And here we are finally at the end of this experiment. I’ve always wondered if publishing posts more frequently would change anything about readership and thought this month would be a good test case for that. Turns out it was, but just not with the trend I’d hoped to see. Oh well. Woe is me and all. I haven’t lost any Facebook friends during the month so at least it doesn’t seem like I’ve offended anyone. That must count for something.
So was it worth the effort? I honestly don’t know. The audience didn’t build, and sure, audience is important. I thought more posts could lead to more people reading or maybe even me getting into enough of a flow to write something people would find share-worthy, but that didn’t happen. Like I’ve said before, I don’t write something and hope I’m the only person who will ever read it. Musicians want to be heard, artists want to be viewed, writers want to be read. Writing doesn’t come to life until someone else reads it and reacts to it. And to generalize, the more people reached the more life the writing has. At least from a perspective.
But collecting Likes and Comments and Hits isn’t the reason for doing all of this. The real goal, whether I ever stated it or not, was to get myself back into a habit of writing every day in preparation for the summer. I have high ambitions about what I’d like to do with my break this year, and with only one more week until I’m there I do feel I’m a lot more ready to get to work than I did a month ago. So in that sense all of this was very much worth the effort, and I’m glad I put in the mileage to get where I am. Now it’s all about the next step.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, you might be interested in the statistics for the month. Going back to my first post on May 1 and up through this one:
I wrote a little more than 28,000 words on the blog this month, which roughly translates into about 95 double-spaced pages. It had taken me the previous year to publish as many posts as I have in May. I collected a total of 72 Facebook comments (not including the few response comments I made) and, oddly enough, 72 likes. Many of the likes and comments kept coming from the same people, and to those people, thank you for reading -- I hope you haven’t learned too many things about me this month that make you wish you could run and hide and forget.
So as you can tell, I’ve been kind of busy. And my eyes are both tired and burning with a little residual sunblock after a day spent monitoring the dunk tank at Track and Field Day. And it’s a Friday night. So, if you don’t mind I think I am going to drop off the face of the Earth for awhile. I’ll be back here when I’ve got something else to say that seems like a good fit. It could be in a few days or a few weeks, but sooner or later I’ll be back. I just gotta rest up a bit first. And of course, June starts tomorrow. Which means I have just a little over three hours to think of what my next monthly goal is going to be....
Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Day 30: In Conclusion
Short one today. Not because I'm stuck for ideas again, but more because I feel like I've arrived at a sort of wrap-up. I wrote awhile back that the inertia of life had become an unofficial theme running through a lot of these Month of May posts. A lot also came up about teaching and school. This wasn't a surprise because those themes have been recurring often enough on "Summer Vacation" to merit their own label. While trying to put together the ideas I wanted to write about tonight, I began to see intersection points between those ideas.
The Inertia of Life came up as a way of describing how easy it can be to fall into a habit or routine, and how that routine can go on long enough to someday become a defining characteristic. That isn't always a great thing if these routines get in the way of the kind of progress a person might hope to achieve.
But if inertia is defined by a tendency to remain unchanged, I think a state of progress can exist that takes place over such a long period of time it's possible the small changes always taking place can go unnoticed. It's easy for me to think, "Well, I've been teaching this grade for this many years and everything just falls into the same routine after all that time." But that isn't really true. Just in the past few years my school has experienced nothing less than a complete redefinition, and while a lot of the familiar anchors and surroundings remain in place, over time they either move on, fade away or evolve into something new. It puts me in mind of some more words from the great Canadian poet Neil Peart, who once wrote:
"Summer's going fast, nights growing colder
Children growing up, old friends growing older
Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
Experience slips away
Experience slips away...
The innocence slips away."
Time does not stand still. Life does not stand still, even if sometimes it feels like it does. We're always living in the good old days one way or another whether we realize it or not. We're always composing the footnotes we'll refer to in the future. We all struggle in some way to reconcile the life we lead with the ideal we may not have achieved yet. And we're always planting seeds. It's just that sometimes you don't realize the seeds have grown and matured into trees until you notice how they've grown to tower above you.
Okay. And that's Day 30. One more of these tomorrow and then I'm going to drop off the face of the Earth for awhile....
The Inertia of Life came up as a way of describing how easy it can be to fall into a habit or routine, and how that routine can go on long enough to someday become a defining characteristic. That isn't always a great thing if these routines get in the way of the kind of progress a person might hope to achieve.
But if inertia is defined by a tendency to remain unchanged, I think a state of progress can exist that takes place over such a long period of time it's possible the small changes always taking place can go unnoticed. It's easy for me to think, "Well, I've been teaching this grade for this many years and everything just falls into the same routine after all that time." But that isn't really true. Just in the past few years my school has experienced nothing less than a complete redefinition, and while a lot of the familiar anchors and surroundings remain in place, over time they either move on, fade away or evolve into something new. It puts me in mind of some more words from the great Canadian poet Neil Peart, who once wrote:
"Summer's going fast, nights growing colder
Children growing up, old friends growing older
Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
Experience slips away
Experience slips away...
The innocence slips away."
Time does not stand still. Life does not stand still, even if sometimes it feels like it does. We're always living in the good old days one way or another whether we realize it or not. We're always composing the footnotes we'll refer to in the future. We all struggle in some way to reconcile the life we lead with the ideal we may not have achieved yet. And we're always planting seeds. It's just that sometimes you don't realize the seeds have grown and matured into trees until you notice how they've grown to tower above you.
Okay. And that's Day 30. One more of these tomorrow and then I'm going to drop off the face of the Earth for awhile....
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Day 29: Planting the Seeds
Depending on your personal belief system there are a lot of ways to take this introduction. I’m just going to describe what happened and let you decide what to think:
I was at my desk correcting spelling tests one late winter afternoon this year while my students were out at recess. I came across one test littered with mistakes that were too indicative of the kind of work all of us in 5th grade had come to expect from that particular student, the sort of spelling test that has made a million teachers roll their eyes a million times throughout educational history. An existential shudder ran through me as I thought about the numerous challenges that student would face upon entering middle school and how woefully unprepared he would be to face them. My first reaction was to think, “God help that kid” and shake my head as I flipped to the next test in the pile. But for whatever reason, I instead added one mental comma into that thought and reframed it as “God, help that kid.” And in the following half-moment, quicker than I honestly think I would have had time to come up with it myself, a thought of response came to me: “That’s why I gave him you.”
With that I sat up a little straighter and thought, “Oh. Okay then. No pressure there.”
From that moment I began making a concerted effort to resist giving in to the several frustrations related to working with that kid, and consciously going out of my way to provide him with the patience and support he deserved. For whatever moments of disconnect from his work he showed or whatever lack of organization fed into the excuses he dreamed up, I made it my personal mission to keep him accountable for his learning and make sure he felt as happy, comfortable, and safe as he possibly could while at school. The sad thing is I had to force myself to put aside my frustrations to do what should have been automatic for me to be doing all along.
As I look back over the the time I’ve spent teaching, it’s too easy to think of the times I’ve failed: the moments I’ve lost my temper, the shortfalls that have led me to spend an entire weekend second guessing myself, things that have come out of my mouth I wish I could have taken back the moment they were said, the times I’ve selfishly cut corners on something just because it was easier or more convenient for me. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I can think of many times over the years I’ve had to talk some of my colleagues back from the ledge when they’ve felt like they had redefined the word “mistake.” I think it’s easy for teachers to be too critical of ourselves because the stakes of what we do are so high and there is such a slight margin of error. Over my two decades of teaching I’ve seen or heard too many stories about former students that left me deflated and depressed: Addictions. Homelessness. Deportation. Suicides. Pregnancies. Abuse. Any variety of personal turbulence or educational crisis that I would never wish on anyone. When these stories get back to me I always wind up asking myself the same questions: Did I do enough? Could I have been that one person they needed to make the difference, but I side-stepped the responsibility when it was in right front of me? Did I give them the support they needed to be successful, or did I push them hard enough to ensure they would learn, or did I lazy my way through?
Logically I know I can’t own all of this myself, and for me to wonder if I could have been the one to make the ultimate difference in someone’s life takes a special kind of arrogance. I know that when considering the entire scope of all the lives that have passed through my classroom I’m just a small chapter in a school career or a life story, or one thread in the tapestry, or another brick in the wall. I know that no matter how critical things can seem in the moment and how often they truly are, there are just as many if not more times when all I’m able to do is plant the seeds and hope someday they’ll take root.
So much of elementary school is about the maybes. I feel it almost tangibly in 5th grade. In most cases when I send the kids home on that last day of school, I’m never going to see them again and I’m never going to know how their lives turn out. I can only hope that the time I spent with them made some difference. Maybe the boy who is so disenfranchised with school might listen to some things I say just because I can speak the language of video games as fluently as he can. Maybe the girl who writes notes to herself about what a failure she is will feel a bond to me if it turns out I’m the only person in her life that tells her she’s important and I’m proud of her. Maybe the kid who winds up in a different school after anger and depression overtake common sense will remember the running joke we had during spelling. And maybe any of the tiny connections like these will open up the window of opportunity I need to just give them the idea that they can be successful, or they are worthwhile, or they’re able to achieve more greatness than they themselves yet realize. All we can do as teachers is plant those seeds and hope that something will someday come of them. To try and to hope and to blindly trust is a lot to take on, but it’s really all we can do.
As a teacher you rarely know down the road if what you did made any difference. You hope it does. You still do it anyway just because it might. You keep throwing things at the wall with faith that sooner or later you’ll find something that sticks. You don’t know if that kid is going to remember you or anything you did beyond the moment, but maybe they will remember something you taught them. Maybe they will carry your thumbprint on the direction they follow as they move forward, without even realizing where their motivations came from. Maybe me biting my tongue and quietly releasing the all too frequent deep breath will eventually come together as something that influences that kid who needs extra encouragement just to get the day started. I’ll probably never know. And that’s just something I have to accept.
But you know, there are also lucky instances when sometimes I do get to see when the seeds took root and grew. Just today I found an envelope in my mailbox in the office. Inside was a photo card invitation from a girl about to graduate from high school who had been one of my students a lifetime ago and was inviting me to her open house in a couple of weeks. I smiled when I opened it, marveled at how much she still looks like her younger sister, and read her short message on the back: “I cannot believe it’s been seven years since I would cry almost every day of school from laughing so hard! Thank you!”
It’s nice to be reminded that sometimes the seeds you plant do take root. And even though there are always going to be times when you don’t meet your own expectations, there are also the times when you manage to get things right. I guess in the end that's what keeps us going.
I was at my desk correcting spelling tests one late winter afternoon this year while my students were out at recess. I came across one test littered with mistakes that were too indicative of the kind of work all of us in 5th grade had come to expect from that particular student, the sort of spelling test that has made a million teachers roll their eyes a million times throughout educational history. An existential shudder ran through me as I thought about the numerous challenges that student would face upon entering middle school and how woefully unprepared he would be to face them. My first reaction was to think, “God help that kid” and shake my head as I flipped to the next test in the pile. But for whatever reason, I instead added one mental comma into that thought and reframed it as “God, help that kid.” And in the following half-moment, quicker than I honestly think I would have had time to come up with it myself, a thought of response came to me: “That’s why I gave him you.”
With that I sat up a little straighter and thought, “Oh. Okay then. No pressure there.”
From that moment I began making a concerted effort to resist giving in to the several frustrations related to working with that kid, and consciously going out of my way to provide him with the patience and support he deserved. For whatever moments of disconnect from his work he showed or whatever lack of organization fed into the excuses he dreamed up, I made it my personal mission to keep him accountable for his learning and make sure he felt as happy, comfortable, and safe as he possibly could while at school. The sad thing is I had to force myself to put aside my frustrations to do what should have been automatic for me to be doing all along.
As I look back over the the time I’ve spent teaching, it’s too easy to think of the times I’ve failed: the moments I’ve lost my temper, the shortfalls that have led me to spend an entire weekend second guessing myself, things that have come out of my mouth I wish I could have taken back the moment they were said, the times I’ve selfishly cut corners on something just because it was easier or more convenient for me. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I can think of many times over the years I’ve had to talk some of my colleagues back from the ledge when they’ve felt like they had redefined the word “mistake.” I think it’s easy for teachers to be too critical of ourselves because the stakes of what we do are so high and there is such a slight margin of error. Over my two decades of teaching I’ve seen or heard too many stories about former students that left me deflated and depressed: Addictions. Homelessness. Deportation. Suicides. Pregnancies. Abuse. Any variety of personal turbulence or educational crisis that I would never wish on anyone. When these stories get back to me I always wind up asking myself the same questions: Did I do enough? Could I have been that one person they needed to make the difference, but I side-stepped the responsibility when it was in right front of me? Did I give them the support they needed to be successful, or did I push them hard enough to ensure they would learn, or did I lazy my way through?
Logically I know I can’t own all of this myself, and for me to wonder if I could have been the one to make the ultimate difference in someone’s life takes a special kind of arrogance. I know that when considering the entire scope of all the lives that have passed through my classroom I’m just a small chapter in a school career or a life story, or one thread in the tapestry, or another brick in the wall. I know that no matter how critical things can seem in the moment and how often they truly are, there are just as many if not more times when all I’m able to do is plant the seeds and hope someday they’ll take root.
So much of elementary school is about the maybes. I feel it almost tangibly in 5th grade. In most cases when I send the kids home on that last day of school, I’m never going to see them again and I’m never going to know how their lives turn out. I can only hope that the time I spent with them made some difference. Maybe the boy who is so disenfranchised with school might listen to some things I say just because I can speak the language of video games as fluently as he can. Maybe the girl who writes notes to herself about what a failure she is will feel a bond to me if it turns out I’m the only person in her life that tells her she’s important and I’m proud of her. Maybe the kid who winds up in a different school after anger and depression overtake common sense will remember the running joke we had during spelling. And maybe any of the tiny connections like these will open up the window of opportunity I need to just give them the idea that they can be successful, or they are worthwhile, or they’re able to achieve more greatness than they themselves yet realize. All we can do as teachers is plant those seeds and hope that something will someday come of them. To try and to hope and to blindly trust is a lot to take on, but it’s really all we can do.
As a teacher you rarely know down the road if what you did made any difference. You hope it does. You still do it anyway just because it might. You keep throwing things at the wall with faith that sooner or later you’ll find something that sticks. You don’t know if that kid is going to remember you or anything you did beyond the moment, but maybe they will remember something you taught them. Maybe they will carry your thumbprint on the direction they follow as they move forward, without even realizing where their motivations came from. Maybe me biting my tongue and quietly releasing the all too frequent deep breath will eventually come together as something that influences that kid who needs extra encouragement just to get the day started. I’ll probably never know. And that’s just something I have to accept.
But you know, there are also lucky instances when sometimes I do get to see when the seeds took root and grew. Just today I found an envelope in my mailbox in the office. Inside was a photo card invitation from a girl about to graduate from high school who had been one of my students a lifetime ago and was inviting me to her open house in a couple of weeks. I smiled when I opened it, marveled at how much she still looks like her younger sister, and read her short message on the back: “I cannot believe it’s been seven years since I would cry almost every day of school from laughing so hard! Thank you!”
It’s nice to be reminded that sometimes the seeds you plant do take root. And even though there are always going to be times when you don’t meet your own expectations, there are also the times when you manage to get things right. I guess in the end that's what keeps us going.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Day 28: The Summer Ahead
Every year at the end of May, a lot of signs start appearing to signal
the school year is coming to an end. My birthday comes and goes; the
final round of standardized testing ends; Memorial Day weekend and its
predictable crap weather passes; more of my non-instructional time at
school is spent packing and doing inventory instead of grading papers;
the daily temperatures (usually) begin to get warmer and everyone at
school starts crossing their fingers really, really hard that we'll
manage to get in another Track and Field Day with no rain. And when all
of these signals start appearing, it becomes impossible to not think
about the approaching summer.
Every school year I've taught through has come to an end with mixed feelings, and this one won't be an exception. But let's be honest here -- one of the undeniable perks of teaching is summer break. I won't even try to pretend otherwise. I am happy to say that in the forty combined years of my life I've spent as first a student and then a teacher, I've never known a summer without a break. It's truly a beautiful thing. The rules and routines that dictate everything about how life operates for the other nine and a half months fall away and are temporarily replaced with new ones, many of which are at your discretion. Do you want to work? Summer school, or tutoring, or curriculum writing? The opportunities are there if you're interested but you certainly don't have to. Your relationship with the alarm clock becomes more casual. You can actually be outdoors instead of just admire it through a classroom window. Everything about life can either slow down or speed up to whatever pace you decide you want. I know someone who once had decided her project for the summer was to discover the recipe for the perfect strawberry margarita. I know another who made a point of reading every article in the newspaper every morning while drinking her coffee. For me, I find that my normal amount of drive spins down to a level where accomplishing one thing in a day is more than enough to make it feel like my time was used productively.
So staying true to the title of my li'l corner of the Internet, here's roughly what I plan on doing with my summer vacation this year....
