If you have a few minutes, read this article about initiatives to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students.  If you don’t, here’s a summary: community colleges don’t have health centers, and often CCs serve populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to birth control, for financial, logistical, or other reasons.  So, says this article, we need to get those kinds of services onto CC campuses in order to help young women prevent unplanned pregnancies and thus finish their CC degrees.  Long story short: info and services related to pregnancy prevention shouldn’t be limited to high schools.

Ok, so.  I’m kind of surprised by my reaction to this.  Because, on the one hand, yes, unwanted unplanned pregnancies suck ass, and if you find yourself in that situation, it’s important to have access to birth control, emergency contraception, or abortion.

However.

Doesn’t this stink a little bit of classism to y’all? I’m not talking about the issue itself, I’m talking about the way the issue is treated in the article.  The assertion is that unplanned pregnancies occur in high rates among single women in their 20s, and that these pregnancies are probably unwanted, and if they are wanted, they shouldn’t be.

Right? Is that how it sounds? Or am I getting all weird and fundamentalist-y?

I guess I’m bothered by that core assumption that unplanned pregnancy = unwanted pregnancy. I’m also bothered by the notion that a pregnancy must be either wanted 100% or unwanted 100%.  Can I get a little nuance up in here?  Because I hate to break it to the patriarchy, but a good lot of us hover around the 50-90% mark most of the time.  When I found out I was pregnant, I freaked the hell out.  I didn’t actively consider abortion, but I did think, “Well, this isn’t the best time for this, and I’m not sure I can handle this.” Am I glad I’ve got a little dude sleeping on my belly right now?  Indeed.  But that doesn’t mean I was dreaming of onesies and playgroups from day one.*

So I guess what bugs me is this: my pregnancy was unplanned, but hey, that’s cool with my university because I’m 30 and married, and I’m in school but I’ve already got an M.A.  So finishing my degree isn’t that important to anyone but me and the fam.**  But if you’re, say, 21 and unmarried, all of the sudden folks have the right to judge the appropriateness of your pregnancy to their institution. NOT that people didn’t judge mine, and continue to judge it.  But those are individuals, not systems, doing the judging.  Big Difference.

Again, I’m not saying that these services SHOULDN’T be provided, because we all know that one thing this country definitely needs more of is cheap and convenient access to birth control. But by likening CCs to high schools, you’re saying that a 25 year old is as immature and incapable of making decisions as a 15 year old, and that’s just not true.  It’s troubling, too, that the people who want to help women gain access to birth control sound just as controlling and condescending as the people who want to take away our right to abortion.

Perhaps most of all I’m bothered by the emphasis on “retention rates,” which, again, would be cool if The Man were worried about the fact that these women want, and need, to get their degrees.  But what they’re really worried about is money, and the fact that pregnant student = drop out = less money in the bank for the CC.  Show me a woman-centered approach to this topic (free day care, anyone?), and maybe we can talk.

*Let me just remind everyone that we actually thought we were going into this marriage with fertility problems, so on one level we were SUPER super happy to know that we could conceive.  But we obviously didn’t time it, because we didn’t think we had anything to time.  So it was a bit of a mindfuck of, hey, praise be! my uterus works!  But, um, did it have to work right now?  BUT! Don’t take it away, god-like entity who might punish me for not being thankful 24/7!  Yeah, because in addition to the whole “your baby might not have a chin! and you might need an abortion at 22 weeks!” thing, we didn’t think we’d be able to get pregnant without the help of Science. So when I freaked out about being pregnant I automatically assumed that Ye Gods would have their way with me because I didn’t leave cookies on the hearth in their honor or something.  And to a degree, I still freak out about that, which is why I’m always qualifying statements about the unplanniness of The Baby.

