Tag Archives: education

Washing Machines

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But tell me again about how all kids have equal opportunity to achieve the American dream.

American public schools are structural inequality in motion. Rich kids go to well-funded institutions, and they attend prepared to learn. Many poor children don’t have that option. Here’s the source: One Answer to School Attendance: Washing Machines. We live in a world where little kids miss out on whatever advantages might be available to them because they’re afraid other kids will make fun of their clothes. And some people are OK with this. The solution is so simple, but society doesn’t consider clean clothes the right of poor children, apparently.

But some people do care.

Anyway, I felt like that story needed a little boost.

Morning in America, 2017 (part 1, maybe)

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Also, music offends me. You’ll have to replace it with the sound of a two-stroke engine.

I’m worried about public education in Arizona. I mean, it’s worrisome all over America, but I live in Arizona, which typically ranks about 49th out of 50 in educational funding. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority for a lot of the population, which includes many aging retirees who just don’t care about other people’s children. But public school funding is important, if only so you don’t end up in a state full of ignorance. You wouldn’t believe how important education is to an outcome of competent adults.

There are 2 schools of thought concerning the nature of education. For me, education is a process of teaching people how to think, so that can adapt to new conditions and make intelligent choices as situations arise. For some people, education is about teaching people what to think, so they parrot your opinions and don’t believe in the validity of any others. Facts are facts, and if your facts cannot stand up to independent analytic scrutiny, your facts are actually opinions, and if your opinions are so frail they fall apart upon examination, why would you expend so much effort to protect them?

That’s what education is for, to keep humanity moving forward, to improve our odds as a species to achieve the best possible outcome. To prevent us from making the same mistake over and over.

Ms. Kitty’s Heart

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You know what would have helped? If I had any idea how to paint. 

Well over a year ago Ms. Kitty was extolling the virtues of her heart collection–a series of paintings by various artists, which she’d acquired over the years, and which all featured prominently the image of a heart–and asked if I would contribute. But I don’t paint all that much (the last really big painting project I did was like 18 years ago) and I didn’t have any real canvas and it just kept getting bumped. But she had asked me again a little before Thanksgiving, and during Thanksgiving my sister was cleaning out her room at my parents’ house (my parents are retiring and threatened to throw all her stuff away, which is something they would totally do and had already started doing) and she was going to toss a painting she did in high school, so I just painted over it.

I know that’s not how you’re supposed to do it, but, as I said, I don’t know how to paint. Unlike me, my sister has taken painting classes, and she told me to cover the canvas in gesso, but I skipped that step and just laid the paint on thick enough to mostly obscure the original image, although you can still see a prominent line on the left side (through the wrist) and there are a couple places where her textures or colors peek through.

For all that, I think it came out decently, even though when I look at it all I see are its myriad flaws and I’d like to paint over it again and do it right this time. But Ms. Kitty seemed to like it. At this resolution, you can’t see the 6 ghost cats hidden on the bottom right.

The canvas itself is about 18″ x 24″ and the paints are acrylic, just the common stuff you can get at Michael’s or any art shop. I think the brand might even be called Basic. Most of the paints were fairly old but still seemed fine. I had to acquire 2 new brushes and 1 new paint. Even in acrylic, painting is a really expensive hobby.

This took me about a week, working between 2 and 5 hours every day. I imagine, if I knew how to paint, it could have gone faster.

Painting made me want to paint more, but I don’t have more canvas. I was actually thinking about trying that thing where you buy terrible landscapes at Goodwill and then paint monsters into them. I bet I could make a killing if I painted Pokemon into them. But actually, getting paintings at Goodwill is not as easy as you’d think.

In other news, The Man decided to give me an early Christmas present by teaching himself bookbinding and creating a hardcover version of The Hermit! I am astonished. It’s really remarkable work. If you’d like to see the step-by-step tutorial of his process, you can follow this Reddit link (and upvote if you’re a Redditor and you like me and you think his work is worthy, which, of course, it is). Now that the paperback version is available, the ebook will be offered, for a limited time, as a free download.

Sleepover (More or Less)

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Obviously, I took a couple liberties with this one, but I think I caught the gist of it.

Well, that’s a wrap. There were a few moments when I didn’t think I’d make it, but I did: 16 comics in 4 weeks and 1 day, 6 panels for every one of the 16 stories in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell. And now I can tell you that these comics will all be available in print, an actual physical comic book that you may have the good fortune of possessing if you happen to check out Bonnie Jo’s upcoming book tour this fall, and maybe if you attend the Tucson Festival of Books this spring, and perhaps some other places as well. It’s pretty exciting.

So, yeah, it’s more about me than about “Sleepover,” but I think, if you parse this comic the way I parsed the rest of the stories, you’ll see the connections. From the very beginning of this project, while trying to figure out where and how to begin, I knew that I would have to tell this story, and so the first piece in the book would have to come last, because who wants to read about Monica? Besides the people who apparently read these blog posts, I guess. Actually, more people read any of my individual blog posts than have read all of my novels put together.

