From today's headlines:
Socialite Anne Bass was one of two people injured during an armed break-in at her Litchfield County estate, state police said.
I had no idea the word "socialite" was still used. I could imagine it being used in a completely sarcastic sense but not as a sincere description of a person. And what shocks me most is that I live in a state where there are people who are apparently best described as "socialites".
Someone needs to take Virginia Tech President Streger aside and perhaps suggest kindly that he think a little more or maybe have someone else look over his statements before he makes them.
Details of killer emerge after 33 die in US campus shootings
There were two separate attacks, two hours apart. The first inside a dormitory early Monday morning killed two people. After that a rampage took place in another building, killing 30 people and leaving bodies at several points in the building before shooting himself in the head. Up to 30 others were reported wounded.
Steger described the attacks as "two very tragic events" that "may or may not" be related. "We just don't know at this point in time," he said.
"May or may not be related" sounds like they think someone else shot the people in the dorm then continued his killing spree in a class building.
I'm genuinely interested to see how this "first gunman" theory pans out since so far, it seems a whole lot like it's just a really intense attempt to explain a failure to consider a "domestic" violent offender an actual threat to society. Coulda been two. Why not. Assholes often travel in groups, don't they? Columbine had two. The shitbags who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building came in a pair.
I also can't help but notice the AP non-agentive sentences this passage starts with. The only agent I can find is "a rampage....killing 30 people, leaving bodies, and shooting himself in the head". A rampage doesn't shoot itself, nor does a rampage have a head or gender (presumably). These are the grammatical contortions people get into when they are trying very hard not to say something. I don't imagine conspiracy. I hardly ever do. I imagine society.
And back to the "domestic" nature of the first shooting.
Campus police chief Wendell Flinchum said the first shooting had appeared to be "domestic in nature" so authorities did not feel it warranted an immediate lockdown of the sprawling engineering and research university which has some 26,000 students and 10,000 staff.
No, not a lockdown but perhaps a warning - a strongly stated public emergency announcement that they are looking for an armed man on campus. I still maintain that what leads people to conclude that the perpetrator of a crime which is "domestic in nature" is a collection of unexamined, dangerous sexist attitudes.
In my inbox
makes me happy, tonight at least. It means no last minute complex problems with the assignment which was due today.
I finished writing finals. Still feeling a strangely OCD-like insecurity that the exam is not this week. It's like the reverse of the dream where you show up to class and find out it's the final and you have no recollection of ever going to this class. It's like that but in reverse. I keep thinking "my god, it can't be this week!" and running off to indirectly confirm this somehow.
I do believe this may be a sign I am cracking up.
Sometimes my breakdowns sneak up on me, I suspect they seem so unexpected because it would not be inaccurate to say my days consist in no small part of periods of rage, hillarity, ecstacy, and painfully over-intense self and intimate other scrutiny. So how am I to judge a deviation from this normal uneven keel? It's the little things like repeatedly not believing your exam is this week although you know it is (or do you?) that sometimes signal "hey you're freaking out".
I got into campus late today and left early. I had been planning to cancel my shrink's appointment so I could finish my exams and possibly squeeze in a little research-based work. Just a smidge, I told myself. I've found small goals are easier to feel less disappointed about if they are not acheived. I hadn't counted on the flood.
When I got in, my lab was wet and somewhat rearranged. Most of my stuff was pulled out from the wall and sort of haphazardly tucked here and there on the dry patches of carpet around the room. Brittney the undergrad sat reading Greek tragedies and drying her sopping sneakers on a forbidden space heater. She told me the office had flooded "mostly in that corner" she added, nodding towards my desk.
As the rain was coming down sideways last night, it apparently got in through the walls. "Cement is pourous you know" one of the building management people told my lab mate Sharon. We hadn't realized pourous meant seivelike. Fortunately, it doesn't look like any equipment or data was damaged.
