Today's Newspaper

In the sports section of the New York Times today, there were two Super Bowl articles that caught my eye. First was the story of a monastery that was renting out rooms at inflated but still reasonable rents (no TV, no alcohol allowed, but spiritual guidance available 24/7). Second was an article I didn't even read with the heading "Belichick Expands Wardrobe." I'm scintillated without even having to take the time to read. I really despise the 2 weeks of endless Super Bowl articles and pictures. No football game could possibly be that interesting (though I'm sure I'll watch it).

The good news is, only 15 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

Foulmouth

Nothing warms a father's heart more than hearing his teenage daughter drop the f-bomb at least once or twice every few minutes. Who wouldn't be proud? We avoided using that kind of language in the house for a long time, but kind of relaxed about it a bit this year. And who would have thought an adolescent would take a mile if you gave them an inch? It's so unfair. I've since had to call her on repeated use of the f word at 6:45 AM in response to not being able to find something in the refrigerator. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Since I can't swear on the job now (as opposed to the world of advertising where it's ubiquitous) and wouldn't let myself do it at home, I of course rationalized it by making it an educational experience. If you can't use swear words, you have to think of the correct descriptive word, helping to make you more articulate. You can also rationalize it by saying that swear words are more effective if you only use them if you really need them. The other side of the argument, as was succinctly pointed out to me by one of my students, is that any sentence sounds better with a swear word in it.

Just as an informational note, since I don't use that kind of language here, whenever I need to substitute something for this words I will avoid the more current "s---" and use the traditional #*@%!. I think it's much more eloquent that way.

Life in a nutshell

A couple of weeks ago I went to buy some skis for my daughter. She's a good skier and I wanted to get her this one pair and then never have to do it again, so I decided in advance I'd get her something good that she could use for many years. When we get to the store, it turns out that her boots that I thought I had to replace were fine, saving me a lot of money, so I spend some of it on her skis. So it turns out she's getting an awesome pair of skis.

They tell me I can pay then or when I pick up, so of course I said I'd pay later, because I don't have to worry about having my mom or dad there to pay for it. They note this on the tag and send them off to have the bindings mounted.

I go to pick them up tonight and the guy pulls the tag off the skis and says, "Did you buy them here?" and I say yes, so he says it would be $21.20 for the mounting. I sign the receipt, he says thank you, and I say, "I'm probably going to be the most honest customer you've ever had, but I never paid for the skis." There's 4 of them behind the counter and they look at me dumbfounded, and I say, "Well I'm sure someone would have eventually noticed that you were missing an expensive pair of skis that never got paid for and someone would have gotten in trouble." And they all shook their heads and said, "No way, they never would have known." I looked at the tag and it really looked like the "Not Paid" referred to the mounting, not the skis themselves.

So they give me a big discount on the skis for being an honest customer and even carry them out to the car for me. I save a couple hundred dollars and feel good about myself. And I feel so good about myself that I momentarily lose focus while I'm driving and almost hit a pedestrian.

I can't think of a pithy moral for this, but "Be an honest person and, for God's sake, pay attention when you're driving" will do.

Ski

I went skiing yesterday. Kind of a spur of the moment thing which I picked because I had the time and it was such a perfect day. I went to Bear Creek, formerly known as Doe Mountain. All the slopes are named after bear-related things. Did they all used to be deer-related things? I don't know.

People seemed surprised that I was going alone, but don't you always ski alone? You can ride the lift with someone, but the skiing itself? Anyway, I like having some alone time.

The skiing was marvelous and there were only a couple of hundred people there, so I decided to ski without a helmet. I just bought a helmet last year (see my earlier post on the War on Fun), which I'd resisted because the wind in your hair thing is part of the joy of skiing. I rarely fall- once or twice a season tops- but when it's crowded I'm concerned that someone might run into me. I guess the joke about snowboarders got to me. How does a snowboarder introduce himself? "Sorry, dude."

I got through the day without head trauma, but not without incident. Getting off the lift with some other guy in the chair and we noticed that there was a pole sitting in the snow right where you got off. Of course, it's the job of the guy in the booth to notice this kind of thing and stop the lift, but he was too caught up in the many other responsibilities of sitting in a little booth, so the other guy tried to kick it away with his ski. We both got so fixated ont his pole that we forgot to get off at the right time. I jumped off, and as I did the other guy started to and then stopped, hitting me in the chest with his skis in the process. I landed awkwardly and my leg and back hurt a bit as a result.

