12

I'm not quite sure how to start this, or what exactly I'm trying to say. (the teacher in me is always paying attention to the meta-entry, thinking about hooks and sentence fluency and what I ask the kids to do - read like a writer, write like a reader - but the writer in me can't always get there, and I've decided it's more important right now to just write, giving myself permission to write badly - as evidenced by the last few entries - and not hold myself to the standards of articulateness I'd like to achieve, especially in this non-revised form of publishing) (ok, that was really an aside that matters only to me, but hey, that's what you get) (I'm too much in the habit of thinking aloud to model the process at school, now I can't keep it in) (and now I really don't know what I was going to say - it's like at the movies, when there are so many previews that I forget what I came to see. Not that I've been to the movies recently.)

Right. So. Anyway. Egypt! That's where I was going. Not actually, though I'd like to someday. Everything that's happening there (and Tunisia and other places) reinforces the notion that I live in a bubble. I see friends posting about it on Facebook, but my updates are about food or the baby. I read columns about it, but write about tv shows and fermenting things. Things like honey wine, not revolutions. Which get fomented, not fermented. Dinner table topics are about family vacations and yoga classes, not world politics. Of course that's not always true, but on the whole, it's far too easy to ignore what's happening, even when it's shaking the world.

I make a point of humanizing current events whenever possible at school, showing the kids that these are real people with real lives. Yet it doesn't seem to stick in my own life - and I'm an educated, upper-middle class white girl who spent half her childhood in Africa and Asia. It's no wonder the average American doesn't have a clue.

I've struggled with this for a while. -- oh crap -- I got interrupted and thought I'd get back to this today, but now it's too late, so I'll just leave the notes I left myself and try to revisit this later --

(generally know the headlines, but not the details. have opinions that come from reactions and the daily show, not carefully formed. helping those less fortunate. accident of birth. place and time. altruism/selfishness/guilt. difficulty of true empathy, really being able to imagine living that life. not always a bad thing - tribes in amazon as well as garbage pickers in philippines. desire to experience it, sometimes. travel changes perspective. to what end? meaning of life? waxing overly philosophical?)