I talked a bit a few blogs ago about my eclectic (or bizarre as the case may be) music tastes and my need for music as an escape and a pathway to seeing the small miracles in my life. Paul Carrack’s (former lead singer for Squeeze and part-time singer for Mike + The Mechanics) “Don’t Shed A Tear” served both roles for me about this time twenty years ago.

This wasn’t just my angry response to allowing a former crush to mess with my future, my status as a student, my understanding of myself as a young and albeit naive young man. Sure, when I sang to the refrain “Don’t shed a tear for me/my life won’t end without you,” I did it because I was pissed and because I knew I needed to move on. But the song was also reaching another part of me. It fit my need to find a silver lining even in the middle of what felt like heartbreak at the time. The song’s refrain was also me affirming that I would get back on track, find my way, succeed despite how hurt I still felt.

Of course, I combined “Don’t Shed A Tear” with my other form of escape — sports — as a message that even in po-dunk Pittsburgh I could expect life to have a soft side, even a side of small miracles. Super Bowl XXII served in that role of small miracle. And though I see the silliness of this now, that game stood out as a symbol that anyone can have a perfect day at some point in their lives. Doug Williams, the first and so far only African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl — this with the Washington Redskins — was supposed to be on his last legs, having spent so much of his talent with the hilariously awful Tampa Bay Bucs of the late-70s and early ’80s. The media spent most of their time on Denver Broncos’ John Elway — “The man with the golden arm” as one broadcaster had said — and discussed Williams mostly as an afterthought. I sat in the common room area of my dorm eating a plate of spaghetti and meat sauce that I had prepared (my first “home cooked” meal since I came to Pitt) as Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter. I could only laugh as the Broncos had managed to give up 35 points in a little more than ten minutes.

It wasn’t so much that I felt pride in Doug Williams’ accomplishment, although I did feel that. It was more the realization that I needed not to listen to the things that others said about me. It made me realize that it was more important to listen to myself, to see myself as successful. That I could overcome anything and anyone in order to be the person I wanted to be. That’s the lesson that I took from that game.

Songs like “Don’t Shed A Tear” and games like Super Bowl XXII had also taught me two other important lessons. One, that just because someone’s been anointed a winner or successful doesn’t mean that their victory is guaranteed. Elway and the Broncos had lost two Super Bowls in a row, including the one to my Giants the year before. They would lose another one two years later, an embarrassing 55-10 to the 49ers. I feel the same way this week with the Giants playing Tom Brady and the Patriots. With people anointing the Patriots as the greatest ever in this watered-down era of the NFL seems somewhere between premature and arrogant. Win or lose, I think that we do each other a disservice when we put folks on pedestals.

Two is that not everything that I’ve had or would have to fight for in life would be impossibly hard. Some things will come with relative ease. Some of the things in my life that I value the most have come with work but with some degree of ease. Because of my previous experiences, the classroom side of graduate school actually felt easier than any other part of my education outside of elementary school. Dating became amazingly easy once I turned twenty-two and especially after turning twenty-five, I’m not sure why. But even in these, it takes patience and applied wisdom — either through experience or inspired epiphanies — to make the difficult into something that is easy to overcome. It’s hard to believe that I pulled this out of the lyrics of one song and from watching a football game, but people like me have to get inspiration from somewhere.

It was six years ago this week that two events occurred to forever change my relationship with my mother and family. It was the joining of these events in my mind, born of my desperation for relief from years of frustration, anger, resentment and emotional exhaustion. It was my family intervention, occurring the same week that my youngest brother Eri became a dad, at the end of January ’02.

The roots of all of this likely go back to when my mother was pregnant with me, but that’s a story almost as long as Boy At The Window itself. The more immediate context begins with one of my once-a-week calls to my mother at the end of July ’01. I called to wish my brother Maurice a happy twenty-second birthday, to encourage him to go back to Westchester Community College and finish his associate’s degree, to find out how the rest of “the kids” (as my mother still called them) were doing.

