Independence Day

I am in row 93, as though such a row could exist on a plane. I think this is the A 380, the super-huge tribute to man's affinity for carbon footprints. I can't say it's much different from the sardine tins usually reserved for economy, but there is more legroom and since it's Lufthansa, the food is actually halfway decent for us poor plebeians down here on the main level.

For the entire flight, one of a set of twin babies has been voicing its intense discomfort--something like colic, that's what it sounds like. We receive reprieves of anywhere between 2 minutes to half an hour, enough time to fall asleep, and then sweet baby reminds us that if he can't have peace, then neither can we. After all these years, I am still amazed at the amount of noise such a tiny packet of humanity can make. They (I am assuming the scientific community as distilled through a kind of urban-legend game of telephone) say that a baby's cry is of such a pitch that it can't be ignored, at least not for long. Pity that nature couldn't distinguish between one who needs to pay attention to a baby's cry, and one who doesn't. Let's not get into that whole "it takes a village..." thing. Every once in a while, the baby upsets his former zygote partner, who then chimes in and creates a chorus of crying children. It's been special. They are about five rows in front of me.

At the beginning of the flight, when the baby started crying, I spent a moment in intellectual wankery, thinking about the opening of Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Fassbinder's film about a woman who strikes out on her own after the second world war, becomes quite prosperous, losing her humanity in the process, all, ironically enough, in order to maintain a marriage that actually never existed, despite the piece of paper that says otherwise. Typisch deutsch. During the opening credits, which pop up in a kind of Wiederaufbau brick-laying pattern, we hear a baby cry, which some interpret as a sign of new beginnings, of untapped potential, of starting over from scratch, from the ground up, on a Tabula Rasa, but with the options of making the "right" choice this time. The desire to seek meaning is sometimes really annoying, that I want somehow to link my "new beginning" to the wailing, pooping Petrie dish five rows in front of me. Don't get me wrong. I like kids. I used to be one. But sometimes...

It's not really a new beginning but a continuation of something I started six years ago. Only, now older and more apprehensive thanks to watching the economy bottom out, suffering through four years of underemployment but the same amount of debt as before, I take it all a bit more seriously, see myself as having a bit more at stake this time around. The last time I moved to Germany, it was a lark, something I wanted, needed to do, to recover from a pretty horrific separation and it's attendant nervous breakdown. I always go to Germany or Austria when I need to recover. Normal people choose warmer climes, Tahiti, Mexico, Paris. I choose the land of sausage and embittered, anxious people who tell each other that their gardens are overgrown and they really should tend to that.

Growth has always been a nice by-product of such trips. Now, the trip is about growth, with recovery being a necessary part. I've got about four years of sleep to catch up on.

In the last four years, I have worked as a commercial baker, a pastry chef for a restaurant, an English teacher in "the 'hood" (at the end of the semester, one girl came up and apologized to me for originally wanting to jump me in the parking lot), a German Studies Lecturer, a Composition teacher, a writing in the sciences instructor, honors adviser, language instructor. I have consistently held at least two jobs for the last 7 years, holding three jobs for a year or two of that. I am, as the Germans say, "erschöpft."

After waking up day after day at 4:30, 5:00 in the morning so that I can work as wage slave and academic whipping boy, and realizing that nothing had changed for me financially or job-security wise in five years, I decided it was time to go, to try something new, to change.

They (again) say that Freud defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If this is the case, I should have been 51-50'd a long, long time ago. The country should have been 51-50'd a long time ago. We are doing it wrong, and we keep doing it wrong but keep hoping for it to somehow work out.

I chose to land in Germany on Independence Day. While all my friends are going to enjoy a nice day off, eat well-grilled Bay Area food, drink lovely wine and beer, consume other products that make them giddy, be they "edibles" or Serrano ham, I am going to topple jet-lagged and punch-drunk off a plane, one of the last people off the plane probably, and make my way to Aachen, schlepping two suitcases and a fencing bag. I chose to land on the fourth because leaving on the fourth would be too hard. I wouldn't make it to any cookouts anyway. Even if I did, I would sit there and wonder, in the idyllic weather and on a comfortable chaise lounge, if I really need to go to Germany, if I really need to move there. I had to be gone before one of the nicest days in the year for me.

The great thing about saying goodbye to people in this fashion, last dinners and outings before my departure, is how wonderful everything is. How much typical Bay Area stuff you get to do: drinking Chardonnay in the Los Gatos Hills at 2,400 feet, looking at the little winery tucked into the valley below; receiving farm-fresh eggs from someone's coop in Los Altos Hills; doing elderflower-liqueur-champagne shots and eating like kings during my going-away fencing tournament; French meals at tiny bistros, perfectly fashioned cappuccinos by our favorite baristas, sampling barley wine and eating tapas, cocktail bar crawls and gourmet fusion French fries. A ridiculously comfortable life. It's deceptive. Because you get this false impression that your life is always like this, but it's not. Mostly friends don't have or make the time for such outings on a regular basis. We have jobs, spouses, children, pets, plants. I only have the jobs, and I don't even have those anymore. These perfect Bay Area days before I leave, something I've experienced before, can be real red herrings.

We land soon, time to go brush my teeth, freshen up, figure out if I'm going to get a "Navi" for my rental car. I probably should. But the idea of some polite female German voice telling me hours in advance that I should prepare to turn right might be a little too much.

Tja...

