Sheesh. How do you defend restraint techniques that result in the deaths of two teenagers? Why wasn't the story all over the news?I guess they figured that our society doesn't need those kinds of teenagers anyway, so their lives are of less consequence.
My kid had to be restrained a few times, but her former elementary had strict rules about it, and they were pretty civil with her as far as restraint goes. That doesn't mean she wasn't traumatized. The whole school experience was traumatic enough for her without four adults crowding around her, gripping her arms and telling her to calm down. Once she got under the principal's desk, she felt much better, and they let her stay there until I could come. I always knew when it happened.
I have an acquaintance who's non-verbal son came home from school with a bruise on his chest when he was about 5. His behavior had deteriorated in dramatic ways after he began public school. One day the principal called his mother in to explain to her that the special ed teacher had hit her son so hard on the back of his head that his chin had bruised his chest. His mother believes that this kind of abuse had gone on for a while, but because her son couldn't say anything, nobody knew. She homeschools now.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
My New Music Blog
Okay, my new music blog is up. It's called The Music Chamber. I've written my first post to introduce you to it, and today I'm going to make sure to personally invite everybody I can think of. It's an audience participation blog...all about the comments...so you can't be Mr. Lurkey. You can be MRlurkey23 if you'd like, though.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Awake
There is a reason a body is attached to my head, and I'm just beginning to figure it out.
I seem to be coming out of a long fog. For the past couple of months, I would say that I have not been "present". But the way things are going lately it seems like that I may have been cocooning. I didn't feel depressed. I felt like a thousand dreams and fantasies were floating about in my head non-stop, while I tried to engage myself in housework and homeschooling. I wanted to be somewhere else mentally. That's my default setting. I've walked into a few doors in my life. I wasn't clumsy, just looking for a higher plane and forgetting the actual one in front of me.
Now I'm singing, writing, drawing, getting to the gym and starting up a new music related blog. I've changed my reading material and can happily say I really don't know much about day to day politics, except that Mitt Romney makes me think of a character from a Hanna Barbera Cartoon. I've stopped trying to know everything, and now I'm actually doing stuff. On top of that, the housework is done, the food is ready. I went to the store at 6am this morning just to get a head start! What is very strange about this change of events is that I'm not rushing around manically to be everywhere at once and get everything done, and yet my closet is organized for the first time in years.
My dreams have been very strange lately. In one of them, I met a lady who had a set of sextuplets, and a set of octuplets. She also had many cats. She wanted me to babysit her tiniest, sickly baby. So I carried her with me through the dream, while I walked around the house I grew up in.
Last night I dreamed I was outside in a field with my kids. Again there were many cats. All running around a rabbit hutch. Inside the hutch was a rabbit giving birth. It had two babies while we watched.
My inner Joseph says this will be a productive year. I'll let you know if I dream of any starving cattle.
I seem to be coming out of a long fog. For the past couple of months, I would say that I have not been "present". But the way things are going lately it seems like that I may have been cocooning. I didn't feel depressed. I felt like a thousand dreams and fantasies were floating about in my head non-stop, while I tried to engage myself in housework and homeschooling. I wanted to be somewhere else mentally. That's my default setting. I've walked into a few doors in my life. I wasn't clumsy, just looking for a higher plane and forgetting the actual one in front of me.
Now I'm singing, writing, drawing, getting to the gym and starting up a new music related blog. I've changed my reading material and can happily say I really don't know much about day to day politics, except that Mitt Romney makes me think of a character from a Hanna Barbera Cartoon. I've stopped trying to know everything, and now I'm actually doing stuff. On top of that, the housework is done, the food is ready. I went to the store at 6am this morning just to get a head start! What is very strange about this change of events is that I'm not rushing around manically to be everywhere at once and get everything done, and yet my closet is organized for the first time in years.
My dreams have been very strange lately. In one of them, I met a lady who had a set of sextuplets, and a set of octuplets. She also had many cats. She wanted me to babysit her tiniest, sickly baby. So I carried her with me through the dream, while I walked around the house I grew up in.
