Things I can change at any time but won't get around to until 2011

I think one reason so many people do New Year's resolutions is because they're too busy to effect change in their lives in November & December. So all of that resolve piles up until the holiday season is finished and you fall with relief into the new pattern you've been plotting for months and wish to really, actually enact in the hope of making it permanent.

Like, I want to get back into going to yoga regularly for mental and physical health, but all of my good after-work times are filled with Christmas shopping and dealing with my job and my not-jobs and seeing friends who are dipping into town from far-off places for the holidays. I am left cycling through lazy sun salutations for 20 minutes before bed. Paying someone to tell me which poses to do for how long is a good investment, even only once a week. I leave ready to take on the whole world.

Mostly I can't blame the holidays for lapses, though.

Like, I also want to start eating breakfast again, instead of junk food over my keyboard at work, and wake up earlier after fewer alarm clock reminders and really, seriously, I mean it, regularly take the bus to and from work, even if it means walking many blocks or driving to the transfer point.

And I want to respond to those little e-mails people send me for nice reasons that I let languish because I'm too busy at the moment and never get back to. And be better a friend in general.

And as always, I want to write more, better, usefully.

Sometimes repetition isn't boring:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

Bloomsday, too, might be literature self-fetishizing.

Another day, another brand new pretentious $17 notebook to fill up. The last one took me more than 2 years, starting with a bullet point outline of a poem I never wrote, ending today with "we change our names and order pizzas / to be sent to the neighbors" so you see I started out with a much more finicky standard for what I wrote in it. Only solid ideas and words already by-my-standards perfect. Now I slosh anything remotely interesting (and many dull things that might eventually be made interesting) onto the pages like a 3 a.m. drunkard. I buy the expensive notebooks for my creative writings with the idea that I'll want to be able to flip through and re-read and re-use ideas for years. But there is no guarantee. It's possible the act of writing on acid-free pages is all just exercise. Words you expel like a long exhale, never to be considered again. I'm all for fetishizing the printed word, I'm all for bound books and the smell of rich mahogany. I still can't quite feel something is real unless I can see it without the help of electricity. Take it camping with me. Set it on fire.

The new notebook gleams with unrealized amazement. Blank pages still recall the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, and that moment as a child when you first realize that a word is more than just an assortment of squiggles. Before you learn that a word is still not quite omnipotent. I think I am fair when I say many people who write do so because they believe (even if they do not admit this to themselves) that if they can just get The Most Perfect/Sharp/Lovely/Breathless/otherwise ideal arrangement of words to the right people's eyes, they can put the oil back in the well and raise the dead pelicans like feathered Christs. Or cure unkindness. Or rub the world's metaphorical feet on carpet until we spark at doorknobs and keyboards and become, all of us, electrical superheroes capable of incredible feats and glowing-eyed awesomeness. I don't think this can happen anymore, but the wish is still one horse in the team pulling my motivation stagecoach.

Harder than it looks.

Been turning myself inside out, upside-down, wringing my bones out like a wet rag. At a class I've been attending on and off for a few years now, the teacher is joyful and beatific in all those ways You Would Imagine of a yoga teacher. I used to roll my eyes a little but now her enthusiasm is infectious, even if I still don't much care about Lakshmi.

Do you ever stop and look at a number like, "150,000 quake-related amputees" and wonder what all those lost limbs would look like if they were piled up in one place? I do. It would be a big pile. Lots of fingers, lots of toes.

"Corpses piled like little mountains."

And yeah, Haiti is still in trouble, guys.

My donation to Partners in Health finally exited my bank account. I'm not sure why it took 4 days. I'm not happy about it.

Ma famille set me free / Throw my ashes into the sea

This morning I watched a woman win $10,000 from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse and say she was going to spend most of it on catching up on her bills because it’s been a tough year. Then I read 21349081231 stories about Haiti. How much did you know about Haiti before it was hit by this earthquake? I didn’t know much, just bare bones, just, “Revolution, more revolution, revolution, francais, revolution.” I still don’t know much, just, “Death, sorrow, rubble, dust, disaster disaster, SOS.” If “our understanding of Haiti” is a rubble heap, then I feel part of the work should be in digging it out and gaining a sense of the place in which this devastation lives, and being invested in paying attention to the longterm effects in coming years, a la Katrina and 9/11.

