Thursday, December 24, 2020

The Best of Rebel Girl (1998-2006): If I Had a Hammer

March 03, 1998 
Dissent 3 
     Unlike the convenient (lecherous Zeus’s sneaky self-changes) or vindictive (the punitive metamorphosis meted out to the presumptuous Arachne) or even compassionate (Daphne’s mutation into a laurel tree) transformations so prevalent in Greek myths, the recent morphing of faculty to management seems steeped in self-interest and nepotism, inspired perhaps by hubris....
     Rebel Girl recommends that offerings of thigh bones wrapped in fat and libations be presented to Nemesis at the appropriate alters near you. 

March 18, 1998 
From Dissent
Originally entitled: WE’RE WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY 
     Clearly, the union leadership, which has so often ignored the rank and file in the past, has done so again—and this time cloaked themselves with our “manufactured” consent. At the press conference, Brother Bob Kopfstein … said that the union opposed the recall on the grounds that it was “disruptive.” Apparently the presence on the college board of a person who sympathizes with the Institute for Historical Review and The Spotlight is not “disruptive.” Apparently the systematic dismantling of shared governance is not “disruptive.” Hmmm. 

December 15, 1998 
From Dissent 14
Originally entitled: Rebel Girl Says: “Basta!”—Or Tales of “Bad” Behavior and Nobel Prize Winners 
     …Rebel Girl knows that every demonstration needs props (related to propaganda, from the Latin for propagate or to spread)—how else to communicate a message to the masses? So while concerned faculty and staff arranged themselves in an impressive conga line, Rebel Girl ran to her faculty office and located a half-sheet of poster board stashed between the wall and a bookcase for just such an occasion. The placard was, she decided, large enough for just one word. But, she wondered, what single word would best communicate the nature of the crisis?....
     …[I]n her cluttered office, the crowd of tension makers outside growing by the minute, Rebel Girl decided what exact word would serve. Six letters, plus the ubiquitous exclamation point…. 
     Finished, she returned to the clock tower picket with her sign. It was well received and passed along from one hand to another until it reached the window glass, where it was pressed so all inside could see it. Our message? Enough!.... 


October 11, 1999 
Dissent 33
     … “But that’s not all that’s been taken down,” she went on. Rebel Girl elaborated on another story that had also reached her that morning. Faculty had until August 8th, to remove any material posted on their office doors, windows or painted surfaces within their offices. If faculty didn’t remove material by that date, the material would be removed for them. 
     “Is this also about sexual harassment?” asked Mr. Pulitzer Prize. 
     “No,” she said, “it’s about worker harassment and the First Amendment. It’s about what they try to get away with when they think no one’s looking.” 
     “What are you going to do?” he asked. 
     “What we’ve been doing for the past two, three years,” Rebel Girl said. “Resist.” 


November 01, 1999 
By Rebel Girl 
[Hostile attorney:] Would you consider the depiction in the upper right-hand corner as being one of maiming? 
[Rebel Girl:] Actually, I would think the only body part that you could [lose] and not have it be considered maiming would be your head. I would offer that that would be a beheading. I’m sorry, I am this English teacher, okay? So I am amending my earlier definition of “maim.” Now, I…believe this is a depiction of a beheading, not a maiming.

December 23, 2000 
By Rebel Girl 

Created by Rebel Girl


September 23, 2002 
By Rebel Girl 
(with apologies to Calvin Trillin) 

I’ll brief the Senates and the unions 
and notify all classified employees 
I’ll send out a lot of memos 
Then do just as I please. 

