Today is only the second day of summer school and I am already ready to quite. Our summer school runs 5 weeks and there are two classes per day–each being approx 2 1/2 hours long. I am teaching freshman English. My first class is a dream. They are quiet and they do all their work without much redirection. My second class is “evil”. No one wants to work, everyone wants to talk. They all complain about the amount of work. It is a lot, but Hello–it’s a semester’s worth of work in 5 weeks–it’s going to be a lot of work. What do they expect a free ride? They were angry at me when I told them just showing up everyday wasn’t enough. “What, we don’t get points for just coming?” UGH!!!

I never thought I would dislike my job. Never. I thought I would teach and want to teach forever. I am counting the minutes until my very last day. 7380. Isn’t that sad? I am dumbfounded by this turn of events. I am trying not to give up on them, but it is so hard when they appear to have given up on themselves. I know that they haven’t or they wouldn’t come.

Work on the house has come to a slow trickle. There is so much to do, but I have lost my steam and my determination. I hope I find it soon–as there is still a chance for us to get to travel this summer. I am almost done with the kitchen and we are really running out of weekends until we “might” get to bring our little one home. I just don’t know where my motivation has gone. I have lost it. Even my weightloss is at a standstill. In 6 months time I worked off 53 pounds. Now, in the last 6 weeks nothing. Granted for about a month I was only going to the gym on the days I worked out with my trainer (2) as opposed to 6. That put a damper on it, and I was horrible with my foods and diet. So I know that it will take me about 3 weeks to really get back on track, but I am desperate to lose more weight. I want to drop another dress size or two prior to traveling to Ethiopia.

I somehow have gotten lost in this whole getting a baby and also getting older. We still would like to have a biological child or two. We opted for adoption first–always knew we would adopt–because after years of infertility treatment and failed pregnancy tests I wanted a baby. I couldn’t deal with the maybe anymore and I was really tired of getting shots in the butt–and I think hubby was really starting to enjoy sticking me with needles. Nothing can prepare you for the emptiness you feel when you cannot conceive. Nothing. I spent my entire teen years trying not to get pregnant–oh the cosmic joke.

The one thing that has helped is my honest belief in fate. Things happen for a reason. I know that I am destined to be a parent. That I have never doubted. Not once have I questioned if I was meant to be childless. I an’t imagine the future of my life with out my hubby and without little ones. But in even my dreams, I did not see little babies that looked like us. I am a firm believer in evolution and adaptation. We are an overpopulated society. Every century or so there have been diseases and catastrophies that have wiped out a large number of humans. I believe that infertility is one of the natural worlds adapted population controls. That offers a small comfort. As though I was selected to not bare my own children but to love and nuture a child that may not have a family otherwise. That makes it a little easier to take. It also makes seeking IVF harder. I feel as though I am going against mother nature and her plan for me. Hubby on the other hand, really wants us to try and for him I would move mountains. We shall see.

7355 now–how time flies.

When does my family (myself, hubby and soon to arrive home baby) become first? Not in the day to day business of living–that one is easy. But as father’s day approaches, we face yet again, family obligation vs. what we would do. I love my family and I have a commitment to them, but I also love my hubby and have a commitment to him. I also have a divorced family and my father has a new girlfriend–well not new they have been together 8 years. They aren’t married, but that is because my dad doesn’t want to really do the whole marriage thing again. He did it once and it wasn’t all roses. But now that there is a baby on the way and the gf is going to be a grandma, her family is now becoming part of my family. I was very content when her family was hers. Hubby does not think of her family as a relation to our child–but here in the midwest things are different than they are in California where he is from. This has been something we have talked about adnauseum. My hubby wants our family to come first and not be ruled by what the other members of the family want to do. I have a really hard time with that.

Father’s day example. My dad called yesterday to tell us that Father’s day would be at his house on Saturday and that the gf’s family would be there too. Well, hubby had wanted to have a party for the US’s game that day against Italy. But to me celebrating Father’s day with my dad is really important. My dad and I are really close. My hubby thinks these things should be celebrated on our terms not anyone elses. Well, in all honesty that is not how it works in my family. We have always celebrated Mother’s and Father’s day as a family at grandparents houses–but since my grandpa has passed away we don’t go to my grandparent’s anymore. We have not spent father’s day with my dad as he is usually with his gf’s family. Now this year we are all going to celebrate together. My hubby is resentful that we are celebrating when gf wants to celebrate. I want to do this for my dad. I don’t want him to be pulled as he would like to celebrate father’s day with his kids and gf of course wants to see her father as well. It is quite a quandry. Hubby of course wants to have his celebration too, when he wants to have it.

