Boston!

I love travel.  I also hate travel.  Do you ever feel this way?

I love to be places and I get excited about experiencing new cultures, sights, history and especially foods.  What I hate is getting there, especially if I am traveling alone.  I don't like flying to be specific.  It's like voluntarily loading onto a flying cattle car, paying to pack ourselves tightly in with germy, snotty, farty humans with no health screening.  And me. I'm the grumpy cat of flying.  I look bored, unamused and ready to bite at a moment's notice. I will too.  Thank goodness for Dramamine- I tend to sleep the entire way.  I was on a plane for 7 hours each way and lost an entire day in traveling.

Driving is a different story.  I love driving, especially across the country.  I love the changing landscapes, the wild open expanses of fields and hills and the bustling cities I zoom around on my way to somewhere else.  I'm all like "out of the way, I have important stuff do to!" and I beep beep my way on into the sunrise.  It's awesome.

I had a presentation proposal accepted for the National Council of Teachers of English this year in Boston, Ma.  I love doing teaching presentations, and I really love doing the national ones. It's a great way to meet people and talk about teaching English. At NCTE I get to reconnect with my old grad school friends and this year, both of my dissertation advisers.  My friend Kimberly Stormer let me crash at her hotel because I was poorly funded by my university this year.

At Boston Common

We took almost all of our classes together in doctor college, wrote our general exams together and have remained pretty good friends through the years.  I appreciate her for her wit and silliness and also for her passionate care of students who need to learn to read and write in order to have a chance at success in life.  She's pretty awesome.

I got to hang out with Cathy and Jackie too. I'm sure you know all about my friend Cathy- she and Charlotte pretty much threw my wedding.  She read a Shakespearean sonnet at my wedding and currently lives in our house in Oklahoma.  She picked the house out for me in 2005.  I started planting an orchard in 2006. She brought me six apples from the trees. Four made it home.  What a kind gesture!

Here we are at a pub having dinner.  The bouncer- a huge man with a handlebar mustache- waxed philosophical about the virtues of teachers in a thick Boston accent. 

Jackie (On left) is seven months pregnant- what an adventurous soul! She teaches Social Studies with Cathy and they did a presentation on cross-curriculum collaboration.  It was us four for the most part all through the conference.  

My advisers, Baines and Angelotti, have always been close to me.  Baines was Kimberly and mys copresenter (along with Anthony Kunkel) and he came up with the proposal.

Me and Baines

Me and Angelotti. He's my academic dad.

It wasn't all work and no play though.  There were dinners and a trip with my amigas to Little Italy in Boston to see Paul Revere's house, to eat at Legal Seafood and to visit Mike's Pastries.  Mike's was packed but we managed to find one of the 6 tables in the joint.  Next to us was an older man with a raincoat and hat, placidly eating a pastry and watching the tourists.  He found out we were English teachers and recited Shakespearean sonnets- including the one Cathy read at my wedding- from memory.  I sort of felling love with him on the spot and told him that's what Cathy had read.  When we left, I thanked him and he shook my hand and told me to tell my husband that he has excellent taste. It was a little surreal, but hey, Boston right? 

There were other sights: 

Flying into JFK on my first flight 

Decorations outside of Hynds Convention Center

I love NWP!

Jackie, Cathy and Johanna presenting

Boston Public Library

Close up of Trinity Church

Yeah.

Paul Revere's House

Boston Terriers in Boston

George Washington wearing a Red Sox jersey

Turtle!

A tree in Boston Common

And a Willow

The Frog Pond

Library statue

Trinity Chapel 

These are all doors at Trinity 

Trinity from afar

A seeker of knowledge outside of the Library 

I think this is Franklin's grave

John Hancock's grave

Paul Revere's grave.  He's a big deal.

I can't remember the name of this church. 

I got to see Temple Grandin speak at the conference.  I video'd the first 8 minutes and put it up on Youtube.  She has Asperger's Syndrome and is so brilliant. I was blown away.  She may not have social graces but she is an engaging, enlightening and hilarious public speaker.  Here is the link. Sorry for the poor quality, but it's my iphone. And I was excited!

