Bad night, better morning

I slept as badly as I usually do when I have to go to bed when the outcome of a game I've been watching is still in doubt. But it was nice to wake up and see the good news.

Waiting game

At the moment we're all sitting around waiting for some report from negotiations. It's not the most productive thing to do, since there may be no news for hours and even at the end the only news might be that there's no news. It's a little like the waiting after labor pains begin, when you know it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days before there's a baby, but this seems easier on my wife and less certain in its conclusion.

For me, aside from anything else, not working has taken the fun out of helping my kids with their math homework. It just doesn't feel right somehow.

A couple of things

A correction to the espresso maker instructions- the warning reads:

• This appliance is designed to "make espresso coffee" and "hot drinks."

BTW, there is a website devoted to such things

This article about tutoring is kind of frightening

I don't have the energy yet to dissect the instructions of the new espresso maker, but I will make a few quick observations.

1. According to the box it has "Retro Styling," which I'm concerned is going to class with the "Vintage Styling" of the new coffee maker.

2. The instructions include a half page on the Short Cord- first explaining their reasoning behind putting a short cord on the thing, then explaining how you can defeat the short cord by using an extension cord.

3. It can apparently be used with ground coffee or something called pods. I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers and am leery of anything with pods other than peas.

4. I'm encouraged by the liberal use of unnecessary quotation marks just on the first page, as in: This device is intended for making "hot drinks." Not sure why that's in quotes, but it's very promising.

Before I get to what happened today, let me take a minute to review how I got here.

I come from a family of teachers. My parents both taught, my mother's sister and everyone in her family (including grandchildren) are or were teachers, and my mother-in-law is still teaching at 83. Many in my family veered off into business, but when that part of my life ended, the first thing I came up with as something I would like to do was to teach math. I got that idea in part because I almost failed Calculus in college, but that's another story.

I ended up at Akiba by a happy accident. I had decided to get a Masters in education at Penn, and they told me I needed some prerequisites for a math teaching degree, but advised me "don't take those courses here, it's too expensive," so I took I think 7 math classes at Temple while substitute teaching at several area school, including Friends' Central School, where I was under the impression that the head of the math department was a friend.

One day in December 2002 (I think) there was an ad in the paper to teach one class for one semester. I came into Akiba, had an interview and taught a demonstration class, and was offered the job. I had been told I was getting a better offer at FCS, but my supposed friend screwed me, I took the Akiba offer, got a full time job the next fall and that's where I've been ever since. There are actually many more twists and turns to it, but that's the abridged version.

So now after 7 years working here, I found myself part of a group that was backed into a corner and pretty much forced to strike to maintain our pensions and I had no idea what it would be like. It was very lonely on the weekend leading up to first day and I was terribly upset, but now after a week out on the picket line with my colleagues, lonely is the last word I'd use to describe how I feel.

I've been through strikes before on the management side, and the union rep said that's the "nicer place to be" during a strike, and I suppose that's true on a financial basis, you're still getting paid and all, but I found the emotional toll to be very heavy. And I suppose if you're on the union side it depends on the situation. If you're striking coal miners, like in Billy Elliott, or omg Matewan by John Sayles, it's way worse (and again, you have no idea how much worse unless you watch Matewan or something along the same lines) that what we have now.

There are always people caught in the middle of strikes, and their reaction is key, because they are what we business types like to call stakeholders, as in they hold a stake in whatever sort of thing the striking workers do. In many cases, like coal miners and transit and even public school teachers, normally the inconvenience that the stakeholders suffer overwhelms their sympathy for the strikers. That's because there's not any kind of connection between the workers and the inconvenienced (sorry, I'd have to shoot myself if I had to use the word 'stakeholders' again in that paragraph- Augh!). I can say with reasonable confidence that that's not the case here. As much as people who run the school like to trumpet the close bond between the students and their parents and their teachers, I'm not sure they really understand it. It's not necessarily a criticism; how could they, really?

The rest of the day was a Shabbat celebration, with food and blessings and singing and togetherness.
Nope, not feeling lonely at the moment.

Except these people really are great

To quote Fred Willard from the movie Roxanne, I'd rather be with the people in this room than with the finest people in the world!

New Stuff!

Our old coffee maker is starting to not work so well. It's a combination regular coffee maker and espresso machine and first the drip coffee part started sending the hot water out in a thin stream so it was pretty much going right through the filter without touching the coffee. Yum! Now the espresso side is starting to leak, and I can tell you, there are few things as exciting as an appliance that might shoot boiling hot water or steam into your face at any moment.

So even though this was a wedding present (over 23 years ago!), we have decided to part company with it. The first step in the break-up arrived today, a new drip coffeemaker. I haven't even opened the box yet, but it promises to be very exciting. Why? Well let me tell you. Here are all the great things about this coffeemaker, based on the outside of the box.

1. It's part of the Premier Coffee Series
2. It offers The Ultimate Coffee Experience (to 'satisfy the most demanding coffee lover,' which is a reasonable description of me)
3. It is the Next Generation of Coffeemakers, yet has Vintage Styling, I guess like the electric coffee makers of yore, taking us all the way back to their introduction in 1972.
4. It has Easy Operation, though from the picture on the box it has 7 knobs and buttons and a clock. Our current coffee maker has one button, so color me skeptical.
5. It's Fully Programmable, Easy To Clean, makes the Hottest Coffee (is that coffee I smell, or a lawsuit brewing?) with Pure Flavor, an Easy-To-Fill Reservoir (I know for a fact that that's a lie) and a Spill-Free Carafe (Ha! They clearly have not been in this house), a Comfort Grip Handle and a Brushed Steel Band, the purpose of which I am anxious to learn.
6. It has a Lift Up Reservoir Lid and I can't think of a single thing to say about that.
7. It says you can Sneak a Cup, but now they've blown that by putting it on the box.
8. It has an Easy to Read LCD clock, which is nearly Impossible to Read even on the box and Industrial Switches, the purpose of which will hopefully be explained along with the Brushed Steel Band, though I'm guessing neither will be mentioned in the instructions.
9. It has All the Best Features, including Simple On/Off button operation.

My one concern is that the box also says it will 'become the centerpiece of your kitchen,' while I wanted to put it on the counter next to the toaster oven. I hope it still will work over there.

More to come after I open the box.

Day Four

My kids don't go to the school where I teach (not for any particular reason- they were settled before I started teaching), but getting back to the social networking aspect of it that I mentioned yesterday, they are aware of what's going on because, well, as my daughter said, "I saw your picture on Facebook."

I love having the students come to visit and stand with us. The kids and parents are the ones caught in the middle here- they're being seriously inconvenienced or worse, so it's especially gratifying in that nobody asked them to get involved. In fact, we were all told explicitly not to involve the students, but this is a motivated, curious, action-oriented group and they don't want to be just sitting at home pretending it's a snow day. It would be inconsistent with what we see from them every day.

Aside from moral support, the kids bring a break from the tedium. I'm not big on jumping up and down holding signs urging cars to honk their horns, but it's probably the most stimulating of the activities available to us. Plus, and this is the same reason I like teaching in the first place, kids have a whole different perspective that adults do and they ask challenging questions.

Unexpected Consequences

Before I forget, check out this important update.

As some of you may have noticed, I've laid off commenting much on what's been happening at school. I've posted pictures and made some general observations, but otherwise have kept my head down. At some point, though, I realized that pretty much all of the rules that we thought we were playing by, at least in regard to dealing with the rest of the community, have gone out the window.

As much as the initial direction was to avoid mentioning the strike on social networking sites, talking to students and parents, etc., I think the people who gave that direction were unaware of how inexorable the flow of information can be if you have a motivated group of seekers and disseminators.

I think unions and management types should consider that this will probably become the norm in future labor relations. In our particular case, it seems to have been favorable to the union, and I tend to think that will usually be the case. In past labor battles, management has had a huge advantage in its ability to communicate to the interested public, because they had the big money and the communications departments. I can't help think that this has helped create the anti-union sentiment that has been prevalent in recent years. Now, however, a few individuals on the union side can take advantage of a wide variety of tools to get their side of the story out to the people who most care about it. It's similar to the trend toward citizen journalism.

Nonplussed

That's always been one of my favorite words. It means to be at a loss or bewildered. I can't really think of a better word to describe how I'm feeling at the moment. I've had some strange jobs in some strange places, but I've never found myself in a position like this before.

