Maxximum Dogg

I wonder if Maxx knows something that I don't know about the sidewalk subway grates. He will not walk on them, even if it means that he has to jump into the street or bowl over oncoming pedestrians. At first I thought that there was a thought process going on inside that dense furry head, but lately I've come to think that the grates might not feel good on his feet.

I am inclined to believe that he does understand and think consequentially about some things because he's the only dog I've ever walked who realizes that if he walks to one side of a sign post and I walk to the other, he's going to get brought up short when the leash hits the sign post. He usually looks back at me to see which side of the sign post I'm likely to choose, and then he does the same.

In any event, his run-in with the hot dog cart has not stemmed his idiocy regarding moving vehicles. I'm constantly having to prevent him from crossing the road when the light is against us. But if any tumbling tumbleweeds of trash come rattling by us in roughly the same tones as a pickup truck towing a hot dog cart, he jumps six feet in alarm.

This Is An Exercise In Fruitlessness

Today I learned the secret to getting someone from the inmate property office on the phone. You go to the inmate property window and explain that you are there to pick stuff up. You have to shout very loudly because the bulletproof window separating you from the guard doesn't have any holes or voice vent in it. Then you huddle with all of the other people around a pay phone in the corner and wait for it to ring. When it rings, it's inmate property on the other end! So intuitive.

It's up to the crowd to make sure that everyone has a chance to talk to the guy on the other end of the phone. Sadly, the first person to get the call didn't grasp this essential fact. He was old, shaky, and clearly upset when the inmate property people confessed to having no record of his son's possessions. He hung up the phone when he finished and shuffled off, grumbling to himself, leaving me and Former Inmate Looking for His Own Property high and dry. Fortunately, the guard asked the inmate property guy to call again so that we could speak to him.

I should have spotted the writing on the wall when Former Inmate struck out as well, but I guess I'm still a little slow on the uptake with this whole incompetence/corruption thing. Sure enough, when I had my turn with the inmate property guy, he told me that they had no record of Denis having left any possessions there. I detailed said possessions as best I could given that I've never actually seen them, and the guard told me that they must have been sent to CTF along with Denis. He said that it's customary for books and papers to go over with the inmate.

It was hard to ignore the rantings that Former Inmate was unleashing on his girlfriend just to my left: "Bullshit, they ain't got a record! More like they went through my shit and took what looked good to them!"

It's possible that Denis spoke to Ginger before he realized that his things would follow him over.

I Am Too Stupid To Feed Myself

I ate too many cherries and now my stomach hurts. It's just that cherries are one of my favorite fruits, and they're only available for a few weeks a year, so I'm always tempted to gorge myself whenever I can find them in the store. It wouldn't be so bad except that I hurt myself with them every freaking day. And it's not only that I hurt myself with them yesterday and the day before that, but that I hurt myself with them last year, and the year before that.

Sometimes when I get to thinking about the possibility of an afterlife, I think that it would be cool if when you die, you're handed a long printout of facts about your life. In my obsessive-compulsive little world, this printout would contain information such as the number of gallons of water you drank, the number of steps you took, eyeblinks you had, and maybe even the weight of all the cherries you ate.

Sometimes I wish that my mother had kept better track of these things when I was under her complete control. There are years that I could have known, with reasonable accuracy, all of the foods that I ate! My mother really wasted an opportunity there. I sometimes wonder, though... what will happen if I ever procreate? What kind of crazy will I perpetrate on my offspring? Will I really present them, perhaps as Sweet 16 gifts, with marble notebooks full of lists of their early childhood foods? Do I have that much crazy inside me? Probably depends on whether I find a job between now and then, I guess.

All The Comforts of Third World Bureaucracy Without the Hassle of Having to Get a Passport

I spent a large portion of Monday desultorily attempting to find out what I have to do to pick up inmate property. What can I say? At a certain point, anything makes a nice study break: half an hour of Con Law, call the jail, repeat. I learned that the website is even more useless on the subject of inmate property than it is on all of the other subjects I've ever tried to learn about there. I also learned that no one in the jail warden's office knows anything about inmate property. I've come to think that inmate property is like the bastard child of jail services, maybe because they resent having any kind of ongoing responsibility to criminals of whom they've gotten bodily rid. Even their terminology is militant: they say that any property left there for more than 15 days will be "destroyed"... not "removed" or even "disposed of." Now that I know about the shit-flinging revolts, I guess I can't exactly blame them if they want to vent their spleens on the unclaimed property.

