In came my new student worker, and I caught her just as she was reaching for the carafe to pour into her travel mug – “hey, that’s old coffee from Friday that I haven’t had time to dump out yet.”

“Friday, you say?” she said, as she cautiously poured a little into her mug.

“Yes, it’s been sitting there all weekend,” I said, my eyes growing wider with horror as she held the swampy effluent to her lips and actually took a sip. “Whoa, hold on, I can make a new batch, it will just take me a couple of minutes!”

“Eh, don’t worry, I can make coffee for myself if I need to. I do this all the time. Hate wasting things. I’ll just heat it in the microwave.”

“We can, uh…we can water the plants outside with that water,” was my feeble suggestion. That seemed to get her to hesitate.

“Hm, well – don’t worry about me, I will make this decision for myself.” I backed away a little relieved, thinking I had dissuaded her from drinking the stale and frankly moldy smelling brew.

Forty minutes later, I realized I wasn’t hearing any coffee pot sounds or smelling any fresh grounds. I did, however, observe her headed to the break room, where the microwave is located.

No facebook or myspace, but this story from last year, another item from the Journal-World, came up:

On a serendipitous alternate route Monday morning, two Lawrence men happened upon a house fire where they helped lend a hand and gave their coats to the resident.

The men, Jack Proctor and Eli Woodman, happened to drive by a burning house, stopped and rescued someone trapped in the house. Proctor lent the man his coat, since it was a cold day and the fire victim was not properly clothed for the February chill. The fire victim, his family and the nurses at the hospital heralded the two as heroes.

A little over a year after the fire, the Good Samaritans would be convicted of detaining another man in his home at gunpoint, beating and robbing him.

Yowza. I guess a lot can happen in a year! One day you stumble upon a burning house and are the toast of the town, the next day things go so terribly that you wind up in prison for violent armed robbery. It is good to be reminded once in awhile just how terribly and madly complicated human beings can be.

“I’m fine, at work right now. How you doing.”

“Good, I – ”

“Are you going anywhere spring break?”

“No, mom, I know we talked about me visiting you in Houston but I have a lot of work to do over break.”

“Don’t go to Mexico! It too much violence now.”

“Uh, okay Mom. I actually wasn’t planning on going there anyways…”

“Got to go back to work. Love you!” *click*

When my brother-in-law arrived, he did most of the driving by default. Despite the fact that she is terrified of his driving (he’s a touch, um, aggressive behind the wheel, to put it charitably!) (Hi, M!), he is a man and therefore automatically better equipped to drive than little girly me. Ordinarily this would annoy my feminist sensibilities, but in this case I was MORE THAN HAPPY to have someone else be the target of the backseat driving. Luckily for M, she’s a little more reluctant to nag him openly; unluckily for my sister, Chiaroscuro, she then gets the brunt of it. A lane change or slight route deviation would cue clucking, sighing and bossy murmuring in Vietnamese from the rear of the car.

Cars aren’t the only things to terrify my mother. My mother had called M’s attention to some ants milling around the base of her house outside. So far as we know, no ants had actually made it inside, but seemed content in their little ant hill suburbs. She said she was worried about termites, so M looked at them and tried to assure her that these ants were indeed ants, and not termites. She nodded and said that she knew they were ants, but still seemed to obsess over them. She had purchased some heavy duty termite toxic death in a can, and wanted M’s corroboration with her planned ant genocide. M wondered what exactly her deal was with these ants, and again reassured her that these ants weren’t doing any harm as they were.

“I know they are ants, but I heard ants can turn into termites!”

One: ants cannot turn into termites, unless biology has failed me. Two: her house appears to be made out of brick and concrete, not anything that is good to eat for termites. Then again, if an ant really could turn into termite, what’s to stop that horrible creature from eating brick, then concrete, then eventually chow down into human brains? Houston ain’t just good eatin’ for people.

Who can trust a world, in which ants can morph into termites and traffic dustups can devolve into quick-draw duels? Though I do not understand my mother, at all, I really wonder what it must be like to be her and to be terrified of everyone and everything, every day**. One of the first few nights I was there, I was relieved to be in a nice warm climate and a not-freezing house! My room was a bit stuffy, so I decided to crack open the window.

