Donnie Does Empathy

 

In my continued monitoring of the intensifying and downwardly spiraling word choices openly used by journalists, pundits and interviewees to describe the pwesident, I have recently added “moron”, “knucklehead”, “unstable”, “unqualified”, “juvenile”, “serial disseminator”, and “obscene”. That last one arose after his boasts about being the Best Condolencer-in-Chief Ever and the subsequent Gold Star squabbles.

(October 16, 2017. Impromptu press conference in the Rose Garden. The Pwesident takes questions as Hostage Mitch McConnell stands in attendance with a strange, forced, grin-like grimace on his face.)

 

REPORTER QUESTION:  Why haven’t we heard anything from you so far about the soldiers that were killed in Niger? And what do you have to say about that?

THE PRESIDENT: I’ve written them personal letters. They’ve been sent, or they’re going out tonight, or in two weeks, but they were written during the weekend. By someone. I will, at some point during the period of time, call the parents and the families — because I have done that, traditionally. At least I think I have. I felt very, very badly about that. I always feel badly. It’s the toughest — the toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens, soldiers are killed. It’s a very difficult thing. Now, it gets to a point where, you know, you make four or five of them in one day — it’s a very, very tough day. For me, that’s by far the toughest.

So, the traditional way — if you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls, a lot of them didn’t make calls. George Washington didn’t make calls. Lincoln didn’t either. At least that is what I have been told. But I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it. Sometimes I don’t think I am able to do it. They have made the ultimate sacrifice. Those people I call. And it is very tough for me.

So, generally, I would say that I like to call. I’m going to be calling them. I want a little time to pass. I’m going to be calling them. I have — as you know, since I’ve been President, I have. At least I think I have. And they were beautiful calls. But in addition, I actually wrote letters individually to the soldiers we’re talking about, whoever they are, and they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow. Or in two weeks. Great letters. Great calls . . . . I do a combination of both. Sometimes — it’s a very difficult thing to do, but I do a combination of both. And they are the best letters. Beautiful calls. The best letters and calls in the history of the world. President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. But I will say anyway that he didn’t. That’s what I was told . . .

 

In case you wondered here or there “Did he really say these things??” –  I can only say in my own defense that I don’t know, but I feel that he did. A lot of people say that he did. That’s what I was told.

 

So these were the words and actions that earned Twump the new epithet “obscene” by more than a few talking heads.

Having lived a mostly sheltered and prudish life, I can’t say for sure if the above and what ensued qualify as “obscene”. The entirety of my experience with the world of pornography boils down to the first 15 minutes of an XXX-rated film which I saw in my freshman year of college. Purely due to peer pressure – of which I was as much an instigator as a victim – about 9 of my dorm girlfriends and I jauntily took our places in the fifth row of the movie theater for a screening of “Debbie Does Dallas”. There were a few creepy, isolated old men scattered throughout the rows ahead of us and a few groups of creepy, guffawing young guys behind us. A few minutes into the film – as terrible actress Debbie was already embarking on her second humiliating locker room encounter, we ten girls all got up and left the theater. I’m fairly sure that all the men in front of and behind us were also happy to see us go.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was totally cool and above it all, or that I found any of this funny. The images before my eyes were shocking to me and completely . . . otherworldly. I had been surrounded by nice and mostly respectful men and intelligent women my entire life. This was a different world. It was base. It was . . . fleshy and yet . . . unpeopled. It made me feel like I needed a shower.

It was like . . . it was like . . .

. . . the Rose Garden.

The Voices of Germany

 

The exceptional musical talents of my two daughters have come up one or twice in this blog (see “Glinke’s Clinkers” and “Fame 2.0 – Stage Mom”) In that second one, I ranted for a while about casting shows and why I forbade my daughter participation in any of those. As a successful cabaret artist / musician / friend of mine once told me, the best path for a budding musician is the most natural one. It begins with singing at family gatherings. From there it goes on to participating in musical events at school or in the village. From there one goes on to singing at weddings and baptisms and then local concerts and festivals. Good results in music competitions help too – first local ones and then ones encompassing larger geographical spaces. The child musician should slowly expand the circumference of their audience or those who recognize his/her talent. All the while, the budding musician should also benefit from having a normal childhood and a good all-around education.

