Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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A Philly Education

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Last night on Twitter the hashtag #PhillyEducation was trending. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a topic to be proud about.

I have been following Philly’s school funding drama enough to know that teachers and administrators have been laid off throughout the district even if I can’t explain exactly the source of the budget shortfall. Yesterday their absence was felt by students and parents on the first day of school. I saw tweets about schools with just one guidance counselor, rooms in new charter schools with no desks because no one had put them together, and this one:

It all makes me think back to a September 15 years ago. I was starting my senior year from a new commute, because my mother and I moved from the depths of Southwest Philly to rent a house just off 2nd street in South Philly – almost the entire width of Philadelphia – .

I remember looking at a lot of houses and apartments that summer, but they all failed one major test. No, not my present-day test of how loudly I could play my guitar before the neighbors complain. Back then, the test was if I could get to my public high school at 17th and Spring Garden on my own via SEPTA by only making a single transfer.

The litmus test was that I had to be able to stay in the Philly school district.

That high school, J.R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, is a public “magnet” school that accepts the top students from throughout the city. It has spent the last two decades perched atop the state’s high school rankings – yes, even above private schools. That’s partially due to the caliber of the students it accepts, but everything to do with the talent and dedication of the staff that develops those students.

I started high school super-smart but uninterested with most subjects. I graduated with an A- average and a huge scholarship to college. Four AP classes and my advanced French skills allowed me to skip almost entire year of course credits at Drexel, which allowed me to start with classes in my own major and to complete minors in theatre and music (and very nearly history). My guidance counselor made sure of that. I learned public speaking skills by becoming a Peer Counselor to kids on the topics of health and sexuality, mentored by my Health teacher. I knew I was interested in theatre because my Biology teacher was also a theatre director, and spent three years nurturing my performance skills until I could hold the stage as a lead. I was interested in a music minor so I could record a third demo CD in Drexel’s studio, having recorded my first lo-fi attempt at home as a senior project with our choir teacher as an advisor. I applied for my job at RJMetrics because I’ve spent a decade teaching myself PHP and MySQL based on programming skills I learned in an elective class my freshman year – I had never had access to a computer before then. I write today because I wrote all the time then, and submitted to an extracurricular school literary magazine every quarter, and because teachers constantly forced me to submit my work to be published outside of school – and it was, repeatedly.

None of those opportunities will be available at Masterman today, or anywhere else in the Philadelphia School District.

This morning I walked into work carrying the same backpack that accompanied me to my first morning as a senior fifteen years ago, but also with a lifetime of skills and experiences built upon a foundation learned in Philadelphia’s School District. I was lucky enough to attend a magnet school, but the real point is that I wanted to learn and I was in an environment where there were many teachers who were happy to oblige.

I’m scared for the students of Philadelphia today, because if Teairah’s tweet is any indication, wanting to learn is no longer enough of pre-requisite to achieve success in the Philadelphia school district.

fresh smelly trauma

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I come to you this evening traumatized. I am not the author who wrote to you about an innocent, chiming bee last night. I live in a harsh new reality.

In a word, the difference is: poop.

Yesterday I experienced my first live baby waste incursion. EV6 and I were just hanging out in the middle of the floor, bouncing around, when suddenly I discovered an incursion from the diapered zone. Before I could take any action, it reached out to touch my leg where it was uncovered by my shorts. The inside of my thigh, to be exact.

My leg! An important part of my body I would prefer not to live without, but I would I need to burn it? Perhaps just soak it in a chemical bath until an entire layer of skin melts away to reveal a new level of epidermis that had never experienced the horrors that the one before it had so bravely defended against.

I won’t – nay, can’t – say much more about the reconciliation process that allowed me to cleanse and reclaim my fully-functioning thigh. All I will note is that EV6 seems to take no notice of my distress, nor is she distressed herself by the proximity of excrement to her own chubby thighs. No, in fact, she seemed to be quite entertained by the process.

Not me. For me, there is only terror. Every time I see a hint of that smiling poop face, hear a whisper of that disturbing gurgling noise in the diaper area, the trauma is upon me again. There is no safe time or space. As long as there is a baby near – any baby – then it can happen again.

I know I cannot be alone in this fear, yet at the same time I honestly don’t know how we’ve come this far as a human race while each generation is faced with this challenge not only to the sanctity of our bodies, but also of our minds.

Oh, Baby

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The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

Despite all of the hilarious and challenging things that happen in your home when it houses a newborn baby, I haven’t found the right way to articulate any of them for you.

Last Sunday night as our midwife drew our baby out of the womb she was purple. My father and mother both warned me – “The baby will be weird colors. It will be alarming.” It wasn’t. She was lovely and purple fading to pink like a violet, wailing all the way with a wide mouth and a broad nose. In her face I saw my father’s mother smiling at me for the first time in twelve years.

