The Teacher's Lounge

Mr. Bean has left the building.....

2008-10-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

So I'm not really blogging here so much, as I'm not teaching. I'm doing Yoga, so I'm blogging
Here. Come in, stop by, rummage through the drawers and the medicine cabinet. I don't mind at all.

Just go ahead and ignore this

2008-10-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

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The Blockbuster

2008-10-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

Promised I would. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/user/thisisourfilms

Soooooooo fun to make.

On Change

2008-10-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not teaching. Had enough for a while.

I'm investigating Yoga. Being a half-breed now in California, I'm in a unique position to provide commentary, and so I shall. You can check out the new blog at

http://yogahalfnelson.blogspot.com/

And so I will be posting there for a while. I'm still going to put up our blockbuster film here, and put a down posts that won't quite fit on the yoga blog, but I'm kinda getting going on the yoga thing, and will be muddling around there for a while. Come join me.

On resting

2008-10-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Being an unemployed, shingles-ridden single bachelor living alone affords one much free time, as you can imagine. And so I'm starting another blog. I'll tell you all about it later, some day, whatever, but the point is that blog land has just eaten up two hours of my day goddamit, but I did find this Hindi god of the Day to your left, and it's so goddam appropriate to the new blog, well, it's going on both. I may abandon ship on this one, and that's ok seeing as I sort of abandoned it for a month, and so lost all 6 readers. Any way, I'm not really a teacher right now, so what the fuck, why not turn the page on this one. Maybe later I'll get back to it. Still though, gotta wait for the movie to come out- that, at least, I can faithfully say I've followed through on. Stay tuned......

On Blisters

2008-10-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Woke up with a half-ring of nasty blood-tinged dried blister globules all around my shirt. Nasty as it is, i hope it's marking the begining of the end......

On Stupid Fucking Ideas

2008-10-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Like trying to conflate painful experiences. What a fucking dumb idea. Let me be the one to tell you, shingles are NO JOKE. They are as painful as everyone says, and more. Dry socket, after getting your molars out? For amatuers. Spinal Meningitis and the accompanying spinal tap? Puh-leeeze, nigger. This shit had me dribbling spit over my chin, leaning onto buildings in public, thinking I was gonna hurl, AND I WASN"T EVEN THE LEAST BIT NAUSEUS. Fuck. It's subsiding, now, thank fucking God, even though he never did answer my phone call.

On God

2008-10-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

Does anyone have his phone number? I need to talk to to this asshole.

On cravings

2008-10-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

Whoa! just had the first one, not 12 hours in, and boy did it suck. And the Shingles welts are even gnarlier than they were last night, but I'll wait until they ripen up before I post a photo. I did say I'd bitch. Bitchbitchbitch.

On Shingles, Smoking, and Embracing Misery.

2008-09-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

I have Shingles. Mother Fucking Shingles.

It’s the chicken pox virus, a form of herpes, if you never knew. You had to of had chicken pox in the past to get Shingles, as the virus remains embedded in your nerve cells long after you contract the disease. Should it ever escape, it’ll infect one branch of your nervous system, usually around one side of your torso, and the skin above the infected nerves will redden and blister. Trust me, I know.

I felt odd on Friday night, after not being able to sleep the night before. Like the hairs on my back were glued to my shirt, and every time I moved, they were tugged and pinched. I was tired, out of sorts, and a little achy. The red spots appeared the next day.

I didn’t worry, at first. One thing about living in California is that there are always bugs, year round. One thing about there being bugs year round is that there are spiders year round. One thing about there being spiders year round is that, when the weather gets too dry, there aren’t enough bugs to eat. And so, the evolutionary crucible being what it is, California has birthed several species of Man-Eating spiders. I have become accustomed to waking up with multiple gouges most mornings, and it terrifies me that one night I will wake up and have to witness this parasitism transpiring. We all take a little bloodshed as karmic payment for the nice weather.

On day three the blisters showed up, and I got worried. Worried, of course, that I had some odd disease, but more worried in the American sort of “ fuck I don’t have health insurance, and this might end up costing me THOUSANDS” sort of way. Fortunately, I live in liberal ole’ Berkeley, and so dropped into the free health clinic. I have a right to be skeptical, as it is staffed by volunteers with marginal medical training, but still, they have to confer with doctors, and the bottom line was that I- likely- had Shingles.

And so I’m left watching this rather disgusting proliference of red patches and blistery yuck slowly work its way around my right torso, in a strip centered around my mid-rib area. I’m subject to malaise in the evenings, and I’m assured it will linger on for the next 2-4 weeks, until my immune system finally catches on and kills the little shits.

