Back at school

Felt good to be back at school today. A couple of random thoughts having nothing to do with that:

If you're curious why Hugh Jackman told Mickey Rourke they'd use a 20 minute delay instead of a 7 second delay if he won, check out his acceptance speech from the Independent Spirit Awards.

I don't think I take anything as seriously as U2 takes themselves. Accomplished as they are, listening to U2 and Coldplay consecutively is enough to suck all the fun out of music.

Amazing stories

My favorite news article of the week.

Back to the living

I'm actually out of the house at the moment, a rarity for me of late (setting aside the time we were away and I was just lying in a hotel room). It feels good, but very unsettling. So is the prospect of returning to school. I have a close emotional attachment to the place, and to have been separated from it for a week and a half, including 4 school days, is upsetting. Even when I broke my hand and had surgery, I was back in 2 days- not totally functional, but back nonetheless. This time, however, I had felt unwell for at least a week before I got really sick, so it's been two weeks since I've really been myself. And I'm still not. The coughing is not quite as severe and scary, but it's very much still there and I'm concerned it's going to frighten someone.

So I sit here on Saturday feeling almost like I do the day before school starts, expectant but a bit nervous. But the world is big and the sky is bright today and I'm looking forward to seeing Rennie Harris tonight and the Oscars tomorrow and being back in the classroom Monday. It's all of a piece. As the Tralfamadorians would tell me, it's just part of a continuum and my life goes on, so it goes. It would be nice if I'd learned something profound from this experience, but I haven't. Just remember to wash your hands and don't always try to keep pushing yourself when your body tells you not too. Nothing you're doing is so important that you can't miss it. I kind of knew that already, but this was a pretty powerful reminder.

Another sick day

I'm feeling just a bit better today, though it's still pretty bad. I am definitely getting tired of hearing everyone's story about how their friend/wife/kid has or had the same thing and how terrible it was. That's why you should never tell anyone you're sick. All they'll do is tell you about how it was when they were sick. Same reason you never try to tell someone about your vacation, unless you really want to hear all about their vacation to that same place or maybe just someplace your vacation reminded them of.

This illness is all about phlegm. That's okay. it's one of my favorite words, (I like fracas too), but I'll be glad when it's gone, which should be within a week or two, depending on whose story I choose to believe.

More sick

I had these great plans to document my time being sick, but I've come to the conclusion that being sick is not funny and it's not interesting, aside from in this particular case, moments of fright when my throat closes up and I can't breathe for a couple of seconds. I know it passes pretty quickly, but choking is choking and it's not fun at all.

Watching TV while sick

I can tell you this from watching about 2 hours of downhill skiing on TV with the sound off:

The guys who look like they're about to fall the whole way down don't do as well as thise who don't. But they do do better than the ones who actually fall.

Food Glorious Food

When you're thinking about the things you eat and drink, you should keep in mind that the stuff that makes orange soda look orange has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that makes it taste orange.

Sick on vacation

I've been feeling sick for about a week and a half now, but never so bad that I absolutely needed to take time off and the school schedule was such that it was never convenient to take time off. So now here I am in a hotel, still feeling lousy. I manage to get up and conduct the day's activities- I really enjoyed skiing for instance- but I have bad cough and no energy and no appetite and by the time we're done with dinner I'm collapsed in bed, which is very much not like me.

So how do you conduct yourself in such a situation? This is one of the subtle kinds of choices that adults face on a daily basis. How much do I push myself, especially when I've always considered myself someone who can push through anything and has sometimes gotten himself into trouble as a result (a 2-day business trip with what turned out to be pneumonia was a particularly regrettable occasion).

So far, I'm choosing to split the difference, go as long as I can but eventually just giving in to it. This approach, however, favors my kids rather than my wife, who I'm sure would prefer to have me functional in the evening. Today we're not skiing, so I'll try something different. Like hoping I start to feel better.

Ski Lodge

Overheard in the locker area, a bunch of middle-aged people putting on ski boots:

"This is exhausting."
"I'm exhausted just from getting my kids ready and out."
"How old are your kids?"
"Young enough to need help and old enough to resent your helping them."
"They could be 25 then."

Okay, maybe I more participated than overheard...

