the reality tunnel

So in an attempt to make my life seem less disconnected, I wanted to tell you all about a show that I’m playing with the band that I play in and have been on tour with for the last 2 weeks.

Sunday, August 31.
6pm
$donation
Lower Cascades Waterfall Pavilion, Bloomington, IN
(see http://bloomington.in.gov/documents/viewDocument.php?document_id=274  for directions)

Defiance, Ohio (that’s me! punk rock with violin and cello)
K-9 (Detroit jam rock with viola and homemade instruments)
Beyond Things (Bloomington O.G.s playing pretty, brooding songs.  Hear them yourself at http://www.myspace.com/ephemeropteramusic)

Come a little early and bring some food to share!  Bring young or old friends!  Bring your pets!

Some folks who have been involved in I-69 resistance are going to have a table and talk a bit about what’s been going down recently.

We were in Miami 2 days ago and were pretty excited to make sandwiches with Cuban bread.  Unfortunately, a lot of Cuban bread has lard as an ingredient.  I struggled to ask if bread contained lard.  I found on the web that the Spanish word for lard is manteca (or perhas grasa de cerdo).

My high school spanish question should have been: ¿Hay manteca en este pan?

We’ve been playing Oh, Susquehanna pretty much every night on tour.  In part it’s a song about how childhood mobilities have been affected by a changing environment.  But, as this editorial suggests, its not just the loss of natural spaces that is changing childhood.

From Remember ‘go outside and play?’ - Los Angeles Times:

Increasingly, American children are in a lose-lose situation. They’re forced, prematurely, to do all the un-fun kinds of things adults do (Be over-scheduled! Have no downtime! Study! Work!). But they don’t get any of the privileges of adult life: autonomy, the ability to make their own choices, use their own judgment, maybe even get interestingly lost now and then.

Somehow, we’ve managed to turn childhood into a long, hard slog. Is it any wonder our kids take their pleasures where they can find them, by escaping to “Grand Theft Auto IV” or the alluring, parent-free world of MySpace?

I think that this editorial definitely writes from a middle class perspective as youth in other communities definitely face different degrees of safety.  Still, even middle class culture restricts children out of concerns for their safety without taking on any of the root causes of the things that make us less safe. 

The collective sense of captivation that the Olympics now seems to hold and just trying to be more active on tour has made me think a bit about sports.  On the first day of tour, stopping in Columbus to pick up t-shirts, will and I played a fast game of basketball against Ryan and Austin.  We lost by a point, but it felt good to run around before getting back in the van to drive the hours to Buffalo.  My only basket was a pretty beautiful one where I moved into space around Austin, shot, and swished one through the hoop.  I played horse yesterday afternoon in a well-worn court by the sea and while we were playing it made me think about the ideas of great moments in personal sporting history.  I think that sports are a pervasive enough part of our culture that everyone has a few of these.  These are things like the time you swung high enough on the playground swingset to awe your playmates, or the time you got the 4-square bully out with the eliminator, or the time you miraculously got picked first for the kickball game.  For those who played organized sports there might actually be a goal in the big game or a sprint to the finish to outpace a rival.  Will remembered his as the time he stole home base in a little league game or the time that his proficiency at sinking 3-pointers from the corner of the court got him the respect of two girls who were total ballers at his childhood summer camp.  For me, I remember fencing in the woods with sticks with this kid I knew who was kind of a bully.  At one point, I knocked him off balance and he fell into a creek.  I ran like hell hoping to escape the repurcussions of my momentary triumph.

I came across this article in the New York Times, A Country Feels a Hurdler’s Pain, and was at first surprised that there would be such a reaction to one runner being unable to compete.  It made more sense when I read further in the article and read this quote by the runner, China’s Liu Xiang:

“It is kind of a miracle,” Liu said. “It is unbelievable — a Chinese, an Asian, has won this event. It is a proud moment not only for China but for Asia and all people who share the same yellow skin color.”

“Please pay attention to Chinese track and field,” he said. “I think we Chinese can unleash a yellow tornado on the world.”

and the accompanying commentary:

Please note these are not the ravings of a Western journalist. These are the words of Liu — reasonable enough, since he had just become the first Chinese male ever to win a gold medal in Olympic track and field.

…

This was not some foolish boast of racial superiority, just an assertion of standing tall against the world. Liu was suggesting that a Chinese man could reach the level of Rafael Nadal of tennis or Kobe Bryant of basketball or Ronaldinho of football or Catherine Ndereba of Kenya, who sprang from other continents.