However, my stuff is another story. Most of the water was concentrated to an area around and under my desk, incuding a book case next to my desk. The under the bookcase water hadn't been touched by the guys who wet vacced earlier in the day. Ok, minor distraction. I'll handle this and then get to work, I thought.
I asked the departmental secretary about how to arrange for the wet vacc guys to come back and get under the book case so we don't get mold in our lab. The secretary said I should move the bookcase out of the way and that she'd call the vacc guys to come back tonight "or tomorrow morning". The problem is, I can't move that shit. There was a time when I would have thought nothing of moving furniture by myself. I routinely would rearrange my dorm room - shifting beds, desks, and dressers even, by myself. Yes, I was tired and and a little sore after but it was a good feeling to have things where I wanted them and to have gotten them there without having to ask some strapping young man or woman to come aid me.
These days I don't even carry the fucking laundry up and down the stairs without screwing my hip for a week. Some days I'm ok-ish with these limitations, some days I'm not. Some days, I am sore before I even thought of them, and on those days I find I quite strongly dislike the reminder of the disability which goes with the infirmity. I seriously wanted to take my dislike out on the secretary. She sucks at her job and she makes many people's lives quite difficult through her obstinate incompetency, but it is against my principles to pick on someone so clearly deficient simply to satisfy a cranky mood.
I resigned myself to rounding up some strappers, relative or real. None of the usual suspects were around which left just me, the undergrad who had just the other day been telling me about her impending surgery to address her severe carpal tunnel syndrome, and Sharon my lab mate who had an accident two years ago which severed tendons in her arm. My god our lab is fucked.
I wandered down into the further reaches of my floor, where the grad students who do strange experiments involving pendulums and gym shorts reside. Remarkably few people were around. It was spookily quiet and smelled like wet departmental rug and 2 day old sweat pants.
Not happening. None of it. I would get not even a smidge of work done in there today. If I stayed, I would feel obliged to address the water, which was seeming to be increasingly unaddressable.
I gave up. I decided I should leave, go see my therapist, and then go home and work. On my way out I ran into four people from my program who asked me if I was staying for a defense of a dissertation on "touching things, lots".
Saying no in a tired and apologetic voice is usually sufficient but not today. I guess today was special. Today there were follow up questions. By the time I reached the ground floor of my building, I was answering their queries by loudly stating "I am leaving because I NEED to go to PSYCHOTHERAPY so I don't snap at people for no apparent reason"
But I am home and I am done. I had dinner, ate cookies, and tried not to think about things like mold, disability, and what I'll say to my students if it turns out the exam isn't tomorrow.
from the San Diego Union-Tribune
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.
“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.
He defended the university's handling of the tragedy, saying: “We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it.”
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger is correct in his statement that they didn't have hours to reflect on it, "it" being the reasonable threat which an at large shooter might be considered to pose to the community. However, we have years of "domestic dispute" related violence to reflect on and increasingly frequent incidents of school based violence where the perpetrators are invariably male and the victims in sickening majority are female. How many more years and bodies does anyone really need to reflect on it before we realize that violence is violence, regardless of whether it is qualified in thought or word by "domestic"?
A lack of understanding or effective strategy in the absence of available experience can be considered ignorance. In this situation, no claim to ignorance is even remotely acceptable in the decision that the issue was resolved with the shooting of one woman in a dorm. In fact, it would seem that even an appeal to mass and sustained stupidity is far fetched at best. This and related incidents are examples of gender motivated violence, plain and simple.
The qualifier "domestic" needs to be abandoned as an outdated characterization of the circumstances of and motives for such violent acts. It is grossly inaccurate. Moreover, it perpetuates dangerous beliefs which are adopted and utilized by all of us, but most notably and tragically by law enforcement officials in their moments of critical decision making.
Law enforcement, policy makers, hell... society as a whole needs to stop believing that when a man chooses to attack or kill a woman, it counts as an isolated, contained, and tacitly excusable act providing the woman was ever in any way involved with the man. Such a man is a threat. That campus should have been locked down until he was found or the students could be evacuated.
