This week, we didn’t just play to type. Each of us actually spent most of the week writing mostly about the exact same shit we’ve written about before.
Theodore couldn’t dismount from his ongoing obsession with what racist people call “rice fever” and what Theodore calls “dating.” Did you know that Asian Jews are the happiest people on earth? Did you care? Do you care about the difference between poor people and broke people with iPads (the post where Theodore describes iPad2 as “same-same but white”)? Do you give a fuck about hamsters? Did you know, as one commenter helpfully insinuated, that Jews do not suffer from Awesome White Guy Penis Syndrome? Maybe not, but Tay Sachs is even funner!
Speaking of fun, Nathan was no fun at all this week (once again). He had his one shot at levity when he posted a video (laziness and levity being somewhat overlapping in the world of blogging), but that turned out to be video of a terrifyingly stonefaced young brute making another 8-year-old cry for mercy. Nathan’s roid rage included chewing out a baby chewtoy and howling at parents who actually pay for kid haircuts. His longest contribution of the week was even more screedy: a reiteration of the obvious point that Gifted and Talented is hella racist.
Matt, meanwhile, stayed in his usual bubble, untrammeled by self-awareness of any order. We know he’s a hipster because he reads Reddit and blogs about it. And because the F Train is the battlefield upon which he repeatedly fights—and is defeated by—the will of his spawn. But when (older) kids of hipster-parents (or, to be fair, overindulgent hip-suburban-parents) appear in an obnoxious Toyota Highlander ad, Matt is the first to wish the boy a horrible, horrible death.
But we have to admit: we were impressed with his evisceration of abando-mom Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We keep him around for moments of insight like that. Someday we may actually pay him for them.
Anyhow, have a good weekend. We’ll try to bring the new shit next week.
I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about the trials and travails of getting Sasha home from preschool every evening. On the whole, it’s not the worst commute: a three-block walk, three stops on the F train, and three more blocks to our apartment. Some people, I’m sure, have it much worse, like the parents of Sasha’s classmates who live in Kensington or Bay Ridge. But those parents, I’ve noticed, bring along a stroller. Jean, Sasha and I long ago gave up on ours; it seemed an imposition on other subway riders, especially at rush hour.
A funny thing has happened to the trip home in the last couple of months, however, something I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge: Sasha has become a calm commuter. Whereas she used to demand I hold her, or let her stand holding a pole, or sit in her own seat, or sit on my lap, she’s now content either to be held in my arms or to sit on my lap, without complaint. No snack needed, no iPhone games—she just waits contentedly, occasionally making toddler conversation with me or flirting with cute girls across the aisle, until we reach our stop, whereupon she announces, “Dao le!” (“Arrived!”) or “We’re almost home!” God, it’s easy.
What happens next is the new problem. In an effort to get Sasha to walk the three blocks home (she’s usually carried), I’ve been letting her lead the way—and she leads the way directly to Stinky BKLYN, one of the many places in the neighborhood that she knows has lollipops. There is no way around this. If I carry her, she bursts into tears and demands to walk, then walks to Stinky. Yeah, okay, I could lug home a screaming child, and I have many times, but I want to avoid that if I can. I always think there’ll be some way around Sasha’s craving, some way of distracting her from her most beloved of treats. But nothing works.
Well, almost nothing. Yesterday, as Sasha was demanding to walk “this way! this way!” I caved: I promised her a lollipop at home. This was not just a move of desperation. A few days earlier, I’d ordered from Amazon a bag of xylitol lollipops—not just sugar-free but good for your teeth!—and was betting they’d arrived. Instead, I found a note from Fedex. Fuck. I had to give Sasha a lollipop from my secret stash to keep her calm. However I game it out, girl’s gonna get her lolly—at least until the weather improves enough to pull my bike out of storage and sidestep the whole walk/carry issue.
All I gotta say is: Her future boyfriends (or girlfriends?) better be prepared!
My phone is dumb and the only pad I have around the house presently is of the steno variety. I offer this not as evidence of any sort of anti-techno bias necessarily, but mostly in the context of these things being awfully expensive. Can someone please explain to me why all my broke friends who are broke like me can afford all these expensive toys when they are broke? Does broke mean something different to them? Something other than not having enough money to buy stuff that looks like fun but isn’t really essential?
So, that’s the perspective, freely admitted, by which I relay the information that Rovio Mobile, the company behind Angry Birds, the phone and iPad video game designed to implant a desire to use addictive drugs in my child’s mammalian brain, has now raised $42 million to develop other evil-yet-fun games of little worth but great compulsive effect.
