I’ve been experiencing a lot of frustration lately, and rather than unloading it on the good people around me I’ve decided to do a weekly core dump here. If you don’t feel like reading about me whining about my life, feel free to skip these posts. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, don’t comment. Having said that, let’s bring on the angst.

I know a couple of my friends and readers have been in a situation much like mine. After being out in the world for a while and running into a bad patch, you’re forced to take a huge ego shot and move home with relatives or move in with friends. No matter how you try to paint it, it sucks. No matter how optimistic you are when you first do it, the golden goose egg manages to turn into another turd by the end. Having your freedoms and privacy stripped from you after you’ve gotten good and used to having both does wonders for your self-esteem and not in the good way. This is what I’ve learned since I moved home.

I’ve been so lucky to rediscover why I stopped getting along with my mother. Let’s put aside being beaten with electrical cords at age 2, being thrown out of my house at ages 8, 12, and 16, being told I was (insert name here), being blamed for her diabetes, and being told that she wished I was never born. I know I am not the only person who has lived through all of that, and I’m far too smart to let it sink all the way in. I don’t believe I am all of those bad things. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still my ghosts, but they don’t make a huge impact on my life from day to day. What stops me dead in my tracks on an almost daily basis is her irrationality.

I’ll try to give you some examples as to why my mother is so exasperating. The newest situation is that she’s losing her hearing and she won’t get it checked. My dad worked in Audiology for over 25 years and I have a BS in Communicative Disorders (Speech Pathology) and she adamantly denies to both of us that there is any real problem and that visiting an Audiologist will do her no good. Denying that you need help is a slap in both of our faces, and she has no idea how insulting she’s being. At least come up with a better reason when you’re talking to two people who worked/studied in the field, and if you choose to stay the way you are, at least have the courtesy to not participate in any conversations so the people talking don’t have to repeat themselves every two minutes! The icing on this cake is that if my father or I harp on it, she’ll go into one of her downward spirals and try to destroy the family again. That’s what she does.

Dear Kevin was astute to point out that I’m not a happy person and I can be a downer a lot. After a lot of introspective thought, I have an explanation for why that is. Aside from all of the not-so-great happenings in my life over the past two years (if you want details, feel free to e-mail me), I’ve realized that my melancholy doesn’t completely stem from that. Being raised in a Caribbean household, I was never taught to seek happiness. I was never encouraged to do things for enjoyment, or to make sure that I was happy. I’m sure I’m not the only COCP (Child of Caribbean Parents) that understands this or grew up in that kind of environment. There is an overwhelming sense of duty and that’s all there is. Having friends and fostering relationships with people is not seen as being important or necessary at all. Leisure activities and relaxation are all a phenomenal waste of time. You get your work/school done because that’s what’s necessary and that’s all there is. Everything else is expendable. Therefore if you don’t find a great deal of joy in work or school (which the great majority of people don’t derive most of their happiness from), where do you get your happy? This is a thought pattern that I have been slowly breaking myself from for years. Every year I get a little bit better about it. I’ve gone from waiting for happiness to fall in my lap to actively seeking it, but like anything else you have ingrained in you as a child.. it’s a hard pattern of thought to snap out of. Like if you’ve given up your Christianity.. around Christmas time you don’t know what to do with yourself. In good time you get over that, but there is an adjustment period which is what I’m going through with my proverbial happy right now.

All in all, I’ll survive all of this, but without having an outlet to angst to, it gets overwhelming and things pile up. I’m going to try to not let that happen anymore. It’s not worth all of the frustration. Anyway, feel free to comment at me.

I saw the episode of ER where Ewan guest starred as a convenience store robber visiting from (I’d guess) Scotland. He makes the rest of the actors around him, namely Julianna Marguiles, look like amateurs. He steals every scene he’s in and looks damned good doing it. I wish there were more people on screen that cared as much about their craft as he seems to. Bad writing on both TV and in movies is unavoidable, but Mr. McGregor can shine even through mediocre dialogue and poor action.

Have you ever stopped to think about how Black males are portrayed on TV? I, like most Americans, watch way too much TV, and I have seen my share of Black male characters in various shows (sitcoms, dramas, etc). I’ve recently noticed that there are only two types of Black male characters portrayed on TV. There is the happy go lucky clown type (Will Smith in Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Jimmy Walker in Good Times), and there is the ultra-broody-sometimes-violent Black male who’s always angry (Eriq LaSalle in ER, John Amos in Good Times).

