Sometimes it Feels Good to Hit "Send"

I wrote an email. I set it aside. And I waited. And I waited.

And then I hit "Send."

And you know what, I feel better.

Dear Daughter's Dance Teacher,

I am writing this after the Extravaganza but will not be sending it to you until after the 3/4 auditions so as not to put you or Daughter in an awkward position. I wanted to let you know how disappointed I was that the 1/2 class had only three performances in the Extrav and those in 3/4 had six. I’m disappointed in particular as, with the exception of the Big Band performance in the fall, this was the one and only performance that the 1/2 class had. The list of other performances for 3/4 is quite long.

I am puzzled as to why a discipline which is purportedly a performance one would have so few opportunities to actually perform. Yes, the students can take the initiative and perform in the soiree as well, which Daughter did at the first soiree of the year. Considering that one of the dances the 1/2 class performed was the same they had performed at the Big Band in the fall, that means only two dances of theirs were designed specifically for the one performance opportunity.

I find that incredibly imbalanced. Throughout the year, my husband and I have been asked to contribute monetarily to Big and Important School of the Arts Within the High School and to the Dance Boosters. I'd be curious to know how, precisely, that BISAWHS-suggested per-student donation of $600 would have been appropriate.

Daughter has only positive things to say about you. This is not a criticism of your teaching. But it is a criticism of the design of the dance program that leaves students in both levels putting in the same amount of class time but having far different levels of performing.

Thank you in advance for taking what I have said to heart. And I trust that you will let me know if you would like me to elaborate on my concern.

Sometimes, hitting "Send" makes all the difference in the world.

Is there a lot of back story to this? Yeah, probably. Does this email make me look like a bitch? Yeah, probably. Even with the back story? Probably not. But maybe.

You know when you know you're old? When you just don't care what other people think of you. Time to start wearing more purple.

Our Town's Own Billy Elliot

Daughter's big dance extravaganza at her arts-school-within-a-school was this weekend. Although I do have lots to say about the make-up of the performances, I'll leave that for another time. A feel-good encounter I had with the family of one of the dancers is where the tale takes me today.

I am guilty of having preconceived notions of how different types of people react to having a son who loves to dance. Hippie-dippie free-spirited sorts likely embrace a dancing son. Educated, middle-class sorts likely accept a dancing son as well.

But newcomers to the U.S. who hail from staunch Catholic, old-school, macho, paternalistic societies are typically seen as being the "type" who would have a really hard time accepting a dancing son. (Did I mention the dancing son also happens to be gay? He is. Out. Proud. Comfortable in his skin.)

I was selling tickets at the final performance, and a man, his wife, his tween son, and his two brothers and a sister (or sister-in-law) arrived early. He came up to the table and said he had come to see his son dance. Knowing who the male dancers were, it was obvious to me who his son was. I said I'd seen the show the previous evening. Pulling out the program, I turned to a page with a picture of his son and asked, "Is this your son?"

With bursting pride, he smiled broadly and said that was his boy. I told him what a great dancer his boy was, and he managed to beam even more brightly. He was positively bursting.

I don't know who any of those people are, and I don't know the path they've been down in their lives. All I know is every kid deserves a father who accepts him and embraces him as that father so clearly does his dancing son.

A Letter I Won't be Sending

Dear Dr. X,

When my son, Eldest, heard about the internship opportunities at your institution, he was quite excited. A world-class scientific research organization, right in our own backyard, with paid internships for high school juniors and seniors seemed far too good to be true. Me being me, I stressed the competition he'd be facing -- comparably smart and capable and eager students in the two counties -- so as not to have him be too disappointed if he didn't make the cut for one of the dozen openings.

I guess your position as Educational Outreach coordinator or what-have-you doesn't permit you to realize that an entire county is out on spring break the day you sent emails congratulating the applicants selected for an interview. And scheduling the interviews for four days later, when the kids are all still out -- and, in our case, gone -- for spring break? Also, clearly not part of your job description.

Should Eldest have checked his email while he was gone? Yeah. Sure. Even though the information about the openings indicated it was at the end of the month that applicants would learn their fate, he should have checked his email.