I mention all of this to complain. Just before I wrote this sentence, I had initially thought to say “ I don’t mention all of this to complain, but…” And then I realized I was lying. I WANT TO COMPLAIN, but I know it makes for poor reading unless you justify it. Let me justify it.

I decided something. I decided to embrace my misery.

I don’t want to complain (LIE), but this summer has been brutal. Break-ups, joblessness, homelessness and Shingles have all knocked me around. Still, much is of my own doing. Smoking, for example.

I smoke (currently). I have smoked for a long time. I thought is was a cool way to prove I was not a wanker that should get beat up in the hallways at age 13, and have embraced it ever since, a sort of mental wall that stated:

“ Don’t fuck me up, because clearly I am destructive enough, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE even, to not care about FUCKING YOU UP TOO.”

….Which was fine for a sort of desperate bid for a teenager, but needs to be lost before your thirty-fifth birthday.

Guess how old I’m turning next month!

I had decided on a quit date, which my friends who have managed to quit things tell me is Bullshit. I had chosen my mother’s birthday, for obvious reasons, at least obvious to those of you who know me well enough for this to be obvious. But, well, it’s going to suck whenever I do it, and I might as well be efficient about it, a move that would thrill my Ex in its naked efficiency. I’ve been moping about the house anyway, purposeless, and why not condense ugliness and pain? The quality and texture of our lives are defined by the overhang, the issues we superscribe as constant, and if I’m docketed to be miserable for the next few weeks, might as well multi-task. And for this reason, I WILL COMPLAIN. That will be all the blog contains for a while. And this is OK. Fuck it. I’m not looking forward to it, but knowing that life will be sucky for a while, well, so be it. I’m going out for a smoke while I still can.

On Movie Making: A great reason to not write

2008-09-08T17:45:00.001-07:00

Because we're making a Blockbuster. I won't tip my hand too much, but it involves both these wonderful masks and the spiritual guru from the last post.......I'll keep you posted......

On Help

2008-09-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

This man can help.

I swear.

On Not Posting

2008-09-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while. I haven't wanted to.

The reasons for this are complicated, but lie largely in

A) all the crappy stuff that's happened to me in quick, random succession and

B) a realization that crappy stuff happens to everybody, and being a whining self-pity whore does no good to no body, so time to stop whining.

So, when i can manage to screw the ole head on straight, I 'll be back again. Soon. Just you wait.

Stupid Wedding Injuries

2008-08-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

There are two welts about three inches above my waist, on my lower back. Precisely where you would find the clamps that anchor one's suspenders.

It started with some mean windmills and moonwalking- although the esteemed J.T., age 3, eclipsed my performance. I will follow his breakdancing career with interest.

It ended with an old Filipino lady hustling me back over to the dance floor to complete my Vanilla Ice- ne Robert Van Winkle- impression, which, I must say ROCKED, but also chewed up my knee, to the point of limping. I am clearly too old for this.

Clearly, this is a filler post- just a way to give a nod to family and friends.

Congrats, Bro, and Sis ( in-law, we aren't hillbillies, although we sometimes act inbred). Rocktacular wedding. Not only was a good time had by all, but you've given me an excuse to post a photo of Vanilla Ice on the blog, which is really all anybody could ever want, you know? Oh, and I'm glad you are married, too.

Sex and the Single Teacher part 3: Women Seeking Men

2008-07-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

For those of you just joining us, welcome to the internet dating experiment. I'm not a woman, but I play one on my blog. The ads are facetious- I just wanted a peek into the mentality of the internet dating world. The last one, Men seeking Women, yielded typical results, that of fake women trolling for my email address, trying to get me to shell out for booty photos. And so, let us see what happens when we juxtapose the genders.

WOMEN SEEKING MEN (Casual Encounters Section)

The Advert:

Seeking to Discipline-30 Strong, professional woman, PhD, independent and self-actualized seeks SWM who needs a little “discipline”. BBW, 6’7”, confident, and 2 months pregnant. I choose this for myself and have no need for someone to be a stand-in for a Baby Daddy. The hormones are kicking in, however, and I need someone to fill me up. I am a dominant searching for a submissive- you must earn your way into the Promised Land. Your pic gets mine. No penis photos.

