My son had Parent’s Night at his school tonight and that meant that I got home from school and then had to spend two hours at another school where educators who are much more poorly compensated but also much much happier with their jobs (ilikemyjobilikemyjobilikemyjob) got to spend ten minutes each giving us thirty minutes of information each and then I had to stop and buy candy for my students tomorrow so I can motivate them to do maybe a little work in exchange for sugar and I’m also thinking that this vile nasal congestion that I’ve had for three days is maybe not side effects of the Covid shot I had on Monday but an actual God damn cold and I’m going to go lie in bed and try not to die now goodnight perhaps I shall blog again tomorrow.
Dilemma the First: I have a student this year who is quite easily the most profoundly disabled kid I’ve ever had in my classroom. Today, somehow in my room without his supposed-to-be-constant paraprofessional– someone else just brought him into the room in his wheelchair and left— he got out of said wheelchair to lie down on the floor and cry about how he wasn’t allowed to use his iPad in his previous class. He has spoken to me a few times. I have only understood perhaps 20% of what he has said to me. I have, literally, no idea how I might educate him, and even less idea why he is in a mainstreamed classroom.
Sub-Dilemma: I haven’t read any of my IEPs yet, including this kid’s, and I am terrified of what I might find in it. I am hoping to find time to read IEPs this weekend.
Dilemma the Second: Kamala Harris is speaking after my bedtime tonight, and I am not sure how I am going to be both asleep and watching her speech. Furthermore, there is a Big Surprise coming tonight, and I am not only not sure what the Big Surprise might be (Taylor Swift will endorse Harris and then announce a new album the day after the election, but only if Harris wins) but I also don’t know when it is, and I bet I’ll be in bed for it too. I have otherwise ignored both conventions this year, although some of the clips I’ve seen on TikTok have made me regret not paying more attention to the Democratic one.
Dilemma the Third: I have too many video games to play and books to read. I need another month before school starts, please. Black Myth Wukong just came out and I’m still not really done with the Elden Ring DLC. Can we redo the calendar?
Dilemma the Fourth: My son turns 13 tomorrow, meaning that I will be the father of a teenager, which is incomprehensible. Unfortunately, he is also his mother’s son in addition to being my son, which means that he doesn’t want anything for his birthday and also won’t commit to making any plans. This is not teenagerdom and wanting to avoid his parents raring its head; it’s his biological destiny. I am the only fucker on either side of my family who it is possible to buy things for. It’s bloody annoying.
Dilemma the Fifth: I have not quite told the truth in Dilemma the Fourth. He would like a “gamer laptop.” He has never touched Windows and does not know a single damn thing about how computer specs work. We’d be looking at $1000 easy and probably $16-1700 for a decent rig (“decent,” not “good”) so that he can play Minecraft.
Dilemma the Sixth: I will likely talk about this more in the future, but my co-teacher in one of my classes sucks. I need her to not suck. I have never actually had to have a “you suck at this and you need to stop” conversation with an adult before and am not sure how to approach it. One presumes I should not actually say the words “you suck at this and you need to stop.”
Dilemma the Seventh: I intended for this to be one or two dilemmas and I have like four more without thinking about it too hard but, again, I’d like to be reading and/or playing video games. So I’m gonna stop now.
I … uh … nope. Nope. I’m going to go put this book in the freezer, and it’s going to stay in there, forever, and I’m going to be very very happy that I started reading it in the morning (and finished it by noon) because being up at 3 AM last night reading this and then trying to sleep would not have worked very well.
It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.
I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.
I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!
Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.
Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.
It won’t actually take all that long for me to dispense with the “review” part of writing about Safiya Sinclair’s How To Say Babylon. You should check it out. There you go. Sinclair grew up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the daughter of a Rastafari reggae musician, and the book is partially about her escape from grinding poverty to ultimately achieve a Ph.D in the United States and become a celebrated poet, and partially about trying to grow up female in a home dominated by an abusive misogynist. Sinclair, as one might expect from an award-winning poet, is a beautiful, lyrical writer, and her story is fascinating. I can’t imagine someone picking this up and not at least finding it tremendously interesting. I don’t recall how it crossed my radar, but I jumped on it, and it’s a pretty fast read.