Not convinced that sexist attitudes are responsible for the remarkable failure to make a connection between "domestic violence" and "real" violence? In the AP "list of deadly campus shootings", an ubiquitous companion to today's story, notably absent is this one which occured almost to the hour exactly two weeks ago (1, 2, 3, 4 - it's not hard to find).
SEATTLE (AP) — A University of Washington researcher was shot to death in her office Monday morning by a former boyfriend who then turned the gun on himself, police said.
Officers responding to reports of gunfire found the two dead in an office on the fourth floor of Gould Hall, the university's architecture building, Assistant University Police Chief Ray Wittmier said.
The 26-year-old woman was granted a restraining order last month against Jonathan Rowan, according to court documents.
Campus police were not aware of the restraining order, Wittmier said.
update1: Fella says "What the hell is with 'dispute'? It's not like these are situations where two people were arguing because they can't decide who is going to kill and who is going to get killed. 'Dispute' is not the right word for this." So it seems as a whole, it's a poorly stated excuse. Imprecise speech in general might be excusable here given the shock of the situation were it not the case that the thought patterns and attitudes underlying that statement may well have been the ones which continue to put each of us at risk of being killed by stray "domestic disputes".
update2 just turned into a post. Go here.
...be writing a final. Yep, that time again. I told my students "next week we have a final. I think."
How's that for being on top of shit? In my defense, there are at least some reasons for my disorientation to time this semester. The university recently changed the academic calendar to allow for intersession sessions, pre and post semester week long "courses", and something like four overlapping interwoven summer sessions. In short, they screwed with the regular academic calendar to allow for as many ways as possible to squeeze a buck out of folks desperate to get that BA/BS stamp of approval in order to enter into the world of 30K+ employment.
I am still coming to grips with the fact that we now have a week off at Thanksgiving, a "spring" break that occurs barely past midwinter, and a Spring semester that effectively ends in April.
The semester changes, this year's "springing forward" too early, recent lab tragedies, and my age induced perception of accelerated temporal passage have conspired to leave me wondering WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS SEMESTER GO, and necessarily doubting the emails in my inbox which say this week is the last week of my teaching gig for the semester. The students I teach are mostly first years and they are as amazed as I am that we have a final next week.
I think that most of them are unaware of the other half of the basis for our shared disbelief that a final is coming so soon. What I am aware of from having designed the lesson plans is that our contact time for the entire semester is twelve 50 minute class periods - only eight and a half of which have real content. Add into (or rather, subtract from) that total the loss from the tendency for late arrivals and early departures each week and you get eight and a half 45 minute content sessions for the semester.
It is so hard for me to come to grips with the fact that I'm supposed to write, give, and grade a final exam on content from 6 and 1/2 hours of sporadic, disconnected lectures. Further, even though I have finally accepted this really is the last week after days of indulging an OCD like obesssion with checking the course calendar repeatedly, I find it hard to muster up the nuggets to write and give an exam under these conditions as I believe testing them on anything from such a set up is, at best, mere grade generation.
Thus far, I have a word document with a nice header saying "Final Exam", "Your Name", and "Section".
Did I mention a student from last semster just emailed me to meet about her grade? Nothing like waiting 4 months to complain about not getting the grade you want (rather than the one you deserve). I'm fighting the urge to write back with extreme cador. Until I can figure that out, I am not writing back. I have given myself a deadline of Monday for a reply. I'm hoping that in the meantime, I can get some advice from university officials and faculty on how to handle this appropriately if not well.
