Art of Good Intention

Today someone very close to me took advantage of early voting and voted for Pat McCrory for Governor of North Carolina. I stood, taking it in, breathing deep and finally asked “Why?” The answer? “He’s a business man.” This is true. He is a businessman. The downside is that he isn’t a very good businessman. I’m using another North Carolinian as an example. Jim Goodnight. Jim Goodnight is the owner of SAS, one of the world’s largest software companies. He’s also the richest man in North Carolina (I have nothing to back this up, I think I’ve just heard it). His employees, upon becoming employees, go through rigorous training, work strange hours sometimes, and have unlimited sick days. Yet the turnover rate is less than 4% per year, and the average employee takes 2 sick days. THe focus is on longevity. Getting someone in there for the long haul. The best way to keep an employee for the long haul is to work really hard at the beginning in training them. The way we take our kindergartners and work them to the bone on where to put their backpack in the morning, how to line up for lunch and when it’s appropriate to put their hands on another student (um, mostly never). I’ve had parents ask me why we do that. Spend so much time on routines instead of jumping into teaching them. And my answer is always the same, “If they don’t know what our expectations of them are, they will not be able to learn in this environment.” It’s all about education. We are frontloading our little ones in the hopes that by the time they read upper grades we won’t have to go over how to line up for lunch. McCrory is not an educator. Which is fine. BUT he is against education. Which tells me he isn’t a good businessman. It tells me he doesn’t realize that the children he refused to educate in Charlotte are going to be the same ones he’ll be complaining about in fifteen years when they start asking for welfare checks. It tells me he doesn’t think that children who come from middle class families are worth exerting time and energy on. EDUCATION is the ONLY service provided that, if done properly, guarantees a more successful human being. Educated children grow up to have a much lower rate of teen pregnancy, lower rate of dropping out of high school, are more likely to attend higher education, and are more likely to bring in the median income. They are less likely to end up in prison (why doesn’t anyone talk about the enormous cost of containing men behind barbed wire fences and controlling their every move 24 hours a day?), they are less likely to ask for public support, they are less likely to end up on disability, and are more likely to work through to retirement age. The bigger question is: How long will this take? Answer: A While. We should start educating our children before they are 5, and their base education should continue on until they are about 18. So you are talking about 12 years of public schooling, plus a little extra thrown in on the front end- Big Bird, for instance. If we vote in people who don’t understand that the most successful businesses are built upon educated people, then what are we doing to ourselves? Are we saying that we can’t be successful? That we don’t trust our children to be successful? Quick Stats: Average cost of sending a child to public school per year: $10, 615 Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/155515613/how-much-does-the-government-spend-to-send-a-kid-to-school Average cost over a 12 year period: $139, 480 Average cost of prisons (These numbers are based on a 2010 figure): in NC: $1, 204, 667.00, Total for 40 states willing to release the data: $38,903,304.00 Average annual cost of prisoner in NC (2010): $29,965 That is almost 3 times what it costs to educate a student over a year. And, of course, that is not taking into account the much higher costs of incarcerating inmates on death row or in solitary confinement. My question for Pat McCrory is: HOW IS THAT GOOD BUSINESS? Second Issue? Environment. Third Issue? Libraries. Coming soon.

When we made the decision to put our house on the market, it wasn’t lightly done. we talked about it and went around and around, and I went faux shopping for new homes (have I mentioned how much I love walking through other peoples’ homes?) and then we talked about it some more and decided it might be a good time to put our home on the market. So we signed with a realtor and then the problems began. Once you start working on your home to get it ready to sell, you realize how much is missing. You start by , say, rebuilding your deck (which by the way is now beautiful). Before you know it, the deck is rebuilt but it turns out the doors need to be replaced. So you replace them only to realize that the light fixture is awful and an abomination (how have you been living with this up until now??) so you replace the light fixture and that’s when you learn that the wiring is faulty…. we had hoped our home would be on the market by now. It’s getting hot and well into summer and this morning I woke up to realize that my summer vacation is being eaten by this project. It is a full time job. How do people who work 50 weeks out of the year possibly get this done?? We are in the throes of both a heat wave, and rebuilding our house, or as Matt puts it “You’re owning this house, one board at a time”. We have become the couple everyone dreads as a 20 something. The couple that spends a Saturday evening hanging out with friends talking about their trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot. So much for partying like rock stars until we were dead. Now we party when a light fixture goes in and works the first time we flip the switch. What I’m curious about is what we will do in our new house. Will we be more responsible and instead of living with stuff actually fix it upon breaking? Will we be careful about spilling things on the carpet, and about pet hair and about keeping the bathrooms perfectly clean? I admire my friends who live minimally, who are constantly giving things away and whose homes always look great no matter when I show up. Like, I could show up at 1 in the morning and they would be lying quietly in their beds with the covers straight around them. For some reason, that’s not me. My friend Cat used to go on these wonderful rampages every few months where she would call me, screaming that her home was driving her crazy and she couldn’t handle it anymore. She would tear through, getting rid of everything, cleaning every corner until it shined and then, calm down. When she moved to Rome, like every other time she moved, she had huge yard sales and sold everything, or almost. I never fail to be amazed by this lack of connection to things. The ability to let things go in order to foster relationships with people, in order to build a life with someone you loved. Buddhism loves Cat. Of course, she’s Catholic, and I’m the one who always thinks I’m going to be Buddhist, but then Methodistism is so much more forgiving about attachment to things. So as I watch our first home prepare to go on the market, I am torn again by wondering what will happen. By attachment to the memories we have in here. Even though I haven’t lived here for long, Matt has been in this house for seven years, and through it gone through roommates, break-ups, meeting me, getting married, having me move in and completely change his lifestyle. Even as I write this I can hear the sounds of powerwashing outside, along with the sounds of geese from the pond. And I know whatever the outcome, we must try.

We’re going to pretend I never had this brief respite from blogging. Long story short- got a job in Raleigh, moved to Apex, M and I are getting married in May, and then I’m making the move to Cary. It’s a crazy triangular world I live in.

On the other hand, it’s kind of perfect that I’m blogging almost exactly a year after my last post. Valentine’s Day. And this year its going to be fantastic. For one thing, I’m not training for a marathon right now, so no 20 miler on V-day. For another, we now live in the same area. Most importantly, we’re going to see “Gone with the Wind” tonight. Thats right- the 1939 classic film that won 10 Academy Awards. On the big screen.

M has never seen it. I quote it constantly. It’s time for this to mesh. Plus I figure after we’re married for a while, he won’t answer so positively to so many things I suggest. I haven’t seen Gone with the Wind in a few years, but when I think about it, remember some key scenes:

Dessert and Ashley Wilke’s barbecue.
Kissing Rhett
The fire
Having Bonnie Blue
Bonnie Blue and her pony
Melanie.

Pretty intense stuff also happens in between, but I don’t want to ruin it for you. You should go see it too.