It was interesting having students around today. They had a lightheartedness about them that I think lifted everyone's spirits, but at least for me it also highlights how solemn adults allow themselves to become. I try as hard as I can to avoid it, but being an adult, or grown-up if you must, can be a real pain in the butt. I got out of the house late this morning because I got a dent in my (parked) car. This is not a fun way to start the day. On the bright side, my car is approaching being an ellipse, as 3 or its 4 corners have now been bent in a bit. I think an elliptical car would feel cool and futuristic, but this seems a very slow and unpleasant way of going about it.

It has been especially cool to hear from students in Israel.

The most oddball character in the whole drama playing out at the school is the "watcher." I don't know what is name is, but he's from the Federation (like those Star Trek guys) and his job seems to be to sit in his car and watch us. The only things I've seen him do are honk when someone is trying to come in the driveway, usually after we've already gotten out of their way, and he gets out of the car once or twice a day to come and tell us to move something (for example, some chairs) off the pavement. He sits there all day doing this and I think he must have done something terribly wrong to be given this job. He's very vigilant about the horn honking though, so he must be trying to impress someone.

We're back at it again tomorrow. We enjoy company and snacks and if you don't want to bring snacks you can have some of ours. And I've noticed that my pictures are all starting to look the same so tomorrow I'm bringing a real camera and I'll try to be more creative.

My Future

I always tell my kids that God doesn't drive parked cars, so we'll talk about getting on the next road and gearing up for the hard work down to travel down it to reach new goals.

Actually, that's a quote from Sarah Palin's book, but I sure wish I'd said it, whatever it means.

Done for the day

The whole scene today was really heartwarming. When you're in a difficult situation it's always gratifying to feel like you're part of a supportive community. I decided a while ago that it's more important to be a good person than to try to make people like you. And if you approach things that way you can't really count on anything in return, so it makes it all the more satisfying when you get support, because you know it's genuine.

Monday 11/16

Updates (or at least pictures) today on Twitter@justfrankt

I don't get Shakespeare stuck in my head often, but he's there now.

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises: and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours…

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

HAMLET, II,ii

The musical version in Hair is good too. And no, I'm not that bummed out (though some Shakespeare scholars believe those lines to be optimistic in nature- I tend to think that someone who has lost all their mirth is not feeling optimistic, at least at that moment).

Serious Business

Two Woody Allen bits are in my head this morning. The first, which relates to nothing is:

The people appeared to be divided into good and bad. The good slept better, while the bad seemed to enjoy the waking hours more.

And more to the point, he had a bit in his standup routine about how he used to work in his father's store and that he unionized the stock boys and they struck and drove him out of business.

Anybody involved in a labor dispute thinking they're going to "win" has to go in understanding that the ultimate extension of their actions is disastrous. The extremes are 100% job loss and the end of the enterprise as a going concern. Not that that usually happens, but you have to keep that potential in mind if you want to be smart about what's going on.

Updating update.

Over the course of the week or more I will be doing most of my moment-to-moment updating via Twitter. My address is @justfrankt. At the moment I have to approve followers, but I will probably relax that for the moment. I will blog when I have the time and when I have something to say that requires more than 140 characters and a picture.

Strike One

I was looking through some boxes in my attic and found some old letters that I'd sent to a friend many years ago. My friend died about 10 years ago and his family returned the letters I'd written to him to me. The letter had been written when I returned to New York after a trip, and the city was evidently in the midst of a sanitation workers' strike. It was not hard to tell that this was going on because there were 6-10 foot-tall piles of garbage bags in front of every building. The smell was pretty hard to miss too.

I only bring this up because it's important to understand that strikes are inherently messy things. One of the problems with the way people perceive strikes is that because they are 'us versus them' kinds of things, and because people are necessarily inconvenienced by strikes, their reactions tend to be emotional and black/white/right/wrong in nature. This is unfortunate, because the reality is far more nuanced.

I've been in and around a number of strikes, as management, labor and innocent bystander. My main observation is that there are never any winners in strikes, only survivors and victims. Everyone suffers. Management can lose revenue, customers, and reputation. Labor can lose reputation, money, and jobs. Bystanders lose anything from a convenience to a necessity.

On the management side, the concerns vary. If the customers have alternative providers of the product or service they provide, they have incentive to at the very least try out the competition. This is not at all what any business wants. In the case of a transit strike, the fallout is usually a drop in ridership, as people find other ways to get where they need to go. For labor, paychecks are the first thing to go, but clearly there's potential for more serious downside. For the bystanders, again, it depends on whether they have alternatives and whether or not the product is a necessity.

Above and beyond that, the organization as a whole invariably loses big time. Whatever the nuance in the situation, for those within the organization, strikes are a black and white choice. You work or you don't work, there is no in between. You have to choose sides. There is always a loss of collegiality; supervisors and workers never look at each other the same way again. Every worker has their own issues that often don't fit into stark choices. Often coworkers never have the same feeling of teamwork and shared purpose. Organizations and organisms sound alike for a reason- they both depend on a variety of processes working together smoothly, and this becomes far more difficult after a polarizing event like a strike. There is simply no knowing in advance how serious the damage is and whether or not it can be repaired.

Another victim in a strike is the truth. Both sides have no choice but to spin the truth, because strikes are often resolved as much based on public opinion as anything. There are always people caught in the middle and where they place the blame is of critical importance. So appearances are just as important as reality.

Whether you view management as penny-pinchers or unions as a bunch of thugs, it's important to not get caught up in the stereotypes. The union movement grew up to protect the weak from the powerful. Labor disputes are always one-sided battles. Management has almost every advantage. They have more resources at their disposal, and as much as their side in the dispute insists that there's only a finite piece of the pie available for labor costs, the pie's recipe is completely under control of management. Labor has one resource- its people, and it's a blunt instrument. Because they have fewer options, labor almost always has to take the more drastic approach. Lockouts, the management equivalent of strikes, are relatively rare. This is consistent with any kind of dispute resolution when the balance of power is one-sided. The more powerful side has the greater ability to generate a long, varied and sustained attack. The weaker side necessarily has to take the more extreme action.

I, like everyone, have to be on one side or the other in the dispute. I will report in as factual a manner as possible on what's going on, but will not venture into the specifics of the dispute and the relative rightness or wrongness of anyone's position. This is nasty business from whatever perspective you view it and I will simply attempt to present it as it appears to me.

New York Trip

I know there are other things that I should be commenting on, but I need to mention my experience last night. My mom has ALS and has been completely paralyzed for the past 5 years. Last night was the New York ALS Association sports dinner and I always try to go and this year I brough one of my kids. The dinner was fun, but we had to catch a 10:00 train, so we left a bit after 9:30. It was in a big hotel and by the time we got our coats and to the lobby, time was already tight and then there were no cabs, so just on the spur of the moment we hopped in one of those pedicabs- like a bicycle rickshaw. It was great. This Turkish guy (he said he'd been in the US for 4 months) was weaving in and out of traffic through TImes Square and all the way down to Penn Station. My daughter and I were laughing the whole way, and we even made ouy train.

Say what you really mean

I left school the other because I was nauseated. I was not nauseous, which means that I would be making other people sick to their stomachs.

Reminds me of the famous (and almost certainly fictional) story of Noah Webster, the dictionary guy. When he was caught by his wife doing some hanky-panky with the maid, she exclaimed, "Mr Webster, I'm surprised!" To which he replied, "No, my dear, I am surprised, you are astonished."

Sunday Randoms

As usual, nothing random about the so-called random thoughts...

I watch Project Runway occasionally and I'm not afraid to admit that my favorite part is hearing Heidi Klum pronounce the word 'out.'

We've been discussing music around here a lot, and when I was listening to some older songs in the car I was reminded of sitting in our dorm room, putting on an one side of a vinyl album which we had chosen after a thorough discussion, and just sitting and listening. Do people still do that? Hard for me to imagine that they do.

On a related (and therefore non-random) note, whenever I talk about music with students they often ask me who I like, so here's a few that maybe give some ideas about the dozens of bands that I like. Current bands include Rilo Kiley, New Pornographers (A.C. Newman's band that also includes Niko Case), Fountains of Wayne, Death Cab for Cutie and others that I hear on the radio and don't always catch the name. I think one of them is called Cake but I'm not sure. I was very into the New Wave thing back in the late 70's with my favorites being Talking Heads and Elvis Costello. Other bands like Steely Dan and artists like Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Randy Newman and Springsteen weave their way in and out as well and there are many, many others.

In the aftermath of something that I will only describe as involving challah french toast, I just vacuumed my toaster oven.