September 25, 2005 
By Rebel Girl 
     At first, I attributed the student’s roving eyes to her indifference to the great but sometimes inaccessible Russian [viz., Chekhov], but then, following her eyes, I saw what she saw: a single mouse, rambling across the flat panels of fluorescent lighting fixtures, through which he (she?) was exquisitely illuminated from furry tail to pink foot pads. It was like watching the Discovery Channel. The eyes of the rest of the students then followed, with the predictable surprise and oohs and ahhs, not of delight but something else which is triggered by vector in the human cerebellum, an autochthonic revulsion which Rebel Girl has herself learned to control, but to which she sometimes succumbs in too-close proximity to administrators and Republicans. 
     Class stopped while we watched the critter make its confident way out of our illuminated line-of-sight, which took some time as the mouse seemed not in any hurry. 
     “Don’t worry,” I reassured the students, a couple of whom seemed ready to run, “it’s not heavy enough to dislodge the panel.” This sounded authoritative, even to me. “It won’t fall on you. After all, it’s not a rat....” 


October 16, 2005 
By Rebel Girl 
ONE THOUSAND SOBER TRUTHS [including….] 

     [Room] B-104 has missing ceiling tiles, and has for years. Every rainy season there is a major leak in that area of the roof. The seemingly long-term solution appears to be this: once the first storm of the season arrives, a large trash barrel is placed in the middle of the room to catch the water. Perhaps this saves money that would otherwise be spent on roof repair and ceiling tiles. Fiscal conservatives, rejoice: join hands and dance around the plastic barrel. Besides, the trash barrel and the rain adds a special something to the classroom: namely a kind of industrial bleakness and dread, a Home Depot kind of despair, and the dependable plunk-plunk-plunk inspires more of the existential drama evocative of the late Irish playwright Beckett. 


By Rebel Girl
October 17, 2005 
What is buried in the old orange grove anyway? 
We can't tell unless you tell us. 
The truth is out there. 
Go find it. 

—Rebel Girl 

By Rebel Girl
October 29, 2005 
(An adaptation of Hemingway’s adaptation of the Lord’s Prayer-–see his short story: “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”) 

Some lived in it and never felt it but she knew it all was Raghu y pues Raghu y Raghu and pues Raghu. Our Raghu who art in Raghu, Raghu be thy name thy kingdom Raghu thy will be Raghu in Raghu as it is in Raghu. Give us this Raghu our daily Raghu and Raghu us our Raghu as we Raghu our Raghus and Raghu us not into Raghu but deliver us from Raghu ; pues Raghu. 

- Rebel Girl 

By Rebel Girl 
October 29, 2005 
     …Perhaps the chancellor believes that his salary, the physical conditions of his life and workplace, the resources available to him, his fancy new car, his Big Chair, his fancy new office digs-–perhaps he imagines that he is a symbol of the district’s success, that our students and indeed ourselves can look at him and feel pride. As goes Raghu, so go us all. But he isn’t a symbol of success, of course. He is, if anything, a symbol of wretched excess, squandered resources, the rise of mediocrity and the power of nepotism. 
     Meanwhile, the lights flicker in my classroom. The mice scurry across the ceiling. The air conditioning fails to work, so we prop open the door with a tin trash can. Soon the room fills with autumn leaves. We laugh and make the most of it. We work hard at transcending our surroundings, very hard. My students know—they are smart, after all—that the conditions of their classrooms reveal what the college thinks of them. 
     To their credit, they think more of themselves than that. 


November 10, 2005 
By Rebel Girl 
     Speaking of PODs (Pals of Dana), ex-chairman of the Orange County GOP Tom Fuentes, who now darkens the halls of the South Orange County Community College District as a trustee, apparently has some scary ties of his own, according to the latest rants from everyone's favorite dissent-spewing SOCCCD website Dissent the Blog. Seems that Tio Tomas is on the board of directors of Regnery, "which publishes books not likely to be found on an academic's bookshelf," Dissent reports.

November 12, 2005 
By Rebel Girl 
Tidbit of the Night: 

     When I "googled" (I know, I know, I have better things to do)—but really, when I "googled" Raghu Mathur (What's an ace reporter to do on a slow night, huh?), anyway, when I "googled" Raghu Mathur — well, hang on, the second result (That's number 2) that came up was DISSENT! 