RESPONSE #1:

Not even 5 minutes after posting, I get my first response, the subject line reading

HOT HUNG ITALIAN SUB

Which is awesome, as it only needs four letters removed to sound like a Jimmy John’s Sandwich Special. He’s been kind enough to not directly show me his goods, but close e-goddam-nough. But, hey, I’m a lady, I get to bide my time and choose- I don’t need to reply just yet.

RESPONSES #2-8

All within 10 minutes of posting, one guy from his iPhone. Jesus, who the fuck trolls craigslist ads from their phone?

Clearly, I’m going to have weed out a few of my suitors out of the dating pool, pull the plug on their sprinklers, so to speak. I’m also worried that they might make me if I don’t change my email. So time to set up a new address. I’m going with the tag
Mistresshelga67. I think it’s cute.

RESPONSES #9- 87 Kajillion

There really are too many. Still, though, this dominatrix thing is great, every response, while completely perverted, retains a gentlemanly ambiance. If I were a 6’7” BBW PhD, I’d definitely consider my dominatrix options. There are quite a lot of requests for face-sitting, plus, every 5th guy or so complements me on my pregnancy. A few choice quotes:

“I want you to sit on my face and dominate me, use me as your sex slave like the filthy man-whore I am. Make lick your asshole around and around, tease me with you breast and pump my cock with your hand. Let me know.Sorry for the long email, I sort of got carried away:)”

“Make lick”? Sorry, dude, points off for bad grammar.

“Your(sic) 6 ft 7inches? Thats(sic) hot.”
Don’t I know it, sweetie. Mistress Helga needs you to use your apostrophes.

“Young guy ready to serve your every need. Big foot fetish and would love to have you facesit on me. No strings attached you Dom me sub action”
-Sent from my iPhone

You shouldn’t be able to send this from your iPhone. Drunk-dialing is a scary enough prospect.

“I won’t bore you with stories of my sexual prowess or the enormity of my cock – although I have been told both are impressive.”

Eh. You just did.

“I would be happy to fulfill your needs during your time of your pregnancy.(btw - congtrats!). I don't know the details but would love to chat. I'm sane, d&d free, considerate. However, I'm nowhere near 6-7, hope that's not a problem.”

Hey, dude, you win points for the ‘congrats’, although check your spelling. Don’t get hung up on the height thing- Mistress Helga knows she Kicks Ass.

“Pls know that i am not a CL faker or BS artist. Not a hustler or a game player.”

Yea, yea, No one is if you ask them. Shit, watch this- “I am not a CL faker.” See how easy that was, and yet, how untrue?

“…want you to sit on my face and dominate me….”

Always with the face-sitting. Do these people understand I’m 6’7”? I could hurt somebody.

“…limits are scat, underage and permanent marks.”

Uggh. As least we share limits. Isn’t ‘scat’ used for other species? Does this mean human feces are OK?

“serving as a maid?”

Did I SAY maid? Do your homework.

“Good afternoon, hope you are well. Would you be up for someone to worship your feet? Are you really 6'7" or is that a typo?”

See, at least he read the ad. Did I mention at least 1/3 of these fellas are into the foot fetish? Why is that? Feet mostly just stink.

“Hi there, my name is J*** and I am 25 and live downtown in the financial district. I am 5’10’’ in good shape and am exceedingly well endowed. I have long maintained a fascination with slightly more mature women – and find that they make the best lovers.”

‘Slightly more mature?’ I’m only 30, for fuck’s sake. Thumbs down.

“Dr. Mistress I saw your advertisement I am a foot shorter than you and require your pregnant discipline.”

I’m pregnant. The discipline is not.

“I am highly experienced with most areas of bondage, dominance and submission. As a male Dom, I have enjoyed giving corporal punishment, such as spankings and floggings and general torture since 1980.”

An Established Mom and Pop Spanking. Thank goodness for Olde Tyme Values.

You would think the most disturbing thing about this little experiment would be how easily I found myself slipping into the role of the Dominatrix, and it was sort of spooky. We all should be able to vote for who we want to be reincarnated as, ‘cause I definitely found my calling. Still, though, this is difficult. Is this what women go through all the time? I feel like I’m rummaging through a pile of half-assed resumes, written with crayon and smattered with coffee-stain rings, such is the quality and care of the responses. Are all men this clumsy? Am I?