I suspect that I'd have less trepidation about handling this if there was any real mentoring for teaching in my department or university. I almost chuckle as I write that. Mentoring for teaching is a farce here. Grads are allowed to teach because it is part of our education as grad students, so goes the reasoning of universities across the US these days. We are not, I repeat, NOT cheap labor for the degree factory. All departments where grads are supported in large part through teaching assignments have departmental based, run, and overseen teaching support. For example, my department has a class on "teaching" where an old and revered british professor tells us how to speak without saying "um" and "like", to move around a room, how to use visual aids effectively, and how to deliver a perfectly non-participatory memorized lecture from start to finish. All of which are important but none of which necessarily counts as "teaching" in my book. There is also a departmental teaching assistant meeting at the start of each semester where our department head comes in dressed in "regalia" usually to the tune of a song which may have been rousing circa the mid 1980s and lauds us for how much teaching we do, and for the assloads of research and undergraduate enrollment dollars our department brings our university (which translate into new buildings full of underutilized resources and 300+ classrooms taught by increasingly undercompensated, non-permanent instructors).
In all of this mentoring, there's nothing about how to deal with the problem student or the student problem. Last semester, there were something like 3 suicides on my campus with many more attempts. It was alarming. In the midst of this, I had a student who was having a meltdown. Needless to say, she wasn't on the top of her game at the end of the semester. I gave what points I could, even violating my exam make up policy for her. My sense at semester end was that although she acknowledged having had a very rough go of it, she was shocked to see her grades reflecting this. And now she's back at possibly the worst time of the semester. My advisor is part time which leaves me as the senior grad in our lab - a resource for the junior grads on topics including funding, housing, health insurance open enrollment, doctoral exam preparation, and how many incompletes you can get without being asked to take a walk. I'm grading the sprawling last assignment for my 44 students and arranging and accepting makeup work for my current round of "students with problems". I haven't touched my dissertation in weeks, have only managed to do less than the minimum amount of work on my other funding assignments, and the end of my semester is looming as well.
I am as uncertain of the appropriate mindset for writing this exam as I am of the way to deal with a four month old problem-student problem without violating university policy and my own teaching and grading practices or escalating this into a hearing-level crisis.
Cat Lady at Reverse Paranoia has an excellent post about the Duke lacrosse rape case. In another post, I see a use of the word "asshattery", which alone would have warranted a link but her summary of the media reaction to the Duke case is seriously excellent.
That would be 'What is the driver of the red pickup?'
Yes, you are correct!!!
N.J. governor critical after SUV crash
CAMDEN, N.J. - New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine was in critical condition Friday but expected to recover after his SUV crashed into a guard rail while heading to a meeting between Don Imus and the Rutgers women's basketball team...Authorities were still searching for a pickup truck driver whose actions were blamed for causing it...Corzine was in the front passenger's seat of a sport utility vehicle driven by a state trooper when a white pickup truck swerved to avoid a red pickup truck that had moved onto the highway from the shoulder, State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes said. The white pickup hit the passenger side of the SUV, sending it skidding into a guardrail. The red pickup left the scene.
The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering that nearly 7 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in a survey of 26 U.S. cities last year were drug-resistant. In 2001, only about 0.6 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant.
"That leaves us with a single class of highly effective antibiotics," said Dr. John Douglas Jr., director of the CDC's division of STD prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous.
Not the one on the blog. I get one emailed to me.
Today's word is Cockshut.
Sadly, the definition does not live up to my expectations.
Had a visit with the GYN today. Not trying to get preggers, I just don't need endo-mess on top of trying to manage being tired, achey, underweight, and poopy most of the time.
At the moment, it seems it's possible the endo has gotten into my ligaments and such. Endometriosis means endometrial tissue has habit of "extending into places where it shouldn't". This is fucking painful but is also potentially more problematic - i.e. all those hip problems I had? They happen to be on the same side that has the most pelvic pain too, and oh let me tell you when the doctor was rummaging around in there it hurt like crazy on that side. "That's your uterosacral ligament" he said.
I guess ultrasounds don't image this shit well. That's the really shitty part about endometriosis. Usually there's no imaging of it, confirmation of diagnosis, or localizing of implants without surgery. My god, it's the 21st century and we have no way to find or confirm endometriosis without cutting into a woman. WHAT the FUCK.