My younger daughter is a wonderful pianist, but does not really enjoy the competitions or performances. She plays in two local concerts a year, purely for the sake of her teacher. The elder daughter, on the other hand, was clearly born for the stage. And her development and trajectory have been right on track. At seventeen, she is now in a band along with some of the best local musicians (all 10 to 20 years older and more experienced than she). Her successes at competitions in singing and songwriting have made her a known quantity in the province’s music scene. Last week, she hit a new high mark when performing at an international symposium in Vienna, attended by music teachers and professors from 25 nations. The concert consisted of nine varied contributions by music school students, one from each of the country’s provinces. Mitzi was “Miss Burgenland” so to speak. She played piano and sang two of her own songs. I realize I am not exactly impartial, but I will tell you anyway that she was fabulous.

And absolutely on the right track.

Yesterday, the husband came home from work and dropped a bombshell. He had received an email from a “scout” for one of the biggest casting shows in the German-speaking area, called “The Voice of Germany”. He (or she) had seen a video of Mitzi on the school’s website and wanted to contact her about participating in the show. (I am not sure if they realized they were writing to Mitzi’s father as well as her school principal . . . ) The fact that Mitzi was being actively recruited meant that she could skip past the first round of auditions – she would begin already in the “finalist” category. The husband added that he had called Mitzi’s singing teacher who was all for it. “Why not?” she had added.

Why not?

I confess, the whole idea creeps me out. I see in my daughter’s eyes that she wants to do it. I see in my husband’s eyes that he could be brought to a “yes” – his mouth is already forming the word silently. I hear my own voice repeating the mantra of earlier years: “No casting shows!” I smell danger. I picture thousands of anonymous voices of Germany whispering in my daughter’s ear for the proverbial fifteen minutes: “You are a star. I love you.” I feel her confusion about just how real these oh-so-unreal reality shows seem to feel. I envision the sudden spike in her trajectory and the deep and drastic dive that follows it. I sense I am alone in my rejection of this whole idea, this detour which will temporarily catapult all of our lives into the realm of sensationalism. I taste the bile of adrenaline as I contemplate the coming conflict.

 

Girl Gone Bad (Temporarily)

About 36 hours ago, I turned to a life of crime. Among my offenses are fraud, corruption, theft, criminal neglect, cruelty to animals and attempted murder. This is my confession.

It began when I went to my boss at the university and explained my predicament of having no students in my course. I was fully prepared to say goodbye to that job after 30 years. Instead, after asking me a few questions, my boss said this:

“I realize it is a difficult situation for you, but I have to ask you to keep teaching the course. We sell this program as a package and can’t simply cut out one of the offerings, even if it isn’t needed by anyone at the moment.”

To be honest, I was kind of stunned. I pictured myself coming to the university each week, sitting in an empty seminar room for an hour or so on the off chance that some sorry procrastinator showed up mid-semester, and then collecting about $250 a pop for my “efforts”. But my boss was clearly perfectly willing to let me do this.

I told him my opinion that it really wasn’t necessary to offer two English courses with the numbers we had in the program right now. He countered that changing the curriculum would be a long bureaucratic nightmare and costlier in the end than paying me for not teaching for a while.

I said I felt uncomfortable taking money for nothing and so he made a few suggestions of how I could alter my hours – maybe blocking them, or maybe offering online instruction . . . He would be okay with any alternative I came up with. He thanked me for coming to see him and for my good work over the past three decades. I left.

I sat on a park bench for a while and thought: ”What am I going to do?” At some point it occurred to me that what I needed to solve my problem was students. Where could I get some? From the other English course. I called up the teacher and we hatched a plan.

I showed up in her course and succeeded in luring her five best students away and into my course. Before leaving her class, I thanked her profusely for allowing me to steal them. Back in my classroom, we joined the two students who had shown up for my course that evening and we were off to the races. Let the semester begin!!

Thanks to my thievery, I felt somewhat better about defrauding the taxpayers. I think that, eventually, I could have even successfully rationalized it all if my crime spree had ended there. Unfortunately, this morning I almost committed murder.

I was hacking away with a hoe in one of my flower beds. I wanted to clear the jungle growing there completely and start from scratch. After a bout of hoe hacking, a round piece of dried weeds came free and tumbled down toward my feet. I reached down to grab it and got stung by pointy quills. I realized that it was a hedgehog that had rolled itself up in self-defense after being bludgeoned by my hoe. The remorse was immediate and overwhelming.

I stood there staring at the poor creature and saw that it was still breathing. Was it injured? Was it suffering? “Do veterinarians treat hedgehogs?”  I wondered. My cell phone rang. The husband was calling to say he’d be home in an hour and would I feed the chickens. I said yes and then blurted out “I THINK I KILLED A HEDGEHOG!!”

