London

"Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!" - Karen Blixen,
Out of Africa, 1937

I've been to London three times, technically. (Heathrow is another matter entirely.) I was introduced to the city when I spent a mere half day seeing the basic sites for the first time in my life. I skipped French class that day and headed up there before the arrival of my friends, who were meeting me so we could spend spring break in Scotland and Ireland. We took an overnight bus to Edinburgh that night. In those brief hours, I thought I loved London.

The next trip lasted a week, which was adequate time to get to know the city a bit. I was taking a post-graduate course on the political economy of the European Union, a six week course that went through six capital cities in Europe, so it wasn't all play. It was in many ways a better experience than a vacation, because we got to work with Londoners, including a member of the House of Lords, Dr. William Wallace from the London School of Economics (I remember his name because of the movie Braveheart), a representative of the UK to the EU, a banker or two, and other prominent members of the politico-economic class of the UK. That's when I went to Greenwich and stood on the Prime Meridian, from where we get all measured time on the planet, and it's also when I bought a pair of Doc Martins from the main store that I wore until they fell apart a decade later. (I have blocked the act of throwing them away from my mind; it was a painful experience.) Us students were such academic dorks during that trip that we were excited when we passed by the Financial Times building on a cruise of the Thames. I have a photo of it that I'll dig out when I begin to publish my journal from that time in Europe under the label "If we had blogs in 1999..."

The third time I went to London was nearly as brief as the first; my flight from Beirut to Washington via Heathrow had been changed, leaving me with a 19 hour layover. Spending ten minutes in Heathrow is a nightmare, let alone 19 hours, so for the first time in my life, I left an airport during a layover and spent the day in London.



It had been eleven years since I had set foot in the city. My trips to Europe in that decade plus had consisted of nearly two months in Bulgaria, three weeks in Budapest, five days in Istanbul, a day in Bucharest (all in 2007), four days in Cyprus (2010), and a week in Paris (2010), as well as the three months I spent in Ireland (and three days in Warrington, England) way back in 2000. I had been working in the Middle East field during that time and had seen Europe plenty of times from an airplane window as I headed to Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, but it wasn't until 2010 when I was in a decent enough financial situation where I could take vacations to Europe instead of flying over it for work.

But this trip to London was neither for work nor for pleasure. I had taken a chance when Safadi Foundation folded in October 2010 and I was left jobless, going to Beirut on my own to continue the work I had started there, but after five months I was unsuccessful in earning a living and had to come home, as my visa was about to expire and I could not justify getting another to the authorities. The war in Syria was about to erupt, anyway, and soon people I knew would be leaving for safer pastures. That day in London was melancholic. I was returning to Washington with no place to live and no job and there I was in London, a rainy, rainy London, walking around and trying to pretend that everything was ok. The day was March 31, 2011.

Queen Boadicea trying to get home before the storm

The rain didn't deter me from walking miles that day with my carry-on luggage weighing me down. I had just spent five months in Beirut; I had one large suitcase in the airport and what wouldn't fit in there was on my back. All I did that day was wander. I had seen all of these things before but it had been over a decade and besides, it was London and it felt more like I was in a movie than in real life.

I don't dream of London. It rains too much and maybe it's too much like American cities for my travel tastes. Most of all, though, is that something about that day sticks with me - that melancholy has never truly left. It wasn't that the next few months were unhappy times; indeed, it was something of the opposite, as I went to Colorado several times to visit The Cosmonaut, who had also left Beirut to return to real life, and I spent some time in Ohio writing and reading and in four months was back in Washington with a new job that I thought at the time was ideal.

It wasn't, though. It wasn't for one reason, and that was that the woman who ran the organization was crazy. I once led a mutiny of our entire staff - I was the first to go to HR about her and the other three members of our team  (the entirety of the organization) - followed suit and soon she was sent to sensitivity training and management training. Of course, I was to blame in her eyes, and the situation continued to deteriorate until I quit after only seven months. Four months later I thought I had found another ideal job at a progressive political research organization, but after a year it has amounted to nothing more than an admin job posting things from staff online because the powers-that-be are terrified of our brave new digital world and don't trust a political outsider with the publicity reigns. I don't even get to write. The firm has wasted my talent and my time.

What prompted this post and this reflection was watching Out of Africa for the first time yesterday. Good lord, could I identify with that movie. (Why have I never read the book?) It wasn't just that it was a travel memoir that connected me to it. It was about the end of a chapter of life, an end to a prolonged period of happiness, a time irrecoverable yet longed for all the same. It was freedom.

Karen's coffee crop failed and she had to leave Africa. She went on to become a highly successful and respected writer, but she never returned to the land where that chapter of her life had been written. There's something inherently sad about that.

I have yet to recover from my happy time in Beirut. I'm still searching for a job that provides contentment. Until I, too, can become a successful writer, I want to work for an organization that appreciates my creativity, my writing skills, my fearlessness and honesty and loyalty, and I want to be trusted when I want to do things differently than conventional wisdom. I want to be surrounded by people who don't care that there's no masters degree on my resume, who recognize that being well-read and well-informed doesn't come from a piece of paper but from intellectual curiosity and life experience. I want to work for someone who appreciates getting the work done, not the hours you sit in an office. I want freedom from the conventions, the rules, the social norms that Karen Blixen had in Africa, that I had in Beirut. I want life to be as romantic as it was when I could take a stroll down the coast of the Mediterranean, when my balcony was my office, when work was meetings in cafes with friends who wanted their country to overcome its injustices. I want that peace of mind. It ended before I was ready.

That is what that day in London represents for me, that melancholy, that longing to rewind the clock and do it all again. I'm ready to start a new chapter, to scratch out the drafts of the last two years and to find the contentment I had in Beirut. It doesn't have to be in Beirut. It can be in Bari, Italy or Paris or Istanbul or Brussels or even Washington. Is it asking too much? Do we only get one of these chapters of happiness in our lives? I don't believe that, but until I go back to London under different circumstances, I won't dream of London.

"When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them." – Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, 1937