I can see why the prospect of a Champion Chinese sprinter would be a big deal.  I loved sports as a kid, but of all of the heroes of Ohio Sports at the time Bernie Kosar, Mark Price, and countless baseball players whose names now escape me - none of them were Asian, looked like me, or my father, or my paternal relatives.  I think it’s hard with institutions, like pro sports, that seem so important, to feel like you don’t really have a place in this world.  This is connected to ideas of masculinity too and a global event like the Olympics and the things that people invest in it make me think about the possibility of a  globalized masculine ideal.  To be sure there are many talented, respected, championed Asian athletes.  However, none come to mind that rise to the top in the contests that seem to define a certain ideal of manhood - absolute strength and speed.

For a long time I’ve wanted to interview my friends who are Asian about their experience, because it’s something that doesn’t seem to have much space to be discussed otherwise.  I’ve only gotten to interview one friend so far, and the thing that surprised me the most when he spoke about his experience of being Asian in a small Indiana town was that what defined his sense of difference was size.  He was just smaller than most of his other male peers.  In retrospect, this was important to me too.  One way of being a boy, one centered around strength and power and physical presence just felt closed to me.  This is probably for the best, and I should feel glad that I managed to find things that gave me attention, that garnered respect, that made me feel like an expert, chances to lead or make decisions, all the subconscious expectations that are important to many people, but that I have always felt were tied to maleness.  I can still remember that sinking feeling though, of surveying the territory and hearing the hum of voices insisting, “this is not for you.”

The book group I’m facilitating at the county jail met again this past week, interrupting an Uno game going on in the common area of the cell block.  I had just played a game of Uno that afternoon, sprawled out across a post-picnic blanket on a grassy patch just above the lake.  Kids splashed below in the warm water, teenage girls lounged allofly in inflatable furniture, and in the distance, people careened back and forth across the wake of motorboats.  This is one of the things that is the most difficult about going into the jail - things that are completely familiar to me, like the Uno game, in a context that is completely different to my everyday reality.  Actually going into the jail has made me realize the boundary between solidarity and being in the same boat.  I think everything that I’ve encountered about jails and prisons firmly establish where you stand.  You are a guard, you are incarcerated, you are incarcerated and in the “therepeutic” block, you are in solitary, you are in the general population, you are a family member or friend here for visiting hours, you are a volunteer.  The roles, the mobility associated with each, and the expectations of each group by the others seem hard and rigid, ruts torn deeper and deeper with all the inertia of the prison industrial complex.  I want to just think that I’m just down, but even going in with the interest of supporting incarcerated folks is mediated by the fact, told bluntly by the corrections officer who did the volunteer training, that my ability to go in is largely based on the realization that programming in the jail tends to placate the incarcerated population there.

The reading group happens in the block and has a variable number of participants.  This is affected by what people have going on at the moment and the fact that people are constantly coming in and out of the jail, coming from a DOC facility for court or returning to a DOC facility after court.  This week, only 4 folks sat down at the table, with only 1 of them having read the book to be discussed.  The book might have been part of the problem.  A few weeks ago we had decided to read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, a travel account of two middle-aged men who decide to hike part of the Appalachian Trail.  It was funny enough, and met the criteria that was established by those initially interested in the group, of having a subject that seemed to be far, far from the reality of incarceration and didn’t have the self-help twelve-steppy overtones that mark some of the other programming they participate in.  Still, a few folks expressed that they couldn’t get into the book.  My favorite response to the book that I heard was one word - “quitters”, as the protagonists seemed to spend as many nights sleeping in hotels and eating at diners as they did in the woods.  As I read through the book myself, I was a little worried that the book centered on this activity that represented an idleness and mobility; to spend weeks just hiking without worrying about jobs, families, or the things that a lot of the things that people in the jail talk to me about as concerns; that it would seem just insensitive.  Still, it’s unfair and just not true to make assumptions about people’s situations or their reactions in the context of their lives.

So what is my place here in the jail?  Reading, for all the reasons that anyone loves it, with the additional weight of it being an activity that can happen, relatively unhindered, even within the constraints of incarceration, seems to be an important part of people’s lives at the jail.  People talk about the books that they read, and pass them around.  I remember a conversation starting with “Remember that Marilyn Manson biography …”, the book having apparenly made its rounds through the block.  There’s no question that books are important to people in jail.  Having someone come in to facilitate a discussion group about books seems of more questionable value. For the men in the cell block where the programming happens, their days are filled with different groups, many of them focussed around rehabilitation, I think that one more structured activity that involves a group and a discussion just doesn’t seem that appealing.  Volunteering in the jail, there seems to be such an impasse between what corrections officials and non-profits think people who are incacerated need and what people who are incarcerated say they need.  I think that more than anything, people need to not be incarcerated, because dealing with all the other things in life become frustratingly cumbersome to impossible.  Beyond that I think the concerns of incarcerated people are the same as a lot of people that I know, obviously with varying degrees of severity: economic security, a safe, comfortable place to live, help sorting out relationships and family.  Those are such large, ambiguous things, but it’s the way I can most accurately express it.