Not meaning to offend anyone, but

I know some people who consider themselves to be thoughtful, intelligent Republicans. All I have to say to them is that you can't have it both ways anymore. You are either a rude, ignorant, intolerant, truth-challenged far-right winger or you are not truly a Republican, (though you might be what they now call a RINO, 'in name only'). Might be a nice time for a 3rd party to arise.

A request

Should any of you hear me utter the words "I'm going to Suburban Square" on a Saturday between now and Christmas you officially have permission to slap me silly and/or physically restrain me from going.

I was there for about 45 minutes, visited 4 stores, was almost hit 3 times at four-way stops, twice in the car and once on foot.

My My, Hey Hey

My 81 year-old father went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert at Madison Square Garden this week. I called him on the phone and he told me all about it. All the amazing people, like Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Sting (his comment on Sting- "I saw Sting. I don't know his last name. I guess I don't know his first name either."), and his favorite of the bunch, Bruce Springsteen. He went on and on about all of them, kind of summing up by saying, "You know, I hate all the music these days, but that older stuff is pretty good." To which I replied, "Uh, perhaps this isn't the moment to remind of what you used to say about all of these people back in the day."

So there's something good you can say about pop music today. It makes older rock music sound good even to my dad.

One more thing

Only 110 days until pitchers and catchers report.

Quick post-mortem

The Yankees won fair and square. They deserved it. Most World Series have some blowout games and some games that are up for grabs. You have to win the winable games, and games 3 and 4 in Philly were up for grabs and the Yankees won both of them. Are they a better team? Yeah, maybe a tiny bit, but not much. I'm kind of bummed out now, but the Phils gave us lots of great moments this year and made it a very successful, memorable season. No parade, but no tears.

A couple of notes

1. In the previous entry I talk about knowing what your principles are, but it occurred to me that newer readers haven't seen what I mean by that for myself. Here's a short statement of my principles:

I will treat other people the way I would want to be treated.

I will strive to leave every situation I encounter better than I found it.

That's it, really. Clearly, both of those things can be expanded greatly, but that would require a multitude of platitudes, which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds (think endless paragraphs explaining things like what I mean by "say what you mean and mean what you say."), and way too much detail to be appropriate for this space. And you really don't know the detail to apply it. They work just fine as they are.

2. I am actually working on part 2 of my post about having too much to do, but it's not done yet.
No jokes about not having time for it, though.

More Awesome Teaching Techniques

Because a number of people are working with ATT program and consider it valuable, I'm usually not going to use real names for the people and stuff that make up the program. However, one of the things I'm supposed to be doing is, and I quote, "Establish a presence on the Ning," which clearly needs no further explanation.

What follows is an excerpt from my Ning presencing, talking about whether people really use all the social networking stuff that's out there. I had made the point that, unlike people in my generation, it never occurs to kids that they will ever lost contact with anyone they want to stay in touch with.

It's also a matter of what technologies you have and what you prefer to use. My kids and their friends all use Facebook, but most of their real communication is by texting and IM. My older daughter does a lot of collaborative schoolwork using IM, which is a relatively old technology but one that does what it does very easily and very well. I've been blogging and reading blogs for several years now, and the only reason I don't use Twitter much is that I have an old cell phone, so I can't really take full advantage of it. That'll probably change when I get an iPhone or a Droid or some such thing. I'm not sure if Twitter is the pulse of the Internet (someone else with Ning presence had made that statement) or the flavor of the month. It's way too early to know.

Going back to my original point about not being concerned about the ability to stay connected to people, as you can see, I have a bird, Eric the bird for you Monty Python fans. (Non-Ningers will need to look at my Facebook page to see what I'm talking about) Eric can be frightened by many things, blue file folders inexplicably being among them, but the one thing he is definitely not afraid of is falling. He's a bird and he can fly. It just doesn't occur to him that he could fall.

Finally, on another point, anyone who feels inclined to jump headlong into the pool of information would be well advised to read Amusing Ourselves to Death, by the late Neil Postman. I think I might re-read it myself.

The Postman book is terrific but not easy reading. One of the points he makes is that most of the information we get now is devoid of context and unconnected to anything else (for example, news about some kidnapping in California or political events and speeches done to look good on TV rather than to contain anything useful).

I'm kind of rambling all over the place here, but overall my point is that, given the risks and rewards inherent in the medium, the principles with which you guide your use of the Internet should be consistent with your principles as a human being. Note, this means actually knowing what your principles are, a piece of self-knowledge well worth seeking. For me, that means knowing what's private and what's public (easy to do because I do it in the classroom every day), and being able to discern the difference between the things that are important to me and those that are not, and to dismiss the latter as meaningless noise.

Only a little bit about baseball

I have to wonder what I'm going to write about after the World Series. I'm not sure if I'll have the time and energy to think of new and interesting things, or if escaping after weeks of sleep deprivation will make things seem less funny than do now.

Yesterday I had extra tickets to the game and did my usual bit to sell them- StubHub plus temple listserv. They sold on StubHub, but the first responses to the listserv weren't about buying the tickets, they were asking if I could drive their kids to the game. I was caught off-guard by that, but I actually did drive a couple of kids that I know slightly whose parents couldn't go (one's sick and one's running for office and just a tad busy the night before Election Day) and couldn't drive. It was very helpful to them and they were excellent company, as it turned out.

Going into the Series I was looking for drama, and the last 2 games certainly delivered. Two teams that never give up and always assume they can overcome whatever deficit they face.

I now have 7 little white towels.

There's a guy with no shirt on with his body painted red and a rainbow wig a few seats away from me.

I like how pitchers wear jackets when they're on base. It's very dapper.

Now that was a baseball game

Sure, I'm disappointed that the Phillies lost, but (1) the Series isn't over yet and (2) that game exemplified why I love baseball so much.

The Yankees scored 4 runs off Joe Blanton despite not hitting the ball hard more than once. The Phillies made much better contact against Sabathia- the two batters up before Utley in the 7th hit the ball just as hard a he did, just not as high and right at someone.

Leading 4-3, Joba Chamberlain comes in throwing 97 mph, strikes out Werth and Ibanez, gets 2 strikes and then makes a mistake to Feliz and wham, the game is tied. Then in the very next inning, Lidge burns through the first two batters, gets what looks like strike 3 on Damon to most of us in the park, then Damon fouls off a few more and then gets a hit and all hell breaks loose. Amazing stuff.

I really like the Phillies, probably more than any team I've ever followed. They're a terrific team, but this is the 9th World Series I've attended and the truth of the matter is that you lose some of them. Who knows which team is better? They're both excellent, but only one of them can win. That's just the way it is. I'll be back there tomorrow rooting for the Phils, but don't expect to see me crying if they lose then or any other night. They did us proud and gave me a lot of joy and excitement and sometimes that's gotta be good enough.

A few notes from a late night before the next late night

I'm sure Major League Baseball is patting themselves on the back for how smoothly and efficiently they handled the rain delay last night. I should just mention that, while they clearly have more important things on their minds than the people who are actually attending the game (we're not watching TV so we don't help ratings), it would have been nice to have a bit of information for the first hour of the delay. Especially when it didn't rain for 20 minutes and they didn't unroll the tarp. Finally after an hour they announced a start time. They pulled the same crap last year during the last game of the Series. Never said a darned thing to us.

If I don't get "swined," as the kids say, from the subway ride I don't know when it'll happen.

As hard a some people tried, there just isn't the same level of hatred for A-Rod as there was for Manny.

They quietly raised the price of a beer by a buck between the LCS and series. And do people really like Campo's cheesesteaks? Ugh. Back to the grilled cheese stand for me tonight.

I have a 95 year-old uncle in California who's been a Yankee fan since Babe Ruth. I'm collecting stuff to send him. Wish he could be here.

I just found a program for the 1980 LCS and a ticket stub from the 1993 Series. I don't want to lose sight of how amazing it is to be going to the World Series here 2 years in a row. The Yankees are a great team and there's no shame in losing to them. If the Phillies are going to lose I'd almost prefer it be here so I can give them a standing ovation for their season.

Safety is our first concern

We bought a new telephone. Our phone in the kitchen was just a crappy phone. It was hard to read the display and the range and battery life were awful. So I bought a new cordless phone. What I found what that when you buy a cordless phone, most of them are called "dual handset" phones. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I forged on. Now that it's here, I open the box and inside are two phones. What does it mean that this is dual handset as opposed to two phones? The only difference I can see is that only one of them plugs into the telephone cord on the wall. Is that what makes something a "phone" as opposed to a "handset"? Since when? I think people consider a phone to be something you use to talk to other people, not something you attach to the wall.