Aside from that it was a great time. My favorite thing was, as I was leaving I stopped in the bathroom (kudos to Bear Creek for the many boxes of tissues in the bathrooms, by the way) and as I'm washing my hands a snowboarder came in, covered with snow, goes over to one of the electric hand dryers, and stands with his back to it and pulls back on this waistband so that the hot air warms his butt. Excellent, dude. I used the other hand dryer.

Martin Luther King and Star Trek

On Monday I was watching TV while I was exercising and saw that an episode of the original Star Trek was on. I liked Star Trek its first time through, but it was a real favorite in reruns when I was in college. In honor of Dr. King they were playing THE most didactic (and many of the episodes were pretty didactic) racial episode of all.

It's about two mortal enemies whose faces are black on one side and white on the other, whose people have been in constant war for the last 50,000 years. Why have they been at war, you might ask? Well, one of them is of the ruling race and the other is of the oppressed. Why, again you might ask? Well, one of them is black on the left side of his face and white on the right side of his face, and the other is white on the left side of his face and black on the right side. It ends with both races wiped out except for the two of them, chasing each other around their lifeless planet.

I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere but I can't figure out what it is because they keep banging me over the head with it. There is some value in bringing things like prejudice up for ridicule, I suppose, but this one makes me groan.

MLK

I saw the motel where he was killed and the place the shot came from. Spooky.

My community service today consisted of driving my kids to their community service projects. Not very fulfilling, I must say.

It's kind of weird to think all that civil rights stuff happened in my lifetime, but it did. I grew up in a very integrated neighborhood in New York and it never occurred to me until I started reading the newspapers. I don't remember Rosa Parks but I certainly remember Martin Luther King.

Cleaning House

Our housekeeper just had twins, and some of the cleaning falls to me. I'm not a particularly good cleaner, but I don't mind it because you have to look at everything around the house in a different way, and I always enjoy that kind of thing.

For instance, we have a nice little glass-top coffee table in the living room. Never really paid much attention to it, as long as it kept the remote controls from crashing to the floor when I let go of them. Now I notice that it gets a ring on it every time someone puts a drink down on it. And we have no coasters! And the thing is, dare I say, a dust magnet. I'd also never noticed just how often the refrigerator gets crud on its handle, that the underside of our kitchen counter is icky, that our dog sheds constantly, and that in the shower, the water makes, well, water spots.

Okay, back to searching the Internet for the best kind of duster.

Another Icon

Bobby Fischer died yesterday. I feel repetitive going on another tear about someone who was big when I was younger, but Bobby Fischer was an unparalleled phenomenon. I guess people watch people play poker on TV, but I doubt that you can conceive of most of the American public watching a guy describing a chess game on TV for hours on end. The Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky world championship match came during the cold war and anything that was US vs. Russia was highly charged. This was especially so because Russians has ALWAYS been champions of chess.

Fischer insisted that the match be televised and then lost the first match on a mistake (or "blunder" as they invariably call it in chess) and blamed the noise from the TV cameras. Then he refused to play the second game in front of the cameras and forfeited. In a chess match, you get a point for a win and half for a draw, and in the world championship you play to 12. So he spots the world champion a 2-0 lead, bullies him into playing in a back room, leaving the people who bought tickets sitting in the auditorium looking at a big projection of a chess board. At home, we also saw the projection of the board and a nerdy but personable little guy named Shelby Lyman (I still remember) explaining the moves as they happened. Fischer proceeds to stomp Spassky, playing every single game differently (in a game where opponents obsessively study each others' patterns) and breaking his will by using a line of play he'd never used before and one Spassky was famously good at playing, and beating him almost effortlessly. The match took pretty much the entire summer of 1972 and the country was transfixed. Fischer, unfortunately was a lunatic, and pretty much disappeared afterward, and at the times he reappeared you'd wished he hadn't.

Of course, there was about a 6 month-long chess craze during the match and afterwards, but it's ultimately too hard to be really good at chess for it ever to become too popular. I got to the point where I could actually plan a couple of moves in advance and play with some sense of purpose, but the complete absence of luck made it all seem too heavy. If you lost you could blame only yourself, which was too much responsibility for a teenager. So I switched to the probably equally nerdy game of bridge, which I was already pretty good at and played frequently and happily for a number of years. Bridge is also very hard, but you play with a partner so it's social and there's plenty of luck in the casual game (though not in tournaments, of which I played a dozen or so during college, including one at Penn).

