I’d call this one of my more controversial posts since it touches on subjects that are way too important to some people, but since very few people will even see this I’ll just call it “potentially controversial.”
I’d define myself as a very casual sports fan. Really. You’ve heard of that mythical person living in the Northern Suburbs who doesn’t live and die by local sports teams? Yeah. Me. I follow the Vikings’ season as intently as I follow any professional sports team, which is to say that I’ll watch each game they play during a season, usually without napping for more than ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll occasionally watch the Twins play if I come across a game while flipping channels or they’re on a TV while I’m on the treadmill at the Y, but I don’t have the patience to care about one hundred sixty-two games played over a season. Basketball can be very exciting, but I’d much rather watch “Hoosiers” again than sit through the carnage of a Timberwolves game. And hockey? Yeesh. I have seen maybe five entire hockey games played at any level in my life. So really it’s not physically possible to care less about the Wild than I do, to say nothing of my theory that youth hockey is closer to being an athletic cult than a recreational program. And I haven’t even scratched the surface here about golf, tennis, lacrosse... fishing... Nascar....
A lot of people I know would call that last paragraph heresy and question my standing as an American for feeling the way I do. Don’t get me wrong -- I’m not saying any of this to be critical of sports, or sports fans. Sports can be great entertainment. Athletes working at a professional level have some truly impressive physical abilities that can be fun to see on display. A team that works together well is inspiring to watch. And for someone who’s a fan of a particular team, they can be exciting to follow. I can get caught up in post-season media saturation for just about any local team; it’s like skipping ahead to the end of reading a thriller without having to wade through all of the back story that led up to it. I always get caught up in the Olympics. And I totally get the passion that goes into someone cheering for a team that represents their school, or supporting their friends or family who are competing. And sports can be great fun to play, as long as there isn’t anyone involved who becomes obnoxiously over-competitive and you don’t wind up with some injury that requires three weeks in a knee brace simply because you fall in the wrong direction.
Let’s face it -- professional sports should not be life or death for anyone except the people who depend on them to make a living and hopefully don’t end their careers with debilitating injuries. I don’t have the same brain chemistry as people who think it’s a good idea to paint their entire upper body to psyche themselves up for a game they’ll only be passively watching at Buffalo Wild Wings. Whenever groups of people start getting into prolonged discussions about the sports topics of the moment, I’ll stand there and nod like I care and quietly wait for the conversation to shift away from what would be the lowest common denominator of conversation if the weather didn’t constantly change. And if you’re one of these people who gets upset over the hundreds or thousands of dollars you risk in playing fantasy football? Chances are you knew it wasn’t one of the more sound investments choices out there. So deal with it, chump. Lot of people out there do it for free, just for the thrill of being able to claim dominance over their circle of high school buddies.
In the end, professional sports are nothing but another form of entertainment, just like movies, books, music, or theater. And following that idea, professional sports teams are, above everything else, business organizations. One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld jokes is about how hard it is to justify the loyalty people show professional sports teams, since in the end “you’re actually rooting for the clothes.” Few organizations illustrate this better than the Minnesota Vikings. Some examples:
Brett Favre: Here you have a guy who Vikings fans hated to their very core of their collective self, but then was treated like a messiah when came to play on the other side of the St. Croix. (I know I’m overlooking his stint with the Jets; he’d probably like to overlook it as well.) There were people following him from the airport, lining the streets and waving, ready to throw palm fronds at his feet as he made his way to Winter Park. Local TV interrupted programming to show him getting a ride from the airport. He sure seemed to enjoy being the prettiest princess at the ball for that first season, but things changed drastically when he eventually returned. He needed team members to deliver him both candy and flowers before he decided to play again, and then as the season unfolded and he was revealed to be an actual fallible human being, the fan support evaporated. My take? He never should have played here. Granted, it was exciting to watch him play in that first season, but even while I was enjoying that I felt all he was doing was damaging any idea of legacy he may have hoped to have.
Donavan McNabb: The new quarterback, a veteran player brought in to mentor the draft pick. I have nothing for or against him at this point. But this guy is indicative of how there are about thirty or so big-name NFL players who rotate through so many teams during a career it’s hard to associate them with any team other than the one currently paying them. News broke yesterday that Payton Manning was paid an unholy amount of money to stay with Indianapolis. I actually get that. He’s become so identified with the team it would be a huge blow to lose him. Joe Mauer was in the same situation with the Twins not long ago. No human on Earth does a job so well they should make that much money for it, but in the ridiculously inflated marketplace of professional sports, signing a local hero to a career contract like that makes sense to keep the fans buying their tickets, jerseys, caps, hot dogs, bobbleheads....
Sidney Rice: This guy had a great season a couple years back, then the too predictable injuries came along. This year he went somewhere else when they offered him a more appealing professional situation than he thought he’d have here. Can’t blame the guy, and he seemed like a nice guy from the little I saw during interviews so I wish him well. But there are Vikings fans who see this as an outright betrayal. My head spins.
Randy Moss: Gifted athlete? Without question. He could not be more self-involved or attention-loving if he was Bret Michaels. He comes back to the Vikings for, what was it? One game last year? If the people of Minnesota had been as fired up and opinionated about the state budget as they had been about Randy Moss returning to the Vikings, a government shutdown never would have been allowed to happen. Such are the priorities that fuel our society.
Greg Camarillo: I hadn’t heard of him before he was traded to the Vikings. He doesn’t seem to be a big showboating superstar, but a pretty reliable, get-the-job-done kind of guy. I like him as a player for these reasons, much the same way I was a fan of Chester Taylor before he was traded away. But will I follow Camarillo’s career if he gets sent to another team, which is always possible because he’s not one of the superstars?
No. Because he’ll be wearing different clothes.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Seven for the Price of One
ONE YEAR LATER
When Tommy Shaw wrote "Too Much Time on My Hands," he was thinking about what my adult life would be like in the summer. Example: Today I decided to reinvent my iPhone. I'm about a year into the contract with a year to go, so it seemed like a good time to make a few changes and pretend I have a new phone. I bought a new case for it, I replaced my scratched up face cover with a shiny new one, I cleared out the apps I never use then reorganized the ones I kept and even downloaded a handful of new ones just for kicks. Then finished the process with updating the music and the photos I keep on the phone. Now it's all kind of vaguely unfamiliar. So, no real changes, but it did keep me busy for an afternoon.
THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF SONG TITLES EVER
I haven't done a music post for some time, but this was worth commenting on. I downloaded a new album by the band Fair to Midland last week. Pretty heavy and noisy stuff so it's perfect for the Y, but also melodic and complicated and literary enough to show a certain amount of intelligence goes into this music. However, my favorite thing about the album has to be the song titles. From what I can tell, there isn't a single title that has anything to do with its song -- they're all just crazily arbitrary, hilariously head-scratching names. Some examples, and I promise I'm not making these up:
Whiskey and Ritalin
Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow
Typhoid Mary Sends Her Best
Short-Haired Tornado
Three Foolproof Ways to Buy the Farm
YES, THAT WAS REAL
For any of my Facebook friends reading this who play Bejeweled Blitz? Yeah. You saw that right. My score last week was 992,500 points. Just sayin'.
WHEATLEY ENTERPRISES
Call me a nerd if you must, but I do dust off the XBox in the summertime, and I just finished one of the most original games I've played in a long time: "Portal 2." It's hard to describe briefly, but I can say that it comes down to a series of physics and logic puzzles with deceptively simple solutions that can be unimaginably frustrating. The storyline is somewhat involved and filled with some pretty dark humor. There was one bit of dialogue that had me laughing so hard at its audacity that I lost track of what was going on in the game for a moment. It might not translate so well out of context, so I'll give you a little background: This was a pre-recorded message that was played over an intercom system in an abandoned laboratory that had once used human test subjects:
"Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of Canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator, and it makes a happy face."
THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Long time blog readers -- both of you -- know that my ultimate summer guilty pleasure is watching the televised human carnage that is "Big Brother" on CBS. I seriously believe that watching this show and seeing how these voluntarily lab rats treat each other over the course of two televised months gives me great insight into how the minds of 10 and 11-year-olds work. At least on Wipeout the contestants get to wear helmets, and their indignity ends after one episode.
EPISODE 5?
I'm starting to think that writing a book about my almost twenty years of teaching would be next to impossible. The thing is? Any story I could tell that would be really, really interesting (and there have been several I haven't explored here through the episodes that have come up so far) would wind up making some people very angry. The interactions between the students, the parents, and the school staff are where stories would come from because that's what goes on in a school. And the real storytelling gems would still be really obvious to the people involved, even if I changed up the names and tweaked the details. So honestly, I'm rethinking that whole project right now. Maybe if or when I decide to use my school experiences to write something, it will have to wind up being fiction. Because frankly, some of the things I could write about wouldn't be accepted as truth anyway.
PURE HATE
I don't like running. When I treadmill at the Y, I'll walk. Gets the job done. But now that the 2011 Lazyman Triathalon is over and I've earned the free t-shirt that came with my entry fee, it might be months until I even consider using the bikes there to warm up. Seriously? One hundred twelve miles? Who does that because it's fun?
When Tommy Shaw wrote "Too Much Time on My Hands," he was thinking about what my adult life would be like in the summer. Example: Today I decided to reinvent my iPhone. I'm about a year into the contract with a year to go, so it seemed like a good time to make a few changes and pretend I have a new phone. I bought a new case for it, I replaced my scratched up face cover with a shiny new one, I cleared out the apps I never use then reorganized the ones I kept and even downloaded a handful of new ones just for kicks. Then finished the process with updating the music and the photos I keep on the phone. Now it's all kind of vaguely unfamiliar. So, no real changes, but it did keep me busy for an afternoon.
THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF SONG TITLES EVER
I haven't done a music post for some time, but this was worth commenting on. I downloaded a new album by the band Fair to Midland last week. Pretty heavy and noisy stuff so it's perfect for the Y, but also melodic and complicated and literary enough to show a certain amount of intelligence goes into this music. However, my favorite thing about the album has to be the song titles. From what I can tell, there isn't a single title that has anything to do with its song -- they're all just crazily arbitrary, hilariously head-scratching names. Some examples, and I promise I'm not making these up:
Whiskey and Ritalin
Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow
Typhoid Mary Sends Her Best
Short-Haired Tornado
Three Foolproof Ways to Buy the Farm
YES, THAT WAS REAL
For any of my Facebook friends reading this who play Bejeweled Blitz? Yeah. You saw that right. My score last week was 992,500 points. Just sayin'.
WHEATLEY ENTERPRISES
Call me a nerd if you must, but I do dust off the XBox in the summertime, and I just finished one of the most original games I've played in a long time: "Portal 2." It's hard to describe briefly, but I can say that it comes down to a series of physics and logic puzzles with deceptively simple solutions that can be unimaginably frustrating. The storyline is somewhat involved and filled with some pretty dark humor. There was one bit of dialogue that had me laughing so hard at its audacity that I lost track of what was going on in the game for a moment. It might not translate so well out of context, so I'll give you a little background: This was a pre-recorded message that was played over an intercom system in an abandoned laboratory that had once used human test subjects:
"Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of Canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator, and it makes a happy face."
THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Long time blog readers -- both of you -- know that my ultimate summer guilty pleasure is watching the televised human carnage that is "Big Brother" on CBS. I seriously believe that watching this show and seeing how these voluntarily lab rats treat each other over the course of two televised months gives me great insight into how the minds of 10 and 11-year-olds work. At least on Wipeout the contestants get to wear helmets, and their indignity ends after one episode.
EPISODE 5?
I'm starting to think that writing a book about my almost twenty years of teaching would be next to impossible. The thing is? Any story I could tell that would be really, really interesting (and there have been several I haven't explored here through the episodes that have come up so far) would wind up making some people very angry. The interactions between the students, the parents, and the school staff are where stories would come from because that's what goes on in a school. And the real storytelling gems would still be really obvious to the people involved, even if I changed up the names and tweaked the details. So honestly, I'm rethinking that whole project right now. Maybe if or when I decide to use my school experiences to write something, it will have to wind up being fiction. Because frankly, some of the things I could write about wouldn't be accepted as truth anyway.
PURE HATE
I don't like running. When I treadmill at the Y, I'll walk. Gets the job done. But now that the 2011 Lazyman Triathalon is over and I've earned the free t-shirt that came with my entry fee, it might be months until I even consider using the bikes there to warm up. Seriously? One hundred twelve miles? Who does that because it's fun?
Friday, July 22, 2011
Episode 4: Paying Back Karma
It’s fair to say that a lot of events from my own school days have played a part in the development of my teaching style. For example, I was kind of famous in junior high and high school, and in college, and at church, and occasional days of staff development if I’m being forthcoming here, for falling asleep when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Now, I really don’t consciously try to do this. But I have the attention span of a gnat, so there you go. But now? If I have a kid nodding off in class? I don’t feel like I’m in any position to be critical. I totally get where that kid is coming from. Most of the time I’ll just let it go, figuring if the kid is going to fall asleep in school she or he probably needs to get in a little catch-up nap, and crashing for ten or fifteen minutes isn’t going to keep them from passing fifth grade. Been there myself, often.
But sometimes I can’t resist a little prank to wake them up, depending on who’s taking the nap and how well they can take a joke. Because after all, as anyone who has spent significant time watching me teach will attest to, I’m pretty much a goofball in the classroom. Which started very early in life.
When I was in 6th grade my reading group performed the play “St. George and the Dragon” in the school gym for the other classes, with a script that was only ten or twelve pages worth of illustrated text right out of our reading books; I suppose since we were the high reading group our teacher, Ms. Fischer, was looking for a way to challenge us with the truly minimal resources available in a tiny parochial school. The dragon’s speaking parts had been divided up into four roles: The head, the tail, the left paw and the right. The kids playing the dragon were covered with by a sheet during the performances, and would wave around a cardboard cutout of their assigned body part whenever they read their lines. I played the role of the dragon’s left paw.
Being stuck under the sheet with three other kids was pretty boring compared to the other kids, who dressed up as villagers and knights and such. And I’ll admit it, I was the kind of kid who wasn’t always shy about making my own fun when the chance presented itself. The conflict in the script involved the dragon taking over a village to eat all of the sheep, but when we found a stuffed pig buried in all of the random junk stored on the school stage we begged Ms. Fischer to let us change the script from sheep to pigs. She agreed to the edit before going back to the classroom to work with the other two reading groups. It’s important to remember she wasn’t actually there during the performances....
The narrator got to the part about the pigs being eaten and someone slid that stuffed pig across the floor to the dragon, then the left paw (me) grabbed it, pulled it under the sheet, and all the little kids would laugh. Our own joke! It worked like a charm! Problem was, I was now in possession of the pig for the rest of the show, and I lived with a dangerous combination of a non-existent attention span and a desperate need to make people laugh, so I don’t know why it surprised anyone when the pig started peeking out from underneath the sheet and waving to the audience. Every kid out there laughed big, and started watching for the pig’s next appearance at the expense of the rest of the play. I thought this was hilarious. The others in the reading group did not.