-manchmal reicht ein Blickwechsel.

That Not-So-Fresh Feeling

I am a child of the 80’s, a bona fide Gen-Xer with an epic chip on my shoulder and a matching Earth-friendly tote bag to carry my judgmental disdain for all things popularized, commercialized, homogenized and franchised. I hate everything, from the latte-swilling Starbucks freak barking at ear-splitting decibels into a phone that has a higher I.Q. than he does, to the emotionally-crippled reality TV junkie who can’t stop obsessing over what Lindsay Lohan and her sketchy BFF of the month snorted behind closed doors before barfing it all up on their newest Prada bags. I am cultural judge, jury and executioner in one. I have to be. It’s my Gen-X duty. Life is soooo hard. But someone has to pitilessly condemn the ill-tempered, ignorant, non-PC, environmentally unconscious and generally retarded people of the world. It can’t all be roses and sunshine.

But lately I’ve had that not-so-fresh feeling, as though my derisive criticism is no longer necessary—or at least heeded. No one seems to care anymore if global conglomerates rape independent businesses wholesale, or that Wal Mart makes its workers piss into a cup for the soul-killing position of capitalist whipping boy. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent 200-million-gallon oil spill, one of the most mind-boggling cock-ups of the human race, raised collective eyebrows for about five minutes, till we heard there was a sale at Old Navy. Indignation has become passé, gone the way of macramé plant holders and crocheted toilet roll covers. We still sound indignant, sputtering our outrage between sips of Shiraz and nibbles of mache salad in a bistro-café-cocktail-bar-art gallery. But little of it translates into action. Facebook groups like “1,000,000 People Who Want to Plug the BP Oil Spill with Sarah Palin” have supplanted actual demonstrations. If a real-live demonstration does take place, police don’t even have to use water cannons to disperse angry crowds anymore. Happy hour at the local bar does that now. The revolution—if one ever takes place—will not be televised; it will be Tweeted. Instead of doing, we are paying lip service, with all judgment, all debate dovetailing into one yardstick, one expression: “douchebag.” We talk about things in terms of douchebags now, douches, douchebaggery, general douchiness. We’ve revived a term that had its 15 minutes of fame in the 80’s, yet was apparently ahead of its time. Unlike other idioms of yore-- “23 Skiddoo,” “Far out,” “Gag me with a spoon”—that never crawl their way out of the linguistic grave once they have been laid to rest, “douchebag” has experienced not just a resurrection, but a viral second-coming. It embodies the Western Zeitgeist with deft economy, sluicing its way through the current discourse, which, considering its vacuity, is not such a difficult task.

“Douchebag” originally signified the implement used in the process of cleansing the vagina, sometimes after a period, sometimes after sex, sometimes after sex to make sure you have your period, after which you’d have to douche, too. Coined first in 1908, it was an extension of the word “douche,” adopted from the French doucher in 1833, and first used as a verb in English in 1838. The term maintained this connotation until 1967, when it became an American slang term for a “contemptible person,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Although the term centers on cleanliness and health, as opposed to “shitbag” or “dirtbag,” it takes on a negative connotation, much like other terms associated with female genitalia. Not surprising, really.

Though it does not provide the same kind of etymological history as its studious cousin, the Urban Dictionary provides a more contemporary definition: “someone who has surpassed the levels of jerk or asshole, however not yet reached fucker or motherfucker.” The Urban Dictionary defines a jerk as “ an idiot or stupid person,” and asshole as “someone being ignorant, rude, or obnoxious.” Anyone can be a jerk or asshole from time to time. We all have moments of arrogance, idiocy, toddler-like behavior. But we tend to get over it. We tell people, “stop being an asshole,” or “don’t be an ass,” implying that one can escape the state relatively easily. We can recover from being jerks and assholes, and we might, just might, on the odd occasion, even apologize for it.

On the other hand, a fucker, aside from the most obvious biological connotation, can also be defined as “a back stabber,” while a motherfucker is “a formidable or inexorable force,” a “bad guy/terrorist who means to bring Evil to the world or just piss Bruce Willis off.” Interestingly enough, the term also seems to apply to jazz musicians of particularly high skill. But generally “motherfucker” is the worst of epithets one can sling at another, with equivalents in almost every language, though something like “I shit in your father’s beard” is much more offensive. But then again, that is very culture specific, and doesn’t possess the same kind of universality that “motherfucker” does. To be a motherfucker is to lack conscience, a moral compass, to be capable of committing the worst transgressions and break the greatest taboos in order to satisfy one’s whims and desires, to have the ability to sleep with one’s mother, Oedipus without the complex. In truth, the label would apply to a select few: Wall Street bankers and Ponzi Scheme architects, Idi Amin and the like. Sociopaths are motherfuckers. Most others are jerks, assholes or douchebags, with douchebags sucking up a good deal of the oxygen available.

Thus, we begin to see that a douchebag is not just any kind of contemptible person, but a pervasively contemptible one, an idiot with a yeasty residue that can’t be washed off. If we wanted to categorize the three types of people using Douglas Adams’ principles of Bistromathics, we might think in terms of pizza. The jerk or asshole snatches the last piece of pizza from the box when they see you reaching for it. But they at least paid for their share of the pizza. A motherfucker would simply take the entire pizza and kick you in the crotch. But a douchebag will “share” the pizza with you, take the last slice, then riffle through their wallet when the bill comes and exclaim surprise at their lack of cash. “I’ll run a tab at the bar and get the first round,” the douchebag says, but then gets a cab and goes home. You get stiffed on the pizza and the consolation cocktail. And the douchebag never feels a need to apologize or later make up for their actions, because they are assholes with a sense of entitlement who never stop being assholes, as it is their natural, God-given right.

