The Stalk Market

Winnie and I attended the buy-nothing-day protest in New York yesterday.  This was after reading headlines about a Wal-Mart worker who had been trampled to death in Long Island by unruly bargain shoppers. I had recently re-read the much publicized story of Addie Polk, a 90-year old victim of predatory lending that resulted in foreclosure, who shot herself in her bedroom as the sheriff knocked on the door on the day she was to be forcibly removed.  Our credit culture has gone too far awry to be an armchair critic.

Winnie and I found the buy-nothing-day protestors at Barnes & Noble on Union Square.  The idea is to take one day – “Black Friday” – and boycott consumerism.  At first we weren’t sure if we had found protestors or a holiday marching band.  We were standing right in front of Starbucks, half a block from the protest, when we clearly heard their chants about the rot of a consumer-crazed culture.

But I was very thirsty.  I have been taking extra asthma medicine and suffering the side effect of dry mouth.  I am hooked on iced chai latte from Starbucks.  I said to Winnie, you probably want to wait for me on the sidewalk, right?  She didn’t say anything, only raised her left eyebrow.  I don’t know why people promise things they can’t control, like promising Winnie I’d be back in a sec when in reality I had no control over how long it might take to assemble my drink.  But I had promised to be quick and so became very stressed when the Barista collaboration begin to break down.

A couple minutes in to waiting for my order, the buy-nothing-day protestors in green santa hats descended on Starbucks. Baristas in green aprons begin chasing a few protestors around the store, who were offering leaflets to the confused coffee drinkers.  A huge crowd converged on the sidewalk directly in front of the door, chanting and ranting.   The remaining Baristas behind the counter began making nervous errors, like rimming the drink with chocolate instead of caramel and forgetting the whipped cream altogether.  I thought that customers should just grab whatever drink was offered to them, given the radically altered circumstances.  But they were stubborn, continuing to insist that the Barista’s fix the mounting drink errors.

Wow, I thought, I am being protested.  By Winnie.  I’ve been protested before, but never by loved ones.  Once the Young Republicans at Chico State protested a speech I had been invited to make about affirmative action.  The protest leader wore a Hooters shirt and held a sign that read “Reverse Discrimination Sucks.”

My iced chai latte was half made but stuck behind a long line of errors.  Protestors were now making speeches in front of the huge glass Starbucks panes and I could see news cameras.  I decided to take pictures of the protest, from the vantage point of a protestee (see below).  The security-prone Baristas told me to cut it out.  I told the other protestees who were waiting for their corrected drink orders that we were not supposed to be consuming today.  One of them rolled their eyes but nobody said anything back.  I had to wait on the sidewalk in front of Starbucks until the entire protest crowd had moved along to their next target before Winnie reappeared.  “You protested me!”, I said, cupping my iced tea between my gloved hands. “Yes”, she smiled.

Even in such dire economic conditions that a trip to the dentist has become a coveted Christmas present, the country can’t resist overspending.  We find ourselves caught in Starbucks, purchasing a $3.35 tea that can be created for a few cents in our own kitchens, even when our hearts are with those who are fighting the corrupt underbelly of the consumption propaganda campaign.

The tenuous distinction between promoting excess consumption for “good”, like to prop up the stock marketing, and consumption for “evil”, like trampling a Wal-Mart employee and then grumbling about the store being closed, is a weak barrier between order and chaos.  Credit is branded as honorable – a high credit score lands you access to jobs and money, and a low one reveals you as a suspicious character.  Everyone wants credit, even though it is credit itself that has thrown families out of their homes and cars and has propelled the nation into an economic sinkhole.

I am grateful that in a moment of either prescience or sheer luck we committed, from the earliest days, to build a firm that did not rely on credit.  Camino PR grows at the pace that the marketplace demands.  We seek out the most frugal solutions to even the thorniest challenges (check out Pablo’s excellent blog about open source solutions).  We work simply, so that our drag on the earth’s resources is minimal.

