The semester is over and (aside from grading, oh, say, 55 final exams!) my life is turning toward waiting. Waiting for my baby to come. For now, I'm turning it in on this blog. You can follow the rest of pregnancy here. I dunno if I'll be back here at all...Starting lots of new things. Maybe time to move on?
P.S. You can also look for me on Facebook!
Yesterday, Jerry took Micah to The Mall for a while. When I met up with them later, I got an earful from Micah about the Battle Bots he saw in action in the rotunda. Jerry informed me that he had difficulty tearing Micah away from the action. I had read about the competition the previous day in the Strib and noted it because of its connection to my current project: grading student papers on potential interventions for juvenile delinquency. The article titled, "Battle 'bots: A guidance program for juveniles," describes how a local Alternative Learning Center offers a class in Battle Bot craft as a means of keeping young men involved in hands-on learning rather than crime. "Their 15-pound wedge-shaped battle robot is keeping guys such as 16-year-old Kiefer Morgan engaged in learning rather than going over the edge of juvenile delinquency."
That's quite a claim for a hunk of metal on wheels. This kind of idea seems to be a salient one for many, however, as my students' papers illustrate. Quite a few are proposing programs to keep kids engaged in leisure and other "pro-social" activities within and outside of school as a means to prevent and/or remedy delinquency. For the most part, though, these types of programs haven't shown statistically significant results in doing either.
But there is one indisputable fact: the Bots kick butt, as the video below illustrates. Anybody else remember this show?
I haven't been posting about this because not all important parties had been informed personally until recently. But, that's done, so now I can say it: I'm going to be a sociologist when I grow up!
Until now, I had been pursuing my PhD in social work. However, various circumstances and stars have aligned such that I've decided the Sociology Department here at the U would be the best place for me to continue and finish my degree. The principal factor is that the faculty, research, and teaching resources here best match my long-term scholarly interests. Other "bonus" features include three years of guaranteed funding (no more hawking my wares all over the U!) and my husband joining me in the Social Sciences Tower as a geography PhD student in the fall. Also, I've been working in Soc for the past two years, so I'm already well-integrated here.
That said, nothing essential has changed. I'm still interested in the same stuff and still want to do research that matters and can have an impact (for the better, I hope) on society.
For some reason, when I registered 10 minutes ago for the classes I need to take in Soc this fall (the main "cost" in this decision is that I have to take a few more classes) this all began to feel more real. In a good way.
Ever heard of it? Can you pronounce it?
This is the name of the cancer that my mom has been surviving for the past 4+ years. It's become a regular part of our family vocabulary. Since her initial diagnosis in 2003, she (and the rest of us) have weathered a few recurrences. This time, the stakes are a bit higher with potentially major surgery to remove a significant portion of her liver on the horizon. We'll know more after next Tuesday when she meets again with her oncologist. In the mean time, we're hoping and praying for the best!
To learn more about Leiomyosarcoma, click here. To sign a petition asking the President to make April 26th "National Leiomyosarcoma Awareness Day," click here.
Finally, here's a recent news story of a women's daring surgery to address her own Leiomyosarcoma. Rare coverage for a rare disease...
Breakthrough Cancer Surgery Saves Terminal Patient
By JEFFERY KOFMAN and ROGER FORTUNA
March 25, 2008
A Florida woman with a golf ball-size tumor in her abdomen who risked a cutting-edge surgery to save her life is now on her way to a full recovery.
Brooke Zepp, 63, was told that her tumor was inoperable because it was buried so deep inside her abdomen and that she had only months to live.
After receiving a diagnosis of leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer in her abdomen, Zepp had tried radiation and chemotherapy but neither had worked.
Desperate for help, Zepp found a team of surgeons willing to perform an unprecedented operation. The tumor was buried underneath half a dozen major organs.
"I wanted to prove that there is hardly any such thing as inoperable cancer," Zepp said.
It took seven surgeons more than 15 hours, in which they removed her stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver and large and small intestines, while keeping Zepp alive. Once they cut out the tumor, which was wrapped around a major artery, they painstakenly put all the organs back in her body.
In other words, it was like taking the engine out of a car to repair it while the car is still running.
"This is definitely one of the most difficult surger[ies] that we've ever done," said Dr. Tom Kato, who led the team of surgeons that operated on Zepp at the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Zepp's organs were outside of her body for approximately 90 minutes, during which time they were kept refrigerated.
Zepp says she never believed her tumor was going to kill her.
"For anybody out there that is being told that they have cancer that can't be operated on, keep looking, keep looking," said Zepp. "I am an all or nothing kind of person. I want a real life. … I don't want to live a half of a life and I feel free now."
Doctors are releasing Zepp from the hospital in Miami today and believe she is now free of cancer.
What are two grown-up nerds to do on a Thursday night in Chicago? Why, attend a taping of National Public Radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! of course! This is precisely what Jerry and I did last night, leaving Micah in the capable hands of his paternal grandparents. We headed downtown to the Chase Auditorium to take in the popular current events quiz show. Much zaniness ensued over the 90 mintues of the taping given the ample fodder availble in the current political scene. My favorite bit was the interview with columnist Maureen Dowd who provided some provocative insights on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. All in all, a great evening, despite fighting traffic and running to catch the CTA (not such a pretty sight - a 31-week pregnant woman huffing and puffing to catch a damn train!). Though I may never have Carl Kassel on my home answering machine, I am proud to say that Peter Sagal is now a friend of mine on Facebook!