I like going into the jail because it has made me have to reevaluate how I think about other people and about prison issues as “issues”.  But, even though I feel like I’m getting something out of my volunteer work, the exchange doesn’t exactly seem equal.  One of the men interested in the reading group said he would talk to others in the block to guage the actual interest and to get some input about what format would be best.  We talked about two things that would be an improvement - meeting once a month instead of biweekly and reading shorter works of fiction.  One thing that seems like something that I can really offer is just giving people access to books.  The Monroe County Public Library has a sweet jail library program, but the men I work with said that while they used to get to go to the library once every two weeks, they now can only go once every 4 or 5 weeks.

I’ve also sporadically tutoring math in the jail, and had been working with someone who just passed his GED exams.  Working in this capacity seems like I can offer people something of myself that seems more useful, but it’s still hard.  The person who just passed his GED said that one of the reasons he wanted to get his GED was so he could go into the armed forces when he was released.  I don’t want to see anyone join the armed forces, but I’m afraid that, facing the realities of the current economy, and the additional challenges that someone with a criminal record faces getting a job, the options are limited.  It’s so frustrating that I, and the things I believe in, can’t offer an alternative.  This makes me feel like I’m not in a position to do what people really need.  I can give people books, or some tricks to solving math problems, but I can’t give people jobs or build houses.  It makes me feel like I’m not doing the right thing. Everyone, and I mean everyone everyone and not just incarceration people, need inspiration and tools, to be sure, but it seems really narrow sighted to think that they’re enough.

This is old news to a lot of folks, but new and powerful to me.

Search for text in files and move matching files

$ grep --files-with-matches --null foo * | xargs --null -I xxx mv xxx dir_for_foos/

The above command searches for the string foo in all files in the current subdirectory.  It then moves each file to a specified directory.

Read a list of files from a text file and move those files somewhere

$ xargs -a ok.txt  -I xxx mv xxx /var/lib/accounting/joblogs/parsed

Working a lot with computers, acronyms have become second nature - lately it’s been SIP and DID and PBX and a slew of other ones.  Somehow though, I’m surprised when I realize that they don’t just exist in the realm of computer technology.  I’m more surprised when, in these other contexts, they no longer seem like par for the course, this arcane language that one can take pride in navigating, but instead a frustrating impediment, a needlessly oblique interface to tasks that should be simple and painless for everyone.

Getting healthcare for the first time on my own and not through school or family health insurance and getting it through the state subsidized Healthy Indiana Plan has introduced me to an entirely new set of acronyms.  A primary medical provider, that is a family doctor, is a PMP, and your recipient ID number is a RID.  And while cold, technical terms for the participants in a network are fine when we’re talking about computers, when I think about it, it’s a little uncomfortable being reduced to a “recipient”.  Even without the acronyms, the language to describe getting healthcare quickly becomes unintuitive.

After having to change my doctor, or should I say PMP, twice because both my assigned doctor and one I picked from a list of doctors with an “active” status in the MDWise system were not accepting new patients, I ended up just calling most of the doctors on the list provided by MDWise and asking if they were accepting new patients.  It was hard to figure out what to say.  I tried using the PMP term, since that is what was used on the MDWise website, but it just seemed to confuse the seceretaries.  More confusing was when I asked if any doctors in their office were accepting patients.  Most of the doctors that are available through the HIP, with MDWise, in Bloomington are part of a large organization called Internal Medical Associates (IMA) that seems to have around 5 locations and, at least according to their on-hold message, around 60 physicians.

So, it was difficult to figure out which doctors were connected with which location and which phone number corresponded to the office of which doctor.  When I was told that a particular set of doctors wasn’t accepting patients, I was often transferred to another location without really knowing where my call was going.  One location asked me if I had to see a doctor, or if a nurse practitioner (a nurse with at least a master’s degree in nursing) would be okay.  I said either and was able to schedule an appointment with a nurse practitioner  only to then find out from MDWise that only appointments with doctors are covered.