As for safety, the warnings here are minimal, but there was one about not using the phone during a lightning storm because of "a slight risk of shock." First of all, if you look at the wire that attaches to the phone it's not even capable of carrying household current. If lightning went through it you would just have a molten mass on the counter. But even more to the point, we're talking about a cordless phone here. You're not even physically attached to the wire. How are you going to get shocked? Maybe they mean don't use it outside under a tree during a lightning storm. Sounds like a plan.

You may be to busy to read this (Part 1)

I always feel like I'm too busy. And I am busy, but what's weird is I feel that way even when I'm not doing anything. I guess it's because no matter what I'm doing (or not doing) there's always something else I could (or should) be doing at the same time.

For example, I'm now sitting and thinking about whether I should be doing something rather than actually doing it. In fact I'm writing about thinking about what I should be doing. And thinking about writing about thinking about what I should be doing and then writing about it. Wait a second. Now not only am I not doing anything but my head is starting to hurt.

Logical traps aside, I do wonder (1) why people fill up their to do lists with more than they can possibly do, and (2) was it always like that?

Number 1 is the bigger question, and I'm not even ready to think about starting to think about it, if you know what I mean, so let's start with number 2. I've read things like Little House on the Prairie and Pride and Prejudice and it appears to me that those people spend a lot of time doing virtually nothing. But is that how they felt? Were they calm, or did poor beautiful and perfect but blind Mary and that feisty Elizabeth Bennet feel like their days were too full to keep up? It seemed to me that things were slower when I was younger. There were fewer interruption because phone calls only happened at home and in offices and they were expensive (everything in the house would screech to a halt if someone called "long distance") and there was no other way to communicate except by mail or face-to-face. Most of the modern life accelerators were invented or introduced during my lifetime- FedEx (1971), fax machines (around 1975- here's a photo of 3 of them- the white thing is a rotating cylinder on which you placed a sheet of paper. It also had a phone receiver that you put in an acoustical modem to send the signal. It took a mere 6 minutes per page), e-mail (early 1970s), personal computers (early 1980s) and cell phones (late 1980's).

There were certainly fewer things to do. I lived in New York where there were 7 TV channels, the most anywhere. Lots of people had no TV at all. So I guess we did whatever we were doing for longer periods of time [let me interject my mother's favorite 'little Frank' stories. I was allowed to watch 30 minutes of TV on school nights, so I told my mom I wanted to watch 8 minutes of one program, 5 minutes of another, 4 minutes of another and so forth. She said no. I guess I was always a multitasker.] It definitely took a lot longer to prepare dinner before frozen food and microwave ovens. I know I always felt too busy to clean my room, but beyond that I don't remember.

Enough ancient history, but it seems hard to argue that all of the present day's communication immediacy doesn't make things, well, at least seem more immediate. Whether the immediacy is actually necessary or whether things are actually more urgent than they used to be is a bigger question that I will look at in part 2 of this post.

Suprastitious

I have concluded that what I say, what I do, what I have to eat, what I wear and the way I sit in my chair have no noticeable effect on the baseball game that's on the TV.

Mauvin' On Up

I did not know what mauve was for the first half of my life and I was okay with that. Then a relative who shall be nameless, who considers his or herself to have excellent taste, replaced their bedroom carpet with a new one that was very much mauve. The rationale behind mauve is that you would be embarrassed to have a pink rug, so you add a bit of grey to it and call it mauve, but it's still pink. We made fun of the mauve carpet when we were out of the relative's earshot.

Fast-forward about 10 years and we're re-doing our bathroom. I don't want to go into home renovation detail, but we basically took a little-used room and combined it with a teeny bathroom to make a big bathroom and dressing area. Being an adult causes you to do this kind of thing from time to time, especially when you have a small, ugly bathroom. The new bathroom is almost blindingly white and very pretty (for a bathroom), but we didn't want a tile floor in the dressing area- we wanted fluffy carpet. So guess what color we picked?

I don't remember the process by which we got the mauve carpet. I'm guessing somebody suggested it and I said okay. It's fine, really. The dressing area is about 4 x 8 feet and it's mostly just like a closet. It does have a window, but we always keep the shade down because it's a dressing room. It has a full-length mirror and places to keep all of our clothes. It's nice.

So why am I bothering to mention this? Because I have discovered a serious problem with the dressing room. We have regular lights in that room. Most indoor lighting has what they call in the color business a "warm" tone. It's a bit reddish and a bit yellowish. "Cool" light is more blue. Light color is actually measured in degrees on the Kelvin scale. Warm light is in the 1500-3000 degree range and cool light is 4000 degrees plus. The color of objects is based on the colors of light that it reflects. Warm light is more pleasant, but it makes every color look warmer than it really is.

This would not pose a problem if I never left the dressing room, but I do on a daily basis. I can tell you with absolute certainty that all colors look different in a mauve dressing room than they do either outdoors or in fluorescent lighting like we have at school. The result is that on any occasion when I want to see if things will match when I get to work, it ends up being a completely wild guess. Things that seem to match perfectly in the mauve room look ridiculous in fluorescent lighting. My reaction to this is to wear black, blue and grey most of the time, along with outfits that I've worn several times before. This is boring and not my preference but is better than looking silly.

Not too many people can pull off a Snuggie as a look.

Is it possible to understand that you lack perspective about something? Or does that imply that you indeed have perspective? Now I remember why I hated philosophy class.

Notes from the weekend

We had dinner tonight and one of the dishes had orange peel in it. I don't spend a lot of time anthropomorphizing fruit, but that poor little orange looks so sad without its peel.

This was another one of those weekends where I know I was really busy but if you asked me what I did I have no idea. I know I filed some papers, if by "file" one means to put them in a box and put the box out of sight. I also watched "I Love You , Man," which was fun. I drove a lot in the rain on Saturday night, which was way too entertaining- nothing like Lincoln Drive during a flood...

Is there some reason we need 11 different kinds of paper towels? You shouldn't even be using paper towels in the first place except on rare occasions.

You know what else is sad? A sports page with no baseball games to talk about.

Sorry to repeat myself, but

If the worst thing about this time of year is pumpkin overload (anybody for a nice squash smoothie?), the best thing is that you have a couple of weeks to use the word, "spooktacular."

Tough choice- beer or cotton candy. Not both.

Tough choice- beer or cotton candy. Not both.

Good news: phillies up 6-2. Bad news: 10:00 in the top of the 5th

My Promise

I resolve to not shave for as long as the Phillies keep winning.

Actually, I pretty much haven't shaved since the first time the Phillies won the World Series.

Stern Warning

As we come into the autumn holiday season I need to repeat my annual warning against accidentally eating something that's pumpkin flavor. If pumpkin is so good, how come we don't eat it all the time?

I'm not talking about pumpkin pie. In spite of pumpkins being the last thing in the world I'd think to make a pie out of, it has this traditional thing going, plus you can substitute sweet potato pie, which actually tastes good, and get away with it. What I'm warning against is things like pumpkin latte's and pumpkin brownies. Why? Why, I ask, would you create such a thing?

Ryan Howard. un f-ing believable

Seems weird tn take my hat off for the Hooters

Oops. Not h&o. Just some guy with a bad haircut.

Hall & Oates singing national anthem? What year is it?

Couple of baseball notes

I really enjoy going to games at Citizens Bank Park. It's a very nice place to watch a baseball game, and I love the energy of the crowd. Last night I really loved the "You take steroids" chant with rhythmic applause. Pretty funny. I could easily do without any chant that ends with the word "sucks." I will plead guilt to being part of crowds in Yankee Stadium whow started it all with their classic "Boston Sucks" chant. But it's enough already. It's boring and unpleasant and not focused on the game. In the beginning, when we chanted in New York it was never during the game. It was something to do on the way out of the stadium after you won. So I'll stick with "Beat LA" and "cheater."

Regarding the baseball itself, I think that there's now tremendous pressure on the Dodgers to win both of the next two games. Even if they split and get back to LA, they still would have to beat Lee in game 7 and they didn't look quite up to that task last night. And don't think he wouldn't have stayed in the game if it was 1-0.

This Program Brought to you by...

It's always been kind amusing to me that sports programs always have advertisements that I'm not interested in. I'm too old for their target audience, but still, am I going to buy beer, razors or cars based on a commercial? Don't think so. Or cell phones. Or financial services.

