“It’s true until it’s untrue.”

-Lucille Ball

There are no paramilitary units stationed in the Student Life Center of my campus, no snipers cowering in civilian clothes behind the ledges of the Health Science building, certainly no tsunami’s breaking over the metro rail of Takoma Park…hell, I haven’t seen a fist-fight, a melee, a skirmish and certainly nothing resembling more than hormonal shenanigans during my two months at Montgomery College. And really why should I? A community college with a student body made-up mostly of  the descendants of some of the very first free black American citizens coupled with a huge number of first generation migrants, many of them refugees and political asylees, might fit the stereotype of what some in America might call a “troubled school,” but for the most part, the level of civility on this campus makes El Cerrito High look like Attica … all right, maybe Richmond

So why is it that when I get a young - perhaps ten years my junior - first generation immigrant bossing me around from the other side of the counter I find myself making excuses for their uncouth behavior? Sure, cultural differences concerning the customer service aspect of life exist from country to country, but whether it may be true or not, I find myself projecting a life of tragedy onto so many of the students that visit me in the store as if it were me who dropped bombs on the southern Sudanese as they attempted to reenter their own country from Ethiopia. Perhaps I imagine that some time in their life they got shit on, shit on sooooo hard that now they deserve the chance to blast dookies back at the world…and the convenient human dookie receptacle is miguel. I’ll be that receptacle for I’ve done my share of pooping.

Ah, but the truth and history of individuals are like melting icicles: the longer you look, the more they change. Even the sheer act of observation and the warmth of interaction manipulates and effects the picture of who we are and what we perceive to be the personalities of the people around us. So, when the Jamaican girl handed me her diplomatic tax exempt card which saved her twenty-or-so cents on a bag of pencils and asked me to “be faster than you were last time,” I saw her as the spoiled puddle she was.

Hours later, a classroom of thirty students chuckling at stereotypes, miscommunications amongst the four major characters, and the simplistic comedic genius of Lucille Ball’s perfectly timed facial expressions helped me climb back outta my hole. When she was in front of that camera, she was all ice: solid matter blanketing the audience from the warming climate of reality and as a television personality she was as real as I wanted her to be… a caricature of embarassment, a doll with apple red lips made for black and white tv sets, and just enough abstract love in her perfomances to make me forget - for twenty two minutes - all the lies we tell ourselves just before we go to bed … and release the dreams of doubt, lust, violence, redemption, and misperceptions.

omfgnyc:

Gonna rent a party hippo for my birthday.
P.S. SHOES ARE HOT!

I’m turning in all my pictures,
home movies,
mayday scriptures,
for the earth to turn away 
from accords now nothing more than softened bursting blisters,

you never felt as bad as the days you missed her,
so you collected beanie babies to fill the void

… and married her sister.

and so it goes, another savannah fire,
the unnamed african government cut the budget

and the prime minister is arsenic retired.

let the circadian rhythms like nocturnal trees grow frosty follicles
pissed off and throw flaming pine cone bombs at you,
dew drop monacles upon the hair, held up to the sun’s ultraviolet like a pilot light

eventually it wallows through the thick wisps
when the wind kicks just a little bit,
much like the radio station in your town.

one nation ready to get down,
under the basement
floundering through the foggy gray days of adolescents,
audio gravy
bleats paisley outta’ radio disney.
plays the commercials like chinese water torture turbulent vertigo
until it’s in me.

and I offer my parents no apology
for the tv is the passage that I passed through
like gastronomy,
so why wouldn’t I back the privatization of social security?
the ads say that they, “put the power in our own hands”
and that, “freedom at the tip of a gun barrel don’t come free in no land.”
I guess that’s what they get
when they have a baby and let the media raise me.

Public Relations never stutter,
never teeter on lazy.
my mannerisms switch from suburban ebonic
to drunk on gin and tonic with Grandma Gopnik.

marketing groups
harbor my childish head-bop mannerisms
to harvest the ebb and flow of tween fashion rhythms

us underlings of Victoria’s Secret
and denizens of DKNY denim,
correcting and commenting on clothing ads
… underage calves follow the purchasing power of mom.

it’s no wonder they call ‘em brands.

amalgamated passenger pigeons ride the breeze
while their primordial memories of birth glide the magnetic fields of earth.

There were questions in the air as we sat in the auditorium, such as, “Will the professor of our African American History class actually show up today?” and, “Why does it seem that a third of the students have dropped this class already?” but perhaps the biggest thing on everyone’s mind seemed to be, “Who’s the black guy in the Spider-Man t-shirt playing with the lights at the teacher’s desk?”