What I got was nearly an hour of stress and despair from my mother about my siblings. The “Judah babies” (my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name) were out of control, my mother said, with the exhaustion of someone who no longer knew how to parent or nurture. Eri “makes me sick,” she said as she went on and on about his girlfriend, the pregnancy, his defiance and threats of violence to her and to the other siblings. Of course, my other brothers Yiscoc (pronounced “Yizz-co,” an old form of Isaac) and Maurice were no good as well. They were “sittin‘ on their asses as usual,” my mother said. My older brother Darren, the only sibling other than me not living at 616 was also on my mother’s shit list for only coming over on the occasional Sunday to eat from her trough. By the time I hung up the phone, I felt stressed like I’d never been before, episodes of abuse included.

At this point I was on a regular phone call schedule with my mother. For nearly fourteen years, I’d spoken with her at least once a week, only to find that these conversations were mostly venting sessions for her. If I had any good news, her response was usually no response. If I had any bad news or not-so-good news, like during my days of underemployment (when I was only teaching part-time at Duquesne University in ’98 and ’99), that gave her the opportunity to talk about her employment struggles and how “West Indians,” “Spanish people” and “Orientals” were taking all the jobs in Mount Vernon. If I asked her how she was doing, she’d say “Tired” with a sigh that made me wish that I never asked. Despite this, despite the way she acted during my doctorate graduation at Carnegie Mellon, despite her never asking about my wife or about my career, I kept in contact. I wanted my journey to be an example of what was possible and real for her and for my brothers and sisters. That’s why I kept calling and frequently sent money, even when it was obvious my success had meant little to my family.

After hearing that Eri had knocked up his girlfriend and that she was do in January ’02, my mindset became less stable for a while (my wife can attest to this). Eri had recently dropped out of Mount Vernon High School after spending nearly two and a half years in ninth grade. He wasn’t working, wasn’t looking for work, and was offended by the idea that I would even ask him to do so. Yiscoc had also dropped out, was working (under the table, of course) and hanging out all hours. Sarai, the next youngest at 18, shared the same room and bed with my mother. The only thing missing from my sister’s infantalization was a chastity belt. And Maurice, my allegedly retarded brother who finished high school with a 3-something average in standard high school courses had stopped going to Westchester Community College after two part-time semesters. Between them and my mother, I became depressed myself. For the next seven months after the end-of-July call, I would have trouble sleeping, often getting only four or five hours a night. I was occasionally testy for no apparent reason, and my co-workers often got on my last nerve (that was more typical, but it lasted longer during those days).

The 9/11 attacked didn’t help matters. The terrorists, in fact, had delayed my original intervention plans. I had planned to go to Mount Vernon in September or October to visit and meet with my family. Being unable to leave Atlanta for three days and all the things that happened after that forced me to push my plans into ’02. Meanwhile, I still needed to keep up some appearances, continue to call my mother and semi-listen to her gripes and aches and pains. The fall of ’01 was total torture, with my mother forgetting my birthday (again) and trashing the Xmas gift I’d bought her. It was a book by one of her favorite pastors on racism and the modern church. “I already know all about racism,” she said with the disdain of someone who didn’t want to be bothered.

By this time I began making my plans. I contacted my Uncle Sam (my mother’s brother living in Mount Vernon), my older brother Darren and a couple of my mother’s old acquaintances to let them know that I would be in town and that I needed to talk with them. I talked with my mother about coming over for dinner on the last Friday in January. I put together a three-page chart of the critical errors our family (mostly my mother, of course) had made since the early-70s. And then I prayed. I prayed for the strength to do this, for finding some positive things to say to temper all of the negative ones I knew I would have to say. I prayed to make sure I wasn’t doing this out of spite or some warped sense of hatred toward my mother.

That week, the week of the intervention, was an exhausting one. I ran a conference for my job in Atlanta in the days before, as well as visited my father Jimme in Jacksonville for the first time since he had stopped drinking four years earlier. “You know what your mama gonna do?,” he warned after I told him about the intervention. At least he understood why.