Another disturbing aspect is that I’m starting to feel a little guilty, like a tease. I’m not sure if I should or not- this is really an ad calling out for some fantasy role playing, and aren’t I providing a service, some fodder for this, albeit mostly for my own amusement? For this reason, I don’t email any of the more carefully rendered responses back, as I don’t want them to get their hopes up. I email back a few poorly written ones, the guys who don’t put in a lot of effort, and the small dialogue doesn’t bear mentioning. Well, there was one guy who was going to cook up a meal, and I started to get interested in the prospect, having him design a menu and everything, before ducking out, remembering that I am not, in fact, a dominatrix, and he’d almost certainly kick 17 types of shit out of me if he found out all his efforts were for a currently underemployed snarky blogger.

Really, the most disturbing part is how goddamn NORMAL all these guys look. A few I’m imagining I even recognize (isn’t that Chuck from East Quad, back in college? Wow, he’s a lawyer now.) I’m not going to be able to leave the house without looking at the bank tellers suspiciously. Oh fuck, that’s not true. I’m a man myself, been one my whole life, and I know we are all pigs. This is no surprise. I fear, though, I’m going to have problems if I continue the logical extension of this experiment. Soon it will be, as my homosexual buddy likes to say, “time to be getting’ gay.” It’ll be bad enough to try and pretend to be a gay man, but it’s the lesbians who are gonna make me, I’m sure of it.

COMING SOON: Men Seeking Men

Sex and the Single Teacher part 3: Men Seeking Women

2008-07-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

There was never meant to be a part 3.

I was supposed to be hitched, done, out of the pool, dried off, re-clothed, outside the YMCA and reading the New York Times in a coffee and bagel store.

Now I’m single again, and I’m not at all used to the idea. They say it takes half the time of the relationship you were in to get over it, and so I’ve probably got a while. Still, though, one must make hesitant steps towards moving on, and so I’m scrolling through the Women Seeking Men ads, not because I intend to contact anyone, but because, well, I guess I can now.

They are exactly what you would expect.

There is much talk of theatre, an interest in actually leaving the house, eating food, long walks, soulful overtones injected into mundane and inoffensive activities. They are generic, hesitant, a broad net cast in hopes of catching any fish, and perhaps a fear of sounding exclusive and opinionated.

Others are specific, a laundry list of requirements, each bullet point telling containing its own story of failures past. They don’t want ‘game players’, they do want honesty, you have to be OK with a kid, a weight problem, an STD. Its remarkably efficient and honest, the new dating scene, but many of these people go too far. I’m short- should I be ruled out over a serial adulterer? He can lie- I can’t grow 2 extra inches.

Still, though, one I find amusing. I couldn’t find it again if I tried, but it’s sort of blasting the whole notion of specificity, and concurrently, generic taglines. This woman says something to the tune of “ …And why do you all say you like long walks on the beach? That’s why I don’t go to the beach anymore. Too damn many of y’all, walking around aimlessly, pretending you like Jazz and theatre and moonlit nights. You aren’t that sensitive. You’re men, just be men.”

Something like that anyway.

I email her, I tell her I think her ad is funny, and she replies, and goes on a little more about how all the ads are too damn specific.

This resonates with me, and I come up with a plan.

The problem with summers off is that all the stupid ideas that cross your brain in a day….well, you have time to execute them. I have no intention of going on a Craigslist date at the moment, but the notion of the uber-specific ad is funny to me, and so I decide to post.

MEN SEEKING WOMEN

The Advert:

OPEN MINDED GENTLEMAN-35

You: Between 5’6”- 5’7 1/2”, brunette (chestnut w/red highlights preferred), weight range of 115-125, Stanford educated, olive complexion, Virgo w/Sagittarius rising, divorced for no less than 2 years, left leg ½” shorter than right, w/mild scoliosis, in search of LTR, SAA, SWM, OPP, FCC, VIP and EPA.

Me: Into long walks on the beach, candlelight dinners, opera (because sensitive men love the opera), travel, food (not for consumption), communication, light body hair, excessive ear wax. You must be OK with this.

NO: Trannies, lefties( southpaws OR communists), fatties, Ford drivers, flag-burners, knitters, walkers, eaters, sleepers or game players. Sorry, but that’s just how I feel.

Must posses own Segway.

Now, I don’t really expect anyone to reply unless they get the joke. Still I get a couple replies, generically written, mentioning nothing about the ad. I’m clearly not a Mensa candidate, but I can tie my own shoes, and it requires a similar IQ to see where this is going. If these are even real people, they are baiting me, trying for my email address, gearing up to flood my inbox with Viagra offers, penis pumps, whatever. I can’t complain- am I not baiting them as well? I figure the polite thing to do is reply. You know, start some discourse. See if they bite. I use an old email account, one infected with penis pill adverts some years ago. See? I can even button my shirt up correctly if you give me a couple of tries.