So this year so far, a few things have stood out. First is the endless repetition of the Fergie and Will I Am Direct TV commercials. We're not even halfway through the baseball playoffs yet and I must have seen that spot 50 times already. Stop it! Next, I want to know what the woman in the Symbacort commercial actually looks like. I know she exists only in silhouette and that she has glowing lungs and that medicine makes them change color, but I want to know if she has a face. And finally, I have grown to despise any commercial that has things talking that don't actually talk- animals, babies and the like, but I do love the Geico commercial with the talking pothole. I think it's the voice.

I've also decided I'm going to pretend that the commercials are the first few scenes of a movie and figure out what the rest of the movie will be like. So far I like the one where the harried housewife gets a putting green to walk on from Fidelity, and we then cut to a man, (her boyfriend or husband?), talking to his reflection about whether to take drugs for his ED, as they call it these days. Then a woman joins him. Is it the same woman? Hmmm. Hope they don't hit a pothole on their way home.

Hotel news

We have blue water in our hotel office bathroom toilet. We never get blue water at home...

One more thing about the webinar

My experience is that any person or thing that calls itself "Awesome," or any other superlative, isn't.

Crimes against the language (or, Adventures in Jargonland)

I've now heard that thing I did today was called a "webinar." This is exactly why I don't like this kind of thing very much. The word seminar is defined (among other things) as a meeting of people to discuss a particular topic. It says nothing about the venue. Should we have called it an audinar if we had it in the auditorium? Or we could do it outside and call it a lawninar.

So the purpose of the program is to help teachers use 20th century techniques, specifically web-based social media tools, but anything that, according to the moderators, moves us away from our current paradigm. This is a problem for me because my brain is set to automatically shut down if someone ever uses the word paradigm. Look it up and tell me if you know what it means after reading the definition. Nobody knows what it means, which makes it extremely useful if you want to sound impressive without actually saying anything.

This is kind of how things went. The program is called something along the lines of Awesome Teaching Tools, or ATT (it's not really called that, but that's the spirit of it) and they keep talking about all the awesome things we'll do and using lots of impressive-sounding buzzwords, but nobody ever actually tells you what those things are. The one time someone asked about a specific thing they said they weren't going to tell us for a few weeks.

You can look at this two ways, certainly an Awesome teaching technique is to let everyone figure stuff out on their own, to have a voyage of discovery. Of course the cynical view is that there really isn't anything and that we'll just make it up as we go along. It reminds of an obscure Monty Python bit where this woman comes on a talk show to discuss her theory about the brontosaurus. She goes on and on and on about how wonderful her theory is until the interviewer finally has to stop her and ask, "So what is it?" And she responds, "What is what?" At which point you can't help but assume that there is no theory, she just likes talking about having a theory, (that's actually an incorrect assumption because there is a theory and it's brilliant in a Python kind of way, but that's beside the point)

So I spent 2 hours doing I have no idea what, and I guess there are worse things. But I'm not sure I want to manage transformational change around the new literacies in order to grow as a f2f professional learning team. But that's just me. Or maybe I'm already doing it and I just don't know yet. My head hurts.

Webconferencing

I just did a web conference. We had a computer screen and audio and chat. It felt kind of like watching something muted on TV and carrying on a phone conversation while 100 people around you are talking among themselves and to you the whole time.

Interesting article

Anyone interested in making connection between and within branches of science might find this article interesting. If you read through the first few paragraphs, make sure you read the last one.

54

I am now almost exactly 3 times as old as my oldest daughter. Here's what it's like to be 54 years old. It feels pretty much exactly like being 53 years old. Hmmm, that probably doesn't help much. I guess you have to split it into physical and mental.

Physically, I still feel reasonably strong and fit and energetic. Stuff hurts pretty much every day. I have a chronically sore left shoulder which hurts, according to my doctor, because I'm not dead yet. I can ease it with exercises and it doesn't stop me from doing anything, but it's annoying. And typical for someone my age. It always makes me chuckle when kids say they feel old because they woke up and their neck or their back hurts. See how you feel when that happens for about 2000 days in a row.

Mentally, the only even halfway bad thing I can think of is that I have too many stray facts stuck in my head, like what kind of Mike and Ike's my students like. It's like my brain still knows where to go but there are more obstacles to getting there.

Like any milestone, a birthday makes you reflect and think ahead. I was discussing what I want to be when I grow up with my younger daughter (she thinks it's funny but I think she's kind of used to hearing me say stuff like that), and she thinks I should be the old guy whose house kids are afraid to go near on Halloween.

My birthday itself was pretty uneventful. I went out to a wonderful dinner with friends which was a lot of fun, and that was about it. I'm impossible to buy presents for because I don't want anything, so you have to find something I'd never thought of. That gets harder at this age because every year I've had more time to think of things.

And now we've moved on to where my daughter is now 18. Time doesn't fly (and for you catching typos at the last second fans, Tim doesn't fly either); it feels like it's been a long time and a lot has happened since she was born. But still, something about birthdays makes you compress time somehow and in ways 18 years seems really short. Not 54 years though. That's a long time.

Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 54 yesterday. Not one of the highlight, emotionally charged birthdays. I had Happy Birthday sung to me in English and Hebrew and a couple of brave souls tried Spanish too, but it petered out after the words, "Happy Birthday."

Thanks for all the kind wishes. I may have some reflections or refractions to share later, but now it's time to have dinner.

Garage Sale

Is it just me or does it seem kind of sketchy to go to a neighbor's garage sale and look through their things. It just doesn't feel right to me, like it's an invasion of privacy.

Sorry About That, Chief

I had an awful fight with someone the other day. That's a pretty unusual occurrence. I'm pretty even-tempered and it's hard to get me beyond just being annoyed. Looking back on it now, it's hard for me to even see what we were fighting about. Who said something rude to someone else, I guess, but the fight itself is irrelevant.

The reason things got out of control was a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of apologies. A line sticks in my head from a book called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. There's a character who's kind of a sage, and at one point he says, "It never hurts to apologize, even if you don't really mean it." This is (purposely, I assume) overly cynical, but the germ of truth in it is that your apology is not for you. Many arguments get needlessly extended because one of both parties feels, "I didn't do anything wrong, why should I apologize?"

Well here's why. Let's say that you do something that's clearly wrong, like forget a meeting and leave someone sitting and waiting for an hour. Of course, you apologize for that. But what does that do? Does it somehow undo the wrong? Does that person get his or her hour back? If you broke something of theirs does it get unbroken? Of course not. The purpose of the apology is to make them feel better. That's always what apologies are for. It has nothing to do with whether you were right or wrong, it's about how the other person feels.

So one of the skills I've picked up over the course of a lifetime is the understanding of how and when to apologize. Little apologies at the beginning of or arguments can help keep the argument small and short. The skill to it is to really understand what the other person is saying and why they're saying it. You need not actually feel sorry but you'd sure better know what it is you're apologizing for. You have to listen and to think about the other person. That's hard, and I didn't learn how to do that until I was around 40. But it's well worth learning.

Portapotties sure have improved. Toilet paper? HAND SANITIZER?

Whew!

I'm woozy. It was hard to go from not conversing with anyone aside from my family for 10 days to teaching 55 kids.

Have I mentioned that I'm tired of talking about college? It's not even safe to walk the dog.

I really want one of those paintball guns like Ari had in the finale of Entourage. How much fun would that be? I've always been intrigued by my inner battle over whether or not to do that kind of stuff. My usual MO is to think all of all of these great mischievous things to do to people, but I rarely do them. I just don't like upsetting people, but I love the idea of practical jokes. I took a personality test once and two of the strongest traits were "people pleaser" and "bomb thrower." That about covers it.

School's getting serious now. No days off until November 19 and lots and lots of stuff to do. This is the hardest part of the year and one of my favorite times as well, because it's a rare opportunity to dig into things without interruption.

Shoot the TV

I know that the "rollover minutes" mom on the AT&T commercials is supposed to be annoying, but kind of in a funny way. Well, they got half of it right. I do kinda like to point her out as an example to my kids when they tell me I'm being unreasonable about something.

Baseball talk

I just heard a baseball announcer say that the Boston Red Sox had outed the LA Angels the last 4 times they were in the playoffs. The proper term, I think, is "ousted." To the best of my knowledge, "outed " has a different meaning.