I’m trying to think of & track down all the fantastic essays I’ve ever read on how developed nations conceive of disaster in other countries. There will be new ones, I’m sure, about how Haiti should have received this help before there was ever any such thing as an earthquake, and how in some ways our discourse on the subject often carries colonialist overtones, and how it’s almost certain there will be misuse of aid money at some point in this whole process, because it’s all being thrown at overwhelmed agencies all at once. (Democracy Now has already touched on the subject).

But either way, money is still wanted and needed and should be given if you can spare anything. I’m sure those few of you who seem to follow this blog have already found tons of lists recommending where to send your money, and have heard the warnings to make sure it’s a legitimate agency. So I’m not going to repeat any of that, except add to the urging that you research where you’re putting your money and do whatever you can to ensure it’s going somewhere effective and useful.

I make a cub reporter’s salary and owe everyone and my mother money, but I’m donating, and it’s an amount that I’m probably going to look back on and wince at.

Book review: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson

I finished reading, at long last, Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, which is a lovely history of American interventions abroad with the theme of, "We are engaging in imperialist behavior To This Day and it will ruin us." While it was written in 2003, and includes a heavy chunk of Bush Jr. and the Iraq wars, Johnson lays out century-old processes leading up to the sins of the Bush administration which make it hard to believe that, even had Obama aggressively pursued rapid turnaround, anything could change terribly rapidly with a new president. The extensive system of international bases (and bases to defend other bases, and bases to defend those bases...) alone would be tough for one man to shake up, and the spending amounts?

"For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Defense asked Congress for and received an increase to $379.3 billion, plus $15.6 billion for nuclear weapons programs administered by the Department of Energy and $1.2 billion for the Coast Guard...The message (Congress) sent seemed to be: No matter how much the United States spends on "defense," it will never be enough. The budget of the next-largest military spender, Russia, is only 14 percent of the U.S. total. The military budgets of the next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together to equal our expenditures." (p. 306 - 307)

Well, who is a president to tell a deep-rooted institution like that it can't have nearly $400 billion dollars? By the way, the four "sorrows of empire," or consequences of the course Johnson saw us pursuing five years ago, are: perpetual war, leading to more anti-American terrorism and increased reliance by smaller nations on weapons of mass destruction; loss of democracy and constitutional rights as presidency continues to snatch power from Congress; loss of truthfulness (already "well-shredded") and a system of disinformation/propaganda to glorify war, power, military; lastly, financial ruin, as we fritter away more resources on military projects and neglect education, health, and domestic safety. Johnson had plenty of evidence suggesting these four were already well under way in 2003. I would say, in 2009, #1 and #4 are easily argued. As for #2 and #3? Worth thinking about.

This book was first introduced to me by prof. Joel Rogers in the sociology class that prompted me to add a sociology major to my journalism major. Joel "I believe in the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount and half my students think I should be president and I direct the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and I make using empirical data to guide policy look really sexy" Rogers. Anyway, he gave us a couple chapters to read and I got angry but of course didn't have time to read the whole thing just then.

Coincidentally, Bill Moyers, hero of myself and 50 percent of living people I'd marry, just yesterday told his followers that Nemesis, the book which follows Sorrows in Johnson's three-part exploration of American foreign policy, is The One Book everyone should read this year. Just saying.

Heart hung humble as a button

A friend was reading me this poem yesterday and I kind of
wept into my Bulleit.

War Is Kind, Stephen Crane
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
       Hoarse, booming drums of the
       regiment,
   Little souls who thirst for fight,
   These men were born to drill and die.
   The unexplained glory files above
      them,
   Great is the battle-god, great, and his
       kingdom--
   A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow
trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
       Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
   Eagle with crest of red and gold,
   These men were born to drill and die.
   Point for them the virtue of the slaughter,
    Make plain to them the excellence of killing
   And a field where a thousand corpses
       lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Thanksgiving post #41231908

This has been a week for appreciating what I have, sort of regardless of the season but also conveniently tied into it.

