“What?” I say. I take my headphones off.
“Looks like barbed wire,” he says to me. I don’t know his name. I don’t know anyone’s name on the SL5 bus to Downtown Crossing. Especially not on a Tuesday morning.
He’s pointing at my ring. “Oh,” I say. “I can see that.” My ring is an oxidized ring of silver made by Elise Moran, inspired by the branch of the weeping cherry tree. “It looks like…” says the man. “It looks like…”
“I was a terrible child,” Jackson says to me. We’re on a beach–Singing Beach–which is a short walk from a train station called, romantically, Manchester by the Sea. “Very bossy. I used to boss everyone around. My sister was my little minion, until she figured it out and escaped.”
He goes on: “At the beach, I used to make coins out of mud and make the other kids pay with them for things, and I would charge interest since I invented the currency.”
My life has been a lot of circles lately.
This–as in this act of typing up a post–is the most recent circle. The most recent return.
Today Jackson and I are hiding from the rain and writing. At least that’s what our headline for the day was. “JACKSON AND RYAN RETURN TO WRITING.” A more accurate headline would be: “JACKSON AND RYAN GET MANICURES AND THEN WATCH TWO EPISODES OF ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK AND THEN LISTEN TO LANA DEL REY AND BRAINSTORM WHERE THEY WILL ORDER FOOD FROM.”
People Are Like Pencils
People are like pencils; honed and whole at first, with a core of potential words hidden beneath a sheath of laminate, a hard-gloss finish in any and every color. People are like pencils; sharpened to a lethal point in a moment of whirring tumult, a point that might prick blood in the half-thought of haste, a point that cuts across yawns of ambiguous blankness in precise, stringent lines that structure and rectify, cross-out and destroy. People are like pencils; their words might be erased, but not the actual imprints they etch on the surfaces they touch; when their sentences are gone, the ghosts of their sentiments are left behind as pocks and scars and smudges and particles of dust.
The walls of the school enclose a large, overgrown courtyard choked with ivies and brambles. A glossy emerald carpet of pachysandra washes over the stone tiles on one end, like a receding tide, and a few students are pulling at it with rakes and sheers.
“We’re not supposed to go past this,” says one student to me as I walk over to supervise the community service. ‘Supervise’ is my assignment, but really I am just curious, and I’d sooner like to find myself sitting in the sun with my book open in my lap. The student goes on, “Because there’s poison ivy.”
“I’m immune to poison ivy,” I tell them.
Today I had 3 wonderful conversations with my students:
1. In lunch, I commented on a students tattoo that referenced a super hero. “I don’t even like that character,” the student admitted. “I like batman.” I asked why, and the student elaborated: “Like, Thor is a god. The Hulk is The Hulk and Spiderman has mad powers. But Batman keeps up with them and he has none of that.” I responded that Batman had a lot of money, and therefor a lot of advanced gadgetry, and the student nodded. Another student chimed in, “But he makes that money. And when he lost it, he made it back again. He’s smart!”
This upcoming week I have an interview at this awesome company up in Providence, that uses design-thinking to innovate business modeling. At least that’s my interpretation of it. I’ve looked at a bunch of firms that do this sort of work but I’m incredibly drawn to this one in particular, and it’s because of their emphasis on social impact and transformative agency.
And–best of all–I’d be focusing on education!
Read moreClassroom Culture, Authority, and Data’s Use in Defiant Youth
Growing up, I thought Disney’s The Little Mermaid was about Ursula. I thought the movie, though oddly focused on that emaciated red-headed hoarder*, was actually a film about a business-savvy octopus lady’s dream of political conquest, and the unfair regulations she was forced to overcome. **
*(This isn’t thin shaming so much as it is a response to Ariel’s most famous frame, in which she is grotesquely disproportionate. This is compared to the rest of the movie, where the animators did not render her a bobble head).
Read moreEducating the Ignorant on the Majesty of Ursula, Sea Witch and Gay Icon
Laura (of Laura Plus Books) and Cayce (of Fighting Dreamer) are doing this great thing called LGBT Month this April (#LGBTApril), and I’m participating!
I mean, I guess I’m always participating, because every month is LGBT Month for me, but it’s more fun to do these sort of things when people are making cute banners for you, and when you’ve got a tribe bristling with restless inspiration and do-good vibes.
There are many tropes. Busty, blonde damsels. Brittle, brunette mistresses. Feisty, red-headed warriors. Alternatively: White-Male-Hero-With-Somnolent-Eyes-Yet-Aerodynamic-Cheek-Bones vs. Anything. Or the ever-plotless vengeance against a villain with no real motivation for villainy save an inscrutable need to inconvenience Our Hero. We know these tropes well. They’re practically family. If one came to your door and asked to come in, you might check for a judicious nod from your mother, but you’d open that door.