Just One, Please

I think it takes a certain, peculiar type of person to enjoy traveling alone. I don't have any illusions about my own peculiarity, but it's interesting that it works well with traveling.

Traveling by itself involves getting lots of curious looks from people. Restaurants obviously would rather fill a table for two with 2 people, not one. Last night I sat in the restaurant where I was the only solo diner and the only person at a table with an odd number of people (you have time to notice this kind of stuff when you're alone). You have to not feel uncomfortable in a situation like that, because it happens all the time. When I arrived here, the customs guy sent me to get my bags searched, rather than just waving me through. I asked him, "What did I do to deserve this?" but I know the answer, I didn't have my family with me. Who's gonna check a 52 year-old schoolteacher traveling with a wife and 2 kids? But the same guy by himself, and not on business, stands out enough to get noticed.

Business travel is the best preparation for that kind of treatment, and I have plenty of experience with that. In fact, a business hotel, weekdays in a busy downtown area or at an airport, is the only place you can be by yourself and not feel out of place.

I'll talk more about the kinds of feelings this evokes later- I've only been away for 24 hours.

The View

I don't think we see the horizon enough. I guess people who live in hilly areas never see the horizon, but seeing it conveys something about the scale of things. There are plenty of reminders in the world of how small we are, but this is a particularly gentle and pleasant one.

Ow, It Hurts!

Painful as it may be to admit, US Airways was right. I'm in Bermuda right now to get a little bit of the rest I never got over the summer. The forecast yesterday was for the weather to be terrible here- 50+ mph winds and rain, and I thought I might like to change my flight to tomorrow, but US Airways said they weren't ready to waive their penalty, so I decided to wait and see, and it all worked out okay.

Go Phillies!

Four-eyes

There's something that seems exceptionally dorky about texting wearing reading glasses.

Back to some school or another

We're a 3 school family, including the one where I work, and so I have the privilege this week of doing 3 so-called back-to-school nights in 4 days. I've never been quite sure to whom the "back-to-school" part is referring, the students or the parents, but I guess that's not important.

This is an exhausting experience by any measure, but it will put me in the unique position of comparing the highs and lows of parent communication at three of the area's finest independent schools. I'll check back in later.

And on the menu today...

Is Mushroom Barely Soup actually Mushroom Barley Soup or Barely Mushroom Soup?

A Quick Dip Into Politics

My favorite line about Sarah Palin's incessant lying about everything from "Troopergate" to the Bridge to Nowhere to her own pay is anything that starts, "Sarah Palin, if that's her real name..."

What Happened to the Bloom on that Rose?

One of the first things I train my students to do is to not just raise their hand and call out, "I don't understand." My response to that is always, "What is it that you don't understand?" They are expected to think through and formulate a question. "Why does it equal 3?" for example. That's a question that can be answered and it's not one that's beyond the ability of a middle-schooler to ask.

It's a mindset of who's primarily responsible for a child's education and what are the goals of a school. Clearly, the ultimate responsibility is with the child. The teacher is there to facilitate and to help the student learn to learn. Obviously, more is expected of a 12th grader than a 7th grader, but the earlier good expectations and goals are established, the more sense the whole process makes to the students when they're required to learn new skills. That's why, when students ask the old "what I am I ever going to need this for?" question, I often respond "Nothing, but your life will be better in many ways if you understand math."

So we're in the second week in the new school and people are kind of settling in. This is a process that seems to repeat for people at various points in their life. A major change takes place and is met with some level of giddiness and dread and optimism and curiosity and adrenaline. Then there's a stage where information begins to overtake infatuation and people begin to make adjustments. Many of us have had experiences like this with personal relationships and we're in that stage here at the new school.

The most obvious example is the behavior of the seniors. In the old building, there was a senior lounge of sorts. Some of the lockers were in there and there were a couple of couches where the students often lounged in inappropriate proximity to each other. There's nothing like that in the new building. So the seniors appropriated this odd area underneath two crossing staircases and turned it into a lounge. The administration keeps threatening to take it away, but so far it's still there.

On a less picturesque basis, there are all sorts of petty annoyances here. They really are petty, so we all overlooked them for the first week and eventually they'll either be taken care of or we'll internalize them and won't notice anymore. But for the moment, the lack of copiers and available computers and the transsoundancy (? whatever the sound version of transparency is) of the walls in the Athletic Building and the tightness of some of the classrooms are getting on people's (students and teachers alike) nerves.

This brings me back to my point about how people respond to major change. Permanent infatuation is not an option. The only way for a new relationship to endure is if you want it to. As you gather information, there are always plenty of reasons to reject and turn away, but if you want to make something succeed, you can learn to sort out what's important and what's not, to formulate questions and seek solutions rather than complaining, and to keep your ultimate goals in mind. The new school building isn't perfect, but nothing is. If we keep our minds on the ultimate goal of creating a first class educational institution, a lot of the annoyances become just background noise. I make it a point, especially with the students, to truly listen to their concerns, to empathize with them, but to never be negative about the way things are and where we're headed.

Modern Living

I just did something I bet you didn't do today. I vacuumed my freezer. All I'll say is that it involved grated parmesan cheese.

Getting Ready For The Second Week

When I think about going back to school this week, the first thing I think of is that I have to bend down to unlock the door. I'm not very tall, so either the card reader's too low or the shoelace holding my card is too short. We have these funny little ID cards that have our heads peering out of a white background. They're supposed to open the doors, take attendance for the kids, and debit our meal accounts. We found out quickly that they meal part doesn't work, so now our cards are actually two cards pasted together. I'm not sure I know anyone else who has this kind of thing.

For me, the biggest problem, if you can call it that, is that I don't see everyone every day the way I used to. When there were only 2 floors in the main wing and only 2 staircases, I saw pretty much every student multiple times each day and most of the teachers as well. Now, I'm not even sure how many staircases there are, and the classes are on 3 floors in one building and 3 in another, so it's become less certain that I'll see all the people I like.

My only other complaint, and I promise I'll stop here, is getting there. I've been incredibly spoiled. When I ran my own little advertising shop, my office was 1.1 miles from home. The old school was 1.1 miles in the opposite direction, so I haven't had a commute of more than 4 minutes since 1993. Even when I lived in LA, my commute was 3 miles through a beautiful canyon and then 5 miles down Pacific Coast Highway. How do people do this every day for years? It's awful. And I'm only going about 6 miles on reasonable attractive suburban roads. I hope I can get used to it. The nice thing is that I have every important shopping spot on the Main Line right on my way home. I look forward to stimulating my area's economy.

Things I really like, aside from the obvious things like beautiful grounds (a 'duck' pond, sans ducks) and air conditioning, are, in no particular order, free coffee for teachers at Starbucks, bells that don't make me cringe and/or jump 3 feet in the air when I hear them, matching desks in our office (we're now on our second set of desktops, but they still all match each other), which used to be a workout room (and we have a mirror wall to prove it), 2 mezuzas in the classrooms with 2 doors, all kinds of unfinished high tech looking things that promise all sorts of excitement, and of course, the kids, who are just as great in the new place as they were in the old.

I'm sure there will be plenty to report on in the days to come, so stay tuned.

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

I'm not really an avid reader of great writers. It's too much work and I possess too much of that impossible combination of laziness and freneticness that dogs many people in my generation to sit down and read a 1000+ page novel, half of which is written in 6 point type footnotes. But just reading two collections of his essays was enough to establish David Foster Wallace in my mind as one of the great living writers. He had an unsurpassed command of all aspects of the English language and displayed such sharp wit and observational skill that it is a huge pleasure to read any sentence he's written. I can't do him any justice by writing about him. I'm just terribly sad he's gone. Here's an overly lengthy excerpt from E Unibus Pluram, an essay he wrote about how totally wrong writers are when they think they are voyeurs gathering observations of humanity by watching television:

Illusion (1) is that we're voyeurs at all: the "voyees" behind the screen's glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we're out there...What we see is far from stolen; it's proffered- illusion (2). And, illusion (3)...what young writers are scanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already formed composed of fictional characters in highly formalized narratives. And, (4), we're not even seeing "characters" at all: it's not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Ft. Wayne, Indiana; it's Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters from pseudo-voyeurs berating him for being a putz from Ft. Wayne. And then (5) it's not even actors we're espying, not even people; it's electromagnetic-propelled analog waves and ion streams...throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much more lifelike than Seurat's own post-Impressionist commentaries on perceptual illusion. Good Lord, and (6) the dots are coming out of our furniture, all we're really spying on is our own furniture, and our very own chairs and lamps sit visible but unseen...

Many of his essays, describing everything from luxury Caribbean cruised or getting caught in a tornado while playing tennis, are funny. But it's his quest for truth and insight and his ability to translate that into written words that made him exceptional. I'm really saddened by his death. And I will finally get around to reading his 1000+ page novel.

The First Week of School

I know that some of you will want some help in describing the first week of school, so I'm here to give you a hand.

Let's start with the building. The building is beautiful. It still looks kind of like a conference center, albeit a conference center for small people carrying books around and cramming lots of stuff into little metal compartments. I think that will change over time, though it may take longer than we'd expect, given the administration's insistence on keeping it clean. We'll see. The laws of nature are pretty insistent on everything approaching a state of entropy, or complete disorder, but at least we can try.