Douchebags, regardless of ethnicity, income or religious affiliation, be it hipster jerkoff or Eurowanker, all share one fundamental characteristic: a sense of entitlement at the cellular level, so inherent that they have no idea that the world neither does nor should revolve around them. Any other situation for them would be akin to believing that Hitler just needed a good hug. Douchebags not only believe that the world owes them something, but they also calculate interest. They are selfish by nature, not due to the misguided belief that all other people are jerks that have to be beaten to the finish line, but because of the misguided belief that the rest of the human race simply does not exist except as instruments for their own pleasure and amusement. They are not the center of the universe; they are the universe. And, like the universe, they take themselves for granted, because there is nothing else. Consequently, the douchebag’s selfishness and entitlement is an organic factor that can only be changed with Herculean effort, or death. And these people surround us like the Russians did the Germans at Stalingrad.

We are so much enveloped by douchebags that we have turned our attention to them in full. Books have begun appearing on shelves in your independent and chain bookstores with titles like Angels, Vampires and Douchebags, The Quotable Douchebag, Hot Chicks With Douchebags and Memoir of a Douchebag. Websites devoted to douchebags populate the virtual waves, providing you with “The Top 10 Biggest Movie Douchebags,” the Douchebag Museum on bigdouchebag.com, “69 Ways to Tell if You’re A Douchebag,” the YouTube video “We Are Douchebags,” and, naturally, a Wikipedia reference. The Urban Dictionary logs 44 different variations on the term, from “douchebaguette” to “douchebag index to “douché,” touché, when addressing a douche. A grindcore, hardcore punk company called Douchebag Records finds its home in Lille, Nord-pas-de Calais in France. Kanye West has proposed a “toast for the douchebags” in his latest single “Runaway,” while a band called Jump Smokers has a single called “Don’t Be A Douchebag,” lambasting men and women alike for consistent idiocy and selfishness. A major motion picture also recently debuted, called, simply enough, Douchebag. A low-budget television satire called Douchebag Beach seems to have gone viral. Jon Stewart uses the term on The Daily Show liberally, sprinkling it appropriately over the politicians and public figures who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in earning the title. And when a term like “douchebag” reaches cable TV, we know it has gone mainstream.

We now have a love-hate relationship with douchebags, lamenting their presence, but lost without them. Douchebags are the new ‘them’ against our ‘us.’ We have divided the world into two categories, the have and the have-nots, the entitled and the exploited, right-wing and left-wing, and anyone stuck in the middle is either a pussy or a wannabe. We condemn people for being douchebags, criticize them for being too liberal or too conservative, yet stroke out when someone refuses to take a side. We are like a teenage girl with her first boyfriend, as clear about what she wants from him as broken glass dipped in mud. We have no clue what we want anymore, but we can identify a douchebag in a crowd of thousands. The tell-tale signs—hair gelled to the max, sunglasses worn indoors at night, retro Miami Vice polo shirt collars turned up in Dracula fashion, biceps the size of Detroit, tits as fake as Jennifer Aniston’s smile, and a sense of entitlement that would blow away Camilla Parker-Bowles—are easy to spot, textbook easy, and easy to judge. We seek out douchebags, enjoy pointing them out, text each other when we spot one, with the abbreviation “D” or “DB.” It’s the Punch-Buggy of the 21^st century.

As much as we hate douchebags, we like them enough to pay them attention and money. Like monkeys in a zoo, we visit them on a regular basis to see what feces they’ll throw out the cage this time. With the re-invention of reality TV, we stopped laughing at innocent practical jokes and started laughing at idiotic, self-absorbed morons with the emotional maturity of amoeba—and that’s insulting the amoeba—as they made their way through “everyday” situations, such as working a normal job, going grocery shopping, and speaking to adults. Much like hockey and NASCAR, we stay tuned not so much for the outcome as for the knock-down, drag-out fights and wrecks that are their natural by-products. We expect these people to act like douches, from Puck on The Real World, to Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, to Tiffany “New York” Pollard, to Anna Nicole Smith, to Jon and Kate Gosselin—who all have their own Wikis, by the way. We want these people to act like douches. It’s not enough anymore to know that someone is poorer than you, worse off than you. We don’t even show those kinds of people on TV anymore. We show the douchebag who spends his disposable income on sunglasses studded with rhinestones and the shirt he wears before he puts on the shirt he wears to go out, the dumbass who drunkenly picks a fight with an end table because it’s in his way. We relish their wastefulness, stupidity, and capacity for violence.

But we don’t just like it; we reward it, awarding people TV contracts, modeling jobs, recording deals, magazine covers and internet renown. We pay people to behave badly for us, pay them a lot. But we don’t want them to simply behave badly. We demand dramatic stupidity, Jackass-like disregard for other people’s safety and feelings as well as their own. We demand they spray on their tans, sleep with their in-laws, snort various powders and wake up in jail. Otherwise, we’re not interested. We’ll prick up our ears at the neo-con’s daughter getting an abortion, but we’d be much happier if we could hear that he was the one responsible for her condition. “The Situation” makes $50,000 per episode on Jersey Shore and $5 million a year in endorsements. Someone is funding his douchy habit, and we can’t say that it’s someone else. As a friend of mine said, "Rome had the Coliseum. We have cable."

