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Takoma Park expatriate Abby
Bardi explores the sins of modern life.
Born and raised in Chicago, Abby has worked as a singing
waitress in Washington, D.C., an English teacher in
Japan and England, a performer on England's country
and western circuit, and, most recently, as a professor
at Prince George's Community College.
Author of the Book
of Fred, (Washington Square Press: Simon & Schuster
2001), she is married with two children and lives in
Ellicott City, Maryland.
June 2008
Girl Power
When I was in college in the mid-Seventies, I took a course called “Women in American History” that, as its title suggests, examined American history from the Puritans to what was then the present by focusing on women. Nowadays a course like this might be called “American History,” but back then, the central assumption, even in academia, was that men constituted some kind of default setting from which women were an aberration. History was by definition the history of men, who at that time ran the world.
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May 2008
Clinging
For the past eight years or so, I have worked very closely with a woman—let’s call her Sheila—who happens to be an ardent Republican. When Sheila’s and my destinies first became intertwined—I won’t bore you with the details of our jobs, and how they intersect—we basically, not to put too fine a point on it, did not get along. We disagreed about nearly everything—policies, procedures, and of course, politics, a subject we tried to stay away from. When Bush, of whom she was at that time inordinately fond, decided to wage war on Iraq, Sheila was all for it, and we had a few tense discussions before we decided it would be best to avoid the subject altogether.
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April 2008
Purple
After the strange elections of 2000 and 2004, I didn’t think politics could get any weirder. Although the division of the United States into Red and Blue states was vaguely repellent, at least it made some sense, given the wide range of, for lack of a better word, styles that exist in this country, whose citizenry’s tastes are said to range from Budweiser to Chardonnay, from Ford to Volvo, from Billy Ray Cyrus to Beyonce to Bach to Birdman.
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March 2008
Personality
In a recent speech in Texas, Hillary Clinton accused her opponent of being “all hat and no cattle.” The implication in her remarks is that while Barack Obama may have a good personality, it will take more than that to govern a country. This is certainly true: Ronald Reagan was often termed “likeable,” though I could never see why. Al Gore, who was in retrospect obviously the far better candidate than George W. Bush, was often described as “wooden,” whereas Bush was characterized as a guy you’d want to have a beer with. (Of course, it turned out that having a beer was one of the few things that Bush was any good at.)
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February 2008
Danger
After spending six weeks in India last fall, my daughter Hortense made a confession to me. “India was a deathtrap,” she said. She then enumerated all the ways in which she could have easily been killed while there: the gas fire in her guest house might have burned the place down; the buses she took up the steep Himalayan roads might have crashed into ravines, as apparently happens frequently; she might have gotten Japanese encephalitis from mosquitoes, or rabies from wild dogs or monkeys, or ended up in the hospital from the dodgy food like everyone else at her guesthouse (as it was, she did spend two days with a high fever from what was probably salmonella).
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January 2008
Hope
Usually, no matter how crappy a year we’ve had, we are able to greet the new year with at least some degree of optimism. Sure, things have sucked, but they can only get better, right?
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December 2007
Disneyland
The other day, one of the administrators at the community college where I teach emailed an article she said was “a good read.” I had a look at it: called “Customer Service and Student Respect: A Winning Combination,” by T. Hampton Hopkins, it suggests that colleges, particularly community colleges, should develop a “culture of excellence.” One way to achieve this, Hopkins argues, is by providing students with good “customer service.” He notes that some people (such as myself) are repelled by the idea of regarding students as customers, but brushes past our objections and focuses on the task at hand: “improving service delivery.” How to do this? By thinking of higher education as “a life event staged for students.”
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November 2007
Common Sense
When I was ten, I had two best friends, Debbie and Patsy. Patsy was the fastest runner on my block and the best Double Dutch jumper. Debbie, on the other hand, read adult books, wrote poetry that didn’t rhyme, and did well in school. Thanks to Google, I know that Debbie is now a high-powered professor of political science. I have no idea how Patsy has ended up, but my guess is she’s in something more practical than academia—for while Patsy was intellectually unexceptional, she had common sense.
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More from 2007
"Vietnam" October
"Peat" September
"Travel" August
"Warming" July
"Politics AGAIN" June
"Tulips" May
"Fools" April
"America" March
"Winter" February
"Holidays" January
2006
"Dinner" December
"Paranoia" November
"Politics" October
"Houses" September
"Heat" August
"Roving" July
"Recruitment" June
"La Marche" May
"Impeachment" April
"Dancing" March
"Leakage" February
"Gluttony" January
2005
"Backbone" December
"Bollywood" November
"Anger revisited" October
"Glue" September
"Anxiety" August
"Fireworks" July
"Mooo-re" June
"Moooving" May
"Volvos" April
"Freedom of Speech" March
"Left-Wing Zealotry" February
"Money" January
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