...there's no place like the Turnpike

A displaced Jersey girl who adjusted to life in Kentucky just in time to head back home.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Perfect Box

My life has once again reverted to the search for the perfect box. I'm moving back to New Jersey this week, and I've spent the past two weeks searching for the perfect size and shape box to pack my life into.

When I was three, the hunt was for the perfect box to be my new playhouse.

When I was five, the perfect box would be a rocket ship to take me to the moon.

When I was eight, the perfect box would hide my treasures away from my prying sister with whom I shared a bed room.

When I was twelve, the perfect box could store my secrets away from my parents, who were suddenly the enemy.

When I was 17, the perfect box would carry my things to my dorm and store them in a way that declared my individuality while living in a room that looked just like everyone else's.

When I was 21, the perfect box could hold "one more thing" for the next tiny apartment.

Now, the perfect box will just get me home and through three months back under my parents' roof...

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Life Would Be Simpler

I have married a full on redneck boy from Kentucky. Redneck, though not in the worst ways, and proud of it. I am starting to realize that there are many things to envy about his life.

He is one of the most laid back people I have ever met. Very few things actually get him truly fired up. I long to ever be that relaxed. This boy is so relaxed that he barely needs sleep since he isn't really expending himself as much as the rest of us when he is awake.

However, the quality I envy most is his total lack of a social conscience. He can walk into a Walmart, find what he needs on the shelf, stand in the interminable line to get it and then leave the store and go about his day to day business.

I, on the other hand, will stress over them not having exactly what I need, get frustrated by the long line and the slow employees at the reguster and leave feeling horribly guilty that I just supported the most evil corporation I can think of.

It seems relaxing to go through life not worried about the grander social implications of my daily activities. He has never asked himself "Is this the restaurant that fired a waiter for being 'too gay' for their image?" "Is this the store whose major shareholder supports the bombing of abortion clinics?" "Was this shirt made by a four year old who makes ten cents a day and will be sold as a servant following her debilitating sewing machine accident?" "Was this manufactured by a company that dumps chemicals into the Monangahela River?"

I wish I could be so at ease.

But then I'd feel guilty about it.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Parents of the World: Save Your Children From Mediocrity!

I went to see the King Tut exhibit in Chicago this past weekend. Since the exhibit has timed entries, you prett much go through the whole thing surrounded by the same group of people. Very close to my friend and I was a woman with two young boys, probably about eight or nine years old. I heard her do the same annoying thing about half a dozen times throughout the exhibit. I heard other parents do the same. I hear the same thing in the museum where I volunteer, too.

The boys would ask a question to which she did not know the answer and rather than (a) admit she didn't know or (b) encourage them to find out on their own, she more or less lied to them. Well, she gave them her version of the truth and what, I believe, she may have truly thought was an answer.

90% of the time her answers were either incomplete or flat out wrong. Almost every single time, the information needed to answer the question was right there in the little information card next to the display.

Why was it too hard to read the information for herself or (novel idea) say, "I'm not sure, let's read this card and find out."? Why was sending her children away with the wrong answer the best solution?

I remember going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child and my parents would get these booklets with questions and activities intended to engage kids in the exhibits. We tried to get out of actually finding the answer when it wasn't easy, but we were kindly told to go look around and maybe learn something. I still remember that knights carry a lance because we spent several minutes dissolved into giggles when we couldn't find the answer and decided it was called a "poking stick" (we were weird kids).

And I still love museums today because of it.

That woman had the perfect opportunity to not only teach her children about ancient Egypt, but to teach them about finding information and independence and the joys of discovery. She chose the easy way out, to lie.

There it is parents, you can make up an answer and have your children think you're brilliant, or you can work a little harder and give them a lifetime of learning.

I'm done sounding like an after school special, now.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Or Maybe It's the Other Way Around

Here we go again.

Journalists have uncovered that the man responsible for that horrible shooting at a college in Canada was into guns and liked to play violent video games. He even has been found to post some comment to the effect of "Life is a video game. Everyone has to die sometime."

Charlie Gibson was already on the evening news implying that his love of violent video games had warped his world view.

