sometimes there's a part of me / wants to turn from here and go

There are stars in the Southern sky... and that song reads much better if you drawl it in your head. :) Anyway, the point of it is that I don't want to say that the South is a whole different country, but several things have come to my attention that I didn't even think about.

When Ernesto blew through I realized that having to deal with a hurricane is a very real possibility in this area. One of my friends who went here for undergrad said that they were off for 11 days one year because of Hurricane Isobel. They evacuated the school, which meant that you went home, and if you couldn't do that you went to one of the buildings on campus. Everything turned out all right, but she said it was annoying because you didn't know from day to day when classes would start again, so you had to call the hotline, etc. And they took away fall break. But hopefully this won't happen this year. *crosses fingers*

We were assigned a project to develop a lesson plan about 9/11 and its significance in American culture. Since it occurred while we were at Bryn Mawr, and because my grandparents live on Long Island, I automatically think of New York City and the twin towers. But as I was looking through articles and photographs online, I realized that down here, with the high population of military families, the attack on the Pentagon is probably more resonant. I never even considered that, but it holds true, just as one article that says that the further west across the country people live, the less significant a memory the event is at this point in time.

Perhaps the most disturbing point was that another friend and classmate told me that she was worried about being gay because many or most school districts down here in Virginia do not include sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination clause. Often, a teacher that is discovered to be gay will get fired on a trumped up charge, usually of sexual harassment. This friend mentioned a school where the softball coach was gay, and there was a lesbian and bi-sexual girl on the team, and the coach got tossed out for "turning the girls gay." Without an anti-discrimination clause, you can't appeal it; and if you get fired for sexual harassment, you can't get a job anywhere else in the country.

This really worries me. It's not fair, it's not right, and most of all, it's a level I didn't think people were stooping to at this point in time. I didn't expect all places to give benefits to gay spouses like at Bryn Mawr; and I know there's still issues with housing and trying to get sexual orientation into the anti-discrimination laws there; but I thought that schools at least were covered. It makes me think twice about wanting to work down here.

Just finished reading: Eldest, by Christopher Paolini. Interestingly enough, I initially had the same issues trying to read this as I did with his first book, Eragon. The writing style was juvenile (he started writing the series when he was 15); the characters, situations, and themes were too derivative (ok, we get it, you've read Tolkein). But halfway through either the writing got much better or I got used to it, and I was sucked in. Not that he completely avoids some obvious plot tactics (the miraculous reappearance of a character claimed to be dead), but he throws in a lot more original things. I don't know if I'd want to own these books, but they are making for a great read.

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. The first novel we're using in my Adolescent Literature class, and I wasn't expecting to be unable to put it down! I thought I had read it before--in sixth grade when each teacher in the team did a book with the class, and that was the one my part of the class hadn't gotten to, so I read it anyway--but I didn't remember it the way I usually do with books I have read. So either I didn't read it, or that was so long ago my usual book-memory is failing. But it was very good, with a great point about the uselessness of gang violence, and Ponyboy has got to be the only gang member who loves to read.

Just finished listening to: Two Plays for Voices, by Neil Gaiman. Closer to a dramatic reading than an audiobook, these are Gaiman's own adaptations of two of his short stories, "Snow Glass Apples" and "Murder Mysteries." Snow Glass Apples was wonderful and creepy, and probably not the best thing to be listening to in the pitch dark when you're travelling on a deserted highway in the middle of nowhere farmland, Virginia... Murder Mysteries is my favorite Gaiman short story, but I don't think it was quite as effective in this medium...just because it's easy to get confused and lose the threads of what is going on. But it was fun to hear, and it made me visualize all the illustrations from the comic book of it that I found for Becky.