For me personally, there are a few things that stick out. First, my office is on the ground floor, which is arguable a basement but I won't quibble. Most of my classes are on the 3rd floor. There's an elevator but I refuse to use it, and I am already developing quads of steel. Our department head had the inspiration to refuse to have our room carpeted, which makes my nice new chair with wheels much more fun than I would have anticipated. There's a large gap in the wall that separates my desk from the guidance office, but I haven't heard anything exciting yet.

The door to our office is always locked and they installed the lock wrong so you can't unlock it. So they took the glass pane out of the door and if the door is closed you have to reach through and open it with the inside handle. There are a few classrooms like that. Apparently they installed the cylinders upside down. Now I know all you math people will say, "How can you install a cylinder upside down? That's like saying you drew a circle upside down. It's symmetrical." I don't know, it's a mystery.

The biggest complaint I've heard so far is that the building is big and spacious, but the classrooms are cramped. I guess that's kind of true, but I don't think it's anything that you can't get used to. I really like the rooms that have 2 doors. It adds an element of surprise to things.

The other complaint is that there's a walk between the 2 buildings. I don't think this is unique to the school. In most cases, if there's two separate buildings you must walk to get from one to the other. It's not a long walk, but it's not a short walk either. We have a bunch of umbrellas, but sometimes, if there are lots of people in transit, one building or the other runs out and students are late because they're waiting for an umbrella. I know there's a oke here but I can't put my finger on it. As for finding a way to get the students from one building to the other more quickly, my first suggestion would be to use pressurized pneumatic tubes, like they use at the drive-in tellers. This is how the first subway in New York operated. Huge fans created air pressure to move the trains. (No, I'm not making this up). If that's not practical, a moving sidewalk will do.

People are concerned because kids aren't staying on the crosswalks. This suggests to me that the crosswalks are not placed correctly. Especially in inclement weather, people will always choose the shortest distance to walk. If the crosswalk isn't there, they won't stay on the crosswalk. Some of you may have heard me mention that when the University of California built their new campus in Santa Cruz. At UCSC, home of the Banana Slugs, (not making that one up either. Photo here), they build no paths the fist year. They waited to see where the students walked across the grass and built the paths there.

Be Afraid

I'm guessing I'm not alone in this, but when I was in my early to mid teens, there was nothing in the world more frightening than a group of pretty girls, walking together and talking very loud and very fast. Though I was, like most boys that age, completely stupid about almost everything, I knew this was something that I was attracted to but could not approach. I didn't need to be told that girls mature faster than boys. I could see it and feel it.

I'll be perfectly honest here and tell you that, even though I have teenage girls of my own and work with teenagers, I still refer to these groups as "scary teenage girls." I'm not in any way afraid of them and would be perfectly comfortable walking up and talking to them if I knew one of them. But somewhere there's still a part of me that remembers being 13 and scared to death.

This has been a long introduction to a short observation. I was at Starbucks this afternoon and as I came out I could hear the sound of one of these groups. Again, I'm around kids all day long, so it's not hard to recognize. But I looked over and these girls could not have been older than 11. But they were wearing makeup and jewelry and cool clothes and talking a mile a minute and they were like a miniature version of the real thing. And I thought, man, I thought it was scary when I was a kid, I have great sympathy in advance for the preteen male of the species.

Shu Mu

I suppose Whole Foods can call it whatever it wants to, but nothing with dried cranberries in it should really be called Mu Shu Chicken.

Off the Hook

I haven't written much about music lately. I'm sure there's plenty to say, but I simply do not listen to music as much during the baseball season, thanks mostly to that infernal XM radio, which broadcasts every game and has a baseball talk channel with lots of good hosts. But I do have some questions and comments.

First of all, can Rihanna sing? I've probably heard a dozen of her songs and I still don't know the answer. I can't say that she definitely can't sing, but I've heard no proof that she can either.

The next thing worries me, because it runs the risk of throwing me into old fogey territory. I don't understand how people don't get bored with the current pop out there. It's not that it's bad or unpleasant. Don't worry, I won't say "how could you listen to that noise?" which is what my parents (who were actually more tolerant than most) used to say. It just all sounds very similar. Every so-called R&B song has exactly the same beat. Most of the songs that have any real melody use the Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, weird synthesized voice. And whiny-boy rock hasn't changed since the 70's. Why do you need to own more than a couple of these? That's what makes songs like Sweet Escape stay popular for so long, because Gwen Stefani can actually sing and brings a unique personality. The only other things I like are fun novelty songs like "Low."

The number of American Idol finalists lurking around the top 20 is jarring. American Idol has a pernicious effect on pop music, because contestants have figured out that there's a formula for success, (eye contact, slow build, the big flourish). This can translate into actual pop success if the singer has any talent (like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and maybe Jordin Sparks), but Clarkson and Underwood didn't really follow the formula once they left the show. And you can't play to the camera on the radio.

Political

My favorite thing about the steady barrage of Sarah Palin oddities is that if you wanted to, you could make up something completely ridiculous about her or her family and if you told people they'd probably believe you.

Back To School

The words that send a chill up the spine of every self-respecting kid. For adults it's a bit more complicated, and for me even more so because I'm going back to school too.

So let's catch up. I had a lousy summer. No need to elaborate, we'll just stipulate that it was lousy and move on. My kids trickle back into their schools this week. What's with the first day half day thing? My kids go to two different schools and they both do it (on different days yet). T come up with a half day schedule, people have to be thinking, okay, we're going to disrupt everyone's nice summer lives by making them wake up at 6:15, but we don't want to give the parents the benefit of a full 6 hours without their kids. I guess this what we call "child-centered" thinking. To this I say "Bah, humbug." I have two teenagers and they do more than enough child-centered thinking for all of us. I don't need the school doing it too.

One of these schools even has a half day the last day before winter and spring breaks. This to me shows a distinct lack of decisiveness and generally muddled thinking.

"Should we have a day off before the vacation? No, that would be silly, but we don't want to start the vacation when the vacation would naturally start, because that might imply that we haven't been giving it any thought, so let's just make it a half day."

Or something like that.

For me personally, the start of school is a prolonged case of the butterflies. My style of teaching is very much dependent on my getting in sync with the class, and having to tune into 4 new classes at the same time is hard work. This year in particular, I'm teaching relatively few students that I've taught previously, and only 2 that I've taught for a full year. Last year, by contrast, I had taught nearly half of my students previously including one entire class. This is not a problem, really, but I'm always a bit on edge until the parents come through for back to school night.

On the other hand, it's exciting to be going to a new building and making a new start in a lot of ways. The first order of business will be to find the bathrooms. After that, anything goes. As teachers, we have either inservice, in service, or in-service, depending on who you talk to. That always seemed kind of gramatically sketchy to me. Should one have in-service or should one be in-service. I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "in" is.

Musical

We saw a show in Lake Placid called 5 Guys Named Moe. It's one of those shows pulled together around a bunch of songs, these being songs performed and in some cases written by Louis Jordan (much to the disappointment of some of our party who thought it would be songs of Charles Jourdan, the French crooner). It's not really much of a show. A guy alone in his apartment feeling sorry for himself and 5 guys named Moe jump out of his radio to help him get a handle on his life, make up with his girlfriend, etc. I'm not sure what it is they do to help him, aside from sing a lot of fun songs. Any show that has Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens is ok by me.

One of my favorite things I ever saw on TV was a bit on Candid Camera where they had a whole diner filled with singers and musicians (all hiding their instruments) and when an unsuspecting customer said something they all break into a musical number, like in a show. The waitress starts singing to him, people in booths take out violins and horns and an accordion, and other customers start to dance. Too bad life isn't really like that.

Unlimited Edition

I was walking through town today and saw what was called a "limited edition" poster. What exactly does that mean? Is there such a thing as an unlimited edition poster? How could that happen? It reminds me of some traditional advertising phrases. My favorite is "fresh-picked," as in "made with fresh-picked vegetables." Well, of course the vegetables were fresh when they were picked. Or hearth-baked. Hearth, of course, meaning oven. Where else would you bake something?

The Demolition Derby at the Essex County Fair

My wife and I went to the Essex County Fair. We couldn't coerce the kids into coming with us, so they went to the movies. I've always been a sucker for these kinds of things, but fortunately nobody else in my family is, so we rarely go. I don't know why I like them so much. I don't play the carnival games because I once read a book that explained in great detail how the odds are stacked against you. The rides are typically not that exciting and I always question the maintenance practices, and the carnies are not usually people you'd seek out for company. But it's always people watching beyond compare. Nobody dresses up for a county fair (except maybe the 4-H club baking contest types). Everyone's in their natural state and seem to be really there, as opposed to being one place and thinking about being somewhere else, as us metro area types are wont to do. It makes me feel like I'm really in the place I'm visiting, which makes me feel calm and grounded.

The attraction of this fair was a demolition derby. For those not familiar with these, a bunch of guys and gals drive a bunch of old junker cars with no windows or back seats into a contained area. On the count of 3 they begin to bash these cars into each other at whatever speed they can muster and continue until only one car can still move. These used to be on ABC's Wide World of Sports from time to time, back in the day, and they were always one of my favorites. Most so-called sports don't look like nearly so much fun.

