One more day

This is exam week at the college. I will be meeting with my students to give back their drafts and discuss them with as many students who want or need to talk to me. Though it is my official exam day, I will collect the final papers by email on Weds. and grade them as fast as possible so I can do my syllabus for first summer session. Thank goodness, I'll be done with this class (nearly) at that point.

The Nursing Home

The nursing home I chose for mom (on the caregiver's advice) is enormous. It reminds me quite a bit of the one in Philadelphia, but is fortunately much cleaner and friendlier, though the layout of it looks like the assisted living part of the place my parents were in initially. Fortunately, the rehab part doesn't resemble it at all. That was a snake pit, where the racist attendants let my father lie raving on the floor after his stroke.
The admissions person (on weekends, at least) is a guy named Hansel, which brought a smile to my face, and you could tell he didn't want to hear the inevitable quips, so no breadcrumbs, no witch who eats children, etc. What were his parents thinking?
Transporting mom by van went well. The caregiver found me a guy who charged a reasonable price, and I will call him again, I'm sure, when I need to. I'm pretty sure mom will never be out of her wheelchair, even after her leg heals.
Tomorrow, the person I hire to take my parents to the doctor will ride the public van with her to have her stitches removed. I am concerned about that. They are less than reliable sometimes. I hope it all works out.

The Israeli/Palestinian issue

American Jews like to think of themselves mostly as Americans, and many of them, like me, find the politics in Israel abhorrent, and want to believe it has nothing to do with us. I have belonged to progressive Jewish organizations, Jewish Palestinian dialogue groups, and fancied myself immune to the taint associated with racism in the Middle East, but what is happening on the UCI campus has made me realize that I can't hide, anymore than the Jews in Europe and Germany could. They didn't think of themselves as Jewish in the old way. They were assimilated too, but no one who wanted to kill them stopped to ask them about their politics before they sent them off to concentration camps.
Talking doesn't seem to do the trick anymore. These guys aren't listening.They are angry, and they have some good reasons for it too. It's just that they are being used by those who want to harness that anger and turn it into something different.

No Wonder I Was Freaked Out on Campus Yesterday; I'm Not Alone

I copied a letter I got on email from the Jewish faculty at UCI. They were as appalled as I was. I am pasting it intact here:


An Open Letter to the Community from Faculty for Israel at UCI
May 10, 2010

We, faculty at the University of California--Irvine, are deeply disturbed about activities on campus that foment hatred against Jews and Israelis. The troubling events over the past few years include the painting of swastikas in university buildings, the Star of David depicted as akin to a swastika, a statement (by a speaker repeatedly invited by the Muslim Student Union) that the Zionist Jew is a party of satan, a statement by another MSU speaker that the Holocaust was God's will, the tearing down of posters placed by the student group Anteaters for Israel, and the hacking of their web site. Some community members, students, and faculty indeed feel intimidated, and at times even unsafe.

Some of these actions are protected by the First Amendment and in no way do we want to limit freedom of speech. We welcome open dialogue among all members of the UCI community. We respect and value our Muslim colleagues, including those members of the MSU who support and encourage open dialogue and civility on campus. At the same time, we take issue with hate-promoting actions that we find unacceptable. They run counter to the peaceful co-existence and civility that are essential to a university environment. Actions that demonize and derogate others, such as the previous events that have occurred on our campus noted above, have contributed to UCI's developing a growing reputation as a center of hate and intolerance. Our campus deserves better.

Signed:

Marlon Boarnet, Professor, Department of Planning, Policy, and Design Matthew Brenner, Professor, Department of Medicine
Dan Cooper, Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Engineering
Rina Dechter, Professor, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
George Farkas, Professor, Department of Education
Paul Feldstein, Robert Gumbiner Professor, The Paul Merage School of Business
Gary Fouse, Adjunct teacher, University Extension
Stephen Franklin, Lecturer, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Jean Fried, Project Scientist, Department of Planning, Policy, and Design Julia M. Gelfand, Applied Sciences & Engineering Librarian
Sheldon Greenfield, Donald Bren Professor, School of Medicine
Amihai Glazer, Professor, Department of Economics
Dan Hirschberg, Professor, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Christopher Kahn, Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine Zeev Kain, Professor, Anesthesiology & Pediatrics & Psychiatry
Tatiana Kain, Chair and Medical Director, Department of Emergency Medicine
Sherrie Kaplan, Executive Co-Director, Center for Health Policy Research Mark I. Langdorf, Professor, Clinical Emergency Medicine
Marc Lerner, Clinical Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Seymour Menton, Research Professor, Department of Spanish & Portugese
Frank Meyskens, Professor of Medicine, Biological Chemistry and Public Health Dana Mukamel, Professor, Department of Medicine David Neumark, Professor, Department of Economics
Alex Nicolau, Professor, Department of Computer Science
Raymond W. Novaco, Professor, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
Richard Pattis, Lecturer, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Shlomit Radom-Aizik, Postdoc, Department of Pediatrics
Carl H. Schultz, Professor, Emergency Medicine
Roberta Seid, Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
Roxane Cohen Silver, Professor Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
Etel Solingen, Chancellor's Professor, Political Science
Dara Sorkin, Assistant Adjunct Professor, Department of Medicine
Eugene Spiritus, Chief Medical Officer, UCI Medical Center
Hal Stern, Professor, Department of Statistics
Dan Stokols, Chancellor's Professor, Department of Planning, Policy, and Design and Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
Gene Tsudik, Professor, Department of Computer Science
Alex Veidenbaum, Professor, Department of Computer Science
Mark Warschauer, Professor of Education and Informatics
Hadar Ziv, Lecturer/Research Scientist, Department of Informatics