I made it home just fine; left the hotel at 3:30 a.m. and got into Seattle at 1 p.m. local time- so 4 p.m. Boston time. I slept on the plane a lot.  I was freezing on my last flight. I put on my hat, coat and scarf and was still shivering. But I was being quiet and trying to sleep.  We were in the exit row, and the middle seat was the only one not taken on the plane.  The man sitting opposite me obviously took pity on me.  He called over the flight attendant and quietly asked her (presumably so I wouldn't hear) to turn up the heat so that I didn't freeze to death.  She did and it got much better.  He's a good example of what a small kindness can do for someone's soul.

I'm glad to be home with G and Eleanor.  I guess they got along nicely, though I was told of an...incident. G was sleeping when he suddenly had a dream of dogs biting his chin.  He woke to a small kitty gently but firmly pressing her claws into his chin to get him to wake up.  I guess it was time to snuggle/play/eat/wake up!  In any case, I think that was the worst consequence.  We are off tomorrow for adventures in Thanksgiving.  Wish us luck!

Boston

Well, the Boston Marathon was bombed yesterday. There were two small explosive devices that went off within a minute of each other. Three killed, lots hurt. People losing limbs. You can see a time lapse video of it here. And here is one in real time. I really like the second one.  It doesn't show any gory stuff. Well, I don't like it, like it, and I am appalled at the atrocity that's been caught on film by a person who got up that morning with the only intention of filming the Boston Marathon on a bright and clear day.

I don't think I'll link any other other pictures I saw.  Too sensational.

What I'd like to concentrate on instead is something I saw in the second video.  As soon as those bombs detonated, police just sort of swung into action.  There isn't time for fear in a situation like this; I doubt they even had time to pause for such a thing as personal feelings.  At the 1:46 mark, you'll see a military service person who has taken it upon himself to go help too.  And civilians. And just people. Going to help others. 

Within hours, there were places for people to go to check in with their loved ones. The Red Cross was on hand. Support poured in from all parts of the U.S. and the world, and nurses, medical personnel and doctors rushed to the Boston hospitals to help.

It also didn't take long for the crazy to start. Conspiracy theories abound, the Westboro Baptist Church is going to picket the funerals of those killed, citing this as an example of God's distaste for tolerance of homosexuality in the U.S.  I'm not linking that site. Too hateful.

It also didn't take much time for the warmongers to start beating the drums.  I have an acquaintance who is in the reserves.  He put this up on his status message:

Hope my fellow brothers in arms are ready to go back war because its about to go down. And I for one am all for it. Don't bring that crap to my country.

I asked what he would think if it was domestic terrorism. I mean, this did happen on tax day and the bombs were small and probably improvised. And it's not such a far-fetched idea. After all, right in Oklahoma was the manifestation of hatred by Timothy McVeigh- a former Army serviceman. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were well orchestrated and on a large scale. That's what terrorism looks like so far in the U.S.  It's fear and racism that wants to separate "us" from "them".  To whom would go to war with, anyway? Nobody has claimed responsibility (furthering my hypothesis). An organized group would use the opportunity to promote their cause. Right? So before we go rain down oppression justice on the heads of civilians "the enemy and their people", perhaps we can take a moment and consider the nature of violence.

That's it. There's too much hate in the world. There is too much suffering and reactionary lashing out. When I was a kid, my sister Yvette and I would fight.  She'll tell you that I pack a mean punch.  She does too.  It took us until adulthood and beyond to learn to hash out our problems with words rather than violence. 

Yes, the world is violent.

Yes, we probably have the largest capacity for violence in the world.

Big fucking whoop.

I'm sick of it.  Even if this turns out to be a foreign threat- some radicals from another land- that does not give us the right or responsibility to go drop bombs on another populace.

Most people are moderate. Most people in the world want peace. Most people are not radical.  Most people do not support violence as a way of life.

Now let's all grow up, put down our weapons, and listen to our elders:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. ~Mahatma Gandhi
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that ~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Maybe the world is crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm going to join them.

I suggest then, that we wait and let justice work itself out, that we give peace a chance and that we dial back on the testosterone a bit. The authorities will find the perpetrator.  It wasn't your neighbor who doesn't look, walk or talk like you. So if you just can't sit still, then go into action. Do something nice for someone. Help a friend in need. Help a stranger in need. Hug your kid. Plant flowers. Plant a garden.

Be kind. Hopefully, that's what we'll learn from Boston.