I am proud to announce that Small Town Living, an online magazine, has published one of my columns.
See it at: http://www.stliving.net/ST_Living_June_July_09_2.pdf
Scroll down to page 50.
May 31,2009
I am travelling this week, and sick. It seems I brought everything I needed for this trip except my immune system. Now, I don’t even remember where I might have left it.
Getting the kind of colds I get, the rough, knock you down kind, away from home is, if such a thing is possible, even more miserable than catching one at home. At least at home, I can be miserable in familiar surroundings.
What happens is that I don’t sleep. The first nights of any trip are restless. I am in strange bed and my body, no matter how tired I am, will not relax. Instead, my body stays awake and worries-about germs, about how the air quality is not right for comfortable sleeping. Mostly though, my body stays awake worrying about not sleeping. I think my body may need some counseling.
I am putting my hope in zinc. I have been sucking those little lozenges, the ones with just barely enough cherry flavoring to cover up the fact you are eating metal. They’re supposed to help you recover more quickly. The family member who gave them to me is a doctor.
“Is there any medical evidence, ” I asked,” to suggest these really work?”
“No,” she said. “But my mother swears by them.”
Well, at this point that’s good enough for me.
May 25, 2009
Part of the responsibility that comes with the power of being sovereign in the classroom is determining student grades. Passing out the occasional F is part of the job, an unpleasant part. Many professors, including me, will go to great lengths to avoid failing a student. Educators–at least the good ones–don’t go into this business because they enjoy seeing people fail.
But.
Once in a great while, a student comes along whose behavior is so insolent, so arrogant, so utterly dismissive of the welfare of his classmates, that he challenges even the most saintly professor not to take some joy in the justice of his failure.
I had one this time. My syllabus states that students are allowed to miss six classes. This student seems to have read this statement through a theory of literary interpretation so arcane only someone with the education and life experience of a college sophomore could comprehend it, and concluded, “Hey, I only have to go to class six times!”
If he attended more than that, I’d be surprised. I took attendance once or twice a week. Even without taking attendance daily , I still recorded more than 15 absences for him. Our department policy states any student who misses more than 25 percent of a course cannot receive credit. So, naturally, the kid failed.
Did the shock of an F on his grade card humble him? Cause him to reflect on his deficiencies as a student, as a man? No, it did not. Instead, it provoked him to email me demanding to know why attending class was necessary at all.
Here is the text of his first email, excluding only his name.
I’m just wondering how it is possible that i failed the class, since all of my speech grades were above 80%. I fit had to do with my attendance then i would like to know why it was necessary that i come to class.
Clearly, this was written by a busy, busy man. So busy, in fact, that not only can he not spare the time to come to class, he can’t spare time for pleasantries like a salutation or proper capitalization.
His argument, as far as I can tell, is that a man who can’t spare the split second necessary to depress the shift key, can’t be expected to attend my class.
Not only did this kid seek to have me justify, after the fact, why he was required to come to class, he sought to go over my head, and wrote to the Dean. Upon learning, shockingly, that the college administration believes students ought to attend class, he wrote to me again.
Here is an excerpt.
I understand that my attendance was the issue. I never recieved a warning report telling me to come to class, nor did you ever mention it to me. i also don’t understand why it was necessary for me to be there. I never recieved anything less than an 80% on any of my speeches, so obviously my understanding of how to give a speech, based on your
judgement, was above average. my attendance in class was not necessary tolearn the material, as evidenced by the grades i recieved. i do not understand why this is an issue. please explain.
Please explain. Pretty demanding for a kid who just failed his basic public speaking class.
Still, here’s my explanation. Perhaps, kid, perhaps the classroom experience is about more than you. Perhaps the goal of sitting in a room with other people and learning something, even if you think you know it already, is something other than maximizing your personal benefit. Perhaps the reason you need to be there is to benefit others, to lend your presence to the mix of personalities in your class from which flows a character-shaping experience called education. By skipping every class session except those where you had assigned speeches to give, you cheated your classmates and broke the contract you made with me and everyone else in the room.
So, you failed. You will have to repeat the class. See you next semester. If you show up.
May 22, 2009
Every once in a while, I see a film that so deeply affects me it is sure to have lasting influence in the way I see the world. These cinematic works stuffed with raw emotional power reach down to the heart and wrench from it a little more compassion, a little more patience, a little more humanity and leave as better than we were.
She’s the Man is not one of those films. The 2006 Amanda Bynes vehicle was cliched and corny. Still, when I saw it earlier this week, I relished it.
There is a part of me, a small part, that loves movies targeted at 12-year-old girls. The bright colors, the snappy soundtrack, the plucky heroine determined to live her dreams all get to me and leave me feeling just a little bit giddy.
The day after I saw this particular film, I couldn’t shake the sense of carefree enthusiasm for life it engendered. The feeling is very different from the one that dominated teen movies of the eighties with their moody protagonists, their rebellious ethos, and quirky kids who, in the end, triumph over the more mainstream popular villains.
In more current teen films, it seems high school is portrayed as a benign setting for achievement and self-realization. A complete fantasy, no doubt, but one that offers some balm for the wounds of those who, like me apparently, have some unresolved issues from adolescence.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the trailer below.
Jack Bauer and the Acceptance of Torture
Here’s a great video explaining how American interrogation techniques have been Bauerized.
In Keeping With Yesterday’s Theme-Another Great Home-Made Music Video
I saw this a while back on Boing Boing. Thought it deserved to be shared.
May 20, 2009
What I did not know before becoming the father of a two-year-old is that buried deep in the psyche of most adults lurks a nearly irresistible compulsion to pass out lollipops.