Really, I don’t think I totally understood “Sleepover,” or Stu’s advice entirely until reaching the last panel. Although, don’t you just understand everything on an increasingly deeper level the older you get? Maybe in another decade it will all carry even greater meaning.

It seemed imperative to get Stu’s actual words and handwriting into this comic, which necessitated spending nearly an hour going through papers for this one particular paper, and even though I was kind of freaking out about the time as it happened, looking over some of this stuff was delightful. I had forgotten what excellent feedback both Stu and Bonnie Jo gave, voluminous critique. Stu covered almost an entire page with comments about “Changing Planes,” a story of fewer than 250 words. He wrote almost as much about the story as there was story, and it wasn’t even for class. He gave me an extra critique just because I asked. And Bonnie Jo headed my thesis committee, even though she wasn’t even employed by the university at the time.

I miss grad school. But the future might be even more fun.

Brave Back-to-School Bulletin Board

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The great thing about this is that, the more you doubt it, the truer it is. Theoretically.

Once or twice a year, my insomnia gets so bad that it comes full circle and after a week of falling asleep around dawn, my circadian rhythms get pushed back so far that I literally miss my window of opportunity for that night and never get to sleep at all. Last night hurt. Probably by 10 a.m. or so I could have slept, but at that point it makes more sense to power through for another 12 hours and get back onto a schedule that puts me in alignment with the majority of humans.

But I had to make a bulletin board! On zero hours of sleep! Fortunately, I had hung the orange background Friday and cut all the letters Monday, so I just had to reinforce the background, space and attach each individual letter, and then get some graphic elements. Due to the no-sleep, walking-around-basically-hallucinating situation, the lion cubs somehow came out half the size they were intended to be but by that point my brain was done. I scarcely felt competent to hold scissors, let alone pilot a car, and I really needed to use the reserve for the driving part, since The Man randomly stopped by, hung out for a while, and then left the Girl in my keeping.

So, I feel like this design could have been 10 times better but I also feel like it’s good enough, and if I get tired of looking at it I can change it later. School starts Thursday in my district (the kids to the south went back last Thursday; the kids to the north, including the Boy and the Girl, start next Thursday). The teachers all seemed to like it.

Normally this is a weird color combination for me. I don’t care for orange unless it’s food and typically I only like secondary colors if they’re right next to their primaries, but it’s just as with the mandalas: I forced myself to choose a different color (orange, to go with the yellow lions) and then convinced myself that purple would stand out against orange, and it really did.

Malala Yousafzai and Love of Learning

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We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow. ~Malala Yousafzai

Considering my final message of the school year, I really wanted to do something that spoke to the ideas of unity and acceptance and love, concepts that seem widely absent from the world this year, and decided to choose a quote from Malala Yousafzai, the education rights activist. If you don’t know about the amazing life of Malala, you should check her out. In a nutshell, she was an 11-year-old girl living under the Taliban when she was asked to blog about her experience as a schoolgirl in a country where education for girls was outlawed, and she began to speak in favor of education and against the regime. Four years later, the Taliban shot her in the head to shut her up, but she survived, and kept at what she had been doing, and went on to win a Nobel Peace prize and some other things too. She graduated high school and went on to open her own school. I don’t think she’s yet turned 20.

It seems like a lot of the problems in our country are predicated by a lack of comprehensive education, a sort of selective myopia about what education means, and what’s important, which is why I chose this quote. You can’t make informed decisions if your schooling has massive lacunae. You need science and literature to understand your world, and you need a good overview of science and literature. You can’t for example, teach science and literature but deliberately leave out the workings of evolution and stories about sex  and claim that you know the shape of the world.

If you must zealously guard your deficits in case something that clashes with your beliefs slips through, then your beliefs are probably not as not as strong as you think they are. Learn about the things that scare you and then evaluate whether or not they’re useful (and why they’re frightening). And that means actually learn. Don’t just be like some people and sit in the classroom with your fingers in your ears, or demanding the teacher reconcile observable phenomena with your preconceived notions. That’s not learning. Science means you look at the quantitative data, not just the parts that validate your story. Literature means you look at the entire human experience, not just the parts that are pretty and clean.

Technically, and from an artistic perspective, this is one of my less ambitious bulletin boards, but I think the kids will enjoy it. Those are real strings on the balloons, and they move when the wind blows. Someone will probably pull them off. Oh well. It took 4 days total, although the first day I just put up the background because I was busy. Then it took a couple hours to make and paste the letters, a couple hours to make the rainbow and the books, and a couple hours to finish and hang everything. The Girl was there to help me, because her school got out a week before mine, and she helpfully pointed out, 3/4 of the way through the rainbow, that I had arranged the colors backward, probably because I haven’t had a good night sleep in weeks. Then she said that it was OK, because the rainbow was unique, like Malala.

So tired.

Straight Lines and All Mandala

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Every once in a while, I find myself accidentally in balance.