“BROOP BROOP BROOP BROOP!” “BROOP BROOP BROOP BROOP!” After my initial shock I realized I’d made a mistake, and ran down towards the alarm system, where my mom and brother were both running back and forth like scared chickens. “Sorry mom, I just opened the window! Sorry!” The alarm system automatically notified the police, my mom had to explain to a grumpy dispatcher what had happened, and I apologized profusely. I guess my mom is worried about crime in the area, and sure, South Houston doesn’t have the best reputation. But…she can’t even crack a window, to enjoy the nice weather? (Of course she probably also thinks this behavior is dangerous).

She also has barred and locked gates blocking entry to the outside doors, in addition to deadbolts and two other locks. Now, as my friend Krissy can attest, I am also kind of paranoid about safety things (for instance it is totally not safe of Krissy to take photos of herself while driving. and I don’t care if I am an e-nag. Hey, it’s in my blood). However, the things I am paranoid about and that my mother is paranoid about do not intersect. Mom is paranoid about burglars breaking in and stealing her early 1990′s TV set with bunny ears, or her collection of pirated Chinese soap opera teleseries dubbed into Vietnamese. Whereas my sister and I are paranoid about, oh, fire safety and potential barrier to exits.

I actually think that fire may be the #1 safety concern in Houston, but one that has astonishingly failed to become incorporated into my mother’s long list of terrors. I spent New Year’s Eve both enchanted by the many impressive fireworks displays going off around our neighborhood, and horrified. I mean, our directly-next-door neighbor was shooting off shit like roman candles and things, while standing directly beneath a tree. My mom said she was too scared to sleep on New Year’s Eves in Houston, because the fireworks sound a lot like gunfire. This is a valid fear in trigger-happy Texas. What is less than valid, from my perspective, is the fear that people will try and burgle your home during the New Year celebrations. Why then, of all times? Perhaps robbers will figure that the Houston PD will be too distracted dealing with people who caught themselves on fire, to be bothered chasing after them?

I never figured out her logic behind that, and I may never figure out her logic behind anything, ever. I do wonder if maybe next visit, the family activity should involve baking a big cake laced with Xanax, lounging around, and enjoying each others’ company – without fear.

* – In looking up all those Houston road-rage-turned-into-shooting articles to link – um, maybe Mom’s a little justified in her terror!

** – I just realized I have these two separate category tags, “Family” and “Crazy.” Perhaps I should just merge these.

Me: I am thankful my boyfriend has one of those fancy phones that can take pictures, so that I can document this injustice.

Happy turkey day! Hope the wheeled denizens of your town are not total assholes!

Today, while sorting the recycling, I actually sat down and looked at the glossies. To my surprise, I found coupons for things that weren’t limited edition 9-11 twenty dollar bills (“commemorate this terrible tragedy by ordering today! Nine and eleven make twenty, get it?”) or fairy angel Precious Moments snow globes. Then I did what I have never done, and what I used to tease my old roommates for doing – I clipped some coupons.

But where to house the coupons? I almost clipped a coupon for a coupon organizer and decided that was too meta. I ended up finding a box lying around somewhere and wrote “coupons” on all four sides of it, so my roommates wouldn’t throw it out or throw pens in it or something, because that would be just too dire. Then I decided that the box needed jazzing up. So I lined the top with some extra wrapping paper left over from wedding presents. Like this:

At some point during the middle of this crafting, it occurred to me that this is something Dad would do. It even looks like his handwriting. Is this what year twenty-five has in store for me, morphing into a female version of my father? If I start hanging bugs in my yard, please do me a favor and call for help!

Enter White Owl, the latest addition. He’s a sixty-one year old Vietnam Veteran who apparently came to campus to study the effects of Agent Orange (apparently functioning as both researcher and subject). Previous to that, he used to hang out in Westport and dole out musical advice to all who would listen, before being driven out of Kansas City due to a house fire. Following the trajectory of crazies, White Owl took up ranting and raving on Wescoe Beach, the same venue that has hosted many a right-wing preacher. Except White Owl’s message isn’t about hating homosexuals and condemning liberals, Muslims, sorority girls, sexually active people, and higher education in general – he’s more about vague pledges to peace, love, and Jayhawks.