Or hadn’t you heard? Perhaps you were too busy lining up to buy your “new generation” iPad (translation: same-same but white).
The search for a public kindergarten for Dalia seems to be in a lull: we’ve applied to all the schools in our neighborhood, including our zoned school (which maintains a waitlist each year because of too much demand), all the dual-language programs we can find, and even to PS333, which apparently will allow us the privilege of entering in its lottery, after all, despite the fact that we did not take a tour in December.
That just leaves the results of Dalia’s OLSAT test for Gifted & Talented. We held our noses through this entire process, mainly because when I went to the public forums on what G&T actually means for kindergartners, I came away convinced that the only defining feature of G&T kids was that their parents are reflexive strivers who want to enter the club just because it seems hard to get into.
But now, after having toured all the schools in our actually very diverse neighborhood, I am starting to see the real nature of the OLSAT: it’s a pigment test. Literally. They say the G&T entrance exam is about recognizing patterns and whatnot, but secretly the test administrators must be bouncing a light meter off the kids’ foreheads to test for darkness. Because when you go from G&T to Gen Ed class and back again in school after school here, you realize: G&T classes are 1500% less black and Dominican than General Ed classes. This is true in PS84, PS75, PS165, and even in PS166, which struck me as more mixed (read: more white kids) throughout all its classes.
I say this as someone whose kids–my wife keeps reminding me–are somewhat pale, but not white. We don’t expect to find lots of Mexican-Japano-Jew-Germans like our kids dotting the schoolyard, but had perhaps expected something less nakedly segregationist than the current system.
This is, of course, terrible for the kids in Gen Ed. They’ve got time enough to learn that the deck is stacked against them for some pretty superficial reasons. Why start when they’re five? It also forces white families into tough decisions. You can be politically opposed to the G&T system, but you see also that it has left general education bereft of the school’s most involved parents: that means fewer PTA perks, less parental pressure on teachers and administrators, and less everything. Now, do you put your kid in those classes to satisfy your politics? Is that punishing them?
I know I’m being naive. Of course G&T correlates to race. The G&T system–like all of Bloomberg’s “choice” in schools–is designed to appeal to an overindulged demographic for whom Choice is just another form of consumerism. It’s the smug feeling you get when you buy Kashi instead of Cheerios. Public education is only worthwhile to them if they know that there’s a lesser brand in the same building. It allows them to have that whiff of exclusivity, the taste of luxury purchase, that is hopefully intoxicating enough to lure them from private schools. So they prep their kids for the OLSAT, and those kids do well on the OLSAT. You can say a lot of things about Mike Bloomberg, but he understands the minds of the rich and of those who, in the words of Warhol, think rich.
My concern is what my daughter will learn in these schools. Kids her age may be math-dumb, but they’re socially very smart, and it wouldn’t take long to learn the lesson of the pigment test: This class is Gifted, the other class down the hall is Dominican.
I’m disappointed that these are the so-called Choices we have in school: a forsaken Gen Ed course or a high-scoring segregated class. But let me also be a realist. Manhattan is as segregated a town as any other, and the fact that we all ride the 2 train together (south of 96th, at least) doesn’t obscure that. In fact, Manhattan is a sort of perfect place to have schools that are two-tracked within a single building. We are talented at living elbow-to-elbow with, and yet completely ignoring, people who are different from us.
So the question becomes, should we expect the schools to attempt a vision of inclusiveness that either eludes or doesn’t interest our other institutions? Wall Street is segregated; journalism is too (DadWagon is heavily integrated, but mainly on the Judea-Asia axis). And housing is most definitely segregated: the reason why our neighborhood is so diverse is because it’s home to a lot of Mitchell-Lama housing and housing projects. Or, seen from the other side, it became diverse once the yuppies started coveting brownstones here. So if our housing, our reading, our banking, our commuting is all segregated, then is integration just one more ideal that we wish to preach to our children without actually practicing it ourselves? I’m so two-faced with my kids when I lecture them on everything from sleeping right to eating well to not dropping f-bombs that I really couldn’t bear to open up another deep vein of hypocrisy.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t automatically think my kids’ generation will solve racism just because they are doe-eyed and color-blind and innocent. The things that keep us apart are systemic and unwieldy and live in the bricks, not just the minds, of this town. And yet: if you can walk through the hallways of our public schools and not get pissed at the sight of a two-tiered, two-toned system, then you’ve already lost.