Hotel vs. Condo

Sometimes we stay in a condo (especially if the kids bring friends) and sometimes we stay in a hotel. We're in the hotel this time, a lovely place called Mirror Lake Inn. Most of the time I'm more comfortable in a condo, because it's more like a house and a hotel room is just a small bedroom with a bunch of other stuff crammed into it. But the nice thing about being in the hotel is that you're taken care of. We arrived late last night and were exhausted, so we really appreciated the bellman carrying our luggage to the room. Today, the bathtub/shower wouldn't drain. One quick phone call, and maintenance guy, who looked remarkably like bellman, came up and fixed it immediately. It's just nice to have that support system when you're far from home.

Previously next

I'm not a consistent watcher of Lost. I saw a bunch of episodes from the first 3 seasons in a kind of discontinuous fashion, but now I see a few minutes at a time and hear it from a neighboring room sometimes. I think this is the best way to watch the show, as a bunch of scattered bits of action and a fun musical score. Why?

Well, at this point I've ceased to believe that there's an actual story. They started with a couple of plot lines and they've just let them go on and expand based on nothing more than "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" Then they make up the justification, such as it is, after the fact.

Second, the whole time travel thing brings new meaning to the TV catchphrase, "Previously on Lost.." So does that mean this stuff happened in the last episode or is it something that happened back in time? And what if it was something that was in the previous episode but happened in the future? Is that really previous? And I guess the same goes for "Next on Lost." What if that's something that happened in the past? Is that really next or is it previously?

Now my head hurts, which I guess really is the point of the show anyway.

About that last post...

What I forgot to mention is why is it that we need our car to tell us the temperature?

Yet more needless complexity

A friend of mine got a new car. It has the most amazing array of gadgets I've ever seen. There seem to be cameras all over it, so you can look at a console and, for example, not only see how far behind you an object is (rear-end cameras are so 2006), but if you park nose in in a parking lot, how close your front wheels are to the curb and even if you're centered in the parking space.

My friend likes all that stuff, but what she really wanted was to have a display on the dashboard of the outside temperature. A lot of cars have this and we were sure this car had it too, but there are, if I recall, 9 buttons on the steering wheel and 8 on the console, none of which will yield you the temperature. Here's where I was able to help- not because I have any temperature information seeking expertise, but because I'm not afraid to push buttons. I sense that a lot of people are afraid to just start pushing things, fearing that something will get messed up. I've worked with enough electronics to know that if you pay attention to what you push, there's almost always a way to backtrack and undo whatever damage you may have done.

My car, which is not as nice, has a button that says "Display," and it's not hard to figure out that that will control what's displayed. But here, behind the steering wheel on the dashboard, there are another two buttons, one of which just has kind of a dot on it, I decided to brave it (it's not my car, after all) and if you push that one 5 times you get a temperature display. Great that I could help, but ridiculous that it's hard.

Overdramatic

The are times when I wish I was the clueless sitcom dad.

More on the Concert

The Pretenders are in unusual band. They play pretty straight up rock with occasional ballads with no frills. The one thing that makes them unusual is their lead singer. I know there are some bands that have female lead singers and of course there are all female bands, but the Pretenders seem like any all guy rock band except the lead singer, songwriter, and for all intents and purposes the band itself is a woman, Chrissie Hynde. Those of you who don't follow music might know Chrissie as the singer that took Phoebe's place at the coffee shop briefly in Friends. Those of us who have followed her career enjoyed watching her struggling to learn "Smelly Cat."

For this concert the band had its original drummer, who was excellent, and an amazing lead guitarist named James Walbourne, but the Hynde is always the center of it all. She looks amazing for 58 years old (older than me!) and sounds great. She has also clearly lost none of that famously cranky personality that made her so endearing to some of us. She was clearly not happy with all the people taking flash pictures from the front of the audience and complained about it between every song for the first half hour. At one point someone called out that she wanted to take her picture and she said, "You want to take my picture? So we're all here so you can get your f---ing picture?" She walked to the front of the stage and posed, first giving the woman the finger, then with her back to her.

It was great stuff. The Pretenders were inducted into the R&R hall of fame in 2005 and it was well deserved.

Not a concert review

I saw The Pretenders last night. Great stuff. I can't go to a concert without a whirl of past concert experiences going through my head. Maybe it's because I've been to so many concerts but not so many lately. I saw pretty much every major band of the 60's 70's and 80's except for the Beatles and the Stones. Don't know why I never saw the Stones, but I never did. My first rock concert was the Credence Clearwater Revival, the great late 60's hit machine (if you've heard John Fogarty, he was the lead singer and wrote the songs). It was at Madison Square Garden and I went with my mom. I was 13 I think. My mom liked the concert okay but she preferred the opening band, a terrific group called Booker T and MGs.