One weekday afternoon my kids claimed to have no homework, so I assigned them an essay on the Wall Street meltdown. Not surprisingly, the kids had no confidence that the adults could pay back the bailout we’ve just gifted to corporate America. My 6th grade son proposed in an essay titled “the Stalk Market Crash” that each household contribute $200 to a debt relief fund, so that his generation could have the money it will take to fix the economy. If you consider that there are almost 115 million households in the country, he created a plan that would generate a $2.3 trillion savings account for bailout relief.  It would require each of us to contribute roughly the equivalent of 60 iced chai latte’s from Starbucks.  Not a bad idea.

Channeling Lynn Spears

Landing a 3-minute middle school parent/teacher conference in New York is akin to running with the bulls. Not everyone makes it to the finish line, and those who do hope simply to not be gored at the end. I grew up in the southwest, where competing for a limited number of 3-minute teacher conference slots is simply bizarre. But I am now a New Yorker with two children in the public middle school system and so I am becoming tougher by the year. Today I jumped in the parent/teacher conference competition for my son who is just starting his middle school career.

The hallways were crammed with worried parents who were shocked to see their star student kids come home with report cards that read “satisfactory” but not “excellent”. One boy reported that his parent slapped him upon seeing the report card. The hallway rumor mill reports that schools are graded on “improvement”, and therefore it is quite unusual to get an “excellent” in any subject in the first quarter.

While I was waiting in the long snaking line of parents anxious to speak to Ms. Quackenbush, the homeroom teacher, I asked other parents how they were able to take an afternoon off from work for about 9 total minutes of teacher interaction. The parent next to me explained that she is a professional personal lingerie shopper and therefore has a flexible schedule. She first evaluates her client’s existing lingerie collection, and then escorts them to some of New York’s finest underwear stores. Her results are transformative, which she credits to a course she took on “women studying pleasure”. I asked her why women had such a hard time buying underwear. She blamed a pitiful social environment that suppresses women’s abilities to feel good about themselves.

Nobody was interested in chatting with me while I waited for the science teacher (perhaps they had overheard the lingerie conversation and were frightened), so I read the packet of information handed to parents as we arrived. This small packet included a full page of safety advice for teens. They recommend that teens carry $10 in “escape money” so that if a cab driver starts acting bizarre you can toss ten bucks at him and jump out at a red light.

Apparently the public school authorities understand that you’ve got to be tough to be a New Yorker. Loretta graduated from middle school in the Bronx, which may explain her safety shrewdness. Just last week as I was leaving the office after dark she advised me to roll up my New York Times very tightly like a stick so I can shank any muggers in the throat if attacked. And then she added as an aside, run like hell afterwards because the mugger will be very angry. I am pretty sure that Loretta has never seen the New York Times used in this way, and I’m very sure that if I am mugged I will politely turn over my ipod.

It’s tough being a stage Mom – even if you are an education stage Mom where the goal is far, far from celebrity-dom. There is a lot of waiting around. I read Lynn Spear’s autobiography to see if I could learn some things that might put stage Mom-ing to good causes. There are some bizarre moments in the book – like when she nearly sent her teen daughter to a Christian home for unwed pregnant teens and instead brought her to New York on a vacation where they snuck in to the movie theatre to watch “Juno.” Mostly it seems that Lynn Spears transported Britney and her sister to lots of extra curricular activities, and waited around. Plus, when she could, she got pushy.

The first time I ran with the bulls was for my daughter, when parents began assembling an hour ahead of the scheduled conference time outside the school doors in the bitter November wind. At exactly noon the principal threw open the doors and parents ran – literally – up the five flights of stairs to the middle school floor. Some parents got winded by floor three and slowed down or stopped to take off their jackets, but the more fit parents just ran past them. Finally, my gym membership had really paid off. Once on the fifth floor, the trick was to run from classroom to classroom and sign up for a meeting, and then race back and forth through the hallways to check your status on the call sheets. The most entertaining meeting was with the gym teacher, who stopped me in the hallway and said “You are Mia’s Mom, I guarantee you that you are Mia’s Mom…” and then led me to his desk where he talked non stop for the entire three minutes, ending with “No matter what happens, Mia’s team won the 6th grade volleyball championships and you can never take that away from her. She served the winning point, did she tell you that? Nope, nobody can ever take that away from her. Never.”