** They’re also spending more on me than they make, but that’s a whole other issue.

Yesterday I was making Jello (the industrial kind–is there any other?) for Wizard  because he’s been in a Jello mood lately. I feel it necessary to add that I have to cook anything involving boiling water (e.g. pasta) because his coordination is so off that making him do it himself would result in a trip to the emergency room.  No, really.  This isn’t one of those “oh, honey, let me do it!” scenarios.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that he’s one of those genius-y people who can’t tie his own shoes.  Yeah.  So that problem extends to things like pouring hot water into a bowl, tying anything into a knot, and standing on one foot.  It’s weird.

I’d think this was just some huge ruse to get me to do shit around the house, except that I’ve heard a neurologist tell him that his scores on a series of hours-long tests were so abnormal that something should be wrong, except that it wasn’t, and it was probably just the same wiring that helps him compute things reallyreallyreally fast, so go along your merry way, and by the way I hope you don’t want a pilot’s license because there’s no way in hell anyone would sign off on one of those.

He was sad about the pilot’s license thing, surprisingly, not so much because he wants one as that he doesn’t like feeling “differently abled.”  And I’m, like, dude, I hate to break it to you, but you are the most differently-abled person I know, in all the senses of different one might imagine.

But anyway. Jello.

It’s pretty simple, that jello.  Powder in bowl, plus a cup of boiling water, followed by two minutes of stirring, followed by a cup of cold water and refrigeration.  If you came here looking for jello directions, there you go.  But it struck me last night that my mother always screwed up jello.  Either it got thick on top, or all the powder was clumped at the bottom, or something.  And as a kid, it annoyed the crap out me.  Who screws up jello?  Why does this taste so bad?  Why is it either watered down or gritty or both?

And then last night, I figured it out  While raising two kids, working full-time, keeping a house, and doing all the other crap you have to do to function as a human in the U.S., my mother didn’t have two spare minutes to stand there stirring the water into the powder. She just dumped it all together, shoved it in the fridge, and ran off to supervise sentence diagramming, or iron clothes, or grade math tests, or whatever.

It’s facebook, actually, that’s making me think more about time and how we use it, as people and as parents.  My facebook is divided rather unevenly into college/grad school friends (lots) and women I knew in high school who had two or three kids and are now trying to finish their college degrees (a few). At this time of year, you see a lot of status messages by grad students complaining about staying up all night, and not having a minute to do anything but write, and the rest of the hell that is a full schedule of course papers and teaching and grading at the end of the semester. I used to complain about those things too.  But now that I’m trying to write a dissertation and co-run a tutoring lab and take care of The Baby and sometimes even be a partner to a person who has yet to submit his dissertation revisions because he’s busy working full-time so the rest of us don’t starve AND because he takes the baby from me the minute he gets home so I have some time to work…(RUN ON!!!)…sometimes it’s all I can do not to post something snarky, like, hey y’all, why don’t you bring a thermos of coffee on over to my house and spend your overnight reading hours watching my baby, who tends to like chilling in his exersaucer at 3 in the AM?

That is, until I read the statuses of my old high school crew, whose lives involve getting three kids to three different places and doing  part-time work to supplement their husbands’ two or three jobs, all while busting ass to meet the demands of college coursework that will hopefully  score them a decent job in five years or so.

What am I trying to say here?  That it’s all relative, I guess?  That I thought it was tough being a student until I was a student-mother?  That any and all sets of circumstances are often difficult?  That I whine too much? That my friends whine too much? That my friends think I whine too much?  That my friends don’t want to whine to me because they feel guilty, even though I remain a good listener and am not nearly as judgmental in real life as I appear in this blog?

Maybe I’ll just say big ups to those of us trying to live in the mind and in the world at the same time, whatever that may mean. And good luck with finals.  And try to resist the urge to fail the kids whose full schedule of sleeping off their heavy drinking is the only thing preventing them from turning in their portfolios on time.

Tell me this: when did I turn into one of those people who considers college students to be consumers and sees her job as providing exceptional customer service?

Probably since I moved from the classroom to administration. I used to grandstand about the life of the mind and goods and services and commodity culture and all the rest.  I used to think college was more than just an exchange of cash for degree.  But now? Now I’m working my ass off to make sure that there is a tutor for every tutee, and I’m not doing it because I’m concerned about their education.  No, I’m thinking about how if a student is turned away, that student will complain that s/he didn’t get what s/he wanted, which will in turn piss off the dean-ly people, which will in turn jeopardize our funding.  Our cash.  Our Gs.