When he did return on the Sunday and saw your email of several days earlier describing an interview date and time that had already passed, he immediately sent you an email explaining his absence and asking if it was at all possible for him to still get a chance to interview for the internship.

You didn't reply on Monday.

You didn't reply on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, he phoned you, leaving a message on your voicemail, repeating what was in his email to you.

You didn't call him back on Wednesday.

Or Thursday.

Or Friday.

Or ever.

Which quite frankly leaves me puzzled as to what message you think you are leaving by, well, not leaving a message. I mean, besides that there's no chance for the interview to be rescheduled.

I'll tell you what the message is, dear doctor-but-not-the-kind-who-can-actually-help-me-if-I-am-injured-or-ill, it's "People suck, kid, even when they are supposed to be in a position helping youth, they suck."

Truly, how fucking hard could it have been to send a note, "Sorry, it's too late. Try again next year." Look it. It just took me two seconds to type that.

Your job title indicates you work with teens as part of your job description. Your inability to respond is reprehensible. Hey, I bet your Ph.D is in Reprehensible Behavior. Well earned, lady. Well earned.

This, That and the Other

On the downhill slide of April, heading into May. It's been a hectic but enjoyable month, assuming we leave out all of the work stuff. And shouldn't that be what we do anyway? Yeah.

Washington, D.C., with the kids was fabulous. Fabulous in many ways, not the least of which is I got to spend time with good friends from long ago. I might venture to say they're no longer frozen in time. The great thaw of '13.

We saw all the sights to we could manage, and we couldn't have picked a better time to go. Oh, right, we could have. It was so freakin' humid that the kids didn't ask one single time why I don't live in the metro D.C. area anymore. If anyone knows my famous sweat-like-a-pig gene, it's those offspring of mine.

The kids behaved. IKR?! Really, they were superb and only reverted to their regular disdain of each other when Pete arrived on the scene after nearly six days. It just goes to show you: he's the problem.

As far as air travel goes, though, let me give a shout down to Virgin America, which we thought would be awesome but which turned out to be as cheap and unhelpful as any American airline. Way to go, Virgin! No pillows. No blankets. Sure, TV screens at every seat, but you had to pay to watch anything other than crappy satellite TV. Shit, don't the other airlines at least play movies for free? And what's with the no pillows or blankets? On a red-eye, no less!

Delayed thanks to runway construction at SFO -- a shout down to San Francisco fucking things up even when we're across the country -- Youngest "won" a free movie (or cocktail) pass whilst we whiled away the two-hour delay at the gate. I say "won" because when we tried to redeem it, the flight attendant said they couldn't do free movies, but why not enjoy a cocktail? Because he's 11?!

And 11 he is, good ole demon spawn. Thankfully, we made it back to San Francisco on Sunday, so he managed to not be in the air on his birthday. Could have gone either way, really.

How did he celebrate? Kamping at a nearby KOA with five of his buddies for the weekend. And me. With them. All of them. If that's not proof of true love, I don't know what is. What? "Demon spawn" is totally a term of endearment.

If that's not enough excitement, Daughter has her weekend-long dance Extravaganza coming up. So guess who came back from camping and then spent two hours helping set up the gym? Go on, guess!

Busy, busy, busy. With more to come, what with the run up to the end of school including, praise Buddha, the end of the elementary school. Cannot happen soon enough. Cannot.

***
I just remembered that I meant to share me as a Homo floresiensis. Thank you, Natural History Museum. A shout out to all of the Smithsonian museums: free. Free. FREE!

Frozen in Time

They are a bunch of high school seniors and college co-eds, with a high school teacher and his wife thrown in for good measure. They still take a lackadaisical view of school work, skipping classes with great abandon and hanging out in the theatre when they should be in social studies or biology with the best and brightest teachers from the district, lured to the spankin' new school experimenting with the hippie open-school theory of education. That open school environment lends itself to slipping away unnoticed to go party down at Burke Lake or at one of the homes of kids with divorced parents whose now-single head of household is off to work each day.

Maybe they've all gone off to college and still return on breaks to see the left-behinds. Those left-behinds among us take trips to visit the colleges their older friends attend and, a little later, to visit New York City or the Jersey Shore or Virginia Beach where new college graduates plant roots and thrive.