When Ms. Fischer returned to the gym between shows to check on things, it was obvious she had been tipped off about my improvising. Everybody tried to be the first one to tell on me. But she cut them all off and just made a generic point about how everyone needed to work together and do what they were supposed to for the play to work. Granted, she said this in a very stern voice and stared right through my soul as she said it, but that’s as far as my well-deserved discipline ever went. (On a side note, it was many years later when Ms. Fischer’s nephew actually turned up as a student in one of my classes. Thankfully he was much easier to deal with than I had been.)
Since I was let off the hook in such a big way, I now feel obligated as the teacher to pay off that debt sometimes when one of my students gets a little out of control. For example, we’ve got the little girl who really wanted to get called on but didn’t, and expressed her disappointment with a word I won’t use here. Everything in the room came to a holy grinding halt, and when I slowly turned around to make sure I heard her correctly I saw her eyes were already filled with tears. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and went right back to the lesson. I did talk about it later with the principal, who laughed harder than I’d ever seen before. I think the girl wound up getting one of the worthless token disciplinary slips we used, but I never gave her the verbal throw-down she was expecting and fearing.
And then there was the kid years later, a quick enough thinker to come up with a well-timed “That’s what she said” in gym class, even if it wasn’t appreciated by the phy. ed. teacher and got him sent to the principal. This was a decent kid who lived in dire fear of what would happen to him if he ever crossed a line so he wasn’t a trouble maker by any stretch, and he surely didn’t expect a trip to the office for a stupid offhand remark that was probably louder than he intended. He’d already gotten an earful from the phy. ed. teacher and the principal, so when he got back to me and I brought him in the hallway to talk, he was crying violently and fearing for his life. (Apparently I’m a pretty intimidating figure -- I don’t see it.) He was so surprised when I told him I wasn’t angry, he nearly stopped breathing.
“You’re not?” he asked with open confusion. “How come?”
I shrugged. “You made a mistake,” I said. “You weren’t trying to be disrespectful. You were going for the joke. You just didn’t put a lot of thought into the whole right time/right place thing. Which obviously it was not.”
He went back into the classroom, still amazed to have dodged the metaphorical bullet, and thanked me as he walked through the door.
I think he should have been thanking Ms. Fischer.
But sometimes I can’t resist a little prank to wake them up, depending on who’s taking the nap and how well they can take a joke. Because after all, as anyone who has spent significant time watching me teach will attest to, I’m pretty much a goofball in the classroom. Which started very early in life.
When I was in 6th grade my reading group performed the play “St. George and the Dragon” in the school gym for the other classes, with a script that was only ten or twelve pages worth of illustrated text right out of our reading books; I suppose since we were the high reading group our teacher, Ms. Fischer, was looking for a way to challenge us with the truly minimal resources available in a tiny parochial school. The dragon’s speaking parts had been divided up into four roles: The head, the tail, the left paw and the right. The kids playing the dragon were covered with by a sheet during the performances, and would wave around a cardboard cutout of their assigned body part whenever they read their lines. I played the role of the dragon’s left paw.
Being stuck under the sheet with three other kids was pretty boring compared to the other kids, who dressed up as villagers and knights and such. And I’ll admit it, I was the kind of kid who wasn’t always shy about making my own fun when the chance presented itself. The conflict in the script involved the dragon taking over a village to eat all of the sheep, but when we found a stuffed pig buried in all of the random junk stored on the school stage we begged Ms. Fischer to let us change the script from sheep to pigs. She agreed to the edit before going back to the classroom to work with the other two reading groups. It’s important to remember she wasn’t actually there during the performances....
The narrator got to the part about the pigs being eaten and someone slid that stuffed pig across the floor to the dragon, then the left paw (me) grabbed it, pulled it under the sheet, and all the little kids would laugh. Our own joke! It worked like a charm! Problem was, I was now in possession of the pig for the rest of the show, and I lived with a dangerous combination of a non-existent attention span and a desperate need to make people laugh, so I don’t know why it surprised anyone when the pig started peeking out from underneath the sheet and waving to the audience. Every kid out there laughed big, and started watching for the pig’s next appearance at the expense of the rest of the play. I thought this was hilarious. The others in the reading group did not.
When Ms. Fischer returned to the gym between shows to check on things, it was obvious she had been tipped off about my improvising. Everybody tried to be the first one to tell on me. But she cut them all off and just made a generic point about how everyone needed to work together and do what they were supposed to for the play to work. Granted, she said this in a very stern voice and stared right through my soul as she said it, but that’s as far as my well-deserved discipline ever went. (On a side note, it was many years later when Ms. Fischer’s nephew actually turned up as a student in one of my classes. Thankfully he was much easier to deal with than I had been.)
Since I was let off the hook in such a big way, I now feel obligated as the teacher to pay off that debt sometimes when one of my students gets a little out of control. For example, we’ve got the little girl who really wanted to get called on but didn’t, and expressed her disappointment with a word I won’t use here. Everything in the room came to a holy grinding halt, and when I slowly turned around to make sure I heard her correctly I saw her eyes were already filled with tears. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and went right back to the lesson. I did talk about it later with the principal, who laughed harder than I’d ever seen before. I think the girl wound up getting one of the worthless token disciplinary slips we used, but I never gave her the verbal throw-down she was expecting and fearing.
And then there was the kid years later, a quick enough thinker to come up with a well-timed “That’s what she said” in gym class, even if it wasn’t appreciated by the phy. ed. teacher and got him sent to the principal. This was a decent kid who lived in dire fear of what would happen to him if he ever crossed a line so he wasn’t a trouble maker by any stretch, and he surely didn’t expect a trip to the office for a stupid offhand remark that was probably louder than he intended. He’d already gotten an earful from the phy. ed. teacher and the principal, so when he got back to me and I brought him in the hallway to talk, he was crying violently and fearing for his life. (Apparently I’m a pretty intimidating figure -- I don’t see it.) He was so surprised when I told him I wasn’t angry, he nearly stopped breathing.
“You’re not?” he asked with open confusion. “How come?”
I shrugged. “You made a mistake,” I said. “You weren’t trying to be disrespectful. You were going for the joke. You just didn’t put a lot of thought into the whole right time/right place thing. Which obviously it was not.”
He went back into the classroom, still amazed to have dodged the metaphorical bullet, and thanked me as he walked through the door.
I think he should have been thanking Ms. Fischer.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Turn the Page
For someone like me who reads constantly and lives with the quiet hope that someday I'll be able to write something that could see the light of day in the publishing world, it's been a rough week. If you haven't heard, Borders is closing. Not just the local one, but all of them.
The local one of course hits me the hardest. This is the store where I waited in line for the last three Harry Potter books; where I have probably done 50% of my Christmas shopping in the past eight or nine years; where I have discovered so many different books and authors just from having the chance to browse the shelves at my leisure. This was the store that provided me with my favorite gift cards.
Let's face it: This is happening for two big reasons that are kind of related. First of all, the economy isn't great, and for too many people buying books when you have the public library available isn't going to be a priority. And pair that up with the rise of the eReaders in the past few years and, I hate to say it, but it really seems like this is one more step in print books losing their cultural relevance, much like CDs and DVDs have in the past five years. I don't think actual print books will ever disappear -- there's just too much power in the tangible feel of a book in your hands, and anyone who doesn't get that... I can't help you.
