Month: May 2002

Here’s my story in Monday’s paper, on how Texans are more edumacated now than ever before. Not sure where it is in the print edition, since I’m still in Louisiana.
This has been a stressful weekend. The low point came at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning. That’s when I scrubbed at the small puddles of my grandmother‘s blood on the bathroom floor, a frenzied attempt to clean them before they’d stain.
My grandmother and I have oddly complementary sleep schedules when I’m visiting here. I usually stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., watching the wonders of late-night TV. She goes to sleep around 7 p.m. or so, then wakes up at 2 or 3. We often overlap by a few minutes.
Last night, I’d gone to bed a bit earlier than normal, around 1:30 or so. My grandmother got up about an hour later to do some laundry. But after starting the washer, she lost her balance, fell hard against the dryer, and screamed.
I dashed in (my bedroom’s two feet from the washer and dryer) and saw her bleeding heavily. Three big chunks of skin, each between one and two square inches, had been sliced off her left arm and were dangling by a thread of flesh. Just the outermost layer, nothing deep, but there was blood everywhere — on the dryer, on the floor, on her nightgown.
You see, my grandmother really frightened me this weekend. She was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis about two years ago. In essence, her lungs are slowly turning to scar tissue, which will kill her. For a while we didn’t think she had much time left; the phrase “a couple of months” was bandied about. But with the help of pill after pill after pill — she’s on more than 20 medications — she’s hung in there. She’s changed quite a bit: she’s slower, the pills have added about 100 pounds. But she’s hung in there.
I drove into Rayne around 2 a.m. Friday night, and when I walked in, she was shaking. I’d never seen her shaking, except for that time she visited my in Toledo in the winter. She looked weaker than I’d ever seen her; she had difficulty making sense, and understanding what I was saying. After she’d been sent to the hospital a couple of days ago for a lung infection, she’d been put on two new medications. They seemed to be screwing with her head.
It scared me. I come down to Rayne about every five or six weekends, and I’m always conscious of the fact each time might be my last seeing her. But Friday night, it really seemed possible.
Saturday was much better. She seemed like her old self, yammering away about Rayne politics and cracking jokes. But then she fell against the dryer. Her sense of balance — never strong, since we Bentons are by nature a clumsy people — is being driven more off than normal by the new medicine. Her skin has become freakishly dry, thanks to the meds, and fragile. Her arms have been more black and blue than flesh-colored for the last year because she bruises so easily. (The nurse who comes to visit her every so often always asks if she’s being beaten. She’s not, unless beatings by medication count.) When she fell last night, her arms didn’t even hit anything sharp, just the rounded edge of the dryer, but that was enough to shave off skin.
I pulled her into the bathroom, where we washed it off with peroxide and water, put some sort of cream she called for on it, cut away two flaps of skin with scissors (she insisted), and bandaged it up as best we could. After a while of sitting down, the adrenaline stopped pumping quite so violently, and we went back to sleep. Well, in my case, back to bed. Not quite back to sleep.
Today, she was back in good form. Cranky, but the kind of cranky that’s been part of her healthy personality for decades. But I keep worrying. I leave town Monday afternoon and won’t be back for a month. I hope she’s here waiting for me then.

Bravo, Chanda. (Chanda and I went to school together. Our lockers were next to each other in 7th grade. I even have an old Boorstin book of hers somewhere in my apartment. I don’t remember stealing it, but I suppose I must have at some point.)
Anyway, Chanda has had a promising career (she was once ranked #6 in the world) sidetracked by repeated injuries, so it’s good to see her back in a final, even if she lost to Seles.
I’m in Rayne for the holiday weekend, gorging on po-boys and rice dressing. Many observations, some of which may make it here in the near future.

I suppose those who start out highest have the farthest to fall. Manute Bol, the 7’7″ Sudan man who remains the tallest player in the history of the NBA, was an endearing freak show during his career. (Woody Allen: “Manute Bol is so skinny, to save money on road trips they just fax him from city to city.”)
But once his career ended, he ended up in the middle of Sudan’s civil war (read that last link if you read no others here), held prisoner by government forces. Last year, he managed to escape to Egypt, and finally a few months ago made it back to the U.S.. It’s an amazing story.
I suppose that’s why it’s so unspeakably sad to see Manute Bol, former millionaire, noble Dinka tribesman, freak of nature, reduced to Celebrity Boxing II to raise cash.