Writing: It always begins and ends with this for me. I've had summers when I've written manuscripts in my head while walking my dog through the neighborhood in the evenings, then staying up and typing out my ideas between midnight and 3:00 A.M. That would be physically impossible for me to pull off anymore, but it's fair to say that this summer more than most is going to see me spending a great deal of time living the life of an aspiring author. There are a total of three projects in the rotation in the coming weeks -- the first is a manuscript I love dearly that I plan rewriting to make it even better, the second is the one I started back in November last year that I'd finally like to finish off, and the third is one that's already done which I'll be trying to push back into the agency market to see if I can get anyone to take a look at it and hopefully represent it so I can finally make my millions and win my Newbery Award. This will mean some early mornings, some late nights, and some long afternoons, and a whole bunch of stir-crazy. My fingers are crossed that there will be some summer get-togethers scheduled for the school crowd so I don't have to rely on Facebook as a substitute for interacting with actual people. But with the kind of work I want to get to this summer, there might be times I'll have to settle for that. If anyone does cross paths with me in the summer and something about the way I carry myself seems a little off, this will probably be why.
House: I had a nice run of some redecorating last summer but didn't get to everything on the list, so maybe I'll be picking up where I left off with that. Other than that there will still be the obsessive level of cleaning and organizing I can take care of while I have so much time to take care of it; when you feel like you've had a full day for only getting one thing done, it can become really easy to stretch cleaning the house into a month-long project.
Travel: I've never been a big traveler, mostly because I think that where you go is less important than who you go there with, and even though I can navigate a single life fairly well most of the time in the every day, traveling without someone to share the experience with seems to defeat the purpose. That said, I'm giving some serious thought to taking a trip or three this summer. Depending on how the scheduling and the airfares come together, I've got some friends in the Pacific Northwest it would REALLY do me some good to see this year. Additionally I've got relatives in other corners of the country that I haven't seen in a long time it would be fun to visit, and it goes without saying that the Turtle Lake Fair is on the schedule already. That would wind up being a lot of getting around, but it feels important to do it this year, because.... talk about burying the lead... a very big announcement coming for the people who understand how big of an announcement this really is, coming from me... I'm starting to think that next summer might be when I decide to get a new dog. I'd only ever get a dog during the summer, and if I do that would make everything about traveling much more difficult. And of course because this is me we're talking about, this is something I'll need at least a year to overthink before I decide anything. So it kind of feels like a now or never deal this year.
Routine: I am most definitely a creature of habit, so I'm looking forward to discovering exactly how my routine for the summer will evolve this year. A lot of the typical checkboxes will make it on the list: morning trips to the YMCA after eating breakfast and reading the newspaper and finishing the Sudoku puzzle, taking naps whenever I damn well please, books to read, movies to anticipate and then finally see and usually find a little disappointing, awful reality TV shows to numb my brain in the evening (God bless the human experiments who volunteer to work through their personality defects while appearing on "Big Brother"), magazines to read cover to cover in one sitting, games to play, maybe even a television series or two to watch all the way through if I can figure out how to get Netflix streaming through my Blu-Ray player (I'd had enough of scratched discs showing up in the mail). But now that I think of it, my sister has a ton of shows on DVD at her house... I might have to browse over there... but anyway. You get the idea.
Seven more days with the students and one more work day afterward, but truthfully that last workday without the kids always has such a different dynamic that I barely think of it as work. And after that day is over and my staff friends do whatever it is we'll wind up doing to cap off the year before we go our separate ways, I'm ready to wake up on that first Saturday morning knowing there are seventy-nine days ahead of me filled with nothing but options.
Like I said -- it's a perk.
Every school year I've taught through has come to an end with mixed feelings, and this one won't be an exception. But let's be honest here -- one of the undeniable perks of teaching is summer break. I won't even try to pretend otherwise. I am happy to say that in the forty combined years of my life I've spent as first a student and then a teacher, I've never known a summer without a break. It's truly a beautiful thing. The rules and routines that dictate everything about how life operates for the other nine and a half months fall away and are temporarily replaced with new ones, many of which are at your discretion. Do you want to work? Summer school, or tutoring, or curriculum writing? The opportunities are there if you're interested but you certainly don't have to. Your relationship with the alarm clock becomes more casual. You can actually be outdoors instead of just admire it through a classroom window. Everything about life can either slow down or speed up to whatever pace you decide you want. I know someone who once had decided her project for the summer was to discover the recipe for the perfect strawberry margarita. I know another who made a point of reading every article in the newspaper every morning while drinking her coffee. For me, I find that my normal amount of drive spins down to a level where accomplishing one thing in a day is more than enough to make it feel like my time was used productively.
So staying true to the title of my li'l corner of the Internet, here's roughly what I plan on doing with my summer vacation this year....
Writing: It always begins and ends with this for me. I've had summers when I've written manuscripts in my head while walking my dog through the neighborhood in the evenings, then staying up and typing out my ideas between midnight and 3:00 A.M. That would be physically impossible for me to pull off anymore, but it's fair to say that this summer more than most is going to see me spending a great deal of time living the life of an aspiring author. There are a total of three projects in the rotation in the coming weeks -- the first is a manuscript I love dearly that I plan rewriting to make it even better, the second is the one I started back in November last year that I'd finally like to finish off, and the third is one that's already done which I'll be trying to push back into the agency market to see if I can get anyone to take a look at it and hopefully represent it so I can finally make my millions and win my Newbery Award. This will mean some early mornings, some late nights, and some long afternoons, and a whole bunch of stir-crazy. My fingers are crossed that there will be some summer get-togethers scheduled for the school crowd so I don't have to rely on Facebook as a substitute for interacting with actual people. But with the kind of work I want to get to this summer, there might be times I'll have to settle for that. If anyone does cross paths with me in the summer and something about the way I carry myself seems a little off, this will probably be why.
House: I had a nice run of some redecorating last summer but didn't get to everything on the list, so maybe I'll be picking up where I left off with that. Other than that there will still be the obsessive level of cleaning and organizing I can take care of while I have so much time to take care of it; when you feel like you've had a full day for only getting one thing done, it can become really easy to stretch cleaning the house into a month-long project.
Travel: I've never been a big traveler, mostly because I think that where you go is less important than who you go there with, and even though I can navigate a single life fairly well most of the time in the every day, traveling without someone to share the experience with seems to defeat the purpose. That said, I'm giving some serious thought to taking a trip or three this summer. Depending on how the scheduling and the airfares come together, I've got some friends in the Pacific Northwest it would REALLY do me some good to see this year. Additionally I've got relatives in other corners of the country that I haven't seen in a long time it would be fun to visit, and it goes without saying that the Turtle Lake Fair is on the schedule already. That would wind up being a lot of getting around, but it feels important to do it this year, because.... talk about burying the lead... a very big announcement coming for the people who understand how big of an announcement this really is, coming from me... I'm starting to think that next summer might be when I decide to get a new dog. I'd only ever get a dog during the summer, and if I do that would make everything about traveling much more difficult. And of course because this is me we're talking about, this is something I'll need at least a year to overthink before I decide anything. So it kind of feels like a now or never deal this year.
Routine: I am most definitely a creature of habit, so I'm looking forward to discovering exactly how my routine for the summer will evolve this year. A lot of the typical checkboxes will make it on the list: morning trips to the YMCA after eating breakfast and reading the newspaper and finishing the Sudoku puzzle, taking naps whenever I damn well please, books to read, movies to anticipate and then finally see and usually find a little disappointing, awful reality TV shows to numb my brain in the evening (God bless the human experiments who volunteer to work through their personality defects while appearing on "Big Brother"), magazines to read cover to cover in one sitting, games to play, maybe even a television series or two to watch all the way through if I can figure out how to get Netflix streaming through my Blu-Ray player (I'd had enough of scratched discs showing up in the mail). But now that I think of it, my sister has a ton of shows on DVD at her house... I might have to browse over there... but anyway. You get the idea.
Seven more days with the students and one more work day afterward, but truthfully that last workday without the kids always has such a different dynamic that I barely think of it as work. And after that day is over and my staff friends do whatever it is we'll wind up doing to cap off the year before we go our separate ways, I'm ready to wake up on that first Saturday morning knowing there are seventy-nine days ahead of me filled with nothing but options.
Like I said -- it's a perk.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Day 27: Songwriting
Back at the end of April when I decided to try this posting marathon, I asked for topic ideas anyone would be willing to share. Since the regular Summer Vacation readers only number in the dozens on a good day, I didn’t get many suggestions. But I did get a few, one of which was for me to try writing a song. “You love music, so why not give it a shot?” Valid point. But it’s probably never going to happen.
Around the same time a friend of mine gave me a CD from a band her husband had been in years ago; I’d put a picture on Facebook that reminded her of one of the songs and the album cover so she brought me a copy. I played through it a few times, knowing those songs had once been important enough to someone to write, learn, practice, record, and share them. This is very much what I feel like at the end of a manuscript. Knowing that I hope people who read my writing will direct some time and considerable thought into it, I was going to do the same thing. The recording had a distinct garage/bar band quality and the drums really jumped out of the mix (being a drummer I tend to notice that) but there was a lot about it I liked, particularly in the playing. I’m still not entirely sure what all of the songs are about (which I’d argue isn’t always a bad thing), but I can respect they each have a cohesive musical/lyrical quality that the guys in this band put some work into achieving.
Which kind of explains why I can’t see myself ever really tackling songwriting. A song needs both the words and the music. I play drums, and on a grading scale of people who know how to play drums but won’t ever get paid to do it, I’m probably a B- drummer in my rare best moments. I used to play piano and I’m confident I could teach myself most of the way back to the modest level of proficiency I once had, but that isn’t enough to write a song. I love guitar and would like to learn it someday, but even if I did and learned enough to try writing songs, where would I go from there? My singing voice is fine if I’m the only person in the car, but it’s not meant for performance. Would I start a band and play the drums? Be the lyric-writing Neil Peart of the group? I don’t see myself putting together the kind of pop ditties that have a good beat you can dance to, so the bar-and-party circuit would be out. So where’s the reason to try and express myself with that kind of economy, especially if I don’t have the ability to create the music to accompany the emotion I would be trying to capture?
If I ever did try writing a song I’d aim for the direction of the music that matters to me, and songwriting is a key element in much of the music I’m drawn to. To name a few.... Let’s start with The Airborne Toxic Event, since I listened to them almost all day today: Most of their songs are infused with so much raw emotion they just break me in half every time I hear them. Or take Bruce Hornsby, or Mumford and Sons: So many of their songs travel the breadth of a novel, with at least half of the story being told through the music. And take more of a pop band like Fun.: Even with the “oh-ooo-whoa-oh” hooks and the autotune overkill, a lot of their songs have a strong storytelling elements that gives you just enough to leave you filling in the blanks on your own. Someone like Todd Park Mohr mumbles through his lyrics while playing so effortlessly it almost seems as if he’s just making it all up as he goes. And all of this is to say nothing of prog-rock giants like Dream Theater and Neal Morse who write songs with such virtuosity and complexity that they’re more closely aligned with the structure of classical music than pop. I could go on for another three thousand words citing examples of songwriting that connects with me, but I’ll let these suffice. (You’re welcome.)
One of my best friends is a professional musician who’s performed all over the world and has had his compositions turn up in television shows and Disney theme park showcases. Every few years I’ll throw out the idea of us trying to come up with something and we talk about it some, but it never goes beyond that because I keep hitting the same block: If we did write a song, who would ever hear it? What’s the point of saying something if nobody will ever hear you say it? And yeah, I know the response some people might have to that question would be along the lines of writing the song for the sake of the challenge -- climb the mountain just because it’s there. But don’t the people who climb the mountain want to tell others about the experience? I feel I almost trip over myself with excitement whenever someone asks me if they can read one of my manuscripts. Even if I decided long ago that I won’t ask people to read something I’ve written (click here if you’re curious about the reasons why), I rarely write something just to keep it to myself. Take this post -- even if only a few dozen people wind up ever reading it over time, it’s out there for the whole Internet to find and I wouldn’t publish it here if I wasn’t okay with that.
So as for writing a song? I have too much respect for the process of songwriting and the people who do it well to even try. I know my wheelhouse. Why try to make a point in four minutes when you can do it in 70,000 words?
Around the same time a friend of mine gave me a CD from a band her husband had been in years ago; I’d put a picture on Facebook that reminded her of one of the songs and the album cover so she brought me a copy. I played through it a few times, knowing those songs had once been important enough to someone to write, learn, practice, record, and share them. This is very much what I feel like at the end of a manuscript. Knowing that I hope people who read my writing will direct some time and considerable thought into it, I was going to do the same thing. The recording had a distinct garage/bar band quality and the drums really jumped out of the mix (being a drummer I tend to notice that) but there was a lot about it I liked, particularly in the playing. I’m still not entirely sure what all of the songs are about (which I’d argue isn’t always a bad thing), but I can respect they each have a cohesive musical/lyrical quality that the guys in this band put some work into achieving.
Which kind of explains why I can’t see myself ever really tackling songwriting. A song needs both the words and the music. I play drums, and on a grading scale of people who know how to play drums but won’t ever get paid to do it, I’m probably a B- drummer in my rare best moments. I used to play piano and I’m confident I could teach myself most of the way back to the modest level of proficiency I once had, but that isn’t enough to write a song. I love guitar and would like to learn it someday, but even if I did and learned enough to try writing songs, where would I go from there? My singing voice is fine if I’m the only person in the car, but it’s not meant for performance. Would I start a band and play the drums? Be the lyric-writing Neil Peart of the group? I don’t see myself putting together the kind of pop ditties that have a good beat you can dance to, so the bar-and-party circuit would be out. So where’s the reason to try and express myself with that kind of economy, especially if I don’t have the ability to create the music to accompany the emotion I would be trying to capture?
If I ever did try writing a song I’d aim for the direction of the music that matters to me, and songwriting is a key element in much of the music I’m drawn to. To name a few.... Let’s start with The Airborne Toxic Event, since I listened to them almost all day today: Most of their songs are infused with so much raw emotion they just break me in half every time I hear them. Or take Bruce Hornsby, or Mumford and Sons: So many of their songs travel the breadth of a novel, with at least half of the story being told through the music. And take more of a pop band like Fun.: Even with the “oh-ooo-whoa-oh” hooks and the autotune overkill, a lot of their songs have a strong storytelling elements that gives you just enough to leave you filling in the blanks on your own. Someone like Todd Park Mohr mumbles through his lyrics while playing so effortlessly it almost seems as if he’s just making it all up as he goes. And all of this is to say nothing of prog-rock giants like Dream Theater and Neal Morse who write songs with such virtuosity and complexity that they’re more closely aligned with the structure of classical music than pop. I could go on for another three thousand words citing examples of songwriting that connects with me, but I’ll let these suffice. (You’re welcome.)
One of my best friends is a professional musician who’s performed all over the world and has had his compositions turn up in television shows and Disney theme park showcases. Every few years I’ll throw out the idea of us trying to come up with something and we talk about it some, but it never goes beyond that because I keep hitting the same block: If we did write a song, who would ever hear it? What’s the point of saying something if nobody will ever hear you say it? And yeah, I know the response some people might have to that question would be along the lines of writing the song for the sake of the challenge -- climb the mountain just because it’s there. But don’t the people who climb the mountain want to tell others about the experience? I feel I almost trip over myself with excitement whenever someone asks me if they can read one of my manuscripts. Even if I decided long ago that I won’t ask people to read something I’ve written (click here if you’re curious about the reasons why), I rarely write something just to keep it to myself. Take this post -- even if only a few dozen people wind up ever reading it over time, it’s out there for the whole Internet to find and I wouldn’t publish it here if I wasn’t okay with that.
So as for writing a song? I have too much respect for the process of songwriting and the people who do it well to even try. I know my wheelhouse. Why try to make a point in four minutes when you can do it in 70,000 words?
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Day 26: Colliding Worlds and The Shadow Self
Not so long ago I had a party at my house with a couple dozen members of my very close extended family. There was some awareness of this party with the people in my school life, and for a time I considered widening the invitation to include some of the co-workers I would have wanted there. After all, many of my relatives hadn’t seen my house before or hadn’t seen it since the redecorating I’d done last summer, and the same could be said for many of my colleagues -- so why not just mix them all together in one big group? Ultimately I decided not to for two main reasons: First off I had a lot of family on the way, and space was going to become limited in a hurry if many more people showed up. Secondly, I wasn’t sure I could reconcile the idea of bringing together two groups that could potentially have such disparate perceptions of who I am. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been any kind of a problem in the end, but just the idea of having that collision of worlds on deck gave me some pause.
One of the podcasts I listen to is called “Stuff to Blow Your Mind.” It’s produced by the same parent company as “Stuff You Should Know” but focuses on topics based more around harder science instead of general knowledge. The hosts are less engaging than Josh and Chuck from SYSK (one is even slightly obnoxious) but the topics are often fascinating. Earlier in the year they had an episode that resonated with me called “Undercover Actors and The Shadow Self,” which raised the philosophical question: Is there such a thing as a real you?
This wasn’t one of those unanswerable meditative thought experiments like “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “How many live albums can Iron Maiden possibly release?” Instead it was more about how all of us construct varying projections of what we define as self depending on the interactions we experience. This particular episode caught my attention because it explored an idea I’ve occasionally wondered about going back to when I was seventeen years old.
I was chosen to participate in some kind of North Suburban honor band in my senior year of high school hosted by a college in the area. One of my best friends was also chosen. She and I drove down together both days of the event and spent any free time we had together since we were the only two people from our school there. I remember looking at the other attendees filling up the cafeteria during one lunch break and commenting that since nobody there knew anything about either of us, we could have invented completely new personalities for the weekend and no one there would have known the difference. We joked awhile about who our alternate selves would be before finally deciding we probably couldn’t pull it off because the people we were at our cores would eventually re-emerge.
