“Pick on Farragut”

Objective: Blame Farragut for anything you don’t like about Knoxville.
Examples: “Farragut caused urban sprawl.”
“Farragut made the downtown a service center for the homeless.”
“Farragut caused my child to be zoned out of the school in our neighborhood.”
How to play: Whenever possible, toss out verbal daggers that criticize Farragut. Counter the criticism with praise for downtown. Bonus points if you use the words “my historic neighborhood,” “walkability” or “destroyed wetlands.” In order to play this game well, you must know the home zip code of every local politician, celebrity and developer.
If you live in Farragut: You respond to this game with comments about paying more taxes than the rest of Knoxville or wide-eyed innocence.
How to win: There is no winner. The only way to win is not to play.

I really enjoyed movies and music more when celebrities kept their personal lives private. Please stop giving the stalkarazzi your schedule and pay for GOOD pr firms, body guards and drivers. If you can’t behave in public, stay home. You are taking all the fun out of spending a week’s pay to take the family to the movies.

Our homegrown terrorist chose his ex-wife’s church as a target. This was not random. He doesn’t just hate some people, he hates everyone. When I read descriptions of him as a “loner,” my head says that he was a lonely, unhappy man who let bitterness and resentment take over his mind like a cancer. Maybe if he had a friend. Maybe if he felt loved. Maybe if we could see each other as human beings first and labels second. Maybe something. I try to pretend the killer is someone I love and care about. I search myself for pity or compassion and find none. The members of the church he attacked will forgive him long before I do. That makes me hateful, too. I don’t want this hate inside of me. The hate inside of me is my responsibility and not his. That doesn’t make me any less angry with him.

The children spent the afternoon playing at the cove while Doug stayed home to work. Word of the tragedy was just beginning to reach people picnicking today. The sadness in the city was palpable as people everywhere quietly whispered what they were hearing from the media and friends. Tragically, there was no sense of disbelief. No shock. Just sadness. Only one woman uttered a comment about this happening in Knoxville. With a shoulder shrug and a head shake she quietly said, “Shootings are a daily occurrence in _____ where I live. I guess it’s everywhere now.”

Continuing on my summer tour of government buildings, I visited the Social Security building on Kingston Pike today. I mailed in my old card YEARS ago with paperwork to get my name changed and apparently it disappeared into space. I didn’t know there was a problem until Tommy’s college paperwork claimed that our e-filed taxes for the past 2 years were denied because my name was wrong on the tax forms. Wouldn’t you think the IRS would have sent us a late penalty notice or something? So, since I have moved from denial that Tommy is going to college to frantic activity, I am trying to fix all of the problems simultaneously.

I was very pleased that the Social Security building is in my neck of the woods. It must really chafe the everything and everyone should be downtown Grumplestiltskins that the Social Security building is halfway between one end of town and the other. Actually, they don’t want everyone downtown. They think that the homeless population should be bused down to the wealthy part of town daily. Anyway, I parked right in front of the building which has been everything from a grocery store to an indoor skate park. It has a new, professional facade to hide the building’s eclectic history. At that point, the experience became the opposite of the DHS building visit. There were no people smoking outside and there was no giant ashtray instead of a flower bed. This place is Disney-clean. When you enter the building, the chairs are lined up in an aesthetically pleasing angle with wide rows around the sides and through the middle to easily traverse the room. There are no employees anywhere to be seen. Everyone checks in with a computer and sits silently until a disembodied voice calls their name and/or number with directions to follow. “Number 67, go to room 15.” “Number 68, go to window D.” Did I mention the unnatural silence? The people looked like zombies, staring at a television that was playing a looped recording of a woman telling everyone they could avoid the wait if they handled their needs online. The recording played over and over, but nobody left to go find a computer. Social Security might want to rethink their plan to get less people in the building.

I quickly figured out the reason for the silence. If anyone tried to use their phone or spoke in a normal voice, a guard appeared out of thin air and barked at them to go outside. “Not allowed. Outside.” You know the experience of getting through the security gate to enter a military base? The guard who is incapable of saying anything outside of his script or thinking independently? That was this guard. A senior quietly asked the guard if he knew where you get birth certificates. “We don’t do that.” “But, could you tell me who to ask?” “We don’t do that.” Dude. It’s the Social Security building, not Buckingham Palace. The computerized voice gave me directions and the clerk corrected my name in the system. I was in the building for less than 20 minutes. On the way out of the building, I pushed a button on my phone and held it up to my ear while waiting for the person I dialed to answer. The guard appeared in a poof of blue smoke and stared at me, waiting for me to speak out loud into the forbidden device. I felt like we were passing each other on a dusty saloon lined street. I spoke as I opened the door to exit. The guard smirked and vanished.