My diagnosis of endometriosis confirmed by laproscopic surgery in 2002. There was a site in place where it was definitely symptomatic but impossible (I was told) to remove. After the surgery, I took bcps on the advice of a silly, old fashioned gynecologist. I switched to a new gynecologist not long after when the silly one retired. The new one prescribed a (synthetic) progesterone only therapy in the hopes that it would shrink that inoperable site up and prevent new ones from forming.
I took it for about months with rotten side effects I didn't even know were possible side effects (hey, who knew it was a respiratory stimulant?). But it helped. I lived with the side effects and stayed on it until about 7 months later it stopped working all at once - all at once while I was travelling. My doctor switched me to medroxyprogesterone acetate (a different progestin), which I took for a month before it landed me in an ER for blood blood and more blood. It was like a horror movie. I stopped the progesterone stuff and haven't been back to it since. That was about 3 and 1/2 years ago.
After I went over all this with the doctor today, he said "well, there's Lupron..."
Lupron is given for hormone suppression therapy. From what I've read and heard, it's like inducing menopause. I've heard very bad things about it from women who've taken it. Since I'm not keen to have an artificially premature menopause at 35, I'd rather only do it if it's seriously necessary, like if there's no other option and I have implants in places where they'll cause more than pain.
Thus my choice today was between inducing menopause with no assessment; scheduling surgery for assessment, some relief from the excision of sites that can be removed, then choosing a hormone therapy based on the severity and location of the endometriosis; or doing nothing and wait until if I can no longer fuck, walk, sit, or pee without being in excruciating pain.
I chose surgery. I'm hoping for an IUD after if the endo is not bad enough to warrant Lupron. IUD stands for Intrauterine Device. This one releases a synthetic progesterone. It's local and not systemic, so it's likely to not give me the rotten side effects but there is some hope it will at least help prevent new endo sites from developing.
Here are some fun items from a search on Uterine Fibroids.
(from the NIH)
Sometimes, health care providers find fibroids during a routine gynecological exam.
Enigmatic, perhaps even a bit puzzled. We might consider whether or not she is wondering "Where the fuck are my nipples?"
Not a very spring-y Easter. It's 36° and cloudy.
I'm guessing Spring in Finland must not be too different from Spring in New England.
I was looking over a quote file I started (and stopped) some time ago. My sister has some excellent entries in there which really seem like they should be shared.
Food
“Jokes and snacks always get out of hand…especially in church.”
“It’s kind of like maple sugar on a piece of brown paper bag.”
(critiquing the flavor of an Oatmeal Scotchies cookie)
Our family
“Four out of five child molesters who eat pastry like it made with dead animals.”
“Why she refuses to acknowledge that they’re both in that giant diaper they call a marriage together is beyond me.”
“That’s like a 4 year old standing in the middle of the street saying ‘This is my street! And I made the sun come up today…’ ”
“What am I gonna give you for mother’s day? I’ve got a cartoon I might give you someday, but it’s not finished. I took out a book on anatomy from the library so I can learn how to draw the small intestine…”
The arts
“For christ’s sake, she doesn’t deserve to have her music played on a Fisher Price Tooty-Ville Choo-Choo train!” (on Britney Spears)
“For some reason or another, I just don’t think people respect Li’l Kim.”
"Beach Girls is a fine film!"
The body
“If you think it hurts when your labia gets tangled under your pad, wait til your nut gets clipped by a leather thong.”
“Their asses are a marvel of the ligament structure of homo sapiens, because there is no way they should remain upright. They should have collapsed.”
“If I had a nickel for every crotch I split, I’d be rich.”
“All I’m thinking is someone must've done one of those double tit clamp tug-a-wars or something, ‘cause her tits were pointing at the floor.”
Miscellaneous
“Oooh! You catty little…little…cat!”