Oh yes, the Jayhawks – one thing that sets White Owl apart from any other garden variety aging hippie in Lawrence is his no. 1 fan status. Traditionally hippies don’t care about sports that don’t involve lobbing sandbags with your feet, or a drum circle. White Owl, in contrast, has become the unofficial mascot of the successful football team this year and was present at every single game, hooting and hollering along with the frat boys and their dads.

The other thing that makes him stand out is his recent engagement to a younger woman. Much younger, in fact – she is twenty-two years old. Making an age difference of thirty-nine years. Now I know age supposedly ain’t nothin’ but a number (as long as the bottom number is above age of consent, of course), but damn. He’s old enough to be her grandfather.

Well, okay, he’s way old and she young, but she’s an adult. Yeah it’s a little weird, but whatever.

Then this tell-all interview came out. The child bride speaks! So what are her opinions on life?

On education:

“I am not really planning on continuing [school] next year. I don’t really feel I need to get a degree because I am not sure what I would use it for. I don’t really feel it is right for me to get a piece of paper so I can tell people I am capable of doing something.”

On religion:

“Somebody in the Old Testament wrote that we should be in constant prayer. Our relationship is all about God, and his blessings in our lives. The reason my past relationships aren’t there is because God has to be at the center of a relationship. He is at the center of my life, and if he isn’t at the center of other people’s life, like daily, in their thoughts and words every day, then I don’t want to be with them.”

On their romance:

“I was at Target and he would come and visit me while I was working. One day after work I called my friend Laurel, and I told her ‘At the risk of sounding completely insane, I think I am supposed to marry this guy,’ and she told me that I was insane. I drove over to his place and we were talking. I knew he was feeling bad because I knew he didn’t want to push anything on me, but I knew how he felt about me. I told him my phone conversation with Laurel and he fell to the floor. It was really cool.”

How sweet! Oh, and they are saving it for marriage, but soon after the big day they plan on having lots of babies. Yep, on his (social security) income of course, since she won’t have a job or earning power due to her lack of education. Honestly, if I didn’t see photos of the two, or know that they were hippies, I would have totally dismissed her as a “Math is Hard” Barbie, future Republican politician’s wife, based on these quotes.

Bizarre crypto-conservativism notwithstanding, I wish them all the best. My friend and I have plans to crash the wedding (well, they did say that it is open to all), document and take photos. We may just witness the birth of a new 21st century cult!

Now there’s a back and forth discussion over whether or not Pierotti can claim this cultural identity. His supporters offer valid points, saying that the blood quantum rules by which we define native identity are flawed: they doom tribal communities to extinction in the next few generation, what with tribal members marrying outside the community, and families spreading further apart and losing track of their own histories. They also argue that Pierotti has contributed so much to the native community – obtaining grants for the Indigenous Nations Center, mentoring students, vocally campaigning for native causes – that he’s basically Indian, even if he’s not a card-carrying member.

But Pierotti has a lot of detractors within the native community, with very real qualms. Tribes are the determining authority on membership, and by bypassing the tribal authority, Pierotti’s claim diminishes their sovereignity. In fact, people’s suspicions first arose when several Comanche students asked him questions about his family, where they were from, etc. Community building questions, which he couldn’t answer. It’s kind of like a stranger crashing your family dinner, pretending to be your long lost uncle. I can see why natives would be suspicious of identity-crashers invading their communities, already strained under the weight of a history of injustice.

The other issue, of course, is exploitation. Is he, as his brother alleges in a fairly brutal email, faking being native to benefit from affirmative action? I’m not quite sure about that. I think if his motive were purely greed, why would he be so vocal about it, instead of keeping under the radar to avoid suspicion? Why invest all that effort in bettering the native community? Similarly, if he was motivated purely by interest in the community itself, he certainly could have done a lot of his work without the fraud. One of my favorite professors, the late Bud Hirsch, contributed greatly to local native community groups, and he never professed to be anything but a literature loving Chicago native (identity confirmed by his accent and love of Bears).