Two side notes...

The movie Searching For Bobby Fischer is excellent. I highly recommend it. It's not about Bobby Fischer. It's about a kid chess player.

Playing bridge was a small but key link in the chain of thought that led me to be a math teacher. My friends and I used to stay after school and play. Our favored spot was the math conference room. After we'd been doing this for several weeks, one of the math teachers spotted us and asked if he could join the game, which of course we let him do and eventually others joined as well. So all through my senior year I hung out with my friends and the math teachers, and it was a very pleasant thing and gave me chance to know them as real people and feel positive about them.

The War on Fun

Today I went to the lounge to fill my water bottle from the water cooler. There was no water left in the bottle, so I went and grabbed another to replace it. When I took the cap off the new bottle I discovered, to my horror, that there was a leakproof valve on top of the bottle, to prevent water from spilling as you installed it. I'm sorry, but the only pleasure in replacing a water cooler bottle was seeing if you could do it without spilling water all over the place. I mean, there's plenty of other places where you can get water, but not many opportunities to take an open 5 gallon bottle of some liquid and turn it upside down. So I'm very let down.

From my recollection, this war on fun started with the popularization and eventual enforced use of bicycle helmets and continues unabated. When I was a kid, we had something called monkey bars. They were open structures made out of steel pipes, shaped kind of like a house or layer cake, 10-15 feet high, and you climbed up them and swung on them and hung upside down by your knees and it was the best thing in the playground. The fact that we were without adult supervision, hanging upside down in a place where if I slipped I would hit about a half dozen steel bars before crashing to the concrete (or asphalt if you were lucky) below, never seemed weird.

Now, of course, you can't even find such a thing anywhere. It took a significant image search just to find a picture. I always assumed it was because they were dangerous but now I'm starting to think it was because they were fun, and there's nothing that these people hate more than fun, at least for other people.

Astonishing

Since "awesome" is overused, I needed to come up with a new word, and I don't hear anyone say "astonishing." It's too many syllables or something.

I was listening to the decades channels on XM radio today- the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90s. I don't really listen to old music much. I swore to myself that I'd never be one of those people whose musical taste got frozen when they were in high school or college. But in my car CD player at the moment are 2 Rilo Kiley albums, A New Pornographers album, and "Learn French In Your Car" (P.S., you can't). I like the 3 albums very much, but they're pretty similar and I got bored.

I kind of flipped by Chuck Berry, because he's such a pioneer of rock and roll that it's difficult to think of it as real music, but it's kind of fun to think about what it must have sounded like when people had never heard anything like that before. I then heard a bit of an interview about Hank Williams. I'm not a big country music fan, but you can trace almost everything in country music back to Hank Williams. I saw a show about his life once. He died when he was 29, and the musical legacy he left is truly astonishing. Nobody since has caught the perfect balance between pathos and charm and humor and great, hook-filled melodies. "Lovesick Blues" and "Jambalaya" were two of my favorites. If you're into music, check it out.

Then I heard "Billie Jean." Michael Jackson has become sort of a joke, but there is nobody in music today who was as hugely famous and successful as he was in the early 80's. I was in my mid 20's a pretty serious softball player at the time and after our games we'd go to this hole-in-the-wall bar on 3rd Avenue and 93rd Street. Sweeney's I think it was called. The best thing about it was that they'd sell you pitchers of beer or mixed drinks and let you take them outside and hang out on the sidewalk. There weren't tables or anything and I'm sure it wasn't really legal, but nobody bothered us. There was a pizza place a couple of blocks away and somebody's go and get some pizzas and we'd eat them out there. It was always packed with softball players after the games. So one time I go inside to get a refill and I see and hear this video on the TV and it was for "Billie Jean" and I'd never seen anything like it. Jackson was the first to do really interesting videos. He was a superb dancer and showman and a real pioneer in music video as a pop culture form. And the song...The best way I can describe it is "itchy." It just makes you have to move. It's a perfect blend of R&B and pop and if you don't think so try playing that song before you hear some modern R&B/pop blender like Beyonce and see which one makes you want to dance.

I've never forgotten the moment seeing that thing. I think there's a DVD of his videos, including the famous 17 minute "Thriller" video, narrated by Vincent Price and directed by John Landis, director of Animal House and the Blues Brothers and Trading Places. Best music video choreography ever by Jackson. Very much worth a Netflix rental. Of course, we all know his story didn't end well, but in 1983 there was nothing to compare.