As if anyone needed to write more about the Beatles

My father used to read the obituaries, something I thought odd as a child, but he said that there were stories about really interesting people all the time. And I have to admit that now I also at least glance at them on a pretty regular basis. Today I spotted the following, Lucy Vodden, 46; Inspired a Beatles song. Part of what caught my eye was her age, which seemed awfully young until I read the story and found that she was a school friend of John Lennon's son Julian.

There's plenty of buzz about the Beatles these days and I hope Rock Band fans are enjoying the game. The thing I wanted to note was that one of the things that make their music so enduring is that it was totally non-formulaic from the very beginning. If you take the time to sit and listen to their music you will hear that every single song has elements of complexity that no other rock band at the time and very few since ever achieved. Even "She Loves You," (not available on iTunes) completely familiar and straightforward, right? Listen to the first 20 seconds and follow the chord changes and harmonies. Or better yet, listen to all 2:19 of it. It's a brilliant piece of songwriting and performance. If you look at the tabs you see there are 8 named chords, 3 more that are invented chords and one place where the harmonies swerve so quickly it just says NC (no chord). I have a strong musical background and I can't even tell whether or not the key changes, (for the non-musical among us, a typical song has around 4 chords). No wonder nobody else sounds like them (and none of their songs sound like any other).

BTW, if you wonder why people my age (at least those who pay attention) think most current popular music is lousy, it's not because it's too cool or modern or raw, it's because it's BORING.

Same stuff, different day

I've decided that I prefer the fever-reducing buzz of Tylenol to that of ibuprofen.

I'm not writing so much because I'm feeling better, I'm writing because I'm feeling BOOOORED!

I don't usually write about math here and if you dislike math stop reading now, but I had an interesting interchange with one of my kids the other day. It concerned the the despised point-slope form of a linear equation, y - y1 = m(x - x1). I don't teach that form because (1) I find the distributive property to be a top-level producer of errors, and (2), you can't graph it on the calculator that way. In fact, the only way you can graph it without transforming it to slope-intercept form (which was I was taught to do in HS) is to plot the point and make a "slope triangle." What I teach kids to do is put the slope and coordinates of the point into y = mx + b and solve for b. Fewer steps and simpler.

My kid mentioned this to her teacher, who promptly flipped out. Apparently mine is a very old-fashioned way of doing this. It took me quite a while to figure out why someone would prefer that awkward form over the more commonly used one. I think it's about shifting. For all other kids of graphs, you learn how to shift them up and down, left and right, and equation form you use to do that is like point-slope form and has the same effect, shifting the line up and down, left and right. So it makes sense to do it that way except that although the form is similar and has the same effect, (1) the form is similar, but not identical (the standard form being y - k = f(x - h) or more commonly y = f(x-h) + k), and (2) I have NEVER seen a math teacher, or a math book for that matter, talk about point slope being about shifting lines. It wouldn't be a bad idea to do that, but they don't.

Mid-life mania

My daughter thinks I should pretend to have a midlife crisis so I could buy that motorcycle.

My morning visit to the hospital

I've kind of had it. I still have this low fever so I couldn't go to shul which was very upsetting, plus I'm supposed to do an 80 mile MS fundraising bike ride next weekend and this was the weekend I needed to ride 40-50 miles to get myself ready for it. Now I don't know what I'm going to do. There's a 45 mile version, or I could just say, oh well, this is gonna hurt and do the 80 miles anyway. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

In the advancement of waiting and seeing, I've been doing the waiting part for most of the day, waiting at the registration places at the hospital, waiting at the lab, waiting for the results, which apparently are not coming today.

My doctor rules out swine flu, since this clearly is not any kind of flu, so we're looking for things like mono, Lyme disease, hepatitis, random infections (the registration lady said 'well, I certainly hope you don't have any of these things,' which was sweet).

I've had mono before, but apparently you can get it again. I got it the first time at age 30, which I do not recommend. It's one of those things where the older you are when you get it the worse it is. I caught it 2 months after starting my fist job out of biz school. I was really really sick, like 104+ fever for 2 weeks and a sore throat so bad I had to take steroids for it, which I also do not recommend as a way to have a good time. Then another couple of weeks of just being regular sick. All told, I missed a month of work and I didn't have the stamina to work 12 hour days immediately when I returned. My boss never forgave me for this. They probably would have done me a favor if they'd just fired me then instead of torturing me for a year first, but then maybe I wouldn't have ended up at the place I worked next where I ended up meeting my wife. So you never know.

As for Lyme disease, I've been to Lyme, CT where it was invented by deer who were tired of being hunted and hit by cars and who conspired with the deer ticks to spread it. By the way, did you know that more people are killed by deer than almost every other kind of animal? Between Lyme disease and car crashes, only bees kill more people each year.

Infection? I dunno, the body's got lots of parts and as best I can tell, almost all of them can get infected.

And then, of course, it may just go away by itself.

Randomly Feverish Notes

There are a lot of shows on TV about dogs.

There are also a lot of superlatives on TV- greatest, extreme, amazing, top, outrageous, super; you could spend a long time watching nothing but the best and worst of virtually everything. And why would we be interested in anything else? Normal is boring is the assumption, I guess. I think normal is what you make it and it really isn't that hard to make almost anything interesting if you try. I'm concerned that people can be too dependent on outside stimulation. This is a really bad thing because ultimately you're stuck with yourself, and if you don't know how to enjoy life without somebody or something else's help, you probably not going to be very happy.

When I was at the hospital today getting my bodily fluids tested, I saw in the parking garage, one of the most beautiful commercially produced things I've ever seen. It's a Victory Vision Tour motorcycle. I don't really care about motorcycles one way of the other (though I once had a great afternoon in college riding on the back of one (as opposed to driving it) squirting my fraternity mates with a fire extinguisher), but this thing was breathtaking. I spent 5 minutes walking around it and seeing it from all angles.

Oh, so let's add walking to your car in the parking lot as something that doesn't have to be boring.

Managing being sick

I don't get sick a lot and I hate it. I'm now on my 4th day of this and if it's not better by the end of the day I'm off to the doctor.

It's a weird kind of sick. The only symptom I have is a fever 100-102. Nothing, and I mean nothing else. No gunk of any sort coming out of my body. That's why I'm pretty sure it's not swine flu. My doctor said he was not aware of any swine flu that didn't also have runny nose and cough. I got nothin'.

Unfortunately, aside from a few scattered hours here and there (like right now), I've felt generally too crappy to do anything, and I'm incredibly bored. When I was a kid, being sick was an opportunity to watch game shows on TV, which I loved. I remember being upset every day in the early afternoon when Let's Make A Deal and The Price is Right were replaced by One Life to Live and All My Children. I tried watching The Price is Right. It was disgusting. Drew Carey is very unpleasant to look at and not nearly as funny as he thinks he is, the showroom model babe is a complete caricature- huge blonde hair, frightening big white teeth, and leeringly low cut dresses. I like looking at pretty women as much as the next guy, but UGH!

And the people? I guess I have to admit that I don't look like those Michelangelo sculptures I saw this summer, but doesn't anybody go to these things who is not a minimum of 20 pounds overweight? Plus, back in the day, people actually used to try to guess what the price was. Now that everyone's savvy that it's the closest guess without going going over the actual price, the first person would guess $1400, the second one would guess $1401, the third $1402 and the fourth $1 to capture anything under $1400. What's the fun in that? The only thing I liked was the set, which was a melange of neon patterns and looked like it was made out of cardboard.

So the most interesting thing to do is monitor my temperature. I remember from when my kids were little that there isn't anything to be gained by repeatedly taking their temperature. But I find the oscillations fascinating. Maybe I'll record them on a scatter plot and see if I can get a curve of best fit. Up and down, sometimes steadily, sometimes in sudden jumps or falls. Maybe I'm just too self-absorbed, but if my temperature was 100.2 at 6AM and 101.9 at 8AM, what happened during those 2 hours? All I was doing was lying in bed.

The only other thing to do is strategize where I'm going to park myself and whether I will be sitting or lying down. In general, I try to avoid being in bed during the day because it makes it harder for me to sleep there at night. The couch in the den is the most comfortable, but everyone else likes to sit in there too and it's next to the kitchen and therefore noisy. So I stay in the living room. The couch is fine, there's a good TV and it's relatively quiet. So I think I will go in there now and prop myself up at a 45 degree angle and watch something I've seen a bunch of times before.

I think we've just stumbled over the TMI line, so I think I'll stop now.

2 sick 2 blog 2 day

Being sick is cruel

I'm not talking about being deathly ill, I just have a bit of a fever and no other majopr symptoms. And it even gives me a 4 day weekend, but it's sooooo booooring. And frustrating, because I got all this time and I don't have the energy to do a darned thing.

