More Tom

More than anyone expected

     Law student and OC Reg columnist Frank "Soft ball" Mickadeit visited Chapman law school on Saturday. He was there to attend the 150th anniversary gala celebrating Chapman’s founding. (The founders were Druids.)
     While there, he heard news about SOCCCD trustee Tom Fuentes (Absent alumnus Tom Fuentes hanging in there):

     The joint was littered with influential faculty, alumni and benefactors … but I was reminded that one member of the Chapman family wasn't with us this night. Another tablemate, former Chevy dealer Woody Oklejas, asked, "How is Tom Fuentes doing?"…..
     If you read my columns on the cancer-stricken Fuentes in August, you'd have thought that we'd have been to his funeral by now. But shortly after that, I started getting reports of random Fuentes sightings. I just saw Tom at the Balboa Bay Club. ... You should have heard Tom's speech trashing Schwarzenegger. ... Tom snuck a beer last night. ... I saw Tom doing Jell-o shooters at ...
     You get the picture. God has been having second thoughts about calling him home, so Fuentes is making the most of it. As it happens, just hours before Oklejas' question, I'd gotten an email from Fuentes (and I don't even email when I have the flu), so I had an update.
     He still spends most of his time in bed, and he has finally decided to take morphine. But, he writes, "when there is an occasion to attend something special, I rest for several days in advance. Then, usually, I can get myself up and to the event." Last week, for example, he gave the invocation at a private dinner for Gov. Rick Perry. He's resting up to give the invocation for a dinner for Rep. Paul Ryan at The Island Hotel Saturday. You need an invocation? I say book him.

     With the haste of a really slow glacier, the Lariat is finally on the “Amy Ahearn” case. See English instructor missing and 'at risk'

Local college websites: the whole gamut, from A to B

This website page would likely get students' attention (Image from HBO's True Blood)

     Nowadays, students are "digital natives," or so they always say during flex week. These students of ours live on the web in a way that we oldsters do not. And so one might suppose that colleges should make darned sure that their websites look snappy—or cool, or whatever it is that gets students' attention and maintains their interest. I mean, these youngsters have got the attention span of goldfish!
     Of course, when you're designing a college webpage, there are other considerations than marketing. College websites ought to do what they're supposed to do and do it well: giving directions, identifying programs, locating restrooms, etc.
     And since colleges teach such things as art and design, their websites really should be attractive and professional. They should exhibit the institution's high standards (if'n you got 'em).
     So I figured I'd scrutinize at least the "home" pages of some local colleges' websites. I'll offer my non-expert opinion. I'm hoping others, including experts, will join in!
     Who knows? Maybe somebody will listen!

     I'll start with my own college, IVC:

Grade: C+

     This webpage is kinda blue, isn't it? What is the college trying to say, blue-wise?

     The page looks reasonably classy, I guess. Does the job, I suppose.

     If college websites should have pizzazz, then IVC's is a quart or two low. 

     This page looks more like a place where you'd request copies of your transcripts. There's nothing fun or enticing here, unless you're into weird-ass towers or the color blue.

Grade: B

     Our sister college's website has more pizzazz, I think. Maybe that's only because the color red is hot and the color blue is not. Not sure. I think students prefer hot to cold/cool. They've never heard of jazz.

     Is it just me or are others annoyed by that Social{LIVE} business in the top half? I have no idea what such symbols signify. No doubt students know exactly what they signify. —Something about zombies, maybe.

     I like that they've got their info phone number right up front. I do hope the number works. Here at IVC, there've been times when callers got no answer—or they were sent spiraling into some kinda phone menu hell. 

     I think Glenn was trying to save 50 cents or something.

C+

     This one seems tidy and nice, but, again, it's seriously short on pizzazzery. They've got their phone number out in front too, which is good, I think. But I'm not sure young people these days respond to tidy and nice. I think maybe they're positively repelled by it.
     I do admire the simple & straight to the point quality of this home page. I like that they keep the cluttery stuff off to the right side, where it does less harm.
     But there's no zing here. Even less zip. Possibly a hair of a smidgen of vim.
     Plus yellow is the color of urine. Usually.

D

     This is the website of a college that has enough students and doesn't want any more.

C+

     I dunno. This one seems designed by people who deeply want their college to be quiet and conservative and nice but who fail to understand that, in fact, it is somewhat otherwise. Those Chapman students are no wallflowers, that's for sure, what with their occasional semi-nude adventures into the heart of the city.
     Plus ketchup thievery is a real problem there.