That said, the book itself isn’t why I’m writing about the book, which ended up fascinating me but perhaps not for the reasons Sinclair intended. All the dialogue in the book is rendered as spoken, meaning that 90% of the dialogue is in Jamaican English, and I want to take a deep dive into Jamaican English grammar rules now that I’ve read this book. The dialect’s use of pronouns is kind of fascinating, and it was endlessly entertaining to me the way I was hearing anything her father said throughout the book. And, actually, after doing a light bit of Googling just now, it’s possible that there is some translation going on, because Jamaican patois is significantly more difficult for an American English speaker to understand than the dialogue in this book, which is unfamiliar but not incomprehensible. So maybe she pulled back a bit to simplify what people were saying, or perhaps conversation in their house was closer to American English than it might have been in other places. All four of the Sinclair kids ended up with university educations, so it’s clear that education was highly prized in the house– by their mother, as the book makes clear– so it’s entirely possible that a certain level of code-switching was taking place from the beginning.
The other thing is reading through this book and realizing I didn’t know anything at all about Rastafari. I went through a heavy Bob Marley phase in late high school and early college that was more or less responsible for everything I know about it, and I hadn’t appreciated just how unusual the … religion, and I’m using that word under some small amount of protest, really is. Rasta is wholly decentralized, for starters; it recognizes the Bible as Scriptural but there is no Rasta text to rely on and it emphasizes individuality to a degree where concepts like “orthodoxy” can barely even exist. In other words, Safiya Sinclair’s father was a devout Rasta, but that doesn’t mean that his practice of Rastafari lined up with anyone else, and while Jamaican culture as a whole tends toward the patriarchal, it wouldn’t be strictly accurate to say that Rasta was the reason her father turned out to be the man he did, or that it was responsible for how he treated his children and, particularly, his daughters.
(Also interesting: there are pages devoted to all four of the women in Sinclair’s family deciding to cut off their dreadlocks. There is not a similar scene for her brother, although there is a poignant moment where he declares his newborn child is going to decide on their own whether to follow Rastafari or not.)
On top of that, I absolutely wasn’t aware that Haile Selassie had traveled to Jamaica and explicitly rejected Rastafari’s belief that he was, in some way, God. Sinclair’s father appears to have believed that he was literally God on Earth; some of Marley’s lyrics lean that way as well, and Selassie straight-up said it wasn’t the case, at which point a whole lot of Rastas turned around and said that only God would be humble enough to deny he was God.
Which … wow.
And, like, think about this, right? Selassie was Emperor of Ethiopia. He was not, himself, a Jamaican, and there are no Rastafari in Ethiopia, or at least there weren’t when Selassie was alive. So this guy is Emperor of one country, and this group of people halfway across the globe decide that he is either literally God or at least the Messiah (and, again, no orthodoxy, so each individual Rasta might have a different idea about how this works) and form an entire-ass religion around him. And then he goes there, and he’s like, “No, I’m not God,” and it doesn’t work, and then eventually he dies and … Rastafari just keeps on truckin’.
There was also a lot of oppression of Rastas early on, including a couple of events that qualify as massacres and/or pogroms, and I wasn’t aware that had happened either.
I need to know more, and I want to read a formal academic history of this belief system, is what I’m saying, and not just a memoir. I feel like I’m overusing the word fascinating in this piece but it’s mind-blowing to me that this developed the way it did.
Fun fact: under certain circumstances, I’m not at all convinced that nepotism is a bad thing. Take sports, for example. My understanding is that there’s been some debate about whether Lebron James’ son Bronny ought to be entering the NBA draft or not. But here’s the thing: maybe (I have no idea, and don’t intend to check) Bronny can use his dad’s no doubt impressive influence to get drafted higher than he might be otherwise. But if he can’t perform at the NBA level, he’s not going to perform at an NBA level. There’s nothing Lebron can do if his kid goes out there and averages two points and six turnovers a game. He’s not gonna get playing time, and if he does,there are a billion people out there who are going to be losing money when he’s on the court and eventually it’s going to catch up with him. I remember when Bob Knight insisted on recruiting his son Patrick. Patrick dragged down the team. It was a terrible fucking idea and IU’s basketball program paid for it.