I'm not saying that eReaders are worthless. I downloaded a Nick Hornby book onto my iPhone last summer just because I wanted to use the feature, and even though I had to turn a page every 14 seconds, the story (or at least one of the two stories) was compelling enough to keep me involved. What matters in the end is the content of what you read anyway. And there is an argument to be made that a huge traditional bookstore like Borders going under could possibly open up the publishing industry; after all, a digital download is a LOT less expensive to produce.
I ordered quite a few books from Amazon back before Borders opened up in my neighborhood. It looks like I might be returning to that option, if not possibly taking the step into an eReader sometime soon. But for now, I still have a month or two of liquidation to look forward to.
And I'm stocking up.
The local one of course hits me the hardest. This is the store where I waited in line for the last three Harry Potter books; where I have probably done 50% of my Christmas shopping in the past eight or nine years; where I have discovered so many different books and authors just from having the chance to browse the shelves at my leisure. This was the store that provided me with my favorite gift cards.
Let's face it: This is happening for two big reasons that are kind of related. First of all, the economy isn't great, and for too many people buying books when you have the public library available isn't going to be a priority. And pair that up with the rise of the eReaders in the past few years and, I hate to say it, but it really seems like this is one more step in print books losing their cultural relevance, much like CDs and DVDs have in the past five years. I don't think actual print books will ever disappear -- there's just too much power in the tangible feel of a book in your hands, and anyone who doesn't get that... I can't help you.
I'm not saying that eReaders are worthless. I downloaded a Nick Hornby book onto my iPhone last summer just because I wanted to use the feature, and even though I had to turn a page every 14 seconds, the story (or at least one of the two stories) was compelling enough to keep me involved. What matters in the end is the content of what you read anyway. And there is an argument to be made that a huge traditional bookstore like Borders going under could possibly open up the publishing industry; after all, a digital download is a LOT less expensive to produce.
I ordered quite a few books from Amazon back before Borders opened up in my neighborhood. It looks like I might be returning to that option, if not possibly taking the step into an eReader sometime soon. But for now, I still have a month or two of liquidation to look forward to.
And I'm stocking up.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Evolution of a Potter Nerd
I got on board with the whole Harry Potter thing a little late in the game. Even though I live my life surrounded by kids for most of the year, the Potter books had escaped my radar in their earlier days. I first knew of it as a phenomenon on a dark and stormy July night, watching some national news magazine reporting on all of the kids waiting in line to buy "Goblet of Fire" at midnight. I figured it was something I should know more about, and had myself caught up with the first four books in a matter of weeks. It was a convenient excuse to say I was following it all so closely because I was an elementary teacher, and felt like I should stay on top of whatever my students were interested in at the time. Admittedly this was a pretty thin excuse -- after all, I've never seen an episode of Hannah Montana, I didn't buy any *NSYNC albums, and to this day I still have no idea how to play Pokémon. So my need to stay in touch with what my students like has its limits.
Once I was caught up in the whole Hogwarts-world mythology, I wound up reading and re-reading each book several times. It became an escape for me while my sister was sick. Reading Harry Potter on the love seat up in my loft with my dog beside me, the house darkened except for a reading lamp, with the John Williams scores from the movie series shuffling through an iTunes playlist providing the background music for my reading was a valuable coping tool during that time. I became very caught up in the mythology, even buying a couple of fan-exploiting speculation books where people had analyzed the books for clues that might provide hints about what still could be coming up in the overall story. Which was perfect reading for someone who overthinks 250 different things on any given day.
My first hardcover copy of "Prisoner of Azkaban" was stolen from my classroom. It was kind of a bummer since it was hardcover, but part of being a teacher is just accepting that at some point books are going to disappear from your personal library. And since Azkaban is my least favorite of the series, it wasn't really the end of the world. It was curious when, months later, a kid gave me a brand new copy of it, just out of the goodness of his heart, since he was so marked by the injustice of my book being stolen. I'm still slightly suspicious about this...
The year "Order of the Phoenix" was scheduled to come out saw the excitement build to a fever pitch at school. I read "Goblet of Fire" to my class that spring -- and it took the whole spring to finish, with several days when read aloud time stretched well beyond the allotted twenty minutes. We even had a poster from the first movie hanging in the classroom that year, and I let the students, led by one particularly psychopathic Harry Potter nerd, keep a countdown to the release date for "Order of the Phoenix" on the whiteboard. Using "Goblet" as a read aloud was kind of a precarious thing to do since this was back in the time when there was a little bubble of controversy around the whole witchcraft element of the stories, but I only heard anything about it from one parent. I got an e-mail from a mom later that summer, saying that my reading Harry Potter to the class had been what had broken through her son's lifelong resistance to reading independently, and that he'd read all of the other books as soon as school had gotten out, and then moved on to other books as well. A pretty gratifying moment.
I was so pumped to get "Phoenix" that I used taking Nephew #1 to the midnight release at Borders as an excuse to wait in line. And wait we did... we probably weren't out of there until at least 1:00, which was much later than Nephew #1 wanted to be there. Although he did read himself to sleep as soon as we were home. We planned ahead better for the midnight release of "Half-Blood Prince," and staked out a place in line as soon as we were allowed in for the Borders festivities. Luckily we hooked up with a group of people all loosely associated with school (including the little girl who would go on to nominate me for my teaching award a couple of years afterward) so the waiting was a lot less boring. Nephew #1 and Award Girl had quite the time laughing over the books in the section where we waited, which were all foreign language translations of current bestsellers. And since this was toward the front of the store, we were out of there in a beautiful eight minutes.
Years later Nephew #1 and I finished off our midnight appointments waiting for "Deathly Hallows." We walked around a bit and snarked to each other about all of the people there in costumes and face paint, then got in line before it became unreasonably long. That year I knew I'd wind up seeing people from school, so I defiantly wore my Pearls Before Swine "People Are Idiots, and I Hate Them" t-shirt, just to see how many raised eyebrows I'd get. There were certainly a few. There would have been even more if those parents had realized how many times I'd worn that same t-shirt underneath a respectable-looking sweater during parent-teacher conferences....
By the time "Deathly Hallows" came out, some of the thrill had burned away for me -- I just didn't need the escape like I had before. By then it was more about having everything resolved and finding out how it ended than about getting all kinds of questions answered. Once I had finished the books and knew how it all worked out, the movies lost a lot of magic since there wasn't anything to speculate over anymore. I've always loved the movies, even the ones that some people don't think worked as well. I was really taken with the first two because the casting and the settings had, for the most part, closely matched how I had envisioned so much of the story... although, I personally don't feel that Michael Gambon's Dumbledore ever came close to Richard Harris's, and I think there was a huge lost opportunity when Tim Roth turned down the part of Snape in favor of that stupid "Planet of the Apes" remake that came out about the same time. Seriously -- go look up a picture of Tim Roth, and try telling me he wouldn't have been an awesome Snape. I'm just saying.
Tomorrow it all comes to a definitive end with the release of the last movie, "Deathly Hallows Part 2." Everything I've read about that movie makes it sound like it should be a great conclusion to the whole thing, and I'm very excited to see it, both to enjoy the movie itself and to just put the last bit of closure on what has been a great story to follow. But is it Midnight Showing Worthy?
I think I'd rather wait for a quieter early afternoon matinee tomorrow, when the theater won't be overtaken by fandom enthusiasm, and I can enjoy it all in the same personal way I have throughout the series. I've waited for the end for this long. Pretty sure I can make it a few more hours.