Everywhere my daughter goes, someone asks me or her mother “can she have a sucker?” Our little chud get lollipops at the bank, at school, at church, at the homes of relatives, and today, from strangers on the street.
Earlier this morning, my daughter and I along with her grandparents went touring the main street of a town nearby. It’s one of those quaint places full of antique shops and country gift stores.
I held my daughter’s hand as she pushed her doll Sally along the sidewalk. When we ducked into a store we’d find someone at the register and politely asked her to “babysit” Sally until we were finished browsing.
On the way back to the car, we passed two women standing in front of their business.
“Oh, isn’t she beautiful,” they both squealed.
We stopped.
“Say thank you,” I instructed.
“Thank you,” the Chud’s tiny voice said.
The women only squealed again.
Then it happened. One of them looked at me. Her eyes were as wide as her smile as she pointed to my daughter, standing in the sun, one hand still on the toy stroller, the other fighting the breeze that blew her blond locks across her blue eyes.
“Can she have a sucker ?,” the woman mouthed silently. I said yes, as usual. Today, it was a cherry tootsie pop that lasted all the way home. My daughter is growing up to believe the world is the kind of place where lollipops appear out of thin air as a reward for being you. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Being Pro-Torture Is Not Conservative
Call me naive, but I didn’t really know people were out there making arguments in defense of torture. Of course, I don’t really watch television or listen to talk radio anymore. Still, I happened to catch this on Fox News this morning. Pure craziness.
Ventura’s right on the substance of the issue, though his arguments here are, for the most part, weak. However, the arguments put forward by Brian…whatever his name is…are so flimsy they barely even make sense.
What kills me is that people think the pro-torture position is “conservative.” Shows just how far the conservative movement has fallen.
May 18, 2009
If you ever want to learn some truths about yourself, here’s what you do.
Take everything you own, lock it it all in a closet for ten years and wait. Once the decade is up, go back and pick through your stash. Hidden among all the boxes and dust, you will find some things you never knew were true about you.
Ten years ago, when I left Indiana for New England, I packed up all my furnishings, my necessities, the contents of every drawer and forgotten box and stuck them in locker at one of those commercial storage facilities that look like a some cult’s paramilitary compound, made up, as they often are, of long, tin buildings and security fences.
Recently, I’ve been working my way through all that I left behind there. Once a month or so for most of this year, I’ve been coming home and spending some time at the locker wading through the rotting detritus of my used-to-be life.
Just this morning I pried open a drawer on my old dresser to discover, among the socks and underwear I’d left there when I made my exit, a mouse nest. Fortunately, for me, no one was home. I used a pencil and the tip of my thumb like a pair of tongs to pull out the clothes before flipping the velvety clumps of …whatever mice build their nests with into the dumpster.
Among the other things I’ve found were my childhood record collection, receipts for thirteen year-old parking tickets, an unsent fan letter to Helen Hunt. Even more interesting have been the clues I have discovered about who I was then.
I was startled to see that I had packed away boxes full of notebooks. There were notbooks on top of notebooks on top of sticky notes on top of stationery, all mostly blank. What became clear to me was that whatever else I might have been 10 plus years ago, I was most certainly a person with a deeply-seated fear of having insufficient paper products.
The upside is that my present self won’t have to be in the market for envelopes, steno pads, sketch books or anything related for at least another decade. I’ve got plenty left over from my youth.
May 15, 2009
I wrote the following back in the summer of 2005. I remebered it last night when once again our family, this time with a daughter who was but an idea when I wrote this, once again stepped up to a sliding glass window to open the summer with some frozen dairy concoction.
I know summer is here because the Mrs. and went on our first spontaneous ice cream run of the year last night. No other season is announced so well.
Going to the ice cream stand takes me back to being a kid. I remember the sweaty Midwest nights I spent peering up at the huge back-lit Dairy Queen menu board. From behind the passenger seat of my parent’s car, I’d read all the the Slushie flavors and imagine sucking every one of them down.
In high school, my best friend lived only a few blocks from the stand. We’d go there together sometimes. Later, I moved away but he stuck around town. Every summer, he’d make his lonely, seasonal sojourn to the DQ. Once, when he got to the window, the woman behind the counter shouted out his order before he’d even spoken.
“How did you know?,” he asked.
“You’ve been ordering the same thing for fifteen years, “she said, “I didn’t think you were going to change now.”
I hadn’t known ice cream was as much a New England specialty as lobster until I got here. It was one of many pleasant surprises.
Here, the ice cream is rich and hard and locally made and served up with shovels so big it takes two people just to fill your cone. One place offers a large serving that amounts to half a gallon of ice cream. If that sounds like too much, you can order a small. It’s only a pint.
In spite of these regional differences, a lot about these summer evening excursions remains the same as it was years ago in my small Indiana town. You see the same people in line: the anxious chattering girls, their eyes sweeping the crowd for boys they know, the couple who lean into each other and sway, the frazzled father carrying a sundae so deluxe he can barely lift it in one hand and a sleepy daughter in the other, and worried about losing them both.
The air feels the same, hot and damp and heavy with the possibilities of a season as yet undiscovered. Little bugs bounce off your arms. The whole thing makes me want to yawp with delight, or maybe cry just a little because I am old enough to know there are only so many of these summer nights a single life can hold, and this is one more slipping into history.
Of course, I do not yawp or weep. New Englanders get nervous whenever there’s a lot of public yawping and they’re even less keen on the weeping. Instead, I take a deep breath and give thanks for what I’ve got: one more night with someone I love, beautiful memories and a bowl of ice so big I have to roll it home.