My wife is a superb photographer, and she wanted to shoot the whole thing, from preparations through the event. We nixed buying a grandstand ticket as too limiting, and in all likelihood the grandstand was more pleasant to look at than to inhabit. It was whitewashed with a big fading red metal roof that oozed beaten down authenticity. But it was packed with a few hundred people, many of whom were eating french fries smothered in gravy. So we walked through the gate into the infield to where everyone was preparing their cars or heckling whoever was doing the preparations. An example of such preparations was the guy banging on the hood of his car with a sledge hammer to flatten out a bend. He then got up on it and started jumping up and down. There was an audience of about 10 guys for this, all offering advice, not all serious. It was clear that we did not belong in this area and equally clear that nobody could care less that we were there. I must say that this takes a bit of the fun out of sneaking in somewhere.

My wife went to do her photo thing. When she does this my main job is to not be in the photographs or in her way, so I steered away from her and just looked. As I was watching the Adirondack Trash Service Demo Team (they all had shirts) it occurred to me that I was sticking out like a sore thumb. It hadn't really occurred to me just who it was we were going to be hanging out with and I do not own the requisite outfit (trucker hat, t-shirt with either the name of a garage of a borderline obscene saying on it, loose, knee to calf-length denim shorts, hemmed or cut off and some kind of boots, shoes or sneakers the color of the dirt). Just so you can picture this, I was wearing a light blue and white horizontal striped Hugo Boss crew neck tee, stone J. Crew shorts, and bright white running shoes (brand new for the triathalon).

On one hand, these were not people I was really going to mingle with. I've been in a few places and can say that it's hard to find purer white trash than in upstate New York. On the other hand, I was there with them and they were fine and I was the one who looked stupid and out of place. This made me feel very alone and even to question my worth as a human being. Well, not really, but I did feel like a total outsider. I felt more at home in Paris where people ask me directions all the time and unless they speak English I just have to shrug.

I watched a pallet carrier picking up wrecked cars and loading them onto a flatbed (there'd been a round of this before we arrived). It was a little hard to tell the competitors from the aftermath, but finally a few of them lined up and it was time to start. We got a spot by the fence in with one of the "teams" and watched 12 cars drive into an area about 25 feet by 200 feet, closed off by movable concrete barriers. I always though it'd be fun to have a car that you could crash into a barrier and not care. The surface was soft dirt. The cars were all painted with numbers and company names and with shout outs to friends and family, living and dead, and snappy sayings like, "Hit me here." Then the countdown and a huge racket (so loud!) and off they went, smashing into each other left and right.

I remember from my viewing days that the strategy was to ram with your rear because the radiator was the weak spot, and once the radiator is smashed, the engine dies soon after. However, an alternate strategy uses the fact that the front end is heavier to so demolish the rear of the other car to the point where the wheels can no longer turn. It's fun to watch a car try to move (and on soft dirt it can) when the front wheels turn but the rear wheels do not.

One other guy had a car that ran fine but he was pushed at an angle so tightly into a corner that he couldn't move. He kept trying to go back and forth to extract himself, showering those of us close to him with dirt. A few of the others were disabled quickly, mostly by Bill, the guy in car 43, who was moving much faster and with more obvious glee than anyone else. Eventually #43 died too, but not without smashing his lone remaining competitor and claiming first prize for his aggression. It turned out that we were standing among Bill's buddies and he got cheers and backslaps when he came over holding a trophy and a check.

We then watched them drag all the wrecked cars out of the ring, after people had loaded all of the car parts in through where the windows had been. It was mostly bumpers and fenders, but there was a wheel attached to half an axle as well. And then they drove another dozen cars in and did it all over again. The highlight of this one was one car that pretty much had it's entire rear end knocked off, except for the wheels. We were a bit concerned for the driver. The safety equipment in these cars consists of a seat belt and a couple of bars inserted in key spots to keep the roof from collapsing if the car rolls (none of them did). To compensate, there were 4 fire engines and 3 ambulances waiting trackside. But everyone was okay and eventually someone won.

There was one more "heat," though heat implies that there's a final and of course all the competitors' cars were destroyed, so I'm not sure how that would work. Everyone in the grandstand stayed put, but we left.

Renting

It's a dream of mine to own a house in Lake Placid, though it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So in the meantime we rent.

We've always rented houses on the smaller lake here, called Mirror Lake. The village of Lake Placid, like a majority of the lake towns here, is not on the lake it's named for. Saranac Lake sits on the shores of Lake Flower, Tupper Lake isn't on a lake at all. And Lake Placid is on Mirror Lake.

It's odd spending 2 weeks in someone else's house. Many of the rental houses here are truly set up for the task. There's a full array of sturdy stuff for the renters and all the good stuff is squirreled away in a couple of locked rooms and closets.

The house we're staying at is clearly not primarily a rental property. The owner's stuff is everywhere, there's no touristy information to be found, and nothing's locked up. We've found at least 5 junk drawers full of assorted stuff. This makes it kind of homey and kind of curious too. How do you have a kitchen without measuring spoons? Why are there over 100 sandwich plates and 8 bowls? Why 3 kitchen cabinets full of glasses? Why are there large open boxes or trash bags in 3 different places, and for that matter, why are there 3 garbage pails in the kitchen? I wonder if every time they have something in their regular home that they don't want or need anymore they just deposit it here.

And then there's the eternal question. Why are all the doors so squeaky? I can't remember the last time I rented a place and didn't have to run right to the store to get WD-40. Every single door in this house squeaked loudly when we arrived. I'm proud to say that none of them do now.

Political Correctness in the Adirondacks

I was shocked today to find that Dump Road, otherwise known as the entrance to the Lake Placid Waste Management facility, has been rechristened Recycling Circle.

Make Your Body Move

I did something yesterday that I'm struggling to sum up in an adjective. Exhilarating? Difficult? Crazy? A bit of all those things, but the only word that really captures it is "triathalon."

Technically, this is what would be known as a mini-triathalon. You swim 400 yards, bike 12 miles and then run 3 miles. They have these things every Monday night in Lake Placid through mid-August. Last year I didn't find out about them until the day before the last one and I had neither run nor swam at all that summer. So I chickened out. This summer, although I'm not in nearly as good a shape as I was last summer, I did swim a bunch of laps and even ran a few times so that I could participate. I even did all 3 in succession once.

So here's the experience. Before we even get there, I look in the paper and see the results from the prior week. I know approximately how fast I can do this, about 10 minutes for the swim, 45 minutes for the bike and 30 for the run and about 5 minutes for changes. This puts me about 10 minutes behind that last person (out of 8) in my age group to finish. There were a few older women who were a bit slower, but that's it. I manage to convince myself that this would give me the 9th best time of all the many 50-59 year-olds in Lake Placid, which is pretty good. So I arrive for sign-up and there are about 150 people there, of all ages and mostly very fit looking. I sign up and they scawl a number on my arm and leg and give me a bathing cap with a number on it as well. Many people are wearing official-lookng triathalon gear and a bunch have wet suits (!) on. At this point it's about 45 minutes until the things starts, so I arrange my towel, bicycle and related equipment, and running shoes in neat (for me) little piles and then spend the next 40 minutes fretting.

I had decided at this point that I was gooing to be that guy in the Olympics who comes staggering into the arena 20 minutes after everyone else has finished and the crowd give him a standing ovation. My wife thinks that's funny and is very supportive of my going ahead and doing this.

So it's finally time to start. We begin with an open water swim. I like swimming in lakes, though the water is often cold. I do not, however, ever try to swim for distance and/or speed. I tried swimming for exercise a few years ago but gave it up quickly. I am, let's just say, a competent swimmer. I can swim. But swimming for exercise is the most boring thing in the world. Swimming is only interesting to the extent that the fear of drowning keeps your mind active, but if you're in a pool that fear vanishes much to quickly to sustain interest. The only exercise I like less than swimming is Stairmaster. Whose idea was this, to simulate walking up stairs? Who likes doing that? I always figure if I dislike doing something in real life, I'm not going to enjoy simulating the activity on a machine.

Anyway, off we go, 150 of us diving into the lake, which is not too terribly cold. I try to go out nice and easy, but with all the adrenaline of the start and the energy required to avoid kicking feet, I find myself pretty winded after 100 yards. This is not good. Swimming laps, you can always pause and take a breath as you turn. Not the case in open water. So I spend the next 300 yards trying to breathe. Now, not being able to breathe is interesting, so I'm not bored on this swim. I figured in advance that I could do breast stroke for a bit if I couldn't keep doing the crawl, but breast stroke is very slow, even if you're good at it, and I wasn't expecting to do 300 yards of it. So once the good swimmers clear out, I start doing the backstroke. It's easy to breathe when you're on your back, but it's hard to see, which is also not boring. I bump into one person, but mostly I notice that the dozen or so people behind me have observed what I'm doing and many of them start doing it as well. I keep churning away and after a very long 10 minutes, I find myself back on shore.