I went up to suburban New York City, New Rochelle (which is only two miles from Mount Vernon and 616) and booked a hotel room. In the two days before, I ate dinner with my uncle and asked him to come to the intervention. I visited one of my mother’s old friends and told her as well. I learned a few valuable things about my mother’s past that gave me some food for thought about why she was the way she’d been over the previous twenty-five years. Then it was time for the intervention. I called my siblings to remind them that I was coming over and that I’d order pizza for dinner.

By the time I arrived, Darren and three of my four younger siblings (Yiscoc had left to hang out with his friends) were already there. 616. The place where beatings, muggings and a fire had happened to us. The place was a disaster of cheap, broken furniture, a petri dish experiment for the interior of the refrigerator, walls plastered and painted the colors of a jail cell. My siblings with the look and smell of poverty. I almost cried just thinking about what I was about to do. So for an hour, as the pizza, my mother and my Uncle Sam arrived, I tried to make small talk, tried but failed. At least the pizza gave me a few minutes to think before I went to it.

I started a few minutes after eight, about ten minutes after Uncle Sam got there. He would at least he my mother from attacking me. I went on for a few minutes about the family history, Darren being condemned to a school for the retarded, my own abuse, my mother’s horrible tastes in men and her consistently taking the path of least resistance in her decisions (including the one to move back to 616 in ’98), about my ex-stepfather and father and their stupidity, incompetence and violence. Then I started on each of my siblings, their laziness, close mindedness, petty jealousies and isolation from the real world. I laid hardess into Eri for making the mistake of becoming a father too soon.

That seemed to get things going. My sister attacked me for not understanding. “Look at you now! You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. I reminded her that not only did I know, I lived with the memories of “what things were like” every day. “You abandoned us! You left and went off to college and never came back!,” Eri screamed, as if my whole life should’ve been spent in the New York area watching over them. Darren and Maurice chimed in, both defending me by pointing to decisions about their education that my mother had made by not making a decision at all. Even my Uncle Sam came down on my side, only saying “Watch your language” a couple of times.

After an hour, Eri was upset, Maurice was crying, Darren was in some sort of delirious heaven, as morbid as he was, and Sarai was pouting, arms crossed while sitting on the bowing couch in front of me. Only my mother hadn’t said a word. She sat and stood in a state of shock, eyes teared and mixed with daggers of rage, face drawn, as if I’d slapped her in both cheeks. She hadn’t made a single sound. As I went on about how “fucked up our family has been,” I realized that as important a voice in the room as my mother was, it was more important to reach my brothers and sister than it was to reach her. So I left, shaking my head, promising not to show my head at 616 anytime soon, hoping that we “would get our acts together,” but realizing I couldn’t invest my emotions “in making all of our lives better anymore.”

I didn’t talk with my mother for three months, and only twice (once by letter) in the seven months after the intervention. I heard from Darren and Sarai how pissed she was at me, that she had said her famous “How dare I…” words after I left. Too bad she didn’t talk during the intervention. I wrote her a letter to tell her that she showed all of the signs of clinical depression, that she should see a doctor and find a way to talk about all of things that she had suffered through in life, only to be read the riot act in a voice mail message a week later. In all of that, there was some good news. After being depressed myself for nearly a month, I started sleeping again. I wasn’t talking with my family every week anymore, and I had found a way to come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t change the course of life for my family simply by doing well myself.

But my intervention did have an impact. Five weeks after my visit, Eri went into Job Corps in upstate New York. Within six months, he had earned his GED, gotten his driver’s license and was earning certification as an auto mechanic. Two years later, he joined the Army Reserve and started school at Monroe College. Maurice started up his associate’s degree work a year after the intervention and moved out of 616 even before that. Sarai and I had to have our own mini-intervention regarding her taking care of my son a couple of years later. By the end of ’04, she had moved to Alabama with friends to live her own life. Only Yiscoc was unaffected by the intervention, at least in a direct way, as he is the only sibling still living at 616 with my mother. At least he has his a normal job.