We seem to appreciate the douchebag’s ability to shirk responsibility, to avoid ever claiming ownership of their shitty decision-making. We live in the age of the beta test. As a student recently reminded me, G-mail was a beta version for years, never saying officially that it was open for business, that the bugs had been worked out and it was ready for public use. We constantly receive “updates” from software companies because everything is forever “in progress.” If everything is constantly being adjusted, it means that nothing is actually ever broken, or faulty, or inherently flawed. It’s hard to criticize a plan that’s always being changed. Just look at the housing market. Even sexually, the notion of personal accountability has disappeared. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” became “hit it and quit it,” and has now devolved into “toot it and boot it.” “Hit it and quit it,” though coarser and nearer violence than its predecessor, is still milder than “toot it and boot it,” a phrase that removes any gratitude or sense of attachment to the issue. Tooting something and then putting your foot to it to remove it from your sight is a far cry from expressing a minimum of gratitude for the privilege of casual sex. Now, it seems that’s simply taken for granted, which is douchebaggery.

Perhaps we envy the douchebag’s moronic status. Maybe we wish we could be rich and famous and completely devoid of taste, scruples, and a work-ethic. I have to admit, it wouldn’t be bad, not giving a shit what anyone thought of me, buying the trashiest clothes I can find and having the balls to wear them out in public. I’d like to be free of the worry of how many gallons of water I consume in a day, in comparison to people in Somalia, for just five minutes. I’d like my super ego to shut up about gas mileage for once and let my Id drive a fucking Porsche. I want to get things made by children in third-world sweatshops and not bat an eyelid in the face of the truth. I want to not know who Banksy is and have never heard of Yo Yo Ma, so I don’t feel inadequate for not being intimately familiar with their work. I want to be an idiot who thinks the world revolves around me, dizzy from the centrifugal force of my awesomeness.

Self-absorption, it seems, is now sexier than power, as evidenced by the customize-me ethos, the ludicrous amount of “personalization” we engage in and tolerate. From the double-decaf-mocha-latte-with-two-and-a-half-pump-vanilla drinker to the student who sends her professor an email asking if she “really” has to buy the textbook required for the course, we are all about ourselves, what we want, right now, and how we feel. I am going to tell you how I feel, but I don’t care how you feel, because I am too busy listening to my music on my iPhone that has a customized cover, ringtone, keychain and personal mascot.

But I can’t go all the way, I can’t go full douchebag, because a part of me still feels bad, still has a conscience, still feels guilt. I can’t be truly mean to anyone, at least, not on a daily basis. I do have my moments of bitchiness, when I can’t restrain myself, but for the most part, I’m too fucking polite to act the way I’d like to. I’d like to run roughshod over all the people who kill my buzz, infringe on my space, force me to overhear their banal conversations because they’re so damn loud. I smile whenever I think of the expression, “shoot ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.”

But I never will. Unfortunately, my inner douche will never truly dominate me. That’s why I need “The Situation,” Paris Hilton, Octomom, Ashton Kutcher, and my next door neighbor, whom I can call a douche whenever I want to, in the privacy of my own home, or out and about with friends. “Douchebag” is like a Sham-Wow: it soaks everything up. The little bit of optimism left over in the 90’s has been replaced by a clueless apathy. Everyone is a douchebag, in some way or another. What used to smell like Teen Spirit has been shat upon from a height and rinsed off with vinegar. The irony of the 90’s has given way to the over-the-top Massengill cheesiness that makes a mountain out of a pimple, a crisis out of a cuticle, that finds a mani/pedi an absolute necessity, instead of sending the money to a charity, any charity, for god’s sake, on the planet. We sold out, and then put even that up for sale.

If you’re calling me unjustifiably judgmental, polemic, stupid, bitchy, classist, elitist, racist, or pseudo-intellectual, I only have one thing to say to you:

Don’t be such a douche.

Thanks to Lucia L.

How Did I Get Here?

Who hasn't asked this question? Talking Heads asked this. Joyce Carol Oates asks this: Where are you going, where have you been? I came across it again while reading Klaus Mann's Mephisto today. An attaché from a Scandinavian country asks himself how he's ended up at the gargantuan and grotesque yet highly civilized and oddly enchanting birthday party of a high-ranking Nazi official. "How did I get here?"

I asked myself this question again, today, while having a cup of coffee with a professor visiting for the quarter from Germany. I'd sat in one of her classes and had been impressed with her calm demeanor and laid-back nature. She was a walking encyclopedia, one of those scarily well-read people who actually knew what they were talking about and wrote books.

I also liked her because we were wearing the same ring, three silver bands loosely entwined, a ring I'd worn in one form or another for 20 years.

She had on these black and grey striped tights, a similar dress. She looked like a German Dr. Seuss, only more reserved.

We were talking about my career, a place I don't like to go, because it's as barren as a 100-year-old woman's womb. The professor suggested I consider going to Japan for a few years, work in one of the German Studies departments there, as they're very interested in hiring right now.

"And I don't think I could have said this 10 years ago, but a black woman in a German Studies department is something unique indeed."

Too true.

"But tell me, have you finished your dissertation?"

"Yes, I finished in 1998."