I'm wet and breathing very hard and my wife is cheering me on and random people are saying "good job!" and my daughter is yelling at me not to walk up to my bicycle because everyone else is RUNNING. I succumb to the pressure and trot. I dry myself enough to get my shirt and my bike shoes on and off I go.

Before I signed up for this, I was wondering what to wear. The guy who runs the events told me that triathalon shorts were best. They're like bike shorts but with light padding so you can swim and run in them. I was startled to find out that I had accidentally bought a pair of these a couple of years ago, thinking they were just lightly padded bike shorts. But in fact they are easy to swim in and not too bad for running either, once you get over the fact that you don't wear anything under them. This makes perfect sense, intellectually, but back in the day we called this "going commando" or "freesyle" and I never got into it.

The bike ride was fine. It's a variation of a route that I've done many times before. I know all the hills and know I can do them. There's a road that runs along the Ausable River for about 4 miles and it is probably my favorite place to ride in the whole world. So I'm loving it, but there's always a little voice in my head saying, "This would be great if I didn't have to run 3 miles when I'm done with this." I got through the ride, even the one hill that I despise (it ends at a traffic light so you climb climb climb and then you have to stop.

I arrive back, get words of encouragement and a kiss from my wife and put my running shoes on and I'm off again. I haven't run this route because I don't run. I used to run but I've gained a bit of weight and lost a bit of cartilage in my knees and flexibility in my muscles, so it's not really fun anymore. So all I know about the course is that it goes along the lake, which is flat, and then up Mt. Whitney Rd. I make the assumption that Mt. Whitney Rd. goes up, which turns out to be correct. It's a mile of steady uphill. The nice thing about this is that it's downhill coming back. I've always liked courses that are downhill for the second half. I actually pass 2 people during the run and one person passes me near the finish line and then I'm done.

It took me exactly an hour and 30 minutes (unofficially). The swim took 10 minutes, the ride took 45 minutes and the run took 30 minutes. My daughter is blown away by the precision of this and I'm pleased to have finished. I'm sore and tired but not beyond comprehension. And so I've done it. I didn't wimp out and I even didn't finish last.

Best Thing Ever

How did I not know about this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/technology/personaltech/07basics.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=power%20tools&st=cse&oref=slogin

Olympics!

The Olympics begin tomorrow. The opening ceremonies are tomorrow night. I'm curious to see if I can stay awake until the end. Until a few years ago the ceremony was mostly the parade of athletes and then a display of national pride by the host country followed by the lighting of the torch. Now it's like a long performance art piece, but with the TV people explaining what's going on. If you need TV people to tell you what's going on, it's not very good performance art. Four years ago, any time I heard Bob Costas refer to the "child of hope" or something like that, I'd make involuntary retching noises. I seem to remember there was ice skating involved. Or maybe that was the winter olympics. Man I'm getting old.

Reassurance and incipient disaster

I just read that Mary-Kate Olsen said she had nothing to do with Heath Ledger's death. I just wanted to make one thing clear: neither did I. I presume from the context that they had some kind of relationship, but lacking the necessary background to know that, it seemed like the most random bit of quotery I can recall seeing recently. It reminds me of Chevy Chase on the original Saturday Night Live Weekend Update. "this just in, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." Same goes for Heath Ledger, may he rest in peace (though I highly doubt that will happen).

I also just saw that they found over 100,000 gorilla's living in a "gorilla paradise" in the Republic of Congo. To quote the great philosopher Don Henley, you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.

New Restaurant

Went out to dinner for my wife's birthday last night, to the brand new Parc restaurant on Rittenhouse Square. It's a new Stephen Starr restaurant, and as such has a clear theme. This one is a Paris bistro. Having been in Paris a few months ago, I can report that it is a perfect knockoff. It looks like it's been around for 100 years, even though it opened 2 weeks ago. This strikes me as an interesting job, making something brand new look old. Parts of it, of course, can be accomplished simply by furnishing with old things, including mismatched chairs and bathroom fixtures with age-cracked porcelin. But it would seem like at least something in the place has to be bought new and made to look old.

There were only a couple of things that seemed different to me. First there's the size. This place is immense. It must seat 500 people. It's easily twice the size of any place I've ever been in Paris. The second thing is the noise. I'm not sure that I've ever been in a louder restaurant. My ears were ringing for an hour after we left. The waitress (a third difference is the service was very friendly) had to come to both sides of a table for 4 to take our order and I still only heard half of what she said. The wine steward told me that they'd hired an acoustician to try to improve things. The food was excellent, though, and I'd definitely go back.

I should also mention that the people eating and drinking there (and it was packed, inside, outside and at the bar) were the most attractive group that I've seen in a Philly restaurant. It made me feel much better looking than I really am just being there. When we came out there was an orange Lamborghini two seat convertible sitting at the curb. I'm sure I'd be even better looking if I was driving that thing.

Hello again

Yeah I know I haven't written anything for a while. There's a good reason for that. I really haven't had much to say. It doesn't take much to get my brain whirling, but there hasn't been much of anything since we got back from Chicago. My days wrap around my daughter's health and it keeps everything within a pretty small range of activity.

Running

I want to do a mini-triathalon in a couple of weeks. It's a quarter miles swim, 12 mile bike ride and 5k run. Today I decided to try running a bit. If you're a middle aged guy and you really want to feel mortal, try running after not having done so for a while. I'm not in terrible shape and I can ride my bike all day, but people my age were not meant to run (evolutionarily speaking, people my age aren't meant to be alive, so running probably wasn't so important back in the old days). It just doesn't really work any more.

I used to run a fair amount, but now I decided I should concentrate on being able to run the maximum useful distance for my life. I estimate this to be about a quarter of a mile. This would allow me to run for a bus or a train, get out of the rain in all but the most isolated settings, and escape imminent danger. I don't really know why else I would need to run.

Back Home Again

Just in time for a big thunderstorm and losing electricity for 21 hours. I think lightning struck a tree on our block, which in turn knocked a couple of branches from another tree onto the the power lines. So we walked around the house reflexively and uselessly turning on lights when we entered the room, and when it finally got too dark we went out to eat and to a movie.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there were only a dozen or so houses with no power. For the common benefit I know that's a good thing, but for us it meant that we were pretty low on the priority scale.

In the aftermath, you do what people always do in situations like this. We plan for the disaster that just happened. Even though I've looked into getting generators in the past, I decided we really don't lose power often enough and the consequences are not sufficiently dire to go to the trouble and expense. I'm still not interested in a generator, but I'm all psyched to go to Target and buy a couple of camping lanterns. Candles really don't make enough light and flashlights are a pain to hold for a long time.

Maybe I'll get a whole disaster preparedness kit. Bottled water? Hah! I'm going for the water purification kit. I got a whole pool full of water. Maybe I'll pick up some freeze dried rations while I'm at it. I've seen that stuff at REI. Dried meat loaf and ice cream and that kind of stuff. Looks yummy inside that silver vacuum pouch. First aid? I can be efficient and skip the rubbing alcohol and just get some extra vodka. You can disinfect with it, drink it, or use it for fuel.

The First College Visit and a Baseball Game

It's kind of early for this sort of thing, but as long as we were in Chicago we thought we'd visit a couple of colleges. Today we went to the University of Chicago. What a coincidence that it's here! (Like Eddie Izzard says about the Pilgrims, amazing that they left from Plymouth and landed in Plymouth). Pretty amazing place. Wish I'd gone there instead of where I actually went. The tour guide talked for 90 minutes straight and then the admissions woman talked for another hour. It's a terrific school and they have lots of words there.

We ate lunch at a bakery/cafe that's apparently a favorite of Barack Obama. Good stuff.

The game was at the snappily named U.S. Cellular Field. In the baseball stadium biz it's known as the place where the architects that designed most of the great new stadia (that's Latin for ya) made all their mistakes. No sh-t. It's completely characterless and you can't get in the place. If you take the subway to the game (which you should), to enter at ground level you have to walk all the way to the far end of the stadium. After an outcry, they retrofitted it with a raised pedestrian bridge, so you can get in close to the subway, but only from across the street. Very weird. The game was no snappier than the name, but I'm glad I got to see the place.

Ratio and Proportion

I was thinking as I was tooling around the lakefront on my Segway, that one of the problems with taking a trip like this is that the ratio of the time you take planning it and the time you're actually in the place is way too high. We're in Chicago for four full days, but I must have spent more than a dozen hours planning, or nearly a quarter of the time we're here. That seems like a less than optimal work:fun ratio. That's why spontaneity is nice. There's no work in that ratio.

BTAIM, this has been a pretty good trip considering it's 2 parents and an almost 17 year-old girl. On the first night we had an amazing dinner at a place called Moto. The restaurant is famous for its odd preparations and presentations. We had a 10 course tasting menu, which didn't include any of the dishes prepared with liquid nitrogen, but did include an edible piece of paper that tasted like Buffalo chicken wings with blue cheese dressing and celery, a liquified greek salad in a pipette, "road kill" duck with beet puree blood and yellow lines on the plate and black salt gravel, and "cracker jack," a peanut flavored ball with a liquid popcorn center. And it was all delicious.

