Pink penguins will be the keynote speaker

For a short time today, it appeared that my healthcare team was maybe possibly unaware of how much Lupron was injected into my actual ass last week but we got it all sorted out and it’s cool; I just was inspired because it was another crazy stressful moment that sort of flops itself
always
on top of the regular crazy stressful stuff we’re all dealing with.
And it reminds me like “whoa, I also have cancer” —
I really think I forget sometimes because everything is so weird.
And then I remember and sometimes I think “huh” and other times I think “Oh! nononono!” and other times still I remember the cancer and think “this is the fuckin’ problem with these mortal human bodies.”

So it is.

Every year at our school, students pulled “pranks” on teachers at the end of the year. This was part of a senior prank one year. No one was crucified in the main office for desecrating a flag; instead we had a good conversation about symbols and what some symbols mean to others, and, yes, I am sorry to this flag.

The pandemic and subsequent politicizing of said pandemic by dark forces in our government (no, not the fucking deep state, but the ACTUAL states, the nation itself) took my favorite people away from me when I needed their comfort the most.

Let’s start with the basics of what would have been, this year, with my stupid fucking outrageously offensive cancer diagnosis (I’m in the “anger” phase of grieving this part of my life — the part where I was just a healthy woman in her forties with a spotty health history). Let’s just start there and say there was NO pandemic. Let’s just say the Capitol never was stormed and the schools never closed. Here is a short list of people I would have seen just because I HAVE FUCKING CANCER again and this alone has been goddamn hard for me:

1. My parents.
2. My sister.
3. My longtime best friends Kristine and Megan
4. My longtime friend and mentor Lynn.
5. My longtime friend Judy.
6. My friends Miriam and Mel
7. My aunts Marilynne and Joanne.
8. My cousin Hope.
9. My dear, longtime, friends Shirley, Carina, Dana, and others.
10. My brother.

This is just a shortlist of “bet my life on it” visitors I WOULD HAVE SEEN in the past thirteen months from all across the fruited fucking plains were this pandemic not so atrociously botched along with every other goddamn thing in this fucking country.
**I come from a long line of Grubers who can’t properly express emotion without first liberally seasoning said emotion with profanity — the “fucks” I give, literally and figuratively, are fucking genetic attributes from my Gruber side; a blessing and a curse.**

But let’s look at the longer list of what the pandemic has taken from me.
Let’s say nothing ever happened.
Let’s say I got metastatic breast cancer, Bernie died, but no COVID-19, no so-called grownups played fast and loose with my healthcare and livelihood and very existence. Let’s say the only true horror I had to contend with, in the past thirteen months, was Crohn’s, metastatic cancer, and the American healthcare system. Let’s say that’s where the horror had stopped. Here’s some folks I would have seen on a daily basis even with my cancer and my dead dog:

1. Mike — Colleague-come-brother; Theater teacher extraordinaire, one of the most empathic men I’ve ever known and a surrogate brother in this time when my actual brother is thousands of miles away with no end in sight. We would have talked shop (education/students) and the we would have talked Seger. Oh, the Seger that would have poured forth from the well of Seger we had begun to dig during class period 2B when we shared a space during our prep hour. **You see, in America, our government and many of our citizens, hold education in such contempt that though we work 40 hour weeks — and if public educators are being honest it’s more like 60 to 80 hour weeks — in the service of young people we are not paid commensurately and find the idea of our “very own office” impossibly hilarious. Like where do you think we are, reader, Japan? (Japan has one of the best education systems in the world, should you not dig my reference.)**
2. Virgil — a-best-friend-and-brother; hilarious, crazy smart, deeply kind scholar, activist, and whipper snapper. He’s something like, I don’t know, ten years my junior? More? I don’t pay attention to such details anymore. What I do know is that Virgil was the kind of guy who would go with me to my medical appointments if Sarah couldn’t. He was the kind of guy who would almost-get-us-kicked-out-of-the-radiology-department for making me laugh too loudly about Ted Bundy while waiting on a tumor ultrasound.
3. Betsy — a colleague-come-best-friend vis-a-vis a kickass overnight field trip with the kids (students) in Los Angeles. I would see her, on some days, lanky in the doorway of room 13 — some kind of Stevie-Nicks-meet-the-Globe rockstar artist-educator eating trout from a can.

This year has brought me closer to more colleagues for whom I don’t yet have a snapshot. I don’t know if — were it not for the pandemic, the political unrest — I would have become so close with these colleagues. So there is a silver lining: new, close friends. Workplaces can be wonderful places for Actual Adults to meet people they genuinely like. This is a reason, outside of money alone, why having a job is good! Better yet, having a job that makes use of your strongest skill sets!

**In this way I am tremendously lucky; I have a workplace where my skills are used and valued.
This is NOT the case for the vast majority of American workers — at least I think not.
I don’t know. Reader, do you feel valued at work?
Do you feel your job makes good use of your best qualities as a human being and member of society?
Does the place where you expend most of your physical, emotional, and intellectual strength compensate you justly for the use of your body and its many assets (of which your mind is part)?
Do they at the very least treat ya nice? Just curious . . .**

This was the fastest and least offensive meme I could find, but for the love of the gods might we learn how to properly use ellipses . . .?

But back to my story. My story about this alternate reality where the only thing BAD that happened to me was cancer and Bernie’s death.
Those two were inevitable.
Those two were made by nature — my cancer, Bernie’s death.
We can delay nature, but in the end we cannot overcome it,
so I’m willing to accept that I will be a cancer patient for the rest of my life
and I can accept that Bernie is dead a little sooner than I wanted him to be
but I cannot accept the unnatural shit happening all around me and to me that sprouts from the worst in human nature: racism, greed, the urge to dominate and bully, the insistence on never being wrong, the desecration of the planet, the absolute and utter indifference to the unnecessary suffering all around us because we’re not suffering OURselves because WE are too scared to admit what WE know is true. Because the truth will INCONVENIENCE US.