E.g. Wednesday night, I was in the ER waiting room waiting for a friend of a friend, L, to find out why her stomach was so swollen and hurt so damn much. She ended up having to stay all of Thanksgiving in the hospital, waiting for the specialist to return from his holiday. L and her husband are jobless and crashing somewhere rent-free right now after moving from Idaho with $500 to their name. With only a few words of explanation from me, my mom and sister eagerly helped pack up a big bagful of our Thanksgiving food – before we’d even sat down to dinner ourselves – so L’s husband could stay at the hospital with her without starving/squandering precious money on food. Turkey included, and my sister made a special trip to the grocery store to buy a couple thermoses for cider and coffee. I am ridiculously proud of my mom and sister, and also very aware that my only problem yesterday was fitting into my schedule (and stomach, ouch) all the dinners to which I was invited before I had to head home so I could work today.

E.g. Not to get mushy about my family, but we have it pretty good considering where all we’ve been since my parents filed for divorce more than a decade ago. For example, we usually get along, and agree that life’s going to be totally sweet when the Death Panels finally arrive. My sister and I go for hour-long walks in suburbia to catch up and drink soccer-mom-power-walk coffee. My brother, 18, shocks us all with a pitch-perfect Carl Sagan impression during a game of ApplesToApples, straight outta the high school Cosmos videos. And while I’m not sure there will ever be a way to celebrate Thanksgiving such that both parents will feel like they got their fair share, these things seem to balance out in the long run.

E.g. The basics. 10 fingers, 10 toes, my 3 new cavities will mostly be covered by insurance (though still cost too much), amazing friends, strong legs, employment in industry related to my college major and lifelong ambitions, exciting and/or meaningful extracurriculars.

Healthcare Monday II

I just scheduled a dentist appointment for the first time as an adult who has insurance that is not her parents'. This is great, because I can investigate the strange sensation my jaw's been reporting to me when I am too quick to stand up or change my general orientation to the world. The nurse also promised my teeth would be shiny and white just in time for Thanksgiving. This seems like a fine idea. My relatives are sure to approve of my clean-looking teeth.

But really I feel really privileged and lucky to be able to call up a dentist and say "yes, I have insurance through XXX," and then they say, "We can see you Wednesday!" and I say, "awesome, this is like, close to free."

Next year I'm switching from a pretty decent medical plan to the scary high-deductible version because I decided it was the closest I could bring myself to sacrificing something in solidarity with the millions of Americans who don't have any choices. But when you're young and healthy, it doesn't actually feel like much of a sacrifice until you unexpectedly get hit by a car or a baby or manic depression.

In the meantime, I'm getting as many chest x-rays and hip replacements as I can before Jan 1. 2010 hits. Right right right?

Healthcare Monday

Two related incidents today:

1. For work, talk to local woman who says her family is living one of those Michael Moore-esque health insurance nightmares. Recently sick husband who has been told he can never work again, she can't work, two-year wait to get on Medicaid, meanwhile COBRA will cost them more than $1,000 per month and their disability payments don't total more than $2,800, and even before his work stops paying for insurance, she's got $300 a month leftover from bills for food and gas. Has been e-mailing Tammy Baldwin, Russ Feingold, the President, and when she received an artfully crafted form letter in reply from Obama, she cried at how touching it was but still thinks nothing's happening fast enough when it comes to reform. "We make just a little too much money," she says. "Where is that humane?"

2. Receive back from very patient former landlord tax documents for 2008. This is my third attempt to get my refund from the state of Wisconsin, and I keep not making photocopies. The last time I tried to file, the post office confirmed that my stuff was delivered, but it still never made it into their system. My apologetic note to (landlord) last week: "The Dept. of Revenue lost my return again. This time they're letting me fax everything, so I swear it's the last time." His note today with my rent certificate: "I hear you. This is exactly why I don't want the Government running my Health Care..."

Neither of them is wrong. & what a mess this life is.

I've got children all over town.

When I was in South Africa, my most wife-like platonic friend took care of my cats. I still owe her child support.