Among the many government aid programs that exist, there is financial assistance for people with disabilities to get vocational training or a college education. I have always known this, because my grandmother earned a college degree with disability funding. The idea is that people with disabilities have skills and knowledge that make them employable and independent. So, at your final IEP meeting, someone from Vocational Rehabilitation is present to do an application for aid. That was in May. My only real memory of the meeting was Evan giggling and throwing crayons until Doug took him outside so that the case worker interviewing Tommy could turn to me and tell me that my then 2-year-old needed Ritalin. Since then, well, I’ve been in denial. Not about Evan. He’s just the youngest of five and I may be a teensy bit more lenient with him. I have been refusing to allow myself to accept that Tommy isn’t going to spend the rest of his life under the safety of our roof. My son isn’t really going away to college. He couldn’t even get dressed and on the school bus without his parents repeatedly asking him to get out of bed.

Then, I looked at a calendar last week and had a little panic attack. I think I’ve calmed down a bit, but Doug might disagree with that assessment. Hysterical or not, I had to meet with the case worker so that Tommy could sign his paperwork. Our initial meeting took place at the high school, but today I was sent to the Middlebrook DHS building. Mmmkay. Have you ever been in this building? To get in the building, you walk past a row of extremely pregnant women and teens smoking in front of a flower bed sized ash tray. You enter the doors and it is like the back of a classroom. Rows and rows of people are seated with their backs to you. A choice must be made. What appears to be an information desk is directly across the room. Nobody is there and you have to walk all the way around the people to get there anyway. On the left side of the room is a clerk at a counter with two women talking to her. It looks like the place where people are ligning up to be seen. You walk over there and immediately realize that this is the interpreter’s counter. The information desk is still unattended. Only one wall left and it has a row of clerks behind protective glass. There are signs everywhere ordering people to remain behind the red line. We walked to the red line. Two of the four clerks looked up and then returned to whatever they were doing in their safe place. After a bit, one of the women snapped, “What?” I was a little stunned by her annoyed tone and wondered if I had broken a rule. I told her we had an appointment with MM. The clerk’s demeanor changed and she asked the clerks on either side of her what she was supposed to do with MM’s clients. One of them suggested that she page MM. Tommy and I sat down in one of the rows of chairs to wait.

There were less than half a dozen men in the room. While we were waiting, a woman came out of the back room, glared at one of them and they left the building together. Every other person in the room except my 17-year-old son and I, was either carrying an infant car seat or obviously pregnant. The majority of them were teenagers. They talked on cell phones, smacked gum and played with their hair, but not a single one of them took their baby out of the car seat. Three dozen infants sleeping, cooing or crying and all were being completely ignored. Do you have any idea how much that bothers me? I wanted to go offer to hold one of those babies and treat them like people instead of dolls. Lucky for me, I didn’t get arrested for being a nosy old lady since MM the case worker came out to get us. We spent the next hour and a half filling out paperwork. Tommy isn’t even getting his full tuition paid by Voc Rehab, but it’s a part of scraping the needed money together to give him this chance. After years of IEP meetings that lasted for 4 and 5 hours, this was a breeze. The only time I felt my skin crawl was when the caseworker said she was relieved that we didn’t bring our youngest child. Raise your hand if you think this worker has no children of her own. We left the room and found a nearly empty waiting room. I guess there’s not much paperwork involved in whatever pregnant women do at DHS. The best part of the appointment was the knowledge that Tommy has to re-visit the case worker at the beginning and end of every semester until he is employed full-time. Blech. Oh wait. I have to gather everything needed to equip a dorm room. Sheets, blankets, towels and does he even have enough clothes to last a week without doing laundry? Ohhhhhh, why is this room spinning?

One of the other scout parents has “concerns” about Tommy attending Boy Scout camp for a week without Doug there also. The person who was asked to relay this information only gave us one quote. “Is Tommy annoying on purpose?” I asked the concerned parent if they are annoying on purpose. No. I would not do that. I might eat their face off though. No. I won’t do that either. In fact, I won’t even be invited to the meeting. I would put my hands on my hips and give the parent one of my patented looks while explaining that we didn’t allow Tommy to join scouts until he was capable of self control and displayed no behaviors that you wouldn’t experience from any other boy there. No. Tommy is better behaved than many of the other boys in the troop. They just don’t have a diagnosis that their parents share honestly with the troop. For some reason, Doug thinks he can handle this discussion with more tact than I can. I might tactfully sign the things I am not allowed to say. On the other hand, I think I’ll just let Doug handle this one.

