Seems like this is nostalgia week here in LJ-land. After writing about my experiences at the DCI Championships last month, I got to thinking about my own marching band memories. Harnessing the power of the internet, I contacted a fellow band geek on Facebook, and asked if he by any chance still had a copy of the video made of our marching band performing at the Atlantic Coast Championships my senior year. No, he didn't, he said, but his mom might...

The power of the internet, combined with the raw will of a band parent, brought me a copy of a copy of a copy; a VHS recording burned to DVD, mailed to me, then uploaded to Youtube for your viewing pleasure:



Look for me as the sole trip player, in the center of the drum line, in the first piece, a medley of themes from Phantom of the Opera (this was 1989, *everybody* was doing Phantom of the Opera). In the second piece, from Romeo and Juliet, I have not one but two closeups, playing timpani and cymbals, and you can hear me playing chimes at the end. In the third piece, Tchaikovsky's Firebird Suite, I'm on the field for the big percussion solo, then switch to the sidelines again, though you can't really see much of me.

They played this song at the Thursday night swing dance, and I found myself getting all nostalgic. It wasn't *really* the song playing when I had my first kiss, but we joked later that it should have been, since we were actually sitting on a dock by the bay at the time.

Atlantic City, NJ. Sunset, almost exactly 20 years ago. And a certain gentleman whose name I won't mention, seeing as he might be reading this on my Facebook page. :) It was his first kiss, too, so we weren't very good at it, but we, ahem, got better with practice.

Thank you, my dear.

A few days ago, I responded on Facebook to the question, “What do you think a parent's responsibility is regarding bullying?” I kept it brief:

I'm really torn on this. I often say we're going to sign Z up for karate lessons as soon as he can walk :) but I'm not sure that would have helped in my case--so little of the bullying was physical. For the psychological abuse, no matter how good your self image is, it's devastating to have to walk, day in and day out, into what you know in advance will be a battlefield. Eventually that good self image gets worn down, until all that's left is depression and anger. I don't know how to prevent this, except by removing the child from the psychological battlefield (you know I plan to homeschool). I don't consider this over-protective--you don't make your child play in traffic so they can get used to being hit by cars.

A day later, a much longer response came in from Bob Lancer, “a parenting expert specializing in helping parents understand the sources and meanings of their child's behavior in order to relate with the child in a way that supports the child's development of positive self-direction.” It was so long, in fact, that I suspect it’s a canned essay he keeps prepared for when this question comes up.

Suffice to say, this sensitive “parenting expert” infuriated me with his very first words, and as I read, I realized I couldn’t let him go unanswered. (The reply in Facebook is a little toned down in language—I want to be polite to the original poster.)

So let’s just start with this:

“The child with low self-esteem is drawn to bullies, who fulfill the purpose of treating him as poorly as he feels about himself. When we consistently relate with children in a way that supports their healthy self-respect, the bully loses power over them.”

With all due respect, this is a load of steaming horseshit if ever I saw one. (Pardon my language, but it accurately reflects the amount of respect due.) It’s right up there with “she was asking for it, wearing that short skirt in that part of town at night.” Wrong, Bob. The bully has power over them as long as adults like you, with your blame-the-victim attitude, continue forcing them day in and day out to endure the bullying, and telling them it’s their fault for having low self esteem.

“… humiliation tactics only work when we have a fragile sense of our own sense-worth.

You’ve got your cause and effect exactly backwards: the child with low self-esteem wouldn’t have such low self-esteem if he/she weren’t being continually abused and harassed, and then told by adults that this is simply the way the world is.

Yes, I said abuse. Let’s call this what it is. The term “bullying” is a weak, childish word that reduces this hellish experience to one of the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence. Get braces, get zits, get your personality twisted and marginalized.

