Wine Club and Lindt

So here I am, at a summer camp for especially gifted kids, living in a dorm with all the other teachers. Come the end of the day, the thing on everyone's mind is alcohol. So we started a wine club.

The theory is that we pay about $20 apiece and then we buy as much wine as we can, opening a bottle or two every night. I tend to steal the bottles afterwards to soak off the labels so I can paste them into my wine diary, but that's another miniature obsession altogether. ;) As a vegan, I have to supply myself with my own dessert, because living on cafeteria salads and overcooked green beans is only acceptable for the soul if you can have dessert afterwards. Cafeteria chefs don't understand non-dairy dessert like sorbet, so I've taken to carrying Lindt bars around with me. The one in my purse last night was a dark chocolate chili bar, which I brought out in a flash of inspiration when a Baron Philippe de Rothschild Mouton Cadet Bordeaux made its appearance.

The Bordeaux is a thinner red wine, without any defined legs to speak of. The Malbec from the other night had very visible legs running down the side of the glass; this one isn't half as heavy. It stands excellently on its own, and you can definitely taste the berry aromas, although my co-wine-lover thought she detected hints of chocolate. Naturally, the next step in the experiment was to try it with my chocolate.

This wine pairing is nothing short of stellar. It was knock-your-socks-off decadent. The chili kick livens up the chocolate and brings it up to par with the multilayered wine, and the wine isn't overpowering enough to wash away the wonderful chocolate chili flavors and leave you with chocolate winey goo in your mouth (yeah, I know, ew!). And the bottle is only $9.99 at Jericho Wine! It is a wonderful red wine, excellent for people who like their wines a little less deep and rich than Cabernet Sauvignons. "Round and crisp attack" at the start is a wholly accurate description, as is the expressive and long berry finish. Simply lovely!

Energy!

Have you ever been interrupted by the absolutely lovely sound of a group of approximately twenty high-schoolers rehearsing several pieces of classical choral music in an acoustically ideal university lobby?

It was the most beautiful sound I have heard in months.

(I have to add, though, that if you really want to hear a sound that will bring tears to your eyes, all you have to say to a friend who knows what you're talking about is yiff!, and you will be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable, hilarious tears.)

Being around these kids is fascinating. They're bursting with all kinds of energy, and these are the kids who are gargantuous nerds at home but who can show their teachers up in Photoshop or Latin grammar. They go outside during their breaks and discuss their most recent German class, the seriously intense Social Studies debate about abortion or laws concerning religious constraint; they talk about Danté and Kant's categorical imperative and Aristotle while at the same time clutching a Marie Claire or a Seventeen magazine. These kids are so fascinating.

They inspired me today. I've been staring blankly at Tetris while watching a computer lab for about two weeks now (occasionally interspersed with the Evil level of WebSudoku) and was generally feeling miserable as a result. I ran across a couple of kids trying to teach themselves yoga and yelling at each other in French, and I finally decided to do something with all this time I've got.

A day into this burst of enthusiasm, I have four pages covered in rough sketches of female figures, three pages added to the beginning of a novelette, a lot of almost-forgotten recipes firmly cemented into Microsoft Word, and did a lot more research on the pros and cons of veganism. (I have to. Would you embark on a new dietary lifestyle with so much ridicule attached to it without checking it out first?) And--what do you know?--I feel absolutely fantastic. Productive. Far, far less lethargic. I'm loving every energetic minute of today. I cleaned my room this morning and I'm looking forward to falling asleep peacefully.

Now, if only I had an available kitchen. ;) But my juicer will have to do for now.

Have you ever noticed the spurt of energy that comes when you decide you want to start something? When you clean your apartment or your house, go to the gym (yeah, that was a three-week stint for me and never again), start a new kind of diet, start a new job, start a new year in college, start anything--you do it with a surge of energy that buoys you up for at least the first one or two days. If you're lucky, it lasts forever! If you're not...you crash and get horribly bored. This is an absolutely brilliant way to recharge yourself--start something new! Start something interesting! I've done it before--zoned out on writing a horrific 40-page college paper, pushed it aside to go paint the river with a best friend, and realized that the paper wasn't bad enough to make me want to kill all human life. It was actually interesting. I finished the paper and got an A. Try it!