RESPONSE #1:

To: Clarence Bean
From: Filia Alida

Hey, My name is filia, I just found your post on craigslist. Just to let you know some stuff about me, I just turned 28 last month, and i?ve lived here for three months. It's hard to find a good man now a days. So i thought i'd try craigslist. If you are interested in getting to know me.. shoot me an email. Talk to you soon

To: Filia Alida
From: Clarence Bean

Filia,

Thank you for responding to my ad. My questions for you are:

How tall are you? I have requirements.

Do you like food?(not for consumption)

Are you in possession of a Segway?

Hope to hear from you soon,

Clarence Bean.

PS. I sincerely hope you are a human being, and not a penis enlargement tablet. I would be crushed.

To: Clarence Bean
From: Filia Alida

Whassup, S*****? (Ed. Note: she figured out my real name from my email address. I feel like I’ve just been made, but I press on nonetheless) want to take a break from what youre(sic) doing? I just logged into my cam site, if you want to have a little fun. Let me know if youre(sic) interested, ill check back in a few cutie

To: Filia Alida
From: Clarence Bean

My Goodness.

Filia, I am heartened that you are a real person, and not a tablet. I'm so lonely. What is a 'cam site'? I surely would like to have a little fun. Do you like Segways? This is what I consider the penultimate of fun. Did you know that most people use the word 'penultimate' incorrectly? It does not mean ‘ultimate', but a sort of secondary 'ultimate'. I hope you know the difference. No matter, I am willing to make an exception for you. Perhaps this 'cam site' will be the ‘ultimate.’

I wait with bated breath ( not 'baited,' that is for fishing),

Clarance Bean AKA s*****

End of Correspondance.

RESPONSE #2

To: Clarence Bean
From: Mary Stewart

Hey I'm Mary and I dig your post. I will send you a pic a little later I don't have one on this computer at the moment. Get back to me on marysparanoidagain**@gmail.com because I've been missing mail from people that I know on this one lately, something about getting mixed up in the junk folder. Cya.

To: Mary Stewart
From: Clarence Bean

Dear Mary Stewart,

Thank you so much for your reply. My initial reaction was that of wonderment- could you be related to Martha? While I respect Martha, I would have to politely decline correspondence. Martha is white, and, as you know, I am looking for an olive-skinned lady.

It was your command of foreign languages that clued me in, however, that you might be of a dusky hue. Of what cultural persuasion is the word "Cya"?

I would like to "Cya" ;)

At any rate, I do hope you own a Segway- perhaps we can go riding soon.

Scoliosis? No matter, I am willing to make an exception for you. Possibly, we can put an elevated pump on just one foot. Like Cinderella, only ethnic.

Don't worry, I am paranoid, too.

Sincerely,

Clarence Bean, AKA s******

PS I sincerely hope you are a live person and not a tablet that counteracts erectile dysfunction. I would be so disappointed. I look forward to your 'pic'.

To: Clarence Bean
From: Mary Saunders

Hello, thanks for getting back to me. Do you have pics? I'd love if we
could chat a bit before meeting up because you never know about people
from the net these days! You should check out my pic on
amateurdatingonline.com it is pretty hot. My profile is hottbod2. I
would send it through here but I don't have any pics of me on this
computer yet. Anyways, let me know what you think and when a good time
to chat is for you. Later babe! Xo

To: Mary Saunders
From: Clarence Bean

Never know about people from the net these days INDEED.

OK Mary "SAUNDERS"- don't think I didn't notice your clever ploy to unobtrusively change your last name. I'll bet you ARE related to Martha Stewart, and are merely seeking to conceal it.

You are making me paranoid, Mary.

You probably don't even speak Cya.

Still, though, I'm exited that you have a hotbod2, as described in your email. Are your legs the same length?

Hoping to hear from you,

Clarence Bean.

End of Correspondence

The stupidest thing about all this is while I know these people (sic) aren’t reading a word I say, I’m beginning to look forward to their emails, which sort of smacks of pathetic. OK, perhaps not ‘sort of’. I think I need a new approach- I'm beginning to sound like that guy, you know, what's-his-name who writes all the letters.

And so, a little reflection.

