Reason # 467 why public education is 'such a deal!'

Click on the link above to read an article about how 1) enrollment has skyrocketed (59%) at adult schools in the Inland Empire, while simultaneously 2) state funding has been cut 20%, 3) their budgets and any surpluses therein were rolled into already decimated school district general funds, so 4) they have started implementing fees and waiting lists.

So much to think about here. First of all, the students themselves:

"Diana Mendez, 37, of Corona, goes to Corona-Norco Adult School with her sister Desiree Kelly, 26, who realized she needed a diploma when her husband was laid off and she started looking for jobs. She and her sister signed up more than a year ago and were able to start the next day."

How do you NOT 'realize' you need a high school diploma, at the very least? I get that there are folks who get pregnant, fall into gangs, have their lives disrupted by family problems, move around, etc. But not to 'realize' and somehow wiggle through life till you are 37?

The problem, as I see it, is that public education in the United States remains too much of a bargain - its contribution to one's life trajectory is undervalued. Now that there are waiting lines and fees to be paid, people are pounding the doors to be let in. They could have simply sat on their butts twenty years ago and done this with less aggro for free.

What can we do to turn this around?

Follow up on the missing hubcap theory

Awhile ago I promulgated a theory that, the more hubcaps your car is missing, the more likely it is that you are living in chaos. One hubcap could be an oversight, two a sign that you are busy, but FOUR?! Man, that's jacked up, as my son would say.

Recently, in conversation, I expanded this to suggest that the pedestrians and cyclists we are seeing more and more of tend to be drawn from this four hubcap class. Think about it, there is only so far you can get with no insurance, a suspended license, expired registration tags, mounting fix-it tickets. All easy to find on your average four hubcapper.

Today, I was thinking about this theory while watching a battered four capper* Corsica LT blow past me on the 215. Ooh, look, the second best selling car of...1988. This happened right before the inevitable 8:50 slowdown/stoppage which I was slowing down for. I love simply taking my foot off the gas, watching the car behind me decide that, at 65 mph I am too slow, jet out around me into the next lane, only to come to a screeching halt at the utterly predictable, happens every weekday, stall.

For some reason, people who drive the same route on the same freeways every day of their lives seem to approach them as if newborn every morning. No pre-knowledge of the system or situation filters through to their behavior. Or, if they think about it, magical thinking means that they believe that "maybe this time" it will be different. Every day. Like Memento.

So, this helps us understand why there may be a correlation between the fact that, the people in the crappiest cars drive the worst, even when it is absolutely not in their economic best interest to do so. Same morning, same freeway, saw a guy in a light pickup toting a large rubbermaid trashcan drive like the proverbial bat out of hell. Hmm, maybe there was an open heart surgery somewhere that could not take place until that dumpster got there?

The same people who wake up every morning and drive like they have never been there before, also take no time to look around and see that, maybe, the BMW driver isn't tailgating people. They have no memory, no self-awareness, no ability to notice others than themselves, or drawn conclusions from those observations - those folks will be carting rubbermaid dumpsters for the rest of their lives. Happy speeding.

* Feel free to use, under a Creative Commons License

The real fantasy in historical romance novels

I am a big genre reader - in something of a cyclical fashion I read mysteries and horror, sci-fi and fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, AND romance novels. Straight up, yo.

Long story. When I was a sophomore in high school, I would head over after school to my friend Michelle's house, where we would do homework and, with her mother, watch soap operas. The one and only time I ever did this (hey, I have had a cross-word puzzle phase as well) and it was only General Hospital during the Luke and Laura years, oh yeah. It was very homey, as Michelle's family were normal, and her mom only worked part-time, so they had things like dinner on the table at six. Normal dinners, like enchiladas, or spaghetti. Not ramen and hot dogs.

Her mom tore through romance novels about one a day, and once I discovered this cheap source of my favorite drug, I was hooked. I even, naturally, started writing one, which was to feature everyone I knew in a supporting role. This became somewhat notorious on my high school campus, and for years afterward people asked me what became of it. It had its points.


I had a similar experience earlier with science fiction, when a family friend, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, gave me shopping bags FULL of old Analog Magazines dating back to 1973. Lord only knows what would have happened if someone had given me a stack of Louis L'Amours!


