Ringing true...

Saints be praised I have actually begun to really work on my dissertation/prospectus. Well, really, I started a while ago, but now it is actually interesting me.

Something clicked when I started reading Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves. Although Kristeva's work naturally focuses more on the problems of immigration in France, much of this book will help me provide a ground work for my own discussion.

One passage in particular haunts me. Perhaps because it is more applicable to my own work about what it means to be home, than to the work for my dissertation; whatever the reason, I can't get it out of my head. Referring to the foreigner, Kristeva says,

"Melancholy lover of a vanished space, he cannot, in fact, get over his having abandonded a period of time."

I still can't quite articulate how this sentence reverberates in my soul. Maybe you can wrestle with it in the comments.

Working it out sort of...

The confusion situation is slowly working itself out. I don't think it will be that big of a disaster, just another example of how communication in our department is less than perfect.

On to other more important things. I meant to write about the Gloucester Pregnancy Pact/No Pact last week when I first heard about it on NPR. Last week what caught my attention and made me want to write was how the interviewer kept asking questions about how these kinds of teen pregnancy rates are usually seen in the inner city. The implication was that teen pregnancy is an urban problem. I have never been to Gloucester, but I'm willing to bet it is a whole lot like the place on the other side of the country where I grew up. The dying industries in town are different, but they lead to the same environment -- communities without a lot of resources, without a lot of jobs, and not a lot for teenagers to do. The lack of jobs, or loss of jobs, leads to strain on relationships, breaking up families, which leaves a lot of young girls looking for someone/something to love. They begin to think that a baby will love them unconditionally. If they have a child, then no matter what, there will always be at least one person in their lives that love them. I have heard this argument made less articulately from the fourteen year old daughter of the man my mother dated at the time.

I am not trying to say that teen pregnancy is not a problem in the inner city. It's just one more way we need to recognize that the inner city and the small town are not that different when it comes to socio-economic problems. I'd also just like to point out that Gloucester is not the only town in the country where it is even possible to think that girls might make a pact of this type.
If you were to ask people in my hometown/family the biggest achievement I made was not going off to college, it was getting out of high school, and town, without getting pregnant