The Good, The Bad, and the Stuff You Never Needed to Know

So today my little brother (who, at 21 years old, is not actually that little, but whatever) got a plane ticket to come visit me next month. I'm excited for him to come up here. I've lived here for about a year now and my sister has visited twice and my parents have visited once, but my brother has never been here before. I think he's going to like it. Really, he's pretty easy to please. As long as our plans involve plenty of opportunities to drink beer he'll be happy, and I'm fine with any and all plans that involve drinks. He has also already informed me that we're going to a baseball game. But I don't really know what else to do with him. My brother's interests are as follows:
1) Baseball
2) Sports in general
3) Alcohol
4) Seinfeld
Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little bit and he actually has more depth to him than that, of course. But really, that's my brother in a nutshell. It probably goes without saying that beyond our shared DNA he and I don't have much in common. We bond over drinking and episodes of Flight of the Conchords and making fun of stupid people behind their backs, and that works out quite well for us and we get along great. But I really don't know how to entertain him while he's here. With my sister it's easy because we both really like history and museums and we have historical sites and museums every twenty feet around here, but I don't know what will interest my brother. He says he'll be happy with anything I decide, and I know he will be, but try putting yourself in the mind of a 21 year-old guy visiting City A for the first time and tell me what you think you'd like to see. So far I'm thinking about going to the zoo because it's free and I've never been and I love zoos and he likes animals, but what else would be fun? (Oh, and if you know City A I'll tell you that the most obvious must-see sites are definitely going to happen, but all those photo ops really only take up one day and he'll be here for three)

In other news, Penn is looking into becoming a Mason. Apparently his grandfather is one and is recommending that he do it, too. He doesn't know if he's actually going to do it yet, but the other day some guys came over to his place to talk to him about it, which I guess is the first step in the whole possibly becoming a freemason process. In my imagination freemasonry is all Da Vinci Code-style with secret hand shakes and robes and bizarre initiation rites. But really, I think Masons are probably just a bunch of retired men doing charity work and hanging out in lodges with big "No Women Allowed" signs. I asked if there are any perks to being the girlfriend of one and because he's ridiculous Penn said, "You get to have lots and lots of hot sex." I was like, "Considering the majority of them are 65 and older, I'm pretty sure that's more of a perk of being the girlfriend of YOU." Ha. Apparently they do have "ladies' night" once a year, though. I imagine it would be really easy to scandalize some blue hairs at that!

In yet other news, there's this woman who works at the camp I'm co-leading as an "inclusion specialist" for one of the campers who has autism. The thing is, I don't think this woman has any idea what she's doing. Admittedly, I don't have much training in dealing with special needs kids, I just have the basic knowledge I needed to get my teacher certification a few years ago. And yet I'm pretty sure that a so-called inclusion specialist shouldn't be doing the following things:
1) Walking around and talking to other kids while her charge is anxiously pacing the room and yelling to himself
2) Questioning decisions the other director or I have made right in front of the kids, thereby completely undermining our authority
3) Losing more things than the kids do
4) Interrupting group instruction time every two minutes or so to ask questions that are completely unimportant and have nothing at all to do with the kid she's supposed to be helping
5) Doing craft projects entirely by herself while the autistic boy sits beside her and watches her, then handing the project to the boy and saying, "Look what he made!" when he knows quite well that she made the whole thing
6) Using the camp phone to call her daughter four times a day because she "doesn't want to waste [her] cell phone minutes"
7) Etc., etc., etc.
Like I said, the other counselors and I don't know much about autism, and yet he is significantly more involved when he's working with one of us than when he's working with her. I have no problem finding projects that he can do by himself with just a little bit of supervision, when I can tell he's getting stressed I go and sit beside him and ask him some questions to distract him and get him calmer, I walk him over to other groups of kids and help him get involved as much as possible in their conversations...why are the other counselors and I better at helping him than the "specialist"? Well, today this whole long series of events took place that eventually led to the other director sitting in the office with the inclusion specialist and talking about all the problems. Well, the specialist refused to acknowledge that she wasn't doing her job properly (when, by the way, there are always at least three other adults in the room at any given time who can confirm that she's more of a hindrance than a help, AND when my supervisor has already told me that she's had complaints about this person before). And then when the specialist realized she was fighting a losing battle she suddenly said, "Is this because I'm black? Is it because of the color of my skin?" My co-director was so taken aback by this question that she just sat there for a minute before finally saying, "No. That has absolutely nothing to do with it!" But the inclusion specialist just kept going on and on, "It's because I'm black. I know that's it. It's because of the color of my face." And once someone plays the race card, that's it. Conversation over. There's absolutely nowhere productive a discussion can go once someone accuses another person of being racist. That drives me CRAZY. I hate when people do that. Yes, there are times when discrimination happens. Of course there are. It happens way too often. But I cannot stand when someone knows they're losing the battle and they pull out that trump card without any basis at all just because they know it works to effectively give them a leg up and end the conversation. It's so incredibly frustrating. And in this situation it's made all the more ridiculous because a) 50% of the campers, including the autistic camper, are also black (and another 25% are Latina or Indian, it's a really great ethnically mixed group of kids) and b) out of the seven staff members at this site, three are white and four are black. And nobody has had any problems with my co-director's "racism" prior to today and we've all been working together for two and a half weeks now. My co-director was so upset by the whole thing that she was crying and crying, and the other counselors came in and tried to convince her that they know she's not racist at all and that the "specialist" is insane, but the whole thing was just...ugh. I really hated that part of today.