How does one balance it all. How do we meld my strong bonds with my family with a hubby who only sees his dad maybe once a year when he comes to visit us. He only talks to his father once a month if that. He talks to his mom a little more and his brother every 5 months are so. He comes from Los Angeles–the land of leaving the nest and never returning. His family has become secondary to me–I hail from the midwest, where so many of us live within 15 miles of our parents. I grew up spending Sundays at grandmas with the entire family. Our backgrounds and attitudes toward family is so different. I think it will be so hard. I know that Christmas will be easy, as we have already lain the foundation for that. We will not leave the house on Christmas day. This is so hard. I do like the idea of celebrating as a whole family on the Saturday and then just us on the acutal day. It is so hard. I can’t change how I feel about spending time with my family, no more than my hubby can change how he feels about spending time with family.

Cultural differences.

For this year’s World Cup. Go USA. Congrats to Germany as they win their opener. I love soccer. Sometimes this countries dismissal of the most popular game in the world, makes me sorry that I don’t live somewhere else the reveres the game. It is everyman’s game. Ghana is in the world cup for the first time. I will secretly be rooting form them–shhhh they are in the same group as the USA. More later about how soccer explains the world…..

After my post yesterday I did a lot of thinking. I was talking to hubby about it yesterday and shared the story of my professors South African husband who didn’t understand the whole ethnic classifications. We, meaning the US, have this classification to track the different groups. Well, why? Why do we have to keep track of this? Well, because we are not the hot bed of democratic equality that we think we are. Well, we aren’t even a true democracy, we are a repbulic. Greece was a true democracy–but even that was limited to male landowners. But at least each and every male landowner got a say, an equal voice. We don’t. Each of us does not have an equal voice. The voice of California is worth more than the voice of my home state of Missouri. Sorry I am digressing.

We live under the guise that we are free here in America. Well if we were truly free we wouldn’t have to track different ethnic groups. If we were really free UCLA wouldn’t be freaking out because they only have 95 black students in the upcoming freshman class–this represents 1.2% of the upcoming freshman class–sad when blacks make up 12.7% of the population. If everyone was equal and opportunities were equal we wouldn’t need to track. This saddens me.

But it is not the numbers entering college that really matter. What does really matter is who is successful in college. The following stats are from The National Center of Educational Statistics. Total Number of BA degrees 2003-2004: 1,399,542 (M-595,425(42.5%)/F-804,117(57.5%))
White: 1,026,114 (73 %) m-445,483(43.4%)/f-804,117(56.6%)
Black : 131,241 (9.3%) m-43,852(33%)/f-87,390(67%)
Hispanic: 94,644 (6.7%) m-37,288(39.3%)/f-57,356(61.7%)
Asian/Pacific Islander: 92,073 (6.5%) m-41,360(44.9%)/f-50,713(55.1%)
American Indian/Alaskan Native: 10,638 (.7%) m-4,244(39.8%)/f-6,394(60.2%)
Nonresident Alien: 44,832 (3.2%) m-23,199(51.7%)/f-21,633(48.3%)

It is not surprising to me that black males receive the fewest degrees (percentage wise). There have been numerous statistics that confirm that a black male ages 18-24 has a greater chance of going to jail than finishing college. According to the Bureau of Justice in 1997 9% of the black population was incarcerated as opposed to 2% of whites. I would assume those rates are about the same as there are more people incarcerated now than 9 years ago. So many more blacks are in jail (over 2 million) than are in college–see above figures. How is the representative of freedom and equality.

How sad is it that we must track the different ethnic groups and the genders to remind ourselves how much work we have to do. Referring back to the race quiz from yesterdays post. The net worth of white families is on average 8 times that of black families. And when the income levels are similar the net worth of whites is 2 times that of blacks. Why? Well why do women in the same position make only 79 cents for every dollar a man makes? Ours is still a world ruled by white men. We live in a country where white men are afforded many more opportunites and rich white men are afforded every opportunity while those of use who don’t fall into that category pull up the tail end of line.

How am I going to raise a successful black man when all the cards are stacked against him? How can we change our world? We are far from “all men created equal.” We are not a fair society and we are not all afforded the same rights. Nothing will change until we pull aside the curtain to let the wizard know that things have gone terribly awry and we must backtrack to right it. What can I do? What can you do? We are a long way off from being a fair society and it is the responsiblity of those of us who have the worlds ear and have the power to make it the place that MLK Jr. dreamed of.