Me and my mother still don’t talk like we used to when I first started college. I call about once every six weeks, and tend to stick to topics that I’m comfortable talking with her about. I don’t talk about writing or teaching or work, refuse to talk about Mount Vernon in terms of race or ethnicity, and won’t allow a discussion of religion or sexual orientation, because my mother’s bigotry and seemingly blissful isolation bothers me. It means that the phone call typically doesn’t last more than thirty minutes, just enough not to end up with a headache. I’ve learned, tragically, that just because I love my mother doesn’t mean that I have to like her or like what she does. At the same time, I still hope that she finds a way to let out her pain and suffering so that she can deal and heal, making her remaining days ones that she can truly enjoy.

Well, it’s not officially Martin Luther King Day yet, but since Dr. King was born on January 15 and would be 79 years old tomorrow, better to talk about him today than next week. What a legacy. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the great American patriots of all time. Yet his generation of civil rights activists and righteous protesters have done as much harm to his legacy as have conservatives evoking his “I Have a Dream” speech to distract us from their bigotry and greed.

Yeah, that’s right. I said it. It’s something I’ve seen almost my whole life. One of the benefits — if you want to call it that — of being born in 1969 is that I’ve witnessed the devolution of the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders and followers into a gauntlet of gatekeepers who expect everyone from my generation to start every sentence paying homage to their sacrifices. I have no problems with that, at least in theory. But the reality is that most folks from the Civil Rights generation — at least the successful ones — made few if any sacrifices for the cause. They were in the right place at the right time with the right education and managed to find jobs, careers and positions of influence while the least fortunate of us all saw few material or psychological benefits from Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

I’ve already talked at length about a former high school administrator whose statement about sacrifice and the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to make me feel bad about letting Black Mount Vernon, New York down because I only graduated fourteenth in my class out of over five hundred students. There are others, former and current teachers, professors, librarians, politicians, writers, producers, editors, pastors, politicians, bosses and charlatans who’ve made a point to discuss their elitist notions of the Civil Rights Movement and generation with me, as if I should’ve been born at least ten years earlier. On April 4th, it’ll be four decades since Dr. King was executed on a motel balcony in Memphis, but we’re still discussing the Civil Rights era as if “We Shall Overcome” will truly carry us to the Promised Land.

What’s happened in those forty years? For college educated, middle class African Americans, life has gotten better, even with bigotry, glass ceilings, DWB, a less stable economy, and the conservative backlash that has gone on unabated since the three years before Dr. King’s assassination. For Blacks not as fortunate, almost nothing has changed, at least not for the better. Some of it, to be sure (and to cut Bill Cosby some slack), is because of individual choices and poor decision-making. Folks, however, can rarely make decisions outside of their own context and circumstances — think outside of the box, in other words — without a significant amount of help. Poverty in all of its forms is just as grinding now as it was four decades ago. To expect people from the generations since Dr. King to suddenly forget their poverty, abuse, neglect and exploitation and give praise to a generation where many but far from most made sacrifices for the Movement is ludicrous.

I’m certain that had Dr. King lived the last forty years, he wouldn’t have stood by to allow his generation to constantly criticize the under-forty as slackers and immature and unfocused, as folks more concerned with money than equality, as people more willing to give up rights than fight for them. He likely would’ve made the point that the post-Civil Rights generations are merely a reflection of their upbringing, of their parents and teachers and mentors’ nurturing and training. He would’ve made the same point that others from his generation like law professor and scholar-activist Derrick Bell has made over the years. That fighting racism, educational neglect and economic exploitation requires more tools than the moral high-ground, protests, marches, a sympathetic media and obvious redneck tactics. The Movement is a shifting terrain that requires new tools and tactics to achieve small victories over a long period of time, longer than most folks from the era are willing to admit or work for.