Also when I was in South Africa, my most wife-like fellow reporter got a plant and we set it between our desks and named it Florence and considered which schools she might attend. We have not yet discussed child support.

Death penalty, exhibit B

Following my previous post, I would like to subject the internet to a series of quotes from Scott Turow's book, Ultimate Punishment. Turow is a former prosecutor and author of many legal suspense thrillers who was also served on the Illinois Commission that influenced Governor George Ryan's decision to commute the sentences of all Illinois Death Row inmates before he left office. Turow's perspective is interesting because, while he agrees the death penalty should be an option under ideal circumstances as, as the Commission words it, "the strongest condemnation of a small number of the most heinous crimes," he believes we are not at this stage prepared to administer it fairly.

While he acknowledges also possible moral issues, Turow focuses on several examples of exonerated inmates, and cases in which the crimes of some life inmates were demonstrably worse than those of certain Death Row inmates.

And says:

“In confronting murder, we as a society ask how we should face an ultimate evil, which, if unchecked, would reduce almost all human interaction to war. We want to punish in order to prevent murder, but also as part of our effort to restore ourselves from the anxieties it raises about our ability to live with one another…"

"Murder takes us to the Land’s End of the law. Our horror and revulsion undermine our capacity to reason—and prove that justice alone will not make us whole. Only the attachments we have to each other, the antipodal experience of what goes on in the moment a murderer kills, can accomplish that. In the face of the cruelties we visit upon one another, murder being the gravest wrong among them, a sense of meaning and connection must come from outside the law.”

“I admit I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be available for the crimes of unimaginable dimensions like (John Wayne Gacy)’s, or that would fully eliminate the marginal risks that incorrigible monsters like (repeat offender who killed again after he was imprisoned) might ever again satisfy their vampire appetites…There will always be cases that cry out to me for ultimate punishment. That is not the true issue. The pivotal question instead is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases, without also occasionally condemning the innocent or the undeserving.”

And here is my favorite.

“After twenty-five years of attempting to establish laser-like guidelines, we still end up with a moral hodgepodge where Chris Thomas is condemned to die because he is poor and belligerent, while the likes of the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents for the millions, or the Unabomber, who killed and maimed and threatened the nation for years, get life. In yet another of the perpetual paradoxes in this subject, retaining the death penalty seems to be a road to breeding disrespect for the law, because it exposes so many of its shortcomings. (emphasis added)”

Ending the death penalty, exhibit A

Consider that sometimes it is in vogue to have emotions. Consider this man in Ohio, who was convicted of doing, yes, terrible things. & when the time came to die last month, & when it proved much harder than expected, & when after two hours they still had not managed to get into his veins, he tried very politely to help.

"Several times, Broom rolled onto his left side, pointed at veins, straightened tubes or massaged his own arms to help prison staff keep a vein open. He was clearly frustrated as he leaned back on the gurney, covering his face with his hands and visibly crying." - Cincinnati Enquirer

If you cannot imagine this with needles and veins, consider moments in movies when the loser of a fight pulls his opponent's knife upward into the heart. Or lifts his arms above his heads to make a bigger target for the firing squad. I know this is not quite accurate or analogous, but it might be a useful image. Regardless, Mr. Broom's magnanimous effort to help the state kill him (like some other inmates before him who encountered difficulties in the process of being executed) is neither proof of his innocence, nor on its own reason enough to keep him alive if you have already decided that logic favors his execution. But it's a sliver of something both extremely painful and important, I think, and, I hope, a wake-up call to those who would dismiss Death Row inmates as utterly without humanity.

As I said in a comment way earlier, the problem I had with this bit of news is not that it was difficult to administer the drugs. He's just the most extreme example of a common problem in medicine - veins don't always cooperate. (Thanks to my friend Sam for pointing that out, p.s.)

The problem I have is
1. Cognitive dissonance. The process of killing killers has changed throughout human history, and lethal injection is the humane alternative to every other method that we have used in the past - hanging, the gas chamber, guillotine, firing squad. So when there is such vivid evidence that we still don't have it quite right - who would have thought ending a human life is actually a tricky and difficult business - then I question what values are driving the decision. Do we care about the inmates' wellbeing or do we not? Should we pretend we care if we don't? If we did care, would we still execute them? If we can care and still execute them, then what more can we do to ensure we are acting on how much we care?