Mom

As I may have said earlier, the nurse practitioner from UCI Med Ctr. has determined that my mom needs to go to a rehab facility and that her care is too much for the board and care to handle. Consequently, I now have the problem of transporting her to the rehab center because she cannot sit in a car or put weight on her leg.
The ACCESS bus for seniors won't transport her, they say, unless I measure and weigh the wheelchair with her in it. So I went to the house and did the next best thing, adding her weight from a recent doctor's visit to the weight of the wheelchair. But they won't take her tomorrow anyhow because it is too late to call for a ride. So I have to find another service that will take her, and the only one I know of doesn't answer the phone.
Meanwhile, I am feeling sick. It seems I have some kind of sinus infection or something that is making my head and ears hurt. This makes everything much more difficult to deal with.
I let off some steam by screaming as loud as I could. It just made my throat hurt. I don't feel any better. I guess I will figure something out.

To the Rehab We Go

My mother is now able to sit in a wheelchair for a few hours per day, but still is suffering from high blood pressure and some kind of infection of unknown origin. She stays asleep most of the day, except at night, when she tries to escape from her hospital bed and stand up. If she did that, she would break the leg again.
Monday, when I am at school talking to the students about their final drafts and preparing them to revise them for the final essay, which comes in Weds., my mom will be going to the surgeon's office to have her stitches taken out. Margaret, the driver, will accompany her, but will not drive her. Instead, they will both ride in the OCTA van, if I can get them a spot. I have to call today.
The Physician's Assistant from UCI who tends to my parents came out to visit my mom and says she needs a few weeks in a rehab, so now I have to choose one. That's hard. Rehabs can be awful. My dad was in a nightmare of one in Philadelphia with racist aides who left him lying helpless on the floor after his stroke, when he was out of his mind. He ended up trying to strangle a doctor, thinking the man was trying to electrocute him with a toilet seat, and was sent to a snake pit of a public mental hospital where everything he owned was stolen. When Richard came to pick him up, he had no underwear, no shoes, and his glasses were gone. The doctors told him no one was going to take him away from there, that he would rot there. I am looking for a decent rehab fairly close by, that will not require me to drive on the freeway. Lou, what's the name of the place where Robert was staying?

Better Day Thursday

Yesterday was a hard day. I had to sit with the student who lost her fiance and tell her that without sources, her paper would fail. She was crying because she can't understand why she's having a hard time. She refuses to see a counselor to help her deal with her grief. Sure, it would be hard anyhow, but I'd snatch at anything that might help if I were her.
I also had to face off with the contemptuous student who says he got a B+ in Writing 1, and this class has made no sense to him from the beginning. He is the same person who says it isn't fair that students should have to go to UCI to research their topics, and refuses on principle to do it. Others just don't because they are lazy.
Then I went to hear a poet read at UCI, a reading I learned about on Reb's blog, but when I got there, I found out that it had been moved to another building. When I went to the room and opened the door, a lecture on Renaissance painting was in process. Several of my former professors from UCI were there. I sat down just because I was embarrassed and I thought it would end soon, and the reading would begin, but after a few minutes, I left again and called R.
It seems the reading had been rescheduled for 7 PM. I went to wait for Richard in front of the library, where I was confronted with a huge demonstration by Palestinian students declaring this "Israeli apartheid week." There were no Jewish student organizations in sight, and I know why. Even though I don't care at all for Israeli policy toward Palestinians, I felt afraid and threatened. I even feared that someone might break my windshield because of the Jewish star chime hanging from the mirror. That didn't happen, but I sure didn't care for having to stand there for half an hour. It turned out that he was in the library waiting for me, but I never came into the library.
Lousy day! But today was better. I discovered that the Writing Center was closed because it was a non-instructional day. I got to stay home and read drafts, awful as they were, in a leisurely way, and now I will write to the students.