Simple Joys

Some times its the simplest things that can brighten up one's day.

Re:re: So Uncomfortable

Sadly, as many things go in education, it is never as simple as "so don't".

The students in question are being stigmatized by their clothing being soiled everyday visibly, as well as the odor coming from them. It is affecting them socially, as other kids don't want to sit by them, work with them, or talk to them at lunch.

And no, I do not have the resources to get them new shirts. I can't afford it, the school can't afford it, and from what I got from the special education teacher, the parents definitely can't afford it. They don't have running water in their home, mom and dad don't work, dad can't read, mom is in and out of the hospital on a weekly basis, and all four of the boys receive almost every service offered by the school.

So maybe in suburban Milwaukee, the worst thing that can happen to you is a teacher labels you a "dirty kid" by discreetly talking to your parents, but in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago it is far worse to have to wait days for your food stamps to arrive because you have nothing in your home to eat.

-Previously-
Re: So Uncomfortable
So Uncomfortable

Dreamcats

My love for tmblr has its limits. This is not one of them. 

DREAMCATS....

Listening to Sung Tongs...

New Mexico dreaming...

Amores Perros

Sartorialist or Catorialist?

via Catorialist, male on street, sporting a bronze ball choker

via Sartorialist, male on street, sporting a butterfly

Re: So Uncomfortable

Simple Answer: You don't. 

It seems that if the boys' hygiene aren't bothering the other students and aren't impairing them educationally or socially (as far as you can see), then why does matter if they have stained shirts? I know you probably have the resources to get them new shirts, but I'm not sure you want to be in charge of these kids weekly dirty laundry.  Any action short of that will result in the implication that the parents aren't keeping up their end in the battle of boyhood hygiene. And I think that prospect is what is seriously putting the chill in your bones. 

But if the boys are getting along fine (whether or not they're secretly embarrassed), then let them go along -- no need to add further insult to injury. 

The worst thing in the world for a kid is for your teacher to name you the dirty kid.

-Previously-
So Uncomfortable...

So Uncomfortable...

I need to have the most uncomfortable conversation that you can have with a parent today. How do you talk to a parent about the fact that they are sending their children to school dirty? I am not just talking about a body odor problem, that’s be easier to handle. These 4 brothers are coming to school in the same grossly stained clothing many days in a row. One of these boys is the student that I spend my entire day modifying work for, and it breaks my heart to see him coming to school in filthy clothing every day.

How do you talk to a parent about this??

Internal Matters for Posterity's Sake

So the wheels are turning again and something might just become of this strange little blog. BUT WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?!

For all of our faithful readers (which are basically just all of us who were already "on staff" so far), I think it is important to peel back the curtains and reveal what's been going on. If only for posterity's sake, so that we might come back to this post months from now and remember when we started to define ourselves. Or so we can trace the origins of the internal disagreements that ripped the blog asunder.

It seems that we've moved back to that special time of year when all of us have been thinking about how we really ought to run a blog together, only it seems that with our group of friends now spread evenly across the country (if evenly is the proper description for a handful of cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest), both Misters Noah J. and Quoctrung Bui have decided to get the ball rolling! How Scandalous!

ITS TIME

OH, Hi Guys...


So its about time to officially rechristen this mammoth boat. 
I was surprised that we managed to update this thing as many times as we have. But now that some of us are out of school, this shouldn't be a problem anymore! Wait...what are we doing here? Some people, like Timmy Wilgrims, believe that a successful blog has to have a precise thematic underpinning in order to be interesting to read. I was thinking about this on my bike ride home, and I wondered what could that theme be? Now that I'm not in school, I could really focus into a very specialized topic and be blog-famous, publish a cheap paperback, and go on tour! Suck it guys...writing is easy--especially in blogform. 


But the question remains, what could it be?