OK. I've said it. Back to bed.

I don't really think they were trying to be funny

Copied verbatim from the text of the talk about the upcoming dance by the head of a school that I don't work at:

Please abide by the following dancing guidelines: (a) consensual (b) vertical (c) nothing over sexualized.

I don't really like to dance, so my dancing is rarely consensual (grudging is a better word), but the intriguing one is definitely 'vertical.' It makes you really want to know what happened at the last dance.

Thursday evening

I'm not feeling well, so I don't have much to say this evening.

I got home from Parents Night and my younger daughter said she needed help with her math homework. She said her older sister had already helped her with a couple of problems. It wasn't until this afternoon that I found out that my older daughter (who was sitting in the next room) knew she needed help because her Facebook status was "Can't do her math homework."

Simple Question

Wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of signal on the outside of a car to let the other drivers know you're about to turn?

You little whippersnappers...

One of my many activities during the work day consists of minding the soccer field during lunch. Fortunately, nobody is allowed to actually eat lunch on the field, because it's artificial turf. This reminds me of when Lenny Dykstra, a world-class tobacco chewer and spitter, used to play for the Phillies. They had an artificial turf field and the tobacco juice had nothing to soak into, as it would on a grass field. So there it would sit and if it didn't rain for a while the area where he would stand would become increasing brown (you could see this on TV) and sticky (or so I read).

Unfortunately, I lack the ability to fully illustrate why this is such an unpleasant enterprise and can only offer the observation that the field is used almost exclusively by 13 and 14 year-old boys and that my only responsibility is to ensure that they do not suffer mortal wounds from either (1) driveway traffic, or (2) each other.

This responsibility is complicated by this particular sub-species' complete inability to connect actions with consequences. It is, however, good practice for my future as a cranky old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.

Darn!

Well, once again, nobody I know got a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

Much Time, Very Little Action

I have nothing but good feelings for the hearing-impaired, but they really shouldn't be telephone reservation agents.

Random New Year Notes

I'm teaching the same thing in 2 different classes out of two different textbooks. Sounds easy, right? Except that the two textbooks use different terms to mean the same thing and I keep switching terminology which is very confusing for the students. Not sure what to do about it. Either way is correct, but I really wish I could stick with just one.

I've been listening to the radio more recently but I keep hearing Nickelback and All American Rejects. There's Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas too, which is fun, but I also keep getting that Taylor Swift song stuck in my head (Update: My daughter just finished practicing piano so now I have Chopin stuck in my head which is much better). It's a way to pass the commuting time, but I might go back to my Learn Italian disks.

Just not getting into Top Chef this time, and So You Think You Can Dance was more fun during the summer. Anybody watch Bored to Death?

What Have They Done?

Not sure what it is or why, but it now takes me twice as long to get through the traffic light at Haverford Station Rd. And Montgomery Av. than it did 2 weeks ago. All I can tell for sure is that the light pattern is more complicated, and more complicated is rarely better.

Is that what it takes? I always wondered what it took.

I know I am a mature individual because my vitamins say so. I apparently achieved maturity almost 4 years ago, when I turned 50. If only I'd known that back in the day when everyone told me how immature I was, I could have said, "Well, just wait."

The End is Near (or, fire that advertising agency)

I just saw some ads at Starbucks that used the atrociously cliched (sorry, I don't know how to do the accent) "It's not just coffee, it's Starbucks." As a professional marketer, I must tell you that if the next thing you see is, "The best just got better" you know they're really in trouble.

Because I never lie, and I'm always right

This post will probably disappoint those who are looking here for humor today. The Jewish new year is designed to be a time of reflection, to evaluate your life and see if you measure up. I've made it pretty easy for myself in that I have a pretty simple life philosophy: Treat everyone the way I'd want to be treated, and leave every situation I encounter better than I found it. As a math teacher, one could argue that the second part should be "better or equal to," or, not worse, since there are many things you can't even affect, much less improve, but I'd prefer to shoot high.

So how did I do? Not sure I can live up to the title (which was, I believe an election slogan on a Firesign Theater album). I still have another couple of hours in shul to work on it, but I think on the macro scale I did well on the first one. On a more moment to moment basis, do I ever get testy with people? Of course I do. I can't promise to never get testy. All I can strive for is to lengthen my fuse, and I think that's something any of us can work on. But I can say with absolute certainty that I did not at any time hold grudges or do anything with the intent of hurting anyone physically or emotionally, and I tried within my own limits to treat everyone with compassion and generosity, whether I felt like they deserved it or not (that being the hard part).

The second part is less focused on intent and more on results, making it a bit stickier both to do and to judge. Was I always a generous with my time and money as I could be? Definitely more so on the latter than the former. I guard my time closely and don't like being imposed on (and in turn try to seldom impose on others). But I feel good about the fact that last school year, at the very end when I was totally exhausted and drained (long story), I still not only gave every bit of my free time in school to helping students who asked, but gave them empathy as well.

On the other hand, more than any other year in recent memory I had to depend on others for help and support. There's a part of me that feels that to be a bit of a defeat, because I prize being self-sufficient, but why should I not give other people the chance to feel good about helping someone? That's what makes this whole thing so darned complicated. I always want to be the helper, not the helpee (?), but by being too self-sufficient I deprive others of something that I myself take great pleasure in, helping people. So is it a good thing or a bad thing? Not sure there's an answer to that question.

So how does it add up? Not really up to me to judge.

College Overload Update

The under wins. The word college was spoken a mere 113 times during Back To School night. This works out to 1.51 times per minute.

More Back To School

I'm going to my final BTS night at my older daughter's school. Anybody want to bet on how many times the word "college" will be uttered? I'm putting to over/under at 140 and I'll be keeping track.

Why real life is better than, if not as interesting as, the movies

I came home early unexpectedly from work and my wife was (gasp!) washing the dishes. In the movies, whenever someone says, "I didn't expect you home so early" you know they're doing something they shouldn't oughta be doing and either drama or hilarity will ensue.

The New Digs

When they did the kind of quick and dirty renovations to this building they used several of the largest rooms for group teacher offices. We had a nice big room in the basement that used to be the workout room. This year, they (correctly) decided that they needed larger classrooms, and so they moved us out of that office and into the so-called hotel section, where 7 of us now occupy what had been 2 hotel rooms. They put the 4 women in one room and the 3 men in the other room.

An arrangement like this is full of potential for amusement, too much for one post. Let's start with the hoteliness aspects of things. We have our own little hotel bathroom. Since it's all guys, we have decided we would leave the seat up (I live in a house full of girls, so that's a tough one for me). Instead of little shampoos and shower caps, we have lots of hand sanitizer and lens cleaner for glasses. And a hair dryer, which I think will be handy if either one small part of our body gets cold suddenly or if we put white-out on a paper too thick. We have a small shower and I intend to bring in fluffy towels (no robe or slippers) so that I can ride my bike to work and then shower. We'll see if I actually ever do this- it's an 8 mile, 35 minute ride.

Think about a hotel room with no beds in it and one thing you might notice is that there are no lights. I'm not sure why this is, but I've been in lots of hotel rooms in all kinds of places and almost none of them has an overhead lighting fixture in the bed part of the room, just in the entryway. So our room is lit pretty much by 3 little fluorescent desktop lights that illuminate most of our desk and nothing else. We have a window, but I can't imagine what it's going to look like in there on a cloudy winter morning at 7:30.

There's no room service, but fortunately, we have a refrigerator (no, not a minibar), coffee maker and lots of snacks. Because I am a rebel I have soda in the refrigerator when there's no soda allowed in school. There's also about 10 things of the same flavor yogurt because that's the only flavor the person who bought them likes. I hesitate to say anything about the food we have, because it attracts animals. 7th grade boys in particular are kind of like squirrels- if you feed them once they keep coming back.

All the rest of the space is taken up by the desks, supply closets, and, well, us. We don't have connecting rooms, so you have to go out into the hallway to visit the other. We've only been in there a week, so I'm going to wait a few more days before I comment on the dynamics of all the women in one room and all the men in the other.

Mental Floss

Woody Allen once said that the brain is the most overrated organ. We all trust our brains to do all kinds of things, even though we really have very little control over them. Nobody chooses to have "Umbrella" or the theme to Friends stuck in their head, but there they stick.