Eventually, I found a doctor who was accepting patients, though not until September, and was able to schedule a physical.  I called MDWise and switched to this doctor and was told I would receive a new insurance card in the mail.  When I told the person on the phone that I had never received my original card, she said that there had been some delays, but that I should expect my new card shortly.  This whole process made me feel happy that I have a job that is flexible enough that I can take the time to make a bunch of phone calls during business hours.  It also made me hope that I will never have to fully master all the acronyms associated with getting healthcare in the U.S., particularly state provided healthcare.  It seems that those who have finally figured out how to navigate the system, to whom the acronyms are second nature, have done so only after a dire struggle to get themselves or their loved ones the care that they need.  I hope that I can stay healthy enough that the frustrations of figuring out how to get health care are an occasional occurence and not a constant reality.  Still, it is important to remember that people already facing the challenges of a state of health that requires more consistent care shouldn’t have to have the additional burden of wading through a bog of acronyms, redirected phone calls, and confusing or unknown information.  I can better understand why some people work jobs just for healthcare.  The idea of being able to get the care you want, when you need it, and to be treated with respect and dignity as you work through the process of that care now seems so amazing, almost luxurious.

I don’t think quality health care should be a luxury.  Perhaps I am naive enough about the logistics of providing health care to expect that everyone could have personal attention, respect, and advocacy for working out problems or questions, but I feel strongly that this should at least be the goal, the benchmark by which the heated issue of healthcare is measured.  I don’t think this is the case right now.  A friend recently made the observation, correctly I think, that the Healthy Indiana Plan is, in fact, a rather conservative proposal.  It seems designed, with it’s coverage of preventative medicine, to reduce the costs of the state from uninsured people using the emergency room and not being able to pay for it.  While it’s certainly true that using the emergency room as one’s primary medical care is not in the best interest of the patient either, my experience with the Healthy Indiana Plan suggests an ultimate goal of cost reduction and not of a positive and healthy experience for the patient.

I’ll continue to write here about my experience with healthcare, with the hope that others in Indiana can share their experiences and together we can identify problems and propose solutions to the state’s healthcare approach. Perhaps we can help share ways that we’ve been able to better navigate the system.  Finally, I want to express the way in which the idea of healthcare has become real for me and not just a topic of presidential debates or news stories.

WHAT IS “THURSDAY’S IN BLACK?”

Thursday’s in Black is an international event. It began as a grassroots response to rape and violence against women in Argentina in early 1970’s. During that time in Argentina, women were being raped, murdered, and disappearing in alarming numbers. In, response local feminist organizers begin organizing “Thursday’s in Black” to raise awareness about the violence that women faced, and to put pressure on governmental officials to do more to stop the violence.

Since those beginnings, Thursday’s in Black has been taken up by communities in Bosnia, Israel, the Sudan, New Zealand and throughout Europe. It has more recently begun happening in the United States, mostly on college campuses. Indiana University students initiated the campaign on this campus for the first time in April 2004.

Thursday’s in Black is always locally organized. There is no international, national, or even state-wide effort to create or build on Thursday’s in Black. In this way local communities create their own Thursday’s in Black in a way that makes the most sense for them and which addresses the specific issues faced by their own community.

At IU, RAISE (Raising Awareness of Interactions in Sexual Encounters) is the student organization at the forefront of sexual assault awareness and prevention initiatives on campus. In addition to training volunteers as peer presenters for the “He Said, She Said” interactive workshop, RAISE also has a men’s program called “No Excuse” and looks for campus education and organizing opportunities around these issues. We believe that the solution to rape and violence against women lies within the culture of campus and the performance of masculinity.

RAISE works in partnership with Middleway House (the local women’s  shelter and rape crisis line) and other community-based groups. Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October) and Sexual Assault Awareness Month (April) are two key campaigns within this community-wide education and organizing effort. Thursday’s in Black is but one of the efforts that we organize during April.

RAISE and Middleway House invite you to participate in Thursday’s in Black in ways that make the most sense for you. We have developed this organizing packet to assist you in raising awareness about the issues, but there are plenty of other  things you can do. You can also contact us to find out about the other events and programs happening during April or October. You can invite one of our peer educators to come speak to your group, club, floor, house or class about the issues and/or about how you can be part of the solution. You can become a volunteer in RAISE yourself. You can  organize a vigil in your neighborhood in honor of the victims of sexual assault or domestic violence. You can organize an ongoing discussion group about the issues and explore how your community is affected (RAISE volunteers can also assist you in organizing this effort or providing speakers or facilitators).

Sexual Assault and domestic violence has an impact on all parts of our campus and community and every person can be part of the solution. Demand an end to Rape and Violence!!! Thank-you for taking a part and we look forward to working with you.

For More information, Contact:
RAISE
Office of Women’s Affairs
Memorial Hall East
RAISE@indiana.edu