Modern music often strives to contain a narrative, the most popular story being one of love or love lost. However, cannot music explore each and every facet of the human experience, even those that cannot be explained through the telling of a tale? When considered beyond lyrics, music is perhaps the most intuitive medium; if film and visual art are an exploration of the external aspects of the self (with an inherent focus that is centered on the physical features, actions and dialogue of the characters), and the novel an internal medium (with an inherent focus that is centered on the thoughts or feelings of the characters), then music must be striving to reach something even more abstract: the ineffable subjectivity of the listener. While one can usually explain or be convinced of the merits of a certain genre of film or style of novel over another, one's taste in music is much more intimate and often inexplicable. While no piece of art evokes just one emotion, they usually fall into a certain range, whereas two people can listen to the same piece of music and have radically different reactions to it. The emotions evoked from a piece of music depend almost entirely on the subjective experience of the listener; if I love Johnny Cash and someone else doesn't, there is little I can say to make them see why and if I find a song uplifting and someone else finds it depressing, there is little either of us can do to close that gulf. But really, I think that is one of music's inherent strengths. Music is, perhaps, all emotion (to the point that trying to use words to describe it is as absurd as trying to use tap-dance to describe architecture), and it is also something that can affect us deeply and with enduring strength, which should be a key component to any definition of art.

Thus, here is a Top-Ten list of songs about prison. To be considered here, the song must actually deal with prison as an idea or an experience and not just have it in the title. I also strove for diverse range of musical styles and ways of interpreting the idea of prison. Also, the song needs to be good.

Israel

So I have a 12 page paper due Monday morning. Now I know what you're all thinking, you're thinking "Holy cow you'd better get started on that bad boy soon, or else you won't have time to do any studying for your psych exam which is on Monday, that being the same day as your paper's deadline." But the situation is not so dire. You see, we had to write a 6 page early version about a month ago that we would then flesh out for this final paper. At the time, I thought this was irritating, but now I am reaping the benefits of having half of the paper done already.

What does this have to do with the blog? Nothing. But here's the dilemma. Every time I need to write a paper, at least lately, it ends up working like this: I keep on trying to start, but I know that I can write much better. And yet I keep on cranking out these poorly written, awkwardly connected paragraphs. But then, after a while, it starts to flow better, and I go back and redo whatever I wrote during those first twenty or so minutes. So I thought to myself, maybe I just need to warm up. You won't attempt to deadlift three hundred pounds for the first time without warming up, would you? Of course not! You'd stretch your hip flexors a bit, maybe do a couple pull throughs to groove proper hip mechanics, and start with lighter weights first. And for my last post on the blog, the same sort of thing happened (this should have been placed higher up): the first paragraph or two was pretty slow going, but then once the ball got rolling the writing went a lot faster, and I started having some fun with it.

But now that I've written two paragraphs, I'm starting to have some serious doubt. I want you all to understand my concerns, so I'll go back to a sports metaphor. If you wanted to race someone in a 400m dash, it's true, you would warm up first. But you wouldn't do just anything to warm up; you'd have to pursue a sport-specific warm up in addition to your general warm up, as detailed by Thomas Kurz in Stretching Scientifically. That is, I wouldn't prepare for a race by doing a bunch of dips or pushups; I would do some leg swings, or butt kicks, or a quick little warm up jog. Could it be, that by wasting the time of whoever is bored enough to read this, I am committing such an error? Will I go back to my essay and find that I've only warmed up for random rambling with sports metaphors thrown in? Will I be unprepared for discussing United States foreign policy toward Israel? Should I have just made a quick outline, or at least taken some time to decide what it is I'm going to write? This is a serious dilemma. I need to write a two to three page contextual introduction, and yet I have no idea what I'm going to say. Why does this matter? What reasons am I going to give? Are there any sources I should read? Is it a mistake to be sitting here without a single one of my sources handy? This seems likely.

Then again, the first paper was supposed to have said introduction, yet my introduction was one short paragraph before I cut to the chase, and yet a got a good grade. But that is foolish reasoning; it should be much easier to write 2-3 pages of filler than 2-3 pages of meat, and I really should take advantage of this great opportunity for easy writing.

Anyway, it is time to turn again to this paper. Perhaps in the future I will share the results of this experiment with you, dear readers, at least those who are left after Tim ravaged the blog mercilessly with a series of inane, pointless posts.