Cetaceus

Thing have come full circle again: I realized today that we have fully reentered a textual world, as opposed to an auditory one. Once, long ago folks on the marble-dusty streets of Athens lamented the advent of writing. Later, greater wails were sent skyward over the printing press. Just when we were getting used to sending letters and thinking that handwriting was the mark of true refinement, we got the telephone. For a brief period, the sound of a nasally, New York-accented operator, connecting people a few generations ago was music to all our ears (including mine now when I hear it in old movies). Finally, for us, we complete the cycle again, effectively using our phones to send letters. I think the pace is quickening however, as I had lunch today in Philly’s glorious Chinatown (after driving past a truckload of dead pigs being shouldered into some back alley) with two guys who make telephony happen on the internet.

New Years looms large. I hope that 2008 will bring all the things my three fortune-cookie fortunes told me I have comin’ to me.

Good news not just for Europeans, but for Americans of a certain stripe (namely, mine) also, the “Schengen Zone” is being expanded to include nine new EU member states. If you haven’t done much border hopping in Europe, the Schengen treaty, which pre-dates the EU, is basically an open-border policy that allows free passage, no passports, no harassment, no creepy Euro-redneck border guards, between countries in the club. It allows for something like traveling from state to state here, mas o menos.

As I am always pulling for Eastern Europe, even if all that amounts to is telling other Americans how awesome it is, it’s really nice to see this expansion eastward. I know that it’ll certainly help bring tourist income to the former front yard of the Iron Curtain. Not to mention that any shift of focus away from the places that have been so culturally dominant for all of recent history toward places that have been more marginalized can’t be a bad thing.

The nice thing about the Schengen Zone for Americans is that a single entry/exit policy exists for US citizens traveling through Europe, making it extremely easy for us to visit and bounce from country to country as well. While I think it’d be great if we’d return the favor at some point (especially as that’d bring in more than a few tourists-Euros), everything in it’s time I reckon.

I got a huge kick out of the following from the article:

Mr Fico said: “From midnight tonight you can travel 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Tallinn in Estonia to Lisbon in Portugal without any border controls.”

Reading this, I can’t help but smile and think “been there, done that.”

In two months I will be 28. My girlfriend is 32, and one of my best friends just turned 30. Last night, said best friend, sister, and myself went to a 21st birthday. Haven’t been to one of those in a while, my own, dimly viewed through the clouded mists of post-New Brunswick time, having gone down in history as eminently uneventful.

The young woman whose birthday we attended, being a well-regarded, kind and interesting Penn student (formerly of some blighted, home-schooled woodland, and who reportely gasped in horror the first time she’d ever seen people making out–as a freshman at said Ivy), provided 21 bands playing 21 one-minute sets as a backdrop for the crowd’s revelry. I can’t help but feel extremely good about someone from such a weird background having such a great 21st.

It reminds me however, that there are a number of goodly folks in my life who have not yet hit 25. This in turn reminds me, semi-solemnly as ever, of the two most important birthdays in one’s brief time on Earth.

At 23, your soul dies.

At 25, you start thinking.

The former truth ascribed to scholar Brenden Leach, the latter to my wise father.

I realize that I have not been updating here with regard to my work situation. I am happy to report that for the past two weeks I have been learning the ropes as the new North/Northwest Philadelphia Area Coordinator for The Center for Literacy, the office of which is conveniently located down the block from my apartment.

Well, so far so good around here. Beginning any new position is always difficult and ever bumpy, but my co-workers are a simply extraordinary group of people and everyone is deeply committed to working to raise literacy levels in the community. God knows this city, and many others, need it.

The numbers of folks who can’t read or struggle with reading, not to mention people working on getting a GRE, are staggering going on sobering. And although this is the largest and oldest literacy non-profit in the country (started out in the basement of the church at 48th and Baltimore, currently of Prometheus Radio Project fame, in the 1960s), it is a serious uphill battle. I often ponder the fate of the lowest income communities in the city, and working here leaves me further convinced that short of a well thought out, fair and legitimate plan for reparations (which I hope to post about at some point), it is going to be a long, arduous uphill battle, step by step, bit by bit, with more backsliding and grief than I care to think about, before real sustainable economic equality comes to this land.

As for me, my job, being administrative, involves sending out longish electronic tentacles into the community to organize, arrange and bring together volunteer tutors with adult learners who are, for the most part it seems, trying to get their lives on a more economically sustainable (and dignified) track. I have been getting my hands dirty in working and interacting with our student population. My aim is to do even more of this by personally tutoring some people or teaching a class once they set me up with a real office in North Philly.

I am tempted to share some of the more intense personal stories I’ve heard from our students just in the two brief weeks I’ve been here. However, as this is a public blog and I’ve already identified myself and where I work, I think it would probably be an infringement on the privacy of our learners. I would rather not compromise these peoples’ dignity in any way, especially as our culture on the whole has been giving it a thorough thrashing for most of their lives.

Suffice it to say, you don’t hear about half this shit on the news. The things they report are the things that shock the sensibilities of the middle class, not the arduous, grinding day to day struggles that so many people somehow live through. And I say that as someone on the periphery, working with folks who have it together enough to try and get out of the hell that exists in an inner city like Philly. I can only imagine what a place like Baltimore is like.

Back to work now. On the docket for today is figuring out where to send these ESL students. Class vs. tutoring, and who will get the most out of either. It looks like this will be the perennial question.

Now this is a rail line. We’ll never see something like this around these parts, and it serves to remind me how much I miss my old pal JR (Japan Rail, that is). Those long walks on the moving sidewalks from the Keiyo line tracks into Tokyo station proper will forever be missed. Now I have to settle for the piss-smelling cold concrete tunnels that lead out of the Green Line station at 30th Street, which isn’t even connected to 30th St. Station proper. Yep, pools of urine and a walk in the freezing cold just to change trains. Why did I leave Japan again?

I semi-religiously follow capital improvement plans going on within the two main local rail systems, NJ Transit and SEPTA, for two primary reasons: I love trains and I use both of those systems regularly. While at work today, I found a great map of proposed/upcoming SEPTA improvements in and around Philly, which I’m pretty excited about. Especially since many of these are going to connect previously unconnected parts of the city, and because they’ll be connecting ever more distant suburban towns, meaning fewer cars on the road, less gas-guzzling and people actually spending time in public in each others’ company. NJ Transit also has a lot of exciting stuff going on, moving it’s service further south, which is great for central and south Jersey, the usually forgotten–and less economically well off–regions of the state. Hopefully, these things will actually be funded and put into place. I’m not holding my breath, but at least it’s on the table. Check it:

SEPTA

NJ Transit Lackawana Cutoff

NJ Transit Ocean/Monmouth Counties

NJ Transit West Trenton Line

One of the great things you’ll notice about the New Jersey Transit projects is how much old rail track they’d be using. Why it was ever allowed to fall into disuse aside, it’s nice to know that in my home state we can at least atone for our mistakes.