C-

     White is such an uninteresting color, doncha think? This page looks dull and busy and haphazard to me. Appealing? Not. And that "myOCC" thing near the top looks like an ad for a public radio station. They give you some "quick links," but they're buried among all that other crap that overwhelms the page.

     The eye is not drawn anywhere in particular. This page is a mess, I think.

     On the other hand, the notoriously frolicsome students of OCC probably don't read anyway.

Let's turn to district websites:

B+

     My guess is that students never visit the district websites, unless they're, like, lost or something. It seems like you'd only need this kind of website for "the taxpayer" and similarly staunch and sober characters, now beyond all hope. Am I wrong?

     With that in mind, I think that the South Orange County Community College District's website is pretty good. Very neat, dignified, utilitarian. It ain't fun, but then it isn't supposed to be (I guess). 

     It'd probably make the likes of Nancy Padberg feel all cozy-frosty. Plus it would inspire Hollywood to rent the place to double as the IRS or FBI.

C

     This is utilitarian, I guess. But it looks like it's straight out of the Yellow Pages.

B-

     Simple, elegant, utilitarian. But those buttons along the bottom do make the page look a little like a magazine ad page. What's that guy down at the bottom right selling? Retirement planning? Help with your taxes?
     "Inspiration, Innovation, Graduation." —That's a bit apples-and-orangy, if you ask me. Why not, "Edification, Creativity, Cafeteria"? Or "Institution, Concatenation, Menstruation"?

Teaching as a Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Rebel Girl has taught Thursday nights at the college for almost all her nineteen years here: a fiction workshop which attracts the usual students looking for a few transferable credits and the unusual, those dedicated to a certain art, a craft: writing. Some already have degrees, some do not. Those students, those Thursday night regulars, who enroll again and again until forbidden by regulations, form bonds. Some of them become lifelong friends, and Rebel Girl follows them as they move on, continue to write, go to grad school, publish, fall in love, marry, fall out of love, have children, face one crisis or joy after another...


One of those students died last week and Rebel Girl thought of him all this long cool rainy weekend which found her observing the end of Dia de Los Muertos in Santa Ana and tending her own altar at home, a little overcrowded this year by recent departures, none as heartbreaking as her student.


Rebel Girl can still see his font choice: the old school typewriter block letters of a Courier style, his name, first and last, in the upper left corner and the story that followed it below, the shapes of the paragraphs, the openness of each word, sentence. She was never disappointed by the stories he wrote. They were always worth her time and everyone else's. Something was always at stake. The workshop always cared about his characters and what they would do. The workshop rooted for his characters even if they failed.

And he, he always cared about the workshop's stories too. Not everyone does, but he did.


Rebel Girl never saw the demons that his other friends have referred to in recent days. She thinks she didn't because when she saw him, when the student walked into the modest institutional college classroom, brightly lit and too chilly from the dark night outside and entered the workshop's clean well-lighted place, (a story he must have read with the workshop once, twice, perhaps three times), when he became not a stranger but a fellow writer, student, when the class made their own warmth around the tables they pushed together, when they sat there and read and listened, spoke and shared, what the class and Rebel Girl saw of him was perhaps him at his best, who he wanted to be. Any demons were left outside.


Whenever he came into the room, joined the circle, he was welcomed, warmly, for who he was, for who he was with us. As Rebel Girl mourns him, she is comforted by remembering this. This is what she tells the other students as she sends emails, makes telephone calls. We were there for him. We always welcomed him. We saw what was good in him and told him so, again and again.

Rebel Girl doesn't know where people came from before class or what they go home to. Sometimes she learns, sometimes she does not. She understands now that for this student there was pain, grief, an unbearable loss.


In the Hemingway story, two waiters, one young, one old, observe an old man while they finish their night shift in a café. It is one of Hemingway's Spanish stories and the language moves smoothly between English and Spanish. The old man drinks too much. The old man, it is said, tried to kill himself. The younger waiter is impatient with the old man, the older waiter less so. At the end of the story, the old man shuffles off, the younger waiter goes home to his wife waiting in bed and the older waiter says farewell:

"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

"What's yours?" asked the barman.

"Nada."

"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.

"A little cup," said the waiter.

The barman poured it for him.

"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished," the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

"You want another copita?" the barman asked.

"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

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