November 19, 2005 
By Rebel Girl 
     At the most recent board meeting, Trustee Fuentes opined that we should try and lure star faculty from UCI (and OCC) to come and teach at our little campus in the orange groves…. 
     Who does the starry-eyed trustee imagine might feel motivated to traipse across town and teach for the paltry adjunct faculty compensation offered by the district, not to mention return some of it for the privilege and convenience of parking on campus?.... 
     How about we just recognize the trustee’s yammering for what it is? A few minutes of hot air offered to distract whomever is listening from real issues. A purposeful blowing of smoke. Or as Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” says: “Merely corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” 


By Rebel Girl
January 16, 2006 
     …Years passed, the college underwent its “changes” and so-called “multicultural programming” was taken over by people who imagined Yul Brynner’s “The King and I” offered relevant lessons in assimilation for college students. Say no more, though Rebel Girl could say plenty. 
     …But Rebel Girl can’t help to add that the deafening silence by which King Day is celebrated on this campus is a sharp contrast to another day that she still remembers: on April 27, 1994, our district distinguished itself by becoming the only college district in the nation to close in an official day of mourning in honor of the passing of Richard Milhouse Nixon. 


by REBEL GIRL 
March 11, 2006 
…The Feng Shui Hypothesis: 
     [The college president’s] window’s openness, its physical and metaphysical vulnerability, allowed the potential for passersby and onlookers to transmit potentially negative energies to the office’s occupant. 
     With installation of the Presidential Window Blind, the college president has both remedied his precarious position, trapping the accumulated psychic energy he creates, while shielding himself and also deflecting the transmission of random or negative cosmic elements emanating from passerby and onlookers. 
     The Chinese have a phrase for this which, translated loosely, amounts to “Fuck off.” 

April 08, 2006
By Rebel Girl  
Rebel Girl writes an administrator about classroom 2: 

     …I decided to investigate the ceiling area to see if the collapse that seemed to loom earlier was somehow mitigated by the sunshine. As I pressed my fingers upward to feel the condition of the ceiling panel—my fingers sunk into the panel with startling ease as if it were a slice of sodden white bread. 
     Clearly, the ceiling in this area is rotten. 
     But more alarming than the ease with which my fingers sank into the panel was what occurred after I retracted them—which I did quickly, I assure you. 
     The indentations instantly filled with swarming black ants. 
     As I watched, the ants spread outward from my finger indentations and across the panel. I am not a squeamish person, but the spectacle of the swift-moving ants was fairly nauseating. 
      Thanks for your attention to this matter. 


April 17, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     Ahem. Rebel Girl has been especially busy of late, what with the predictable tumult of paper grading that comes, lo, as if a seasonal floodwater. The winter of their discontent has ended, the glacial icepack of student disinterest or ennui has melted after many cold weeks, and so she is drowned, ironically, in her own spring rains. Then there is her relentless inspection of classroom facilities for real flooding and rodents and insect infestation, not to mention the mid-term carpeting adventure, which found her packing and unpacking her office as if auditioning for some strange Olympic event. 
     —And then there is her ongoing adjustment to her duties as department chair…. 


May 02, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     Rebel Girl, along with Red Emma, and pulling Limber Lou in his little red wagon, joined thousands of others marking the Day Without An Immigrant in Santa Ana yesterday…. 
     As the march began to move out, I looked up. In the wide set branches of a tree, sat a broad-chested young man, in clean, well-pressed khakis and a white button-down shirt. His tie was red, white and blue. His hair was clipped close to his head. His brown face was gleaming with sweat. He shouted down at us, urging us forward, like some figure out of Greek mythology. 
     At the plaza where we paused for speeches in English and Spanish, we met up with three colleagues from Saddleback. We congratulated each other on being there as it was clearly the place to be. Solidarity, indeed. 
     Media reports cited counter protesters, but I saw only one, a single fellow, singularly unhappy, standing there with his own bitter hand-lettered sign. He had, Red noted, obviously more problems than one. 
     The march continued, winding its way around the Civic Center. At the corner of 901 Civic Center Drive, the crowd looked up and noticed a group of men on the roof, arms crossed, watching us. Clearly business men, they had taken off their suit jackets to better bear the heat, but their ties remained tight around their necks, their shirts tucked into their belted trousers. Standing there, arms crossed, they watched us, the slowly moving sea of white shirts and red, white and blue flags. We started waving, calling out “Hello!” “Hola!” No reaction. We shouted louder. Nothing. We called, “Come join us!” and realized how absurd that request was, but still, we repeated it. “Hello!” Come join us!”…. 