But after listening to The Shadow Self episode and living a few decades beyond seventeen, I wonder if that would have been true. I think the idea of self is a tenuous, malleable concept. We all have different masks we wear in different environments. I know that the self I project can change drastically depending on what situation I find myself in or who I’m talking with. Conversations with my parents are slightly different than they are with my brother-in-law or my sister, and again with my nephews, and again when everyone is together. Many colleagues I work with daily who only know me on a surface level as someone who takes what I do pretty seriously might be shocked to see how animated and ridiculous I can be when I’m with students. I know I modify who I am if I’m taking with kids, or parents, or co-workers I don’t know as well compared to co-workers who are friends. I’ll talk to the receptionist in the dentist’s office one way and will be slightly different when talking to the woman who has cut my hair for the last five years. I feel a tonal change in what I project even at the grocery store, all depending on which cashier winds up helping me.
I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve seen it from the other side as well. I can think of one woman in particular I worked with not long ago; she always projected the embodiment of professionalism and cordiality and we got along just fine but didn’t interact much outside of professional contact. I remember one small group meeting we were both in, and as soon as it ended and she stood up to walk away with someone else, another side of her came out so suddenly it was as if a completely different person was inhabiting her. She didn’t do anything wrong or inappropriate, but It was such an abrupt change that I had a moment of “Blink” awareness that immediately made me more guarded around her. Fair? Probably not. But in my defense it wasn’t a conscious decision; I’d seen that our interaction up to that point had been done from behind a kind of mask, and I discovered the person I thought I was getting to know well was only who she was allowing me to perceive. For someone who doesn’t always trust easily, that glimpse behind the curtain was all it took to raise my defenses. I know I don’t share everything about myself with everyone either, but I hope that I’m less obvious about it than that.
How much of who we display represents the person we are at our core? With so many self projections rotating throughout a typical day, is it even that easy to recognize who that core self is? Or is it the case that there really isn’t any core other than a blend of these many adaptive facets? What is it you are allowing people to see and know about you in any situation? For example: If you’re reading this you likely found it through a social networking link. When you signed up to join that network, you were given the options of sharing several types of information about yourself: Your history, your professional or education background, your personal preferences, the people in your life, and even what images you’d want other people to see. If you’re at all like me, you put a great deal of thought into what you wanted to share and what things about yourself you wanted to maintain as private, not to mention how widely you wanted that information to be available throughout the network. Do you let everyone know everything, or are there layers? How carefully do you consider what you say in the comments you write and how they might portray you to other people? Is your online profile a true representation of your actual self, or is it closer to being a character you’ve created? Take Facebook for example, since that’s probably how most people found their way here: What do you have for your profile picture right now? What ideas that you might not have even been aware of influenced why you chose that specific image to represent you, if you’re even in it?
For me, I’d estimate most of my interactions boil down to about half self and half construct. I look over my Facebook profile and think of how carefully I considered the information I share. I think about my interactions in a typical day and how my personality seems to adapt to whatever situation I’m in. I think of the deep and open conversations I can have with people I know well and trust, and how there are still people around whom I’ll protect that kind of vulnerability.
I’m still not sure where I meant to go with all of this even now as I’m wrapping it all up, but I think it still fits in with the overall theme of so many of these marathon-month posts. Maybe shaking off some of the inertia needed to keep exploring life involves being more aware when the chances to drop the masks come around, and then gradually but consciously taking advantage of them.
Or maybe I just like writing about things that make me sound deep and using big words. Which would really just be another mask altogether, wouldn’t it?
One of the podcasts I listen to is called “Stuff to Blow Your Mind.” It’s produced by the same parent company as “Stuff You Should Know” but focuses on topics based more around harder science instead of general knowledge. The hosts are less engaging than Josh and Chuck from SYSK (one is even slightly obnoxious) but the topics are often fascinating. Earlier in the year they had an episode that resonated with me called “Undercover Actors and The Shadow Self,” which raised the philosophical question: Is there such a thing as a real you?
This wasn’t one of those unanswerable meditative thought experiments like “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “How many live albums can Iron Maiden possibly release?” Instead it was more about how all of us construct varying projections of what we define as self depending on the interactions we experience. This particular episode caught my attention because it explored an idea I’ve occasionally wondered about going back to when I was seventeen years old.
I was chosen to participate in some kind of North Suburban honor band in my senior year of high school hosted by a college in the area. One of my best friends was also chosen. She and I drove down together both days of the event and spent any free time we had together since we were the only two people from our school there. I remember looking at the other attendees filling up the cafeteria during one lunch break and commenting that since nobody there knew anything about either of us, we could have invented completely new personalities for the weekend and no one there would have known the difference. We joked awhile about who our alternate selves would be before finally deciding we probably couldn’t pull it off because the people we were at our cores would eventually re-emerge.
But after listening to The Shadow Self episode and living a few decades beyond seventeen, I wonder if that would have been true. I think the idea of self is a tenuous, malleable concept. We all have different masks we wear in different environments. I know that the self I project can change drastically depending on what situation I find myself in or who I’m talking with. Conversations with my parents are slightly different than they are with my brother-in-law or my sister, and again with my nephews, and again when everyone is together. Many colleagues I work with daily who only know me on a surface level as someone who takes what I do pretty seriously might be shocked to see how animated and ridiculous I can be when I’m with students. I know I modify who I am if I’m taking with kids, or parents, or co-workers I don’t know as well compared to co-workers who are friends. I’ll talk to the receptionist in the dentist’s office one way and will be slightly different when talking to the woman who has cut my hair for the last five years. I feel a tonal change in what I project even at the grocery store, all depending on which cashier winds up helping me.
I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve seen it from the other side as well. I can think of one woman in particular I worked with not long ago; she always projected the embodiment of professionalism and cordiality and we got along just fine but didn’t interact much outside of professional contact. I remember one small group meeting we were both in, and as soon as it ended and she stood up to walk away with someone else, another side of her came out so suddenly it was as if a completely different person was inhabiting her. She didn’t do anything wrong or inappropriate, but It was such an abrupt change that I had a moment of “Blink” awareness that immediately made me more guarded around her. Fair? Probably not. But in my defense it wasn’t a conscious decision; I’d seen that our interaction up to that point had been done from behind a kind of mask, and I discovered the person I thought I was getting to know well was only who she was allowing me to perceive. For someone who doesn’t always trust easily, that glimpse behind the curtain was all it took to raise my defenses. I know I don’t share everything about myself with everyone either, but I hope that I’m less obvious about it than that.
How much of who we display represents the person we are at our core? With so many self projections rotating throughout a typical day, is it even that easy to recognize who that core self is? Or is it the case that there really isn’t any core other than a blend of these many adaptive facets? What is it you are allowing people to see and know about you in any situation? For example: If you’re reading this you likely found it through a social networking link. When you signed up to join that network, you were given the options of sharing several types of information about yourself: Your history, your professional or education background, your personal preferences, the people in your life, and even what images you’d want other people to see. If you’re at all like me, you put a great deal of thought into what you wanted to share and what things about yourself you wanted to maintain as private, not to mention how widely you wanted that information to be available throughout the network. Do you let everyone know everything, or are there layers? How carefully do you consider what you say in the comments you write and how they might portray you to other people? Is your online profile a true representation of your actual self, or is it closer to being a character you’ve created? Take Facebook for example, since that’s probably how most people found their way here: What do you have for your profile picture right now? What ideas that you might not have even been aware of influenced why you chose that specific image to represent you, if you’re even in it?
For me, I’d estimate most of my interactions boil down to about half self and half construct. I look over my Facebook profile and think of how carefully I considered the information I share. I think about my interactions in a typical day and how my personality seems to adapt to whatever situation I’m in. I think of the deep and open conversations I can have with people I know well and trust, and how there are still people around whom I’ll protect that kind of vulnerability.
I’m still not sure where I meant to go with all of this even now as I’m wrapping it all up, but I think it still fits in with the overall theme of so many of these marathon-month posts. Maybe shaking off some of the inertia needed to keep exploring life involves being more aware when the chances to drop the masks come around, and then gradually but consciously taking advantage of them.
Or maybe I just like writing about things that make me sound deep and using big words. Which would really just be another mask altogether, wouldn’t it?
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Day 25
Yep, I'm only calling this one Day 25 because I honestly don't have a better title. I had a feeling it was going to come sooner or later during this month-long posting marathon, but today I find I've hit the wall. I've nearly spent an hour now wandering around trying to think of what I'm going to write about and nothing is there. I had a few moments when half an idea showed up and I sat down by the keyboard to see where it would go, and I couldn't even get a coherent opening line started. I literally -- and I'm using that word correctly here -- tried eight or nine different topics and/or opening lines before finally admitting that today would be the day I only rode my bike to the end of the driveway and back because the six inches of snow on the ground was in the way.
I've got enough topics lined up to finish the rest of the month but none of them felt right for today. Or some are too significant for me to spend the Saturday of a holiday weekend working on because I know hardly anyone will see them, and I feel they deserve a shot at a wider audience.
But it does remind me of something that has been right in my face all month: Writing is HARD WORK. And that hard work is exactly what how I plan to spend a great deal of my actual summer vacation this year. Days like this one when the well is dryer than usual make me wonder why.
I feel like I should tell a joke or something at least, but I don't even have one of those. Oh well. Coming back stronger tomorrow....
I've got enough topics lined up to finish the rest of the month but none of them felt right for today. Or some are too significant for me to spend the Saturday of a holiday weekend working on because I know hardly anyone will see them, and I feel they deserve a shot at a wider audience.
But it does remind me of something that has been right in my face all month: Writing is HARD WORK. And that hard work is exactly what how I plan to spend a great deal of my actual summer vacation this year. Days like this one when the well is dryer than usual make me wonder why.
I feel like I should tell a joke or something at least, but I don't even have one of those. Oh well. Coming back stronger tomorrow....
Friday, May 24, 2013
Day 24: The First Five Months
Another music post today. I’d intended Summer Vacation to be much more music-centric back in the beginning, but I tend to shy away from those types of posts now because they seem to get less of a reaction. (See how I didn't say anything about music in the post title? If you were duped into clicking the link anyway, my plan worked!) But I figured since nobody is legally obligated to read any of this, and since there have been a couple of people throughout the years who’ve told me later about how I’d introduced them to an artist they didn’t know about, I figure that’s enough reason to continue. So tonight I’ve got a list of my Top 10 albums from 2013 so far, with a brief description of why they made the list. In order of addition to the iTunes library:
*“Driving Toward the Daylight” by Joe Bonamassa. Joe is my biggest discovery of recent. Once a child prodigy of a blues guitarist, he’s matured into a truly impressive musician. He plays a mixture of blue covers and original songs that largely stay true to what people would traditionally think of as blues music but with a heavy infusion of guitar hero rock noise. In addition to his guitar playing, he’s also a pretty darn good singer. I first found him in the rock supergroup Black Country Communion and quickly got pulled in by his playing enough to buy one of his live solo albums. It took me some time to get into it because I’ve never been big on traditional blues, but the live version of his song “Mountain Time” got my attention and I haven’t looked back. This album was the first download of 2013, and the first of his studio albums I bought. Just as much bluesy rock as blues music, although after becoming a fan of his I’m beginning to develop more of an appreciation for blues.
*“All the Wars” by Pineapple Thief. No matter what other types of music I wind up sampling and exploring, a big part of me is always going to drift back to a prog-rock nerd. The complex songwriting, the composition and the virtuosity of the players is usually all it takes to win me over. I found this band by following a chain of “other albums customers have bought” while browsing iTunes and decided the band had a weird enough name they were worth giving a shot.
*“Welcome to Oblivion” by How to Destroy Angels. Kind of an inflammatory band name, but since the driving force behind it is the same guy who was essentially Nine Inch Nails all on his own it isn’t surprising. Dark, moody and electronic with a strong female voice. Pretty cool stuff.
“Dead Sara” by the band of the same name. They were the opening act for Muse when I saw them back in March. Usually the opening act is kind of a joke and the name of the band sure set them up to be one, but I thought their set was interesting enough to preview and then buy the album and it turned out to be one I really like. Very much like a hard rock Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. The live show was okay at best, so I was surprised to find out how much I wound up liking this one.
*“An Acoustic Evening Live at the Vienna Opera House” by Joe Bonamassa. Joe blew me away with his playing on an electric guitar, but this album really raised the bar. It highlights exactly how strong of a singer he is and how versatile of a guitarist he is -- not every player can pull off switching between electric and acoustic and have both sound like what he usually plays. I actually wound up getting this as a Mother’s Day gift after my mom heard a few songs from it at my house and liked it. It’s calm and melodic, and perfect to listen to on a day where you don’t have anything to think about than just being and letting the time comfortably pass by.
*“Sloe Gin” by Joe Bonamassa. I bought this soon after the acoustic one when I read a review of how it was more acoustic-driven than some of his other studio work. It’s actually a pretty solid rock album with acoustic touches to it, so it kind of has the best of both worlds.
*“Such Hot Blood” by the Airborne Toxic Event. This is the third studio album from band I’ve discovered in just the past couple of years. The band is competent and musically interesting, but the songwriting, particularly the lyrics are so literate and layered with subtext it’s hard for me to not be impressed. My one nitpick is how they rely too heavily on some of the alternative music tropes, like repeating lines over and over to build a chorus. This guy has had his heart broken several times over and he is not at all shy about it. You can hear the pain in some of his singing coming from a very real place.
*“Here’s Willy Moon” by Willy Moon. Do you remember that iPod shuffle commercial with all the colorful little iPods bouncing around and multiplying to this song that sounded like an odd hybrid of some kind of old-school soul song set to an overproduced hip-hop beat? I really dug that song -- I’m usually a pushover for percussion-driven songs like that. When I saw the album I figured the rest of it would sound the same way, and it did. Kind of a weird combination, but it works for me.
*“Love Lust Faith + Dreams” by 30 Seconds to Mars. The first two albums by the band were interesting by not great, but the third had some musically thematic quality running through all of the songs that really resonated with me. I don’t know if this one will connect as much as that one did, but so after just a couple of listens I’m really liking it.
*“Seesaw” by Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa. Beth Hart is a singer that Joe has now collaborated with on two albums. The first one was more straight blues with something of an updated sound, while this one has an added horn section that opens it up to something sounding almost like big band music. It’s not exactly blues, or big band, or rock, and it’s nowhere near as obvious as something like the Brian Setzer Orchestra, but the understated guitar playing serves as a great foil for Beth Hart’s voice. She actually cameoed on the first JB live album I bought; their live version of “I’ll Take Care of You” is all the proof anyone would ever need that these two work well together.
And that’s it for tonight’s token music post. Not many days left in May, and there are still a couple of heavy topics I want to get to before the month runs out. Stay tuned....
*“Driving Toward the Daylight” by Joe Bonamassa. Joe is my biggest discovery of recent. Once a child prodigy of a blues guitarist, he’s matured into a truly impressive musician. He plays a mixture of blue covers and original songs that largely stay true to what people would traditionally think of as blues music but with a heavy infusion of guitar hero rock noise. In addition to his guitar playing, he’s also a pretty darn good singer. I first found him in the rock supergroup Black Country Communion and quickly got pulled in by his playing enough to buy one of his live solo albums. It took me some time to get into it because I’ve never been big on traditional blues, but the live version of his song “Mountain Time” got my attention and I haven’t looked back. This album was the first download of 2013, and the first of his studio albums I bought. Just as much bluesy rock as blues music, although after becoming a fan of his I’m beginning to develop more of an appreciation for blues.
*“All the Wars” by Pineapple Thief. No matter what other types of music I wind up sampling and exploring, a big part of me is always going to drift back to a prog-rock nerd. The complex songwriting, the composition and the virtuosity of the players is usually all it takes to win me over. I found this band by following a chain of “other albums customers have bought” while browsing iTunes and decided the band had a weird enough name they were worth giving a shot.
*“Welcome to Oblivion” by How to Destroy Angels. Kind of an inflammatory band name, but since the driving force behind it is the same guy who was essentially Nine Inch Nails all on his own it isn’t surprising. Dark, moody and electronic with a strong female voice. Pretty cool stuff.
“Dead Sara” by the band of the same name. They were the opening act for Muse when I saw them back in March. Usually the opening act is kind of a joke and the name of the band sure set them up to be one, but I thought their set was interesting enough to preview and then buy the album and it turned out to be one I really like. Very much like a hard rock Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. The live show was okay at best, so I was surprised to find out how much I wound up liking this one.
*“An Acoustic Evening Live at the Vienna Opera House” by Joe Bonamassa. Joe blew me away with his playing on an electric guitar, but this album really raised the bar. It highlights exactly how strong of a singer he is and how versatile of a guitarist he is -- not every player can pull off switching between electric and acoustic and have both sound like what he usually plays. I actually wound up getting this as a Mother’s Day gift after my mom heard a few songs from it at my house and liked it. It’s calm and melodic, and perfect to listen to on a day where you don’t have anything to think about than just being and letting the time comfortably pass by.
*“Sloe Gin” by Joe Bonamassa. I bought this soon after the acoustic one when I read a review of how it was more acoustic-driven than some of his other studio work. It’s actually a pretty solid rock album with acoustic touches to it, so it kind of has the best of both worlds.