Truth be told, humans aren’t really all that different from the rest of the animal kingdom. I think most men would be happy to connect their testicles to a sprinkler head and let the semen rip, hoping to impregnate something, anything. Women are left holding umbrellas, so to speak. The biggest complaint from the ladies’ ads I read on craigslist is a proliferance of penis photos, something I’m not so sure I want to see myself. But, in the nature of scientific inquiry, let’s give it a shot. This is a learning process, and how could I not give equal time to all genders if I'm claiming due scientific process? I’m going to have to make this next one a little more believable, though.

COMING SOON: Women Seeking Men.

On Traveleling Zoos 5: Serval Cats and Quitting

2008-07-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

About a month into my employment, I had the big ‘To Do’- I was going out on a show with the actual boss. And, as the actual boss was going, we were taking the performing animals, ones she had trained, that only she handled. We were going to a community center in some generic northern suburb.

Her vehicle, the official one, was a converted ambulance. It was painted lavender and stenciled on the side, not all that delicately, were the words ‘Samantha’s Amazing Animals’. For every other show I had done, we had taken a brokedown* white van, but here I was, with the boss in the company vehicle, one that had undoubtedly seen the last dying breaths of many good citizens. I did not feel good about this.

Here’s the thing about training animals; you can’t train them. You can only encourage them to do things that they normally do anyway. You can get the horse to ‘count’, but he can’t perform arithmetic. You can get the cat to walk like a fashion model down a runway, but she’s doing it for the treat, not the prestige. Yes, a piano-playing duck sounds pretty cool, but it’s not so impressive when you find out it’s just picking up duck food that you threw on the keyboard with its beak, striking notes in a haphazard manner. There is no composition. Still, we all like to anthropomorphize animals-especially city people-as it makes them seem a little less alien to us, a little more toward our realm of consiousness and a little further away from their animal natures, which seem quite brutal to us. Take the raccoons, for instance.

They played basketball. That is to say, they would take the little orange Nerf© balls that Samantha gave them and drop them through little toy hoops. These same creatures, in the pen in her backyard, would snarl and hiss every time you went by. We were all under strict instructions to never go near them, and never give them opportunity to get close enough to the cage for them to take a bite out of us. Still, they looked cute on stage, and didn’t give any indication of their true natures while performing.

Not so with the Serval cat.

I should give you an idea of what a Serval is before I get into the actual performance. It is the smallest of the ‘Big Cats’, a loose category used to describe predatory felines large enough to take down substantial prey, something bigger than rodents or birds. According to wikipedia-a dubious source, to be sure- it can weigh up to 40 pounds. This doesn’t sound that huge at first; a profoundly obese housecat can get up to 20, so in these terms, it’s just two Garfields. The Serval, however, is built along different lines. It has extraordinarily long, thin legs and, according to www.serval-cats.com, is often confused with Cheetahs.

Cheetahs.

These things are tall and lean. Yes, it does hunt rodents, hares, etc., but it also hunts antelopes. Small ones, to be sure, but antelopes nonetheless. Antelopes are among the worlds fastest terrestrial mammals, and this thing can take one down. After one show, Cyndi, the only other one allowed to handle it, was dragging it upstairs on a leash, and the Serval was being, to put it mildly, reluctant, and was voicing its displeasure. Servals don’t meow. They growl, in that National-Geographic sound-bit sort of way, the one that makes nature documentaries interesting from the once-removed perspective of television. Live action is different. To be succinct, they induce bowel twisting primal terror when the thing is within striking range without a moat and a fence between you and it. At one point on the way up the stairs, when Cyndi was bringing it back up to its home after a show, it was writhing and leaping around in such a way that I swear all four of its paws (and I hate to use the word paws, as it conjures up images of cute kitty-ness) were off the ground, and I swear that Cyndi used this opportunity to yank the leash in such a way that it was yanked in flight up the last remaining section of the stairwell. My respect for her was growing immeasurably, as well as a little fear. If she could kick a Serval’s ass, she could certainly kick mine. I sensed a glass ceiling in the company, but that’s not important now. Back to the show.

For the performance, Samantha had set up two collapsible tables, the kind found in elementary school cafeterias, about six feet apart, and had set up a ring for the cat to jump through. Pellet food and doggie treats are fine enough for ducks and raccoons, but the Serval was having none of that. This was a cat, after all. Human vegetarians like to get their digs in on the meat eating portion of the population by calling us ‘carnivores’, but it isn’t true, really- we are designed by nature to extract protein from a number of different sources, and only a small percentage of that should be meat, much less than is incorporated in the typical American diet. ‘Should’ is a strong term as well- countless people have shown that we can get by fine without it.

