I am no better and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do
You love me
You hate me
You know me and then
You can't figure out the bag I'm in
I am everyday people

Talk to a US college student about land policy and environmental programs in the developing world, suggesting the kinds of solutions that Hernando de Soto advocates, and they'll ask questions like these:

What are the consequences in the short term of giving property rights to people who haven't been educated about what property rights are?

You say that if you give rights to people then they will use the land to their best ability (i.e., farming, selling land, etc.). However, what role would education play in educateing those individuals to use their land well? (If not use it, will they know a fair price to sell it at?)

How can people act in their best interests if they don't know what those are?

The audacity of kids who don't understand what it means to work for the things they have, who have been sheltered and protected and handed everything on a silver platter, thinking that they know better than people who understand actual struggle and hardship positively amazes me. I'd like to plop them down in the heart of the Kalahari with nothing but an iPod.

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

It's only day four of a nineteen-day work week, and my brain has already begun to seize. What's worse is that these first five days are still the easy ones -- straightforward 9-5ers. The next fourteen involve a roadtrip to Philly, a transcontinental flight to Palo Alto, hundreds of students from all over God's green earth, sleeping in dorms, and being on stage for sixteen hours a day.

My next blog may be from that mental hospital where Ken Kesey tripped the nightshift.

Give him a fire in his heart
Give him a light in his eyes
Give him the wild wind for a brother
And the wild Montana skies

For those of you who've not had the pleasure of entering my boudoir (which is just about everyone, thank you very much!), then you may not have gotten up close and personal with my collection of art based on found Montana animal parts.

Yes, animal parts.

I've a candlestick made of a cow vertebra found on our family ranch near Bozeman when I was a wee lass, a charm made of rattlesnake vertebrae found on the Phantom Spring Ranch near Helena where I worked one year, and two lovely paintings by Joe Veltkamp -- one of which depicts an antler he and I found on Phantom Spring Ranch (or on Rattlesnake Ridge where I grew up in eastern Washington???)

If won't find yourself in my apartment anytime soon, but you will find yourself in Seattle, you can catch other Montana-inspired art by Joe at Jody's newest Cupcake Royale. I love it when my friends who work with different media collaborate for a total sensory experience.

Music, food, and art. Life gets better, but not indoors.

Well, not indoors with clothes on.

Unless of course, you're in the kitchen experiencing Joseph's foie gras seared in vodka and Idaho huckleberries, in which case you don't feel like you've ever felt wearing clothes.

/caveat

Spinning on that dizzy edge
I clicked the green
Then clicked the red
Dreamed of all the different ways
I now can color, whoa!

Alina says happiness is dancing in the rain. It's true. But happiness is also Retractable Fine Point Sharpies.

Is this the future we were promised, Joe? I think it might be.

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when they introduced the 24 pack of Ultra Fine Points. Now, it appears that my love affair with this company has no end. I know which one'd be my character in Jennifer Government.

My favorite passage ever.
Well, one of my favorite passages.

To begin, I told her my name was Nunumu. She called me Miss Moo. We used to sit in the courtyard and I would teach her the names of things, as if she were a small child. And just like a small child, she learned eagerly, quickly. Her mind wasn't rusted shut to new ideas. She wasn't like the Jesus Worshippers, whose tongues were creaky old wheels following the same grooves. She had an unusual memory, extraordinarily good. Whatever I said, it went in her ear then out her mouth.

I taught her to point to and call out the five elements that make up the physical world: metal, wood, water, fire, earth.

I taught her what makes the world a living place: sunrise and sunset, heat and cold, dust and heat, dust and wind, dust and rain.

I taught her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.

I tauught her how two things mixed togheter produce another: water and dirt make mud, heat and water make tea, foreigners and opium make trouble.

I taught her the five tastes that give us the meories of life: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty.

One day, Miss Banner touched her palm on the front of her body and asked me how to say this in Chinese. After I told her, she said to me in Chinese: "Miss Moo, I wish to know many words for talking about my breasts!" And only then did I realize she wanted to talk about the feelings in her heart. The next day, I took her wandering around the city. We saw people arguing. Anger, I said. We saw a woman placing food on an altar. Respect, I said. We saw a thief with his head locked in a wooden yoke. Shame, I said. We saw a young girl sitting by the river, throwing an old net with holes into the shallow part of the water. Hope, I said.

Later, Miss Banner pointed to a man trying to squeeze a barrel that was too large through a doorway that was too small. "Hope," Miss Banner said. But to me, this was not hope, this was stupidity, rice for brains. And I wondered what Miss Banner had been seeing when I was naming those other feelings for her. I wondered whether foreigners had feelings that were entirely different from those of Chinese people. Did they think all our hopes were stupid?

In time, however, I taught Miss Banner to see the world almost exactly like a Chinese person. Of cicadas, she would say they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil. She hated them, decided they had no purpose in this world. You see, in five ways she could sense the world like a Chinese peson. But it was always this sixth way, her American sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinionis, and her opinions led to conclusions, and somethimes they were different from mine.

From Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, which is a really good book. Her best, I think.

Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall

People from elsewhere are reluctant to believe me when I tell them we have a statue of Lenin in Seattle. Yes, Lenin, as in Vladimir Ilyich, as in the father of Soviet Russia. Yes, a statue, as in a giant public tribute honoring the life, works, and deeds of the Bolshevik leader.

People from elsewhere are also reluctant to believe me when I say that Seattle suffers from leftist groupthink.

Knowing all of the above, though, I was reluctant to believe that the Seattle Public School District would actually publicly claim that people of color are neither future-oriented nor individualists. Love, "they" say is blind, and I do love my Emerald City.

A colleague forwarded the following to me:

Seattle Public Schools claim...that people who save for their retirement and have long-term goals are, ahem, also engaged in cultural racism. The reason? People who have what the district calls "a future time orientation" are exhibiting behavior that is among the "aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color."

There are other gems of alternate universe wisdom on the district's Web site, such as that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is also cultural racism. It doesn't even merit mentioning that the district believes that only whites can be racist.

I was certain that it was a hoax. Alas, it's not.

But don't take my word, you can read Andrew Coulson's op-ed , the school district's response, or what appears to be the original (now cached) page.

Still don't believe me about Lenin?

Or the groupthink?

Seattle is decidely not my kind of town -- intellectually anyway -- but I love it anyway.