“They should have one of those for marajuana (the bouncing ball cartoons on pre1980s TV where they taught you how to spell words like missippi). It’d go ‘M-a-r...j-k-y...na-na na-na na’”
"If it's so fucking free, how come the people we hear the most from are multi-millionaires?" - my sister
What's good for people isn't always good for pets. And, as is consistent with my deep faith in the fallibility of our species, I am quite certain some recipes out there are in fact toxic.
For example, someone just posted in my comments section with a link to a blog with dog food recipes on it. I looked the blog over and noticed several of the recipes included garlic powder (I also noticed it was a strangely impersonal blog with no info about where the recipes came from and with ads all along the side...not the sort of environment which induces a sense of trust).
The problem is, garlic and onions contain a substance which is toxic to animals. The raw forms have been associated with hemolytic anemia, and the powdered forms show evidence of the same effects.
The ASPCA operates an animal poison control center which has an "ask the animal poison control center" page with an archive of questions about food. If you are planning to feed you pet home made pet food or human food, do some research first. Check this list out, if you don't see something you want to feed your pet on there ask about it here or talk to your vet before you introduce it into your pet's diet. The whole point of switching to home made food would be to AVOID poisoning your pet.
I just found out another friend of mine from school is VERY ill. Extremely ill. Should be in a hospital but was seen through the infirmary where they are barely competent ill. He is also in my lab. So that makes breast cancer, death, and acute severe illness all in one lab in about 2 1/2 months.
A few years ago when the university was considering cutting grad student health insurance, I would hear the phrase "grad students are a young and relatively healthy population" used so many times I wanted to smack someone. It was the context which made me smacky - that therefore we didn't need as "rich" a plan as the faculty or staff at the university. Let's look at my lab, which only has 6 students in it, as a small sample. Sharon put her arm through a plate glass door a few years back. Not intentionally, she tripped and fell. It resulted in a year's worth of treatment and two surgeries to reconstruct tendons which had been severed. She will have long term effects of this for the rest of her life, including neuropathy. My friend with breast cancer has been treated for thyroid disease for as long as I've known her. I had endometriosis, surgery and many treatments for it which themselves caused complications and more treatments, severe migraines, and neurolyme disease. I'm currently being watched for developing an autoimmune disease, and being treated for isolated symptoms as they come up. My friend who is very very sick right now has a congenital heart condition which increases the likelihood that he could go into v-fib and now is quite sick with something which could be contagious.
Young and relatively healthy my ass. If we were all 21, it might be a reasonable statement - but given that my lab's mean age is 28 this talk about a young and relatively healthy population is clearly nine kinds of bullshit. This is an age group where the early arrivals in terms of disease show up. Think about all the diseases which have as their onset age "child bearing years" and you've got my group. But we are also at increased risk of certain injuries and infections due to being still young enough to be more physically and sexually active than our 35+ married with children peers.
I just had to get that out of my system. Needed to rant. I feel so bad for my friend. He was so sick this week. He really should be in a hospital.
Report: 1 in 3 employees thinking of leaving
The sentiment of the old country song "Take This Job and Shove It" is on the minds - if not on the iPods - of many company employees these days, according to a recently released report.
In surveying more than 65 organizations and 50,000 employees over the last few years, Discovery Surveys Inc., a Sharon consulting firm, has concluded that one out of three employees are seriously thinking about leaving their employers.
Oh I do know how they feel. Seeing this sort of reinforces my "you can be miserable anywhere" belief though. That sure sounds pessimistic when I write it down. Somehow it doesn't seem as pessimistic when I think it.
My school recently sent out surveys to PhD students in select disciplines. I got one. I hadn't quite realized just how negatively I feel about this place, the structure and organization. I tried very hard to answer as honestly as possible - usually erring on the side of positive rather than negative, but I know my answers were still consistently quite low ratings. When I got to the question "If there were one thing you could change about your program, what would it be?" I think I spent about 20 minutes just sitting there thinking about it.
Those "one thing" questions always stump me. They're a good exercise in determining your values. One thing. That's it. One.