People have spent countless hours over the centuries (millenia, really) trying to understand the relationship between people and their minds. They've tried to divide up the functions physically and spiritually and functionally. Thousands and thousands of pages are devoted to mind and soul, id and ego, conscious and unconscious and subconscious and semiconscious (my personal favorite). I studied a lot of that stuff in college.

And what do I think about it now? I think it's a bunch of hooey (yes, that's actually a word). I firmly believe that the whole world of philosophy has been built trying to convince ourselves that we are somehow in control. If you dig into it, the logic of the argument in favor of all of our actions being predetermined is much, much simpler than the argument for our having free will, which is still a work in progress. Simplest explanations aren't always the best, but they're usually a good starting point as long as your specal (? what would be adjective form of species?) pride doesn't get in the way.

And of course, I have no idea why I was thinking about this.

A little more about Serena Williams and a little more

I see that Serena Williams finally issued and apology. Good for her.

I'm not any kind of behavioral purist, but what I find inexcusable about what she did is that she is a professional athlete. Nobody's forcing her to do this. If your chosen profession is that of a an athletic competitor, part of the job requirement is that you respect the rules and the people who enforce them. People cut corners, intentionally or not, and cheat all the time, but they know enough not to lose their temper and threaten the people whose job it is to enforce the rules. I'm sure Serena didn't foot fault intentionally, but she also could not possible be looking at her feet, so how could she know for sure that she didn't? I'm not sure what was going on in her mind that made her think it was okay to do what she did.

In a behaviorally related item, I love Kanye, but what he did to Taylor Swift, who did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG, was inexcusable. Nice to know you loved Beyonce's video, but how would you feel if you'd just gotten an award and the presenter started spouting off how Flo Rida's video made yours look like a 6th grade art project? Would that feel good, or might it make the moment a little less satisfying?

It's all a matter of treating people the way you'd want to be treated yourself. It's such an obvious kind of thing that I'm amazed how often people forget it.

Pedro Martinez is a Punk (and other sports news)

I've been watching Pedro Martinez pitch since he was with Montreal (yes, there used to be not just a team but a very good team in Montreal) and I've always hated him. He was just obnoxious enough and more than good enough to annoy and opposing fan, and he had a well-deserved reputation for throwing at people's heads. Then when he was with Boston during a brawl he threw a 70 year-old Yankee coach to the ground and it was sealed. My daughter, who grew up a Yankee fan, almost cried when the Phillies signed him.

All that being said, everyone who loves baseball should take some time to appreciate what Pedro is doing with the Phillies this year. Aside from all the punk stuff, he was also always known as having the best pitching smarts this side of Greg Maddux, and to watch him work last night was to see genius. The man is an absolute artist on the mound and some of the pitches he threw were things of beauty (if you like that kind of thing).

Having been a baseball fan since 1962 (!) I have been privileged to see many wonderful things, from Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle to the 2008 Phillies, and I have to add watching Pedro Martinez pitch-by-pitch to my personal highlights.

Over the weekend, I also got to see Serena Williams curse out a lineswoman (multiple f-bombs) at match point and be given a one point penalty to lose the match. I have never seen anything like that in all my years. That woman is an excellent tennis player but she has a way of tainting every loss, almost like she's planning her excuses as she goes. Usually it was just some injury we'd never heard about before ("and I don't want to use this for an excuse, but...) but this was pretty creative. This is not the kind of person you want to play with.

Big Advances In Science

Glade is now making a room freshener with a motion detector so it can give the room a spritz when someone comes in. Cool idea, though it would be better if it had an odor detector in addition, so it only does its thing when smelly people enter the room.

I Don't Think This Means What You Think It Means

I had to fill out a health from for school that has all the usual emergency contact stuff (I do have to remember to tell my friend that she now rates as an emergency contact- I'm sure she'll be flattered) and doctor information and do I have any allergies. And then there was a space that asked, "Other Procedures You Would Like Done."

I'm not really sure what they're getting at here. Do I want them to take all possible action to save my life? Of course, but why don't they just say that, so it must mean something else. So I put in that I would like Lasik surgery so I don't need reading glasses anymore and new orthotics. I'm sure there's some sort of cosmetic surgery I'd like too but I couldn't think of anything under pressure.

More Start of School Thoughts

There's a real danger in thinking that the kids are listening to you because you are an interesting person when in fact they may just be listening because they have to.

The most flattering thing that's happened to me so far is that I asked a student how she'd liked her summer program (I'd written her a recommendation for it) and all she wanted to tell me about was all the mischievous things they'd done in and around the labs. Nothing about what she'd learned (except maybe that dry ice is entertaining), just the fun parts.

First Day of School

One of teacher's edition math books has math jokes for every section! Here's an example:

Q: What kind of roots does a "geom-e-tree" have?
A: Square roots!

Another...

Q: Why was the math teacher upset with Cupid?
A: He kept changing the "like terms" to "love terms."

It's hard to compare the first day of school to any other job I've ever had. It's this weird mix of new and familiar and routine and completely varied. Plus I'm doing a completely familiar job but I haven't done it for 3 months. For students, this is all they've ever known, but I can't think of any other adult job that's like this. Maybe a farmer.

I like the first day of school, certainly more than I did when I was a kid. On the first day of school there are no papers to grade, no scolding for not having done homework, no pre-exam stress. Just getting to know new people and reconnecting with others. I have one class that's full of students that I know pretty well, but for some reason have never taught.

In another class, half of them are new to the school, which means they learned math in completely different ways. Since one of my favorite things to do is trying to make some sense out things, I always find classes like that challenging and interesting.

The one thing I don't like about the first day is that I talk too much. Maybe the kids like it, but I get tired of the sound of my voice after a while. I like my classes to be conversations, not monologues. I'm always afraid I'm sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher.

72 hours of my life

I'm messing everything up just by writing this. Three hours of sleep followed by the routinely surreal airport experience. The best coach seat I've ever had on an airplane. A bloody mary (an "eye-closer"as my dad used to say) and into hours of head-bobbing dozing and an hour of reading about how people try to disappear and how they (usually) get caught. And it was only now that I had any idea of what time it was.

Back in the day, I never would have even considered taking a flight this long in a smaller type of commercial airplane. It would have to be a widebody- one of those planes with 2 aisles. Nowadays, though, it's almost impossible to find anything else. I'm going to Sacramento where my aunt, who survived 10 years or so with repeated episodes of liver cancer, finally said enough and came home to be comfortable for the last days of her life. I don't have a big or especially close family, for a variety of reasons. My parents each had one sibling. I have 3 first cousins on my father's side of the family and have not seen any of them for what must be 30 years. I don't think they were at my wedding. I'm recently in touch with one of their kids on Facebook. My mother's sister and her family were the only ones I ever really cared about.

This ends up being a very important set of relationships for me. My aunt is my only relative of that generation with whom I've really felt simpatico. She always loved and not just accepted but seemed to understand and even cherish me and my peculiar manner of behaving. Over the years I found myself in all kinds of trouble, or maybe just making mischief, when I was visiting the family at their home outside Sacramento or on their annual camping trips to the mountains and/or the beach. Once I went rafting on the American River with my cousin's boyfriend and for reasons that now escape me later admitted that we had been doing something out there on the river that we probably ought not to have done. This led to many hours of frank and interesting conversation, of which all I remember was how devoid it was of any sort of judgmental vibe. I could make a mistake and still be accepted and loved.

I visited often during high school, college and immediately post-college, so you can imagine the kinds of stuff that went on. It was a gloriously freeing set of experiences. I've had periods of close and sometimes complex relationships with my cousins and their circle over the years. I haven't seen her family as much since I got older and more settled, aside from a bunch of visits when I was living in California. Even that was over 20 years ago. But the close ties have remained and taken as a whole it is unforgettable.

I'm only giving you a trickle of the flood of emotions and memories that have almost overwhelmed me since I heard that my aunt was coming home to die. I arrive in Sacramento and call to check in and find that my aunt passed away while I was in the air. This both stems that flood and starts another one. It seemed like a peculiar time to arrive, but in ways it could not have been more perfectly timed. I had spoken with my aunt on the telephone on one of the last days she was capable of doing that. I had a chance to tell her I loved her and that she was in my thoughts and my heart. I could have done little more had I arrived earlier.

Now, on the last day of my visit, I'm still in this fog of present emotions and memories and family where I can't quite put a name on it. It doesn't always feel good, but it somehow feels right. I will always treasure my memories of my aunt, and I feel blessed to be able to have this sense of closure.

Sitting in the Vegas airport eating a salad.