I had a number of great concert experiences. They used to have summer concerts in Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. It was subsidized by the city and tickets were $4 for the front section and $2 for the back section- all general admission. The only way to get tickets was to line up for a couple of hours at one of a half dozen places in the city that sold them- Ticketmaster didn't exist at the time. My place was the A&S department store in downtown Brooklyn. I'd go and buy as many as I could afford.

The best of these was Blondie and Rockpile. Blondie was of course one of the top bands of their day. Rockpile was a kind of new wave/rockabilly supergroup featuring Dave Edmunds, best known for his hit "Trouble Boys" and Nick Lowe, performer of "Pure Pop For Now People," one of the greatest new wave albums of the late 70's. Blondie's current hit was "One Way or Another" and we heard them sound check it a dozen times while we stood on line a dozen times to get in. It's still stuck in my head to this day. Blondie played a fantastic 2 hour show, but Rockpile, limited to the 45 minute allocation opening bands got, blew them off the stage, highlighted by a song called "Crawling From the Wreckage" which still maybe my favorite concert song ever.

A few years later, after I'd finished business school and moved back to New York, I learned about Ron Delsner's ticket club. Ron Delsner produced pretty much every major concert in the New York area in the 80's and if you paid him $100 it gave you the right to buy 2 or 4 tickets to every show he produced. They were usually the best seats in the venue and the only catch was that there weren't very many of them, so you had to go to his office on Wednesday, the day new tickets came in, and haggle with Ron's irritable sister, Harriet, to get tickets to as many shows as you could. We saw lots of great stuff though that club.

My favorite thing was the Concerts at the Pier. They didn't do the Wollman Rink concers anymore, but they had a similar general admission arrangement at one of the west side Manhattan piers. So how did the club give you the best seats in a general admission arrangement? We all got in at the same time, but the regular customers would enter through a gate on the north side of the pier, they would go almost the full length of the pier (about 100 yards), past the concessions stands, and then back toward the stage and seating which was all the way back on the street end of the south side of the pier. Club members would enter through a small gate on the south side next to the stage and walk right into the seating area. So we would walk in, pick our seats, sit down and then watch 1000+ people dash 100 yards out and 100 yards back and scramble for seats. This was really fun.

Enough for now. I'll write about the concert itself later.

SSB

Yesterday, one of my kids (1) injured her hand playing sports and (2) reported to me that "half of one of my teeth is missing." So here's my morning:

At 5:30 the phone rings to tell me that my school is canceled. I come downstairs and turn on my computer to see about my kids' schools. Neither school web site says boo, so I go to the KYW school closing site, which says nothing about either school, but reports that Philadelphia Public Schools are closed. I remember something from the school handbook at kid #1's school. I download the pdf and find that, yes, that school is closed. I then go back to kid #2's school site which has put a closing message up during those 3 minutes.

I go back to bed to wait for the phone calls from the other 2 schools. One comes after about 15 minutes and the other one, this from a school that sends messages to my home phone number and both me and my wife's cell phones every time a committee meeting is cancelled, never calls. I sleep until about 8:30.

Then I get up and call the doctor. They can take my kid whenever. I say 11, because I don't want to wake her too early. I then call the dentist. He has an opening at 11:15. Don't think that's enough time in between, so as I'm trying to decide if I want to call the other doctor back and reschedule, they tell me there's a spot at 1:30. Much better.

Wake kid #1 up at 10. She's grumpy. Kid #2 wakes up at 10:02. She's hungry. I make her some of my famous pancakes. I go to Starbucks and get coffee for everyone. Then home and to the doctor. First regular doctor, then down to x-ray. Sit and wait. Then x-rays taken and home to wait for the results. I say to kid #1, let's go to Trader Joe's before the dentist. She says okay. We get in the car and I get halfway and realize I don't have my wallet. This is not a positive development. We go back home and now there's no time for Trader Joes :(

Then to the dentist, get the tooth fixed. Come home. It's now 2PM. I have essentially done nothing and I'm exhausted.

So if your parents seem crabby today, give them a break, eh?

SAT Vocab Watch

Anybody else hear Al Michaels say that the Cardinals were moving with alacrity?