Sea Ray fans (and that should include anyone who’s gotten my May mix, since they’re Track 2): tune into DCN tonight at 9 pm. (CDT) for a live webcast for their show at Maxwell’s, opening for Remy Zero.

The long-time voice of Judaism at The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, has a crack piece on Jewish fear. Robert Siegel talked with Wieseltier about it on NPR Tuesday. (Robert Wright had a more press-centric take on some of the same issues. The American press always gets hit with allegations of bias on Israel vs. Palestinians, although the attacks are almost evenly split down the middle between those who think the press is too pro-Palestinian or too pro-Israeli.)
Speaking of Judaism and NPR, anybody else confused about the endless promotion they’re giving the Yiddish Radio Project? They’ve been hyping this 10-part series (!) every day for months. They promo it at least once an hour during All Things Considered and Morning Edition. I’m sure it’s great (I’ve just heard promos, not any of the actual pieces), but I’ve honestly never seen any form of media give this much promotion to anything they’ve ever done — not newspapers, not magazines, certainly not radio. While I’m sure NPR’s audience skews more Jewish than most media, I have a difficult time imagining there’s enough interest to merit that much hype.
Plus, the radio series actually has its own separate set of corporate sponsors, including (logically) Hebrew National. That always makes me leery.
Certainly I’ve got no problem with NPR having a corporate underwriter; to me, it’s just like a normal advertisement. But it bothers me when the money gets too close to the journalism — as in a corporation sponsoring a specific story. (For instance, I don’t like it that Marketplace, the fine radio business program, apparently has no problem letting companies pay for specific beats or areas of coverage. Phillips Petroleum sponsors their international business coverage, for example.) Imagine if a newspaper series ran with a little tag that said, “The Morning News’ education coverage is sponsored by Stanley Kaplan.”

Celebrity blogger Virginia Postrel is writing a regular column for D Magazine, our local city mag. (I had no idea until I saw her byline that she lives only a few blocks from me. Back when I was a hyperpolitical teenager, I used to read her libertarian magazine Reason.)
Her political blog ranks up there with my fave, Mickey Kaus’ newly Slate-d kausfiles, and Josh Marshall’s TPM as far as blogs-by-opinion-journalists go.
Anyway, her column on downtown this month (and especially her dead-on takedown of the McKinney Avenue Trolley last month) are refreshing counters to the typical mess of economic development pablum usually serve up. If you’re interested in urban design and how cities become more vital places, she’s a good read.
And if you’re not interested in urban design and how cities become more vital places, well, while you’re at the D Mag website, you can hear Mark Cuban threaten to “come and slice your fucking nuts off.”

The weather’s gorgeous, summer’s approaching, and it’s not yet 112 degrees outside — but just about every last person I know is stressed, depressed, cranky, or otherwise out of sorts. (Me included.) No idea why.
Hell, even the Internet feels tired.

A print columnist explains why he’s also a blogger. “As someone who gets paid to write, the idea of writing for free seemed counterintuitive at first. But in my experience, writing more has made me a better writer. Meanwhile, the blog lets me publish work that might otherwise go unwritten.”

Vocab Dept. (alert Gareth Branwyn!): Google shout-out, n. The gratuitous naming of an individual in a blog post in hopes that a popular search engine will pick it up and provide a search return where there was none before.
Sample usage: When I was in AP English in high school, our instructor (the superb Don DeWitt, who deserves a Google shout-out in this entry)…

Found while researching the independence movement in the New Zealand territory of Tokelau: www.nopantsland.tk. (No content there yet, but it’s been registered. Luckily, prime domain names like easynopantsland.tk, quicknopantsland.tk, and interactivenopantsland.tk are still available.)
It’s really a shame Tokelau probably won’t be with us much longer. And man, they had a rough couple of decades in the 1850s and 1860s.