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April, 2005

  1. duck, duck, goose

    April 30, 2005 by elenamary

    I’ve been working with Seyd on updating my blog. He asked me if I wanted to include an avater or better known Gravatar. A Gravatar is an image that appears next to your comments. For example, for some of you who use instant messaging services, you might use little images in your messages.

    So, Seyd asked me if I wanted to include the gravatar images in my blog comments. I told him ‘No’. I explained to him that I thought they were exclusionary, that sometimes when people leave comments they feel left out of they don’t have an image and I didn’t want to be exclusionary.
    Seyd countered with the fact that the internet, and a blog and comments are all exclusionary. There are people who don’t know how to leave comments, there are people who don’t have access to the world wide web.

    This blog(gy) world is exclusionary. And so I said yes to including the Gravatar images. Expect them to come soon. If you would like to understand more about these images check out El Oso‘s entry Get a Gravatar Bobbo.

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  2. My Catholic

    April 29, 2005 by elenamary

    Catholocism as we know differs from country to country. When I was in Germany I attended mass probably on an average of three times a week. It wasn’t my Catholic church. Where was La Virgen? What was up with the men and women sitting seperatly? Where were all the icons? Come on now, they don’t even kiss their fingers when they cross themselves!

    The Irish Eagle asks “How Catholic were the Irish?” The Irish Eagle offers a quote from The Irish Echo that reminds me a lot of the way we might describe Mexican Catholocism, ¿no?

    A century and a half ago, two clerics embarked on an ambitious project: to transform the Irish people into practicing Catholics. Archbishop Paul Cullen in Dublin and Archbishop John Hughes in New York were deeply distressed by the lack of devotion and orthodoxy among their respective flocks.

    In pre-Famine Ireland, for example, only 30 to 40 percent of the population attended Mass and many who identified themselves as Catholic had virtually no knowledge of the faith’s dogma and practices. Worse still, many still clung to pre-Christian pagan rituals and beliefs that had never fully died out after Ireland was converted to Christianity by Patrick and his successor missionaries. The response of Cullen and Hughes was to launch a campaign to instill faith, orthodoxy, and obedience among the people, a process historian Emmet Larkin famously dubbed, the “devotional revolution.”

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  3. Elementary Elenamary

    April 28, 2005 by elenamary

    The elementary school I attended for Kindergarten, L.O. Donald, in Dallas, Texas, as I recall had three kindergarten classes. One was for monolingual Spanish speaking students, one was for monolingual English speaking students and one was for bilingual Spanish and English speaking students. I was in the English speaking class. My father had requested they put me in the bilingual class but the request was denied. I remember running during lunch and recess to the bilingual teachers classroom and talking with her and her students in Spanish. I missed speaking Spanish in school.

    After kindergarten graduation (I’ll look for the picture of 5 year-old me in cap and gown) we moved back to Mexico and I completed about one-third of first grade in Taxco. We moved again back to the United States, but this time to Ohio. I started classes the day before thanksgiving break.

    My new first grade class at Barrington Elementary, was having a Thanksgiving celebration. I was seated between two girls and across from a girl named Molly. The Mollys kept asking me if I liked Turkey and mashed potatoes. I left my first day of school in Ohio thinking that all white people were named Molly and obsessed with Turkey.

    While I had gone to school in the United States before, I had gone to school in a primarily poor, urban, majority Latino school. This new school was suburban, wealthy and Anglo. It was not however the first time I felt that I didn’t fit in. In Dallas, I was the only in my kindergarten class who was bilingual. I was the only one that could read. I was the only one that didn’t get free lunch. I was white and my dad was white. My mom and dad were the classroom parents and helped organize the class parties.

    In Ohio everyone was white. No one spoke Spanish. I had never (as far as I could recall) celebrated Thanksgiving. When I was 9 or 10 I was watching Growing Pains and I felt really bad for the children in the family. I asked my mother, if the mother could understand them even though she wasn’t Mexican? Could the talk to each other? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t realized that other kids had white moms, it as all the kids in my class had white moms. I had just never thought about their relationships with their mothers. I felt bad for them, my mom is awesome.

    I’ve been thinking about this all day after comparing my elementary school in Dallas, Texas to my school in Upper Arlington (suburb of Columbus), Ohio at the webpage School Matters. Below I am including a pie chart and some basic stats on my two elementary schools. The comparisons are at two amazing extremes. We are not a melting pot.

    Pie Chart Race-Ethnic Make Up.bmp

    TX vs OH stats.bmp

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  4. Weather

    April 27, 2005 by elenamary

    Years ago, Marcos Parra my friend who had been a crush, then would become a blink of an eye faje, and now a great friend, invited me and El Chicloso back to his house to watch Twister. After watching a few tornados El Chicloso said aloud, “Wouldn’t it be awful if those things existed?” Marcos responded “Yeah, that would be horrible”. I laughed, “They do exist! We have tornados in Ohio”. They both questioned me, they couldn’t believe it, what did I do during tornados, had I ever been in one, wasn’t I afraid of dying in a tornado?