*“Such Hot Blood” by the Airborne Toxic Event. This is the third studio album from band I’ve discovered in just the past couple of years. The band is competent and musically interesting, but the songwriting, particularly the lyrics are so literate and layered with subtext it’s hard for me to not be impressed. My one nitpick is how they rely too heavily on some of the alternative music tropes, like repeating lines over and over to build a chorus. This guy has had his heart broken several times over and he is not at all shy about it. You can hear the pain in some of his singing coming from a very real place.
*“Here’s Willy Moon” by Willy Moon. Do you remember that iPod shuffle commercial with all the colorful little iPods bouncing around and multiplying to this song that sounded like an odd hybrid of some kind of old-school soul song set to an overproduced hip-hop beat? I really dug that song -- I’m usually a pushover for percussion-driven songs like that. When I saw the album I figured the rest of it would sound the same way, and it did. Kind of a weird combination, but it works for me.
*“Love Lust Faith + Dreams” by 30 Seconds to Mars. The first two albums by the band were interesting by not great, but the third had some musically thematic quality running through all of the songs that really resonated with me. I don’t know if this one will connect as much as that one did, but so after just a couple of listens I’m really liking it.
*“Seesaw” by Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa. Beth Hart is a singer that Joe has now collaborated with on two albums. The first one was more straight blues with something of an updated sound, while this one has an added horn section that opens it up to something sounding almost like big band music. It’s not exactly blues, or big band, or rock, and it’s nowhere near as obvious as something like the Brian Setzer Orchestra, but the understated guitar playing serves as a great foil for Beth Hart’s voice. She actually cameoed on the first JB live album I bought; their live version of “I’ll Take Care of You” is all the proof anyone would ever need that these two work well together.
And that’s it for tonight’s token music post. Not many days left in May, and there are still a couple of heavy topics I want to get to before the month runs out. Stay tuned....
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Day 23: Writing Tomorrow's Footnotes
I had to go to the dentist after school tonight to get a filling replaced. It wasn’t such a big deal since I don’t get too freaked about dental work; when I had a root canal done a few years ago I asked them how long it would take, created an iPod playlist for the duration ahead of time then settled back to listen to my music. But for some reason tonight I was on the verge of a raging stress headache by the time I arrived at the dentist’s office, and being lowered back into the “we’re about to jam pointy metal things into your mouth” position didn’t help. After about five minutes reclined that way, I realized I was gripping the ends of the arm rests kind of tightly. And out of nowhere I thought of my sister Erin. She had to go through some pretty intense radiation during her cancer treatment. I’m going to dig out something from one of her mass e-mails during that time and let her explain where I’m going with this:
“While getting radiated, while lying on the table, my arms have to be above my head and I have to grab a bar. The key to relaxing? Don’t grab the bar. That’s where the head game wins. If you grab the bar it’s too easy to be tense. That makes your muscles hurt and the cancer wins. The trick? Hold the bar. Consciously make the effort to just hold the bar in your hands. To focus on keeping your fingers unclenched. You breathe easier, your mind wanders to your peaceful place. You feel calmer. You win.”
Now granted, a dinky little filling is nothing compared to radiation. But thinking back to this I loosened my grip on the arm rests, just setting my palms on their ends and letting my fingers cradle around them. And wouldn’t you know, it worked. My filling took about forty minutes, and by the time it was over I felt like I was waking from a nap. Until I found myself in the dentist chair tonight it had been years since I’d thought of how she saw that radiation bar as her nemesis during treatment, and how I’d told her to give it a defiant squeeze at the end of her last session just to prove to it she had won.
It can be easy to talk to people about my sister and the experience my family had with her cancer and just lump everything about it under one massive heading, especially with the people in my life who never knew her. But of course the truth is much more complex than that. So many events come along in life that can dominate our thoughts, our emotions, and our time while they’re in our present. But almost always these things find some resolution and eventually come to an end. Life moves on without them as new challenges or celebrations emerge, and before you even realize it’s happened that thing that was surrounding every waking minute of your thoughts has been reduced to something you can summarize and dismiss within half a sentence.
If I say something about my townhouse now, or my apartment, most people would hear that and think of those places as the residential stepping stones that led me to where I am now. But living in those places represents a full third of my life. If I say something about moving out of the townhouse, I can now encapsulate into one thought the time it took to sell it, and the remodeling I did in preparation, and the constant cleaning, and the dozens of times I had to scramble home after school to get my dog out of the way if I had a showing, the reasons I decided to move in the first place, and the euphoria of finding the house that would become my new home. When I sold my townhouse -- just a footnote now. The year I spent subbing; when my sister was sick; teaching first grade; college; the Seattle trip; Spencer. I could list dozens of dismissive titles like these that represent periods of my life that during their times were the driving forces behind everything else happening to me.
It’s no secret that I spend way more time thinking and reflecting than any three people combined rightfully should. But tonight I’m not advocating the idea of spending a lot of time digging through the footnotes we all have representing whole chapters of our lives. Instead I believe it’s just as important to take time to realize we’re all writing tomorrow’s footnotes every day.
I just know for myself that I try to remember that whatever challenges I have to endure will likely someday become little more than toss-away memories I might roll my eyes about, and the good times that eventually run their course will be the things I can look back on and smile about.
“While getting radiated, while lying on the table, my arms have to be above my head and I have to grab a bar. The key to relaxing? Don’t grab the bar. That’s where the head game wins. If you grab the bar it’s too easy to be tense. That makes your muscles hurt and the cancer wins. The trick? Hold the bar. Consciously make the effort to just hold the bar in your hands. To focus on keeping your fingers unclenched. You breathe easier, your mind wanders to your peaceful place. You feel calmer. You win.”
Now granted, a dinky little filling is nothing compared to radiation. But thinking back to this I loosened my grip on the arm rests, just setting my palms on their ends and letting my fingers cradle around them. And wouldn’t you know, it worked. My filling took about forty minutes, and by the time it was over I felt like I was waking from a nap. Until I found myself in the dentist chair tonight it had been years since I’d thought of how she saw that radiation bar as her nemesis during treatment, and how I’d told her to give it a defiant squeeze at the end of her last session just to prove to it she had won.
It can be easy to talk to people about my sister and the experience my family had with her cancer and just lump everything about it under one massive heading, especially with the people in my life who never knew her. But of course the truth is much more complex than that. So many events come along in life that can dominate our thoughts, our emotions, and our time while they’re in our present. But almost always these things find some resolution and eventually come to an end. Life moves on without them as new challenges or celebrations emerge, and before you even realize it’s happened that thing that was surrounding every waking minute of your thoughts has been reduced to something you can summarize and dismiss within half a sentence.
If I say something about my townhouse now, or my apartment, most people would hear that and think of those places as the residential stepping stones that led me to where I am now. But living in those places represents a full third of my life. If I say something about moving out of the townhouse, I can now encapsulate into one thought the time it took to sell it, and the remodeling I did in preparation, and the constant cleaning, and the dozens of times I had to scramble home after school to get my dog out of the way if I had a showing, the reasons I decided to move in the first place, and the euphoria of finding the house that would become my new home. When I sold my townhouse -- just a footnote now. The year I spent subbing; when my sister was sick; teaching first grade; college; the Seattle trip; Spencer. I could list dozens of dismissive titles like these that represent periods of my life that during their times were the driving forces behind everything else happening to me.
It’s no secret that I spend way more time thinking and reflecting than any three people combined rightfully should. But tonight I’m not advocating the idea of spending a lot of time digging through the footnotes we all have representing whole chapters of our lives. Instead I believe it’s just as important to take time to realize we’re all writing tomorrow’s footnotes every day.
I just know for myself that I try to remember that whatever challenges I have to endure will likely someday become little more than toss-away memories I might roll my eyes about, and the good times that eventually run their course will be the things I can look back on and smile about.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Day 22: Another Big Block of Cheese
Today I will resist once again explaining where the Big Block of Cheese Day reference come from, and why a post like this would be more suitably named after a Take Out the Trash Day reference, and why I prefer the Big Block of Cheese Day reference even if it's more appropriate. Instead I'm just diving into tonight's list of mini-topics:
**My phone is suffering from old age. Smartphone generations seem to be about two years and mine is going on three. I'll spare you all of the nitpicky details, but suffice it to say that by the time all of my contacts just randomly disappear on a restart for the second time and need to be re-synched from back up and individual ringtones reassigned, it's a good sign that it's time to think about upgrading. I'd be ready to take care of it right now if I hadn't been reading rumors about an iPhone 5S coming out this summer, so now I'm playing the hunch that it will be worth waiting. I think I can make it as long as my phone doesn't completely give out; I don't make a lot of calls with it, and I could probably get by without texts for awhile if I had to. Other than that most of my phone use comes from a frustrating amount of Candy Crush Saga and almost too many games of Words with Friends to manage, including one particular game that has now lasted longer than most of my adult relationships. Can I hold out for a few more weeks until the news breaks and the announcement hits? I hope.....
**My birthday yesterday was a good one. One of my hallway neighbors sabotaged my room with a door sign and a banner above my desk, then also gave me a shiny birthday sticker to wear. One of her second graders gave me a bracelet made of small and colorful vinyl-covered paper clips that I'm proud to say I wore the whole day. My students covered both of my white boards with dry-erase graffiti, and two cards group signed by two different classes appeared on my desk during the day. There was also a certain Marilyn Monroe quality to the day, which, now that I think about it, was really the second time that's happened in some manner over the years. But the highlight of No. 45 was one particular gift, the kind that would seem completely meaningless and oddly inappropriate were it now for the layers context that made it so awesome. Plus it brought the first time in a long time I can remember someone bouncing in excitement as I was about to open a gift, as well as having to close my eyes before I could open it.
**Now that my birthday is out of the way, I'm starting to notice a lot of routine events popping up that signal the end of the school year being close. The last of my classes finished off their last round of computer-lab testing today (except for a few die-hards who aren't done yet), which is always a big springtime milestone. Memorial Day is coming up in a few days, which will be the first day off we've had from school in something like seven or eight weeks. We had our Track and Field Day info-dump meeting today, which is when we all start crossing our fingers that the weather is going to cooperate when the day arrives. I'm finding myself with more restless evenings than usual because I don't have to invest the same amount of energy into school work as I typically do earlier in the year, and start refocusing my teacher brain toward closure instead of progress. In just the past couple of days I had a conversation with my teaching partner evolve into a planning session where we more or less organized our schedules for the rest of the school year. I'd really like to start thinking ahead to summer break, but I'm finding it hard to do that just yet. There are still a few loose ends about this year that need to be securely tied off before I'll allow myself to think that way.
**Seems like outside of my posting marathon, I've got my editor hat on more than my writer hat these days. Another teacher just today asked me to look over some writing work from one of her talented students just to offer an opinion, which I'm happy to do. I don't miss teaching writing out of a prescribed curriculum so much, but I do sometimes miss the discussions about writing when one of those kids with some real game comes along who seems to really get it. But right now I'm also giving a first look to a manuscript one of my writer cousins just finished. We've always been good about helping each other out back and forth. I'm glad I can help him out, but it's also a big help for me. Summer is almost here after all, which for me means some concentrated writing time. I think there are few better ways to prepare for more writing than forcing myself to look at someone else's work analytically. That, along with this daily posting business, is starting to get my writer brain stirred up.
**Summer plans, math and weather all came up as topics when I went fishing for ideas tonight on Facebook before I lazied my way into another Big Block of Cheese post. I think I'm going to table those for now and see if anything bigger can come from them, now that I only have about another week of daily posts to go. Because I'm telling you, the writing of the posts isn't really that big of a deal. But a new stinkin' idea EVERY DAY? That's no ride around the lake.
I promise something real tomorrow....
**My phone is suffering from old age. Smartphone generations seem to be about two years and mine is going on three. I'll spare you all of the nitpicky details, but suffice it to say that by the time all of my contacts just randomly disappear on a restart for the second time and need to be re-synched from back up and individual ringtones reassigned, it's a good sign that it's time to think about upgrading. I'd be ready to take care of it right now if I hadn't been reading rumors about an iPhone 5S coming out this summer, so now I'm playing the hunch that it will be worth waiting. I think I can make it as long as my phone doesn't completely give out; I don't make a lot of calls with it, and I could probably get by without texts for awhile if I had to. Other than that most of my phone use comes from a frustrating amount of Candy Crush Saga and almost too many games of Words with Friends to manage, including one particular game that has now lasted longer than most of my adult relationships. Can I hold out for a few more weeks until the news breaks and the announcement hits? I hope.....
**My birthday yesterday was a good one. One of my hallway neighbors sabotaged my room with a door sign and a banner above my desk, then also gave me a shiny birthday sticker to wear. One of her second graders gave me a bracelet made of small and colorful vinyl-covered paper clips that I'm proud to say I wore the whole day. My students covered both of my white boards with dry-erase graffiti, and two cards group signed by two different classes appeared on my desk during the day. There was also a certain Marilyn Monroe quality to the day, which, now that I think about it, was really the second time that's happened in some manner over the years. But the highlight of No. 45 was one particular gift, the kind that would seem completely meaningless and oddly inappropriate were it now for the layers context that made it so awesome. Plus it brought the first time in a long time I can remember someone bouncing in excitement as I was about to open a gift, as well as having to close my eyes before I could open it.
**Now that my birthday is out of the way, I'm starting to notice a lot of routine events popping up that signal the end of the school year being close. The last of my classes finished off their last round of computer-lab testing today (except for a few die-hards who aren't done yet), which is always a big springtime milestone. Memorial Day is coming up in a few days, which will be the first day off we've had from school in something like seven or eight weeks. We had our Track and Field Day info-dump meeting today, which is when we all start crossing our fingers that the weather is going to cooperate when the day arrives. I'm finding myself with more restless evenings than usual because I don't have to invest the same amount of energy into school work as I typically do earlier in the year, and start refocusing my teacher brain toward closure instead of progress. In just the past couple of days I had a conversation with my teaching partner evolve into a planning session where we more or less organized our schedules for the rest of the school year. I'd really like to start thinking ahead to summer break, but I'm finding it hard to do that just yet. There are still a few loose ends about this year that need to be securely tied off before I'll allow myself to think that way.
**Seems like outside of my posting marathon, I've got my editor hat on more than my writer hat these days. Another teacher just today asked me to look over some writing work from one of her talented students just to offer an opinion, which I'm happy to do. I don't miss teaching writing out of a prescribed curriculum so much, but I do sometimes miss the discussions about writing when one of those kids with some real game comes along who seems to really get it. But right now I'm also giving a first look to a manuscript one of my writer cousins just finished. We've always been good about helping each other out back and forth. I'm glad I can help him out, but it's also a big help for me. Summer is almost here after all, which for me means some concentrated writing time. I think there are few better ways to prepare for more writing than forcing myself to look at someone else's work analytically. That, along with this daily posting business, is starting to get my writer brain stirred up.
**Summer plans, math and weather all came up as topics when I went fishing for ideas tonight on Facebook before I lazied my way into another Big Block of Cheese post. I think I'm going to table those for now and see if anything bigger can come from them, now that I only have about another week of daily posts to go. Because I'm telling you, the writing of the posts isn't really that big of a deal. But a new stinkin' idea EVERY DAY? That's no ride around the lake.
I promise something real tomorrow....
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Day 21: An Examined Life
I know someone who turned thirty-two recently. It’s a pretty uneventful number as far as ages go, but it felt like a significant one for me when I was growing up. I’d done the math early on to realize that when the year 2000 came along and we’d be living in the science fiction world of the future (or at least what I speculated that would be back in the 1970s), that would be the year I turned thirty-two. I wondered what my life would be like by then, in terms of the state of the world, what wonders the future had in store, and what the adult life I had built for myself would be like. The only real model I had to guide my speculation was my father, so I looked at his life and worked out where he had been at that age, thinking that as his son it was reasonable to guess my life wouldn’t be dramatically different. At age thirty-two, according to my best estimates, he’d been married for a few years. He had a house, two very young children, and even if he had an amazingly long commute to get to it, he had a job that let him take care of his family. I think he even had a dog or three.
When I turned thirty-two the story was quite different. I had the job, I had the house, and I had the ultimate dog. But some of those other relatively humble milestones had evaded me. So it got me wondering: Was I contrasting my life against a standard I’d set before I had any right to reasonably know better? Was I putting together a life based on things that made me happy and fulfilled, or was I following the path of least resistance? Were my actions outweighing my inaction, or was it the other way around? As the wise poet Neil Peart once wrote, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” How many of my choices were made because I let the inertia of life choose for me? Catching up to the present day means age thirty-two was some time ago. How much of who I am now at forty-five is the person I’ve always assumed I’d become?
I promise all of this reflection isn’t coming from an unhappy or depressed place, and has nothing to do with getting older. I just think birthdays are good natural times to reflect, and forty-five will be one birthday that I remember fondly for several reasons. I don’t mind getting older at all. As I’m reminded now with each birthday, every year I turn older is a year my sister won’t get to experience. But that also begs the question: What am I choosing to do with these bonus years that she’ll never see? Am I using the time I’ve been given to become the person I want to be? And if I examine things and discover that in some respects the answer is no, what needs to be different? What would be missing? And exactly when would I plan on doing something about it?