Last night I dreamed I was outside in a field with my kids. Again there were many cats. All running around a rabbit hutch. Inside the hutch was a rabbit giving birth. It had two babies while we watched.
My inner Joseph says this will be a productive year. I'll let you know if I dream of any starving cattle.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
The VERY Last Dance With Mary Jane
As my love would say, "There are just some things you can't un-see." He noticed the camera just about the time we'd used up the memory. Things got really "good" at that point too. Oh well. Here's a taste.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Did I Write that?
Got up this morning at 4 am with a song in my head. This is one of the rare occasions that I just get up and write it. I liked it very much and have been singing it all day. Now I'm a bit worried that it's actually an Allison Krauss song. Oh well. It's happened before, with pretty good results. So sue me.
Update: Hubby says he doesn't know why I ever thought it sounded like an Allison Krauss song, and that it sounds like a Michele song. Also, it's been 12 years since I've written anything. At this rate, I'll have a CD in 120 years. Stick around okay?
Update: Hubby says he doesn't know why I ever thought it sounded like an Allison Krauss song, and that it sounds like a Michele song. Also, it's been 12 years since I've written anything. At this rate, I'll have a CD in 120 years. Stick around okay?
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Gitcher Geetars...
As many of you know, I plays me a little music. I used to play more back in the old days before kids and hubby and homeschooling etc. When I was in college there was an open mic that I frequented on Tuesday nights at a little bar near my apartment. I was a regular, and it seemed I wrote a new song a week and got up there and sang it. I usually sang it well, I can't say much for my guitar playing though, but I had to have backup, so I did the best I could with what little guitar talent I had. They called me "Bottom of the Bucket Newton" because the host would draw names out of a bucket to order the performers, and I was almost always chosen last. Usually the morose heroin addict with his battered notebook full of disturbing poetry was at the top of the list. He usually traded places with me, so that I could go on early. Most people were leaving as he was bloviating at 2 am. I guess he didn't mind, he wasn't really there at that point either.
After a couple of years I stopped playing open mics. Many things came together at that point to send me in a different direction. The first was meeting Hubby. I would take him with me to the open mics and he would sit there with a matchbook in his hand lighting one match after the other, watching them flame up and burn down. I thought he was trying to be all rebel-without- a-cause for me. You know, bad boy, leather jacket, fire.... Really it was a thing with crowds. Hubby doesn't like them, and he bore it in silence for me. He also had to deal with an ex-boyfriend of mine who would sit at the bar and glare at him. Not that Hubby couldn't kick his butt, it's just that the ex-boyfriend usually started crying at some point. That was just too weird. So he threw me over his shoulder and dragged me out of it all. It was all okay with me, cause he was sexy and stuff.
Funny little side story:
When I was still jailbait, and Hubby didn't know me, I used to sing in a band. We played a local club called Planet Earth fairly frequently. The bands would play upstairs, afterwards there was usually an industrial dance night downstairs. One night we were playing and began to smell smoke. We lost our crowd, but were never told to evacuate. Later we found out some moron downstairs had set a couch on fire behind the building.
Many years later, when Hubby and I were still new, he told me about his Planet Earth days. He used to frequent the Industrial Dance nights. He could put up with a crowd if he was stomping and pushing people around for fun. He also had a thing for girls who lined their eyes thickly and wore a lot of black. He told me one night, before the "music" started pumping, he was hanging out with one of those goth-girls in the back stairwell. Maybe the smell of leather and cloves made him anxious, because he was lighting matches and throwing them out the window unaware of the highly flammable couch below. Good thing I didn't meet him then. Not because I was supposed to think he was a moron, but because I was just 16 he was really cute.
Yes, it's a long story, but it's prelude to something else. I have this crazy idea about starting another blog (great way to treat an internet addiction, huh?). It will be a Tuesday Night Open Mic where folks can submit their own audio or video files for me to post. It needs a name first, then I can take some time and figure out the details.
So why Tuesday nights? Well that's just selfish I guess. I used to play the open mics on Tuesdays. Oh, and TV sucks on Tuesday night.
