A friend submits the following challenge:

Foglia, dans sa dernière chronique, a proposé un jeu :

“ON JOUE ? - Pour finir, une idée piquée dans un journal en Alabama, je ne sais plus lequel, anyway c’est un jeu. On a demandé un jour à Hemingway d’écrire une nouvelle en six mots ; pas n’importe quoi, une vraie nouvelle qui raconte vraiment une histoire. Hemingway a écrit ceci : À vendre : souliers de bébé jamais utilisés (en anglais ça fait six mots).

Sur ce modèle, le journal – peut-être The Atlanta Journal – a demandé à ses lecteurs de raconter leur vie en six mots. Le journal a reçu plus de 15 000 réponses. Deux exemples au hasard : Found true love, married someone else. Moins intense : Wasn’t born a redhead ; fixed that.

J’ai essayé évidemment. J’ai visé de ne pas être trop sérieux, mais quand même, d’être le plus près possible d’un vrai résumé de ma vie. Ça donne ceci : Euh, quelqu’un aurait-il un tournevis ?

Vous, votre vie en six mots (pas sept), ça donnerait quoi ?”

Moi, ça donne ceci : Né handicapé, pour limiter les dégâts.

Et vous ?

Luc

Ok, my six-word life summary is: “Well, at least I didn’t breed.” (I had some others, but they were too self-deprecating to publish.)

And yours? It’s harder than it seems. Give it a try!

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Addendum March 23: If you submit something for the Six Words challenge I’ll bake you a cake next time I see you! If you submit something not self-deprecating, I’ll bake you a cake as a reward and encouragement. It’s a harder thing to come up with and you deserve the recognition. (If it is self-deprecating, then I guess you need cheering up.)

Alston has invited his readers to do the ‘privilege’ meme. It was designed as an exercise for students at the University of Indiana. Students line up together and for each Yes answer they take a step forward. At the end of the exercise, some students have taken quite a few steps. This represents the head start in getting to college that they had over the students who stay close to the original line. Discussion, anger and rationalisation ensue.

An interesting aspect of the exercise is that it’s for college students, so doesn’t include getting to college as a step. (I would hope that the discussion includes those who will never be in that room.)

I am hugely privileged. I knew that: the results of this exercise are no surprise to me. I would have used different criteria in the exercise myself, and my criteria would show me to be even more privileged.

My eye-opening experiences in college were with respect to entitlement. Despite my enormous privilege, I wasn’t prepared for the sense of many of my classmates that the world belonged to them. People who assumed that the position of CEO was theirs - not by right exactly. They’d still have to demonstrate to the board that the position was theirs. But it was what people like them did.

Utz I could deal with: “I know I have more money than most people, so I’m careful. When I go out with someone who doesn’t have money, I take maybe $250 in cash with me. That reminds me that I have limits. If I brought my credit card, I might end up offending my friend by doing something like buying a motorcycle on impulse. If I only have cash, I have to think before I spend.” (This was in 1981, so substitute $578 in today’s currency.) See, Utz had money but he didn’t think the world was his by right. He was always worrying about his place in it. (Well, actually I couldn’t really deal with Utz. I didn’t judge him, but left him to his anxieties and self-doubt. The problems of having too much money were not ones I could relate to or cared to contemplate.)

But this other woman whose name I have erased from my memory? “Don’t worry about Jimmy. Look, he only wants a union in the kitchen because he’d be paid more. But he’s not paid more because he doesn’t deserve more. That’s how it works.” Um, no.

Jimmy ran the dish belt in the kitchen where I worked. He quit school at eight to work in the cotton fields of Georgia when his father got sick. I could relate to him: I had friends whose parents had done the same thing. And Jimmy was an educator, like my family. He used his position on the dishbelt to educate the children of privilege about what it meant to be black and working class in America. I was grateful. He died of a heart attack before retiring.

There were other, unironic, expressions of entitlement. “I always prefer a little blood on the bedsheets.” “I like it so much when women wear hats and gloves.” The hats and gloves comment from one southern man meeting another and happily identifying common cultural touchpoints. But no recognition of what a society where women wear hats and gloves means.

I only lasted a year in that school, but I’m glad I went.

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This is the exercise:

Take a step / Set to bold…

• If your father went to college before you started.
• If your father finished college before you started.
• If your mother went to college before you started.
• If your mother finished college before you started.
• If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
• If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
• If you had a computer at home when you were growing up.
• If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up.
• If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up.
• If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up.
• If you were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up.
• If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen.
• If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen.
• If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively.
• If you had a credit card with your name on it before college.
• If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate.
• If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate.
• If you went to a private high school.
• If you went to summer camp.
• If you had a private tutor.
• (US students only) If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen.
• (International question) If you have been to the US more than once as a child or teen.
• If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes.
• If all of your clothing has been new.
• If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
• If there was original art in your house as a child or teen.
• If you had a phone in your room.
• If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen.
• If you had your own room as a child or teen.
• If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course.
• If you had your own cell phone in High School.
• If you had your own TV as a child or teen.
• If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College.
• If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline.
• If you ever went on a cruise with your family.
• If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen.
• If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

So. My modifications would be to remove the step associated with having your own television (this is about getting a head start on going to university, and having a tv in your room is more likely to be a disadvantage). And to add a step for having people who work in your home, like a housekeeper or gardener. For not working more than ten hours a week. A really big step was omitted, and I don’t know why in this context: If you have no children.