May 03, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
The long spring meeting 
Raghu says nothing 
so so many times 

A fishy smell 
the room where we sit for years 
waiting for nothing 

The spring we don't see 
the marked trees await their fate 
the ax, the death which arrives for all 

The chancellor! 
not interested in oak trees, 
teachers or students without classes 

The clock tower rots 
A-quad rabbits stare ahead 
still, waiting to run 

May 08, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     This regime—the board and Chancellor, the administrators in charge of the commonwealth, public education, our cultural and political lives—have done to language what they have done to our nation, our state (Der Terminator) and our county. They are foolish people for whom language is something less a tool than a destroyerator of tools. As Orwell claims, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” 
     “Pure wind.” 
     Brrrrrr. 


May 20, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     Much could be said about yesterday’s commencement ceremony at IVC. Rebel Girl will leave most of that to her colleague…. 
     I know, I know. Apparently some in yesterday’s audience found charming the parade of bloopers and egotism that was lost on me. 
     Could be. Maybe. I know staff members wearing sandwich boards were hawking the official video version of the ceremony to an eager crowd. But in the parking lot, out of the trunks of their cars, business was booming for those quick-thinking entrepreneurs offering a specially priced bootleg “Commencement 2006 Outtakes: Bloopers.” 
     Sure, picking the wings off of a fly is fun, but for how long? Reb cannot linger long in a world where delusion and malapropism pass for charming hobbies, though that may be where she is doomed to live out her days…. 


August 21, 2006
By Rebel Girl 
 [The] Adventures of a Night Dean 
     …Meanwhile, she wondered: How many of those students remembered the orange groves where they now parked their cars? How many faculty remembered for that matter? Early on, still a fresh hire who knew only how to say yes, she once spent an afternoon in the groves with students, raising money by allowing people to pick their own oranges. The students didn't raise much money but they had fun. Late in the afternoon, a woman had driven up and asked if she could pick the orange blossoms. She'd be happy to pay she said. The fragrance reminded her of her childhood in Iran. She went off with armfuls and paid more money than the people who picked the fruit. That must have been ten years ago. Back then Kit looked like one of them – a young woman in blue jeans, squinting in the sunlight. Now, still in blue jeans, but wearing a black classic blazer, (she thought of the coat as her concession to meetings, as a kind of professional shield that she wielded.) Kit was who she was, no doubt about it. A middle-aged woman whose gray hair surprised her. 
. . . 
    Just last Spring this section of campus had been cordoned off for hours when the college president found a suspicious package. The Bomb Squad was called. Students, staff and faculty were swept into the parking lot and kept there. A bomb-detecting robot seized the object and removed it to the special bomb-transportation truck. X-rays revealed no explosive device. The president's "bomb" was a sandbag, a leftover from a video production. Kit marveled at the man's suspicion, his paranoia. She thought his fear said more about him and his own predilection for violence then it did about his foes on the faculty and staff. 
     Kit glanced around for security, the friendly fellas packing heat who rode around the campus in a fleet of unlikely but swift golf carts, her backup. They were nowhere to be seen…. 