I feel I’m in a pretty unique position to think about this, mainly because the life I lead gives me more time than most people my age for self-indulgent pondering. After all, I don’t have a family to take care of. When my friends and acquaintances update about their lives on Facebook, it usually revolves around things they do with their spouses and children, either showing extensive albums about landmark events or just sharing everyday snapshots meant to illustrate their happiness. Are they happier than I am because of that family element in their lives, or is it just a different type of happiness that I wonder about in a grass-is-always-greener kind of way? That all seems like the kind of life I should be immersed in at this age even though it got past me somehow. But how much of that would I really want?
And if I feel that at my rapidly advancing middle-age I’m still trying to figure out a lot of things, then how does that loosely-defined sense of self compare to what others see? Where exactly do I stand with my friends? Is there a proportional balance there or do I need them more than they need me? Or is it possible they need me more than I recognize? Do they see the curiosity I carry with me or would I be surprised to learn what they perceive? Is the life I’ve made what I’ve been steering toward without realizing I was doing it or has it all been accidental?
All kind of heavy stuff, I know. Even if there are points I’d never bring up on “Summer Vacation,” it can’t be said that I won’t shy away from letting others see the process. So now if you ever hear me saying something about how I’m “reflecting on things,” maybe you have a glimpse into just how absurdly deep that can go. I doubt anyone could force their way through reading all of this blah blah blah and come away from it thinking it’s any more ridiculous than I do myself. But the thing of it is, I also think it’s healthy. Leading an examined life doesn’t necessarily give me the answers I’m looking for, but it does help sort through the questions and narrow them down to the ones that matter.
So now another year of life is beginning and with it a whole world of possibility is about to open up, much of which is probably completely unknown to me right now. There’s really nothing I can do about it at this point except think about the roads ahead, decide which one I’d like to try and follow for a while, then start moving forward to see what’s around the bend. Who knows what the future holds.
When I turned thirty-two the story was quite different. I had the job, I had the house, and I had the ultimate dog. But some of those other relatively humble milestones had evaded me. So it got me wondering: Was I contrasting my life against a standard I’d set before I had any right to reasonably know better? Was I putting together a life based on things that made me happy and fulfilled, or was I following the path of least resistance? Were my actions outweighing my inaction, or was it the other way around? As the wise poet Neil Peart once wrote, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” How many of my choices were made because I let the inertia of life choose for me? Catching up to the present day means age thirty-two was some time ago. How much of who I am now at forty-five is the person I’ve always assumed I’d become?
I promise all of this reflection isn’t coming from an unhappy or depressed place, and has nothing to do with getting older. I just think birthdays are good natural times to reflect, and forty-five will be one birthday that I remember fondly for several reasons. I don’t mind getting older at all. As I’m reminded now with each birthday, every year I turn older is a year my sister won’t get to experience. But that also begs the question: What am I choosing to do with these bonus years that she’ll never see? Am I using the time I’ve been given to become the person I want to be? And if I examine things and discover that in some respects the answer is no, what needs to be different? What would be missing? And exactly when would I plan on doing something about it?
I feel I’m in a pretty unique position to think about this, mainly because the life I lead gives me more time than most people my age for self-indulgent pondering. After all, I don’t have a family to take care of. When my friends and acquaintances update about their lives on Facebook, it usually revolves around things they do with their spouses and children, either showing extensive albums about landmark events or just sharing everyday snapshots meant to illustrate their happiness. Are they happier than I am because of that family element in their lives, or is it just a different type of happiness that I wonder about in a grass-is-always-greener kind of way? That all seems like the kind of life I should be immersed in at this age even though it got past me somehow. But how much of that would I really want?
And if I feel that at my rapidly advancing middle-age I’m still trying to figure out a lot of things, then how does that loosely-defined sense of self compare to what others see? Where exactly do I stand with my friends? Is there a proportional balance there or do I need them more than they need me? Or is it possible they need me more than I recognize? Do they see the curiosity I carry with me or would I be surprised to learn what they perceive? Is the life I’ve made what I’ve been steering toward without realizing I was doing it or has it all been accidental?
All kind of heavy stuff, I know. Even if there are points I’d never bring up on “Summer Vacation,” it can’t be said that I won’t shy away from letting others see the process. So now if you ever hear me saying something about how I’m “reflecting on things,” maybe you have a glimpse into just how absurdly deep that can go. I doubt anyone could force their way through reading all of this blah blah blah and come away from it thinking it’s any more ridiculous than I do myself. But the thing of it is, I also think it’s healthy. Leading an examined life doesn’t necessarily give me the answers I’m looking for, but it does help sort through the questions and narrow them down to the ones that matter.
So now another year of life is beginning and with it a whole world of possibility is about to open up, much of which is probably completely unknown to me right now. There’s really nothing I can do about it at this point except think about the roads ahead, decide which one I’d like to try and follow for a while, then start moving forward to see what’s around the bend. Who knows what the future holds.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Day 20: Respecting Nature
A friend of mine used to live in Florida. Occasionally his city would find itself in the path of a hurricane, and the almost nonchalant attitude he had about it baffled me. He wouldn’t dismiss it as no big deal, but his point always was that hurricanes don’t take you by surprise. You know they’re coming because they’re all over the news. There’s time to board things up and tie things down and get out of town if necessary. In Florida, hurricanes are going to show up sooner or later. It’s just the ways things are. Compared to hurricanes he found tornadoes to be a lot more frightening because they just show up out of nowhere.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far about weather related problems. When I was a kid at summer camp I was about fifty yards away from an enormous tree when it was hit by lightning and exploded into irregular chunks of wood and splinters. My old townhouse lost some siding when a storm tore through one night, but compared to some of the damage even three miles away I’d gotten off easy. Another evening when I was very young a tornado warning was announced and my mother hustled the three of us kids and any number of dogs we had down to the basement to wait it out while our father was driving home from work in the middle of the storm. My younger sister, all of four years old, was ready to run outside with a Wiffle Ball bat to chase the tornado away until our dad got home and loudly slammed the garage door closed after parking his car, giving all of us quite a scare that we'd just had a touchdown in the front yard.
I find weather fascinating: the beauty of it, the power, the incomprehensibly massive system that keeps it all in motion. Too often I’m one of those chumps that sees a storm alert come on TV and then wanders outside for a better look. Maybe I wasn’t very observant as a kid, but I can count the number of times on one hand I remember even seeing hail come down back then. I thought it was so cool to see those little pieces of ice falling from the sky it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be damaging. Now here in the 21st century it’s just as common as not to have hail accompany a summer storm, particularly when a big one come though and trips all the alarms. But like I said, maybe it was back then too and I just didn’t notice.
But somehow I doubt that. Looking at all that’s happened in the world in just the past five or ten years that has somehow been weather related it’s hard to deny that things are changing. I’ll admit that I’m basing this on purely anecdotal evidence, but when entire cities are being wiped off the map by hurricanes? And unusually devastating tornadoes or storms like the one that tore through Oklahoma tonight are becoming more frequent? You can only choose to keep your head in the sand or recite cherry-picked facts about the longitudinally cyclical nature of climate patterns for so long.
I see a storm like the one in Oklahoma appear and I feel a surge of survivor guilt, thinking “Thank God that didn’t happen here.” And as the story develops after storms like this and the casualties grow and the totality of the devastation becomes more evident, I always think back to an argument I had with a student long ago, back in one of the years I was teaching science. This kid didn’t like science very much and one day questioned why she had to waste her time learning about it.
“You need to learn to respect nature,” I answered.
She smirked at me like I’d just fed her some granola-induced hippie mantra. “So we recycle, and pick up the litter, and take care of all the little animals?” she snarked. “That’s why we have to respect nature?”
“No,” I said, matter-of-factly. “You need to respect nature because nature has no respect for you.”
And the disturbing truth is that nature will win every time. We saw that clearly today, and the people struggling through the tragic aftermath in Oklahoma will be living with that truth for some time to come.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far about weather related problems. When I was a kid at summer camp I was about fifty yards away from an enormous tree when it was hit by lightning and exploded into irregular chunks of wood and splinters. My old townhouse lost some siding when a storm tore through one night, but compared to some of the damage even three miles away I’d gotten off easy. Another evening when I was very young a tornado warning was announced and my mother hustled the three of us kids and any number of dogs we had down to the basement to wait it out while our father was driving home from work in the middle of the storm. My younger sister, all of four years old, was ready to run outside with a Wiffle Ball bat to chase the tornado away until our dad got home and loudly slammed the garage door closed after parking his car, giving all of us quite a scare that we'd just had a touchdown in the front yard.
I find weather fascinating: the beauty of it, the power, the incomprehensibly massive system that keeps it all in motion. Too often I’m one of those chumps that sees a storm alert come on TV and then wanders outside for a better look. Maybe I wasn’t very observant as a kid, but I can count the number of times on one hand I remember even seeing hail come down back then. I thought it was so cool to see those little pieces of ice falling from the sky it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be damaging. Now here in the 21st century it’s just as common as not to have hail accompany a summer storm, particularly when a big one come though and trips all the alarms. But like I said, maybe it was back then too and I just didn’t notice.
But somehow I doubt that. Looking at all that’s happened in the world in just the past five or ten years that has somehow been weather related it’s hard to deny that things are changing. I’ll admit that I’m basing this on purely anecdotal evidence, but when entire cities are being wiped off the map by hurricanes? And unusually devastating tornadoes or storms like the one that tore through Oklahoma tonight are becoming more frequent? You can only choose to keep your head in the sand or recite cherry-picked facts about the longitudinally cyclical nature of climate patterns for so long.
I see a storm like the one in Oklahoma appear and I feel a surge of survivor guilt, thinking “Thank God that didn’t happen here.” And as the story develops after storms like this and the casualties grow and the totality of the devastation becomes more evident, I always think back to an argument I had with a student long ago, back in one of the years I was teaching science. This kid didn’t like science very much and one day questioned why she had to waste her time learning about it.
“You need to learn to respect nature,” I answered.
She smirked at me like I’d just fed her some granola-induced hippie mantra. “So we recycle, and pick up the litter, and take care of all the little animals?” she snarked. “That’s why we have to respect nature?”
“No,” I said, matter-of-factly. “You need to respect nature because nature has no respect for you.”
And the disturbing truth is that nature will win every time. We saw that clearly today, and the people struggling through the tragic aftermath in Oklahoma will be living with that truth for some time to come.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Day 19: Living in the 21st Century
When I was a kid, people talked to each other. If you wanted to see your family or your friends, you had to go to them, they had to come to you, or you had to go to the same place.
When I got older, we talked on the phone. If you needed your parents to come and pick you up from some activity, you had to call them. If you wanted to talk to your friends but didn’t live close by, it was easier to pick up the phone and call and talk for a few hours.
In college, most of my close friends lived within a few miles of me. Our lives and schedules had us crossing paths several times in a typical week. It was great, but most college friendships were fated to be temporary. Someone changes jobs, classes end, someone moves or graduates and the ties are cut. There were still some friendships you held onto, including those precious few that had been there for most of your life: the friends attending different schools in different cities or states, the cousins starting their own families and figuring out the first steps of actual adulthood. At least in my experience, a lot of handwritten letters were exchanged during that time, because none of us wanted to pay for the long distance phone calls unless it was necessary and because e-mail was still something only scientists were using.
When I began working, the only way to stay in touch with friends at school was to once again seek them out and talk to them, or maybe schedule times to get together and visit. If you needed to tell someone something, you wrote a note and put it in their mailbox in the office or left it on their desk if they weren’t there when you went to see them. Once we had e-mail at school, that all changed. People exchanged messages while following their own sets of personal writing conventions and voices, which often led to misunderstandings that wouldn’t have happened with the less convenient face-to-face conversation, but sometimes could fester enough to change a relationship between people, even just a little. And it all led to a bit more personal disconnect.
I had my first e-mail address in 1995 and had no idea what to do with it. I signed up to join an online service (R.I.P., eWorld), and began reaching out to communicate with total strangers, sharing ideas and opinions on message boards, pretending that chat rooms were legitimate substitutions for human interaction, and even playing with the earliest versions of instant messaging. There was a two-way street to this for me: I only know one of the best real-world friends I’ve ever had because of chat rooms and instant messages, and I also stopped talking to one of my sisters less because a few minutes of online chat saved us the time of catching up some other, more meaningful way. Because of these short bursts of virtual interaction, I didn’t notice the distance that was starting to grow between us.
I was never big on chat rooms outside of my early and brief curiosity, but instant messages became important to me, mostly as a way to keep in touch with people I knew who lived far away. And it didn’t make much for the mechanics of instant messaging on a computer to translate into text messaging on a cell phone. I held back from getting a cell phone as long as I could, and by the time I did text messaging was just on the cusp of blowing up. This was back when you had to tap the 1-9 keys multiple times to create the characters you wanted to use, before the luxury of sliding and touch screen keyboards. In the nearly three years since buying my first smart phone, the ratio of text messages I’ve sent to phone calls I’ve made has to be at least 50:1.
I’d argue that social networking has done more to break apart human interaction than enable it. When I login to Facebook, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 people on my friends list. Several of those people I see daily, if not weekly. Many I see a handful of times each year. Some I haven’t spoken to in a decade and it’s quite possible I never will again. But they are my Facebook friends because of whatever links us together, and because of social networking I’m able to stay in touch with what’s going on in their lives, or at least with what they choose to share with me. The funny thing is I’ve noticed that it’s more the rule than the exception that when information is put up on Facebook (or in text messages, or in whatever other types of virtual communication I haven’t kept up with because I’m sure there’s a lot), it rarely is ever addressed again in real life.
Take Summer Vacation here, for example. Some things I post about here are stupid or ridiculous and some are admittedly self-indulgent, but there are the rare occasions when some are deeply personal. And I’m not always someone who readily shares what’s deeply personal. But if I feel there’s something I really want to express, this seems like a good avenue for that. However, I know that a limited number of people are ever going to read whatever I write here. And maybe if I have someone or a particular audience in mind when I write something, there are no guarantees they are ever going to see it. But once I write what I need to write the need is purged, and unless the topic ever comes up in real life as a reference to something I write here (which is somewhere between rare and never), whatever thoughts or ideas I wanted to share will have, at least from my perspective, have been shared. It could be out for the whole Internet to see if they were enterprising enough to find it, but maybe the five people I wanted to see it never will. So I admit, I’m just as guilty as anyone else as taking advantage of virtual communication as an easier, more convenient, and potentially less risky way to open up.
I asked for a book at Christmas this past year about The Singularity. It’s a theory I’m fascinated with, about how technology is advancing so rapidly in the 21st century that in a matter of decades it will have evolved to a point where humanity and technology will become so interrelated it will be hard to tell where the technology ends and the person begins. When I think about how many of my students are walking around with cell phones in their pockets, it makes me wonder if such an idea is all that impossible.
When I got older, we talked on the phone. If you needed your parents to come and pick you up from some activity, you had to call them. If you wanted to talk to your friends but didn’t live close by, it was easier to pick up the phone and call and talk for a few hours.
In college, most of my close friends lived within a few miles of me. Our lives and schedules had us crossing paths several times in a typical week. It was great, but most college friendships were fated to be temporary. Someone changes jobs, classes end, someone moves or graduates and the ties are cut. There were still some friendships you held onto, including those precious few that had been there for most of your life: the friends attending different schools in different cities or states, the cousins starting their own families and figuring out the first steps of actual adulthood. At least in my experience, a lot of handwritten letters were exchanged during that time, because none of us wanted to pay for the long distance phone calls unless it was necessary and because e-mail was still something only scientists were using.
When I began working, the only way to stay in touch with friends at school was to once again seek them out and talk to them, or maybe schedule times to get together and visit. If you needed to tell someone something, you wrote a note and put it in their mailbox in the office or left it on their desk if they weren’t there when you went to see them. Once we had e-mail at school, that all changed. People exchanged messages while following their own sets of personal writing conventions and voices, which often led to misunderstandings that wouldn’t have happened with the less convenient face-to-face conversation, but sometimes could fester enough to change a relationship between people, even just a little. And it all led to a bit more personal disconnect.
I had my first e-mail address in 1995 and had no idea what to do with it. I signed up to join an online service (R.I.P., eWorld), and began reaching out to communicate with total strangers, sharing ideas and opinions on message boards, pretending that chat rooms were legitimate substitutions for human interaction, and even playing with the earliest versions of instant messaging. There was a two-way street to this for me: I only know one of the best real-world friends I’ve ever had because of chat rooms and instant messages, and I also stopped talking to one of my sisters less because a few minutes of online chat saved us the time of catching up some other, more meaningful way. Because of these short bursts of virtual interaction, I didn’t notice the distance that was starting to grow between us.
I was never big on chat rooms outside of my early and brief curiosity, but instant messages became important to me, mostly as a way to keep in touch with people I knew who lived far away. And it didn’t make much for the mechanics of instant messaging on a computer to translate into text messaging on a cell phone. I held back from getting a cell phone as long as I could, and by the time I did text messaging was just on the cusp of blowing up. This was back when you had to tap the 1-9 keys multiple times to create the characters you wanted to use, before the luxury of sliding and touch screen keyboards. In the nearly three years since buying my first smart phone, the ratio of text messages I’ve sent to phone calls I’ve made has to be at least 50:1.