There was no card in the camera. All these things they tell you to remember – remember the onesie and remember the paper you want the footprints on – and not one list said “remember to put the card in the camera.” So there are no purple pictures. E didn’t see it, either. It’s one of those memories, those crystalline moments, that resides only in my own mind.

Minutes later I was sitting in a rocking chair with this tiny creature wrapped in my arms, singing her the song I had been singing to her in the womb, a song about grandmothers and taking things for granted that I wrote while crying.

She did not cry. Not then, but afterwards. The entire way to the nursery for her first checkup and all throughout as I sat with my head resting against the other side of the glass, fighting off sleep. Eventually I was satisfied that she would not stop crying anytime soon and I returned to E’s side to wait to hold her a second time.

The next day I did not want to put her down. How could I put her down and miss her face for an instant? I am writing that here for posterity, as since then I’ve found plenty of reasons to put her down, but the recovery room is a honeymoon and I had never seen a newborn before in person. I didn’t want to miss anything.

The first night at home was hard. I told E I would take the night shift, only waking her to breastfeed – after all, she had done all of the hard work in the past day. But I kept falling asleep in the rocking chair, coming to as my head dipped forward on my neck, afraid I would drop her. I would set her down in the crib, knowing full well she would wake up as soon as she noticed my arms were gone, and sleep fitfully on the floor for three or five minutes at a time until I heard her cries and quickly scooped her back up. I have stayed awake through blogathons, benefit concerts, and music festivals, but never was every minute so hard as that night.

I wish I had written every day last week, but what would I have said? That swaddling was easy when we were in the hospital, but impossible once we returned home. That I quickly learned how to change a diaper and don’t gag at it the way I do whenever I’m tasked with cleaning a toilet. That I am spouting constant puns at her, an endless stream, narrating her every move with pith. That after our most frustrating night so far I played Amanda Palmer singing Carole King and Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre” and cried softly as I sang along. That I decided Curious George was too facile and with bad grammar, so I am reading her The Tempest instead.

My daughter is eleven days old and she now looks like my mother’s mother. It’s uncanny, actually, to peer down at a new human being and see an old one that you can’t have back even while knowing this this moment, too, will pass and never return.

Does that baby come with a side of time?

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Last night I found myself in a dire situation.

I was out of clean underwear.

To put this complex issue in the correct framework, you need to consider the source. I am not the kind of guy who has just five or ten pairs of underwear, or who has one massive heap of undone laundry. No. My underwear drawer is multitudinous, and my laundry is sorted into six equally-laundered segments.

I might run out of fitness clothes, fashionable colored bandanas, or pink button down shirts, but even with my general aversion to folding and stowing clean clothing, it ought to be an utter impossibility that I ever run through underpants unless I have a recurring gnome problem.

Yet, there I was, unable to fight the downward drift of my eyelids with a load of laundry just beginning, not knowing what fabric would cover my backside in the morning.

Never fear, friends and people who have sat next to me on the subway today, for I did not go commando. No. E, knowing my distress, woke up before me and moved a small quantity of underwear into the dryer to rush them to a state of readiness. For that and many other reasons she is awesome.

However, my point here is not that I need more underwear (trust me, I don’t) or that E is awesome (we’ve known that here at CK for over a decade now).

No, my point is: baby.

Allow me to expand.

There are barely enough hours in the day as it is. I work and sleep and create and perform and mow a little of the lawn every time the trimmer battery recharges and occasionally mainline a new series from Netflix in half-season increments. Yes, I could excise that brief bit of media-consuming brain-deadness, but otherwise I am always looking for a few more hours in the day to read, blog, exercise, balance my budget, finish mixing our EP, or – yes – launder undergarments.

That’s okay, though. I have kept all the plates spinning and all the progress happening for years now.

Then there’s this idea of a baby. I’m still coming to terms with it and how it’s going to be here in five-ish weeks. I got over the “The baby is real” phase, the “How will we afford this baby?” phase, and even the “Where exactly is this baby going to go?” phase. What I am having trouble with is, “When am I going to pay attention to this baby?” – or, more accurately, “When am I going to do all of the things that make me me and also keep my in clean underwear?”.  Because, if the baby requires, say, thirty minutes of attention per day, that is going to result in way less songs rehearsed or words written, you know?

(Disclosure: I am pretty sure it is going to take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the baby alive, let alone make it a super-genius congressperson or UN ambassador with a theatre background and a degree in engineering.)

And I’m thinking it probably will require more than thirty minutes of attention a day, so something’s got to give, and I think I’ve exhausted the slack in the laundry department.