A few weeks ago while shopping for high schools at the borough fair, I switched gears and started asking hard questions, like whether the school environment was gay friendly. One guidance counselor became flustered, claiming “I can’t know what everyone is thinking” and told me the story of how a few years ago a student “had a parent situation like mine” but problems were averted because “only one of them came with her at a time to the school, they didn’t ever come together.” A few guys from the performing arts schools were gleeful to be asked and begged me to choose their school.

It was far more satisfying to engage in a discussion about creating an empowering and respectful educational environment rather than focusing on whether or not my kid should have received an “excellent” grade instead of the less glamorous “satisfactory.” Loretta has told me to stop harassing public workers, but I couldn’t help myself. I called my daughter’s school principal and asked her what she is doing to make sure there isn’t gender bias in the classroom. They have ramped up their ballroom dancing curriculum, but the girls outnumber the boys so my daughter has been assigned the role of a “boy”. I asked the principal what she intended to do about the fact that the dance program reinforced the role of boys as leaders and girls as followers. Couldn’t she have simply assigned my daughter to the role of “leader”, instead of forcing a gender switch? And isn’t it possible that two girls might someday want to ballroom dance together? In a month where gay marriage just became legal in Connecticut, shouldn’t these kids be able to imagine a groom and groom waltzing?

Unfortunately, after about three minutes, the principal was called away to an emergency meeting in the middle of our phone conversation.

Good Grammar

“I’m going to think about that, yes — writing a book,”
- President George W. Bush pondering the possibility of writing a book after he leaves office

Grammar, having been battered incoherent by politicians and bloggers, is stubbornly standing between middle school students and their desire to attend New York’s most elite public high schools.

I am coaching my daughter for the specialized high school admissions test. The first hurdle is the scrambled paragraph. The idea is to read the first sentence of a paragraph, and then figure out the correct order of the subsequent sentences. This exercise will demonstrate your ability to grasp the main idea and to understand the most logical way to support the main idea.

Try writing down the correct order of this sample test paragraph:

The human male, hearing for the first time about the heartrending love-life of the male praying mantis, would wonder that the species continues.
Q. The anxiety comes from an instinctual awareness that he is likely to quite literally lose his head during mating; this dread seems to slow the process for up to several hours.
R. In response, the female who is locked beneath him turns her head and, if she can manage to, bites his head off.
S. Though now dead, he remains locked in mating position, and the course of the anxiety is ended.
T. The release of his sperm speeds up after his demise, assuring a large supply of future praying mantis (who, in the manner of insects, have no further use for the progenitor).
U. But in the insect world, romance is not an issue – the drive to reproduce is – so the male praying mantis mounts the much larger female despite his anxiety.

You don’t get partial credit, so make sure you’ve got the right order. Otherwise, you are likely not eligible to attend Stuyvesant High School.

I have to wonder about the wisdom of discussing the lethal sex habits of the male praying mantis on the entrance exam. I suspect that admissions officers put this question on the test to see which kids will get distracted by the mental image of an insect ripping the head off of her sexual partner. Only applicants that score among the top 3- 5% of aspiring New York brainiacs get admitted; they apparently are nonplussed when watching Animal Kingdom.

Here’s the answer key:
UQRST

Excellent writing skills have been on the decline among graduates over the years. Voters have rarely valued the proper use of the English language when choosing U.S. Presidents. After Warren Harding died, E.E. Cummings said, “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”

The Bush era of freewheeling grammar is nearing its end, though if Palin is elected she may continue his practice of throwing the administrations full support behind the value of scrambled paragraphs. Just in case traditional grammar does rise again, however, those who have reveled in a world where articulate speech was so very passé may be wise to join the middle schoolers for test prep.