"'98?"

I took a slow, quiet, deep breath. I knew what was coming. "Yes, in '98."

"Oh. That's a while. 11 years. You might be better idf staying here and doing the same rhing for a while. Where were you?"

Where was I? I've been trying to answer that for years. I've been trying to make up for it almost as long.

I told her the story, the whole thing I'd told another professor in the spring. What bothered me most was the fact that the story never became more comprehensible, that it never seemed to get better, that it never hurt any less to know how badly I seem to have screwed up. A woman without a country and only a shitty sob-story to call her own.

How did I get here? Where am I? Maybe if I start with the latter question, I can better answer the former.

Where am I?

Right at this moment I'm sitting on a train on my way back to the city, where I'll pick up my car and go home. I'll change clothes and go to fencing. Then, I will go back home, make some dinner, and grade essays.

But I guess that's not the really an adequate answer.

I am trying to find my way to the surface of academia again, too stupid to give up, and too lacking in other, more profit-oriented skills that could actually help me pay off my student loans.

I'm 38 years old, single, childless, and working as an adjunct lecturer between 2 vastly different institutions.

I am in a place where I can't seem to move forward but refuse to step back.

I am between the proverbial rock and a hard place, trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, if you don't mind incongruous metaphors.

I am teaching at a great university in a great German Studies Department. I am working with people who are teaching me things I should have learned in graduate school, and students I enjoy and adore.

And it is only temporary at best.

I am on the brink of getting it, of actually using my brain for something other than wondering what's for dinner, or if I should wash the dishes or take out the garbage.

I am in transition, I hope to better things.

So does that help explain any better how I got here?

Does that mean that I simply don't know?But I know. Very clear cut choices landed me where I am.

I try to focus on the good choices. Without choosing to go back and live in Germany for a year, I would have never taken the job where I am now. If I hadn't stopped talking to my ex after the break up, I'd be an even bigger basket case than I am now. If I hadn't chosen to stick to a diet for more than a year, I would have never lost the 80 pounds that made me miserable for 7 years.

Is my learning curve just that much worse? Is that why I did so badly in geometry?

People tell me it's unproductive to worry the past like a dog does a bone. They're right. Doesn't make it any easier though.

Some would say that my "here" ain't that bad. And I agree. But it ain't that great either.

The professor, towards the end of our chat, pointed at my ring and said, "We're wearing the same ring." She smiled brightly.

"I've had this ring for 20 years." I did not mention the gold version I wore for almost 12 years, the ring I buried in a box and passed over to friends so I wouldn't set the whole thing on fire and regret it later. That was five years ago. My friends still have the box.

"I chose this ring because of my three children."

I got the ring instead of children.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

It is one thing to be an underpaid adjunct lecturer. It is entirely another to be an unpaid adjunct lecturer. As an underpaid lecturer, you get to at least eat while you bitch about your plight. As an unpaid lecturer, you just bitch. You don't even get a cocktail to soften the blow of the day.

Due to the horrific joke called our economy, the community college I work for had to slash its budget dramatically, which put part-timers like me on the chopping block faster than a lamb at a biblical slaughter get-together. The English department had to cut its budget by 12.9% for the academic year. The only way to achieve this and keep everyone employed was to take some of us (I mean me and a few other schmucks) off of full instructional time and place us on non-instructional assignments. Note that the first three letters of "assignment" describes a particular state of being. Non-instructional assignments, for the layman, are hours clocked doing something other than teaching, for example, sitting in a writing lab, or contemplating suicide.

My non-instructional assignment came in the form of monitoring the new English Lab at a satellite campus deep in the 'hood. The "campus," which consists of one sad building that strikingly resembles the local County Jail, reflects the principles of a community college, as the whole community--enrolled or not enrolled--come into the building. The unenrolled come in because they have learned that there are computers with Internet access inside. The enrolled come because they have to.

Most things I can live with, like the girls who answer their cell phones in the lab and proceed to have a full-volume conversation with their baby's daddy. Even the people who punctuate every sentence, not to mention every independent clause, dependent clause, preposition and transitional adverb with "my nigga" give me little pause. The "students" who don't have any business within a 100-foot radius of the building but come in to print out their travel itineraries don't bother me so much, either. It's being saddled with a program that I will appropriately title Gateway to Hell that raises the hackles on the back of my neck.

Gateway to Hell is a program designed for high school students who don't "fit in" to normal school environments (Translation: teens from 15 to 19 years old who have dropped out of school, are gang members, are apprenticing prostitutes, or are doing this because the terms of their parole require it). One or two good students who actually want to be there to learn something and move on with their lives have somehow been gathered up with their contemporaries and have to endure the same crap as the rest of us. But for the most part the program consists of kids who have never experienced a boundary in their lives and are in desperate need of therapy and a healthy dose of shock treatments. Let's just say that they didn't do so hot in finishing school.

Note: yes, I understand and have a profound appreciation for the fact that these children--because they are children--come from a variety of highly fascinating forms of dysfunctional families. In the first six weeks, I learned more about being a street kid, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism and drug abuse, mental illness, eating disorders and social workers than I thought I would in a year. But since they applied for the program, since they said they wanted a 15th chance, since they said they were "college ready," and since the staff running the program told us the same thing--which they knew at the time was bollocks--my sympathy has quickly run dry.