 

I am happy to conclude this post with a few updates:

The chickens experienced hunger today, but the hedgehog survived. (He eventually unrolled and burrowed back into my flowerbed.) The relief I felt will help me to return to the straight and narrow – my life of crime is over.

I will not defraud.

I will not steal (any more) students.

I will not be cruel to animals.

I will not hoe.

Other People’s Secrets

 

For the first two and a half years of bloglife, I was skipping along . . . riding a wave . . . whistling my way down Easy Street. Meeting my self-imposed, randomly chosen goal of posting three times a week turned out to be no prob. Ideas arose, ran down from my brain through my nervous system to fingertips on a laptop keyboard and then on to the WordPress Dashboard and then out into the ether. I had no qualms about publishing my own personal stuff for the world to see (albeit when I say “the world” here, I am talking about a total of zero to 20 readers). Surprisingly, the husband and daughters were also okay with me telling their stories from time to time – possibly as a way to make up for not being part of my blog’s reading audience. Having a job in the real world that I loved and no ambition to see my name on a book jacket helped me to concentrate on the fun factor. It propelled me along hummingly in my hobby.

Something changed.

It is now fall, which has always been my undisputed favorite season. It reminds me of my childhood excitement for the first day of school and how I always laid out my carefully chosen outfit the night before, next to my beautiful new school supplies in an un-customarily neat room. Fall reminds me of later pleasant backaches induced by hours of stacking firewood or gathering chestnuts to roast and then not eat because they don’t really taste good, but still somehow manage to seem romantic. Fall is the time when everything begins anew even as it is changing into glorious colors shortly before dying.

This fall has been different. It seems to be ALL about endings and few foreseeable beginnings. As I navigate my way through a successful start of the school year with my three new English groups, I can’t ignore the world around them disintegrating. My beloved school is in deep trouble on the parental level. Some new personal conflict arises among them every week, spreading quickly through the social network and ultimately to the kids in the classroom. Our sociocratic experiment has hit a rough patch. Something tells me the path to resolution will be a long and disruptive one. I assume the school will continue on for the next four years – my last four before retirement. But I am preparing myself anyway for eventuality that it won’t.

At the same time, in the other half of my professional life, I am also realizing that the end is nigh. The stream of students into Business or Economics majors at the university has been drying up because, on graduating, too many of them find they are over-educated for the jobs most companies want to fill these days. (They want lower level staff and techies.) With fewer and fewer students enrolling, my GDE course tailored to them is also shrinking out of existence. This is officially my 30^th year teaching this course, but I think it will be the last.

Then there is my expatriate life and morbid fascination in the quagmire American politics has become. Unfortunately the daily twumpian absurdities combined with the sheer distance between me and my ability to affect anything there are leading me to detach.

And my more immediate private life? It has revolved completely around – been infiltrated and consumed by – Other People’s Business.

 

In this autumn of endings, day after day, week after week, my thoughts have been chock full of events and concerns and news and ideas and developments and amateur psychology sessions – none of which are technically my own and none suitable for blogging.

 

So, once again, I will write about chickens.

They also incessantly squawk and squabble and peck at one another and make everything a mess. But they are chickens. So it kind of suits them. And night after night, they all waddle into the coop together where a few sorry ones on the lower bar get pooped on by others who managed to get a better perch higher up.  I suppose it is still better than being outdoors at night and risking being eaten up by a weasel or a fox.

After that glorious first egg my alter-ego, Blackthumb, told you about, a second one was found – lying on the grass and broken. After a closer look around, we discovered a pile of destroyed egg shells – maybe four or five of them. One of our chickens was breaking and eating the eggs (of another one, I assume). As for the layer of the destroyed eggs, I suspect the Sulmtaler (“Trump”). Despite being the same breed as our rooster, he doesn’t give her the time of day. She spends the day waddle-darting from here to there, acting all nervous and confused (not to mention looking silly with that awful hairstyle). As for the Egg Killer, I immediately suspected the Swedish Flower Bully. She then further incriminated herself by beginning to lay one egg a day in the quarantine coop. A half dozen so far. Thanks to this whole episode, she finally has a name: we call her Darwin.

 

Tomorrow her six eggs will be fried or scrambled and eaten along with some bacon and buttered toast. I will do my best to find them distasteful.