Wharf Rats
I once lived in a rental house in a fishing town on the Oregon coast. It was a cozy place, spacious, and warm. It was a fine place to be. My feelings about it changed one night, though, when a member of the household found a rat in the toilet. After the screaming stopped, and I understood what was going on, I took a look. Sure enough, there was a wet rat doing a little rat-paddle, round and round the bowl.
I did what anybody would do - I slammed the cover and flushed. Three times, to make sure. And I put a concrete block on the lid for additional peace of mind. Still, the honeymoon was over with that little beach house.
On guard, then, I looked around because I know enough about rats to understand they don’t work alone. Suddenly the holes in the sandy bank behind the house took on new meaning. No surprise, I was living in rat country. It was a fishing town, after all. But I didn’t realize how devious and resilient a rat could be.
The common species are opportunistic survivors and often live with and near humans.
I have nothing against rats. But I don’t live with them. They’re free to do their rat business somewhere other than where I do mine.
From Meg Spohn, this link to the Nietzche Family Circus generated a connection with a contentious comment mess that’s kept me busy the past week. Wish I’d managed it better. I dumped my share of fuel on the fire, I know. Inflammatory, sarcastic, or disruptive comments, meant to draw people into pointless argument, is harrassment, and won’t be indulged. Personal attack and innuendo is not debate.
Squirrels are a problem now. They get in the shed and tear stuff up. They take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder…
I have heavy screens in the roof soffits to keep them out of my house insulation. I moderate them with a live trap and drive them down the road. Like the rats, they can do their squirrely mischief somewhere else. Since they’ve gotten into the shed, I can’t keep them out. They chew right through the door! Now I have to keep a closer eye on stuff in there. I think they attract one another by scent marking the place.
You ever listen to one? They cuss like sailors when you piss ‘em off. The ones we have here do, at least.
I have nothing against sailors…
Sarah Puglisi wrote,
Hi….I left this comment on another site and decided it belonged here too….
I know essentially this discussion that devolved here, was a place I took my concerns and some experiences from my teaching and simply was responding to a piece in a form I thought …maybe…provided a kind of real life example or …perhaps almost a kind of written response to what a first read in my context of living lead me to think about. Written in the moment.
So it was a kind of thinking aloud with a type of audience piece I suppose. Really it wasn’t much more than a sharing of thought. I didn’t really consider a comment to be an argument per se or a kind of factual, scientifically validated piece for the perusal of a judge or deconstructive writer,and certainly my level on any day is not up to the original piece, nor of course at the time I initially wrote in had I yet to learn about individuals who spend inordinate amounts of time sledgehammering others from their own child’s classroom teacher to other teachers in general as a kind of anger management problem or personality disorder couched in highly developed dialectic “style” and hoping to engage in a playground kind of punching match and get into a long argument about who started it and whether it’s okay, really, to punch like this so long as Mom or Dad told you to defend yourself and you “had a good reason”. Whatever that was, it looked that way to my teacher eyes.
But actually, from this I learned a few things. Some “sides” in educational groups, if one can loosely use the term, draw the lines in different ways than I learned to draw lines in personal behaviors. Some people misrepresent intention and discourse to their own ends like a bully pulpit, some individuals have really bad taste in their associates and some people are proud of behaviors that are embarassingly juvenile. And very unused to apparently providing an apology.
I want to apologize however. Please know, I did answer back to some twisted logic in that original posting as I thought I’d failed really to communicate my meanings. Also in naivte, also simply because I don’t know some things all that well about internet discourse. That is an ignorance argument…not a very good place to find oneself. Never a good excuse and always indicative of a need to get more knowledge. And of course I rather apologize for a tendency towards longer comments and personalizing as reading something out of the exchange that I followed I see I generally shouldn’t do that….live and learn.
I was/am an elementary teacher with real concerns about things happening with students. I have lots to learn , and some few insights from working with children daily and watching that world well with daily written notes to myself to fall back on for memory strand, over 23 years…with a kind of introspective desire and a big willingness to admit I know very little and sometimes nothing at all.
In the face of an increasingly rude, shouting, shoving phenom in modern culture with “survivors” and voting off and so much pop culture around telling off….it’s a time I know almost nothing apparently( from my teacher perspective) for it looks like a place from which nothing to assist humans with hurts and problems with needs and concerns into lives can be cared about. It feels like a land where you justify trying to do a good day’s work and help others understand your contexts. To me it feels like a kind of process is a foot to create an atmosphere where hate and anger is more acceptable, intolerance and deliberate deception is a process, making someone else comply is a desired action, and for me, knowing very little, of the few things I do see , they lead me to conclude that in this process a force is being let loose once again in the world, one of many methods and faces and forms as Steinbeck once so cagily remarked, but obviously leading to some rather easily extracted conclusions….and as I was wounded a bit in this and stopped myself to think about why, and stopped from moving forward for a bit to articulate my meanings, slowed into self justifification…I feel I can speak to that. It sickens me. i’m very sorry Doug.
I know times are indeed changing….at any rate I’m sorry to you for my part of that unproductive line of thought. It was my intention to provide some views of a real teaching life and to allow a very good piece of written questioning and thought on this site to be answered back with a kind of gentle hello, I hear you. Failing to do that with unproductive discourse means as a teacher I lost my footing in carrying forth my teacher and personal standard around that mission, and that is never acceptable to me. Sarah Puglisi.
Link | October 20th, 2006 at 3:47 am