I don’t know that I’ll send this letter to school with my kiddo tomorrow – don’t really want risk negative attention from the people teaching my kid, and (more importantly) while writing this, I started to think that the ‘forbidden’ aspects of this speech will probably do more good towards getting kids to pay attention. Best-case scenario of the whole thing would be for those who aren’t allowed to see it to seek it out, and as a result, be even more engaged by it. It’s an inspirational speech, and giving it an air of controversy may well give it an even more powerful impact. Still, I had to get this off my chest.

Edited: after talking with more people, I punched it up a little, copy/pasted it into an email, and emailed the principal. I am just too afraid there will be too many from the other side making noise, and not enough on this side.

Dear Principal,

I was very disappointed to hear that parents in our community had actually contacted the school to express concerns about the President’s speech tomorrow, especially since I have read the full text of this speech and it is a beautiful and inspirational message, completely devoid of any controversial content. After discussing this with a number of friends of mine and reading some disturbing articles about more extreme measures being taken by other districts, I feel grateful that “all” [school] is doing is postponing the speech one day to allow parents to respond, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that this whole situation is filled with distressing closed-mindedness and misinformation.

In the long history of Presidents, and elected officials in general who have taken the time to speak to schoolchildren, there has been no precedent for this kind of reaction, and for the additional measure of offering parents the ability to “opt out” of a portion of the curriculum. I realize that there is tremendous pressure not to anger parents, but I have been following this made-up controversy very carefully, and it disappoints me that this pressure extends to appeasing people on the fringe of the political right, who have deliberately remained ignorant of not only the history of this type of speech, but to the lack of any objectionable material being covered.

If we are to let fringe elements dictate the school’s curriculum, I fear that we will end up allowing children to opt-out of everything up to and including science, history, civics, and literature. I hope that the School Administration is fully aware of the source of this kind of fear, uncertainty and doubt, and remains committed to providing our children with a well-rounded education that does not shy away from encouraging our young people to be involved and informed in the political process, using critical thinking rather than accepting reactionary rhetoric as truth. I do not want our schools to take the default position that everything they teach must pass muster with every parent – if you had to limit your curriculum to avoid contradicting every parental prejudice out there, well, there wouldn’t be much left to teach.

I hope that when you provide the text of the speech to these “concerned” parents, that you do so with a strongly worded preface encouraging them to read the full text of the speech before deciding to exclude their children from this wonderful opportunity to learn.

Thank You,

Mom of a 7th grader who sometimes doesn’t pay enough attention, and really needs this speech.

things that bug me:

war
politics
religion
intolerance
the internet
upsetting television dramas (e.r., law & order, third watch, et. al.)
every single person i spoke to or saw today, more or less
my computer
money
the sound of sirens

wait. i can break it down a little more succinctly:

everyone.
and everything.

no wait. i got it. every*one* is part of every*thing*, technically.

so: everything.

everything i needed to say has been said, under my breath, to my self, then typed into a notepad window & saved in case time & circumstances collide with blood alcohol levels & influenced fierce needs in sufficient quantity to warrant a sending. hopefully healing will intervene & allow a simple deletion in the meantime.

whatever (is the title of the file. it is whatever.txt). doesn’t that sound just like something you wouldn’t want to send if you cared about sounding, oh i dunno, grownup? though the wisest advice i received sounded like this & made the most sense “you should be all, like, whatever”. my daughter is wise beyond her overuse of the colloquial “all, like”, which is damn evocative & an efficient means of communicating things it would take me many minutes & burn too many mindcalories to express otherwise. yes i realize working the brain out is a good thing, however i need to burn in another direction right now, i have certain urgencies (in a word, work).

whatever. i added a shitload of pictures to the galleries while contemplating getting back into the rhythm of code by integrating recent gallery additions into the blog design so i could quit mixing my obvious photobloggeristic tendencies with actual blogging. of course this would mean far fewer posts since i am all about the photographic metaphor these days & that is, i assure you, for the best.

my toilet is still bubbling & has issues with the whole “flush” issue, however it is not overflowing onto my bathroom floor so i am thankful. also the shower is no longer filled with darkly sniffarific sludge. again, thankful. thankful shall be the word of the day, rather than whatever. or perhaps i should combine them: “whatever. thankful.” or “thankful, whatever.”

tembak. that’s a bad thing right? all google has is stuff in (possibly) malaysian? but certainly has a familiar, rather sinister ring to it. and the 95% server resources it was hogging didn’t make me feel real fuzzy towards it either. but in order to kill it, i have to find it. it’s a big server.

i was going to go into how exactly much i don’t know about this, but instead i’ll get back to scowling pensively at the various server administration thingys i have open.