I highly recommend catching a taping if you're ever in Chicago on a Thursday. Tix are a mere $20.
I'm always in awe of the artists I know - putting themselves and their work "out there." Our Best Man Josh Wetjen will have his name in lights this coming July, along with dance sensation Eddie Oroyan (left) at the Southern Theater. Josh is a killer guitar player and has composed and will perform live the music for Eddie's original dance performance. Should be a synergistic evening!
Eddie Oroyan
Brown Rocket
Oroyan’s volatile duet traces a deteriorating yet strangely elastic relationship. With the choreographic influences of Bruce Lee and Gene Kelly, Brown Rocket follows the trajectory to the lovers' inevitable collision, no holds barred.
Dancers: Eddie Oroyan and Laura Selle-Virtucio
Music: Joshua Wetjen
Within the span of an hour this afternoon, I found myself sitting across two very different tables. The first was at the county jail. I was conducting a follow-up interview for the research project I'm working on. Surrounded by concrete walls with security doors buzzing and slamming in the background, I listened for 45 minutes while a young man described his nine days of freedom in-between lock-ups. As we parted through separate security doors he said, "So I won't ever see you again?" and I said, "No, I don't think so," followed by a reiteration of the study's location within the U should he want to contact us with any questions. We shook hands.
After paying a ridiculous $15 for 45 minutes worth of parking downtown, I whisked myself back to the U for my Friday afternoon seminar on the life course and found myself siting across a very different table from nine other highly educated people surrounded by a great view of the city through large windows. Funny enough, the topic was intra-societal variation in the life course featuring readings about the very social structures and circumstances from whence my research participant hails. Though I'm always at least somewhat aware of the distance between myself and those I "study," the chasm felt especially wide this afternoon. Perhaps the two tables made it all the more clear.
If nothing else, the experience renewed my resolve to always remember the humanity of those I study. They aren't abstract concepts to be operationalized and fitted into regression models. They live and breathe and suffer and rejoice all the while I read and write and do this academic thing and tell myself that maybe what I do might be of some benefit to them...somehow.
Far greater minds than I have blogged recently about the Pew Center's report citing 1 in 100 Americans now in prison, so I hesitate to even approach it. But the hubster forwarded a link today to an editorial in Time (below) by the writers of The Wire, a show we have watched religiously for the past several years. I find two things intriguing about the editorial: 1) the appeal to draw from fictional characters the inspiration to enact social change and 2) jury nullification as a legitimate route for citizens to take action.
The authors put on no airs regarding their lack of authority on the subject, except that they have spun a good tale for TV that takes on real issues of race, crime, law enforcement, education, and general urban decay in perhaps one of the most accurate attempts to date. But they do evoke their characters as muses for average folks who might want to make a difference in the sad state of U.S. carceral affairs. I can't help but wonder if the same viewers the authors hope to inspire spent one hour per week on some of the corners in my neck of the 'hood would find similar sympathy for my less-than-fictional drug dealing neighbors? I don't have to turn my TV on to see "the other America."
At the same time, I resonate with the authors' assertion that politicians are not likely the best targets for citizens who want to effect change when it comes to penal policy. Even our beloved Bill is culpable for a great deal of "get tough on crime" policy in the 90s that has contributed to this trend. Neither Dems nor Republicans are likely to "get soft" anytime soon. In this respect, I'm intrigued by the idea of jury nullification as civil disobedience. It seems like it might have little impact, unless it were to become a widespread practice. How many non-violent drug offenses actually go to trial vs. plea bargaining? Within that number, how many will have juries with willing objectors? For instance, I have yet to serve on a jury for anything, ever, much less a drug trial.
I have no real expertise to speak to the law enforcement side of things, but anecdotally, having lived for 2 years on a block where open-air drug dealing was an unrelenting daily reality, the police didn't seem to be able to do much about it by continually arresting the lil' homies on the corner. Our neighborhood association regularly sends us opportunities to give "community impact" statements on offenders, many of them drug-related, and the sheer number of arrests and/or convictions for many of these individuals is staggering - yet the problem persists.
It's an interesting proposition - if I do get called for jury duty in such a case, I guess I'll have to consult my conscience...
Wednesday, Mar. 05, 2008
The Wire's War on the Drug War
By Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon
We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.
These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?
And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.
Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9
Good friend and high school English teacher extraordinaire Josh Wetjen shared this video of some St. Paul Central High students fulfilling a requirement from their Environmental Science class. Al Gore could hardly do better...
Just for fun, I subscribed myself to one of those weekly email services that sends you an update on your pregnancy, week-by-week. I like to be reminded of what's going on in my womb while I'm busily doing "important" things.
What strikes me as funny is that each week I am informed that my baby now resembles some form of produce in size. It started out with fruits in the early weeks, like "your baby is now the size of a grape" or "a plum" or a "large orange." But now that we're in the third trimester, we seem to have graduated to vegetables. Last week, my baby was approximately as big as a head of cauliflower and as of yesterday he is, apparently, "like a Chinese cabbage." Mmmmmm...
So, next time you're in the produce aisle, pause for a moment and think of my fetus. Any guesses as to what veggie he might be next week?
For more on my pregnancy, visit my birth blog: Off My Rocker
