I've been knocking people's hats off, or really, elbowing this one chick who stopped in the middle of the subway stairs to chat someone up at rush-hour and snarling at a couple of hot French dudes who tried to cut in front of me in the deli line. I'm not taking mess.

There's all manner of things to be upset about lately (Obama's approval rating [and overcaution], weather, birthday parties). Like this morning I saw one of several (spaced through the week for repeated pre-office weeping) reports on NY1 about the initiation of closing procedures at 20 New York public schools. Yesterday and today, the discussion turned to Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, now officially scheduled for closing (meaning new enrollment will cease). In this segment from yesterday, you can get a notion of what a beautiful, old municipal building it is, as well as how much the interior, its halls and classrooms, appears to be like any other large, historic city school. It looks remarkably similar to my alma mater, Memphis Central.

I really really don't understand school closing. This defense, penned by a member of New York's BOE, makes the mandates no clearer. If the City intends to open new schools to replace the old ones, why/how will these new schools be better than revamped (new staff, security, etc.) versions of the old schools might be? Is this a matter of different zoning? Do the new schools simply exclude 'problem students,' those who are too far below reading level to graduate, those with difficult home lives--drug-addicted or incarcerated parents, young children of their own to care for--who struggle to graduate within the allotted four-year timeline used to judge schools' value/potency? Does the BOE consider the buildings haunted, cursed? Will they open the new schools in time to accommodate the present-day middle schoolers who were otherwise planning to matriculate at Robeson? If not, will there be a couple of years during which kids are attempting fruitlessly to enroll at already overflowing schools outside of their district?

This News article contains particularly bleak information about Robeson's variously insolvent student body.

The closing of schools, beyond its brutal resurfacing of cities, city blocks, city histories, seems to me to be a brutal attack on American young people, the most disadvantaged American young people. It's presented as a last ditch effort to restore good education to underserved areas, but clearly, through an accompanying clumsy bureaucratic process, a number of students (not to mention displaced teachers and administrators) will be (pun intended) left behind. Of course, these young people were "left behind" years ago, allowed to move unnoticed from grade to grade without promised knowledge imparted, without becoming literate or math-literate, history-literate. One could reach further back, expand the net, and note that students in closed schools live in our poorest neighborhoods, come from families rocked by deregulation (the resulting decline of the American working class), epidemic drug use and spikes in crime, seemingly unbreakable cycles begun decades before their birth, a cousin epidemic of parentlessness. The story of urban American school closings is essentially the story of the failed progressive agenda, the post-Johnson one step forward five steps back, the violence brought home from multiple fronts, the mess of having and not-having that grows wilder and wilder unchecked by any modicum of democratic-socialism (bank bailouts don't count). It's an out-and-out tragedy, a crime more like, an ultimate symptom of many-layered wrong-doing, a shirking of gravest responsibility, a shame shame shame.

Mayor Warbucks, Are You Going to Adopt Us?

Yesterday was all kinds of heavy symbolism for Auntie P and I'm losing my mind today just a tad, coming off yesterday's 10 hour workday and today which is going to find me on my feet long into the night thanks to the dreaded FiFi awards. I spent the last two nights tossing and turning and fretting about a future-determining meeting that I have no control over and at around 4 AM this morning I gave up on sleep and crept downstairs to borrow my neighbors hard copy of the Times and opened it up to this long anticipated and poorly written and miserably defeating Op-Ed.

I'm not quite sure how the onus of opposing our impossible-to-beat billionaire Mayor Munchkin fell on the shoulders of a SUNY educated member of the House who represents a solidly middle class district that stretches across Brooklyn and Queens but it's all over for Weiner now (who, by the by, evokes his plucky borough-kid roots much less eloquently than another prominent New Yorker did yesterday--but more on her later.) The point is, it's not just over for Weiner, it's over for all of us and most of all it's over for Bloomberg who is going to sail into his third term on a ship made out of silicon and trans-fat free pastries while flanked by iron clad battleships and submarines filled with gold bars. Giuliani, who is to blame for Bloomberg's entire existence in this city from back in his America's Mayor® days, has been suspiciously quiet as to his proteges ability to achieve a level of totalitarian power in this city that he only dreamed of and dreamed of often.

But this week also brought joy in Mudville, as yesterday we saw the President choose to nominate Sandra Sotomayor, decidedly one of the most deserving and experienced judges to be named to the highest court in the land in decades. Sotomayor is a symphony, she's lived a life out of a Dickens novel; as the New York Times put it yesterday in a fleeting moment of eloquence, "she is walking through a door she pushed open for herself."

Conservatives are letting a lot of shit fly in anticipation of her confirmation hearings, cause that's their job. Barring the inevitable inquiries into her taxes, her divorce, her childlessness, my personal favorite barb thus far is the uproar about a statement she once made that (I'm paraphrasing here) Latina women, with their richness of experience would more often make better decisions than white men, which is, like, duh. I mean starting with the leggings department obviously but has anyone who thinks that ever MET a Puerto Rican lady? My Puerto Rican roommate (who has never once been mistaken for Puerto Rican) shed a single tear yesterday at the news mostly, he confessed, because the idea of someone who thinks like his mother making important decisions overwhelmed him with confidence for the future of America.

So anyway, here's what I was thinking. I know Bloomy's been beating on a white chick these days (who consequently is the head of the NY State Banking authority, the conflicts of interest never end) but I think it's time he stopped dating women he could easily abuse and looked up, say, Rosie Perez. A little bit of empathy, and maybe the next four years won't be so bad.