Genetically there is only one–the Human Race. There is not genetic difference between those of us here in the cushy US and those indigenous people of rural Africa, South America, or Indonesia. Yet our society acts as if there is. A Race Literacy Quiz was posted on one of the ethiopadopt message board–http://www.newsreel.org/guides/race/quiz.htm. It was very enlightening. I have always said the only thing that separates the races is our outward skin color. It was nice to know that scientifically I was right. In my Anthropology classes in college–I was required to take 2 in my liberal arts education–there was never talk about race, it was always about cultures.

Currently in our country there is a push by the right to pass an amendment to the constitution that takes away the right for certain people to marry. I catch myself off guard by this as I always believed that the constitution was there to protect rights not take rights away. But the Constitution was born out of the declaration of Independence–which was the biggest contributing factor to the way that we treat blacks in America. It was designed to guarantee rights but not “all men”. The writer of the declaration of independence–the esteemed Thomas Jefferson–claimed that there was a chance that blacks were inferior.

What causes this “us” and “them”? How do we go from being one race–the human–to be classified by our ethnic heritage. It shouldn’t matter if I am white/Caucasian, black/African-American, pacific islander, native American, Latino, etc… I have professor whose husband is South African and white. He is completely perplexed by forms that ask for ethnicity/race–I will get to those two words becoming synonyms a little later. The first time he filled out one of our American forms he had to ask his US born wife what to check–He really is African and American but he doesn’t fit the American idea of what African-American is. Interesting how we here in America have taken an entire continent and turned it into a designator for an entire color of people. Not all black people are of African descent. Any group that lives near or on the equator is going to have darker skin and less hair than those who live farther away from the equator.

From Wikipedia: Africa is the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30,300,000 km² (11,700,000 mi²) including adjacent islands, it covers 5.9% of the Earth‘s total surface area, and 20.3% of the total land area.[1] With more than 840,000,000 people (as of 2005) in 61 territories, it accounts for more than 12% of the world’s human population.

The US is not nearly as big, we are quite small compared to Africa and we recognize the differences within our own local population. We hold on to our heritage and wear it with pride. I am from St. Louis and from the Midwest–that says something about me. We care where each other are from and acknowledge the cultural differences of being from the West Coast, East Coast, South, Mid-West, etc. Yet we lump everyone that is black–together African–Africa is a continent not a race or even an Ethnicity. My son is Ethiopian, my good friend is Nigerian. We lump everyone that is Asian together–again a continent not a race or even an Ethnicity–the Korean culture is very different from the Japanese, ChineseVietnamesese, etc.

This whole need for American to classify people and judge them based on this classification is tearing apart the fabric of our society. It will affect my family and my children. It affects all of us. I don’t see how we can change it. It has been a part of how the American culture has done things. My husband pointed out something that I find interesting–at work he has noticed that all of the black employees great each other in the hallway, whether they know each other or not. There is comfort in those who look like we do, but also those who are similar not only in looks but in status. I am not sure what this means yet, I will post more about this when I think it through more.

Race vs. Ethnicity. What truly do these words mean. It is difficult. Race has about 6 different definitions–this is part of the ambiguity of language. I will have to check out the OED and see the origin of the word, as we have a tendency to change words and their meanings to suit our needs.

Ethnic by definition is Of or relating to a sizable group of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage. or it means Relating to a people not Christian or Jewish; heathen. These are loaded definitions and seem to be slightly inspired by ambiguity.

I am constantly perplexed by the desire and need of our society to define people. We are all so very different. There is more genetic variation in a localized population than there is in different populations. There is more genetic variation between me and my neighbors than there is between me and my son. Yet our family will be different because my son’s skin has more melonin than mine. By grouping people together and labeling them together we build a community that fosters hate and not love. We pit groups against each other. And by we, I mean white middle class americans. The middle class has managed to demonize certain groups and then a new group comes in and then we demonize that group as if it is ripping apart the fabric of our country and our values, then the previously demoninzed (or demeaned if you wish) group joins our group in disliking the new group–the old group is just happy not to be the old group anymore. It is a viscious cycle that appears to have no end in sight as our society moves on to hispanics and homosexuals.

I could speak on this topic for days but there are many ideas I brought up that deserve further research on my part before I pontificate on them further. But I must say I am left with the though that if Scientifically there is no difference between us, why do we treat each other so differently? Why can’t we see past the apperance and just see the person?