Untitled

This is the response I want to make to the arguments on Videogum. I'm sorry to clog up this lovely and hilarious blog with this, but I feel like I have to say this, and I feel like saying anything on Vgum right now will only perpetuate the idea that I'm somehow the face of this whole argument. And that was never what I meant. So here is my response, it all its glory. If it works for you, great. If not, scroll down, there's comedy to be had.

I have known immature teachers. When I was in 5^th grade I started laughing out loud recalling a joke Mr. Connor had told earlier in the class period. He asked, “What are you laughing at?” In a panic I said, “Nothing.” He then suggested that on our field trip to Columbia that the bus drop me off at the well-known mental hospital on Bull Street. “That’s where people go,” he said, “when they laugh at nothing.”

In 7^th grade, the teacher moved Steven away from his girlfriend to sit him by me, because they talked so much in class. She said, “Maybe this girl won’t get you in trouble for talking.” His friend cried out, “That’s because, if he wants to talk to her, he has to say, ‘BARK BARK BARK’.” The whole class started barking at me. The teacher allowed it. That is an immature teacher.

I strive to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere for each of my students. I became a teacher not because of the great teachers I had but because of the awful ones. I want them to feel safe with me. I am empathetic to a fault. Before I speak I think carefully about how my words might affect each and every one of them. I realize that their experience of my words might be completely different than my experience. I realize that they’re kids—they aren’t the people that they’re going to be. They’re learning. I try to teach them empathy. One time I had a boy accuse the homeless of laziness. “If they would just get a job,” he argued, with a privileged private school student’s understanding of employment, loss, and poverty. Of course, he didn’t know (and I took into account that he was uninformed when I chose my response carefully) that my father is homeless. I mean, unless you consider prison a home.

Yes! That’s right. It’s not all golden sunshine for me. This holiday is going to be hard. And I want some of you to know you’ve made it harder. Crippling social anxiety doesn’t ease the pain, either.

You can say anything you want to about Baby Friday, because that is the person you know. You have no right to comment on me, the actual person living my life. You know nothing about the person who stands in front of my classroom, the person who cooks meals for my husband, the person who calls my senile grandmother and has the same conversation day after day after day just to have any conversation at all. I am a super sensitive person. I like Disney and cartoons and my dogs and pictures of cats. I am educated, so I understand why The Little Mermaid is awful, but I didn’t get what some call “a childhood”, so I’ve got a lot of time to make up. And I make it up by having a wonder of the world. By delighting in things, by laughing, by joking, having innocence when there is innocence to be had. If that makes me a worse person, then a worse person I will be. Because I know that by extinguishing myself I bring light to others. And if you are not one of those people, then I’m sorry. Because I really just want to leave this world a better place than when I found it.

Ani DiFranco might have said it best, so I defer to her.

Squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I'm beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Because someday you're going to get hungry
And eat most of the words you just said

Both my parents taught me about goodwill
And I have done well by their names
Just the kindness I've lavished on strangers
Is more than I can explain
Still there's many who've turned out their porch lights
Just so I would think they were not home
And hid in the dark of their windows
Until I'd passed and left them alone

And God help you if you are an ugly girl
Course too pretty is also your doom
Because everyone harbors a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
And God help you if you are a phoenix
And you dare to rise up from the ash
A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
While you are just flying past

I'm not trying to give my life meaning
By demeaning you
And I would like to state for the record
I did everything that I could do
I'm not saying that I'm a saint
I just don't want to live that way
No, I will never be a saint
But I will always say

Squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I'm beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Because someday you might find you're starving
And eating all of the words you said

I never was anything but nice. Search, google, whatever you want to do. Up until this week when people were openly cruel to me did I ever say anything with a short temper or without thoughtfulness. Yes, I disagreed. As all intelligent people are bound to do. Still, I'm so sad that this thing with which I have such positive associations has soured beyond the point of recognition.

But I still dig my friends. I mean, we still Monsters.