A few notes of interest:

– I love e-mails, especially the hate mail. It usually makes me laugh, but this one really made me shake my head. I made a one line comment in response to Liza Sabatar’s blog about the Jena 6, and this guy wants to e-mail his comment to my personal e-mail. OK, I’ve seen this move before, though I’m not sure if he has his own blogs to post all of his comments on. Of course, the subject on the e-mail is “Black Racist,” ironic considering how racist the e-mail was. I reply with another one liner like,

“Thanks for your opinion. I’ll consider it yours.”

That’s it. Nothing but “Hey, that’s your opinion. Let’s move on.”

His first line in the reply called me a “condescending jerk-off” all at once. At least he feels something towards me.

This man has the nerve to tell me how bad Black people and prove it with statistics, and how Whites have made the greatest contributions to society, etc. etc. It was a racist mess. Needless to say I really didn’t read it because he just wanted me to validate his own angst. He needs to go listen to Limp Bizkit and be angry for no reason somewhere else. He’s like the really insecure and often ignored kid in high school who picks on the most innocuous-looking “minority” so he can boost his self-worth.

Little does he know I’m still from the hood. We don’t play that. Plus, I really would like to see more unity across the racial lines, but I also notice that we have a LOT of work to do before we can get to that point. I don’t see things in just Black and White, but apparently some do. More on this later.

– NYC needs a Busboys and Poets, similar to the local restaurant here in Washington, DC. The setup for the one in DC is exactly how it sounds like: a big restaurant with a poetry lounge inside of it. It’s also got a bar and a library / bookstore / waiting area sponsored by Teaching for Change. In other words, it was awesome. I was more in awe that they had that much space dedicated to this effort. Of course, the food was great, and so was the environment. The name of the restaurant is an allusion to Langston Hughes, and I can imagine him actually being proud of such an establishment.

– I finally put some words in that book I’m supposed to write, which from now on I’m calling the WOW Project. The beginning part is the hardest, because you want to give people an impression of why they should read the book without actually giving the whole book away. That’s why I love books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon or 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But we’ll see what happens. Like Sonia Sanchez told me once, I need to create new words.

jose, who has some really good student profiles this week …

update: quote of the weekend –

“Wake up! Wake up! Get your shoes and slippers on! This is Silver Spring, Maryland. Get up! Those of you going to Washington, DC, y’all have a good 15 minutes to get somethin’ and take a break. If y’all come at 15+1 minutes, there’s a few buses right behind this one 1/2 an hour from now, and there’ll be a bus with your stuff waiting for yo, but I won’t be in it. Hurry up, cause I’m trying to get my groove on tonight. I’m trying to get into somebody’s daughter!”

– Greyhound bus driver, this weekend

Yes, I’m always around people who say things like this …