Cats, however, are a different story. They are real carnivores. Anybody who has a cat will back me up- how many times has your cat turned her nose up at the dried Purina cat chow in her bowl? How much does she love you when you give her that gross slab of gelatinous processed meat out of the can?**

The point is, cats are real carnivores. They eat meat exclusively, and it being so high in protein and saturated fats, it affords them most of the day to sleep it off. They are all cute when they are purring and snoozing in the sun, but when duty calls, they are mean little predatory machines. The Serval cat was technically a pet, but Purina cat chow was not going to do it for him. Samantha solved this by using chunks of raw steak to entice him to jump from table to table, and through the hoop. When she brought the meat out of the carton during the show, the Serval’s response was immediate, raw and Pavlov. It instantly started drooling uncontrollably, great swathes of saliva dripping off its chin like regurgitated chocolate milk. I didn’t think it was possible for an animal to bug out its eyes like a bullfrog and narrow its eyelids to hunter’s focus at the same time, but it did. It was alarming to see this, and to see how clearly it was beyond this animal’s power to control or moderate its response. I think Samantha had to wipe up the drool puddles with a rag during the show. I’m sure, actually. I clearly remember her handing me the drool rag and making me do it.

Memory is a fickle thing. Reason tells me Samantha would never light a hoop on fire and have the cat jump through it, given that it had a coat of very flammable fur, but I think because I was involved in all the theatre productions in high school and therefore a ‘drama’ geek, I prefer to remember it that way. I’m fairly certain it didn’t happen, but it seems more in line to think about it as such. What I am sure of is that at some point I either had to move a stationary hoop or hold one in one place. Regardless, I was up close and personal, ‘on stage’ as it were. The cat was drooling everywhere now, in wild anticipation for raw meat. but was, for whatever reason- be it singing its fur or retaining it’s dignity- reluctant to jump through the hoop. All I know was that the thing looked at me, mad with craving for flesh, but unwilling to perform for it.

Supposedly, only Dr. Doolittle can talk to the animals, but I watched the gears turn in this animals head, and I clearly understood what it was thinking when it came to the realization that there was a ready source of soft, dark meat that it wouldn’t have to sacrifice its pride for. No hoops, no prepared little chunks of cold-cow cuts, this hunk of walking gourmet was closer, warmer, and, given the look I probably had on my face, easy pickins’. Plus, everyone likes Indian food.

I’m sure gave every indication that I was lock-dead easy prey, but pre-programming and Samantha’s constant cajoling won over. It jumped through the hoop, Samantha gave it its treat, and I excused myself to go throw up in the bathroom.

This same cat finally sealed the decision to quit. We, as employees, had to go up to the ‘office’, Samantha’s third floor apartment, to sign out for our paycheck. I guess I’d done a couple of shows, and they were getting used to seeing me around, because Cyndi told me to just go up by my lonesome and sign myself out. The creaky wooden chair, the one I’d imagined Dee sitting in when I’d made my initial call, was behind an old wooden desk, the hub of business transactions for SAA. The baby squirrel was skittering around the place, the snakes were slithering in the computer room, and the Serval was staring at me from the kitchen, entirely off the leash.

‘Oh’, I thought to myself, ‘There’s the funky little squirrel doing his thing, here’s the paperwork I need, the snakes are milling around the computer room, and there’s the Serval cat, stalking me. Everything seems in order. I think. Should I be worried about something? I feel like I’m missing something.’

There is something to be said for denial. Had I freaked out entirely, the Serval would’ve knocked my ass senseless like a big stuffed catnip toy. The image of the cat registered in my mind as I reluctantly pressed the rewind on my brain, but I did have the sense to turn my head around slowly. Yes, I had done shows with the thing, yes, I was aware that Samantha let it run free in the apartment, but I trusted these people enough to figure that, I don’t know, it would be in a special room or asleep or something. I was alone, it didn’t recognize my smell*** , and the thing loved raw meat. I was on his turf.

Underwear isn’t all that expensive, but I wasn’t getting paid enough to write it off as a business expense, given the rate I was soiling them in this job, and when the thing let slip a throaty, guttural growl and hunkered down into pouncing position, claws extruded and dug into kitchen tile for purchase in its final killing leap, I decided it might be prudent to try other employment, should I live through this one.

When I got home that evening, a letter awaited. I had applied to a fast-track teaching certification program some weeks before, and I found I had been accepted, training starting next month, we hope to hear from you soon, etc. I made the decision right then and there to try my luck with human animals, a safer bet. At least I spoke some of their language, if not entirely fluently. Yes, parents can sue, yes, the salary is sorta dismal, but being alive to bitch about it seemed worth it. Time to become a schoolteacher.
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*And I mean ‘brokedown’ as in “brokedown drag-queen”- it had that effect, and I couldn’t tell you why.