Maybe if they didn't come in for their required lab hours so high kites would be envious, or if they actually did something other than look for ultimate fighting footage online, or if they stopped spending all their time uploading pictures from their cell phones and trying to score dates on facebook, I might be more tolerant. I might be more easy going if, when I told them they are supposed to be working on their papers, since it is, like, the English lab, they didn't look at me like they wanted to jump me later in the parking lot and then go right back to checking out tire rims. I might feel more warm and fuzzy if I felt like I could leave my belongings in the lab when I go to the bathroom--but I can't, since they've stolen crap from other people who work for the program. I might feel the milk of human kindness flow through me a little if I actually got paid for the work.

But I haven't been paid in over a month, because the Gateway to Hell program screwed up the accounting. I am being paid for my instructional hours, but not the non-instructional ones, the ones for which I really need some kind of reason not to blow my head off with a shotgun. I am not the only person who's experiencing this. I'm just the one who's most pissed off about it. It is one thing to work in little South Central with the Future Thugs of America. It is entirely another to not get paid for it.

I'm certain that if this had happened to the chair of our department, or one of the administrators for the Gateway to Hell program, an emergency check would have been cut toot sweet. But no, I am making calls, doing the rounds, and am getting ready to call my union, for what seems like the thousandth time.

The situation once again reminds me of how awful this particular community college is. This is a college that had to slash budgets, but managed to waste millions of dollars on two construction projects that, now over budget to an alarming extent, have to be put on hold. This is the school that every few years has some kind of scandal about misappropriation of funds, for which one or another bigwig at the school is responsible. This is the school that, despite the fact it has 40,000 students, can't stay above water, even if you threw it a life preserver. This is a community college where someone actually suggested that, in order to bridge the budget gap, we allow private entities to sponsor classes. Sure! Why not? We'll get Coca-Cola to sponsor Health and Nutrition classes, and the Pro-Life people can sponsor the classes in Childhood Development. While we're at it, let's get the KKK to sponsor Religious Studies classes.

Cut the f#*@ing shit.

How is it that the people doing the work for which community colleges are best known and which they espouse--providing access to higher education for the more challenged and disenfranchised members of our community--are the ones not getting paid? The Chancellor goes home to a lovely, warm place where the bills are most likely paid and few threats of bankruptcy and destitution hang over their head. Full-timers get to teach overload while part-timers go wait tables. Landscaping is lovely and the new buildings on campus are immaculate. But I'm wondering how I can turn chunk tuna from a can into an interesting, exciting, and hopefully halfway tasty meal. At least I don't have any cats I have to fight with for the lion's share. I don't get combat pay, although I deserve it, if not, at the very least, a flak jacket and a Howitzer.

The woman in Payroll who is supposedly the nexus point of this clusterfuck has been unavailable, out of her office, hard to reach, not doing her job. I'm sure she's off somewhere enjoying her pay, doing things like putting gas in her car, buying groceries, paying a hit man to finally put an end to her unhappy marriage, which is most likely the fault of a lack of organization and empathy on her part, if her job performance is any kind of reflection. And when she gets back to her desk, She might even clock some overtime, since she has a lot of catching up to do.

She's not the only one who's asleep at the wheel, as is obvious to almost all of us now. I want to track down this woman and her ilk and have them locked in stocks in a public square so I can throw rotten vegetables and fish heads at them, before I move on to bricks and pit bulls. At least they'll be getting paid while they're being abused. I don't even have that right now.

It is one thing to have a job in which you are supposed to take deal with other people's laziness, sloth, bad attitude, wastefulness, corruption and general stupidity. But it is another ball of wax altogether to not get paid for it.

Dumping My Modal Load

I admit, details are not necessarily my biggest passion. Don't get me wrong, I can obsess over the tiniest detail in my barbie-doll nativities, or spend hours working out how to best slide pie dough into a pan. But those aren't details as much as they are God's little way of getting me to hang around for another five minutes. I hate Details, with a capital D, which rhymes with B and that stands for Boredom. I despise the stuff you find in very small print on acid-free paper. I hate paperwork, go blind when I sit down to fill out forms and stroke out when someone passes me a "handbook." Things like health insurance manuals and union rulebooks have no purchase for me until the moment I need to know the information. But usually by that time I have junked said manual in order to get the bad ju-ju out of my house.

So I once again find myself in this situation. I'm not sure I've actually tossed the manual I need this time, since all my stuff is packed up in storage right now. But I most likely have already thrown it out in some fit of pique. It would be the handbook for the community college where I currently work, if you want to call it working. I consider it more an interesting experiment in masochism.

I'm not even sure what handbook I should be looking for, or what I'm actually looking for. Considering I have never really spent a whole lot of time looking at these kinds of handbooks, I can't necessarily figure out how to find something or judge the quality of organization. But I can say the few manuals I've dared open for five minutes before I started bleeding out the ears would have made the Marquis de Sade blush at the exquisitely cruel manner in which the information was assembled.

Although I consider myself a slight dabbler in foreign languages, I have never been able to wrap my head around Academic Bureaucratese, a language known for its protean grammar and bandersnatchy verbiage. A.B is a language quite like Esperanto--everyone could and should learn it, but why on Earth would anyone in their right mind devote one spare nanosecond of time to it? I wonder if people who learn Klingon also have a talent for A.B. They're probably distant relatives to the Vogons.

