lumière des étoiles

Who Loves The Sun?
2004-06-10 11:11 a.m.

"Why does it always rain on me? Is it because I lied when I was 17?"

That's a line from the band Travis. It's self-pitying and egotistical, but the speaker seems to have that enviable quality of heightened self-awareness and a curiosity about karma and providence. How does the world work, exactly? I like it when I realize that other people want to know that too.

I managed to escape this melancholy overhang. Yesterday felt good, like Santorini or Capri. It was hot here - too hot to do anything, hot like it is where siestas to escape the afternoon heat are part of habitual living. There's something that makes sense to me about that way of life, something that is healthy, sane and beautiful about shops and banks and schools closing down for two hours each afternoon so people can have proper lunches and see each other for a while.

Why can't we love life that much here? Why do we have to have such disdain for it, and such disregard for each other? Driving here is getting hard. The other day in the shoprite parking lot, this woman leaned out her car window and yelled "you asshole!" to an old man in a jeep in front of her. I guess he wasn't rounding the parking lot corners fast enough. I'd like to forget that her two, under-ten-years-old children where in the car with her. Like mother, like son and daughter. So the cycle will continue well into my children’s' lives.

Like I tell my students not to push themselves to do, I don't think I'm looking for any ultimate answers to impossible and rhetorical questions about life this month. I wish I could understand better why I am still feeling so quiet and introspective, so philosophical and frustrated at times.

Maybe the mood is contagious. I've noticed that there's a sudden awareness among people I know, everyone from my students to my own friends, about the extreme imbalance of wealth in this country. An awareness, and an anger. That statistic - that 2% of the country owns all the wealth, or something - has been eternally present, but suddenly the thing to discuss seems to be the ridiculous tax laws that allow billionaire corporations or people to pay less taxes than we do, or how some people struggle for a year to make what others do in three days.

I'm not talking about good jobs, bad jobs, low- and high- skilled workers, either. I'm talking about priorities, and where our culture seems to put them.

For example, it's really pathetic that two full time teachers (such as yours truly and her husband) cannot really afford to buy a home in the communities which surround their places of employment. Where are middle income, civil servants, which I suppose we are, technically, supposed to live? Sixty miles south or west, where it's cheaper? Next door to the drug infested tenement buildings in the city?

In 1974, my parents could afford to put a down payment on a three bedroom, two bathroom house with tons of property with ONE public school teacher's salary. Ok, so my dad played music on the side to supplement his income, and my mom did substitute teaching some times when we were at daycare. But it's not as if Steve and I could do something comparable now and afford to live. If he quit and did part time work to mostly stay home with our hypothetical children a few years from now, we'd be on food stamps and gov't cheese before you know it.

I know the real-estate market boomed and I have some basic understanding of how inflation works, but there is a growing disparity between what people are being paid and what it costs to live in this area. It used to be somewhat more realistic, and goals like surviving used to seem more attainable. This disparity is growing to ridiculous proportions, and I'm left wondering how most families are able to survive month to month. If gas continues to rise and stays at this ridiculous price, but people's salaries don't rise to match (cause they hardly ever do without some kind of dramatic fight), what will people do? If milk continues to rise, health insurance, houses, etc.; what then?

About those priorities: My students told me that the actors in Shrek 2 were paid almost ten million dollars each for work that took about eighteen hours to complete. Ten million dollars for eighteen hours of work? So they have a skill. But I do too. So do you. In fact, sometimes people give me reassuring pats on the back, and tell me that despite my frustration, the work I do and the skill I have is very important to society. But three lifetimes of Steve and I working at our "important" jobs still wouldn't bank that much money.

So while some of us have gold-plated toilet seats, sixteen cars, and can send the private jet off from new york to seattle just because we feel like having a particular cup of coffee, others, who are college-educated and have "good", "important" jobs have to put back that cereal at the supermarket if they want to have enough to pay the gas bill this month.

Yeah, that seems about right.

I'm really not interested in hearing any gross rationalization about profitable market value or something else cold and clinical that reduces people to $$ and interchangeable goods. Save it.

That felt good.