Sherry, darling, I don’t want to compare, and I’m not saying it is wrong or anything, and I would never tell you how to blog. But I kindof noticed that your title below is a little obscure. What would you throw in the water fountain? Is it some song lyric that we’re supposed to know, about water fountains? This blog is open for everyone, but not everyone is a mind reader, you know. You may not be aware of this, but people think in very different ways and if you use obscure in-joke titles, you may be leaving some people out. Maybe if they were wearing their gadgets, there would be a record of their confusion and hurt feelings. Anyway, I know you would never want that, so I’ll just let you think about how you want to title your posts in the future.
Real answers under the jump and an uninformative update...
You asked me what I would tell incoming freshpeople about class. Oh man, questions like that make me cringe. Because, like feminism, there is a whole field of study about class. Really bright people have thought about it for a long time and written stuff down. I haven’t read that stuff, because I haven’t. I’m opinionated in general, so if pressed I could answer something about class, or racism, or feminism. But then people who know their field could say things like, ‘Hey, you sound like you fall into the third wave of [someone’s name] theory. Lots of people think like that; what do you think of the standard critiques?” And I would be all “Oh. Those are interesting critiques that I don’t know enough to support or reject.” But I’d still be re-hashing old ground. At best I figure I sound like an undergraduate. (I suppose that is a couple months ahead of your entering students, so maybe that’s still helpful.) So I try not to opinionate, or at least create a permanent record of my guesses, in the very many fields where I’m a layperson.
I don’t know what I’d tell people about class. But I do think there’s a role for you that matches your strengths. You love revealing the invisible, right? Schools of fish that roil the water, spider webs that appear in dew, wind that fills sails. My rough take on class is that it is all about expectations. “I fully expect to go to college.” “I fully expect politicians to cater to my demographic.” I bet you’d be good at drawing people’s expectations out, making them visible. There are negative expectations too. “I fully expect to drive home without cops hassling me.” Maybe you could help your kids sketch the outlines of those, show how they create physical and societal boundaries that are visible.
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You think you’d try to game the system, trick the tutors? I didn’t even think of it. I must have been a really obedient kid. I’m not sure that I think it is possible, anyway. Because I kindof think that how you act will be how you are afterwards. I mean, what would you try to do? Convince the tutors you are more social than you are? If you hang out with more people to trigger your gadget, afterwards you would have been more social. I suppose you could do different things with your gadget, like put it on your dog’s collar or leave it in your locker. That’d be fun. I’d sortof like to know how social my cat is during the day. I use that technique a fair amount, when I need to work up nerve for something. I used to live on a busy corner, and most weekend nights I’d get drunks walking by all night. Once a month I’d hear nasty drunk arguments, and the bad ones ended with hitting. I’d lie there in bed, thinking, “Dude. I want no part of this. I so do not want to get up and get dressed, step out into the dark and figure out a way to stop him from hitting her.” The thing that would get me up was the thought. “Who do I want to be? Am I someone who listens to a woman screaming in the night and stays in bed or am I someone who gets up, calls the cops and uses my presence to stop it?” I reluctantly decide I am not someone who lets a woman cry in the night on my block. That means I stand up and go outside. The nice thing about that is that afterward, I am a person who does something about fighting and beatings outside my window.
It works for lots of stuff. If I go to the pool now, at 1:30, I will be a person who swims at lunch. If I raise my hand and point something out in the scary meeting, when the meeting is done I’ll have been a person who participated. So for something like socializing, I’m don’t know if the gadget can be gamed. If you spend a week chatting up your classmates to fool your socialization tutor, at the end of the week, you’ll be a chatty person.
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The ten year old girl is still at the pool, and still revolted by the sight of us changing. I have not made any progress on my plan to win her over. Perhaps I should smile at her little sister for a while.