Naturally, in my teens I was also reading Stephen King, and V.C. Andrews, as well as the classics, so it all naturally formed a set of preferences that helps explain my prediliction for urban fantasy today - sex, horror, mystery, fantasy - all in one easy to consume package.



Among the classics I have read and re-read and which were absolutely formative, were Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. So a taste for Regency/early Victoriana makes sense (hmm, perhaps also explaining my steampunk leanings?) At the same time, whenever I would visit my grandmother in Tulsa, she had stacks of old Ladies Home Journals, which always had some novelette dealing with Dukes and Rakes in the back. Ah, Grandmother, who also always had a taste for what my grandfather used to call "that yellow lit-er-A-ture" (books with lurid subjects, which could be really anything from penny dreadfuls, dime novels, to Balzac, were covered in yellow jackets from about 1860-1960).

Her own minister celebrated her taste in "literature great, and not-so-great" at her funeral. From her shelves I found heroines (mostly antebellum) named India, with tight stays and heaving bosoms. I also got Shakespeare and the Bible from her shelves, so you can see the genesis (pun intended) of my mixed up tastes there as well. The logical outcome of all of this juxtaposition is a chronic case of Maupassant's Syndrome. Don't bother googling it, for it exists only in the minds of myself and Carol. It's where you mix up the plotlines of Guy De Maupassant and Armistead Maupin to hilarious effect - "Maupassant wrote Babycakes?! Are you sure that's who you mean?"

Kind of like mondegreens but liable to leave you even more helpless to explain.

Okay, so after a long digression, what do I mean by my title? It occurred to me, a modern working mother and wife, that what the Regency novels in particular offer, in terms of escapism, is such a pared down version of everyday life as to be blissfully free of any type of complication, no one ever reaches for their dayplanner in this world! No one picks up the kids, or has to remember shots, or snacks for the school party, signing papers for the fieldtrip. No one has to resolve a clash between a vacation, a business trip, and daycare. Four words - there are no commutes!

A typical day for our heroine involves donning a pelisse, snagging her abigail, and setting off for the shops to purchase some furbelows. During this outing she may run into the hero, who later in the afternoon takes her for a ride in his curricle (minds out of the gutter) before depositing her back on the doorstep of her aunt's London townhouse for tea-time. Later, she will probably go to a ball and then, to bed.

No remembering that they are out of coffee once she is in bed, or discovering that the pilot light on the hot water heater has blown out again. She may get thrown from a runaway horse, and rescued by a dashing rake, but she never has to wait 45 minutes for AAA in a dark and rainy parking lot crawling with likely serial killers.

Forget any sexual tension, who gives a rats? What I am looking forward to is a long soak in a world of few choices and lots of servants.

Fiscal fiasco

"In the most dramatic step yet to curtail huge pay packages for executives on Wall Street and elsewhere, the Obama administration plans to slash the compensation of those running the seven biggest recipients of federal bailout money.

The action, to be announced as early as today, would on average reduce the total compensation of the 25 highest-paid executives at each company 50% from what they received last year, according to people familiar with the decision. Cash pay -- salaries plus cash bonuses -- would plunge 90% on average.Some of the lost cash pay would be replaced by grants of stock that the executives would have to hold for a set period before selling.

The plan applies to companies that have been given "exceptional" assistance -- tens of billions of dollars each -- under the Treasury's $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. They are American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., General Motors Co., Chrysler and the automakers' financing arms, GMAC and Chrysler Financial. Altogether, they have received $240 billion, or more than half, of the TARP money invested so far. Compensation experts described the pay cuts as
unprecedented."

Ha ha Citigroup. I hope you enjoy the squeezing as much as I enjoyed you hiking my credit card from 0% to 29.99% this month! Their decision, about a twenty year long 'relationship', coming on the heels of several other similar actions by credit card companies, on top of the evisceration of our retirement portfolios, has lead us to a decision that will help us and hurt them even more. We are taking our retirement savings, what is left, and paying off as much consumer debt as possible. Of course, along the way we discover how little of that money we can actually get our hands on, between employers hanging on to a chunk, fees, taxes, and penalties. But guess what, do the math and it is still worth it! Not only will it free up our cash flow in the most immediate way, which we can turn around and use to first pay down remaining debt, and then building a cash cushion, and then return to retirement (maybe, I am kinda leaning towards a mattress at this point) - but it will be payback time for at least four or five financial institutions, the ones who have harmed us the most.