I actually don’t have a strong ax to grind against the Civil Rights generation. Without folks like Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers or Ella Baker, I wouldn’t have found myself in a gifted-track program in middle school or high school in the ’80s. But let’s not act as if my life was a walk in the park. The legacy of the Civil Rights era never stopped a fist from being thrown into my face by my now ex-stepfather. It never kept us from going on welfare or kept two of my siblings from bring diagnosed as mentally retarded. It didn’t stop teachers and professors from putting up barriers to my success as a student or employers from putting up a glass ceiling in an attempt to slow my career advance. It’s never paid one of my bills, kept food on my plate or kept me from experiencing homelessness. It’s never even been a source of pride, because that would mean that the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy belongs to me as much as it does to the people who allegedly marched with Dr. King.

I can’t wait for those who cling almost in desperation to the idyllic legacy of Dr. King and the cause to retire and fade away, for the ’60s to truly be over. Maybe it’s then that folks from the post-’60s generation — folks like me who care about economic and educational equity, social justice and spiritual transformation — will be able to make an impact on our nation’s sorry state of consciousness without pouring libations to folks who gave up on Dr. King’s work ages ago.

There have been moments in my life where the only decision I could make was either to give up or fight for whatever I wanted at the time. Some many of those times have occurred right at the beginning of the year and right after I’ve made a decision to turn a situation around.

One example of flight-vs.-fight immediately comes to mind. One was twenty years ago tomorrow, the beginning of my second semester at Pitt. After battling my obsession with my second crush and my homesickness through most of the previous fall, I made the decision to never allow a woman to steal my sanity and confidence like that again. Then on the day I was to fly back to Pittsburgh, my grades from the first semester came in. I earned an A in Astronomy for athletes, a B- in Pascal, a C in Honors Calculus (no surprise there) and a C+ in East Asian History. The grade in that course was a shocker, but it shouldn’t have been. I missed two-thirds of my history classes in November and December, and just under half of all of my classes overall in the last six weeks of the semester.

Some may say, what’s so bad about having a 2.63 GPA in your first semester at Pitt, or any other university for that matter? I had an academic scholarship that depended on me finishing each school year with a 3.0 minimum overall GPA. If I didn’t, then it was bye-bye academic scholarship. I needed to have a monster of a semester to push my GPA over a 3.0. Plus, I felt a sense of shame, of not wanting this part of my life to end in failure. I started my undergraduate career the same way I ended my days at Mount Vernon High School — underperforming and in need to turn things around. I didn’t want to spend my undergrad years constantly coming from behind — like an underperforming athlete — just to earn a halfway decent grade.

I had already plotted my comeback when two obstacles immediately came to my attention. One was my Pitt bill, which was nearly $1,300 in arrears, a lot of money for me. I had to stand in a line wrapped around Thackeray Hall in minus two degree weather for nearly two hours and make a call to my former employers at General Foods (where they held $1,200 in trust for my college tuition) to get my Pitt bill straightened out. That was the easy part.

Obstacle number two involved my dorm mates, half of whom were on Pitt’s basketball team (not the nicest sort), the other half the folks I usually hung around (geeks who would make most of my high school classmates look like socialites by comparison). They had spent most of November and December binge drinking and occasionally taking me along for the ride. One of them had begun to build a pyramid of Busch beer cans in their room, one nearly five feet tall by the time I returned from the holiday break. All I needed to do was to figure out how to co-exist with my immediate dorm mates, as they had aggravated my situation with their morbid, drinking ways.

The opportunity I needed happened a few days after I straightened out my Pitt bill. As usual, I left my door open and walked down the hall to the bathroom, did my thing, and went back to the room to call my mother. When I called, my mother kept saying “Hello . . . Hello . . . Who’s there?” She apparently couldn’t here me. After my third attempt, I checked my phone to see what was wrong. One of my idiot dorm mates had unscrewed the phone and taken the transmitter piece out, which was why my mother couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t even make a call to report what they did. I set out looking for the Busch beer pyramid guy in his room. When he saw me, he ran and immediately closed his door, almost breaking my hand as I kept slamming my body into his door and put my foot between the door and the door jam.