We've seen Blue Man Group and Second City, all very funny, taken a boat ride and a Segway tour along the lake front, and walked through Millennium Park with its giant silver bean. We're still visiting a couple of colleges, going to a baseball game (unfortunately not a Wrigley Field, the Cubbies are out of town) and seeing some cool modern art and maybe a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It's been a pretty good trip so far.

Travel

Of course, air travel is always somewhat unpleasant, but Southwest does seem to go out of its way to make it less so. Their people tend to act more like people and less like automatons than the other airlines. This has the residual effct of making the people flying with them less tense and better-humored, which is good for everyone. Those of you who know me would probably say I'm a reasonably nice, mellow, tolerant person, but when I'm trying to deal with US Airways, something about it immediately turns me into an SOB. When people are rude to me I have no problem bring rude in return and I arrive at the airport ready for them to be rude to me. Not fun.

Before I forget I have to mention my new favorite warning label. On the plane they give you Cheez-its and peanuts. On the (incredibly teeny) bag of peanuts it says:

INGREDIENTS: Peanuts, salt.
ALLERGY WARNING: This product produced in a factory that processes peanuts and tree nuts.

I guess it would have been more disturbing if it wasn't produced in that kind of factory.

Chicago

Oh my God are there a lot of tourists here! Why? I like Chicago. Been here several times in circumstances ranging from major business conventions to getting off a train after a 12-hour delayed 48 hour trip from Montana and a few more normal occasions, and I've always enjoyed myself. But a tourist mecca? Maybe for people from Gary, Indiana, but international? Cosmopolitan? I never would have figured it.

But why not. It has the best architecture of any city in the United States and there isn't even a close second. In the downtown area, any time you look up there's a treat. Art Deco, Romantic, Modern and Post-Modern. Turn of the 20th century buildings paying homage to the great edifices of Europe and turn of the 21st century buildings paying homage to them in turn. On one corner there's a building with real flying buttresses 40 stories up and across the street a modern skyscraper with rectangular structures on the setback to give a respectful nod to it.

It has good pizza too. And lots of stuff to do and great restaurants and a big honkin' lake.

More details tomorrow.

Driving

Almost had our first real accident today. We cut a left turn too close, swerved to the right (correctly) to get away from the car, but hit the accelerator instead of the break and almost hit a pole. I think everyone does that once or twice when they're first learning, and there really isn't any way to teach someone not to do it. You just have to hope for the best and try to learn to control your panic. That's why insurance rates are what they are.

Some Things Just Don't Sound Right

I have a package of ground turkey in my refrigerator that says "All Natural." I think the turkeys would beg to differ.

Quotable

There are signs around my neighborhood for "The Mother of All Yard Sales." I wonder if the person who made those signs knows who coined that particular turn of phrase. Do you know?

It was Saddam Hussein. During the first Gulf War he called for his troops to prepare for the "mother of all battles." Of course it wasn't really, but Saddam now lives on in our vernacular.

Be Very Afraid

I am embarking on one of the most terrifying journeys one can imagine. I am teaching my daughter to drive.

Let me say from the get go that she is, for a new driver, very good. She's basically careful, sees the road well, brakes and accelerates reasonably smoothly, and takes instruction well for a teenager. However, this does nothing to advance a feeling of calm and well-being.

I have strong opinions about driving and I drive in a way that reflects a particular philosophy. I know this is shocking that I have a philosophy of driving, but there you go. I haven't had an accident in over 30 years so it's hard to convince me that I'm wrong. My driving is based on two facts:

1. The idea of driving is to get from one place to another without bumping into anything. A corollary is that stationary things are easier to avoid than moving things.
   
2. Driving is the single most dangerous thing you do in your life (I think taking a shower is a distant second)

A number of strategies flow from these two facts. Most are based on the idea that you are safest if you can avoid driving with another car within bumping distance. So you don't drive next to anyone, go traffic speed to avoid passing or being passed, drive in the left lane on a freeway, and never count on anyone else to do the right thing.

Following this philosophy, or any other basic driving instruction, is predicated on the ability to drive in a straight line and to execute left and right turns at approximately a right angle. And this is where the adventure begins.

First let's talk about the straight line thing. We all know that the shortest distance between 2 points is straight line and so we should try to drive this way. Road design. however, conspires to thwart this in two ways. First of all, roads by necessity have to avoid things like trees and houses and streams, so many roads have curves. Second, roads are not flat. They are built to "crown" in the center and slope down to the right. This is to encourage water to flow off the road. Gravity therefore continually pulls the car to the right and the driver has to continually guide the car back to the left. New drivers forget to do this periodically, and also have an understandable fear of cars in the adjacent lane, so if you're sitting on the right side of the car, it's best to stay alert. Or wear a blindfold.

Turning is also a challenge. Cars are hard to turn. They're big heavy things and you have to control a whole bunch of things at the same time. You have to turn the wheel enough that the car turns and then recover it before it continues to turn after. This is astonishingly hard for new drivers, and I think it always catches their parent/instructor by surprise.

So we made it through a week of this with only one dent in the car. You have to resign yourself to dents if you're going to allow a new driver to take control of your car. This is why I'm doing this and not my wife. I'm keeping it there as a reminder.

I'll post on this again after we've been on a highway.

Getting to the New Digs

I rode my bicycle from the old school to the new school. It's a bit hard finding an appropriate route, because there are two sections of the route that are designed to be impenetrable. You can't get from Remington Rd. to Wynnewood Rd. without going on main roads somewhere, and Haverford College has no entrance on it's eastern front, so you're stuck with going north or south of it.

Before I go into details, let me add the the obvious best way to get to the new school is by the 100 trolley, which has a station that exits directly to the campus.

From the school you go a couple of blocks up Old Lancaster, then left on Sycamore. Why not just take Highland? In a car it probably doesn't matter, but when you're biking, shortening the trip by a couple of hundred yards saves a minute. Follow Sycamore to Merion Rd. I know there are lots of somewhat famous homes on this section of Merion Rd. We actually looked at a house there where Will Smith was living right before he left for California. He and Jada were just hanging out when we were looking at it. He wasn't a huge star yet, Fresh Prince of Bel Air was just about to come on the air. OMG! That was a long time ago! 17 years I think.

Follow Merion Rd to Bowman Av. and turn left. Go past the elementary school. The road is pretty beat up because of water pipe work, but you can manage. Make a right on Wynnewood Rd. This section is a pain in the butt. It's busy and there's lots of driveways, which are always terrifying for a cyclist because you're never sure if the person pulling out is only looking out for cars. Also, since you're going straight at Lancaster you have to end up in the middle lane because the right lane is right turn only. Bicycles in the middle lane are generally frowned upon by motorists.

Once you cross Lancaster there's not as much traffic and even though it's still a 4 lane road, your main concern is what are technically referred to as depressed storm drains. These storm drains are not depressed enough to harm themselves, but they're pretty good at harming you if you ride a bike over them. Follow Wynnewood Rd. for about a mile and then turn right onto County Line Rd. From the vantage point of County line Rd., it is difficult to discern any difference between the two counties. I guess this is one of these places where your neighbor goes to a different school from you. County Line Rd. has not been repaved for a long time, with the overall effect of simulating a gravel road. You can't go 100 feet without hitting some kind of patch or hole in the pavement. But you do get to pass Carlinos and a "multi-color hair salon." Not sure what that means.

Make a left on Ardmore Avenue and head down to Haverford Avenue. Here's where Haverford College is in the way. Fortunately, Haverford Av., though busy, has a center lane for left turns only. Since there are pretty much no places to make left turns on this stretch, this means that cars can pass you easily. Once you're past the college, defy the temptation to make a right on College Av. and go to the next light, which is Buck Rd. I'm sure nobody really wants to see a buck on Buck Rd, but that's okay because you then make a left onto Old Railroad Av. and I don't think anyone wants to see an old train there either.

Follow Old Railroad until you reach the intersection with another incarnation of County Line Rd. If my trip was any indication, during this stretch you will encounter a short but drenching rain shower. At the intersection go soft right onto some little street that takes you over to Byrn Mawr Av. It's more direct to go on Haverford Av, but the intersection of Haverford and Bryn Mawr was cleverly designed such that it is impossible to make a left turn onto Bryn Mawr Avenue, which is where you need to go. So go up the little street and make a left onto Bryn Mawr and go through the light, past Wawa on the left, and then the school is on the right.

Coming back is essentially the same, only backwards. The Haverford Avenue section is 2 lanes in this direction and seems to always be more heavily trafficked than the other direction. This state of affairs seems counterintuitive to me. You'd think that everyone would eventually end up on the eastern side. The best part of this section is that it's downhill.

When you're riding, there's always a time and place where you wish you had a motor. On this trip, it's the ride up Sycamore from Merion Rd. to Old Lancaster. It's not steep, just long and steady.

The trip took me 26 minutes. I don't really know how far it is, but I'm guessing my average speed is around 12-13 mph, including stops, 15 mph when actually riding.

Know Your Consumer Products

Benefiber is a fiber supplement.
Benecol is margarine.
Beneful is dog food.

The Daily Dilemma

Nap or coffee?

Learn Something Every Day

I often say this to students who ask "are we learning today?" I find this a surprising and peculiar question, but I always respond that we should all try to be learning all the time, even if we're just fooling around.