Citibank and Chase and AMEX lose us as debt serfs (bye-bye!) and TIAA-CREF, which lost about half my money, doesn't get more time to eat the rest. Vanguard gets to keep some of Markus's money. The biggest winner in this game, besides us, will be our credit union, which will probably continue to have some skin in our game, and stay our go-to people for financing if and when we need it in the future. Eat crow, suckahs.

Could we quit bitching?

You know who you are, liberals who are cranky that Obama has not lived up to some promise or another (granted, there are a few). Have you forgotten the daily calamity that was the Bush Administration? Don't forget, Obama's folks have to fix eight years of malign neglect and purposeful undermining of the Federal Government that occurred as a policy - not to mention the results of constant failure that were chalked up to 'oopsy-daisy'!

"Legislation granting the Food and Drug Administration new powers to oversee the nation's food supply has elbowed its way onto Congress' crammed calendar with bipartisan support and rare agreement between consumer groups and an industry stung by product recalls."

Yeah, remember Bush's nomination for the CPSC? An industry lobbyist. Remember how the purposefully understaffed the USDA inspectors? Or the TORTURE??!!

Really, just stanching the flow of criminality, venality, and incompetence would be a hard enough row to hoe. Let's keep that in mind as the Obama Adminstration also tries to wrap up the wars the Bushies inveigled us into, solve the economic crisis they left like a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep, and get everyone some healthcare.

So not good

"Four years after denying a Chinese bid to buy Unocal, the U.S. may be in too weak an economic position to object...A Chinese company's gambit to drill for oil in U.S. territory demonstrates China's determination to lock up the raw materials it needs to sustain its rapid growth, wherever those resources lie."

Another foreclosure porn story in the NYT

Read the story and then the comments for fullest effect. Several people seize upon the fact that the woman in the story, who ironically becomes homeless after running a homeless halfway house, has family she could have depended upon:

"Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car."

Similarly, in this story, Bessie Mae Berger is 97 and homeless, living with two of her eight children in a 1973 Suburban in and around Los Angeles. The story states that she is not in touch with the other six of her offspring. Hmm, I wonder why? She and her sons are having trouble landing housing, because they are not willing to be separated. Okay, I can understand the sentiment, but doesn't that strike you as an oddly rigid stance for some folks living in their car? They prop her outside of freeway overpasses with a cardboard sign, and people scream at her as they go by, insisting she is a fraud, not truly born before the Titanic sank. Is that really better for one's ancient mother than a state-run facility? To me, this suggests a folie a trois that goes a long way towards explaining why they are not in contact with the other 75% of the original family unit.

The woman in the New York Times article, Sheri West, comes in for some classic, albeit almost perfunctory, vilification in the comments about how she squandered her resources, with the kindest among them lamenting the lack of comprehensive financial education in this country and the willingness of banks to extend credit on predatory terms. Ok, given, but in the audio slide show, a telling shot for me (composed as an ironic grace note I am sure) is the row of frivolous and expensive-looking shoes that line one side of her shelter room. It tends to lend support to some of the vitriol. I may have as many shoes as she does, but only if you count sneakers, flip flops, work boots, and other activity specific shoes. In other words, if you need me to help you load a moving van or replant some small trees, I can help you, no questions asked.

These 'between-the-lines' indicators remind me that, tragic as it may be when a mother (even one of 55 or 97) becomes homeless, just because you are a mother doesn't mean you can't be insufferable. I should know, because my own mother could just as easily be a subject of oneof these articles, being upside down on three houses, taking in random homeless people as roommates, borrowing money from reluctant friends - all due to her own poor judgement. She is an unpleasant person, a narcissist, who I cannot have living with me for her own safety. Now, if she hit rock bottom, I'd get her somewhere safe, manage her income, stash her in a decent apartment, take care of her pets, dispose of her junk, in order to fulfill my filial duty. But perhaps the children of West and Berger have also talked themselves blue in the face, made futile attempts to help, found none of their advice taken by people who say "its my way or the highway?" Maybe on top of that, they lack the cultural or social capital, in addition to economic capital, to assist in other ways?

Just because people are unpleasant or have alienated friends and family does not mean they should end up on the street, which is why we need social nets with elasticity, that stretch well beyond what family, friends, and neighbors can provide.