I’ll tell you more about it later. Right now I’ve got a customer.

You mean the whole point is they’re trying to get married? There’s not going to be any…action…or anything?

–my father, after watching the first hour of Pride and Prejudice

So I was supposed to be out of town this weekend, but instead I’m stuck at home with a cold. Despite my best efforts and liberal use of hand sanitizer, I wasn’t able to avoid catching some germs from the plague-invested students with whom I was forced into close contact. Oh, how I wish it were socially acceptable to wear a re-breather and rubber gloves to work. Yes, I’m a bit of a germophobe. Don’t go feigning surprise.

Since I’m stuck here, I might as well catch up on blogs and such. No sense getting ahead on work or anything like that.

As the whine-a-roo post below indicates, I’m immersed in 9/11 lit, and it’s depressing the hell out of me, so I’m not capable of posting something coherent right now (which is not to say I’ve ever posted something coherent, come to think of it). My dissertation is not exclusively on 9/11 texts (note to self: update wholly inaccurate “Dissertating” page), but a lot of what I’m reading right now will most likely make it into some of the chapters.  So in lieu of something interesting, here are some back-to-school observations:

1. This year’s cycle of freshmen?  Young’ns.  It’s amazing how different the groups look from year to year.  The class of 2012, despite being the first group of true 90s babies, has the puffy look of youth and abandonment about their wide eyes.  Last year’s group was more sophisticated, more “grown up.”  These kids are more my style: shlubby, pale, undone.  I hated the year I taught a MWF 8 AM full of freshmen who consistently came in full hair and makeup.  I looked a bit like their zoned out, dressed down drug dealer in comparison.
2. There’s an asshole in every class.  Part of my new, non-teaching fellowship requires me to make quick visits to classes to talk about writing (and yes, it’s even worse than it sounds).  So far I’ve only been doing this for a week, but initial studies show that, wow, everyone gets saddled with that one dickhead kid who, according to law and contract, you’re not allowed to throttle.  Or perhaps it’s one of those “nature abhors a vacuum” things, so that in each class an asshole is made, if not born, out of necessity.  At any rate, I used to think it was just me.  Or, just me and most of my friends.  But I’ve been to a bunch of classrooms this week:  tenured profs, well-respected and adored profs, even the class of the “cool guy” prof, and in each case there was some smirky, dicky, slimy jerkoff.  Gender analysis aside, they were all male students.  One might blame that special blend of “gotta get laid before Labor Day” hormones that accompanies all of them this first week.  All’s I knows is, NOT MY PROBLEM.  Not my students, not my smirks, not my grading, not my annoyance.  Woo.
3. College isn’t a mall, but you wouldn’t know it to see it.  I don’t know what’s going on on the rest of your campuses, but at my school (which needs a nickname, does it not?  It’s a religious-affiliated school, so let’s go with Jesus Loves U–JLU) they just keep buying up property and turning that property into…no, not classrooms, try again.  Parking?  No way.  What about a state of the art multimedia facility?  Stop kidding around.  No, they’re turning that shit into a strip mall, complete with restaurants and coffee places and a freakin’ Barnes and Noble (which, granted, is the way all school bookstores are headed, but still).  I don’t know if this is on the meal plan.  I don’t know if this is just supposed to assure anxious parents that their kids don’t have to leave campus for bad burgers and stationery.  But let’s just say that if the school REALLY wanted to be helpful, they’d have built a small, maybe even low-price supermarket so that the students wouldn’t have to travel several miles through The Scary Unwalkable Part of Urbanville just to get their poptarts.  But hey, that would have benefited the surrounding community, too, and we can’t have that.  So let’s just knock down the affordable (though admittedly decrepit) housing and put up a Starbucks.

So, that’s what I learned at school this week.  How about you?