So what did I learn at the hospital? The biggest thing I learned is that medical care at a big hospital is like a game of telephone. Quality and consistency of care are completely dependent on how well each person passes on information to the next. If you have a nurse who doesn't write something down or forgets to mention something, the next day you might not get fed. In the course of a 17 day stay, there's a combined oral and written tale that's collaboratively created and retold to later generations and this seems to me to be the weakest part of the system. That's why you need to advocate for yourself- not because anyone means harm, but because they don't know anything if the person before them didn't say so or write it down.

I learned that there's such a thing as an extern that is different from an intern but not really.

I learned that it's possible for a hospital responsible for feeding hundreds of children to run out of pizza. And veggie burgers. At the same time.

I learned that the more comprehensive and well-documented a treatment plan is, the greater the opportunity for personal style to play into how it's implemented.

I learned that Lost really was a good show.

I learned that if you have lots of electrical circuits and therefore lots of circuit-breakers, it's a very good idea to label every outlet with its circuit number.

And I learned that it's very nice to have a nourishment room nearby at all times, because everyone needs some nourishment now and then.

Normal?

For those of you following at home, my daughter is out of the hospital and home.

George Carlin

I'm really sad today because George Carlin died. Maybe it's kind of stretch to say he was an "influence" on me, because I'm not a comedian or even a humorist in the way people usually think about it. But as a person for whom humor is a defining characteristic, he was among my strongest influences. He considered himself a writer first and performer second and his books are funny, but his delivery made the material even better. I think he did audio versions of his books. They're not as spirited as his stage act, but still worth listening to.

He's probably most famous for his "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" bit, which is still funny, mostly because you still can't say most of those words on TV and almost everyone uses and hears every one of them every day. It's not the words that are funny, but what it says about the strangeness of our society that they're "kind of" taboo. Can you think of anything else that's kind of taboo? Seems pretty oxymoronic to me. Or maybe just moronic.

Carlin was an angry iconoclast, and he had an ear for language that was unsurpassed, even among observational comedians. There are plenty of obituaries and "appreciations" out in the newspapers and online, but all I want is to see a marathon tribute of his HBO specials, to trace his evolution from stoner humor to social commentary to the plain old "Did you ever notice..." stuff that he did better than anyone. Comedy Central did a ranking of the top standup comedians of all time, which is an incredibly stupid idea, but any list that has George Carlin between Richard Pryor (ranked #1) and Lenny Bruce (#3- before my time so I don't really know) turned out okay. Pryor, by the way can be seen in a couple of concert movies that are still spectacular if you don't mind hearing the f-word every 10 seconds or so (you get used to it after a while).

With all the bits that were repeated in the obituaries, I didn't see one of my favorites, where he riffs on "Save the Planet." He goes on about how it's not the planet we're trying to save, it's us. The planet will be here long after we're gone and maybe the our part in the great cosmic plan was just to come to the earth for a period and to leave the earth with plastic.

I will miss George Carlin and I'm glad I can still hear his voice in my head.

An explore

I think the phrase "going for an explore" is from Winnie the Pooh, but that's what I did for a few minutes. My destination, the mythical Connely Center. I was only interested in this place because any time I ask about about where I can get something, more soda, a cup of non-McDonalds coffee, DVDs, they tell me to go to the Connely Center. From where I am now, that requires either an escort with magnetic card or two elevator rides. It's not busy now, so I figured the elevator part wouldn't take too long and I was right.

The Connely Center looks kind of like an airport lounge without a bar and 8 TVs with CNN on. And airplanes (though there is a heliport on the roof). It was empty and quiet, but, like airport lounges, would clearly be loud and uncomfortable if there were more than a half dozen people in it. It does have the elusive fully equipped coffee machine (there are other coffee machines but no coffee to accompany them), which I will check out and report on in the morning. I already feel a bit of performance anxiety, because there are lots of signs saying there's video surveillance. For the moment, I settled for a can of soda, since the Nourishment Room is all out.

What You've All Been Wondering...

Is whether all the doctors and nurses are hot and have significant and poignant conversations at every turn. Or whether I'll be able to watch another medical show after I'm out of there.

This particular hospital seems to be run almost entirely by women, though the occasional male doctor or nurse appears to stir things up a bit. Depending on your point of view, this would either virtually eliminate any drama or perhaps create drama where none really exists. The nurses are pretty in about the same proportion as people anywhere are pretty. The conversations, however, are more like what you hear between the checkers at Acme than anything on TV. When's break? Where are you going for the weekend? The boss (or in this case, hospital bureaucracy) is a pain in the butt. I've got too much work. I don't have enough to do.

Since life in a hospital has absolutely nothing to do with TV hospitals, I don't think I'll have any trouble with medical shows. Life in the hospital reminds me of what they say about being a policeman- 99% boredom and 1% pure terror. We haven't really had any terror, but I've been doing nothing for 99 or even 99.9% of the time, then occasionally some issue comes up that requires a bit of brain power. Otherwise, it's like having a total vacation at the most boring, uncomfortable place ever. And (for me anyway) without the beds. I used to like sleeping on the couch, but not anymore.

Non-Medical Hospital Update

The Icee machine is fixed after suffering a painful-sounding seizure a couple of days ago. Even better, whoever fixed it also brought big Icee cups with those cool dome lids. My tongue is now bright orange.

The TV in the MPFL generally has FOX on during the day, and from 2 PM until now it has had one of those pseudo courtroom shows on. It's Judge Judy now, but there was an older African-American judge on from 2-3 and a younger Caucasian judge from 3-4. Judge Judy is, predictably, a woman. The plaintiffs are indistinguishable.

Since we've been here we've been following something they've called a "protocol." At one point when I was complaining about the lack of flexibility in the protocol (as far as the patient is concerned, of course, the hospital itself has total flexibility) the representative they sent to talk to me said, "Well, it's not so much a protocol as guidelines." I'm presuming most of you have seen Pirates of the Caribbean and I can assure you it took tremendous effort for me to not burst out laughing.

So we have an accord.

Unintended Consequences

I used to hate it when there were phone numbers like 1-800-CAR-RENT, but now that I text message a lot it doesn't bother me so much.

The Multi-Purpose Family Lounge

So I investigated the MPFL and today its purpose is to house me while I grade papers and for the staff to keep their lunch in the refrigerator. No other family members entered during my tenure there. The TV was on, with lots of pictures of Tim Russert, who I guess is especially big news for TV people because he was a TV person.

A New Room

Today I found the Multi-Purpoase Family Room. I'll let you know what purposes I find for it later.

I can see outside!

We've been in several rooms so far, but this is the first one where I can actually see outside, kind of. I can see the sky at least, and I can see a building across what I thought was a courtyard until a man in a hard had casually walked past my 5th floor window this morning. Tempted as a was to snatch the curtains back and make a scary face, I refrained. Becasue this is a nice, new room I feel like I should behave

Watched "Little Shop of Horrors" on video last night. The score is really reminiscent of "Hairspray," or I guess it's the other way around. I remember seeing it off-Broadway many years ago. It's still fun.

Hospitals Suck

Nothing personal, mind you. This is a perectly nice hospital, as hospitals go, but as a species, they're awful places. With an occasional exception, all the crappy cheap motels I've ever stayed in are more pleasant places than the nicest hospitals.

For one thing, there are sick people everywhere. I know that's not a coincidence or anything, but you see people being wheeled around in beds or attached to IVs and then when you see someone in a gown just walking around you thing to yourself, "ooh, what's wrong with that one?"

I'm not sure that you ever really get used to being in a hospital, but you do learn to navigate it. I know that you can get free coffee at McDonalds. I know how to get to park in the closer parking lot when you're not really supposed to be there, and the quickest way to get here from the further parking lot.

On the other hand, how do you navigate having an aide sitting in the room while you're sleeping who listens to gospel music loud on headphones and mutters "Amen" under her breath all night?

On the other hand, you do get to see signs like "This room for pumping mothers only." And there's an Icee machine in the nourishment room on the 5th floor.

Trash Talk

It's hard to throw something away in a hospital. In our room there are 3 color-coded bins that say General Waste, Infectious Waste and Soiled Linens, plus there's recycling for cans and bottles. It reminds me of Penn and Teller's show on recycling, where they demonstrate people's desire to recycle by asking if they will comply with increasingly complex and ridiculous rules, (e.g., "This container is for slightly used tissues.") and people always agree to go along with it.

The other thing I noticed is that there is not a box of tissues to be seen anywhere. I'm presuming this is a way of being more sanitary, but how and where you're supposed to blow your nose is a bit of a mystery.

Aimee Karaoke

If the embedding isn't working, try this link: Aimee Karaoke

Levi Karaoke

Don't have the entire song, but this certainly gives a good flavor of the performance and whole scene.

If the embedding doesn't work, try this link: Levi Video

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Not sure why, but Blogger won't let me delete the duplicate post.

Hospital Blogging (No medical information included)

Hospitals are peculiar places. You go to the emergency room, they determine whether you are going to (a) die no mater what they do, (b) live no matter what they do, or (c) could go either way and could use some assistance making sure it tips the right way. You get the best care if you're in category c, as I can attest from the times I had chest pains. You always get taken care of quickly if you have chest pain and you always get helped very slowly if you have a broken finger. It's called triage, so if you want fast service in an emergency room always say you have chest pains. Just like if you want to get through to PECO just say you smell gas.