** One part of the Olden Times that I notice has survived the pandemic is this: all-caps still reads like yelling. Some things just never change. **

The worst thing the pandemic took from me:
my students.
Current.
Former.

See I don’t think about my students as things-in-desks.
I think of them as younger human beings which is what they are and what I once was and even you, too, once were.
They’re human beings at a very formative and challenging time in human development and they are being placed in my care as an educator and for some CRAZY REASON I take that shit so fucking seriously.
I don’t know.
I guess I just don’t want to be the kind of educator who totally fucks up another generation like my generation got fucked up by our educators.
I can only speak for Gen X.
Actually, I can only speak for the endish part of Gen-X and even that I can’t speak for because the Generation itself has not yet offered me that position.

Education, to me, does feel like a calling —
maybe rooted in the earliest days of my own education when,
at Catholic school in the Chicago suburbs, little girl me marveled at the nuns and their vows.
Maybe as a gay kid who didn’t really yet understand what GAY was, I saw some hope there.
Hope of another way of living that didn’t involve husbands and babies and babies and babies (not that there’s anything wrong with this kind of life, but it just wasn’t for me. It was in my deck but I, you know, just didn’t want it. Ick. That said, I know so many brilliant people who somehow manage to do husband and wife and babies very, very, very well and I am so fucking glad they exist because they make my job as educator a lot easier).
I knew in my bones, since early girlhood, I did not want what most of my female friends wanted.
I felt, inside, like a freak.
The nuns made me feel less freakish.

My peers, in elementary and middle school, made me feel worse.
Some of my teachers, who saw past my grades to my humanity, made me feel better. (Banging on about the regular garbage, but I feel really strongly about this subject — the subject of education and its role in human development and development of healthy societies — I just can’t stop writing about it. Sorry for being passionate, okay? . . . Folks about to take that Standardized Test in Bob, Arizona what I just did there is called SARCASM and it’s probably going to be a word on the test so don’t forget it or the meaning of it right now because if you do you’re going to be so screwed.
I’m kidding, Any Student Reading this.
It doesn’t really matter what you get on an ACT or SAT or AP exam.
It doesn’t even matter if you ever took these tests at all.
Tests don’t say anything about you as a unique human being.
They tell me nothing about your ability to think or feel or create.
All that they MAYBE tell me is that you are really good at following rules. And
therefore MIGHT make a good mid-level corporate worker and if that’s what you’re after: just your Standard Edition American Dream Model, that’s great and you NEED STANDARDIZED TESTS.

For those Young Americans with loftier ambitions — to lead, to change, to leave the world a little nicer than the way you found it? Tests don’t tell me or anyone else ANYTHING about your ability to do that.

I missed most of my freshman year of high school due to a botched surgery (long story! quite a story! and quite a scar!)
By the time I came back most of the kids thought I was dead
and those who knew I wasn’t dead had more or less moved on.

I found my first freak friends in high school. Then I went on to find all the smart freaks and befriend them. That is the story of how I made every fucking friend I have. Period.

My freak friends and I have mellowed with age, mostly, or I guess I can only speak for myself.
I haven’t seen y’all in over a year.
I have no idea what you’re up to now.
Me? I’m working like a maniac and trying
to manage my medical care and finish this book
that’s coming out later this year with Tolsun Books.
(in which a version of this essay will likely exist.)
I don’t feel like a freak anymore, and that’s good.
At least I don’t feel like a freak in the “come-as-you-are”
American circles in which I run. I don’t know all of this cumbersome country,
I just know a handful.
I just feel like myself.
An American educator during a pandemic
who is dealing with human shit atop political shit,
getting our first American taste of what it’s felt like for our world community who, much to our American indifference, has been suffering shit like this and far, far worse — much to our great big American indifference — forever.

All these petty hangups, America?
You gotta let that shit go.

America, as a public school educator, I just want to help young humans
be healthier, happier Americans who are so damn smart and compassionate and funny (really, America, our humor needs work) because all the preceding generations (including mine) thought this way couldn’t be changed:
if you were lost in the education system?
welp, you were a teen, so that’s on you!
you’ll be fine! there’s always prison or minimum-wage labor!
plus, America lets no human fall through the cracks! just look how well our severely mentally-ill populace lives!
Look how compassionately we treat those in pain!
And the sick!
You mustn’t worry!

Again, where the fuck do you think we are, Cuba?

America’s gone mean. Real fuckin mean. Petty garbage, fear-based mean.

Egged on by man’s baser instincts,
the masses are turning against civil servants who are literally risking their actual mortal fucking lives trying to HELP YOUR COMMUNITY by assisting in the education of your children.
Part of that’s on you, America, at large, too.
I mean parents and teachers can’t shoulder the whole fucking burden of raising decent human beings but sometimes it seems like those are the only people who are even THINKING about the common good of the community much less the nation.
Or is it something darker? Do we know? Do we know something
about what will happen if we go forward with business as usual during this
precious moment in American History? Do we know and in spite of what we know are too lazy and apathetic to change?

Ugh.

I’m hungry. I am going to end this rant.

I’m hungry and I’m lucky that, despite my wife being fired, we have enough money to have food in the house so when I get hungry in a pandemic after spending my entire day (but the last hour in which I wrote this) helping young human beings get through this terrifying mess

I have food to eat.

This is not true for every American right now.

That is a sick FACT.

So I’m going to eat and think about that while I eat. What are you thinking about when you eat? If you’re just thinking about yourself most of the time NOW might be a good time, America, to start broadening your mind.