Once I was caught up in the whole Hogwarts-world mythology, I wound up reading and re-reading each book several times. It became an escape for me while my sister was sick. Reading Harry Potter on the love seat up in my loft with my dog beside me, the house darkened except for a reading lamp, with the John Williams scores from the movie series shuffling through an iTunes playlist providing the background music for my reading was a valuable coping tool during that time. I became very caught up in the mythology, even buying a couple of fan-exploiting speculation books where people had analyzed the books for clues that might provide hints about what still could be coming up in the overall story. Which was perfect reading for someone who overthinks 250 different things on any given day.
My first hardcover copy of "Prisoner of Azkaban" was stolen from my classroom. It was kind of a bummer since it was hardcover, but part of being a teacher is just accepting that at some point books are going to disappear from your personal library. And since Azkaban is my least favorite of the series, it wasn't really the end of the world. It was curious when, months later, a kid gave me a brand new copy of it, just out of the goodness of his heart, since he was so marked by the injustice of my book being stolen. I'm still slightly suspicious about this...
The year "Order of the Phoenix" was scheduled to come out saw the excitement build to a fever pitch at school. I read "Goblet of Fire" to my class that spring -- and it took the whole spring to finish, with several days when read aloud time stretched well beyond the allotted twenty minutes. We even had a poster from the first movie hanging in the classroom that year, and I let the students, led by one particularly psychopathic Harry Potter nerd, keep a countdown to the release date for "Order of the Phoenix" on the whiteboard. Using "Goblet" as a read aloud was kind of a precarious thing to do since this was back in the time when there was a little bubble of controversy around the whole witchcraft element of the stories, but I only heard anything about it from one parent. I got an e-mail from a mom later that summer, saying that my reading Harry Potter to the class had been what had broken through her son's lifelong resistance to reading independently, and that he'd read all of the other books as soon as school had gotten out, and then moved on to other books as well. A pretty gratifying moment.
I was so pumped to get "Phoenix" that I used taking Nephew #1 to the midnight release at Borders as an excuse to wait in line. And wait we did... we probably weren't out of there until at least 1:00, which was much later than Nephew #1 wanted to be there. Although he did read himself to sleep as soon as we were home. We planned ahead better for the midnight release of "Half-Blood Prince," and staked out a place in line as soon as we were allowed in for the Borders festivities. Luckily we hooked up with a group of people all loosely associated with school (including the little girl who would go on to nominate me for my teaching award a couple of years afterward) so the waiting was a lot less boring. Nephew #1 and Award Girl had quite the time laughing over the books in the section where we waited, which were all foreign language translations of current bestsellers. And since this was toward the front of the store, we were out of there in a beautiful eight minutes.
Years later Nephew #1 and I finished off our midnight appointments waiting for "Deathly Hallows." We walked around a bit and snarked to each other about all of the people there in costumes and face paint, then got in line before it became unreasonably long. That year I knew I'd wind up seeing people from school, so I defiantly wore my Pearls Before Swine "People Are Idiots, and I Hate Them" t-shirt, just to see how many raised eyebrows I'd get. There were certainly a few. There would have been even more if those parents had realized how many times I'd worn that same t-shirt underneath a respectable-looking sweater during parent-teacher conferences....
By the time "Deathly Hallows" came out, some of the thrill had burned away for me -- I just didn't need the escape like I had before. By then it was more about having everything resolved and finding out how it ended than about getting all kinds of questions answered. Once I had finished the books and knew how it all worked out, the movies lost a lot of magic since there wasn't anything to speculate over anymore. I've always loved the movies, even the ones that some people don't think worked as well. I was really taken with the first two because the casting and the settings had, for the most part, closely matched how I had envisioned so much of the story... although, I personally don't feel that Michael Gambon's Dumbledore ever came close to Richard Harris's, and I think there was a huge lost opportunity when Tim Roth turned down the part of Snape in favor of that stupid "Planet of the Apes" remake that came out about the same time. Seriously -- go look up a picture of Tim Roth, and try telling me he wouldn't have been an awesome Snape. I'm just saying.
Tomorrow it all comes to a definitive end with the release of the last movie, "Deathly Hallows Part 2." Everything I've read about that movie makes it sound like it should be a great conclusion to the whole thing, and I'm very excited to see it, both to enjoy the movie itself and to just put the last bit of closure on what has been a great story to follow. But is it Midnight Showing Worthy?
I think I'd rather wait for a quieter early afternoon matinee tomorrow, when the theater won't be overtaken by fandom enthusiasm, and I can enjoy it all in the same personal way I have throughout the series. I've waited for the end for this long. Pretty sure I can make it a few more hours.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Truth Behind the Bunny Suit
Class party days obviously aren't as educational as other days at school. Even if the parties only last an hour or so, the kids spend much more of the day thinking about the upcoming party than focusing on any learning that should take place.
Believe it or not, class parties have become fairly political in the past few years, with Halloween being the biggest potential firestorm on the list. For some people Halloween is just a chance for kids to wear costumes and make-up and wigs and funny hats and so on, dressing in whatever ways will get the biggest laughs or draw the most attention. But for other people it’s a precarious day when the kids are in danger of being exposed to any and all varieties of terror and violence through frightening masks and fake blood and phosphorescent goo, all of which will undoubtably instigate weeks of nightmares. The kids themselves, for the most part, just want to have a fun time and enjoy a day at school with their friends when they’re allowed to do something out of the ordinary, like play games or dress up have treats. In many cases this has led to some schools or grade levels or individual classes tweaking their party themes and renaming them “Harvest Festivals.” Which is decent work-around I guess, and the kids don’t care much as long as they get to have their special day. And celebrating the harvest is appropriate enough, because it is October after all, and apparently we live in the 1700s.
At my school, the Halloween / Harvest breakdown happens by grade level. My grade has always come down on the Halloween side of things and probably will until we’re told not to. I honestly don’t care one way or the other, outside of one small detail: If we were to hold a harvest festival instead of a Halloween party, I would look terribly out of place dressed like a big white bunny.
Several years ago my younger sister Erin was dying, stricken with the astonishingly rare variety of lung cancer that occurs in non-smokers. After fighting through some aggressive treatments, she was given a terminal diagnosis in the late summer. She was the activities director at an assisted living complex and worked as long as she could but reached a point when she had to stop, which hadn’t been an easy concession for her to make. It also meant that she wasn’t going to be wearing her bunny suit to work on Halloween that year. Our older sister had made the suit for her years before. It was white, fuzzy, and inescapable, the kind of attention-getting costume that was self-deprecating and in your face all at the same time.
Erin had begun downsizing her belongings that fall, and as Halloween approached I thought back to the bunny suit. I had never willingly worn costumes to school before and became theatrically grouchy about such ideas whenever they were brought up. Wearing the bunny suit to school would catch people so completely off guard it was worth considering. I e-mailed Erin to ask her what had happened to it. She thought it had wound up in our parents’ garage, and pieced together what I was thinking. “That would rock,” she replied. “Your kids would love it.”
I wasn’t sold on the idea and knew I’d be setting myself up for some pretty serious embarrassment, but decided to go for it when I thought of Erin, stuck at home that year with no energy to do anything, no costume to wear and nowhere to wear it. And if the thought of my wearing the bunny suit would bring a couple smiles to her face while she spent her day fighting back her fear and depression, it was worth doing. “I love it,” she wrote when I finally made up my mind. “Please have someone take a photo.” Knowing what the reaction would be, I assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.