As a footnote, that song was followed by Steve Miller Band, "Fly Like An Eagle," the consensus most impossible rock song to dance to.

Juno

Actually saw a movie last night. We really liked it. The girl was great, and all the supporting roles were well done too. Nothing rang false. I loved J.K. Simmons (I like him in everything) and Alison Janney. We wondered afterward whether the right-to-lifers of pro-choicers would like it better. She does decide to have the baby, but not on any moral grounds, and the point is, I guess, that she has a choice.

Don't want to make it too heavy. It was a lot of fun and a great soundtrack. Any movie that has the Kinks and Sonic Youth can't be all bad.

The Meaning of Life

There's Monty Python bit with an interview where the interviewee has a "theory about the brontosaurus." There's a long lead-in, but ultimately her theory is, "All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end."

I've decided that that's a good a theory of what life's about as any. Life is thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end. So when my life seems too busy and overwhelming I can take some comfort in where I have been and where I (hopefully) will be.

Baseball

I was on XM Radio's baseball channel a little while ago. The hosts were talking to Lee Smith, who was until recently the all-time Major League leader in saves, and he couldn't have been nicer and more charming, so I called in with a story of when I saw him play in the minor leagues (a true story in fact, not that I'm above making things up from time to time).

I was driving across the country by myself. I was moving to Philadelphia to go to school and didn't want a car there, so we sold it to my aunt who lives in Sacramento. To amuse myself, I stopped and saw baseball games everywhere I could along the way. First Cleveland, then Chicago, and then I was intending to see an afternoon game in Minneapolis, but it was raining there, so I headed south because I was going to visit my brother in Colorado on the way to California (another story to attach here at another time).

I got to Des Moines (actually pronounced demoyne, to my disappointment) around 8 PM and was scanning through the radio dial and hit on a minor league game in progress, and saw on my map a place called Sec Taylor Stadium so I headed over there and watch the last 5 innings of the game. There are 3 things I remember about the game. First, every time someone hit a foul ball back over the stands, the PA announcer would say "And there goes another one into the mighty Raccoon River." Second, it was foggy, almost too foggy to see the outfield fence from behind home plate. Third was Lee Smith.

Iowa was up by a couple of runs in the 9th inning and they called for their closer, announced as "Lee Arthur Smith." And out of the fog comes the biggest baseball player I've ever seen. Smith is about 6' 8" 275 pounds and solid as a rock. He threw about 100 mph. And even from the stands you could tell the batters were terrified about this huge guy throwing so hard out of the fog. But he didn't hurt anyone. He struck out two and the other guy popped out. He was in the majors about a month later and I've never forgotten the moment.

Parenting (Updated)

My lack of anonymity here often prevents me from discussing in detail anything about my family, but I did want to make some general observations as one who deals with teenagers both as a teacher and parent.

First off, the hardest thing for me to balance is how to set rules and limits and guidelines without totally alienating said teenagers, whether in a class or at home. It's not hard to clamp down on someone, and it's certainly to keep lines of communication open, but it's hard to do both at the same time.

The key, I think is listening. Listening is a skill that is highly underrated for almost any job or activity having to do with people, and it's important not to take it for granted. I know I've ranted from time to time about how I don't think multitasking is good for you, but the absolute worst time to be thinking and doing something else is when someone is talking to you. As both a teacher and a parent, part of my job is to be a mind reader, and mind reading is hard enough if you are listening. I submit that it's impossible to do so if you're not. More on this later.

Second, no matter what you think of yourself, you have to get out of your head the idea of being a "cool parent." There is no such thing. No matter how good your fashion sense, skills, taste in music, physical coordination or knowledge about pop culture, when it comes right down to it cool people do not make and enforce rules. They don't create consequences for misbehavior, in fact, ignoring misbehavior is part of what cool is, and it's antithetical to a parent's duty. Baby boomers such as myself, who grew up in an era when it was of utmost importance to be cool, have to get over this and it's hard. You can be a cool person without being a cool parent.

Update
My colleagues pointed out that it is possible that your kids will refer to you as a cool parent once they emerge from their adolescent purgatory.

On a slightly related note, on Degrassi yesterday, one of the kids was bemoaning how "These are supposed to be the best days of my life.." and my wife and I both snorted and shouted back at the screen (and my daughter) "These are not the best years of your life. They're the hardest and possible the worst. So it cuts both ways.