There were a lot of things I didn't like about open mics. Many would agree with me that you had to sit through a lot of crap before someone would get on and actually entertain you. That wouldn't happen in the blog world. I think people would spend their time adjusting the mic before they press record, and if you happen to dislike what they were playing, there's a little button you can push to shut them up. Then you can go to your own free bar, pour yourself a Sam Adams and fire up the next one.
Let me add something here. There are also a great deal of unexpected little gems at open mics. I remember Mindy Smith played at the one I did. She was very shy and unassuming and she wouldn't play her guitar. She used it as a cane. The first time I saw her, I thought, "oh no, here comes another asthmatic squeaker to sing a Janis Ian song." Then she started to sing. She did sing cautiously and quietly, but that was fine because the crowd had a good dose of the shut-up as soon as she had her first word out. That was probably another reason I stopped playing the open mics. I didn't want to be anywhere near her on the list.
Okay, my open mic blog needs a name. If you have any name ideas or suggestions on how to put the thing together, just leave them in the comments section.
After a couple of years I stopped playing open mics. Many things came together at that point to send me in a different direction. The first was meeting Hubby. I would take him with me to the open mics and he would sit there with a matchbook in his hand lighting one match after the other, watching them flame up and burn down. I thought he was trying to be all rebel-without- a-cause for me. You know, bad boy, leather jacket, fire.... Really it was a thing with crowds. Hubby doesn't like them, and he bore it in silence for me. He also had to deal with an ex-boyfriend of mine who would sit at the bar and glare at him. Not that Hubby couldn't kick his butt, it's just that the ex-boyfriend usually started crying at some point. That was just too weird. So he threw me over his shoulder and dragged me out of it all. It was all okay with me, cause he was sexy and stuff.
Funny little side story:
When I was still jailbait, and Hubby didn't know me, I used to sing in a band. We played a local club called Planet Earth fairly frequently. The bands would play upstairs, afterwards there was usually an industrial dance night downstairs. One night we were playing and began to smell smoke. We lost our crowd, but were never told to evacuate. Later we found out some moron downstairs had set a couch on fire behind the building.
Many years later, when Hubby and I were still new, he told me about his Planet Earth days. He used to frequent the Industrial Dance nights. He could put up with a crowd if he was stomping and pushing people around for fun. He also had a thing for girls who lined their eyes thickly and wore a lot of black. He told me one night, before the "music" started pumping, he was hanging out with one of those goth-girls in the back stairwell. Maybe the smell of leather and cloves made him anxious, because he was lighting matches and throwing them out the window unaware of the highly flammable couch below. Good thing I didn't meet him then. Not because I was supposed to think he was a moron, but because I was just 16 he was really cute.
Yes, it's a long story, but it's prelude to something else. I have this crazy idea about starting another blog (great way to treat an internet addiction, huh?). It will be a Tuesday Night Open Mic where folks can submit their own audio or video files for me to post. It needs a name first, then I can take some time and figure out the details.
So why Tuesday nights? Well that's just selfish I guess. I used to play the open mics on Tuesdays. Oh, and TV sucks on Tuesday night.
There were a lot of things I didn't like about open mics. Many would agree with me that you had to sit through a lot of crap before someone would get on and actually entertain you. That wouldn't happen in the blog world. I think people would spend their time adjusting the mic before they press record, and if you happen to dislike what they were playing, there's a little button you can push to shut them up. Then you can go to your own free bar, pour yourself a Sam Adams and fire up the next one.
Let me add something here. There are also a great deal of unexpected little gems at open mics. I remember Mindy Smith played at the one I did. She was very shy and unassuming and she wouldn't play her guitar. She used it as a cane. The first time I saw her, I thought, "oh no, here comes another asthmatic squeaker to sing a Janis Ian song." Then she started to sing. She did sing cautiously and quietly, but that was fine because the crowd had a good dose of the shut-up as soon as she had her first word out. That was probably another reason I stopped playing the open mics. I didn't want to be anywhere near her on the list.
Okay, my open mic blog needs a name. If you have any name ideas or suggestions on how to put the thing together, just leave them in the comments section.
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