Change is in the air, lifting the wings of a paper crane as it floats over turbulence, rustling the unkempt spikes on a dragon’s back. Mesmerizing. This week, probably. For a lot of years–maybe 7 or so, I should think–the Fox and I kept up a daily correspondence about our creative output in the previous 24 hours. Then I got cranky and disillusioned with the industry and he met and fell in love with the Otter and that all got put on hold for 2 years. Then he married the Otter (I married the Otter and him, because that is something I am totally qualified to do in the state of Arizona, and he had kindly married The Man and me 3 years earlier) and I got my groove back and we have been writing each other emails again. This is very exciting.

Tomorrow I’ve been invited to participate in a panel on gender and sexuality at a near-ish college, and I’m really excited. I think this–adult sex ed–is something I want to get more involved in. I guess I’m suffering from a little chest cold (6 airplane flights in 5 weeks, not surprising) and I’m not feeling like much of a dragon, but I’m determined to put my heart into this, because it’s important to me that young adults see that the world is not 100% heteronormative and cis-gendered, that’s it’s OK to not fit into a false binary, that you can be happy and fabulous without conforming to arbitrary life expectations based on someone else’s perception of your genitals. I was lucky to attend Antioch College, so I heard these messages when I was 17, but even with the Internet, I guess a lot of kids still don’t know that they’re OK.

But if you’re reading this, and your gender and/or sexuality don’t match up with your community’s stereotypes of acceptable outcomes, know that you are OK.

The History of Rock and Roll

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Everyone wants to feign short term memory loss about all that weed they smoked in college, but no one smokes that much weed.

When I see Facebook pictures of some of the people I went to high school and college with holding their children, looking quite responsible and PTA-friendly, it makes me snicker. I remember what you did! You were crazy in the ’90s! And now you have to look your kids in the eye and tell them not to do the exact same things you had so much fun doing? How?

So this is a long-running joke I have with The Man, and it’s what we actually do, every time the subject comes up, whether we’re listening to old music, watching old movies, or reading current events. History of a brilliant career, et cetera, et cetera, “but then they took too much heroin and died.” I’m absolutely sure these kids will never, ever take heroin. Hooray!

For this comic, I attempted to draw 13 celebrities, most of whom came out looking more or less like themselves. In panel 3, on the left, is Nancy Reagan, the First Lady who famously implored the nation’s youth to “Just say no” to drugs while simultaneously working to ensure that the President of the United States never made any important decisions without first consulting a psychic.

To her right is Bristol Palin, the world’s most fertile argument against abstinence only education.

The dead music and theatrical personalities in panel 4 are Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holliday. They didn’t all actually die of heroin overdoses, but they arguably all took too much heroin and they all died. If I had more space, I would have also drawn Dee Dee Ramone, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Cory Monteith, at least.

Finally, in panel 8, Keith Richards, who has taken all the psychoactive substances known to science and lived a long, productive, successful life.

My Hero

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If you’re wondering why past Mallory has curly hair and future Mallory’s hair is straight, that’s because it’s 1989, so past Mallory is sporting a bad perm.

Just some standard silliness. If I could travel back in time and give 3rd grade me some advice, I’m not sure what I’d say. It’s tempting to joke about stock tips and the outcomes of sporting events, but in fact I don’t really have a great sense of what that would be, and 8-year-old me probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

If picking a past me to meet and offer advice, I’d probably pick 7th grade me, because she could really use some assurance that she’d show them, she’d show them all. And it would have been nice if future me had clued hormonal adolescent me in about pointless relationships and the fact that I wasn’t actually going to get married until I was 38.

I learned my times table eventually. But, like, not until high school. It wasn’t a huge priority. I was never going to become a physicist. Unlike Mallory Morimoto, who, most likely has further heroic time traveling adventures to pursue. There are wrongs to be put right.

When Sallie Mae Comes Calling

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The Bard does not approve.

The Bard does not approve. Then again, the Bard never went to college.

This gag is actually an old joke of the Rabbit’s. We used to laugh so hard. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you default on your student debt? You can’t, as the expression goes, get blood from a stone. You can, however, get it from a head wound. But despite the central premise of The Merchant of Venice, there’s really no meaningful gain to taking a financial obligation out of a human body.

This comic is for the many, many people I’ve watched claw their way out (or not) of the rough burlap sack of the lowest levels of academia. The ivory tower is a sink or swim proposition. At this point, I don’t know that many people who are still adjuncting–most of them have gotten tenure track jobs or gone into some other lines of work–but I do know a few, and at one point I knew dozens. It’s basically thankless, low paying work that people do in the hopes that it will lead to more prestigious work with better pay and also job security, but it only works out that way for a select few.

Aside from The Man’s largesse and faith in me, one of the reasons I am able to do what I do is that I never had any student loans, since I am essentially 1 1/2 steps away from being a trust fund hippie. I mean, I don’t have the cash, but I do have the safety net. But I have friends who have been making well over their minimum payment for over a decade. I have friends who have been paying the same undergraduate education off for almost 2 decades. It’s crippling. You could get a mortgage in some parts of the country for what some people pay every month for the privilege of education.

In some places, it’s considered a right.

You can run. You can hide. But you can’t escape Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or Dr. Biff and the Brain Repo Man.