August 22, 2006
By Rebel Girl  
     …Death comes. We gulp. The air is more precious than ever. Our lungs. Our heart. It all comes back to us, what it means, how it works. There is never enough time it seems to say or do what we should and that is the special sharp grief that survivors possess. 
     Now is the time, a wise friend reminded me early this summer, when my mother-in-law, in round three of ovarian cancer, went into hospice, for my husband to tell his mother what he wanted her to know. We knew she was dying and that knowledge was a difficult gift, but a valuable one. But too often, we don't know that death is coming…. 


August 27, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     It's true. 
     There are others like us out there and Rebel Girl, through her online rambles (ah, she remembers the days when she'd pack her rucksack and off to Europe she'd go with a train pass and Swiss army knife), has found them. 
     Listed below are some of the best blogs written by our comrades across the country and the world. They offer insight, affirmation and stimulation. Maybe they'll even inspire you to join us…. 


September 19, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     …Mostly though I am haunted by events of last week that Chunk alluded to in an earlier post: a student was expelled from campus due to his actions. I am somewhat close to these events and remain shaken and confused by many elements. This follows on the year anniversary of my chair-ship, which first immersed me in the world of student grievances (so many grievances, so little time!) and the sometimes related sphere of disturbed students (there's more out there than you imagine!). 
     While the grade grievance process is fairly straightforward, I have found myself puzzled and somewhat frightened by how vulnerable instructors (and staff and other students) are when dealing with a student who is obviously disturbed. Such a student presents, at times, a physical threat as well as a professional one. 
     What is to be done? How to preserve access for all students while still preserving and protecting those who teach? So they pull one student out of one instructor's class—but what about the next instructor who faces that student?  

October 16, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     …Sometimes the universe offers you little moments of serendipity. Sometimes you look over at the stack of papers and curriculum revisions and course equivalency forms stacked six feet high next to your desk and see that, yes, when the Big One hits, you will be crushed to death by the writing of students who cannot distinguished between "their," "there," and "they're." But this, along with, apparently, noticing the hypocrisy of the Schwarzenegger crowd, is what we call irony. To which the front-page story of an earthquake (!) in Hawaii on the same day adds even more. Ah, Monday, Monday…. 


October 17, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     REBEL GIRL, reporting from Irvine Valley College: 
     LATE LAST WEEK, in an early morning raid, Bio-Nite commandoes liberated a washing machine, which had been rudely padlocked, allegedly by a member of the School of Fine Arts. 
     Said machine and its accompanying dryer were always the property of the School of Fine Arts; that fact is not in dispute. 
     However, for some time, the two machines had been stored in Bio-Nite Territory where they were used to wash the thin nylon costumes often seen in Fine Arts productions. In recent years, an accord had been reached and ratified by the two factions, which allowed the Bio-Nites to utilize the machine for purposes deemed more serious (the cleansing of laboratory garments). This access was seen as an exchange for the continued storage of said machines in Bio-Nite Territory…. 
      Whatever the motive, the Bio-Nite Liberation Army (BNLA) commandoes moved into swift action, and said machine was liberated via a device identified by a renegade art historian as either an "Oklahoma picklock" or a "Texas nutcutter." 
     All parties involved declined to state their names, leaving Rebel Girl unable to fill in the details. 

October 22, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     …It was kind of shocking. Could it be, she wondered, THE Sergio Ramirez, a stalwart Sandinista revolutionary in Nicaragua back in the day, Vice President of the little country that roared at the US and then was undermined by the Reagan-Bush-Elliot Abrams even as the CIA mined its harbors? And wasn't my, our, Sergio Ramirez himself, ironically, a writer, in fact a novelist of some renown? Could this Ramirez have undergone the same kind of transformation as, say, Christopher Hitchens, turned from socialist land reform and education and national self-defense advocate (No pasaran!) into a nutty right-wing national chauvinist, all the while living here in Garden Grove or Santa Ana or Newport Beach and doing the cha-cha-cha with La Nutjob Suprema Senora Barbara Coe?.... 