2. As a social body, what is the impact on the rest of us to be complicit in killing our fellows? Perhaps we would be complicit by suffering murderers to live, even behind bars. But capital punishment is so much more a machine of death, a series of calculated decisions involving both elected officials and the ordinary citizen, and I wonder, following one measly philosophy class three years ago, if it makes us harder, if it tells us revenge is the Right Way Of Doing Things. In addition, if we say killing is okay at all, if we say all you need are many many rigorously-defined criteria and the backing of the entire justice system, aren't we still, on some level, condoning even those most violent and awful "illegal" killings? I'm not trying to turn this into a slippery slope argument, but I think the question of "Who are we as a society if we collectively commit these actions?" is one that should be invoked in any discussions of law.

Isaac Asimov also predicted Michael Pollan. sort of.

This is what you get for letting me read old science fiction anthologies. I don't know who you are or why you had any say in what I'm currently reading, but for some reason two hundred pages of delightful speculative frolick turned, suddenly, deadly serious. I think suicide might be involved.

"...so the question is whether a non-nuclear war is really possible, and the answer is "No!" The trouble is that the advance of technology has made war into such a high-energy game, played with such high-sophistication pieces, that no one can afford to play anymore.

Under the best conditions, war is fought with a nation's surplus energy and resources. Or a nation can fight a short war even without surplus energy and resources in the hope of seizing and enemy's energy and resources and continuing the fight with those. Where no nation has surplus energy and resources large enough to support the current technology of war, the whole process becomes purposeless and a mere exercise in suicide, albeit one somewhat slower than the nuclear variety...

So war will vanish not because of a growth of goodness in the human heart, or of understanding in the human mind (would that it were so!) but only because war has already priced itself out of existence, except as a form of world suicide."

From, "Is there hope for the future?" Isaac Asimov, 1974

Drunk Driving Law: an ounce more prevention please.

I'm very glad to see Wisconsin's drunk driving laws continuing to get attention and, it would appear likely, very tight reforms.

There seem to be good things in both the Assembly and the Senate versions. I absolutely think ignition interlocks - those are the breathalyzers that start your car - should be required for all repeat offenders, as the Assembly has proposed. On the other hand, I also am not sure the Assembly version is strong enough on the penalty side, in making it a felony only if it's the fourth offense within five years. Knowing you risk a felony conviction could be a valuable edge on the deterrence side.

This is, of course, assuming deterrence - in which the rational citizen decides the costs of being caught engaging in the crime are too high and too likely to happen compared to the benefits and likelihood of success - is a meaningful theory of crime prevention. In the case of drunk driving, though, rational decisionmaking is often, guess what!, impaired by alcohol. People who are prone to rational thought plan ahead, of course, and find a DD or a friendly futon. And we should encourage that kind of planning ahead. But for various reasons, some people don't plan, and suddenly it's 3 a.m. and it's really not that far a drive, really, and who wants to pay for parking overnight anyway? Etc.

Furthermore, deterrence as Jeremy Bentham first articulated it relies on "swiftness, severity, and certainty" of punishment, or at least the criminal's perception thereof. And really, it's the "certainty" element we need most. A drunk person might have a vague idea of how "okay" they are, but they won't know their BAC. They won't know exactly where they fall, legally, and chances are they'll think they can handle it anyway. You can have a felony on first offense and twenty years of license revocation, but if a person can drive in a straight line, stop as needed, and stay within 5 mph of the speed limit, chances are they'll get home undetected and try it again the next weekend. We all know it happens. Once someone has been caught once, you can identify them as "trouble" and impose all the limits you like. But you have to catch them first.