Or having graduated college, they work for little pay but purported great satisfaction at jobs they knew they were made for. Some, hoping to break into acting, toil as waiters and stagehands as they pimp themselves for a breakout role.

At most, they're in their mid-20's, with just a very few married with a newborn or toddler or baby on the way. They have better paying jobs and are truly settled, but still so young and still able to recall adventures to Myrtle Beach or Martha's Vineyard or the crypts or the farewell week of a Mormon boy off to Bolivia for his mission.

But no way are they in their 50's, an unimaginable age, older even then most of our parents at the time we were the talk of the little theatre in high school. Facebook postings have clearly been manufactured. He doesn't have grandchildren. She doesn't have children who have graduated from college. He isn't possibly the nurse of the year.

Were I to believe all that -- that they exist in real time as real people -- then that would mean that I, too, am there as well.

***
Daughter is at about the same age I was when first I met that high school teacher and his wife, when first I forged the strongest of high school bonds with a handful of oddballs and wannabes. Eldest is at the age that I recall as being the best year of my life. Plucking them from this time and placing them at that time doing what we were doing gives me pause. Pause and a wonderment that my kids are now the same age as those friends, frozen in time.

Kinda Like National Lampoon

We'll be hitting the road, me and the kids, for spring break soon enough. I can hear all of you parents of kids attending schools without ski week saying to yourselves, "WTF? How come your spring break is so late?" Being pagans, our school district supports worshiping the snow for a week in February and then scheduling another week for spring break which has no association whatsoever with that Christian holiday which shall not be named in the public schools.

Being someone who digs that ski week in February, I'm all for a later spring break in exchange. Keeps us away from all the riff-raff, donchaknow.

We're going to D.C., staying with some old friends for part of it and staying in a hotel for some of it. And while I already cringe when people who know my family in its entirety get to witness the group dynamics of the clan, I cringe all the more envisioning the reactions of people who don't know my kids when they get to see them all up close and personal for an extended period of time. I hold out no hope that they'll tone it down when they meet my very dear old friends. [Note I'm not calling them "old," because then I'd have to call myself the same. Shit. I am old. And so are they.]

It's going to be the Bickerers on Vacation. It won't matter that each will be spoken to, individually and collectively, by Pete and I, singularly and together. The eye rolls and instant raising of hackles and poke-poke-poking old wounds won't be kept our own little family secret.

Now that I think about it, we Family Bickerers really could bring Olympic-style panache to those activities. I'd win, hands-down, for eye rolling, particularly the covert and yet subversive ones. Eldest will win in the raising of the hackles, although Youngest will be the one responsible for raising said hackles, it being a team event and all. And Daughter, with her fevered assertions of "HE TRIED TO DROWN ME ONCE" and "HE IS ALWAYS LIKE THAT" as proof of Youngest's demonic inner being, will win the old-wound-poking martyrdom crown.

Gold medal winners, we are.

We're going to take the Capital -- and the Capitol when we tour -- by storm.

Look out.

With a Side of Garlic Bread, Yum

I listen to the arguments. I see the vehemence with which opponents state their opinions. I am left angered beyond all sensibility. I just don't get it.

Allowing gays to marry is wrong because...? I can't see any logical rationale supporting that stance. In the end, it really comes down to a belief that God is against it. I see opponents pointing to the Bible to support their stance.

Which logically takes me to wondering why the hell what is written in the Bible and purported to be the views of God has anything to do with government. [I won't even venture down the rabbit hole of picking and choosing which parts of the Bible it's okay to agree with and which are not. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Can you say "capital punishment"? Can you say "remarriage after divorce."]

Oh, see, I started venturing down the rabbit hole.

How can I support same sex marriage? Because we're all supposed to be equal. Granting rights to some people and not to others does not make equality. What's so hard about that?

I want to hear a logical rationale for being opposed to same sex marriage that does not throw religious beliefs in the mix. It's freedom of religion, not freedom to shove your religion down my throat. [Uh-oh, that sounds a bit risque, don't you think?]

You and your God don't get to dictate any more than me and my Flying Spaghetti Monster God get to.