Once you're in the emergency room the same rules apply. Once they know you're not going to die, you might as well not be there. In the chest pain example, I got test test test test and then hours of nothing until they told me I could go. They never figured out what was wrong with me, just that I wasn't likely to die in the next 24 hours. My regular doctor figured it out the next day in about 5 minutes and it wasn't anything serious.

During this particular visit, this led to us sitting in the emergency room bed for 2 1/2 hours waiting to go to our actual room. Then we moved to the 5th floor and just as we were getting settled, again up to the 6th floor. Once you're settled, get ready for a series of petty annoyances, getting poked, prodded, measured and to be asked for various bodily fluids.

My favorite thing about this place is the Nourishment Room. I think every place should have a Nourishment Room. In this place the Nourishment Room is kind of like the snack room at my fraternity, except with way more formula and frozen breast milk and not nearly as many chips. Cereal, peanut butter, milk and juice, that kind of stuff. Everything neatly labeled with a label maker.

Nourishment Room is typical of the odd kinds of signs you see in hospitals, like Bed Management Office, but my favorite sign here isn't hospital specific. It just says, "This Door is Closed."

Senior Trip, Day 3

Or should I say day 2, continued, since day 3 started only a few hours after the chaperoning business concluded during the night.

The weather was pretty lousy, so we decided not to go to Dorney Park and to just stay at the resort for a few more hours. Because we had to get out of the rooms, everyone dumped their bags in Governor's Ballroom C (I'm sorry, I think I can say with absolute certainty that the governor has never held a ball here and even if he did he would have used the much grander Governor's Ballroom B or perhaps the mythical Governor's Ballroom A, which we never saw) and then moved on to whatever indoor activities were available in the morning. As best I could see, that mostly included, bowling, arcade games, signing each other's yearbooks, or the always-popular, waiting to get served at the restaurant.

The restaurant really reminded me of when we went to Paris and 2 747's arrived and there was one immigration officer there to process all 600 people. Imagine that a plane might show up at the airport full of people! Imagine that people might show up at a hotel coffee shop at 9AM and want breakfast! Forty minutes for a toasted bagel and half a grapefruit. This yielded a visit to the hotel desk to say that we couldn't check out in time because of how long breakfast took.

In spite of Ballroom C's lack of character, it was nice to have someplace to hang out and I was able to do some of my least favorite work, that being making up incorrect answers to multiple choice questions. This is more subtle and difficult than you might believe. You can't ask the question, what's the vertex of y = x^2 + 6x + 8 and give and answer of 17. It has to be something that could possible (the smiley-face graph aside).

It got boring enough that a bunch of students joined in the morning BINGO game. And yes, bingo is just as exciting as you remember. The highlight was the special game where you had to fill your B row and your O row and when you won you had to stand up all call out "I have BO." For some reason, by the time that was over, most of the students had left. Do people even know what BO means anymore? That term, if you can call it that, was invented by an ad agency in the 1950's to sell a product called Ban deodorant. I'm not sure if they still sell Ban

Then it was time to gather on the buses and head home. We watched "The Goonies," which was fun. And then it was done.

At the risk of sounding mushy, I love this group of seniors. I've never met a group of kids that I've been this fond of. I would have loved to have friends like them when I was in school. So taking a trip like this was absolutely the highlight of my teaching career. I wish I'd been able to spend more time with certain people, but I'm hopeful that I can keep in touch with them.

I'll keep in touch

As some of you may know, I'm dealing with a bit of a family emergency, so I haven't been able to write/upload, but I will keep in touch about what's going on. Things are okay for the moment.

Update

I've got the karaoke video in my computer and will upload it to youtube tonight. I'll e-mail a link and post it in the blog. I'll probably have a day 3 review and parting thoughts done tonight too, depending on how late I'm out at graduation.

The rest of Day Two

My favorite sign of the day:

NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. PLEASE SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I’ve seen plenty of “swim at your own risk” signs, but none of them really sounded like invitations to do so. In any event, it’s nice to be polite.

After dinner, most of the kids gravitated toward karaoke. I’ve successfully avoided karaoke for most of my life, but it was really fun to watch kids I know get up and perform this ridiculous stuff. There was a pool party going on at the same time, so every time on of our kids was singing everyone would pile out of the pool and into the hallway, wrapped in towels. Two of our kids made it to the final round, one of whom sang “Hey Jude” (inexplicably, the 7 minute version with all the na-na-na’s) with background vocals by his fellow students and the other sang “Summer Loving,” again, with the boys singing the “wella wella wella” part and the girls doing their “tell me mores.” By this time, there was about ¼ inch of water on the floor and everyone is dancing and sliding everywhere. Ultimately, one of our boys won and celebrated by sitting on and falling through a glass-topped table. It was really quite spectacular.

Then it was everybody back in the pool for some beach ball volleyball until midnight, when it was time for ice cream. Predictably, this did not aid in settling everybody down and going to bed. It was a smaller crowd in the hallway, with lots of people signing yearbooks, playing music or cards, or just talking. Then the security guard came and it was time to insert everyone into their rooms.

Let me take a moment to discuss the whole chaperone thing. I’ve chaperoned the school ski trip for the last 3 years, but aside from that I’ve never participated in any of the out-of-school activities that take place around here. It never would have occurred to me to do this if it wasn’t this particular group of kids. I know they wanted me along because they like me, but I have this sneaking suspicion that part of it is that I’m not really inclined to be strict. Maybe it’s my own general issues with authority (I am a child of the 60’s remember) and maybe it’s the giving people the benefit of the doubt thing, or maybe (and I certainly hope not) it’s because I hope people will like me more if I’m “nice,” but I’m not exactly Mr. Discipline.

This puts me in a ticklish position from time to time and brings up the occasional slight discomfort about just what is my relationship with the kids. I’ve thought about this a lot, probably more than I should, because there are a bunch of kids that I relate to as if they were friends, at least when I’m not grading their tests. And it’s my nature to always want to know exactly where I stand. I speak openly and honestly about my life and I think they respond in turn. But we’re not exactly friends in the regular sense of the word. I guess maybe I’m like an uncle. Most everyone has a uncle they like. More fun than a parent, but still an adult. I’ll go with that for the moment.

So the kids go to their rooms and Uncle Frank and the rest of the chaperones do a head count. The security guard settles into his chair and we go in to our rooms. At 2:15 AM, I get a phone call saying “This is the manager and could you please come outside?” These aren’t really the word one wants to hear. What’s up? Well one group of boys is trying to run over to the girls’ room and another guy was running around the hall with a lampshade on his head. So part of me is thinking “Lampshade? That’s kind of refreshingly old school. So chiche’ it’s not cliché.” And part of me is thinking, “Whoever it is I am so calling him 60 Watt for the rest of his life.” And part of me is really irritated.

We fan out into the boys’ rooms and my line is, “I don’t even want to talk to people I like at 2:15 in the morning and certainly not hotel managers” and I basically tell them I really don’t want to have to do this again tonight and yes I did think that this and all the other ideas they didn’t do were pretty funny, though not in this context. And then I go to bed and fall asleep sometime around 3.

Metablogging

It’s a little disconcerting, albeit in a good way, to have a bunch of people running up to me and saying “I can’t wait to read about this on your blog.” It gives me performance anxiety, since I always work under the assumption that NOBODY reads what I write. I mean, I’m always happy to hear that somebody does, but I never count on it. So do I need to make it extra special good? Do I need to accurately reflect the spirit of the senior trip? Well, no, because the trip wasn’t about me and my take on it is not an insider’s take. I wasn’t in the room at 2AM deciding what pranks to pull on the security guard. But I’ll certainly reflect my own feeling about things, and I'm hoping that that's really what everyone wants.

Senior Trip, Day 2 (part 1)

I was half expecting to wake up to a soccer ball slamming against my hallway window, but I woke up before most of the kids. I know some of them were up early, but some of them were not up in time to make the 12:30 check-in. Teenagers are funny things.

First I'll write about what I did, though that's not really the point of this. My roommate and I went for a walk and rented bicycles for a few minutes. Then we had lunch and everybody set out for their afternoon activities. I spent most of the time at the beach. I kayaked out to the middle of the lake and just sat for a while, then met up with a couple of students and paddled around with them and finally back to the beach. I really should have napped, but I can say that almost anytime. I also probably should have gotten work done, but what the hey, finals, shminals.

Evening was dinner and Phillies game on TV and a pool party and karaoke and ice cream and finally more hanging out in the gigantic hallway. Sounds like your basic resort day. And so it was.

So a few words about the resort. Nothing terribly surprising. The bicycles we rented were a mess. Mine had no air in the tires and my colleague's had the chain off and stuck in 2 different places. The person renting the bike was mostly in charge of mini golf. She knew enough to point us to the bicycles, say"they're in here" and hand me an air pump. In general the staff isn't exactly surly, but they're not exactly bubbling over with the "what can I do to make your stay as good as it possibly could be" spirit. I don't think there are all that many other people staying in this place (and it's huge) and you'd think they might like to take care of the guests, just to give them something to do. Then again, one employee told me he gets paid $7 an hour and at that rate, who really cares?