Me: “Which presidential candidate do you like right now?”
Sarah: “Not the old guy.”
Me: “Why?”
Sarah: “Because he’s OLD.”
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And, the comments that ended a conversation when I had to bite my tongue. Hard.
“I’m surrounded by bleeding heart liberals. If I could vote for GW again, I would in a heartbeat. The good people in this country are not going to vote for a black man.”
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Sarah’s comment is stupid, but forgivable, because contrary to what she thinks, she is a child. Age doesn’t make a person unfit. If she wants a president who is physically healthy, she should question which candidate is a smoker. The other comments, well . . . I apologize for offending a relative, but that was racist and I believe that the GOOD people in this country can see beyond skin color and gender. A few of the women who are still having a tantrum because Hillary isn’t the candidate are letting their misandry show. I don’t believe that men need to step back and let women have their turn. I have sons AND daughters. I want them all to be treated fairly. Instead of refusing to vote and helping nobody, how about channeling that energy into something that would do good? There are really just two candidates in the presidential race now. Don’t sit back and demand that they convince you who to vote for in this election. Every word and action of the candidates is recorded somewhere. Decide for yourself. I hate seeing politicians pandering to groups in bowling alleys, bars and wrestling matches. The presidential candidates do not “feel” what it’s like to be a middle class American. They are wealthy, educated, well-traveled and socially connected. I want to know how they will lead this country, not how they like their bbq cooked. With the constant media and blogosphere attention, candidates shouldn’t be wasting all that money on ads and attacks on the other candidates. They should raise money and show Americans how they spend it. McCain should be buying body armor for the troops and campaigning for better military benefits. Obama should be building energy efficient schools and campaigning for environmental reform. Wouldn’t it be nice if campaigns did good? “I am no better and neither are you. We are the same whatever we do.”

If Turkey Creek had been designed to be walkable, they would not have the hordes of spoiled, thug wanna-be teenagers take over the property for drag races late at night. I am a Turkey Creek fan. I love to go there and people watch. I have just never understood why it wasn’t designed more intelligently. People should park their cars and walk everywhere in the complex. The people who approved the strip malls on either side of a highway design deserve to have the late night races all over their landscaped retail world.

I want to say kids will be kids. I want to say live and let live. I just can’t. This bothers me as a parent. The idea of unsupervised drag racing makes my mom alarms flash and ring. I don’t deny that my worry is fueled by the presence of two permit holders in our house. The awareness that all of my children’s peers are also permit holders has me dreaming of a large empty parking lot converted into an obstacle course for safe learning. My teens and their friends probably dream of joining in the late night races at Turkey Creek. I am acutely aware that we shun teens and deny them places to interact. I just don’t think that nitrous cars are a good way to socialize and impress. Turkey Creek needs to tear up that drag strip and replace it with a row of small shops and SIDEWALKS.

I will miss many things about Kindergarten, but carpool is not one of them. If you get there half an hour early, there will still be two cars in line ahead of you. If you get there five minutes before the bell, you will be in line a block away from the school. If you leave the car running, you are destroying the environment. Turn the engine off and you freeze or melt. It interrupts baby nap time as evidenced by the tiny wails of misery coming from the other cars. Toddlers express their frustration at having to be strapped into a non-moving vehicle. Nobody likes carpool. It works as efficiently as possible because everyone follows the rules. Well, almost everyone. We have one parent at our elementary school who jumps to the front of the line and gets out of their car to claim their child the minute they arrive instead of waiting in their cars in the line like everyone else. This parent is not a doctor, nurse, police officer or fire fighter. If it it was, everyone would understand the inability to wait. This parent is one of the people who ended up on Gilligan’s island. You know the song, “With Gilligan, the Skipper too, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the professor and Mary Ann, here on Gilligan’s Isle.” This parent has the kind of job that would allow them to show up two hours late for a meeting and people would all smile and claim that the person was right on time. There are parents and grandparents in the carpool line who are using their entire lunch hour to pick their child up and drop them off somewhere before they rush back to work. They follow the rules and wait their turn. Why couldn’t this parent? I know that the impatient parent was aware that they were annoying people. I watched other parents giving this person the stink eye day after day. At class parties and on field trips, this person’s carpool behavior ALWAYS came up in discussions. Ironically, this person is thought of very highly thought of in our community. Anyone in their neighborhood would have carpooled with them. They just aren’t making any friends in the carpool line. Does this parent not realize that they are setting a bad example for their own child? I am thrilled that I won’t have elementary school carpool next year. Hopefully, the impatient parent will have gained patience over the summer.