Also omitted were questions related to access for people with physical disabilities. If you can walk up stairs. If you can pick up a book. If you were hospitalised or institutionalised for less than a cumulative total of two weeks as a child or teen.

Related: If money was never an object to getting health care. If you were never required to nurse a chronically ill family member.

An assumption in the exercise is that you were raised by your parents. I know it’s cumbersome to read out ‘parent or parents, and/or a relative or guardian you were living with’ but if the purpose is to make privilege visible… let’s do it.

If you felt safe at home as a child and teen. If somebody told you that you were smart. If nobody told you that you were stupid.

What steps would you add? Which do you think do not belong?

This is where someone with a blog has been asked to list a certain number of things about themselves that nobody knows, then to tag a certain number of other people with blogs to do the same thing, and they do, and you are one of the certain number of other people. Then you are in the difficult position of either complying or publicly rejecting an invitation from someone you have a relationship with. I’ve been dreading this happening to me ever since I started posting.

I am twice fortunate. Once, that I have only been tagged to list eight random things about myself. They don’t have to be secrets I have held for up to 43 years. Twice, that the person tagging me is someone I know only incidentally. I commented on her blog recently that I was imagining little joeys in my Bartholin’s glands, so she drew my name when she decided to tag her commenters. Thus I can choose not to accept the tag without damaging a friendship.

Hm. Not so dreadful. Maybe I can do this.

1) I received my high school education in Nigeria at a mission school primarily for children of missionaries. Moving to Nigeria was a bit of a shock, but not a big one. It was clearly different from where I came from, which was Montreal. So, keep an open mind, look for opportunities to enjoy and learn and share, and do what you need to do to keep yourself safe. Attending a mission school was disorienting in a much more fundamental way. The greatest difficulty was coping with the fact that the other kids looked like me. They were mostly white Americans, wore western dress, spoke English with American accents. It was hard to see and adjust to the cultural divide. Not only were they fundamentalist Christians (at the time I started at that school I hadn’t realised there were still people who believed in God), most had been born in the bush. They spoke various West African languages and Pidgin in addition to English. They believed in witchcraft. The friends they were raised with from babies, and who they played football with when they went back to stay with their parents over summer vacation, were West Africans who spoke little or no English. Some of their friends died in childhood of illnesses like dysentery. One of the school’s functions was to teach American culture to these children of missionaries to help them when it came time for them to go ‘back home’ to college. I didn’t get this at the time. I knew (North) American culture as well as most thirteen year olds, and I didn’t understand why a school for (mostly) white children in Nigeria would not put more effort into bridging cultures - which was my need. I didn’t get that I was one of the few who didn’t already have a very solid bridge of their own.

2) I loved Bible class in high school. We were taught about how people think and make judgements, which was fascinating to me. The agenda of course was to prepare us for missionary work so that we could overcome people’s resistance to our attempts to convert them, but I subverted it to my own ends.

3) I googled some people from my past not too long ago. One I liked and respected greatly. I found out that he died in 1995. He’s still being mentioned in current publications. Another I allowed to harm me. She now has a colostomy. I think because she had cancer. I don’t know how I feel about either of those facts.

4) When I split up with my girlfriend of ten years, she took one of our three dogs and moved into a crappy apartment. Six years later she’s living in a different crappy apartment, is lonely without a girlfriend, is unhappy at work and her dog is always sick and needing expensive vet care. The dog has also recently started to leave large puddles of pee everywhere. In the meantime I have gotten together with a Man, we have bought the building my ex and I lived in together and the Man has been fixing it up and making it beautiful, I’ve had promotions at work and my dogs are as healthy and continent as they were ten years ago. I feel guilty but not responsible. I think there’s something immature about my feelings but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be aiming at.

5) I am a lesbian married to a man. I never thought I would marry - as a true Canadian I hold that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation - but now that I’m married I like it. I freely recommend it to everyone. (Note also that as a Canadian I could marry a woman just as legally as marrying a man. By recommending marriage I am not at all promoting heterosexuality. No. Here in Canada those are two completely independent thoughts!) (Oh - the answer to the usual question: “Well, I’d certainly prefer him to be a woman, but nobody’s perfect.”)

6) I am addicted to medblogs. This has almost completely supplanted my earlier addiction to advice columns. What I have learned is that medicine is a profession that will engage you intellectually, physically and emotionally. It will keep you sharp into old age. These are good reasons to go into medicine. A bad reason is wanting to help people. If you think you want to help people it’s just because you haven’t met enough of them. I don’t know if this is a widespread or universal attitude among doctors, though I suspect it is. From a patient’s perspective, I find it comforting. I don’t have to be likeable to get good care. An individual doctor’s level of misanthropy (or distance) is well-established before they meet me, and they are still in medicine. Because they want to be. For reasons that have nothing to do with me or my likeability.

7) I have almost no imagination. I can think very analytically about something that already exists, but I have almost no ability to create something that does not yet exist… say, a trip to somewhere I haven’t been yet.

I wonder how my life would be different without my dogs. They are wonderful companions. Pepe asks to be carried all the time, and carrying a soft, sighing 2.5-kilo creature is very soothing. Poupoune’s absolute joy in her walks is infectious. So one would think they improve my life, and perhaps they do. Perhaps without them I would be more driven to seek human companionship. I can’t know.

Who I tag: nobody. This one ends with me.