Caterina.net

Soon after the Lance Armstrong doping scandals emerged last year, I was talking to friends about the prevalence of doping, and my shock. “How could it be true?” I asked. And my friends said, “Are you being willfully naïve? Doping isn’t optional, it is required! they informed me. Riders were kicked off teams for NOT doping. And it’s not just biking…” and a lecture on professional sports, and how they work, ensued. You can do a blood transfusion, and train while on drugs, then do another transfusion before the testing to clean up your blood. There are new, undetectable drugs.

Next they told me you could take Adderall and improve not only your basic school performance, but also your S.A.T. scores. Kids were opting out of studying, and the months-long, grueling Kaplan SAT prep courses and popping pills instead. One girl, now at an Ivy League college said:

“Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?”

Madeleine estimated that one-third of her classmates at her small school, most of whom she knew well, used stimulants without a prescription to boost their scholastic performance. Many students across the United States made similar estimates for their schools, all of them emphasizing that the drugs were used not to get high, but mostly by conscientious students to work harder and meet ever-rising academic expectations.”

“Steroids are now in the middle schools,” one of my interloctors said grimly. And even before middle school, parents are “redshirting” — putting 6-year-old kids in kindergarten to give them an advantage — they’ll be bigger, stronger, and more advanced than their peers, an advantage that appears to follow them throughout their lives, especially in sports.

If there is a national, secular religion in the United States it is the belief that America is the Land of Opportunity, that we are a Meritocracy, that any kid, no matter who they are, or where they come from, can work hard and move up in the world. That their effort matters. “You too can be the President,” every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country. Everything from doping to boob jobs speaks to the struggle to gain an advantage in a competitive world. But this is a rational response to a society where the winner takes all.

So how do we keep the dream alive? How do we make it a dream worth striving for? I am reminded of one of my most retweeted tweets: “Avoid a life of chasing prizes not worth winning.” You’ve been such amazing commenters, I’d love to hear your ideas.

• All that ukulele playing finally paid off when I went to the Ukulele Rebellion last weekend after my clay class at Sharon Arts Center. So good.
• I have some thinky blog posts coming, just haven’t had the time to write them down, they’re just in my head.
• At a YBCA event last night I learned about the work of Capacitor, a bay area dance-circus group, showing this crazy piece with four dancers in a kind of cage, but with the sides made of an amazing stretchy rubber, like if a net had a baby with a trampoline. It was quite something! Their underwater highlight reel is here, but not quite the amazingness of the stretchy cage piece.
• At the same event, I learned about Kote Ezawa’s work, another Bay Area artist who teaches at CCA, whose best known work is an animation of the verdict of the OJ Trial. Ezawa was born in Germany, came to San Francisco to attend the Art Institute, and decided to stay. I liked this: “At the Art Institute, I always asked the security guards for their opinions. Security guards in museums and art schools often have an incredible knowledge of, and affinity with, art because they spend so much time looking at it. The artist Robert Ryman is just one of many well-known artists who started out as a guard. The best person you can have a conversation about art with is ‘the passerby.’ I like when people happen upon art, in contrast to the dedicated art audience that is looking for art.”
  
• “It’s like, how much more black could this be? …and the answer is none. None more black.” — Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap
• I was astonished that no one at my office had heard of Ron Popeil. I was extolling his virtues as a product designer.

Another week and another weekend wind their way down the road, never to be seen again! And here I am blogging again.

• Do you know about shit? was the question Jessica was asked by her son, in one of the funniest notes ever left on Findery. It’s so charming it made my week. A duet, with the daughter…just read it.
• The Daily Ukulele has been my constant companion this week, which I ordered on Jill’s recommendation (as well as its sequel, the Leap Year edition). Thus far I’ve managed to master The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and Blue Bayou, which led to an afternoon of listening to Roy Orbison, as I’d forgotten the tune.
• I had a lot of Tune-yards playing on my headphones at work this week. Here is Bizness, though my favorite song is Gangsta. I like the Bizness video better. (I watched them both just now).

  I would welcome some new music recommendations! I was proud of having found Tune-yards…I have no recollection of how. Pitchfork? But my colleagues at work aren’t music recommenders, and none of my social music apps have come up with anything good recently.

• Following on last week’s conversations about a commercial-free childhood I somehow came across a book called Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets, which I read, and which would probably have been informative and novel to someone who watches a lot of TV, but I never have, so most of the things these families were saying (“I have so much more time! I now play the guitar, exercise, talk to my family!” “We average 48 minutes of meaningful conversation per day!”) and so on, were not new to me. It didn’t talk about screen time in general — video games computers and social networking. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading some parts of it, and learned that people take offense at people who are TV-less as they feel it is a judgment of them. I nodded at the part about how the people who are most adamant about the TV-less life turn out to be those, like me, who did not watch TV growing up, and know that not being familiar with Saturday Night Live won’t make you a pariah. If you’re interested in this book, I can send it to you. Email me your address! TV-watchers considering eliminating TV preferred.
• Kickstarter’s year in review is amazing. I missed a bunch of those awesome projects, but I participated in at least one! I am proud to be an investor (which is either bragging or Full Disclosure, you decide). I love Kickstarter!
• I am reading The Blue Poetry Book, a collection of children’s poems, because I can’t bear the amateurish poetry included in my daughter’s homeschool curriculum. There is a lot of Blake in here, and some serious, sinister poetry. For example, a medieval English ballad, The Demon Lover, which I’d known only as a folk song The House Carpenter, on Harry Smith’s Anthology. Kids love this kind of thing! I got sick of reading all these Going Shopping With Mommy type books, and got The Highwayman and Orpheus
  by Charles Mikolaycak, Aïda, Golem and other serious children’s books.
• Saturday Crafternoon, I finished my rug! And made a clay pot on Sunday, in a class with my sister.

Identity is what makes me who I am, as opposed to some other person. In the seventeenth century, English philosopher John Locke suggested a series of thought experiments that involved transplanting certain parts of the self, to find out what essentially defines us: Suppose that your next-door neighbor were in your body, and you were in hers. You suddenly had short blond hair, for example, and broad hips. Would you still be you? If so, then your body is not essential to your personal identity.
Now suppose that your characters were transposed. You took a lover and lied about it, or started going to church, neither of which is like you. Would you then be a different person? I don’t think so. You’d be the same person, acting in strange new ways.
But now suppose that your memories were transposed with your neighbor’s. You thought of your neighbor’s children as your own and remembered the day they were born and how that felt. They were asleep in maple beds that you remembered inheriting from your mother. At that point, I think, you would have become someone else.
So, to a certain extent, it’s your memories that make us who we are. For example, I am the person who remembers seeing a flock of white pelicans over Thompson Lake and the apple tree in the backyard of my house. And every time I notice something, every time something strikes me as important enough to store away in my memory, I add another piece to who I am. These memories and sense impressions of the landscape are the very substance of my self. In this way, I am – at the core of my being – made of the earth.

— from an interview with Kathleen Dean Moore.