Asakiyume mita

Look at this; two entries in one day--what is this, 2008? But it's because I had two very disparate thoughts that didn't sit nicely in the same post, so here you go.

When I did a unit on vaccines with my students, almost all of them were pro-vaccine ... with the exception of the flu vaccine. Many more people were on the fence about that or were actively opposed to it. The flu vaccine has the problem of being a best guess as opposed to a sure thing in terms of how relevant and effective it'll be against whatever strains of flu happen to go around, and I bet that contributes to people's feelings. With polio or measles or whooping cough, you're talking about just one illness, and the immunization is very effective; with the flu, you're talking about lots of different types of flu, and the vaccine may or may not be that effective.

Relatedly, we've been watching (against my mild objections; I guess I can tolerate the show) Arrow on Netflix, and in one episode, a drug dealer had a plan to create a citywide market of addicts by lacing a flu vaccine with the drug, so everyone who got a flu shot became addicted. "Thanks, show; great way to play to people's fears of the flu vaccine!" I shouted at the screen--and then started thinking about how this particular flavor of suspicion feels equivalent to the fears that people in Pakistan have with regard to the polio vaccine--that a purported good thing (immunization against a harmful illness) is being used by shady actors to accomplish a nefarious purpose.

For two days early last week, it was hard to turn onto the long, uphill driveway to the jail because workers were repairing--replacing, it turned out--a utility pole right at the entrance. The day they finished and cleared off, this shrine appeared by the new pole:



I've seen roadside wreaths and flowers and crosses, but the mass of candles was new to me and moved me.

I asked the officer at the lobby desk if she knew the story of it.

"Yeah, last week we were doing our outer,"** she said, "and this car came really fast, so fast--and crashed into the telephone pole. It was a boy and a girl."

"Did they both die?" I asked.

"She did. He survived. She was young," she said.

It seems like the candles have been lit, too. I wonder if someone comes by to light them each night.

**outer = outer perimeter. I hadn't realized they do this but, duh, of course they would.

We'd looked at "quiet" poetry earlier--the sort you read to yourself in books--and so I brought in some recordings of poetry being performed for my students to react to and think about.

I played them Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's "Tell Them," and felt a warm glow as they reacted visibly to her lines about Styrofoam cups and dusty rubber slippers, and my favorite line, about the children flinging like rubber bands across the street. And then when I asked them which lines stuck with them, they had so many others they loved too--the curling letters, "toasted dark brown as the carved ribs of a tree stump," "the breath of God," "papaya golden sunsets" ... and "the ocean level with the land" and "we see what is in our own back yard."

They heard what her poem said.

I played them Elizabeth Acevedo performing "Night Before First Day of School, the opening poem to her novel-in-poems, The Poet X (which I'm reading--except I lent it out to one of the students), and they loved "I feel too small for all that is inside me."

I played them Laurie Anderson's "From the Air," and several students fell in love with it. What's it about, I asked, and some talked about a plane and a crash, but several said, "It's about more than that. It's about living your life--'there is no pilot': you're the pilot. But you're not alone."

I played them Billy Collins reading "Monday," and they got his teasing affection for poetry and poets.

--I should have asked them if they noticed the boys angling across the street... in context, an echo of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's poem.

And then we turned to some Tupac Shakur raps. The students range in age from 22 to 55, mainly White, but everyone knew those raps. They recited right along with them, and by the end of "Dear Mama," several were in tears--I think maybe not just for the love in it, but because that love came in spite of the fact that Tupac's mom was an addict. In that piece he's acknowledging all she's gone through and asserting that he loves her as she is. **Many** of my students really want that to be possible for them, with their kids.

I felt like I had wandered into a room so much bigger than I had imagined.

"He's not dead," one student said stoutly. Yeah. Sometimes your presence and your creation is so meaningful that even death can't decommission you.

Week two of teaching completed. I love the students; I love the actual in-classroom time. Actually being employed by the jail, though, is stressful and traumatic. I haven't felt so much free-floating anxiety in a long time. I keep telling myself to breath deeply. This story is unrelated.

The first time I lived in Japan was after college. I lived for a while in special housing for foreign exchange students, where my closest friends were two women my age--a French exchange student and an Italian one. The French one, S, was ethnically Chinese, born in Tahiti, and grew up in New Caledonia, mais comme une vraie française, elle se identifie comme française, et pas comme chinoise ou caledonienne. (Not sure how grammatical that French is... just wanted to see what I could recall.)

She had a way of pulling me in. We'd be sitting in her room on her bed; she'd be looking at a magazine of photography and smoking (everyone smoked, it seemed to me, except me). So she'd be looking at this magazine, and she'd take a drag on the cigarette and thrust the magazine in front of me and say, "What do you think of this photo?" And she'd look at me intently, like it was the most important question of the decade, or at least the evening. And so I'd say what I thought. And if she agreed, she'd say "Yes! YES!" positively joyfully, and we'd talk on about the picture. And if she disagreed, she'd say vehemently, "Not me--I think [whatever]," but not with huge disappointment that we weren't in accord, but just as if it was very necessary to share what she felt.

I felt so delighted when we agreed, and so desperate to understand her point of view when we didn't.

Like me, she had a Japanese boyfriend. One time we somehow got into a conversation that somehow led to something like, What if the two of us kissed? "I don't think it would be cheating," S said, "because we're girls."

I don't have the world's strongest sex drive, but I felt a thrill just then, and a sense of possibility, but also danger.

"I think it probably would be cheating," I said.

. . . Nothing ended up happening.

We stayed in touch for a long time and even now are tenuously connected thanks to Facebook.

This memory brought to you courtesy of mallorys_camera, who was writing about attraction and got me thinking.