Notice that though some of the characters were on sitcoms, they were still broody. Good Times was not a drama, yet the James Evans character was more angry, frustrated, or serious than not. Granted John Amos is a talented actor and he can do comedy as well as drama, but his character was really not written to be funny in any way. Odd for a sitcom, eh?

The only exception to this rule of note is Bill Cosby. On all of his shows, he strayed from playing too far into either stereotype. He was funny, without being too slapstickish (most of the time) and still could play the stern father figure convincingly. Of course this stems from the fact that Bill Cosby was conceivably the most famous Black man on network television for most of his career and had massive amounts of creative control. It seems as though most of the other characters fall into one of the two above mentioned camps. I am sure that there are exceptions, but none of them is so clear cut as the Cos.

If you have any thoughts or blatant exceptions to this rule, feel free to post them in the comments.

I’ve become blogsloppy. I neglected to post anything of interest for multiple days in a row. I am not happy with myself, but I’ve been preoccupied. A little bit of administrative crap stretched out over the course of four days made me almost blow a gasket. I’ve also been frittering away my hours in an offhand way chatting with geeks of the male sort.

This morning for the first time I tried out iChatAV and even though I found out that there is something wrong with the mic port on my Mac, I have to say that iChatAV is better in beta than NetMeeting could’ve ever hoped to be. I know there’s been a proverbial generation gap between the origins of these two programs, but you can tell the people at Apple are deadly serious about sound and picture quality. The sound quality, even coming from a modem connection, was excellent. There was a little bit of gobbeldygook but not much. I am obviously impressed.. so much so I went out an bought a spiffy new stereo headset with noise canceling mic. I’m itching to try it out. That’s not a cue to bombard me with voice requests on iChat, btw.

For the first time in about a year I feel as though I know where I want to take my life, where I want to go, and what I want to do. It’s a very strange feeling. I’d been living in a cloud for such a long time. There was such confusion, so many deaths, so much frustration. Today I woke up and for the first time in a very long time I looked up and saw the sky, not the dark cloud usually hanging over my head. Weird. I hope I don’t lose sight of it.

For all of you who know me personally, this does not mean that I am happy. I would hate to disappoint all of you by becoming a happy person. I still wear my melancholy like a warm blanket, or an Oxford sweater.

So I got up really early this morning. In fact I never really went to bed *smirk* so I turned on the Sunday morning news for kicks. They were doing a special on the state of education, namely reading skills, among Florida youth. Being interested in education, I started to watch this special and I was astounded by what is going on down here.

According to the research, over two thirds of tenth graders in the Florida public high school system have reading skills below average for their grade level. Yeah, you read right, TWO THIRDS. Governor Jeb recently got eleven million dollars in funding to revamp the way reading is taught to children in the school system down here. Revamp? You mean there is more than one way to teach children to read?

Apparently the Florida school system employs a “wholistic” approach to teaching fundamental reading skills. Essentially, they expose children to books and give them “meaningful assignments” that encourage them to read. What this boils down to is they put a kid with no fundamental reading skills in a room full of books and give them assignments on their reading. There is no step-by-step process to teach the kids basic phonics skills, model reading behavior, read aloud in groups, or any of the things I did as a child when I was learning to read. Of course I am one of the exceptions to the rule. I was reading books on my own before I started first grade (which was considered advanced even in a New York City private school), so I can’t really compare my experience to what these kids are getting, but simple logic tells me that it’s all bullshit. How can you expect a child to learn to read if you don’t teach them the sounds of the letters. How can they make the connection between written and spoken word without this kind of learning? How can they just pick up a book and spontaneously read it and comprehend it without any of the tools that are necessary to read?

This “new research” that Governor Jeb got the 11 million dollars of funding based on is essentially a laundry list of the skills and tools that were used by my parents and my school to help me learn to read. This research states that children have to be taught the alphabet, the phonetic representations associated with the letters in the alphabet, and basic grammatical structures to begin reading. If this is news to you, faithful reader of my blog, please feel free to contact me immediately and tell me how you learned to read. I was under the assumption that all of the things I mentioned above were necessary requisites for learning to read. The research goes on to also state that reading education should be specific, and the assignments and lessons should be explicit in their purpose.. as opposed to sitting a kid in a room full of books and waiting for them to learn to read via osmosis.

If I sound sarcastic and a little bit angry, you’re wrong. I’m really pissed off about this situation. No wonder why I haven’t met anyone my age down here in a bookstore. Two thirds of them can’t read on their age level, so I’d never run into them outside of the children’s section! Can you honestly believe that this kind of thing still exists in American education system? We are the richest country in the world and the greater population of certain states can’t read on their age level. No wonder why we’re a running joke internationally.