I was at school early on the morning of the party day to make sure I could smuggle the suit in unseen. I called one of my friends to come to my room and help with the make-up since I didn’t have a mirror. Her reaction was a good preview of the abuse that would be piled on me throughout the day, but we couldn’t get the make up kit to work at all. We eventually dismissed it the cheap piece of grocery store junk that it was and dug some washable markers out of a student desk instead. They did the job nicely.
Most people on the staff laughed like I had never seen them laugh before. A few managed to keep straight faces and play along, but the effect worked exactly like I thought it would. Eventually the make up issue was resolved by an expert. One of my students was dressed as a zombie cheerleader, and even though she wasn’t wearing her make-up during our class party, she has practiced extensively with the kit that came with her costume. "You have to get your face wet first, and then it works," she said. And it did. So she redid my face for me, and I finally looked like a bunny for the last two hours of the day. Several pictures were taken, and I was able to e-mail them to Erin that evening. Knowing how much she enjoyed them made it worth the embarrassment.
The following Halloween came around only weeks after she had died. I was destroyed, angry and depressed in the aftermath, and was doing little more than sleepwalking through my life with no sense of bearing or purpose. But I still decided to wear the bunny suit again as a tribute, even if it was something that only a few people would know the reason behind why I was wearing it. Because frankly, the thing is a pain in the butt to wear. It’s unimaginably hot. The ears flop down in front of my face and block my vision, the head is constantly twisting sideways on its own to try and cover my left eye, and the little bunny mittens make it next to impossible to pick up anything and write while staying in costume, to say nothing of the discomfort that comes from walking around without shoes all day because bunnies don’t wear shoes and it looks even more stupid to do so. And since they only way in and out of this thing is a velcro strip down the back, simple things like using the bathroom or putting keys in a pocket become pretty impractical.
I still wear it, all the years later, and still as a tribute even though most people only think its just a costume. It’s become something of a tradition at school: Little kids jump and wave when they pass me in the hall that day, and for the rest of the year will point at me and shout “YOU’RE THE BUNNY!” like I’d forgotten about it. If there ever was a year I decided not to wear it, the grief I’d collect from much of the staff, and especially the students, would be worse than just enduring the thing for another year. But as much as I gripe I have to admit the suit has become a distinctive hallmark, and if / when the day comes when our Halloween celebration becomes more harvest-oriented, I’ll miss not having to drag it out.
And even though I’ve probably now worn it more times than Erin ever did, I still think of it as hers. In fact just a couple of years ago I’d gotten an e-mail from someone at a different school asking about it. They were having some kind of reading night or whatever and had heard through a connection to my school that I had a bunny suit which would fit perfectly with their event, and wondered if they’d be able to borrow it.
My reply: “No, I’m sorry. It’s not my suit. I only borrow it.”
Believe it or not, class parties have become fairly political in the past few years, with Halloween being the biggest potential firestorm on the list. For some people Halloween is just a chance for kids to wear costumes and make-up and wigs and funny hats and so on, dressing in whatever ways will get the biggest laughs or draw the most attention. But for other people it’s a precarious day when the kids are in danger of being exposed to any and all varieties of terror and violence through frightening masks and fake blood and phosphorescent goo, all of which will undoubtably instigate weeks of nightmares. The kids themselves, for the most part, just want to have a fun time and enjoy a day at school with their friends when they’re allowed to do something out of the ordinary, like play games or dress up have treats. In many cases this has led to some schools or grade levels or individual classes tweaking their party themes and renaming them “Harvest Festivals.” Which is decent work-around I guess, and the kids don’t care much as long as they get to have their special day. And celebrating the harvest is appropriate enough, because it is October after all, and apparently we live in the 1700s.
At my school, the Halloween / Harvest breakdown happens by grade level. My grade has always come down on the Halloween side of things and probably will until we’re told not to. I honestly don’t care one way or the other, outside of one small detail: If we were to hold a harvest festival instead of a Halloween party, I would look terribly out of place dressed like a big white bunny.
Several years ago my younger sister Erin was dying, stricken with the astonishingly rare variety of lung cancer that occurs in non-smokers. After fighting through some aggressive treatments, she was given a terminal diagnosis in the late summer. She was the activities director at an assisted living complex and worked as long as she could but reached a point when she had to stop, which hadn’t been an easy concession for her to make. It also meant that she wasn’t going to be wearing her bunny suit to work on Halloween that year. Our older sister had made the suit for her years before. It was white, fuzzy, and inescapable, the kind of attention-getting costume that was self-deprecating and in your face all at the same time.
Erin had begun downsizing her belongings that fall, and as Halloween approached I thought back to the bunny suit. I had never willingly worn costumes to school before and became theatrically grouchy about such ideas whenever they were brought up. Wearing the bunny suit to school would catch people so completely off guard it was worth considering. I e-mailed Erin to ask her what had happened to it. She thought it had wound up in our parents’ garage, and pieced together what I was thinking. “That would rock,” she replied. “Your kids would love it.”
I wasn’t sold on the idea and knew I’d be setting myself up for some pretty serious embarrassment, but decided to go for it when I thought of Erin, stuck at home that year with no energy to do anything, no costume to wear and nowhere to wear it. And if the thought of my wearing the bunny suit would bring a couple smiles to her face while she spent her day fighting back her fear and depression, it was worth doing. “I love it,” she wrote when I finally made up my mind. “Please have someone take a photo.” Knowing what the reaction would be, I assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.
I was at school early on the morning of the party day to make sure I could smuggle the suit in unseen. I called one of my friends to come to my room and help with the make-up since I didn’t have a mirror. Her reaction was a good preview of the abuse that would be piled on me throughout the day, but we couldn’t get the make up kit to work at all. We eventually dismissed it the cheap piece of grocery store junk that it was and dug some washable markers out of a student desk instead. They did the job nicely.
Most people on the staff laughed like I had never seen them laugh before. A few managed to keep straight faces and play along, but the effect worked exactly like I thought it would. Eventually the make up issue was resolved by an expert. One of my students was dressed as a zombie cheerleader, and even though she wasn’t wearing her make-up during our class party, she has practiced extensively with the kit that came with her costume. "You have to get your face wet first, and then it works," she said. And it did. So she redid my face for me, and I finally looked like a bunny for the last two hours of the day. Several pictures were taken, and I was able to e-mail them to Erin that evening. Knowing how much she enjoyed them made it worth the embarrassment.
The following Halloween came around only weeks after she had died. I was destroyed, angry and depressed in the aftermath, and was doing little more than sleepwalking through my life with no sense of bearing or purpose. But I still decided to wear the bunny suit again as a tribute, even if it was something that only a few people would know the reason behind why I was wearing it. Because frankly, the thing is a pain in the butt to wear. It’s unimaginably hot. The ears flop down in front of my face and block my vision, the head is constantly twisting sideways on its own to try and cover my left eye, and the little bunny mittens make it next to impossible to pick up anything and write while staying in costume, to say nothing of the discomfort that comes from walking around without shoes all day because bunnies don’t wear shoes and it looks even more stupid to do so. And since they only way in and out of this thing is a velcro strip down the back, simple things like using the bathroom or putting keys in a pocket become pretty impractical.
I still wear it, all the years later, and still as a tribute even though most people only think its just a costume. It’s become something of a tradition at school: Little kids jump and wave when they pass me in the hall that day, and for the rest of the year will point at me and shout “YOU’RE THE BUNNY!” like I’d forgotten about it. If there ever was a year I decided not to wear it, the grief I’d collect from much of the staff, and especially the students, would be worse than just enduring the thing for another year. But as much as I gripe I have to admit the suit has become a distinctive hallmark, and if / when the day comes when our Halloween celebration becomes more harvest-oriented, I’ll miss not having to drag it out.