But back to the manual, the one I don't know if I should be reading or not because I don't know if it has the information I want or if my precious information is hiding in another manual, which I'll have to go to Middle Earth to retrieve. I'm looking for a term called "modal load." This little three-syllable set seems to pack quite a wallop, since this is what's supposedly preventing me from teaching two classes in the English Department next semester, rather than teaching one class and working in a lab.

Working in the lab, under normal circumstances, would not be such a big issue, even though I receive about $300 less a month. But since I have been plunked down in a lab that seems to sit in a very small version of South Central, I'd prefer to find my way back to the classrooms on the main campus, as most people in our department who are of sound mind and body would. Part-time lecturers lost classes this past semester, due to the budget cuts, i.e., massive cash hemorrhaging that took place because of a ridiculous series of Trustees' mismanagement that was then compounded by the failing economy. So instead of teaching my usual 2 classes, I got one class and a complementary number of hours working in the "Writing Lab." The Writing Lab at South Central Jr. is more a repository for juvenile delinquents and people who wander in from the street looking for a place to check their MySpace page. People get very little writing done there. I can't get anything done there because I'm too busy telling people to stop talking about their girlfriends or their baby's daddy at full volume on their cell phones.

So I get paid less, work 3 times as many hours, and wonder if anyone is breaking into my car while I sit in a lab that hardly anyone ever comes to in order to do something the lab was actually designed for.

So when I saw an e-mail from the chair telling all faculty that a number of classes for next semester remained unstaffed and asking if anyone was interested in teaching them, I happily rejoined with "I would be very interested in taking the MWF 2-3 p.m. class," which translates into F*** Yeah!" Who wouldn't want to get back to teaching, recover the $300 a month and spend less time sitting indoors with a bunch of computers? If it were a boyfriend with a bad attitude and a nifty haircut, I could see it, but there was nothing remotely attractive or sexually gratifying about the lab gig.

But I get this e-mail back, addressed this time to "Part-time Faculty." The chair tell us that she received many e-mails from part-timers but she could not give them the classes, because, since we're at .25 a class, that would push us past our limit. So, in order to meet "modal load" for the adjunct lecturers, she would have to give us one class and "complement" the class with lab hours.

"I hope this is clear," she wrote at the end of the e-mail. I don't think that needs translation...

I wanted to write back and say, "The next time you send out an invitation for classes, but you actually don't want the part-timer's to write back, maybe you shouldn't include them on the list in the first place." Actually, I wanted to write back and say, "Eat shit and die." But that wouldn't have gone down well, either. So instead, I'm blogging.

What kills me about this whole thing is overload is overload. Whether full-timers take the classes or part-timers take the classes, the English Department is still going to end up spending more money. Why give people who already have a fixed salary more money when part-timers are struggling to make ends meet right now?

But even better than giving the extra work to the full-timers is which full-timers get the classes. Our chair was kind enough to send all the faculty the names of the instructors who'd be teaching the overload classes. One of them is clueless. I just heard from a couple of other students about how insensitive another one is. Two of the people on the list are having an affair in front of God and everyone, and another person is an outright racist. The cliche came to mind when I read the list: There is no justice.

What the hell is modal load and how can I get it off my back? I'm too busy trying to keep up with my classes to protest the fact that I'm getting screwed over by a bureaucracy that could give a flying flip about me. The three hours I need to sit down and read the manuals until I find what I'm looking for are usually being consumed by lesson preparation, paper grading, driving, and dodging bullets at the lab. And I know that when I look up modal load, it's going to lead me to the next ten things I have to look up in order to understand anything. Just as the poor are too busy being poor to be interested in elections, I am too buried under one mountain of papers to develop any interest in another mountain of papers.

But it has become a pie crust slipping into a plate now. If I'm going to bitch, I'm going to get it right, down to the last detail.

After minutes of searching, I discover that the 117-page handbook for faculty covers "modal load" in one paragraph: "The sum of instructional and non-instructional assignments shall not exceed 60% of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for regular employees having comparable duties." Although the term "modal load" seems to appear nowhere in this handbook, I think this is what it comes down to: %60. This still makes no sense to me, as 2 classes at .25 still equals only 50%. Perhaps I have smoked too much crack, but something does not seem kosher. Of course, I'm sure it's far more complicated than my pretty little head can handle. I'm sure it's just as complicated as when Kaiser was taking health insurance premiums for me from two different state institutions but I couldn't get unemployment insurance when I desperately needed it last year. The state can pay my health insurance premiums twice over but can't help me put food on my table. What, the computer systems don't tell you when you're doing the same thing twice? Even my Microsoft Word can do that.

"You already have this file. Would you like to replace it with this new file?"

Modal load, it seems, is the load that gets dumped on you when you're an adjunct. Modal load is the "stay right where you are and come no closer." Modal load is the rock tied round your foot so that you sink faster when they dump you into the river, if they don't sell you up it first. Modal load is the wall my boss gets to hide behind right now, while I get to hide behind my computer screen at the lab, wondering how long I have to stay in South Central Jr.

I'm Soooo Fired"

I think I behaved myself in class for about 30 minutes once, probably the first time I taught. I probably didn't even make it through the first third of the class. I'm not sure why, but I've never been able to act like a normal human being as a teacher.

How do I define normal, you might ask? Normal, as we all in academia are quick to exclaim, is a relative term that has little, if anything to support it as a concrete concept. It's the first catechism we learn.

"What does one do when confronted with the term 'normal?'"