Given this, I'd be much happier if we were not quite as focused on taking the people we do catch (and catch and catch and catch) and hitting them harder, maybe spending a lot of money on turning them into felons and making it harder for them to have normal, healthy lives when they're done being felons. Where is the discussion on sobriety checkpoints? Here, I'll start - vehicles may have many of the same qualities as a residence, and absolutely are subject to privacy concerns. But when you drive, you are in the public sphere, you are a public danger, and you are part of the reason driving a car is one of the most dangerous things a person can do in the United States. If a police officer wants to talk to you for a minute to make sure you're capable of driving your death machine (you will read my hyperbole and you will like it) home - and this is ALL they do unless it becomes clear that you are in fact incapable - I say the public interest most likely wins.

While this obviously wouldn't catch everyone, it would at least boost the perception that yes, you can get caught, and yeah buster, you had better make plans to crash somewhere until you're safe to drive. Studies of states where sobriety checkpoints are legal suggest that there is a deterrent effect. If the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is correct in saying it could be up to 20 percent, then Wisconsin might find a great deal of human savings in instituting such measures. There are other things we can do too, of course. Making bartenders and parking facility employees play nanny, for example. But that would just be more intrusive and, probably, less effective.

On another note, I'm very glad to see treatment getting emphasis in both the Senate and Assembly proposals. I'm speaking as someone who at one point years ago picked up her own [older relative, let us call them Z] from a police station because Z was driving drunk. With a minor on board. For the second time in five years. I saw Z, a generally "upstanding" citizen who had never had other brushes with the law, spend two months in jail, go through treatment for alcoholism and depression, and turn their life around completely. It's true that the jail was probably a big part of the wakeup call for Z, but without the resources to support necessary change, a person can easily succumb to despair. In other words, it's not enough to know you're in trouble; you need to know how you can fix it.

Of course, we would all like to assume that people are good and decent and thoughtful enough to make good intoxicated decisions based solely on how many awful things have happened when people have driven drunk. We've all been inundated with the anecdotes, so I won't repeat them, except to say it hit home especially for me last summer when a high school friend got in the wrong car and paid for it with his life. But if that were the case, we'd also be writing laws that force first offenders to paste photos of DUI-related crash victims to their ignitions and dashboards. And that would never work, right? Right?

Showdown in the Joel's Basement Corral

You know those nights when you're exhausted from a bout of insomnia and you have the next day off and all you want to do is sleep and your good friend pulls you to a house full of gamers playing board games promising you can leave "whenever we want," and the first game of Bang! is so fun and quick (because the Sheriff got killed off fast) that you all agree to "just one more" even though everyone else is tired too, and it turns out that the second game lasts over an hour because it's one of those situations where the outlaws are picked off one by one and then no one knows who's the Deputy and who's the Renegade, and finally it's just Sheriff Robin versus Renegade Allan and they both want so badly to go home but the damn dynamite won't explode and Allan is nearly invincible but lacking offensive tactics and it's a war of slow attrition that just won't end even though neither remaining player has anything to live for and finally the dynamite explodes on Allan and he dies and Robin wins and you're all so excited to be done that you run screaming out of the house for fear of getting sucked into "just one more game"?

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Is there another lamp in the room?

A Chinese woman I just met today has difficulty distinguishing between "thighs" "hips" and "waist" when her reading tutor tells her to point to each. What is the difference anyway? Don't they all blur into one excessively scrutinized but generally awesome region? The picture dictionary is full of gleaming kitchens and lavish dining rooms and women in party dresses from the 1980s. Throw pillows, candalabras, whole rooms just for entertaining guests you see once every two weeks.

When I start tutoring, I am going to assemble a Baraboo picture-dictionary from things I cut out of magazines, and it's going to include important terms like "thrift store dresser" and "crookedly-hung photos of my most wife-like platonic friend" and "window hung with purple cloth, overlooking rain."

An English girl I know would object to the section in the books that focus on pronunciation and stressing syllables according to American standards. The short objection is that as long as everyone can understand what you are saying, variations in pronunciation based on your first language should be allowed as expressions of regional autonomy. This, she says, is especially important in situations where the English teacher, often young and idealistic and anti-empire, has come from a far nation with a history of meddling, and must be careful to avoid furthering nascent empires. There is a long objection but I am not subscribed to the proper scientific journals.