It seems like the place where nepotism is the biggest problem is in politics and business, along with those parts of the entertainment business where, y’know, knowing things can be useful. There are too many examples here for it to be really necessary to list any, but nonetheless, the previous occupant’s wastrel children and Meghan McCain come to mind immediately. You don’t even know about Meghan McCain because her dad was good at something. You know about Meghan McCain because her grandfather was good at something. Similarly, Eric Trump would be living in a trailer park if his grandfather hadn’t been rich. Go find a picture of Rudy Giuliani’s kid sometime. He barely even looks human.
Which brings me to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s children. They have tried, tried oh so hard, to make Jaden Smith a thing. Jaden Smith’s not a thing. He’s not gonna be a thing. Because in order to actually be a thing in the entertainment industry he’d have to be talented, and if he is talented I have yet to see any evidence of it. Which is why he doesn’t show up in things that don’t have his parents’ money and influence behind them.
Now let’s talk about Willow.
Okay, you would never have heard Whip my Hair if it wasn’t for Willow’s parents. Fine. But do you happen to remember how that story ended? The kid shaved her head in the middle of the tour so that she didn’t have to perform the song any longer. She’s got all kinds of interviews talking about it, but I’ve always enjoyed hearing Will discussing it here.
Willow just released empathogen, a … jazz album? I have her two previous albums; I haven’t listened to anything earlier, although I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and dive into her work before I discovered her on lately I feel EVERYTHING. Her last two albums have been punk rock, and they have kicked ass. This is completely different, and from what I’ve seen her first three albums don’t sound like any of these last three either. I’m not convinced empathogen is a jazz album, although it’s definitely jazz inflected, but most of the instrumentation is guitar, bass and drums; if there are any horns or other strings on there I didn’t notice them on my first listen, which I will admit was in the car and not exactly careful. The vocals are definitely jazzy. I’m not even sure I liked the damn album, but I’m absolutely fascinated by it. (Thinking about it, empathogen is as much of a jazz album as Cowboy Carter is a country album. The influence is clearly there, but you can’t pin either album down to a single genre.)
There’s been some talk in the last few days about whether Willow is a “nepo baby,” in other words, whether she owes her career to her parents’ influence or not. I would like to suggest that given how wildly, insanely eclectic Willow’s musical output over the last nine years had been, I’m really fucking glad that her parents are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and not Steve and Carol Smith … because the kid wouldn’t have a career if she didn’t have a leg up. The music industry doesn’t work with people who refuse to fit into boxes like this. Can you imagine what would have happened if some random fuckin’ kid told Jay-Z that she was done with her fun little hair song and wasn’t touring any longer? We’d never have heard from her again. And, I mean, we can argue about whether Will Smith as a parent should have said “Okay, baby, I got you” or, uh, something else(*), but the fact is if her parents weren’t famous I wouldn’t have these albums, and if nepotism gets me lately I feel EVERYTHING and empathogen once in a while, I’ll maybe put up with some fourth-generation news nitwit if I have to.
Suri Cruise and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt are both either already or about to turn eighteen, by the way, so I look forward to the two of them owning the world in, oh, five years or so.
(*) “Baby, Mr. Jay-Z is going to cut Daddy’s balls off and bury both of us underneath Madison Square Garden. You’re gonna grow that hair back today if I have to sell your soul to Satan to make it happen.”
Forced Taught the boy to shave tonight, and his shitty little 12-year-old rat mustache is no more. He is disappointed. I have never identified more closely with my own father, who I recall having precisely the same conversation with me when he forced taught me to shave at about the same age. Also, I’ve reminded myself why I abhor disposable razors, which are even worse for a novice shaver, since he didn’t really know how to hold the razor and thus did less shaving than just shoving shaving cream around on his face.
I did not die yesterday, and in fact the boy’s team did quite well, and he managed a third place (of 23) in one of his events. The team, which is loaded with sixth graders (6-8 are eligible), did not qualify for nationals, but given that 2/3 of them had never competed before (and, oh, also, I don’t want to go to nationals) I’m pretty proud of him. That said, we got up at six and didn’t get home until about 10:30, so it was a long day, and I think all three of us feel somewhat robbed of our weekends.
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