I thought about telling our RA, who was too busy screwing his girlfriend to notice that he had no control over our floor. So I took matters in my own hands. The next day, the stupid ass was next door in a mutual acquaintance’s room, bouncing balls off my wall and laughing like there was something funny about it. My anger turned into a rage I hadn’t felt since my fight with one of my classmates six years before. I grabbed my dust mop and unscrewed the handle, walked next door, and proceeded to smash the drunk ass and one of his stupid ass friends on top of their heads. “I don’t hear anyone laughing now!,” I yelled. “If I don’t get my phone piece back by this time tomorrow, there’s going to be a fight, and I don’t intend to lose! We can all get kicked out of school!” I’d never seen three White guys so scared. I knew I had crossed a line, but so had they. To make sure they knew that I meant business, I smashed my dust mop handle against the wall as hard as I could and said, “That’s what’s gonna happen to your heads if I don’t get my phone piece back.” They sent another dorm mate — the only other person of color in our group — as an emissary with the transmitter by the end of the day.

I didn’t allow myself to feel bad about going psycho or, from their perspective, “Black” on my dorm mates. With only a couple of exceptions, I saw everyone on my floor as the enemy for a while. And for the next couple of weeks, whenever I left the room at night for the bathroom or for something else on my floor, I took the dust mop handle with me. I wasn’t crazy. I was as sane as I’d been in a long, long time.

The result of my decision to excommunicate almost all of my first semester friends was that I could start with a clean slate. This was especially true on a campus with nearly thirty thousand students. In my resolve to become more serious about school, I also became more serious about whom I wanted to befriend or hang out with. With few exceptions, most of the friendships that began that semester were with folks at least two years older than me. I knew I needed to grow up, and fast, if I expected to make it through the end of the semester and year.

Still, as I’ve talked about in other postings, I didn’t trust myself enough to maintain contact with my new friends and the few people in authority I knew. Even after a semester in which my GPA rose to a 3.3, bringing my overall GPA to a 3.02. My resolve to change things in my life came out of anger, and could only be a short-term solution to the long-term problem of my life, of trust and faith in myself and others, a willingness to risk failure in order to have success, to allow myself to like and love someone, risking deep hurt in the process. Still, I had to start somewhere, and anger channeled into the only thing I knew how to do well — being a student — was probably the best starting point of all.

Happy New 2008 to all of you! We’ve made it through another year and another holiday season. It’s time to take stock, to think about losses and gains, to contemplate what I want to see happen in the new year. But first, I thank you all for your emails and for your support in visiting my blog and my website over the past seven months. It’s been great to know that there are people out there who are either entertained by my ramblings or take my thoughts seriously. I hope to keep up the good work throughout this year as well.

Taking stock is always an interesting task. Do we do it from the standpoint of what society says we should value? Do we include intangibles like human losses and gains into account? Do we forget about the past completely and just move on, as if what occurred a few hours or days ago isn’t linked at all to the present or immediate future? Or do we just take a glass half-empty or half-full approach, emphasizing gains or magnifying losses beyond their actual significance?

For me, my approach for most of my life has been measured by progress toward diploma or degree, progress in my career, progress in reducing the number of times I masturbate, and progress in increasing my income. Since I married my wife in 2000 and especially since we had Noah in 2003, my priorities have shifted a bit. Of course I’m no longer a student in any formal sense, and haven’t been since the end of ’96. But being part of other people’s lives as a husband or father does make taking stock of a year more complicated. Did me and my wife argue less about money or about our relationship this past year? Did we have more sex or less? What was the quality of our sexual activities over the past year? Are we more in tune with each other’s emotional and psychological needs than we were a year ago?

As for Noah, gains are pretty easy to measure. He’s becoming a intelligent goofball who loves to ham it up around us and his friends, has his first girlfriend (for a four-and-a-half year-old, that is), can count up to 30 easily, 50 a little less so, and with some assistance, can count up to 100. Noah also had become good at using that smart mouth of his, which I as a reformed smart mouth occasionally try to curtail (at least for his sake). He’s starting to recognize words and spellings of words (we sometimes talk in code in front of him, but he’s picked up spellings like p-i-z-z-a and l-i-g-h-t and t-r-a-i-n, for instance). He can throw a Nerf football up to 15 yards, and had learned how to catch most of what I throw to him. I don’t know if Noah’s a genius, an actor, an athlete or an orator yet. But I do think that he has a lot of potential, and that we saw those potentials develop quite a bit in ’07.