I’d argue that social networking has done more to break apart human interaction than enable it. When I login to Facebook, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 people on my friends list. Several of those people I see daily, if not weekly. Many I see a handful of times each year. Some I haven’t spoken to in a decade and it’s quite possible I never will again. But they are my Facebook friends because of whatever links us together, and because of social networking I’m able to stay in touch with what’s going on in their lives, or at least with what they choose to share with me. The funny thing is I’ve noticed that it’s more the rule than the exception that when information is put up on Facebook (or in text messages, or in whatever other types of virtual communication I haven’t kept up with because I’m sure there’s a lot), it rarely is ever addressed again in real life.
Take Summer Vacation here, for example. Some things I post about here are stupid or ridiculous and some are admittedly self-indulgent, but there are the rare occasions when some are deeply personal. And I’m not always someone who readily shares what’s deeply personal. But if I feel there’s something I really want to express, this seems like a good avenue for that. However, I know that a limited number of people are ever going to read whatever I write here. And maybe if I have someone or a particular audience in mind when I write something, there are no guarantees they are ever going to see it. But once I write what I need to write the need is purged, and unless the topic ever comes up in real life as a reference to something I write here (which is somewhere between rare and never), whatever thoughts or ideas I wanted to share will have, at least from my perspective, have been shared. It could be out for the whole Internet to see if they were enterprising enough to find it, but maybe the five people I wanted to see it never will. So I admit, I’m just as guilty as anyone else as taking advantage of virtual communication as an easier, more convenient, and potentially less risky way to open up.
I asked for a book at Christmas this past year about The Singularity. It’s a theory I’m fascinated with, about how technology is advancing so rapidly in the 21st century that in a matter of decades it will have evolved to a point where humanity and technology will become so interrelated it will be hard to tell where the technology ends and the person begins. When I think about how many of my students are walking around with cell phones in their pockets, it makes me wonder if such an idea is all that impossible.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Day 18: The Now of the Good Old Days
The series finale of “The Office” was on just a few nights ago. It took a season or two before I became caught up in the show, but ultimately it was one of my favorites for a long time. I even kept watching after Michael Scott moved to Denver and the show became much less funny in the reinvention, because it was still capable of moments of greatness, even if they were much less frequent. (And the storyline about Jim and Pam’s marital strife surrounding “Athlead?"That was so obvious and artificial that it alone was enough to get me to take the show out of my DVR queue. Some pretty lazy writing there. Just saying.)
What makes the difference for me in whether or not I connect with a show is the characters. When you have several years to spend time getting to know about the lives of the characters involved in the story you’re experiencing, you form kind of relationship with them. And if the finale of the show resolves things in a way where people have to go their separate ways to bring the story to an end, it’s easy to have a sympathetic emotional response to that. It’s almost as if with all of the hugs and kisses and goodbyes and tears, the characters are reacting in proxy for us. A quote from the final scenes that stuck with me -- and with a great deal of the Internet as well, judging from the reaction it had -- was Andy saying during one of his interviews, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” That quote reminded me a lot of another quote that stuck with me from another favorite show of mine: “Cheers.” One day while sitting at the bar, Fraiser Crane (before he had his own show and became an insufferable windbag of a caricature) commented on how the old gang seemed to be going their separate ways and dug up some obscure poetic quote: “Oh, death in life, the days that are no more.” I’ve always liked that quote, but I liked Andy’s better. It both acknowledged that the good old days are something that can be beautiful and meaningful, and that it’s worth taking the time to notice this so you can appreciate them while they’re still happening.
I feel this perspective building around me right now as the school year is in its final days. It’s almost a presence and grows in intensity as it approaches. I’m lucky to say I can’t think of a single class I’ve ever been happy to send home at the end of a year, but of course it’s been harder to let some go than others. Even a class with an unusual number of challenges will have personalities in it that leave behind a real absence when they’re gone. I’ve had several students come through my class over the years that I knew I’d miss. The feelings fade after some time, but they never really disappear if they were important.
Of course it’s the same with adults too. Adult relationships are different because they usually evolve into something else instead of just ending abruptly. But sometimes situations change beyond what we’re able to control, and to some degree it’s going to hurt when one chapter closes off. Maybe that’s why those series finale episodes become so emotional. The characters we’ve been vicariously living through for so long are saying their goodbyes to us as much as they are to each other. We all have had our painful goodbyes to face, and its unfortunate that they usually aren't wrapped up as neatly as they are on television.
I think we almost have a responsibility to remind the people surrounding us what’s beautiful about our shared lives and about each other. As guarded of a person as I can easily be, I hope I’m not so guarded that my people don’t realize how important they are to me. Sitting here in my office with no one but the iMac to hold me accountable for what I might decide to write, it would be easy enough to just type my way through a list of friends and family and colleagues and be clear about their importance to me, and then hit the “Publish” button and live with whatever reaction might follow. But I can’t speak for how anyone else would feel about that, so it wouldn’t be fair.
Instead, I’ll just have to hope that whatever example I try to live by or whatever awkward attempts I make at demonstrating how I feel don’t go unnoticed. And when time brings along those moments when the everyday world is about to become the good old days, I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to appreciate it and just soak up as much as I can.
What makes the difference for me in whether or not I connect with a show is the characters. When you have several years to spend time getting to know about the lives of the characters involved in the story you’re experiencing, you form kind of relationship with them. And if the finale of the show resolves things in a way where people have to go their separate ways to bring the story to an end, it’s easy to have a sympathetic emotional response to that. It’s almost as if with all of the hugs and kisses and goodbyes and tears, the characters are reacting in proxy for us. A quote from the final scenes that stuck with me -- and with a great deal of the Internet as well, judging from the reaction it had -- was Andy saying during one of his interviews, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” That quote reminded me a lot of another quote that stuck with me from another favorite show of mine: “Cheers.” One day while sitting at the bar, Fraiser Crane (before he had his own show and became an insufferable windbag of a caricature) commented on how the old gang seemed to be going their separate ways and dug up some obscure poetic quote: “Oh, death in life, the days that are no more.” I’ve always liked that quote, but I liked Andy’s better. It both acknowledged that the good old days are something that can be beautiful and meaningful, and that it’s worth taking the time to notice this so you can appreciate them while they’re still happening.
I feel this perspective building around me right now as the school year is in its final days. It’s almost a presence and grows in intensity as it approaches. I’m lucky to say I can’t think of a single class I’ve ever been happy to send home at the end of a year, but of course it’s been harder to let some go than others. Even a class with an unusual number of challenges will have personalities in it that leave behind a real absence when they’re gone. I’ve had several students come through my class over the years that I knew I’d miss. The feelings fade after some time, but they never really disappear if they were important.
Of course it’s the same with adults too. Adult relationships are different because they usually evolve into something else instead of just ending abruptly. But sometimes situations change beyond what we’re able to control, and to some degree it’s going to hurt when one chapter closes off. Maybe that’s why those series finale episodes become so emotional. The characters we’ve been vicariously living through for so long are saying their goodbyes to us as much as they are to each other. We all have had our painful goodbyes to face, and its unfortunate that they usually aren't wrapped up as neatly as they are on television.
I think we almost have a responsibility to remind the people surrounding us what’s beautiful about our shared lives and about each other. As guarded of a person as I can easily be, I hope I’m not so guarded that my people don’t realize how important they are to me. Sitting here in my office with no one but the iMac to hold me accountable for what I might decide to write, it would be easy enough to just type my way through a list of friends and family and colleagues and be clear about their importance to me, and then hit the “Publish” button and live with whatever reaction might follow. But I can’t speak for how anyone else would feel about that, so it wouldn’t be fair.
Instead, I’ll just have to hope that whatever example I try to live by or whatever awkward attempts I make at demonstrating how I feel don’t go unnoticed. And when time brings along those moments when the everyday world is about to become the good old days, I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to appreciate it and just soak up as much as I can.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Day 17: How it All Began
I haven't done a Top 10 in awhile so I think it's about time for one. This morning I was listening to an episode of SYSK in which Josh and Chuck were talking about how music can provoke emotional responses. They each shared songs that bring back specific childhood memories whenever they heard them even today. I figured I could come up with at least ten songs like that, and it didn't take long at all. It was an interesting thing to reflect on and gave me some insight into what the origin story of my music obsession might have been. In no particular order:
1 - "I Was Made For Loving You" by Kiss. I got to know this song well while traveling across South Dakota to visit the Black Hills one summer. It was one of the songs on the mix tape my cousin John had recorded off the radio while listening to Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" show.
2 - "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow. For several years, "Barry Maniow Live!" was the closest thing to a rock/pop album we had in our house as kids. This song has a short little part that slips into a minor key I always thought was a little scary.
3 - "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" by Elton John & Kiki Dee. So much of my love of music happened under the influence of my cousins -- I started listening to "American Top 40" because they did, even though I was in 2nd grade and didn't know most of the songs. The show was four hours long, and there were many Sunday nights I would fall asleep with my small transistor radio resting on the pillow beside my ear.
4 - "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace. This was the opening song on a K-Tel album my sister bought, which she probably bought for this song, which was again influenced by my older cousins. And if you don't know what K-Tel albums are, sorry, but you haven't lived.
5 - Anything from the "Grease" soundtrack takes me back to the Elk Cinema.
6 - "Tragedy" by the Bee Gees. My mom bought the piano sheet music for this song and my younger sister loved singing along whenever someone would play it. I can still hear how she was just a little too sharp.
7 - "Cars" by Gary Numan. One word: Cheapskate. One more: Skateland. Enough said.
8 - "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner. This was song was on the set list the first time I saw my cousin Dan play with his band. I was amazed to see an actual drumset being set up in my aunt and uncle's back yard.
9 - "Earache My Eye" by Cheech and Chong. It was a great day if this song came on the A.M. radio during the school bus ride during first grade. Imagine how dangerous a bunch of parochial school kids would have felt to hear the word "butt" on the radio.
10 - "Kisses of Fire" by ABBA. My cousins also had me listening to ABBA in sixth grade. One of the girls in my class also did, and it was a weird little thing we bonded over because nobody else in our class thought ABBA was cool. I remember her breaking into song one day while we were working on an art project, just leaning over to the shy and awkward little boy next to her and singing, "Lay your head on my chest / so you hear / every beat of my heart."
He nearly died. I thought it was awesome.
1 - "I Was Made For Loving You" by Kiss. I got to know this song well while traveling across South Dakota to visit the Black Hills one summer. It was one of the songs on the mix tape my cousin John had recorded off the radio while listening to Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" show.
2 - "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow. For several years, "Barry Maniow Live!" was the closest thing to a rock/pop album we had in our house as kids. This song has a short little part that slips into a minor key I always thought was a little scary.
3 - "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" by Elton John & Kiki Dee. So much of my love of music happened under the influence of my cousins -- I started listening to "American Top 40" because they did, even though I was in 2nd grade and didn't know most of the songs. The show was four hours long, and there were many Sunday nights I would fall asleep with my small transistor radio resting on the pillow beside my ear.
4 - "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace. This was the opening song on a K-Tel album my sister bought, which she probably bought for this song, which was again influenced by my older cousins. And if you don't know what K-Tel albums are, sorry, but you haven't lived.
5 - Anything from the "Grease" soundtrack takes me back to the Elk Cinema.
6 - "Tragedy" by the Bee Gees. My mom bought the piano sheet music for this song and my younger sister loved singing along whenever someone would play it. I can still hear how she was just a little too sharp.
7 - "Cars" by Gary Numan. One word: Cheapskate. One more: Skateland. Enough said.
8 - "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner. This was song was on the set list the first time I saw my cousin Dan play with his band. I was amazed to see an actual drumset being set up in my aunt and uncle's back yard.
9 - "Earache My Eye" by Cheech and Chong. It was a great day if this song came on the A.M. radio during the school bus ride during first grade. Imagine how dangerous a bunch of parochial school kids would have felt to hear the word "butt" on the radio.
10 - "Kisses of Fire" by ABBA. My cousins also had me listening to ABBA in sixth grade. One of the girls in my class also did, and it was a weird little thing we bonded over because nobody else in our class thought ABBA was cool. I remember her breaking into song one day while we were working on an art project, just leaning over to the shy and awkward little boy next to her and singing, "Lay your head on my chest / so you hear / every beat of my heart."
He nearly died. I thought it was awesome.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Day 16: Q & A, Round One (?)
As I mentioned a couple of months ago, one of my manuscripts is being read to all three classes in my grade level right now. Surprisingly enough I’ve heard next to nothing about it from any of the students. Though maybe it shouldn't be surprising, because several of them have been passing around a different manuscript for most of the year and even though nobody has volunteered opinions about it (and I fight the urge to ask what they think), some apparently felt strongly enough that they talked their talent development teacher into giving it a look. I guess this means I shouldn’t automatically interpret a seemingly non-responsive audience to be unengaged. Which frankly is something I tend to do, even here: I’ll read the comments as they show up on Facebook, and I’ll check the hit count for a post when I login to publish the following post, and I’ll usually use those two metrics to decide if I feel like what I wrote connected with anyone or if it just sailed by unnoticed. Such are the bottomless insecurities of a writer.
So it was nice yesterday when one of my girls asked if I was going to do a Q & A session with the students about the manuscript (Following Infinity, for those who know it) when it was finished. I am planning to, partly for my benefit as I prepare to revise it this summer and partly for their benefit since it’s an unusual opportunity for elementary students to be able to question the author about a book they just experienced with fresh questions and perspectives. And since all of that happened in the same time window I was thinking through the list of questions I’d asked for last week, it seemed like a good introduction into today’s version of the same thing. If reading through these answers make anyone curious enough to ask more questions later, I’m perfectly willing to do another round. Frankly, it makes for an easy post idea during this thirty-one day marathon, the hardest part of which has been coming up with a new idea every day that I hope people are going to find at all interesting. So if you think of any more, shoot them my way and I’ll collect them for another post. PLEASE. Until then, here we go:
If money was no object, what job would you love to do? I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. I distinctly remember a conversation with my father when I was in college, where I told him my plan was to teach during the school year and try to write books in the summer. Of course my naive early-twenties self was pretty sure those books would be published, but that’s essentially what I wanted for a job and what I’m doing now. Minus the publishing part....
Favorite childhood toy? Probably my Han Solo Star Wars action figure who stayed in the rotation even after his head broke off. Retrospectively it seems like a sign of things to come, but whenever Erin and I would play Star Wars action figures we’d go forward in whatever storyline we had with my added subplot that Han Solo didn’t actually lose his head, but after some encounter with a bounty hunter his head had been rendered invisible, and it had to stay that way until they all caught up with that same bounty hunter and things could be made right again.
"...and Justice for All” or “Master of Puppets?” “Master of Puppets,” just because the rest of the band was still hazing Jason Newsted during the recording of “Justice” and the bass is almost nonexistent in the mix.
What’s your desert island beer? Don’t have one. I cannot stand the taste of alcohol. I’m less than a week away from forty-five years old and I’ve never even been close to drunk before. I’ve had people I work with make fun of me for grimacing if I eat a piece of some kind of fancy-pants candy that has sugar alcohol as an ingredient because it tastes so strong to me.
When was the last time you didn't have facial hair? I think it’s been about four years. I stopped shaving one year during spring break out of laziness and when I returned to school decided to let some of it continue growing out. One of my girls walked into the room that first morning back to school, saw me and said, “What... is that?” I told her I was curious to see what a beard would look like, so I decided to let it grow out. To which she replied, “Okay. Now you know. So get rid of it.”
Would you rather live in a world without cheese or a world without movies? I know could get used to living without cheese. There was a time regular soda pop was practically the only thing I ever drank, and I haven’t had enough to fill even one can in three years. If I could break that, I could could get used to giving up any food.
What are your must-have foods? Elaborate. This kind of spins off of the previous question, and it’s hard to answer since my idea of “must-have” food has changed so much after losing over fifty pounds and keeping almost all of it off for three years. I literally cannot think of any foods I would categorize as “must-have” since I’ve learned to live with moderated sacrifice. I’ll get a lot of take-out or sandwiches since I live close to a lot of restaurants, and since I live alone cooking feels like waste of my time. The small bit of cooking I do isn’t based on what foods I really, really want to eat but more on how quickly I can get it prepared because I’ve got better things to do. I know there are a lot of people who cook for a hobby or to relax (otherwise I don’t think Pinterest would exist), but I’m just not one of those people. Having said that, I’d probably my list of top 5 foods would go something like this: bacon, cheese dip from Acapulco restaurant (even though I know I could give it up to keep movies), crab legs, Buffalo Wild Wings boneless wings (either parmesan garlic, honey barbecue, or teriyaki), and... okay, seriously. I can’t think of a fifth.
What are you afraid of? Two things, mainly: Something really going wrong with my house that I wouldn’t know how to handle -- plumbing is a particular sore spot for me -- and discovering out of nowhere that I had some chronic disease that I couldn’t do anything about. Since we are currently in the middle of my least favorite week of the year, I’ll let you speculate where that particular fear came from.
If you were a baseball player, what song would you have them play when you came up to bat? “When They Come for Me” by Linkin Park.