Finally I found the number for inmate property itself, which felt like a triumph until I realized that no one ever answers it and the voicemail box is full (always a good sign). I misdialed once and got all excited when it kept ringing instead of going to the full voicemail box, but that was predictably short-lived.

The whole information chase was frustrating because every time I've gone over there for visiting hours, I've stared at the sign on the inmate property window. I've read it over and over, but I can't remember anything it said because I never knew that it would apply to me.

This morning I woke up refreshed and prepared to overlook the ludicrous inefficiency that was about to occur: I metroed over to jail and read the sign anew.

But that's not the best part! The best part is that I happened to show up within the time window when "male property" can be picked up. I explained myself to the guard at the window and he looked me over carefully and then said that I should come back tomorrow because he had something he needed to do right then. And he picked up his hat and left. As he was leaving, another woman sidelined him and started asking after her inmate property, which was apparently approaching its fatal 15th day. He promised her that he wouldn't "destroy" it (again with the destroying!) as long as she would return tomorrow to take it off his hands.

I wish I'd been brave enough to attempt a bribe, because that seemed like the time to try it. I've been inspired ever since Denis told me how common bribery is in Honduras. If DC is going to insist on staffing itself with arbitrary and capricious (again with the Con Law--ugh!) public servants, I think that we should be allowed to bribe them.

I Got Stood Up, AGAIN

My reading student (we'll call her B) stood me up again. I want to feel annoyed by it because it inconveniences me to plan a lesson and then haul everything down to the meeting place, but then I remember that it's not like she can just write a note to herself about the time and place of the meeting, and then I feel bad about my anger.

Working with them is very interesting, because it boldly underscores the importance of early childhood education. Not that I thought education was frivolous before, but now I can see so much more clearly how kids who slip through the cracks even as young as the first grade face such disadvantages. Student B works very hard, but she is nearly 50 years old and I think that it will take her years of hard work to achieve a third or fourth grade reading level. She's not stupid. She has an excellent memory for words; she recognizes hundreds of words because she's memorized what the combinations of letters look like. It's just that her brain is totally untrained to read. She approaches words from every other angle before she gets off her duff, metaphorically speaking, and tries to read them.

Student B tells me that several members of her family have literacy problems and that there were never any printed materials in the house when she was growing up. Likewise, she never had books or newspapers around while her son was young, and he has reading trouble too. I found it interesting because Susan's sister Maureen, acting on some statistic she found that says that having ten books (or something in that vicinity) in the house is all it takes for a child to develop an interest in reading, has been trying to get books into the houses of her lower income neighbors. It sounds quixotic, but if Student B is any indication, maybe she's onto something very important.

Next Time You Do Something I Don't Like, Maybe I'll Try Flinging Poop At You

One inmate attacked another with a homemade knife, or "prong" if you're into prison lingo, last week. They were taken to the hole and everyone else was put on lock down for somewhere between two and four days. Denis gets vague about the passage of time when it starts to come in 24-hour chunks of enforced inactivity, which upsets the obsessive side of my nature, but I guess it's a coping mechanism. Either that or he's killed too many of the little grey cells.

Incidentally, I'm glad that I finally had a chance to refer to "the hole." I've been sort of hoping that I'd get to say it, with authority.

Anyway, no one was happy about the lock down, and a few of them protested by saving up their poops and then throwing them into the hall in a concerted effort. One enterprising man stuffed his toilet full of newspaper, crapped in it, and then flushed until the whole mess overflowed into the hall. The point of it was that the guards have to clean it up, although Denis said that they didn't exactly hop to it (surprising, no?).

The thing that gets me about this story is that the inmates clearly engaged in a fairly evolved degree of political cooperation in that they agreed on a course of action designed to express their unhappiness with the status quo and presumably, to change things for the better. That's some of the best of human reasoning right there. And they used it to fling poop. It pleases my sense of irony, is all.

It's a gross story, but I admit to a certain amount of amusement imagining clean freak Denis coping with a stagnant pool of raw sewage on the floor. I'll bet that he regretted giving up the top bunk that day.