It’s not just self-esteem that suffers in these cases: bullied children often lose their ability to relate to other people. When you grow up knowing, not just afraid but knowing, that everyone you meet is going to automatically want to hurt you for their own amusement, it's kind of hard to make friends, even in brand new environments. Anger, resentment, and a growing sense of alienation are the results of what started all they way back in the school yard, where adults in authority couldn’t prevent—-often couldn’t even see—-the abuse going on in front of their noses. The bullies can be remarkably good at avoiding wrong-doing in the eye of authority, while still putting enormous pressure on their targets. This is understandable, if still deplorable--in a school situation, where the adults are vastly outnumbered, the eyes of authority can't be everywhere, and the bullies know it and exploit that weakness. What's worse is when the adults can see it, but decide to let the kids sort it out themselves, because after all, "they have to learn that not everyone will be nice." The result is a child who assumes that no one will be nice, and simply shuts down further attempts at communication.

Even more than the watered down term “bullying,” what really infuriates me is Landers’s insistence that verbal bullying “basically means ‘name-calling.’” Wrong again, Bob. Verbal bullying is not just “name-calling.” When a group of people form a systematic network to intimidate you from such necessary daily activities as using the bathroom or walking down a hallway, is that name-calling? When someone tells you your cafeteria lunch is made of feces mixed with menstrual blood, is that name-calling? When people ask you loudly, in public, whether you’ve engaged in sexual practices with animals, is that name-calling? When adults do things like this to children, it’s called psychological abuse. When adults do it to other adults, it’s called libel, hazing, stalking, and harassment—-often sexual harassment. These are all punishable by law and custom, and yet for some reason, when children do it to other children, it is dismissed as typical, unpreventable behavior. Kids will be kids. The world isn’t always a nice place.

No, the world isn’t always a nice place. That’s fairly obvious. But shouldn’t it be a place where children can learn to be adults without being psychologically damaged in the process? We cover electrical outlets and pad the corners of the coffee table, don’t we? We put up gates in front of the stairs. We guard our children’s physical well-being in every way imaginable, but when it comes to their mental and social well-being, we throw up our hands in self-righteous helplessness.

I have no idea what to do about the bullies themselves--I know that it isn't always possible to stop them at their game. But telling the victims it’s their responsibility to prevent their own abuse, and putting it all down to their "’poor me’ victim mentality,” just makes a bad situation worse. I know it's not an option for every parent, but me, I’m getting my kid out of the war zone.

I make a point of not ordering potato pancakes at a restaurant, unless of course there's a Jewish grandma in the kitchen. I ask, too. The answer, sadly, is usually no.

See, I had a Jewish grandma. And though I didn't have much actual Jewishness in my upbringing, I did have potato pancakes. Not necessarily for Hanukkah, just in general. Latkes. And my Grandpa (who was not Jewish, which explains the low-Jewishness upbringing) was convinced that no one made them like Grandma did--completely from scratch, none of those boxed mixes in her kitchen, no sir!

What he didn't know was that Grandma never let him see the green box marked "Manischewitz" lurking in the kitchen cabinets. What she very carefully did let him see was the single whole potato she very ostentatiously grated into the mixing bowl. And Mom never let on, either.

Fast forward a dozen years, after Grandma died, and Grandpa decided he was going to make latkes. Just like Grandma used to make. You see what's coming, don't you? He didn't know the secret ingredient. Many many chopped potatoes later, after we'd turned off the smoke alarm, and after my Mom got home from work, she let him in on the family secret.

So this year when I found a latke recipe on Weightwatcher's website, I couldn't resist giving it a try. Just for Grandpa.


( Potato and Apple Pancakes )

These tasted about right, but just didn't seem crispy enough. I'm starting to think Grandma had the right idea. Oh, well, happy Hannukah anyway from me, Grandma, and the Manischewitz family.

My mom emailed me in reply to my post on Haves and Have-Nots, and with her permission, I re-post her comments here for your reading pleasure:

----- Your so-called father left when you were three months old. Before you were a year old I began working again, starting with being an Avon Lady. We were on Welfare because that was the way to get Food Stamps and medical insurance, but I always reported my income and our check was reduced accordingly. Then I got into Tupperware and was very successful. When I became a manager we got a company car and lost the Welfare. It was a risk, but we were without health insurance for a few years. Then I got a retail job in order to get the insurance.