The bathrooms require a couple of comments. First of all, I always appreciate it when bathrooms are labeled "Ladies" and "Mens." Life already has far too may apostrophes. Second, they have these high powered hand dryers in some of the bathrooms that all but peel the skin off your hands. Much more entertaining than drying your hand ought to be and completely underutilized as toys.

The resort has the usual complement of snack bar, coffee shop, pizza place at the beach and nice restaurant, although the nice restaurant may be mythical. The snack bar is very dark and looks closed even when it's open. The pizza place looks open even when it's closed, which seems to be almost all the time. The coffee shop has decent food and what may be the slowest service I've ever experienced. I guess I'm used to business hotels where the management figures that time is important to the patrons and staffs accordingly. The average wait time for breakfast, 30 minutes. For lunch, 40 minutes. This does not factor in the people who were there for shorter periods but left because nobody came to take their order. I had a sandwich called an SOB. This stands for "South of the Border," but it's odd in that there is nothing else in the hotel that even hints at a sense of humor.

Senior Trip, Day One

The day divided neatly into 3 parts. Paintball, pre-dinner, and post-dinner. I like to do many things and paintball is one of the few things I have never had even the slightest desire to do. I wasn't alone in this inclination so the bunch of us sat around a little pond doing ain'tball for what seemed like hours but was in fact, well, hours. Finally, after we'd been sitting around for about 3 hours we talked the bus driver to drive us into the adorable little town of Jim Thorpe, PA, a few miles back. We had ice cream (I had a root beer float, though one of the students reminded me it's the ice cream that floats). On the way back one resident overheard our conversations about Jim Thorpe and went on a tirade about how horrible it was, that the town had nothing to do with Jim Thorpe himself, that his wife "bought" the town and made them change the name (from its much more attractive name, Mauch Chunk) and then became a kind of out of control trollop. Then, a driver yelled at a bunch of us for crossing not at a crosswalk, so the town was dubbed Angry Town.

After a not-too-long bus ride, we arrived at Split Rock Lodge in Lake Harmony, PA. I've been in places like this before. It's a full-service resort on a huge plot of land with a bunch of condo complexes around a main lodge/activities building. The condos are usually time shares and people rent a condo or a room in the lodge and partake of the myriad activities available. In tune with my prior experiences with this kind of place, the lodge is reasonably pleasant, slightly run down and functional, and the activities are mostly second-rate, but they're there. They have a way of looking like they were built in some bygone era, whether it's the 50's the 70's or the 90's. I'm sharing a suite with another teacher and we have 2 little bedrooms and a not-unpleasant living room with a kitchenette. In the entire suite we have 2 windows, one is a skylight in the living room that I just figured out how to open and the other is in my bedroom and opens into a 25 foot wide hallway.

The hallway is a natural gathering place for the kids, which is kind of nice. After dinner, all of us chaperones (I'll touch on the whole chaperone thing later) went for a walk around the property until we realized that we'd managed to get every chaperone 1/2 mile away from the lodge at the same time, so we toddled back. Some kids swam, others played ping pong, and whatever else. Eventually, some went to sleep (paintball is apparently very draining, and so, I can say with certainty, is ain'tball), and the rest of us hung out in the hallway, watched baseball or a seemingly endless hockey game on tv, or some combination thereof.

As chaperones, we have to go to bed last, which in this case means 1:00 AM. So we all participated in the hallway activities. It was kind of like a coffee house without tables and chairs. Or coffee. I can't speak for the other faculty, but I played Apples to Apples, listened to and played guitar, told kids to stop picking up other kids and whirling them around, and talked talked talked. Let me be honest and say that as a species I don't think teenagers are the most interesting of people. I agree with my grandmother-in-law who proclaimed teenagers to be inherently the most conservative people in the world because they all dress alike and act alike, but with this particular group I have to diverge. I think it's because the school is so accepting of different kinds of kids, and the kids are generally nice to each other, there's a terrific diversity here and I'm never bored talking with the kids in this school.

We got the last stragglers into their room at around 1 and left them in the charge of an unusually serious security guard, who was ultimately rewarded for his efforts by having his chair stolen while he was making his rounds.

More to come...

Wall to wall

Euphemisms are fun in general, and I've always enjoyed those for artificial hair. Hair piece is the most obvious and least interesting Toupee, from the French for "top" has jaunty, kind of Eurotrash feel to it. Wig is just kind of a funny word and has the fun association "wigged out," which I'm not sure if it comes from the kind of wig you wear on your head, but it's still a good and useful description of someone who's unhinged. But my favorite is rug. That evokes some terrific mental images. I saw a guy today who could have been the inspiration for that one. It really looked like he was wearing a rug made out of human hair on top of his head. I always wonder if someone wearing something like that thinks they're fooling anyone...

It's Not Their Fault, It's Our Fault

It's one thing for the kid to come downstairs at 10:15 as you're about to watch a DVD and tell you that she's forgotten that she needs to bring a sword (okay, a pretend sword) into school tomorrow and could it be 2 feet long and painted silver. It's another thing entirely to say "yes." Not to mention going online to find a picture of the appropriate kind of sword. And we wonder why out kids feel entitled.

Memorial Day

Based on the noises I'm hearing from the surrounding backyards, I don't think it would be a very good idea to get out on the road tonight...

Supermarket stuff

I walk around a supermarket and my marketing sixth sense takes over. "Why is this here?" "Who buys this stuff?" or simply "Huh?" Today I was in the bread aisle, and let me say that I find the whole concept of a bread aisle mystifying. Why we need six different brands of soft whole wheat bread and over 40 kinds of bread in all (and this does not include the bakery section of the store where there's another couple of dozen) is beyond me. That's a lot of water, flour and yeast.

Anyway, today I was drawn to a brand of soft whole wheat bread called "Hearth Farms." I've always like the "hearth" thing on bread. "Hearth-baked." Yeah, well a hearth is an oven and I'm not sure where you'd be baking that bread if not in an oven. Not quite as good as "fresh-picked." Of course it was fresh when it was picked, but I'm interested in what it's like NOW. Anyway, companies like to put "hearth" and "farm" on their labels, because they have a good wholesome feel about them. But what in the world is a hearth farm? Is it a pastoral field full of ovens? And it sounds like there's more than one. I need to find out.

Looking for Fun

The trick for staying happy, it seems to me, is to not let life get in the way of having a good time. It's not always that easy, when things are busy or stressful or downright unpleasant, to remember that the fun is still there. All that might have changed is your ability to recognize and participate in it.

In that regard, I was given a hand today by a bunch of students who dedicated this year's school yearbook to me. I don't feel like I go out of my way to seek approval, but I put a lot of effort into making every class I teach special in some way, and to make a real connection with my students, whatever the hell that means. There are times when that's easy and and times that it's extremely difficult. With this particular group it was never difficult and it's nice to know the feeling is mutual.

Movies

I've seen 2 movies in the last week. On Mother's Day, we all went to see "Young at Heart," a documentary about a senior citizen's chorus from Massachusetts whose repertoire includes such old favorites as "Should I Stay of Should I Go" and "I Wanna Be Sedated." Very funny at times, but sad at times too, and though the old people and the guy who runs the chorus are great, the narrator is kind of irritating. I'd still recommend it though.

On Saturday, we saw Iron Man, which was just a blast. I've always liked Robert Downey Jr., and he's really in his element in this. The suit and the technology are to die for. At one point when he's working on a impressive and very cool-looking computer system, Ronnie nudges me and whispers "My birthday is in 2 1/2 months." The action scenes are great and don't go on forever so you never get overloaded and it's very funny. I felt like I was dragging Ronnie because it's an action-adventure kind of thing, but she enjoyed it to.

Father's Day is Coming!!!!

I got my first "get this for father's day" e-mail ad today. It was for coffee, which actually isn't a bad idea. At least I drink coffee, even occasionally the coffee from the company that sent me the e-mail. It's better than the whole aftershave/golf/car/toolbox thing. I barely shave, don't golf, don't care about my car as long as it runs and don't have a toolbox or a single power tool. Of course, this means that most of the ads on TV programs targeted to men (i.e., sports) are useless for me.

The whole mother's day/father's day thing is ridiculous to start with, though it does give a nice boost to the greeting card companies, who invented them as "holidays." The only upside is that you always get to answer the question "Why isn't there a children's day?" with "Because EVERY day is children's day."

Whether There Will Be Weather

Yesterday I wake up and it's dark and water is falling outside. Today I get up and it's bright and it couldn't be more dry. This is why I want to be a weatherman when I grow up.

Welcome to the 21st Century

I know a decent number of kids who have two mommies. In a couple of cases they're separated. This makes for a pretty awkward Mother's Day, don't you think?

Free Verse

Opening up City hall
Enthusiasts find rewards in their backyard orchids
Bakelite jewelry and rare Warhols
If it's worth doing it's worth doing right
Hurt arm doesn't get in way of his feet
Harassment needs to be addressed
Banish the blues with color
Life is "crazy crazy wonderful"
Get everything in writing

Headlines from the Home and Design Section