If you're continually bored, lackluster, tired--just push sleepiness aside and do something else! Teach yourself rudimentary Photoshop. Try cooking something new. Go to a restaurant you never thought you'd like. (I did that with sushi, and now I'm hopelessly addicted! I love it so much!) Pick up that instrument you haven't played since high school. Plant an herb garden. Read a book totally out of your usual genre!

Try Terry Pratchett's Going Postal (there is a brilliant laugh on every page), Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great (for believers and unbelievers, it's something to think about), Natalia Rose's Detox for Women (inspiring and so, so healthy!), Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring (brilliant, luminous writing), Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (ever wonder how questionable phenomenons like Hush Puppies were catapulted into fame?), or Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI (the Johnny Depp movie's coming out in July!). Try anything! Anything and everything! Life is only there for us to grab it and make it ours!

It's everything we ever wanted, if only we can make it so. So, ladies, let's do it! Let's sing because we can, love because it's fun, kiss in a surfeit of feeling!

Rioting in Valdosta

I'm currently working at a program which is essentially a summer school for fantastically gifted kids, rising juniors and seniors. We've got about seven hundred kids split up into different majors, which range from Math to Communicative Arts (foreign languages and English fall under this umbrella) to Dance. Then they get to pick from minors, and we try to shove them towards picking minors that they are new to. For instance, our Computer Tech minor has a lot of Visual Arts kids, a lot of CommArts and Social Studies majors, and, okay, a lot of Math kids. Theatre kids are seriously encouraged to go study Physics or Agricultural Science or Education or Latin--just something that they're almost completely ignorant about. And they love it.

They're being pushed out of the box every single second that they're here. It gets crazy, too--the day before yesterday, the SocStud majors wanted to personally study riots after researching Iran, so the natural conclusion was--to start a riot and study the effects. It was awesome and, okay, a bit insane. The supposed riot was about the ID cards all the kids have to hang around their necks, and although their teachers, the director of the program, and the president of the university campus on which we're holding this summer school thing all gave the project the OK, someone forgot to tell the RAs, who freaked out and called the police.

We had to step in and tell the cops what was going on, because they were getting ready to arrest a whole lot of kids, so everything eventually calmed down. I think the official reason for the arrests would have been congregating without an approved permit--you have to have a permit if you want to riot. However, the result is that we have a bunch of kids who hear about Iran and know just how terrifying it is to be up against law enforcement. True, they weren't in danger of their lives, and this was specifically a non-violent riot, but you can't tell me that these kids will remain blasé when they read news reports about Iran.

Personally, I believe that this shock value in education is fantastic. We've deleted it from our Social Studies and History books, resulting in bland heroes like Christopher Columbus and Woodrow Wilson who are such irritatingly inhuman do-gooders that they just don't matter to kids. No one cares about perfect people who are supposed to be heroes. But if you tell someone that Christopher Columbus wrote letters to Spain promoting the advantages of the New World by advertising that young Indian girls were widely available and used as sex slaves; the ones at nine years old being most in demand, then they care. Then that's something interesting. Then--oh, boy--those kids realize that "heroes" are often revolting and that they are better than their "heroes" are. And this means that they can do better than Woodrow Wilson, who led America through World War I and was one of the worst racists of his time.

Iiiiiiinteresting.

Helen Keller didn't just fade into historical dust after blurting out "wa-wa". She went to university and grew up to explore the slums, the factories, the sweatshops; she learned about Communism, and, in support of the inhumanely downtrodden poor of this country, spoke everywhere in support of a Communist America. She experienced more than anyone could possibly guess out of the deified pages of American history books.

Adolf Hitler inspired absolute devotion in Eva Braun, a lovely, peaceful German girl who refused to leave him when the Allies neared their bunker, saying that she lived only for him. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a fondness for younger women and the FBI tried to blackmail him into halting his equal rights campaign by threatening to show a sex tape of him to his wife. (He refused.) There is good reason to believe that the FBI was behind Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death. These are fascinating and riveting historical details, which are left out of mainstream education.

In camps like the one I'm working at, kids are exposed to all of this and shock values of practically every kind. They are pulled out of their comfort zones and thrown into learning. The result is that they leave this camp more grown-up, more changed, more knowledgeable, and more inspired than they have ever been in their whole lives.

Isn't the present and future of this nation's children more important than deifying historical figures who, after all, don't deserve the annihilation of the very traits that made them human?

Well, isn't it?