In my humble opinion, I think there should be a national education system with national exams for basic literacy, math skills, science/technology, and analytical skills. More than half of the countries on the planet have similar systems, and their kids are going to be the ones coming here and getting the jobs that our kids used to get. Technology companies are outsourcing their IT work in countries like India and China because the salaries are lower and the talent is much brighter. Let’s face it, national education systems and testing structures work (England, Canada..), why can’t we get together as a country and ignore state’s rights long enough to get our kids to read and write at age appropriate levels? What’s so scary about that? For the life of me I can’t figure it out…

So I finally broke down and TiVoed this movie. I know what you’re thinking.. James Van Der Beek as a tough guy, eh? Ironically it wasn’t that bad. I was concerned that since it had so many young actors and actresses in it, it was going to be campy like the lost American Pie movie. It wasn’t. Van Der Beek almost pulls off the tough guy thing except for a couple of times when he just looked constipated rather than angry or mean. Jessica Biel was more forgettable here than she is on 7th Heaven and that’s a feat onto itself. Eric Stoltz had a very small part but his character was hilarious. Thomas Ian Nicholas (Kevin Myers from the American Pie Trilogy) plays the part of a scruffy, whiney, sex-obsessed rich kid. He’s barely recognizable. All in all it wasn’t a bad flick. I don’t think it completely obliterated Van Der Beek’s Dawson legacy, but it’s a step in the right direction. Kudos to him for choosing such a darkly original movie to be part of. It almost makes you forget Varsity Blues, but only for a second.

If you’re not watching this show, you’re missing out. The idea is that 5 ultra hip gay men (all with different personalities and specialties) take pity on some poor straight schlub and transform him from zero to hero. They give the guy and his apartment a physical, cultural, and sometimes emotional makeover then send them out into the world to their families, friends, and girlfriends.

With the exception of one cop from Staten Island, there haven’t been any homophobic panic attacks from the straight guys, which is nice. I’m always happy to see straight guys make friends with gay guys. There’s something special about that kind of relationship.

Anyway, as always, I’ve developed a massive crush on one of the gay guys. His name is Thom. he’s the dark haired god that does the interior design magic. Why do I always crush on the gay guys? Ugh. Anyway here’s a picture of the sweetie. He’s delish.

I met a Desert Storm vet at the library today. He was a really nice guy, and pretty intelligent too. I tried to help him out with his job search (tell him where I’ve had no luck so maybe he wouldn’t waste his time). He is really down on his luck and it saddens me. His veteran’s benefits can barely cover his rent if at all, and he can’t seem to find a job down here. He returned to college to have his aid run out so he won’t be able to afford books anymore. He also told me that veteran’s benefits are in danger of major cutbacks if they haven’t been cut already. We discussed the situation awaiting the men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan (if they ever do). It’s going to be hard times for a lot of them and that saddens me. How can Dubya send people to war and destroy their benefits so when they come home with god-knows-what ailments, they might not get proper care? Doesn’t make any sense.

On to other more mundane things.. I’ve been watching a lot of the “Original Series” on Showtime and HBO. Showtime has two new shows which are excellent: Dead Like Me and Out of Order. Dead Like Me is a really amusing dramedy about a girl who dies and becomes a grim reaper. She works with a bunch of other grim reapers who take the souls of people before they die in horrible painful accidents. She, of course, goes through trauma and growing pains while she adjusts to her new life. It’s dark humor at its finest and helps to quell my post-Buffy withdrawl. Oh, by the way, it stars Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride). Out of Order stars Eric Stoltz (Lance in Pulp Fiction) and Justine Bateman (Mallory Keaton on Family Ties). It is a drama about a man who has a wife who is suffering from clinical depression (and perhaps other mental illnesses) and his struggle to keep his marriage alive, stay loyal to his wife, and keep his wife from going on a destructive downward spiral. The show is wonderful and it’s definitely worth the watch.

HBO has its own group of interesting Original Programs. I am addicted to Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. I never thought I would’ve gotten so addicted to The Sopranos, but James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli are wonderful. It also helps that I have major hots for James Gandolfini. How could you not? He’s a big, mean, teddybear! Grr! Six Feet Under is the most morose show I’ve ever watched, therefore its wonderful. It helps you to look at death in different ways and break up some of our culture’s taboos about death and dying. The two worst shows I’ve wasted any time on are Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sex in the City. I’ve already blogged on my hatred of Sex in the City, so I won’t revisit that, but I can’t make it through the opening sequence of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hopefully it’ll get canned soon and they’ll start another series.