My theory: maybe he started out with purely financial motives. Jobless and increasingly desperate, he seized upon this long-shot plan to land a tenured job. It worked so well that he gradually convinced himself he really was Comanche. In that manner he could rationalize away the initial lie, and gain a cool new identity in the process. He could make a name for himself in the community, and be something much greater than just a low-level professor at a Midwestern state university.

Whether he really is Comanche or not, I am certainly inclined to think that the guy is nuts. When I saw who the article was about, I had to laugh. I actually met Pierotti during a Native American Lit seminar that Prof. Hirsch taught; Pierotti sat in on a few sessions. Here was this kind of grizzled, rugged cowboy man sitting at the table, wedged in the tiny conference room amongst the rest of us bratty college students. Pierotti didn’t contribute much to the discussions from what I can remember. He did have on him a rather alarmingly big knife, sheathed but prominently on display at his hip. On campus. I didn’t think weapons were even allowed on campus, but maybe they make exceptions for native persons (though, as far as I know, none of the other native professors go around wielding giant knives). In general, we all thought he seemed a little, um, off.

Doing some more research into Pierotti’s background, I’ve found he is no stranger to controversy – or lawsuits. He and his wife have filed lawsuits against the university; she claimed to have been denied tenure on the grounds of sexism, he claimed to be discriminated against because of his ethnicity (I’m not exactly sure what the nature of this alleged discrimination was). He’s been vocal about promoting equal opportunity hiring on campus, and actively opposed the hiring of a professor I know, solely because there were other non-white male candidates for that position (well, unless they were faking it too, hehe).

And then there’s this article from the Journal World, back in 2000, describing a bizarre incident that took place after Pierotti’s wife was denied tenure. Pierotti had to take medical leave for part of a semester due to an eye surgery. Instead of arranging for someone else in the department or a TA to cover his classes, his wife simply covered for him. Letting someone not employed by the University, and thus not bound to the rules and regulations imposed on University instructors, for some reason didn’t fly with the administration. Imagine that! And would you let someone you recently fired sit at the front desk of your office, or handle important paperwork?

There are a lot more layers to peel from this onion of madness, to be sure. I’ll update with new developments.

p.s. – Here’s a bit of fun Lawrence history for you. While looking up his wife’s name on the LJWorld database, I found this letter to the editor she wrote in defense of the Borders tree protestors. The Borders tree, for those of you not from here, was this giant tree in a parking lot next to a Borders. The tree had been suffering from Dutch elm disease and was certainly dying, if not fully dead, at the time developers planned to cut it down. That didn’t stop area hippies from organizing sit-ins and candlelight vigils to save the tree. Now a good number of the supporters were using the tree’s felling as a symbol of protest against town sprawl, and I certainly sympathize. But frankly, all this fuss about saving an already dead tree probably did the anti-sprawl cause more harm than good. (I personally think that Lawrence hippies wanted to feel important, like they were saving the rainforests. Why should West Coast hippies hog all the endangered trees?)

Thus last night, instead of joining Eli on funny drunk escapades at a friend’s house, I opted to stay inside instead and tend to the stock (and maybe get a few stars in Mario Galaxy on the side, too. So I didn’t socialize but at least I was a warm dork). Several hours and seven stars later, the stock was finished – a beautifully colored rich broth of turkey goodness! Excited by my new creation, I let it cool while I deposited the bones and herb matter into a garbage bag, a peace offering to the aggressive raccoons of East Lawrence. Still in my pajamas, I put on some shoes and my puffy down coat and went outside to take out the trash, and then I saw a girl lying collapsed on the sidewalk.

She was on the street corner directly outside my house. My first panicked thought was that she was a homeless woman in the process of freezing to death at my doorstep, but no – she was slightly younger than me, college age, one dirty, crumpled ballet slipper on her foot and the other lying next to her. She was sobbing impressively.

