in recovery September 29, 2007
I had a drink last night with Fantastick Patrick and some of his school teacher colleagues. I had been very curious to hear about how it’s going with Patrick’s first year of teaching. He’s teaching biological sciences in a Recovery District middle school, after being switched at the last minute from teaching social studies. He said the kids are great. The boys are hilarious and the girls remain inscrutable to him. The parents he has interacted with so far have been great.
I’ve noticed that when two or more teachers are gathered, the introductions include “which district?” You can teach in either the Orleans Parish Schools District, or the Recovery Schools District, and with new schools opening, no one is sure which is which. The short hand is “Orleans” or “Recovery,” so you frequently hear teachers stating, “I’m in Recovery,” Hah! It makes it sound like you’re in a group therapy session in a bar with everyone drinking alcohol.
According to his colleagues, all the kids love Patrick, which is not hard to believe. He told me that he had to start off the classes with mini-courses on basic note-taking. No one was writing anything down, and they told him they didn’t know what to write. His “modular” classroom has a lab, and there are materials for experiments in the cabinets, but no microscopes yet for the kids to look at stuff. He’s expecting them to come in soon, but right now the kids are getting a little bored with just vocabulary.
He told me that one kid wasn’t paying attention, and he told Patrick he didn’t need to learn about science because he is going into business. Patrick said, “well, if you are going into business, you need to learn to take notes.”
The kid said he was going into the porn business. Patrick said, “then you definitely need to learn about your biological sciences. You can go into the porn industry, but if you don’t know your biological sciences, you might come out of it with something you can’t wash off.”
Patrick said the kid likes him now, and he mostly stays awake and participates in class. When Patrick catches him sleeping, he says, “what’s the matter, E? The Industry keeping you up late on a school night?”
Another time, some kids were tossing around a wrapped condom in class. Patrick said he was going to take it away. One kid said he needed it because he had a date that night. Patrick said, “so, if I see this in here again tomorrow, what does that tell me?”
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Protected: middle passage September 27, 2007
failure to honk
This morning, on my way Uptown for class, I got behind someone in a huge pickup truck driving at 10 MPH all the way down Carrollton Avenue. I was inspired by the lady I met at the hair salon, who was so positive and calm. I thought, “I’m not running late. I’m not in a hurry. Perhaps this person is lost. I’m going to relax, follow this slow-poke, not tailgate, not honk the horn, and enjoy a leisurely drive down one of the most beautiful streets in New Orleans. Never mind that impatient, toxic person who is behind me, tailgating.”
Finally, the person in front of me turned off on Hampson Street. I saw a magnetic sign on the door of the truck that said “Cash 4 Houses” and a phone number. Vultures, driving around looking for desperate New Orleans homeowners to take advantage of. I wondered if I had time to turn around and follow them, just to honk at them.
more fun legal facts
This semester, I decided to take only classes that have subject matter that interests me. I’ve fulfilled the requirements, and to hell with the bar exam. I may regret that decision later, but for now I’m enjoying going to class and can actually read a whole case without falling asleep.
One thing that interests me is copyrights. The subject got even more interesting to me when I realized it was in the Constitution. Who knew?
I was fascinated to learn that when you buy a work of art such as a painting, you are only buying the object, not the rights associated with it. Unless you’ve got a contracting transferring the rights to you, the artist retains the exclusive rights to reproduce it, make posters or little note cards, or authorize other uses, such as in advertising. I guess big-time art collectors know all this, but I wasn’t aware that when you buy a painting you don’t even really have the right to exhibit it without the artist’s agreeing to it. The reason I didn’t know that was because I have never met an artist who would object to a patron exhibiting their work, I don’t care if the exhibit is in a whorehouse. Also, I think most people who have an art degree, as I do, have no idea that they could prevent their sold work from being exhibited by the New Orleans Museum of Art if they chose to. No one would want to do that. But it’s nice to know that an artist can conceivably prevent his or her work from being exhibited in promotion of something abhorrent to their values, like if the Ogden Museum suddenly went nuts and held a fundraiser for the Southern Society for the Promotion of Dog Fighting.
After a certain length of time, everything goes into public domain, so more of the proverbial Dead White Male Artists are quickly losing their grip on the living every day. I always thought flash photography was prohibited in museums because of the potential damage to the art works, but now I can see that they are protecting themselves from works in public domain being used by others. I can’t freely use someone else’s photograph of a painting for my own purposes, but I can go to the Fine Arts Museum in Philadelphia, snap off a few shots of older works in their collection with my cell phone and go to town.