By Rebel Girl 
October 29, 2006 
     …Meanwhile, Rebel Girl herself remains astonished by the vision at the heart of the story Tan Nguyen keeps telling: how, after the hysteria broke out about the letter, he retreated to the shores of the Pacific where, he claimed, he met many Latinos. He approached them and asked them the meaning of emigrado. These Latinos with sand in their zapatos all told him the same thing: an emigrado is a green card holder and thus, in Nguyen's loca cabeza, they exonerated him and his campaign. 
     I can't help but picture the scene: Huntington, maybe Corona del Mar. Latino families out for the day with Igloo coolers and folding chairs. It's what we call Indian summer here in So Cal. You can still don shorts and tanks tops and not catch a chill. The kids let the waves chase them. Seagulls squawk. Bags of Doritos flutter in the breeze. Los Tigres del Norte play on the boom box. A slight man dressed in a white button down shirt and dress pants stumbles toward las familias. He clutches a crumpled letter, looks harried. 
     Can you help me, he asks. Can you tell me what emigrado means? Please? Please?....

November 14, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     AS some of you know, department chairs serve as “night dean” one evening every semester. For that evening, the ND holds all the power of the college in her hands. You know, the football, the red phone to the Kremlin, keys to Glenn’s office so the night dean can swivel in his chair, a sidearm for personal use, a private Cushman to tool around the grounds in, the presidential Seadoo to cruise the Gensler Lagoon. Being night dean is sort of like being lieutenant governor. Rebel Girl looked around for special orders to sign in during this evening’s power vacuum but found none, alas. 
     Rebel Girl knows she should use this time to grade papers, review applications in the adjunct pool, clear her desk and revise curriculum but she has been going all day and simply doesn’t have it in her. So she orders a medium size Moroccan pizza (baked eggplant, pesto, feta, pine nuts & mozzarella) from Z-Pizza and pops a lemon Snapple. She’s feeling particularly flush since she (and the other two chairs in her school) finally got paid! A check appeared in her mailbox, made out from the district's "Revolving Cash Fund" account. However, the amount of her check is puzzling and leaves her to wonder just how much she isn’t getting paid. Still, she’ll shut up and deposit it. She'll sit on the "Revolving Cash Fund" and rotate. She'll pay her property tax. And if anyone could help her figure out the compensation package, she would appreciate it…. 


November 19, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
 …Even though Rebel Girl doesn't care for John Updike nearly as much as everyone else, she offers him and his poem "Relatives" as part of her Thanksgiving week offering. Recent events (!) have left her pretty much wordless so she will renew herself this week by giving loyal Dissent readers other people's words to read and thus uphold the stereotype of mild-mannered professor of English in the process….

November 20, 2006
By Rebel Girl  
     …Years ago—Rebel Girl is now at an age that when she says years it does indeed mean years—so over two decades, nearly a quarter-century ago, Red Emma, who even then was a man who knew what he wanted, gave her the following poem. (Yes, they go waaay back folks, those two.) Yes, he typed the poem out as was done then. 
      Rebel Girl had never heard of the poet before, the great Peter Everwine who lived then and lives still (someone say yes!) in the great Central Valley of California. The poem was from Everwine's book Keeping the Night. She taped the poem to the wall of her small kitchen, above the round table where they first began to eat regularly together. Rebel Girl cooked Red his first artichoke, made him drink coffee, red wine, ouzo. He kept giving her poems. She is, all these years later, still thankful…. 

November 28, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     If Rebel Girl had a hammer, you can bet she'd hammer in the morning, in the evening, all over this campus. There is, indeed, much repair needed. 
     However, the inability to find the necessary tool to hammer out our particular strains of injustice and incompetence, plus the inability to generate many words continues (Week 2!), so Rebel Girl will do what some of her students sometimes do when faced with a blank page and a deadline: Quote! A lot!.... 