I said I would change the attitude which glamorizes a lifestyle of poverty, misery, and privation during graduate school. I said I would change it because this lifestyle in this context is a luxury. People who have been raised in lower income families, people who are "on their own" as graduate students, people who only have themselves to take care of them, people who have their own families or obligations to aging parents....those people cannot afford to "play" academic tramp.
I asked a faculty member the other day whether there was any kind of procedure (stated or not) for how to cover for a graduate student when something tragic or very serious happens. We were speaking about my friend's mother's death. The faculty member is something of a mentor to me, and is rather close with my friend as well. She said "well when one of our students got so sick last semester we just sort of self organized a solution. I had someone who was an RA and I took him off that, continued paying him, and had him take on her teaching load for the semester."
My response was that my side of the department wasn't so good at self organizing. She had no comment.
If I have to watch these assholes (by which I of course refer to my graduate faculty) fumble the ball on this one, I think I may very well have to leave. I know my leaving is doing them a favor, getting rid of some of the detritus which has accumulated in the program, opening up a desk and some office space if nothing else. I have no illusions that my leaving would be any kind of hardship for anyone but me. However, I have given it a lot of thought - how and who these people are, and what kind of professional identity I could possibly develop which would allow me to work with them with less daily friction. I haven't got many answers where I do not require super powers or some kind of insane monk like calm. I've thought about this angry, discouraged, happy, capricious, empowered, disturbed, preturbed, sick, healthy, and oh about everyway possible and I still have the same conclusion that I would not be happy on the "standard" academic path even if it were to lead more or less directly to a permanent faculty position. I've seen the permanent faculty. I know what I'm heading for. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, watch "Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf", remove the witty dialogue and you've got a pretty accurate picture. No really, I'm serious.
And so into this system - the one in which I and my friend are both parts and wholes unto ourselves we bring in a 100% genuine tragedy. A thing where people are supposed to shine their brightest. And so far, I am seeing some wonderful responses from graduate students and departmental support staff. But not from the faculty.
I can't work for or with people like that. And I certainly can't be one of them.
When you are learning a foreign language, you do little "culture" sections. Not so much geography and politics as just crap like "A la plage!" (je porte un maillot?) and whatnot.
What you don't get are "At at funeral" or "When someone dies". I'd think at least the latter if not also the former would be important, especially if you were planning to someday live in the country where that langauge was spoken. Of course, English is sort of all over the damned place, but so's French and that sure didn't stop Madame Higgins from using books and materials which were France only.
Today an international student asked me "so what happens now?" regarding our friend whose mother just died. I talked a little, made reference to "holy week" and the problems this entailed for funeral planning, then noticed he looked very confused. I asked him if he knew anything about US funerals and death customs. Nope.
If you don't want a comprehensive and detailed answer, I am a bad person to ask. I assume if I and a non-local get into what could be an awkward topic, the best thing to do is to give them as complete an answer as possible. My sense is questions like "what do you do with used pads" are hard to bring up in another country, so I like to be sure the person gets the most out of the exchange.
It was sort of odd to phrase so much of it in terms I tend to reserve for anthropology papers..."and the preist....er...any of the christian...I guess clerics, would be quite busy with all the Easter, um, rituals this week..." But we got through it. About 15 minutes later, he had gotten the "everything you never wanted to know about US or at least New England funerals and death rituals" lecture. With an Irish Catholic Boston spin to it (e.g. "Whenever anyone is in the room where the dead person is laid out, they tend to be very quiet. Some people approach to kneel and pray. Generally it is expected that the people in attendance approach the coffin. Even if you don't have anything in mind or anything...it's part of the 'paying respects' thing. Family members usually drift in and out, sometimes hiding out in a back room chain smoking and telling incredibly stupid jokes...sometimes someone shows up drunk.
My friend's mother died today. It was completely unexpected. When I spoke to her, she still didn't know how or why, and was waiting for a ride to the hospital to find out.