Another interesting thing about copyright is that you can tell from the first few sentences of a case how it’s going to go. For instance, one of the leading cases is Feist, a 1983 Supreme Court case wherein the Feist company was sued for using data compiled by the monopoly phone company to produce their own ad-supported telephone directories. Just think about the proliferation of unnecessary and unused off-brand telephone directories and you can see who won that one. If Feist had lost, the Real Yellow Pages would still be the only Yellow Pages, and millions of trees would be alive today.
in praise of positive people
I got my hair done on Tuesday, in the middle of a crazy day. I was preoccupied with the kids and their car. They were at my house talking to the insurance people, using my phone because both of their phones had been talked out.
The very young woman who cuts my hair asked me if I was still happy with it and if I wanted this and that. I tried to think about hair, but I couldn’t. “I don’t care.”
She looked at me like I had just told her I don’t care about world peace, there is no Santa Claus, and soylent green is made of people, people!
“You don’t care?”
I felt terrible for saying that. Hair is her life. Me, I just don’t want to go around looking like a “faithless slattern,” as a now-gone, very funny friend used to call badly groomed women.
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I do care. I just had a bad night, and it’s a busy day. I need to leave it up to you. Just fix me up and put me back out on the street.” After that, we were both laughing and bitching about everything.
She asked about law school, and I said something flip, like I’m almost done slogging my way through it and I am looking forward to failing the bar exam in February.
A little while later, a woman was suddenly standing in front of me. She had long red hair and a very friendly face. She said she was a counselor, and getting a graduate degree, and she was about to turn 60. I could not believe it, she could easily pass for 40. Even her hands looked 20 years younger. She said she had overheard our conversation and she wanted to tell me that she could tell by the way I speak that I am the kind of person who will succeed at what I am trying to do. I sometimes feel like going to law school in my 40s was a weird thing for me to do, and it’s always nice when people make me feel like it’s perfectly normal. Sometimes people tell me they “admire” me, and I feel like they wouldn’t say that if they knew what a struggle it has been and what a mediocre student I am! I tell myself every day that a lot of successful lawyers were lousy law students, and they were half my age at the time. I thanked her for going out of her way to make me feel good.
After she left, Priscilla and I couldn’t get over how young she looked and how positive and calm she seemed. Priscilla has a child, and I had been anxious over my children, so we decided that people who look 20 years younger than they are and are positive and calm all the time must not have any children. I added that I bet she never touches a drop of alcohol, which is the best anti-aging habit in my opinion.
Today, Eddie came over to pick up my car and work his magic. Amy later called and said that her car insurance is paying for a rental car and the Monday night towing and storage, but they won’t pay to have it towed to Lafayette. When Eddie came back I told him the story and asked if he could recommend a place to get it repaired here. He said, “don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of everything tomorrow.” That was EXACTLY what I wanted to hear.
I asked, “what do you need to get it out of the pound?” He just gave me a mysterious smile and said, “nothing.” I love it.
Protected: we have alleged victims! September 25, 2007
a good day gone bad
I was having a great day and it suddenly took a nose dive. I started off in Environmental Law class, where I learned this fascinating factoid: when I was a child, the single largest thing ever made by humans was the great pyramid of Cheops. Now, the largest thing ever made by humans is the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, NY. It’s 155 feet high and 2.9 cubic billion feet in volume. It leaks 1 million gallons of toxic water every day, and some ungodly amount of methane gas as well. It’s 100 times larger than Cheops, so take that, ya Egyptians!
Then David and I drove over to the house in Hammond to talk about some work that has needed to be done there since before the hurricane, so progress on the horizon there.
I hurried back to New Orleans because Laurence and Amy had tickets to the Saints game and I was keeping Jackson. They left his car seat here, but it rained and I didn’t feel like taking him out. I downloaded “Casper” from Netflix and he watched it four times while playing with his stash of toys he keeps here. They were planning to drive back to Lafayette after the game.
While Jackson was hosting the Casper film festival on my computer, I turned on the TV and kept an eye on the game with the sound muted. Even when there is no competing sound, I like to watch football games with the sound muted. All that chattering adds nothing to it, and there are so many loud commercials.
I watched the score as it suddenly started ticking rapidly the wrong way. Right after that, everything went bananas around here.
My phone rang and it was Amy. I expected her to tell me they were leaving the dome and were on their way home. Instead, she was crying and she told me someone had hit them. She was driving her car with Laurence and their friend Lacy. She told me that they were all OK but the car was a mess and undrivable. There were no street signs, and they don’t know New Orleans that well, so she said they were on Galvez somewhere. It totally freaked her out that there were no street signs. I guess I’m just used to it, but I haven’t been in a car accident. I had my bike in my car, so I took it out and installed Jackson’s car seat, buckled him in and took off down Canal to Galvez. I saw the flashing hazard lights just past Tulane.