That's the story and I'm sticking to it. Sorry about your teeth. -----

Turns out I was wrong about the rent-controlled housing too, though I swear I remember some sort of community meetings about the property being sold and the rent controls disappearing--or maybe just the rent going up.

Anyway. I thought this was interesting. I remember the Avon job--my earliest memories are of trailing her door-to-door as she dropped off samples. And my very first paid work was helping her pack Tupperware orders. I got a 1% commission on every order. This was a lot of money for a poor grade schooler.

A post from Misty provoked this thought. (Read her post first, or this won't make much sense.)

I grew up a have-not. I don't know what my mom's income level was when I was a kid, but we lived in rent controlled housing, and I got the free-lunch program at school. I think the only reason we didn't take welfare after a certain point was that my grandpa moved in with us and contributed his military pension to the household budget.

So I grew up going to the local flea market. And when I took a considerably more affluent school friend with me one day, I remember her looking rather taken aback, and commenting, "I don't see people like this very often." I'd never noticed that the people there were much different.

(The very first thing I did when I got my first job out of college with insurance--get my cavities filled. All 8 of them. It pisses me off when dentists get all tsk-tsk about my crooked teeth and tell me I should have had braces as a kid. Yeah, and I should have had two parents and dental insurance, too.)

Children take things awfully literally. When you were a kid, did you ever conflate some perfectly logical adult utterance into some inexplicable or terrifying situation?

My Sunday school teacher, telling the story of the parting of the Red Sea, ended the lesson by saying, "And maybe Pharoah and his armies are still down there, under the Red Sea, and maybe we'll find them someday." Now, of course, she meant they'd be dead, and archaeologists would be digging up their bones and chariots and helmets and whatnot, and tagging them to put into museums...but I got it into my head that they were all still alive under there, waiting for the Red Sea to part again, and they'd come out one night, find out where I lived, and get me. This kept me up nights; I would pray about it, begging God to protect me from Pharoah and his armies. I was terrified.

Oh, and I also used to worry about Skylab falling on my head. I didn't know what Skylab was, or why it was falling, but I knew it was coming down, and I used to worry that it would come crashing through the dining room ceiling one night while I was eating dinner. Just call me Chicken Little.

"Episodes I and II, 'The Phantom Menace' and 'Attack of the Clones,' were hits, but they disappointed many fans who wanted to see a full-blown Vader from the outset."

Noooo, George, they disappointed your fans because they were lame. The whiny little kid was annoying, and he didn't get any less whiny as a teenager. Obi-Wan was a terribly condescending and over-protective father figure, and the Jedi are dumb enough to limit their own procreation, even though it's an accepted fact that the strength of the Force is hereditary. And who in their bloody right mind would make a senator of Jar-Jar Binks?

Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing "Revenge of the Sith" along with the rest of the lemmings...and it looks like this one might not even suck. We can always hope.

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Aaron and I got an extra-long workout this weekend, because we happened to catch a TV documentary on the early days of Star Wars. Back then, they were blowing up tiny little models of spaceships, filling the Death Star with marbles, and making Mos Eisly out of Quaker Oats boxes. The good old days, when men were men, women were Princess Leia, and Yoda was still a puppet with Frank Oz's hand up his you-know-where.

Yeah, they can do so much more with CGI now. Jabba the Hutt can walk, and Yoda can fight a badass lightsaber duel (and tell Frank Oz where to put his hand). But, damnit, it's too easy. You want a clone army? No problem, load up the software and away we go. None of it feels real anymore. It looks real, yes, but...the fun of guessing "how did they do that??" is completely gone, because the answer is always the same. Oh, I admire the artistry of the digital da Vincis, and I know I sure as hell couldn't do that--but I miss the good old days...


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The funny thing is, I wasn't really part of the good old days. "Star Wars" came out in 1977; I was five years old. I had a vague interest in the droids, in the way that little kids consider robots cool, but the other characters were a bunch of obscure adults doing obscure adult things for obscure adult reasons. I know this is sacrilege, but there it is. I was still reading Little House on the Prairie.