And even though I’ve probably now worn it more times than Erin ever did, I still think of it as hers. In fact just a couple of years ago I’d gotten an e-mail from someone at a different school asking about it. They were having some kind of reading night or whatever and had heard through a connection to my school that I had a bunny suit which would fit perfectly with their event, and wondered if they’d be able to borrow it.
My reply: “No, I’m sorry. It’s not my suit. I only borrow it.”
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
George, Boom City, and the Drunken Boat Race
I hate listening to people talk about their vacations. I understand how they were adventurous and restorative experiences, but too often listening to the trip or looking at the pictures is the kind of thing I find myself only being able to politely endure, because the enthusiasm with which the vacation is retold never translates well to someone who wasn’t there to experience it themselves. Having said that, I’ll cut right to the interesting parts of my recent trip to Washington state. And I’ll skip the photos entirely.
*I get stressed pretty easily about flying -- not so much the flying part, but the whole getting through security on time and not being stranded in Chicago kind of thing. It just seems like too much can go wrong, and on my way out it sort of did. My connecting flight was delayed an hour, and when we finally got on I was trapped in a window seat between the side of the plane and a 317-pound poster boy for sleep apnea, who snorted himself awake every eight minutes all the way to Denver. I was very happy to deplane and grab a quick lunch while waiting in a quiet corner at the gate for my flight to Seattle. Which I enjoyed, right up until the moment Larry the Cable Guy’s in-laws came along and sat down behind me for half an hour. The flight to Seattle was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Denver, though not until we were already on the runway. This was mostly okay though, because I fell in love with our flight attendant Jamie about six minutes after I sat down. She looked good in her librarian glasses and airline shorts, and spoke with just enough of a southern lilt to make everything she said sound vaguely and dangerously flirtatious.
*I stayed with my friends Dax and Melissa, who live just outside of Seattle. Dax works out of their home and has some flexibility in his schedule so we were able to check out sights while Melissa was at work. The first big visit was Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, a shopping experience not entirely unlike a day at the Minnesota State Fair. Pike Place is three stories worth of fish market / farmer’s market / craft fair / tourist trap / food court / shopping mall full of stores selling things that nobody could possibly need. It’s so crowded you need to walk through it sideways and look ten feet ahead to navigate your way through everyone else. We saw at least a dozen different street musicians playing while we were there; it occurred to me that if all of these people got together and collaborated, they’d make up the most eclectic orchestra imaginable. The vendors we encountered were unfailingly friendly, except for the fish guy who was trying to give me a complex when I wasn’t immediately willing to ship 15 pounds of fresh salmon to every person I know.
*With the fourth of July approaching Dax really wanted to get some fireworks, so we went on a run after Melissa came home. There were signs along the highway advertising “Boom City,” a temporary explosion mall located on a reservation where a wider variety of combustion promised to be available. And holy smokes, was it. Boom City was the size of a county fair, and looked scary enough to make me think it was the kind of place where the quasi-criminals populating the backgrounds of movies like “The Fast and the Furious” would go to buy their fireworks. A couple days later we found a newspaper article about Boom City, where one of the carnies -- I mean, vendors -- had been asked about what seemed like the legal gray area of what they were selling. He said they stayed within the law, because, and I quote: “It ain’t worth the felony.” Which is the kind of statement that implies there could possibly be a list of things in his worldview that would be worth the felony. But apparently selling $1,300 packages of fireworks was just fine. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to decide we were out of our league, and we quickly retreated to a friendly little tent outside of a nearby grocery store.
*Last winter when I was first planning my trip, Dax told me that Rush was going to be playing Washington in early July, so we decided to go. Regular Summer Vacation readers know I saw Rush just last summer, and seeing them again seemed like it’d be a good time even if it would be the identical show from the same tour. (Although it turned out to be the very last show of the tour, so that was kind of cool.)
The real draw this time was to see a show at The Gorge. This is a world-famous amphitheater in central Washington that has the Columbia river and its resulting canyon -- or gorge, I suppose -- for a backdrop. The Gorge is really remote, the nearest bit of civilization being a truck stop of a town called George. Yes. George, Washington... I know! This place is so far removed from the rest of the world that people living here would have to travel to the middle of nowhere for a night on the town. We took the interstate through the Cascade mountains to get there, so we did take in quite a bit of scenery not generally found in Anoka County. The climate shifted so dramatically on the eastern side of the mountains it was like traveling to another region: instead of the lush, green cool of the Seattle area, we were surrounded by dry brush and rock formations, with a good twenty-degree summer-like jump in the temperature. The view at The Gorge is transcendent, and the sound was great. I can’t imagine a better place for a midsummer concert. The one drawback? Sitting on a hill with a forty-degree grade messes with your balance.
*The next day we took the ferry over to Poulsbo, where Dax’s parents live. They have a great house with a stunning backyard. Calling it a garden wouldn’t do it justice -- it’s more of a private arboretum. When Dax’s mom, Lynn, mentioned something about shopping at the farmer’s market in town (which I’m sure was amazing), I couldn’t see the point: There had to be twenty different fruits and vegetables growing there between the yard and the rooftop garden above the garage.
Poulsbo would be the most blatant tourist trap imaginable if it had been intentionally created, but instead it just exists as it is. It was all genuinely small-town Americana: a downtown of nice restaurants and specialty shops, a band shell in the park, art shops and bookstores, a boardwalk along the waterfront, all tied together by Norwegian heritage. After touring the town, we spent the evening at a neighborhood picnic, complete with music playing, more food than seventy-plus people there could possibly eat, and kids running around in a massive water fight all night long. It was great fun to be a casual observer of it all, and worth noting that I did in fact hold a brief lead in the men's 18-and-older division for the Cherry Pit Spitting Contest.
We stayed at the picnic until it was dark and cool enough to collect the sweatshirts and blankets we needed before walking down to a small park overlooking the water, where we could see hundreds -- seriously, I’m not exaggerating here, I mean hundreds -- of enormous boats waiting for the fireworks. They’d been parked down there all day. We joked about the challenges presented by anyone trying to navigate their way out of that when the show ended; it would have been difficult enough in the dark, much less sober. Which likely didn’t describe too many captains by that time of the night. But it was a perfect location. The last fireworks I intentionally sat down to watch were over a shallow mud hole of a lake formed in a river bend. This year they were over Puget Sound. Make your own comparison.
*Dax and I spent most of the actual 4th of July regressing to fourteen years old: sleeping late, watching TV, playing video games, driving around listening to music, going to Five Guys for lunch. When Melissa got home from work, dinner was ribs on the grill, homemade onion rings and potato salad, and my first corn on the cob of the summer. Not a bad meal for the 4th. While the events of the day went on, the Washington Statewide Fireworks began. Now, Minnesota people who complain about their neighbors shooting off fireworks? No. You don’t get sympathy from me anymore. Because Washington on the 4th is INSANE. There was so much popping and crackling and pounding and whistling and screaming throughout the day, it was enough to turn a mildly ADHD kid inside out. When it was dark enough for the real show to begin, it continued on for at least three hours. Constantly. There were more professional-grade fireworks being shot off within a two-mile radius than I could follow, including the display by all the neighbors in Melissa and Dax’s cul-de-sac. There are few things I’ve seen in recent memory as disconcerting as the sight of an eight year-old kid in flip flops using a propane torch to light the fuse on a $30 chemical mixture that could melt bone, then yelling “Fire in the hole!” and jogging away. Things finally started quieting after midnight... but notice I didn’t say “stopped.” It was still going on when I fell asleep, which wasn’t as hard to do as you might think, because it became so easy to tune out all of the noise by then. But the dogs were not pleased.