How come no one thinks it just might be the other way around. That people who have some sort of sociopathic tendency towards violence are likely to enjoy video games that involve high body counts? That people with underlying problems that cause them to be aggressive and have no regard for human life really get off on playing games where they can shoot people full of holes with no consequences.

I know plenty of people who enjoy video games. Many of whom even enjoy ones with guns. And none of them show any tendency to decide that what they see in the game is a good idea and go on a rampage. In fact, most of them are gentle, kind people.

Anyone who has ever done any hard science research knows that associations are easy to prove but causality is nearly impossible to demonstrate. I just wish that more sociologists and psychologists and the journalists who report on them would finally figure that out.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Step One: Admit You Have a Problem

My name is Jerseyaikidogirl and I am a book addict.

I can't help it.

I picked up "Poochie Flower Power" When I was 2 and a half, taught myself to read it and kind of never stopped aftre that.

I blame my parents. They are such regulars at their neighborhood Barnes and Noble that, if it is slow, the girl at the counter will go into the Starbuck's and buy my father's coffee and bring it to him when she sees him come in.

I am not lying.

When I was about 12, I went through a phase where I stopped reading because I "couldn't find anything I liked." My parents must have dragged me through a bookstore at least once a week until I found something I would read. It wasn't that big a crisis. I was kind of too young for "adult" books and too mature for books written for middle schoolers. And I had a lousy literature teacher who had turned me off for awhile. It was not as dangerous a situation as my parents feared it would be.

I can easily go into any bookstore on any day and drop $20-$80.

I once spent far more money than I care to admit to on shipping so that I could get books by a favorite author whose work I could only find on Amazon UK.

My nightstand regularly holds 3-10 books, all of which I am "in the middle of."

When a friend dared to suggest that I should decrease my book collection (as he was helping me move into a new apartment), I cried out that I could never throw away an old friend.

I'm thinking of starting a 12-step group for people like me, but I'm pretty sure it would degenerate into a book club within a month.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

A Further Case for the Public Schools

While looking for an image, I found this, and it scares me. The true horror is in the number 5 reason to be homeschooled: "I get to study the gospel truth. I don’t have to worry about being fed humanism and evolution by my teachers and textbooks."

We can't have our children being exposed to other opinions. We must control everything they learn. They must only get our perspective on the world. We can't open their minds and expose them to independent thought.

Or, maybe, they're just afraid that exposing their kids to other ideas will make them realize how small-minded and unconvincing their own teachings are...

The Cool Kids


I missed my ten year high school reunion this past fall. It was held a few weeks before Thanksgiving in New Jersey, so the odds of me getting there and still being at my sister's dining room table to watch my toddler nephew get my 88-year-old aunt to put a paper plate on her head were pretty slim.

I missed out on finding out what happened to everyone.

I grew up in a pretty small town, so the basic details are often easy to come by. Someone's mom is bound to run into my mom and know what two thirds of the kids from my class are up to now. But all that tells me is who works in a bank and who got married and has four kids. Those are just mundane details.

What is really eating at me is, have the cool kids changed at all?

I was never one of the cool kids. I always have been and always will be a geek. I studied in homeroom. I ate lunch in the band room. I was in the drama club. I hung out with the kind of kids who would cut a pep rally to finish up a biology lab.

In middle school, I envied the cool kids. I even liked New Kids on the Block in an effort to fit in with the cool kids( Donnie Whalberg, sigh). I did everything I could to be one of them.

In high school, I figured out that the cool kids weren't anything special. I didn't want to be one of them. Their parties seemed stupid and, in their constant quest to not be like me, they acted like idiots. I actually sat in tenth grade English and listened to two of them (kids I had been in the top groups with all through elementary school) spend 45 minutes discussing whether or not London was a country and, once they exstablished it was a city, whether or not it was in Paris.

I couldn't force myself to act that dumb if I'd tried.

So, what are these kids up to now? Do they all have normal jobs? Do they regret being so cruel in middle school and acting so dumb in high school? Will they encourage their children to act like them?