“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.