"Empire Strikes Back" came out in 1980; I was eight. By this time I could have drummed up some interest in space battles, but we were way too poor to go to the movies in those days. Betamax was a thing only rich kids had, and I was certainly not one of those. To really put the nail in the Star Wars coffin, my mother had no interest in what she still calls "that stuff." My best friend had a Dagobah playset, but I didn't really understand why you could put Luke in the little harness so he'd turn upside-down.

Three years later, Return of the Jedi came out, but I was still catching up by watching "Star Wars" on cable, which had finally come down in price enough to be mainstream. I had borrowed the novelizations from the library, so by the time I got to watching "Empire," I already knew Vader was Luke's father, and that Leia was his sister. I knew Leia fell for Han Solo (which annoyed me, because even at that age I thought he was a jerk--a charming jerk, and probably a good kisser, but a jerk nonetheless). And I knew that Yoda died. Eventually I caught up by watching them all on cable or video, but the "big screen experience" had passed me by.


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So I wasn't really part of the Star Wars phenomenon. I was more next to it. I even managed to miss the digitally mastered re-releases of the late 90s, because I was teaching at a private school and still too poor to go to the movies. But still...it's mine, in a way that these new movies aren't, and really can't be even for the kids growing up with them now. They have the Matrix, and the Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and...

In way, Star Wars really ruined its own mystique--because of the first trilogy, sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters have become acceptable risks for Hollywood. Now there are so many (and some of them are even good), that Lucas has to really work to live up to his own legacy--and, alas, so far he's not making it.

Why did this require a bloody NSF study to figure out?

"Our data show that children are emotionally affected on the days they get picked on...Kids reported feeling humiliated, anxious or disliking school on days when they reported incidents..."

Wow, really? Who would have ever imagined such a thing?

"If kids continue to get harassed over time, they become more psychologically vulnerable."

Gosh, ya think? Who did this study? Popular Jock Sociologists of America?

Found lying around:

1. Go to Mapquest.com and click on "Directions"
2. Enter your current address and the address of your childhood home (or at least the town if you don't remember the exact address)
3. Post the time and distance in your LJ.

I actually used Yahoo maps:

From Somers Point, NJ to Atlanta, GA:
Distance: 841.1 miles
Approximate Travel Time: 12 hours 56 mins

Partially inspired by hopeevey 's question of the day, and partially by a conversation I had earlier with celticdragonfly:    

What kinds of career aspirations do you remember having as a kid?  How did they change?  And did you end up realizing any of them?

When I was in kindergarten, I was taking dance lessons, so I wanted to be a tap dancer; I had heard a very impassioned sermon at church about mission work, so I wanted to be a missionary; and I liked the idea of helping sick people get better, so I wanted to be a nurse.  (I'd have said doctor, but at that age I thought "nurse" was the word for a female doctor).  Later on in grade school I decided I wanted to sell Tupperware like my mom!  When I was in middle school and high school I wanted to be a writer and an actress...and in high school I wanted to be a dolphin trainer at Sea World, which turned into wanting to be a marine biologist.

By the end of high school, I was aware that writing and acting were not likely to make me a living, and the marine biology ambition didn't last very long, because I only liked dolphins and whales, was afraid of sharks, and dissections grossed me out.  In fact, for a couple of years I had no ambitions whatsoever, which is why I delayed going to college for a year. 

Then one day out of the blue I decided I wanted to be an English teacher.  I did everything bass ackwards: I applied for only one college without ever having visited or done any research on it; I applied in June, when it was too late for most scholarships (and my high school grades weren't that hot anyway), and ended up taking out loans to cover the gap between my Tuition Aid Grant and the total tuition.  I got accepted to Rutgers just under the deadline, and ended up having to attend my freshman year at their campus in Camden, NJ.  (For those not familiar with this urban wasteland, let me just say it makes Mordor look like prime real estate.)   Since my high school didn't require three years of math for graduation, I had taken only the required two; this wasn't enough for admission to Rutgers, so I had to take remedial math. 

English Comp 101 convinced me I couldn't possibly spend my life teaching high school students to write; what my peers in that class produced was horrifying enough.  So the following year I changed my major to French, and I actually kept the same career ambition for the next 5 years.  Of course, that ended in disaster, and I gave up on both teaching and career ambition...