“Hey…can I help you?” I ventured, repeating myself a little louder so she could hear me over her sobs. She lifted her head to look at me – kind of chubby, but pretty nonetheless – and looked kind of embarrassed amidst her anguish. “No, no, I’m fine.” I offered to call somebody for her, but she shook her head and said she lived just over there, pointing vaguely ahead of her. She thanked me and smiled, the embarrassment quickly replaced by resentment of my presence. My bag of bones was dripping, so I went to go toss it in one of the bins behind my house, and when I came back, she had gotten up and walked away.

As I saw the retreating figure, it occurred to me that I could have offered her a ride home – she was more or less standing in front of my car, and it was a terribly cold night for someone in crumpled, booze-stained ballet flats. I always think of these things too late.

It’s the morning now and I hope she was able to make it home without incident. I did hear sirens not too long after I came back to the apartment and wondered if it was for her. What in the world happened to her, to cause her to collapse on my street corner? Had she been raped? Or did she just get rejected, by a boy she liked, in a particularly odious manner?
Whatever the case, I hope she made it somewhere safe and warm.

Cha-ching!

Yes, being showered with lucky money is very much preferable to being astoundingly hungover the next morning. The tradition, for those of you not in the know, is that all the adults will distribute little red envelopes, stuffed with crisp new bills from the bank, to all the children running around on New Year’s Day. Luckily for me, the definition of “children” has been stretched in my family to include “young adults with student loan debts.” Heh heh.

Aside from the money, and the wonderfully delicious food, the best part about lunar new year is the chance to spend time my extended family again. My cousins are turning out to be funny, if rather quirky, people, and it’s nice to see them grow up. (Although terribly, terribly shocking. Some of these kids were busy wetting their beds not too long ago, and now they are driving around in cars. Cars!) The great thing about hanging out with my cousins is that I have someone else, besides chiaroscuro, to commiserate with regarding the wild eccentricities of the family: the strange things we used to do as children (like ducking and covering whenever someone rang the doorbell, melting plastic Barbie heads in the sun, etc). The conversation this time around revolved around the mysterious man who lurks in the basement of my aunt’s house.

Some time, probably four or five years ago, I accompanied my mother on a visit to said house. Now, this particular aunt has an even looser grip on sanity than my mother (who, by the by, believes I shouldn’t think about moving to Portland, Oregon because of the danger of tsunamis) – she’s quite paranoid and doesn’t much care for leaving the house, except to visit her less hermited sisters. Anyway, my aunt needed to get something from the basement, so we followed her down. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a shadowy figure moving in one of the rooms, behind a half-open door.

“Who’s that?” I asked. My mom didn’t say anything then, but later she explained that this was my aunt’s “boyfriend” (which, in Vietnamese adult vernacular, can really mean anything from ‘friend who is male’ to ‘life partner.’ In this case, she meant that they are married).

“What? How long have they been dating? How come he never comes to any of the parties?” My maternal extended family in Wichita has get-togethers roughly once a month, and I had never seen anybody accompany my aunt before.

“Oh, he’s kind of, how you say, mental?” said my mom. “He doesn’t like people; he just stays at home.”

Hence began my mini-obsession with the crazy guy who dwells in my aunt’s basement. Apparently he’s the brother of a friend of my aunt’s; they met when she was visiting his house. Being that I’ve never seen the guy in direct light, let alone any interaction between the two, I’m not sure of the driving force behind the relationship. I do know that my aunt collects some sort of social security benefits for taking care of him. I don’t want to assume that my aunt just married him to collect a government paycheck, but then again, I can’t dismiss that possibility when it comes to my notoriously stingy, penny-pinching aunt.

Anyway, he’d never really come up into conversation among members of my family other than my mom and I, until about yesterday. So I’m a bit relieved that it wasn’t some shared hallucination between me and my mother, and mildly amused at the notion that my family has a basement lurker. If I were any younger, he might haunt my nightmares, but now I kind of wish I could befriend him, and maybe lure him out of his basement lair somehow (according to one of the cousins, he does mow the lawn sometimes). Maybe if he would come to our parties, he’d get over his fear of people. He could sit at the “kids” table, with the children and the rest of us who don’t speak Vietnamese! He could get to eat New Year’s Cake* with us and laugh at all the adults. It would be a grand time.

* – Actually a savory dish made with rice, beans, and egg, wrapped in banana leaves. Really tasty when fried.