What passions do you have other than writing? Here we have a good challenging one because I think passions is a really strong word. Obviously my job is at the top of the list: For better or for worse, I believe that being a teacher defines me more than anything else. And anyone who reads Summer Vacation even semi-regularly knows how important music is for me. Reading branches off of writing so they’re related but different, and it’s easy to become passionate about a particular book if it works on all the levels I need it to. If you asked my fifteen-year-old self he’d say video games, particularly games that are so complex and challenging that they activate the problem-solving center of my brain and don’t allow me to turn away. I have to qualify this though, by saying that even if I’ll admit to owning an XBox, I can honestly say that I can go months at a time without even thinking of turning it on. But summer is only a few weeks away....
What do you think of driverless automobiles? I can honestly say I’ve never taken the time to consider them before. I think I’d trust them more than some drivers I know and less than some others.
So there you go with the first and possibly only round, unless anyone thinks of other things they’re curious about or just wants to see how much they can mess with me. I might be running out of ideas by the end of the month, so bring it on.
So it was nice yesterday when one of my girls asked if I was going to do a Q & A session with the students about the manuscript (Following Infinity, for those who know it) when it was finished. I am planning to, partly for my benefit as I prepare to revise it this summer and partly for their benefit since it’s an unusual opportunity for elementary students to be able to question the author about a book they just experienced with fresh questions and perspectives. And since all of that happened in the same time window I was thinking through the list of questions I’d asked for last week, it seemed like a good introduction into today’s version of the same thing. If reading through these answers make anyone curious enough to ask more questions later, I’m perfectly willing to do another round. Frankly, it makes for an easy post idea during this thirty-one day marathon, the hardest part of which has been coming up with a new idea every day that I hope people are going to find at all interesting. So if you think of any more, shoot them my way and I’ll collect them for another post. PLEASE. Until then, here we go:
If money was no object, what job would you love to do? I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. I distinctly remember a conversation with my father when I was in college, where I told him my plan was to teach during the school year and try to write books in the summer. Of course my naive early-twenties self was pretty sure those books would be published, but that’s essentially what I wanted for a job and what I’m doing now. Minus the publishing part....
Favorite childhood toy? Probably my Han Solo Star Wars action figure who stayed in the rotation even after his head broke off. Retrospectively it seems like a sign of things to come, but whenever Erin and I would play Star Wars action figures we’d go forward in whatever storyline we had with my added subplot that Han Solo didn’t actually lose his head, but after some encounter with a bounty hunter his head had been rendered invisible, and it had to stay that way until they all caught up with that same bounty hunter and things could be made right again.
"...and Justice for All” or “Master of Puppets?” “Master of Puppets,” just because the rest of the band was still hazing Jason Newsted during the recording of “Justice” and the bass is almost nonexistent in the mix.
What’s your desert island beer? Don’t have one. I cannot stand the taste of alcohol. I’m less than a week away from forty-five years old and I’ve never even been close to drunk before. I’ve had people I work with make fun of me for grimacing if I eat a piece of some kind of fancy-pants candy that has sugar alcohol as an ingredient because it tastes so strong to me.
When was the last time you didn't have facial hair? I think it’s been about four years. I stopped shaving one year during spring break out of laziness and when I returned to school decided to let some of it continue growing out. One of my girls walked into the room that first morning back to school, saw me and said, “What... is that?” I told her I was curious to see what a beard would look like, so I decided to let it grow out. To which she replied, “Okay. Now you know. So get rid of it.”
Would you rather live in a world without cheese or a world without movies? I know could get used to living without cheese. There was a time regular soda pop was practically the only thing I ever drank, and I haven’t had enough to fill even one can in three years. If I could break that, I could could get used to giving up any food.
What are your must-have foods? Elaborate. This kind of spins off of the previous question, and it’s hard to answer since my idea of “must-have” food has changed so much after losing over fifty pounds and keeping almost all of it off for three years. I literally cannot think of any foods I would categorize as “must-have” since I’ve learned to live with moderated sacrifice. I’ll get a lot of take-out or sandwiches since I live close to a lot of restaurants, and since I live alone cooking feels like waste of my time. The small bit of cooking I do isn’t based on what foods I really, really want to eat but more on how quickly I can get it prepared because I’ve got better things to do. I know there are a lot of people who cook for a hobby or to relax (otherwise I don’t think Pinterest would exist), but I’m just not one of those people. Having said that, I’d probably my list of top 5 foods would go something like this: bacon, cheese dip from Acapulco restaurant (even though I know I could give it up to keep movies), crab legs, Buffalo Wild Wings boneless wings (either parmesan garlic, honey barbecue, or teriyaki), and... okay, seriously. I can’t think of a fifth.
What are you afraid of? Two things, mainly: Something really going wrong with my house that I wouldn’t know how to handle -- plumbing is a particular sore spot for me -- and discovering out of nowhere that I had some chronic disease that I couldn’t do anything about. Since we are currently in the middle of my least favorite week of the year, I’ll let you speculate where that particular fear came from.
If you were a baseball player, what song would you have them play when you came up to bat? “When They Come for Me” by Linkin Park.
What passions do you have other than writing? Here we have a good challenging one because I think passions is a really strong word. Obviously my job is at the top of the list: For better or for worse, I believe that being a teacher defines me more than anything else. And anyone who reads Summer Vacation even semi-regularly knows how important music is for me. Reading branches off of writing so they’re related but different, and it’s easy to become passionate about a particular book if it works on all the levels I need it to. If you asked my fifteen-year-old self he’d say video games, particularly games that are so complex and challenging that they activate the problem-solving center of my brain and don’t allow me to turn away. I have to qualify this though, by saying that even if I’ll admit to owning an XBox, I can honestly say that I can go months at a time without even thinking of turning it on. But summer is only a few weeks away....
What do you think of driverless automobiles? I can honestly say I’ve never taken the time to consider them before. I think I’d trust them more than some drivers I know and less than some others.
So there you go with the first and possibly only round, unless anyone thinks of other things they’re curious about or just wants to see how much they can mess with me. I might be running out of ideas by the end of the month, so bring it on.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Day 15: You Got Strobed
I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of catchphrases or “cool” words. Most catchphrases seem to come from TV shows, movies, commercials, or SNL skits, but the “cool” words are harder to pin down. I remember an old "Wayne’s World" skit in which Bruce Willis was playing the coolest kid at Wayne and Garth’s school, and every fall it was his unofficial job to come up with the new popular word for the year. It wouldn’t surprise me if that gag wasn’t far from the truth of how many of these slang terms come to be, especially with the way things evolve now between social networking and Internet shorthand. But sometimes they just happen. I know this because this past weekend while I was at my sister’s house celebrating Mother’s Day with our family, a new catchphrase was born.
I have three nephews. I’d imagine that any house with three boys living in it has a lot of goofy boy energy and nonsense going on, and since I didn’t grow up with any brothers my inner fifteen-year-old can easily get caught up in this. Some examples: For years I threatened to buy Nephew #3 a Barbie doll for either Christmas or his birthday, right up until Nephew #1 suggested that he beat me to the punch and buy me a Christmas Barbie first, which he did. At some birthday we had a cake made with two layers of different sizes. When Nephew #3 got a piece from the bottom layer I told him he had to eat Basement Cake, and he was not amused... but then a couple birthdays down the road my birthday cake was made up of two non-congruent layers, this time with the words “Basement Cake” clearly frosted onto the lower layer. If one of the boys comes up with what they think is a great joke to burn me with, it is always the second thing I'll hear when I walk in through the front door of their house (the first thing being a trio of excited dogs barking).
Nephew #3 is big on any chance he can get to take a shot at someone. He’s a good kid but he's also the youngest, so it’s kind of his responsibility to occasionally irritate the rest of us. His most common target is easily Nephew #2. Sometimes he’ll go after #2 because the music he likes “isn’t any good,” or the video games he plays “are stupid,” or if they aren’t stupid then he "sucks at them," or he plays a stupid instrument in band, or he got a B+ on something instead of an A.... I’m sure you get the idea. They’re both in middle school and only two years apart, so they’re at ages when they can switch from being best friends to mortal enemies between breaths. At this point #2 has fielded so many arguments and insults that he’s more or less immune to them now.
This past weekend while I was at their house to celebrate Mother’s Day with the whole family, #2 and #3 were tapping away at their phones when, for some reason I don’t remember but I’m sure it must have been both valid and critically important, #3 felt compelled to point out that the flashlight app on his phone was better than the one #2 had because of the faster strobe light. This news didn’t even phase #2 -- he either seemed perfectly happy with his flashlight app or he couldn’t care less about the taunt because he didn’t even acknowledge it. But I was amused. I rolled my eyes and pointed out to #3 just how weak of an argument he was making: “Really? You’re so out of things to irritate him about that you’re resorting to this? You’re making fun of his strobe light?” Then I announced that for the rest of our lives whenever #3 made up some weak argument to try and take #2 down a peg, I was going to point out how sad it was by saying to #2, “Oh, dude. You just got strobed.” The translation of this being “Did you notice how feeble your brother’s latest insult was?”
Throughout the rest of the night, the phrase “You got strobed” was used more than once, and not just by me. I think it’s got legs. I would encourage anyone reading this to somehow find a way to work it into conversation tomorrow if the opportunity presents itself. Let’s see if we can get a brand new catchphrase into circulation!
I have three nephews. I’d imagine that any house with three boys living in it has a lot of goofy boy energy and nonsense going on, and since I didn’t grow up with any brothers my inner fifteen-year-old can easily get caught up in this. Some examples: For years I threatened to buy Nephew #3 a Barbie doll for either Christmas or his birthday, right up until Nephew #1 suggested that he beat me to the punch and buy me a Christmas Barbie first, which he did. At some birthday we had a cake made with two layers of different sizes. When Nephew #3 got a piece from the bottom layer I told him he had to eat Basement Cake, and he was not amused... but then a couple birthdays down the road my birthday cake was made up of two non-congruent layers, this time with the words “Basement Cake” clearly frosted onto the lower layer. If one of the boys comes up with what they think is a great joke to burn me with, it is always the second thing I'll hear when I walk in through the front door of their house (the first thing being a trio of excited dogs barking).
Nephew #3 is big on any chance he can get to take a shot at someone. He’s a good kid but he's also the youngest, so it’s kind of his responsibility to occasionally irritate the rest of us. His most common target is easily Nephew #2. Sometimes he’ll go after #2 because the music he likes “isn’t any good,” or the video games he plays “are stupid,” or if they aren’t stupid then he "sucks at them," or he plays a stupid instrument in band, or he got a B+ on something instead of an A.... I’m sure you get the idea. They’re both in middle school and only two years apart, so they’re at ages when they can switch from being best friends to mortal enemies between breaths. At this point #2 has fielded so many arguments and insults that he’s more or less immune to them now.
This past weekend while I was at their house to celebrate Mother’s Day with the whole family, #2 and #3 were tapping away at their phones when, for some reason I don’t remember but I’m sure it must have been both valid and critically important, #3 felt compelled to point out that the flashlight app on his phone was better than the one #2 had because of the faster strobe light. This news didn’t even phase #2 -- he either seemed perfectly happy with his flashlight app or he couldn’t care less about the taunt because he didn’t even acknowledge it. But I was amused. I rolled my eyes and pointed out to #3 just how weak of an argument he was making: “Really? You’re so out of things to irritate him about that you’re resorting to this? You’re making fun of his strobe light?” Then I announced that for the rest of our lives whenever #3 made up some weak argument to try and take #2 down a peg, I was going to point out how sad it was by saying to #2, “Oh, dude. You just got strobed.” The translation of this being “Did you notice how feeble your brother’s latest insult was?”
Throughout the rest of the night, the phrase “You got strobed” was used more than once, and not just by me. I think it’s got legs. I would encourage anyone reading this to somehow find a way to work it into conversation tomorrow if the opportunity presents itself. Let’s see if we can get a brand new catchphrase into circulation!
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Day 14: The Longest Week
My younger sister Erin should be turning forty-two today. Our birthdays were separated by one week on the calendar so it was always a bond we shared. I used to see her birthday as the beginning of a countdown to mine. Now if there was one week out of the year I could choose to be knocked unconscious for and miss completely, this would be it. I hate it.
Which kind of grief do you think would be worse to live with: The pain of what you’ve lost or the pain of knowing what you’ll never have?
Which kind of grief do you think would be worse to live with: The pain of what you’ve lost or the pain of knowing what you’ll never have?
Monday, May 13, 2013
Day 13: My First Guest Writer!
Today is one of my favorite posts here on Summer Vacation since after many months of thinking how fun it would be to have someone write a guest post and even dropping occasional hints about it to see if anyone would take the bait, I finally have a guest writer who’s taken me up on the offer! Some of you know him very well, but I’m fairly sure that anyone who takes the time to click on the Summer Vacation Facebook links would be familiar enough with my other Facebook activity to recognize his name: Paul Carlson.
Some background context for those of you who only know of him though his unique combination of slightly off-the-wall commentary and particularly insightful perspectives: My cousin Paul is a handful of years older than I am and has lived in or around southern Arizona since I was in college. He stayed with my family for a time when I was in high school after finishing college and looking for employment in the Cities before deciding to go back for some more schooling and pursue the education degree that often seems inevitable for so many in our family. He’s now beginning to explore his options in education administration. (Better him than me, for so many reasons.)
Our shared history is too extensive and sublimely ridiculous to elaborate on here, so suffice it to say that we’re good friends beyond our blood ties. One of the things about 21st century social networking I enjoy the most is how it allows me to stay more connected with the people in my family like him that I don’t get to see as often.
Enough of my prefacing -- take it away, P.
********************
I have known Tom since way before he was a flesh-and-blood 15-year-old who may or may not have meditated on what his inner 3-year-old thought about his latest Matchbox car. We may have even had an argument or two about whose car that really was. We have always been and will always be cousins, and we share many points of connection, including an affinity for music which at times borders on obsession, an appreciation of exquisite descriptive writing, a tendency to embrace our sarcastic side, and some kind of strange metaphysical preoccupation with tacos.
Recently here Tom mentioned the inertia of life, and my mind went into cloisters. I looked up the word so I could be relatively certain that I knew more or less what it meant (the wishy-washy “relatively” and “more or less” were used because with Wikipedia, you can never be too sure, right?). Basically, it boils down to “keeping on doing what you’re doing”. So, inertia accompanied me on my usual 2.77-mile walk, as did my dog and Led Zeppelin, Edvard Grieg, Paul Simon, and a dozen other people. I don’t have any recollection of having taken any actual steps, but I must have, right?
Then, as it is wont to do, my mind took a leap (whether forward, backward, or sideways, who’s to know?) from the concept of inertia to the psychological phenomenon known as the empty nest syndrome. Today I find myself at T minus 104 days to the day the fledglings are scheduled to take wing. The youngest begins his undergraduate studies, and the eldest begins her graduate studies.
It is highly unlikely that I will acquire the syndrome (because I am much closer to the water-runs-off-my-back end of the personality spectrum than the uptight end). Still, I find myself thinking an inordinate amount about what will and what will not change after they are gone, which kind of brings us back full circle. Major changes in one’s lifestyle disrupt inertia like the walls change the path of the racquetball. Here is my Top Six list of things that will change after August 24th:
*I must bid a fond farewell to Robert Downey, Jr., Christian Bale, and Will Smith. (It’s either that or go to the movies by myself)
*I won’t be watching silly YouTube videos, except for the ones that my kids bring to my attention on Facebook.
*I won’t have to worry about getting punched, wrestled to the floor, or unobtrusively shoulder-bumped as I walk through my own house.
*I won’t be eating any more Takis (not that anyone ever forced one down my throat, but....)
*I won’t be joining in a chorus of primal screams whenever “Kashmir,” “United States of Eurasia,” or “Because” comes on the shuffle. It will fall to me alone to do all the testosterony bursts from now on.
*It will be much harder to foment discord between my offspring because one will be 300 miles away and the other will be 1200 miles away. I’d have to do it through a 3-way Skype session or some such.
And as for what will not change:
*Working 50+ hours a week
*English practice and garden/house projects with my wife
*Walking the dog
*NFL and March Madness
I don’t know . . . Maybe I should dig out the sax and try forming a band?
********************
Me again, with just a couple of points I need to respond to:
*I have to admit that at this point I’m a little burned out on tacos for awhile.
*I really liked the phrase “the inertia of life.” Was that me or was that you encapsulating the post? Either way it’s a good line, and at least in my head it’s kind of the thematic subtext to this “posting every day for a month” stretch.
*There is no rule that says you can’t go to movies by yourself. That’s how I do it most of the time. And as sad as it might seem to some people, that’s how I’m currently planning on celebrating my actual birthday.
*Thank you for introducing the word “testosterony” into the blog.
*Takis, Paul? Seriously? Seriously?
Some background context for those of you who only know of him though his unique combination of slightly off-the-wall commentary and particularly insightful perspectives: My cousin Paul is a handful of years older than I am and has lived in or around southern Arizona since I was in college. He stayed with my family for a time when I was in high school after finishing college and looking for employment in the Cities before deciding to go back for some more schooling and pursue the education degree that often seems inevitable for so many in our family. He’s now beginning to explore his options in education administration. (Better him than me, for so many reasons.)
Our shared history is too extensive and sublimely ridiculous to elaborate on here, so suffice it to say that we’re good friends beyond our blood ties. One of the things about 21st century social networking I enjoy the most is how it allows me to stay more connected with the people in my family like him that I don’t get to see as often.
Enough of my prefacing -- take it away, P.