As the man flipped switches, shadows of my baseball cap and triangles that only black girl’s hairdo’s could pull off bounced around the room, making it impossible to work on my Algebra homework any longer. Instead I thought to myself… “there are forty students in a class. three of them are not considered black by American standards. three fifths of those who would be considered black were born in Africa. what is the algebraic formula for figuring out how many students were born in the United States?” Bah!!!

After five minutes of silent disco-strobe the man spoke. At first he apologized for the light show, he was only trying to figure out which switch controlled the lecture screen behind him, then went on to say, “…also, I’m sorry I wasn’t here on the first day of class. There was a misunderstanding between myself and the school. My bad. I really am more professional than that… I’ve been teaching Black Studies for a minute now.”

All right! Now we were getting down to business… Well, not really. All I had in my mind of how this course was gonna go was laid out like a bad episode of the Cosby spin-off, A Different World, and this was my version of Spellman College. Dr Jones began his lecture straight away by talking about Egypt. Within five minutes we were discussing the construction of the pyramids. After six minutes he was saying that their construction should be a source of pride for all black people. After seven he was talking about aliens. Besides the fact that he fails to mention slave labor’s role in the making of this ”source of black people’s pride,” and besides the fact that Egypt’s three kingdoms really has nothing to do with the history of black people in America, and besides the fact that he admits that almost all slaves brought across the Atlantic came from West Africa, I was really having a good time listening to this guy go! It reminded me why I was so excited to attend this college. For the most part, the instructor’s have been more than adequate, but really, its the ethnic make-up of the student body that makes Montgomery College’s Takoma Park campus so intriguing. East Africans, black Americans, Salvadoreans, West Africans, south Asians, central Asians, and a sprinkling of Pollacks just to make things interesting. To give you an idea … at the on-campus textbook store where I now work, out of a staff of thirty there are two employees who were born in the US: myself and the assistant manager.

Even before I had really travelled anywhere I had been driven by an urge to move, but since I’m too broke to buy a plane ticket, then I’ll have the world brought to me.

…I’m old for a college freshman. Not Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School old, but let’s just say that I’m pleased when the other students remark that I could pass for twenty six. At least it’s a step in the right direction … and much like Dangerfield, I’m often demanding respect, at least from myself. So today as I sat at my desk wondering how I tested so poorly on my math assessment test, especially after once finishing pre-calculus in high school, I shifted my critical gaze to the man in the blue blazer behind the desk, Mr. Schwanebake. Class had not yet started and I was still recovering from the embers of serrano peppers that I had chopped into my chili from the night before. The precipitation still fresh from my visit to the bathroom left my perceptions superficial. It seemed to me that everything about this man who was to about lead me on a three month trip down a mathematical memory lane conjured images of a teacher I once had in high school who taught both US History and photography … and seemed to enjoy neither.  The clock ticked and Schwanebake had so far not spoken once, he sat stoicly entranced as if he were correcting homework that had not yet been given, but just as the clock hit eleven he began to raise his head slowly … as if breaking from a day dream of algorithms and a life time of hangovers … as if the panels in the ceiling of the classroom were not hiding cheap halogen tubes but instead an applause of stage lights, all of them converging on his face.  He grinned, and dramatically raised one finger up to the sky. Then, purposefully, he flexed it down and pressed play on a tape recorder hidden behind a stack of papers and stood up. His grin became a full fledged smile as he walked between the aisle of desks beginning a slow clap along to the music. The track playing was something I’d heard before, but not something from an actual album, perhaps a soundtrack to a movie? something cheesy. Karate Kid? The scene just before the big tournament between Daniel and Kobra Kai? I was almost sure of it!  Schwanebake, now clapping and bobbing his head, began to chant. “Math Lovers!!! Math Lovers!!! Math Lovers!!!” Not one student seemed to know one from the other until we began to make eye contact, confirming this absurd ice breaking technique unfolding before our eyes with raised eyebrows and finally big laughs. An absurd ploy flawlessly executed. Kudos Schwanebake, Kudos indeed! I’m sure we’ll be hearing a bit more from you in the future.

I walked away from the class delighted that with or without his mind bending antics I was ready for school, and that as entertaining as he was - also blurting out that his variables “t” and “v” did not stand for transvestite - I was no longer in need of these Dead Poet Society tricks to keep me interested, even for the most remedial of classes.