"We ask them to be more specific."

"What do we say when they say 'you know, normal?'"

"We ask them to define the term."

"And what do we do when they cannot adequately define the term?"

"We lambast them for being ignorant bottom dwellers. "

"Uh, no."

"We tell them that normal is a broad generalization that is subject to cultural variations and interpretation."

"God be with you."

"Amen."

Despite knowing the catechism by heart, I'm going to broadly generalize and possibly insult and alienate various individuals. I'm okay with that.

Normal human beings who teach typically pay attention to what they say, how they behave, and how they dress. Normal teachers, lecturers, professors do not have frequent Turette's explosions and sound like they just returned from a back-alley cock fight. Normal teachers at least pay lip service to political correctness, and if they actually do something heinously racist, classist, sexist, etc, etc, it is usually because they lack the self-awareness to realize how idiotic they are.

I, on the other hand, have difficulty in these areas. These things come out of my mouth (for one) and I do these things that make me think immediately afterward, "I'm so fired."

It started off small enough, with making a party tee-shirt with one German class at Stanford. I thought of all those party tee shirts sororities and fraternities used to print up for their keggers. So we ended up printing up tee-shirts with "German 115, Spring Quarter: It's whacked!" That was how I answered their questions about German grammar.

"Why does the verb go at the end of a dependent clause in German?"

"Because it's whacked."

Why is the definite article for "boy" masculine but the definite article for "girl" is neuter?"

"Because it's whacked."

"Why is there a neuter gender in German?"

"Because it's whacked."

It seemed to suffice for the most part.

Over time, I have lost almost all impulse control in the classroom. During my more demure years, I used to cultivate belches during lecture. I'd feel one coming on, pause, pat myself on the chest, spread my arms, and then let rip. Sometimes I'd take a bow if there was applause.

You Have a Ph.D. in What?

Whenever I tell people that I have a PhD in German Studies, there is always a moment of silence. The listener must first deal with the cognitive dissonance that suddenly invades their head like the Germans marching through Paris. I'm not sure what throws them off, perhaps my bubbly personality--not. Maybe it's the fact that I look a little too young to actually have a Ph.D., at least, from an institution that doesn't exist only online. Maybe it's my wardrobe, which consists of jeans and long-sleeved tee-shirts, fleece pullovers, and scuffed-up clogs. Maybe it's the dreads that people have a problem with.

Or maybe it's the fact that I'm African-American. There just aren't that many black people interested in the Fatherland. I can't possibly imagine why.

People, once they realize they must be looking at me as though I have two heads and collect themselves, create a spiffy rejoinder: "Well, that's not something you hear every day," "Wow, isn't that...interesting," "Okaayyyy..."

The best one, I think, came from an African American woman I talked to at the MLA last year, who, when I told her I taught at a U.C. asked me if I knew a couple of different professors there. I told her I didn't, and she said, "Well, they're in African American Studies. You sure you don't know them?"

"I'm in the German and Russian Department."

"Really?"

"Yes, I have a PhD in German Studies."

"Oh...," she said, at a total loss for words. Then she regained her composure and said, "Well, you go girl!"

People have a hard enough time believing I have a Ph.D., which manifests itself in all manner of backhanded compliments, racist statements, and direct challenges of my qualifications--another blog entry for later. But when they discover that my PhD is in German Studies, the tectonic plates in the Marianas Trench of their minds shift severely, and the resulting tsunami almost always takes me out.

For example, I used to work for a non-profit organization as the Adult Education teacher, which meant I helped people who'd dropped out of school years before earn their GEDs. I also acted as a liaison between them and the faculty they worked with at a local community college while they were getting their certificates in Childhood Development. To a great degree, this meant preventing the women from cussing out the professors because they were pissed off. If I were in a job interview describing the experience, I'd say something like, " I functioned as an intermediary between the academic staff and my clients who, at times, because of minor breakdowns in communication, felt that they were not being clearly understood."

Ha!

The non-profit also started a job-preparedness program called STRIVE and had invited a number of city and state employees, from Social Services to EDD, to a kick-off event. My clients at the non-profit had always told me how much they hated their social workers, that they couldn't believe people like that were being invited to come to the building, invade their space and eat for free. I'd told them that the social workers couldn't possibly be that evil, and that maybe they would see a new side of them at this event.

Was I ever misguided.

During a dynamic presentation of the staff during the ceremony, our employment specialist introduced me, saying, "And we have the great privilege of having a Stanford PhD work as our adult educator, and we're incredibly proud to have her here!" All the city and state representatives turned towards me, and I sheepishly waved from where I was standing. Because the job required it, I did have on "business attire" that day, so I didn't look like I'd just come off the playground. But I was still young, a whole whopping 28, and I'm sure my blushing and turning my feet inwards like a six-year-old didn't help.

Later, when everyone was grazing and discussing how non-profits would one day take over the world, one of the social workers approached me and said, "So you have a PhD in German, huh? That's interesting."

"Yeah," I said, trying to avoid heavy discussion. "It's not very practical, though. Had I known then what I know now, I would've gotten a degree in Spanish or Russian."

"Or Ebonics," the social worker said, "since you speak that anyway."

Oddly enough, his name was Mr. Black.

People have a hard time grasping all of this at one fail swoop, but very few people ever ask if I had a hard time getting there. The answer to that would be yes.

But that's for another time, and another post.