*My return trip was blessedly uneventful, and the morning sky was uncharacteristically clear and we could see Mount Rainier dominating the southern horizon on the way to the airport. The whole experience was a great trip, and just the break I needed. And even though we ate really well the whole time, there was so much to do and so much walking around that I actually dropped a few pounds while I was there.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
*I get stressed pretty easily about flying -- not so much the flying part, but the whole getting through security on time and not being stranded in Chicago kind of thing. It just seems like too much can go wrong, and on my way out it sort of did. My connecting flight was delayed an hour, and when we finally got on I was trapped in a window seat between the side of the plane and a 317-pound poster boy for sleep apnea, who snorted himself awake every eight minutes all the way to Denver. I was very happy to deplane and grab a quick lunch while waiting in a quiet corner at the gate for my flight to Seattle. Which I enjoyed, right up until the moment Larry the Cable Guy’s in-laws came along and sat down behind me for half an hour. The flight to Seattle was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Denver, though not until we were already on the runway. This was mostly okay though, because I fell in love with our flight attendant Jamie about six minutes after I sat down. She looked good in her librarian glasses and airline shorts, and spoke with just enough of a southern lilt to make everything she said sound vaguely and dangerously flirtatious.
*I stayed with my friends Dax and Melissa, who live just outside of Seattle. Dax works out of their home and has some flexibility in his schedule so we were able to check out sights while Melissa was at work. The first big visit was Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, a shopping experience not entirely unlike a day at the Minnesota State Fair. Pike Place is three stories worth of fish market / farmer’s market / craft fair / tourist trap / food court / shopping mall full of stores selling things that nobody could possibly need. It’s so crowded you need to walk through it sideways and look ten feet ahead to navigate your way through everyone else. We saw at least a dozen different street musicians playing while we were there; it occurred to me that if all of these people got together and collaborated, they’d make up the most eclectic orchestra imaginable. The vendors we encountered were unfailingly friendly, except for the fish guy who was trying to give me a complex when I wasn’t immediately willing to ship 15 pounds of fresh salmon to every person I know.
*With the fourth of July approaching Dax really wanted to get some fireworks, so we went on a run after Melissa came home. There were signs along the highway advertising “Boom City,” a temporary explosion mall located on a reservation where a wider variety of combustion promised to be available. And holy smokes, was it. Boom City was the size of a county fair, and looked scary enough to make me think it was the kind of place where the quasi-criminals populating the backgrounds of movies like “The Fast and the Furious” would go to buy their fireworks. A couple days later we found a newspaper article about Boom City, where one of the carnies -- I mean, vendors -- had been asked about what seemed like the legal gray area of what they were selling. He said they stayed within the law, because, and I quote: “It ain’t worth the felony.” Which is the kind of statement that implies there could possibly be a list of things in his worldview that would be worth the felony. But apparently selling $1,300 packages of fireworks was just fine. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to decide we were out of our league, and we quickly retreated to a friendly little tent outside of a nearby grocery store.
*Last winter when I was first planning my trip, Dax told me that Rush was going to be playing Washington in early July, so we decided to go. Regular Summer Vacation readers know I saw Rush just last summer, and seeing them again seemed like it’d be a good time even if it would be the identical show from the same tour. (Although it turned out to be the very last show of the tour, so that was kind of cool.)
The real draw this time was to see a show at The Gorge. This is a world-famous amphitheater in central Washington that has the Columbia river and its resulting canyon -- or gorge, I suppose -- for a backdrop. The Gorge is really remote, the nearest bit of civilization being a truck stop of a town called George. Yes. George, Washington... I know! This place is so far removed from the rest of the world that people living here would have to travel to the middle of nowhere for a night on the town. We took the interstate through the Cascade mountains to get there, so we did take in quite a bit of scenery not generally found in Anoka County. The climate shifted so dramatically on the eastern side of the mountains it was like traveling to another region: instead of the lush, green cool of the Seattle area, we were surrounded by dry brush and rock formations, with a good twenty-degree summer-like jump in the temperature. The view at The Gorge is transcendent, and the sound was great. I can’t imagine a better place for a midsummer concert. The one drawback? Sitting on a hill with a forty-degree grade messes with your balance.
*The next day we took the ferry over to Poulsbo, where Dax’s parents live. They have a great house with a stunning backyard. Calling it a garden wouldn’t do it justice -- it’s more of a private arboretum. When Dax’s mom, Lynn, mentioned something about shopping at the farmer’s market in town (which I’m sure was amazing), I couldn’t see the point: There had to be twenty different fruits and vegetables growing there between the yard and the rooftop garden above the garage.
Poulsbo would be the most blatant tourist trap imaginable if it had been intentionally created, but instead it just exists as it is. It was all genuinely small-town Americana: a downtown of nice restaurants and specialty shops, a band shell in the park, art shops and bookstores, a boardwalk along the waterfront, all tied together by Norwegian heritage. After touring the town, we spent the evening at a neighborhood picnic, complete with music playing, more food than seventy-plus people there could possibly eat, and kids running around in a massive water fight all night long. It was great fun to be a casual observer of it all, and worth noting that I did in fact hold a brief lead in the men's 18-and-older division for the Cherry Pit Spitting Contest.
We stayed at the picnic until it was dark and cool enough to collect the sweatshirts and blankets we needed before walking down to a small park overlooking the water, where we could see hundreds -- seriously, I’m not exaggerating here, I mean hundreds -- of enormous boats waiting for the fireworks. They’d been parked down there all day. We joked about the challenges presented by anyone trying to navigate their way out of that when the show ended; it would have been difficult enough in the dark, much less sober. Which likely didn’t describe too many captains by that time of the night. But it was a perfect location. The last fireworks I intentionally sat down to watch were over a shallow mud hole of a lake formed in a river bend. This year they were over Puget Sound. Make your own comparison.
*Dax and I spent most of the actual 4th of July regressing to fourteen years old: sleeping late, watching TV, playing video games, driving around listening to music, going to Five Guys for lunch. When Melissa got home from work, dinner was ribs on the grill, homemade onion rings and potato salad, and my first corn on the cob of the summer. Not a bad meal for the 4th. While the events of the day went on, the Washington Statewide Fireworks began. Now, Minnesota people who complain about their neighbors shooting off fireworks? No. You don’t get sympathy from me anymore. Because Washington on the 4th is INSANE. There was so much popping and crackling and pounding and whistling and screaming throughout the day, it was enough to turn a mildly ADHD kid inside out. When it was dark enough for the real show to begin, it continued on for at least three hours. Constantly. There were more professional-grade fireworks being shot off within a two-mile radius than I could follow, including the display by all the neighbors in Melissa and Dax’s cul-de-sac. There are few things I’ve seen in recent memory as disconcerting as the sight of an eight year-old kid in flip flops using a propane torch to light the fuse on a $30 chemical mixture that could melt bone, then yelling “Fire in the hole!” and jogging away. Things finally started quieting after midnight... but notice I didn’t say “stopped.” It was still going on when I fell asleep, which wasn’t as hard to do as you might think, because it became so easy to tune out all of the noise by then. But the dogs were not pleased.
*My return trip was blessedly uneventful, and the morning sky was uncharacteristically clear and we could see Mount Rainier dominating the southern horizon on the way to the airport. The whole experience was a great trip, and just the break I needed. And even though we ate really well the whole time, there was so much to do and so much walking around that I actually dropped a few pounds while I was there.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
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