On the gains chart, the biggest one was finishing the first draft of Boy At The Window at the end of last January. It gave me the year to find an agent, to clean up and revise prose (in some sections, eight times over), to conduct additional interviews and gain more insight into my family, friends and former classmates and teachers, as well as some interesting thoughts about the Donald Collins I was before ’87 and college. You could easily argue that the year from the spring of ’07 on was a loss because I haven’t found an agent willing to take on the book yet. My only counterargument is that publishing is a nutty “who-you-know” (not what you know) business. It’s one in which immediate profitability and name recognition (or name dropping) takes precedence over writing quality and excellence. The reality is, even for a (self) published author, these things take time, and I’m willing to fight as long I have to for the right agent and publisher for Boy At The Window, because my characters and my readers deserve the best that I can do.

The other gains are of lesser importance but are still worthy of mention. Quiting my job at the beginning of November has gained me a few more brain cells and slowed down the graying process. My last day as a full-time, stagnating upper-middle-manager at a large nonprofit organization in the capital of the nonprofit world ends on February 1, and I couldn’t feel any better about that than I would if I had a book contract right now.

I’m teaching at the University of Maryland this semester, effectively ending my time at Howard University. Here’s to wishing Howard well and hoping that my time at Maryland is more exciting and stimulating than my time at Howard.

The road trip me and my family took to Florida to visit my father and to take Noah to Sea World was one of the most exciting times of my life. It was exhausting, and I couldn’t believe we could drive that many miles in a Honda Element. But it was so much fun visiting folks, seeing my father sober and in great health (he’s 67 now), teaching Noah how to swim (somewhat anyway), going to Sea World, and attempting to convince my wife that there are a couple of places farther south than DC (like Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) where we can live comfortably without making at least $150,000 a year.

Now for what I’ve lost. I will never see doing good work in education reform or social justice the same after ten years overall as a nonprofit manager with three different organizations, the last two much more interested in making a profit than in staying on mission or achieving a good. I wasn’t idealistic when I left graduate school and part-time teaching for a full-time job in ’99, but I did have ideals, I did have a vision for making social justice and education reform real, even if only for a few folks. But it’s a money game for all involved. Between whimsical and conservative private philanthropy, large nonprofits with flimsy support systems for fundraising and programmatic work, and little job security except for the most senior of managers, it was obvious to me that I wasn’t cut out to be a money whore.

Still, I do know that there are other places and plenty of people doing great work on the issues I care about despite these realities. I haven’t given up my ideals. I’ve come to recognize my need to do something about my ideals is translated best as a writer and a teacher, whether in academia, at a nonprofit, or with a foundation.

Brandie Barrie Weston. Gone too soon, suffered too much, wished I’d known her better. Glad to have known her for as short a period as I did. It’s a real shame on all of us as a society when someone dies all to young, homeless, mentally and physically ill and tortured as I’ve understood her to be.

Noah’s no longer a baby or a toddler. I sometimes miss being able to treat him like a baby, if only because he’s growing up faster than I’m sometimes prepared for. But this loss is more than offset by the wonderful child that he is. I just wish he would wipe his own butt without giving me a hard time.

There’s so much to look forward to this year. Teaching a course that I know how to teach (Social History of Washington, DC). Working at home as a consultant. Finally finding an agent and publisher for Boy At The Window. Obama or Edwards becoming the next President. Noah starting kindergarten and reducing our childcare expenses by 150 percent. My wife finding a new job and/or starting graduate school. Having a career that both pays the bills and gives me enjoyment and fulfillment, all at the same time. All I know is that if most of this happens this year, next year’s blog might be more (or less) interesting than this one,