    I was reminded of this discussion this past weekend when it snowed here in Columbus, Ohio and in Louisville, Kentucky. Caonabo told me that he wanted to see snow that he had never seen it. I gave him a call Friday and told him that we might get some snow while we were in Louisville (he was going to play and I was going to hang out with some friends). “Yeah, I heard it is going to snow. Do you think it really will snow?” he excitedly asked me. “Yeah, I think it might snow a little bit. You will get to see snow, and play in it!”
    “Oh, No, we won’t play in snow.”
    “Why not? It isn’t like it will snow so much that the field will get wet”
    “But the ground will be covered in snow?”
    “No, No. This type of snow doesn’t accumulate. It is just a light amount of snow. It will probably melt before it even hits the ground.”
    “What do you mean ‘type of snow’?”
    “There are different types of snow. This snow won’t stick.”
    “Well, it will still be too cold to play, if it is snowing.”
    “It won’t be any colder than it is today.”

    It was odd and entertaining explaining snow to Caonabo. Just as it was odd explaining tornados to Marquitos.

    We take the weather we know for granted. I am still shocked at the rainy season in Taxco, you could almost set your watch to it. It starts around 6pm the sky opens up into a deep black hole and pours its soul for 15 minutes and then boom, it is all over.

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  5. “Do you sodomize your wife?”

    April 26, 2005 by elenamary

    I know El Pocho Abogado loves ol’ Antonin(Antonio) Scalia.

    from The Nation

    Editors’ Note: Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down the nation’s sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia’s answer, Berndt asked the Justice, “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia demurred and law school administrators promptly turned off Berndt’s microphone. As Berndt explains in his post to fellow law school students, it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion–had it been in the majority–would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes. We reprint Berndt’s open letter below.”

    Please read Eric Berndt’s letter to his classmates it is awesome.

    Thanks Anne for the link.

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  6. Marla Ruzicka

    April 25, 2005 by elenamary

    Whenever I get frustrated with “the fight”, My friend Christine will always tell me about her friend Marla. She will tell me about Marla and her courage to keep fighting the good fight no matter the obstacles.

    I recently received the following email from Christine:

    Friends,

    As many of you may already know, a shining light in our
    world, and in the fight for humanitarian aid and civil
    rights was lost this weekend. Her name was Marla Ruzicka.
    She was one of my dearest friends, and I selfishly grieve
    for the loss of her in my life. But I know that across the
    globe, in war torn countries, lives an even greater void in
    the hearts of the people she helped. The whole world has
    lost Marla whether we know it or not, and we should all be
    grieving now.

    She was a truly amazing woman (or as she would say: she
    ROCKED). Hell, she mooned the president in the name of
    public power and sold beer on the black market to raise
    money for wounded civilians: salsa dancing, giggling, and
    being unbelieveably effective the whole way. What’s not to
    like?

    Please take a moment to read a little about her. She would
    not want this time to be about her, but she would want us to
    use this as an opportunity to remind the world the true cost
    of war. Who but Marla was out there counting that cost in
    such a real way? Who will pick up where she left off? Her
    work and her spirit must continue. Marla took the whole
    world into her heart, and made its pain her own, without
    ever allowing herself to indulge in cynicism or retreat.

    There are hundreds of articles, here’s one:
    sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

    Or if you prefer to listen, here’s a piece from Morning Edition:
    www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php

    Here’s the nonprofit she founded:
    www.civicworldwide.org

    And the speech given on the Senate floor on Monday by Sen.
    Patrick Leahy, a moving testimony:

    http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200504/041805a.html

    I think a lot of people would think that what she undertook
    was crazy. And it was! It’s crazy to have so much optimism.
    It’s crazy to believe that it’s possible for a lone unarmed
    slender young woman to go traipsing around a war zone
    knocking on doors. It’s crazy to believe she could save
    people and help families. It’s crazy to think you can just
    call up a senator enough times to raise $20 million to help
    wounded civilians (a completely unprecedented concept). It’s
    crazy to travel around with $20 in your bank account and
    think you can raise millions.

    But that’s exactly what she did.

    Maybe that kind of crazy is just a lack of cynicism, an
    optimism that we tend to believe is impossible.

    Maybe that’s a kind of crazy we could all benefit from. It’s
    the kind of crazy she’s inspired me to strive toward.

    Please feel free to repost this message if you know others
    who you think would like to know about Marla and her work.

    With Peace Love and Solidarity,
    Christine

    marla.jpg
    (more…)

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