When I drove up, I saw that there was a large Ford Explorer with a Georgia license plate, and some black people wearing Saints gear. The block is desolated, with vacant lots, piles of wood, empty houses, and very little lighting. I saw no visible damage to the Explorer, so I was shocked when I saw Amy’s car. Her car is small and low to the ground. She had been hit behind the rear passenger side door and then pushed into the curb, which smashed the front end of the car all up. She was very shaken up, but Laurence and Lacy were calm. No one was hurt, in their car or the other one.
Amy said she was making left turn and didn’t see anyone coming. There is a grassy neutral ground there with no obstructions. She said he came out of nowhere. She had had two beers at the game, and said she wasn’t impaired. I couldn’t tell what had happened because I wasn’t there, but the other driver had to have been going pretty fast to do so much damage to her car.
The police took around two hours to get there. The Lafayettians were appalled at that, but that’s nothing in New Orleans. Amy called her insurance company and I went down to get the information from the other driver for her. The fucking asshole refused to give me his insurance information (even though he had insurance), or the year of his Explorer, and he told me his name was “Abraham Lincoln.” I wrote down his license plate number.
Meanwhile, the other guy’s relatives all start showing up, and also Laurence’s friends who had gone to the game with them and Lacy’s brother. While we were waiting for the police, I decided to drive down to the store at Galvez and Canal and get some water and cigarettes for everyone. In an absolutely unbelievable turn of events, I was sitting at the stop light at Galvez and Tulane and I got rear-ended! I got out of the car and went around back. There was crappiest looking car I’ve ever seen, and a driver so drunk he could hardly hold his head up, and another guy passed out in the back. He lolled his eyes up at me. I said, “You just ran into me.”
He said, with a Spanish accent, “Oh, lady, I am sorry. I got insurance.”
I didn’t see anything wrong with the car, so I just turned around, got back in my car and drove off. I drive a hoopdy Ford Exploder, so you really have to run me good and over before I’m going to fool with you. I thought, “I don’t have time for this drunk asshole, when there is another asshole just down the street who has run into my kids!”
When the cops got there, they took a quick look at Amy’s car, talked to the asshole and his family members for over an hour, and then cited Amy for “improper vigilance.” So, they are spending the night here, after we got home past 1:00 a.m. Her car has been towed, and a friend is driving them back to Lafayette tomorrow.
I try to get my kids to like New Orleans, but they generally think of it as a scary place. The one thing that Laurence likes to visit New Orleans for are Saints games. The important thing, of course, is that no one was hurt, but it really bums me out that they came down here to have a fun time at the game and wound up getting in a car accident. This isn’t going to make it any easier to get them to come down here.
‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea,’ September 23, 2007
I am so relieved that Bill O’Reilly was able to go to a black-run, black-patronized restaurant, sit down and have a civilized meal. Because, I mean, usually when you go to those places, it’s nothing but a bunch of Mandingos running around getting girls pregnant.
times are tough all over September 22, 2007
I went to see The Valley of Elah at Canal Place last night. I was in the mood for something substantial, as I find I often am these days. It’s by Paul Haggis, the director and writer of Crash. It’s one of the best anti-war movies I’ve ever seen. It’s as powerful a statement as The Deerhunter, but the action takes place almost entirely stateside. Although the narrative has absolutely nothing to do with New Orleans, everyone who lives in New Orleans has to see it. I can’t tell you why, but you’ll know.
Mind you, it’s tough to watch. Very tough. It’s based on a true story, and we watch the true stories we have, not the true stories we wish we had, right? If you only like escapist entertainment, skip it, it’s way too real. I knew that going in, and I don’t like getting my heart wrenched at the movies or anywhere else. On the other hand, three of my favorite actors are in it - Susan Sarandon, Charlize Theron and Tommy Lee Jones. In the dictionary, next to the word “man,” they should just have a picture of Tommy Lee Jones. I could listen to him read the phone book. He and Susan Sarandon both look like hell in this movie. They play a southern, middle-aged couple whose son has gone AWOL off his military base. The way these people react to their situation, they are what I think of, rightly or wrongly, as “typical” Americans. Decent, trying to do the right thing, and trying, above all, to be tough and maintain what they think of as the right standards.
This movie is certainly not for the kiddiwinks, but if I had an older child who might be exposed to a military recruiter, I would drag them down there and make them watch it.
Some of the reviews I’ve read have criticized Haggis’ use of the Annie Lennox song at the end. As Susan Sarandon says to one of the characters in the movie, “you don’t have any children, do you?” I’ve been listening to Annie Lennox all day.