December 07, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     Smokin' in the Boys Room. In the back of the room, having arriving fashionably late, slouched K.S. and Rebel Girl, the two stalwart female profs who close the place down most Thursday nights, Rebel with her writers, K.S. with her cadre of mostly female students wielding scalpels above the prone forms of small, dead animals. The two lobbed a few questions – stipends, reassigned time, the justice of the DRAC model and the possibility or lack thereof of increased justice in the future. They watched as the Chancellor, as is his wont, unspooled his vision, a tapestry of aphorism and narcissism. 
. . . 
    In the Still of the Night. Rebel Girl minded her tongue for once and didn't ask about the state of security of campus, especially late at night. She didn't mention the student who recently died in the middle of the night in the parking lot, whose death went unnoticed for over 10 hours and who had to be found by his father the next morning. She thinks about that event often and wonders what went wrong here that night, what other matters were so pressing that no one noticed a car sitting in a well-lit narrow strip of the parking lot with its windows rolled down and a young man inside…. 

December 13, 2006 
By Rebel Girl 
     Don't even ask what the past week has been like. Suffice to say, Rebel Girl has not finished grading her various paper sets, has not finished staffing all the classes for the next semester, has not finished writing letters of recommendation, has not even begun to do faculty evaluations let alone holiday shopping and sister calling and instead has been composing a 2000 word essay titled "Pedagogy of the Deceased." It's too long and dreadful to post here but if you want a copy just let her know and she'll be happy to share the pain…. 


December 14, 2006  
By Rebel Girl 
     The most dreadful semester wound down in fine style in the A-200 faculty lounge on Wednesday when two instructors, inspired by what a little goodwill might do (Yes, Virginia, yes!) created a party from nearly nothing: a few trays of cookies baked by a generous faculty mom in Whittier; a cardboard box o'coffee bought at the local neighborhood mega-monster corporate coffee-opoly; a tablecloth improvised from the OC Weekly holiday edition; chairs stolen from various empty classrooms (the faculty lounge sports, as you know, only four chairs); and jazzy holiday tunes wafting from a nearby office. 
     Friends, it doesn't take much to make folks happy. Yes, George Bailey, it's a wonderful life. 
     Chris and Jan from the Health Center (a Zen-like zone of peace and tranquility in the Student Services Center) took the prize for traveling the most distance to attend the spontaneous cookie soiree. A-100 was well-represented by Kathy, Gee and Al Tello. The adjunct pool sent representatives from Fine Arts, English and Spanish. Beth from the Reading Lab showed up, and the usual suspects from A-200 were in attendance, ambassadors from across the disciplines and programs. The dapper and charming Bob, Dave F's personal hero, also put in an appearance. We reminisced. We told jokes. We roasted chestnuts. We were visited by the ghosts of administrators past. We asked advice of each other. We gave advice. The spirit of holiday camaraderie --- all, amazingly, without boozy nog --- nestled itself into our collective bosom, and an atmosphere of cuddly and jingly and warm descended on the straw-strewn manger, er, lounge…. 

December 19, 2006
By Rebel Girl  
     MORE POETRY today from Rebel Girl who is trying to muster up the energy to finish grading, compile the summer schedule, pack for Mexico and relate to you all the sad tale of her student and maybe yours who needs assistance perhaps more than he knows. More on that later but get your checkbooks ready. Rebel Girl has opened a savings account at the teachers credit union with his name on it and will be asking, soon, for your donations…. 
Graphic by Rebel Girl


February 01, 2007 
By Rebel Girl 
     …She remembered that last year, Red Emma had tried to do a good turn and buy a case of cold medicine for the local Catholic Worker homeless shelter only to be challenged at the check-out counter at Target. Seems that even over-the-counter cold medicines are subject to restrictions, especially when one is buying in quantity. Who knows what you're really doing with that cough syrup… Long story short, Red actually muscled and shamed his way through the resistance he met at Target, summoning up the specter of homeless kiddies who really needed their Tylenol and Robitussin and carted off his case of the stuff to Santa Ana….
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Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...