********************
I have known Tom since way before he was a flesh-and-blood 15-year-old who may or may not have meditated on what his inner 3-year-old thought about his latest Matchbox car. We may have even had an argument or two about whose car that really was. We have always been and will always be cousins, and we share many points of connection, including an affinity for music which at times borders on obsession, an appreciation of exquisite descriptive writing, a tendency to embrace our sarcastic side, and some kind of strange metaphysical preoccupation with tacos.
Recently here Tom mentioned the inertia of life, and my mind went into cloisters. I looked up the word so I could be relatively certain that I knew more or less what it meant (the wishy-washy “relatively” and “more or less” were used because with Wikipedia, you can never be too sure, right?). Basically, it boils down to “keeping on doing what you’re doing”. So, inertia accompanied me on my usual 2.77-mile walk, as did my dog and Led Zeppelin, Edvard Grieg, Paul Simon, and a dozen other people. I don’t have any recollection of having taken any actual steps, but I must have, right?
Then, as it is wont to do, my mind took a leap (whether forward, backward, or sideways, who’s to know?) from the concept of inertia to the psychological phenomenon known as the empty nest syndrome. Today I find myself at T minus 104 days to the day the fledglings are scheduled to take wing. The youngest begins his undergraduate studies, and the eldest begins her graduate studies.
It is highly unlikely that I will acquire the syndrome (because I am much closer to the water-runs-off-my-back end of the personality spectrum than the uptight end). Still, I find myself thinking an inordinate amount about what will and what will not change after they are gone, which kind of brings us back full circle. Major changes in one’s lifestyle disrupt inertia like the walls change the path of the racquetball. Here is my Top Six list of things that will change after August 24th:
*I must bid a fond farewell to Robert Downey, Jr., Christian Bale, and Will Smith. (It’s either that or go to the movies by myself)
*I won’t be watching silly YouTube videos, except for the ones that my kids bring to my attention on Facebook.
*I won’t have to worry about getting punched, wrestled to the floor, or unobtrusively shoulder-bumped as I walk through my own house.
*I won’t be eating any more Takis (not that anyone ever forced one down my throat, but....)
*I won’t be joining in a chorus of primal screams whenever “Kashmir,” “United States of Eurasia,” or “Because” comes on the shuffle. It will fall to me alone to do all the testosterony bursts from now on.
*It will be much harder to foment discord between my offspring because one will be 300 miles away and the other will be 1200 miles away. I’d have to do it through a 3-way Skype session or some such.
And as for what will not change:
*Working 50+ hours a week
*English practice and garden/house projects with my wife
*Walking the dog
*NFL and March Madness
I don’t know . . . Maybe I should dig out the sax and try forming a band?
********************
Me again, with just a couple of points I need to respond to:
*I have to admit that at this point I’m a little burned out on tacos for awhile.
*I really liked the phrase “the inertia of life.” Was that me or was that you encapsulating the post? Either way it’s a good line, and at least in my head it’s kind of the thematic subtext to this “posting every day for a month” stretch.
*There is no rule that says you can’t go to movies by yourself. That’s how I do it most of the time. And as sad as it might seem to some people, that’s how I’m currently planning on celebrating my actual birthday.
*Thank you for introducing the word “testosterony” into the blog.
*Takis, Paul? Seriously? Seriously?
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Day 12: Mother's Day
I almost did my student teaching in the district where I work now. I’d been assigned to a fourth grade classroom at one of many elementary schools in the district and had gotten far enough into the process to visit the school and meet my cooperating teacher. A couple of weeks before the assignment was set to begin the college called all of us newbies for a pre-student teaching meeting, during which I first learned we were forbidden from completing our student teaching in a district if we had any relatives employed there. As both my mother and my cousin were.
At first I thought, “It’s a huge district. Nobody’s going to care. They have close to thirty elementary schools. That rule has to be in place for small rural districts with one elementary school or something like that. Nobody’s going to make any connections between us.” But since I was the same compulsive little rule follower back then that I still am now, I brought it to the attention of some professor, who replied with a wide-eyed stare and what I can only assume was a significant blood pressure spike. Long story short -- a different student had just dropped from the program and the spot at Snail Lake I took opened up and the rest is history.
But after I was hired in the district myself, it didn’t take more than a few months for me to learn my assumptions had been misguided. For the next several years I wouldn’t walk into any kind of district meeting, staff development session, or major event without encountering someone who knew my mother.
My last name isn’t terribly common. It’d be a different story if you traveled to Ireland, but over here there just aren’t a lot of us running around. In fact I learned in the past year that since all the male cousins on my father’s side have only fathered daughters, the pressure is really on me to carry on the family name... well, history will have to decide how that eventually works out. But if there are only two people with the same name in a school district of over three thousand teachers, and one of those people is close to thirty years older than the other, people start connecting the dots.
A lot of people knew we were mother and son when I started subbing since 80% of the jobs I got were at her school, not so coincidentally. But even after I got my first classroom (her school secretary pulled her out of a workshop week meeting so I could give her the news), I started to see just how widely networked she was. It was always nice to hear about these connections because it gave me a familiar anchor in a district so large that it may or may not cover the same square mileage as Rhode Island. I did eventually reach something of a tipping point where it seemed like people were starting to know me as an individual, but often that only lasted until somehow the dots were connected again.
And I never minded this. My mother was the biggest influence I had in not just becoming a teacher but also in evolving into the teacher I am now, and I’ve never been anything but proud to claim that. I knew well how loving and kind and patient she was as a mother -- trust me, I put that last descriptor to the test more than once -- but only when we began to share colleagues did I come to fully appreciate how widely respected she was for those same qualities that made her the mother she’s always been. Whenever someone made the connection between us -- whether it was a student, or an instructional coach, or a union officer, or a teacher, or a paraprofessional, or a principal, or a parent, or an associate superintendent -- whatever memories about her came up as they spoke to me were reflected on their faces with genuine respect and affection. It always gave me a reminder of how broad of a legacy and a standard I had to strive for.
It’s taken the better part of twenty years to reach the point where there are more people who hear my name and identify me as someone other than Tina’s son, but it’s really only happening because the generation ahead of me that knew her so well has been going through successive rounds of retirements in recent years. But you know what? It still happens anyway. Just a couple of months ago I was walking in the hallway to pick up my mail after lunch when a woman I didn’t know stopped me. She was in the building that day to complete some testing with one of my students and wanted to confirm the scheduling that had been set up in advance was still going to work. After we quickly settled that it would, she brought up that she’d known a woman at a different school with my name and wondered if we were related. I told her we were. And as she began telling me her Tina story, she smiled.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Thanks for setting the bar so high. I love you!
At first I thought, “It’s a huge district. Nobody’s going to care. They have close to thirty elementary schools. That rule has to be in place for small rural districts with one elementary school or something like that. Nobody’s going to make any connections between us.” But since I was the same compulsive little rule follower back then that I still am now, I brought it to the attention of some professor, who replied with a wide-eyed stare and what I can only assume was a significant blood pressure spike. Long story short -- a different student had just dropped from the program and the spot at Snail Lake I took opened up and the rest is history.
But after I was hired in the district myself, it didn’t take more than a few months for me to learn my assumptions had been misguided. For the next several years I wouldn’t walk into any kind of district meeting, staff development session, or major event without encountering someone who knew my mother.
My last name isn’t terribly common. It’d be a different story if you traveled to Ireland, but over here there just aren’t a lot of us running around. In fact I learned in the past year that since all the male cousins on my father’s side have only fathered daughters, the pressure is really on me to carry on the family name... well, history will have to decide how that eventually works out. But if there are only two people with the same name in a school district of over three thousand teachers, and one of those people is close to thirty years older than the other, people start connecting the dots.
A lot of people knew we were mother and son when I started subbing since 80% of the jobs I got were at her school, not so coincidentally. But even after I got my first classroom (her school secretary pulled her out of a workshop week meeting so I could give her the news), I started to see just how widely networked she was. It was always nice to hear about these connections because it gave me a familiar anchor in a district so large that it may or may not cover the same square mileage as Rhode Island. I did eventually reach something of a tipping point where it seemed like people were starting to know me as an individual, but often that only lasted until somehow the dots were connected again.
And I never minded this. My mother was the biggest influence I had in not just becoming a teacher but also in evolving into the teacher I am now, and I’ve never been anything but proud to claim that. I knew well how loving and kind and patient she was as a mother -- trust me, I put that last descriptor to the test more than once -- but only when we began to share colleagues did I come to fully appreciate how widely respected she was for those same qualities that made her the mother she’s always been. Whenever someone made the connection between us -- whether it was a student, or an instructional coach, or a union officer, or a teacher, or a paraprofessional, or a principal, or a parent, or an associate superintendent -- whatever memories about her came up as they spoke to me were reflected on their faces with genuine respect and affection. It always gave me a reminder of how broad of a legacy and a standard I had to strive for.
It’s taken the better part of twenty years to reach the point where there are more people who hear my name and identify me as someone other than Tina’s son, but it’s really only happening because the generation ahead of me that knew her so well has been going through successive rounds of retirements in recent years. But you know what? It still happens anyway. Just a couple of months ago I was walking in the hallway to pick up my mail after lunch when a woman I didn’t know stopped me. She was in the building that day to complete some testing with one of my students and wanted to confirm the scheduling that had been set up in advance was still going to work. After we quickly settled that it would, she brought up that she’d known a woman at a different school with my name and wondered if we were related. I told her we were. And as she began telling me her Tina story, she smiled.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Thanks for setting the bar so high. I love you!
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Day 11: The Three-Decade Differential
I turn forty-five in a couple of weeks. Most years my birthday is
something I have a hard time caring much about. I don’t mind getting
older at all; The way I figure it, every year I get older is a year my
sister Erin didn’t get to have. Our family birthday celebrations are low
key, usually on a weekend before or after the actual day depending on
when everyone’s schedules come together. There will be dinner, a few
presents, usually a cake, and that’s about the extent of it. If news of
my birthday is discovered by students somehow, there are a few who will
make cards or do other little things to celebrate it -- the year I
turned forty some of my girls "borrowed" my masking tape so they could
make giant tape-letters of my last name on their backs and walk around
like that, jumping into the correct order throughout the day to show off
their spelling skills on demand.
I’ve mentioned my inner fifteen-year-old occasionally here. The first time I realized I even had an inner fifteen-year-old was sometime in my thirties. I’d been living in my old townhouse a few years and decided the anemic artificial Christmas tree I’d been using just wasn’t getting the job done anymore. Since I don’t make a lot of decisions without first thinking about them from eight different directions, I had spent a few weeks thinking about exactly what kind of tree I’d want. One day while shopping at Target I wandered past the holiday decorations and saw something that had been brand new at the time: An L.E.D. Christmas tree, plugged in and lit up with a rainbow of colors lazily swirling after each other through the boughs. Part of me found it mesmerizing, part of me was a little embarrassed to be mesmerized. I finally decided to buy one, figuring that even if I wasn’t completely sold on the idea in that moment, I really owed that tree to the younger version of myself who would have been so pumped to know things like that were going to exist in his future that he would have started stashing away money at fifteen years old to make sure he could afford to buy one when the time came.
Now, acknowledging that I have a fifteen-year-old self doesn’t necessarily mean that I actively cater to his wants and needs. But there are certain things about the life I have that he’d be pretty okay with. A few examples:
*Knowing he would have a home office with a widescreen computer on the desktop, and that he only had to spin his chair ninety degrees to be sitting behind an electronic drum set would have had him seeking out people to high-five.
*He doesn’t have to scrimp and save his allowance to buy new cartridges for the Atari, but can buy a new XBox game if it’s just a weekend afternoon and he’s kind of bored.
*He doesn’t have to make mix tapes for his cheap generic Walkman, and has an embarrassing amount of music he can listen to pretty much anytime and anywhere. He can store thousands of songs on the phone in his pocket, for crying out loud.
*Which brings up another point: If he had any idea smartphones were coming... wow....
*He might not be thrilled to learn that about 30% of what’s left of his hair is gray, but it would be easier to accept it once he pieced together that he still had any hair at all past the age of thirty.
*He’d love going to movies pretty much any time he wanted. Living within six miles of close to forty movie screens would have been an embarrassment of riches after a childhood of being trapped halfway between the Elk Cinema and the Anoka Theater, each of which only showed one movie at a time and didn’t always switch them out very frequently.
*He’d be able to eat bacon whenever he wanted. That wouldn’t make it a good idea and it certainly isn’t the way things ended up happening, but he’d be very glad to know the option was always available.
*He’d be relieved to know that 80% of his adult life would see him dressing pretty much the same way he was back then. If someone removed the t-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans and shorts from his adult wardrobe, he’d have to do laundry a lot more frequently.
I could go on with some more examples, but I’d think this is enough to make that point that my life as it is today is something that would win the approval of many fifteen-year-olds. The thing of it is though, my inner fifteen-year-old would now be close to turning thirty. And since even that dopey kid was too introspective for his own good, he’d be at an age where he’d start wondering whether or not things were all going in the right direction, or if maybe there had been points along the way where he had just let the inertia of living catch up with him in such small incremental steps that he wouldn’t notice until it was almost on top of him.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about how dissatisfying my life is. I know full well how fortunate I am with the life I have and how blessed I am to share it with the people who populate it. But this coming week is my sister Erin’s birthday; my least favorite day of the year, but that's a different story. The last time we were able to celebrate Erin's birthday with her was nine years ago. I don’t know if there’s much about my life that’s changed in that time. It occurs to me that if she were still alive today, I think she’d recognize a lot of my 2013 life as the same collections of habits, routines, and preferences that defined it was before she got sick.
Which also has me thinking a lot these days: If this is all true, maybe there should be an expiration date on getting away with living like this. Maybe thirty years spent at fifteen is long enough. Maybe there's a point when it’s time to take proactive steps to outpace that inertia....
I’ve mentioned my inner fifteen-year-old occasionally here. The first time I realized I even had an inner fifteen-year-old was sometime in my thirties. I’d been living in my old townhouse a few years and decided the anemic artificial Christmas tree I’d been using just wasn’t getting the job done anymore. Since I don’t make a lot of decisions without first thinking about them from eight different directions, I had spent a few weeks thinking about exactly what kind of tree I’d want. One day while shopping at Target I wandered past the holiday decorations and saw something that had been brand new at the time: An L.E.D. Christmas tree, plugged in and lit up with a rainbow of colors lazily swirling after each other through the boughs. Part of me found it mesmerizing, part of me was a little embarrassed to be mesmerized. I finally decided to buy one, figuring that even if I wasn’t completely sold on the idea in that moment, I really owed that tree to the younger version of myself who would have been so pumped to know things like that were going to exist in his future that he would have started stashing away money at fifteen years old to make sure he could afford to buy one when the time came.
Now, acknowledging that I have a fifteen-year-old self doesn’t necessarily mean that I actively cater to his wants and needs. But there are certain things about the life I have that he’d be pretty okay with. A few examples:
*Knowing he would have a home office with a widescreen computer on the desktop, and that he only had to spin his chair ninety degrees to be sitting behind an electronic drum set would have had him seeking out people to high-five.
*He doesn’t have to scrimp and save his allowance to buy new cartridges for the Atari, but can buy a new XBox game if it’s just a weekend afternoon and he’s kind of bored.
*He doesn’t have to make mix tapes for his cheap generic Walkman, and has an embarrassing amount of music he can listen to pretty much anytime and anywhere. He can store thousands of songs on the phone in his pocket, for crying out loud.
*Which brings up another point: If he had any idea smartphones were coming... wow....
*He might not be thrilled to learn that about 30% of what’s left of his hair is gray, but it would be easier to accept it once he pieced together that he still had any hair at all past the age of thirty.
*He’d love going to movies pretty much any time he wanted. Living within six miles of close to forty movie screens would have been an embarrassment of riches after a childhood of being trapped halfway between the Elk Cinema and the Anoka Theater, each of which only showed one movie at a time and didn’t always switch them out very frequently.
*He’d be able to eat bacon whenever he wanted. That wouldn’t make it a good idea and it certainly isn’t the way things ended up happening, but he’d be very glad to know the option was always available.
*He’d be relieved to know that 80% of his adult life would see him dressing pretty much the same way he was back then. If someone removed the t-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans and shorts from his adult wardrobe, he’d have to do laundry a lot more frequently.
I could go on with some more examples, but I’d think this is enough to make that point that my life as it is today is something that would win the approval of many fifteen-year-olds. The thing of it is though, my inner fifteen-year-old would now be close to turning thirty. And since even that dopey kid was too introspective for his own good, he’d be at an age where he’d start wondering whether or not things were all going in the right direction, or if maybe there had been points along the way where he had just let the inertia of living catch up with him in such small incremental steps that he wouldn’t notice until it was almost on top of him.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about how dissatisfying my life is. I know full well how fortunate I am with the life I have and how blessed I am to share it with the people who populate it. But this coming week is my sister Erin’s birthday; my least favorite day of the year, but that's a different story. The last time we were able to celebrate Erin's birthday with her was nine years ago. I don’t know if there’s much about my life that’s changed in that time. It occurs to me that if she were still alive today, I think she’d recognize a lot of my 2013 life as the same collections of habits, routines, and preferences that defined it was before she got sick.
Which also has me thinking a lot these days: If this is all true, maybe there should be an expiration date on getting away with living like this. Maybe thirty years spent at fifteen is long enough. Maybe there's a point when it’s time to take proactive steps to outpace that inertia....
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