* * * * *
oh.my.god. so i ran the apache upgrade because it said it was insecure, and because tembak is a malicious somethingorother, being run from two different IPs i traced to Jakarta, Indonesia. so i upgraded. and apache crashed, ftpd crashed, mysql crashed, and … right, exim. so, the server was fine except for not having database access, email, ftp, or the ability to serve pages to a browser. full reboot got apache started well enough to be able to deliver some lovely error messages. restarted mysql, restarted ftpd. exim is taking its time.

how were the goddamn indonesians running tembak on the server? i need some tequila.
* * * * * *
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE
the upgrade of apache is won’t run PHP files CHMOD 777 which is like, most of them, because it’s world writable do you have any idea how many fucking PHP files there are on these goddamn servers?

so i finally figured out it’s
find / -name *.php -exec chmod 755 {} \;

otherwise i think i might have had to do something drastic. goddamn motherfucking piece of shit computers.

* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
ANOTHER MOTHERFUCKING UPDATE
i can fix ‘em all i want but one MT rebuild sets ‘em back to 777 and kablammo. fuck.

know what? i’ll be back. i need to go get beer.

so i figure if this blonde stuff wrecks my hair, i can just cut … some … more … of it off. fortunately, i have the sort of hair which can be cut unevenly & actually look better that way.

and it gives me something to do while i’m waiting for this itty bitty table thingy made out of a micronuked mini-cd with an elizabeth arden bottle sticking up out of the middle, and arms for legs, to dry.

this blonde thing has turned out to be such a bad idea. nothing like a good bad idea, i always say.

well, it is lighter. and more even. it is, however, still nuclear mutant carrot.

so, i had some things to say about the damsel, instead i spent much of my afternoon about two pixels from an insect’s armpit. damsel flies. of course.

sitting here thinking the shade of the hairdye drip on my arm is a good sign, much darker than the box. because i picked an entirely inadvisable color to go over the faded outgrown red i had. & honestly, i know better. the choice i made could be construed as a deliberate attempt to have a hair disaster, thereby necessitating extreme corrective measures.

sometimes the only way i can manage to change is to fuckup in some spectacular fashion so that the choice is taken out of my hands. it’s like some reverse failsafe switch in my head — when my indecision keeps my wavering on the side of whiny overcaution for too long, there will come a time when the reckless hedonist within gets fed up. picture tooling along at 20 in a 25 zone & suddenly jumping out of the car. go ahead, run the scene though your mind, professional stuntperson & all — it’s more exciting than picturing me sitting here with cheap medium blonde hair dye doing god knows what to the entirely wrong hair i just put it on. the larger metaphor for the way i escape suffocating stagnation in my life? we’ll pretend it’s just hair.

so, i had some things to say about the damsel, instead i spent much of my afternoon about two pixels from an insect’s armpit. damsel flies. of course.

sitting here thinking the shade of the hairdye drip on my arm is a good sign, much darker than the box. because i picked an entirely inadvisable color to go over the faded outgrown red i had. & honestly, i know better. the choice i made could be construed as a deliberate attempt to have a hair disaster, thereby necessitating extreme corrective measures.

sometimes the only way i can manage to change is to fuckup in some spectacular fashion so that the choice is taken out of my hands. it’s like some reverse failsafe switch in my head — when my indecision keeps my wavering on the side of whiny overcaution for too long, there will come a time when the reckless hedonist within gets fed up. picture tooling along at 20 in a 25 zone & suddenly jumping out of the car. go ahead, run the scene though your mind, professional stuntperson & all — it’s more exciting than picturing me sitting here with cheap medium blonde hair dye doing god knows what to the entirely wrong hair i just put it on. the larger metaphor for the way i escape suffocating stagnation in my life? we’ll pretend it’s just hair.

if i could describe the sensation of abject panic without revealing the wildly unflattering personal details at the heart of the attack, i would, but i’m lost for words. digression: the hot-cold air-blower here is a psychotic bastard and my peeps are becoming dessicated. my peeps, dammit.

so i fight panic with denial and mad bargaining, and within minutes (well, a hundred twenty of them anyway) i am back to my peeps and froststroke and heatbite and … dammit my peeps. i’ll have to eat the entire exposed tray within the next few minutes or all’s lost.

and as to that panic, i have hatched a wacky plan and much hilarity will ensue, so cue the applause sign and cut to commercial, gotta pay the bills on this sitcom.

cigarette. c-i-g-a-r-e-t-t-e. i have some. in my car. cold out, bare feet, probably don’t care, even though the whole piercing as reward/pacifier for a week w/o cigarettes (not without them, they were with me, in my car, on the floor, i just wasn’t smoking them) but i am so fucking hungry. more or less fasting at this point, the smoothie didn’t appeal, nothing does, except things that need chewing and me not ready to be doing that and hungry i am hungry … and oh you know a ciggie’d fix that at least a little bit.

the sprint across the cold yard did drive a point home about my desperate mindset. think if i could just stop this here and say no i will not be reduced to this! that is if you want to think about that, i myself need to find a lighter.

and in that instant take the day counter back to zero but you know i’ll just lay a little spin on it instead – hey one ciggie in eight days. go me.

fucked up part about cigarettes is that they do, indeed, fix whatever’s wrong with me that made me think i needed them, it’s never about oh shit this ain’t cuttin’ it. it’s ahh.

fuck.