**The reasons for this are biological. Intestine length has much to do with diet. Cows and other ruminants have complex digestive systems. Four metabolic chambers, a sequential chemical sequence that requires back-and-forth regurgitation with precise timing, a symbiotic relationship with specific strains of bacteria, and, most significantly, an intensely long and coiled alimentary track- all of this is needed to digest something as simple as grass. A carnivore has a different layout- look at a lion sometime. Within the ribcage and torso, it is thicker, as it contains HUGE lungs (it has to exert a lot of effort to catch its prey, and oxygen is needed in spades to do this) as well as its normal set of organs, liver, heart, spleen, etc. What it doesn’t have is a big huge belly- cats are slim around what for lack of a better term we can call a waist. We, as fancy monkeys, are somewhere in between. We don’t carry enormous fat reserves of fuel, unless we happen to be American, and we don’t have the same type of complicated alimentary track as ruminants, as we don’t need to digest grass all the time. We do get beer bellies, however, and in part that is because we need to have a lengthy enough tract to digest whatever comes our way, but short enough to be able to catch, acquire, etc, whatever is available, including beer. We are, in short, omnivores. Sorry for all that, but I am a biology teacher, after all.

***Or perhaps it did. Chicken Tikka Masala, I imagine.

On Traveling Zoos Part 4: Squirrels and Eddie Munster

2008-07-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I was allowed into the upper eschelons of the zoo. The building was a two-flat with a basement, and the top floor was where Samantha The Boss lived, along with her favorite pets. Well, some of her favorite pets. The other half were the sick and problem pets, ones that needed special attention because they were either ill, and needed special care, or were too ornery to be given reign in the lower eschelons. One of these was the baby squirrel Samantha had rescued.

Before I introduce the squirrel, I need to explain my relationship to squirrels in general. I am an avid cyclist, and probably due to sheer odds, I’ve nearly hit squirrels several times with my bike. It’s usually (a combination of) neither of us paying enough attention to where we were going, but despite the close call, it was unintentional on both our parts. They usually bounce off my spokes, shake their little skulls into sensibility, and scurry away. It is disconcerting to have one of these creatures bolt across the room and deliberately clamber up your leg, your back, your shoulder and nuzzle right up to your ear and start chattering and chewing on your earing, but that was precisely what happened about two minutes into me being up there. The baby squirrel clearly felt comfortable on my shoulder, and liked the taste of my earwax, because she decided that she would make camp there, even as I strolled around the apartment.

It was my second day here, only six weeks in the Big City, and already I was wearing a squirrel like a foppish pirate. Things were looking up.

In addition to wearing a squirrel pirate-style, I began to feel even more surreal staring at her ‘celebrity’ photographs, the same type you would see in any restaurant hoping to attract the big clientele- the cook or the owner beaming proudly next to Cher, with some sort of personalized autograph and quip, like ‘Thanks for the best ribs in Key West!’ Hers were of celebrities of the pseudo-creepy sort. Robert Engler, the guy who played Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies was up there more than once, and I got the feeling they probably called each other every so often, sent Christmas cards, inquired about each others kids, etc. In itself, discombobulating, but the one with Eddie Munster was the one that put me definitively off-kilter. It wasn’t so much that it was him, but that it was an adult him. And it wasn’t even so much that it was an adult him, but that it was an adult him in full Eddie Munster regalia- widow’s peak, faux-dracula waiscoat and shorts, the whole bit. Still, I could imagine that maybe he was coming from a comic-book convention that day, trying to milk a few bucks from his former career. What was most disconcerting was that he was clearly tanked, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, in a kind of raucous, falling-over-at-the-bar cameo shot, the kind of photo you only get of your friends when you go out late on a Friday night. My God. I had to accept the fact that my boss goes out and gets kershnonkered with adult cast members of The Munsters.

……………………………………

On Traveleling Zoos 3: Pythons in Satchels

2008-07-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

My first real show was a birthday party held at a community center out in the suburbs, for children ages 1-1/2 to 4. I say this as if I had some sort of ‘practice’ show- no such luck. This was two days after meeting the animals. For the show, we brought an assortment of reptiles, including some of the smaller constrictors, a three-foot iguana, both alligators, and a turtle or two. The Asian girl-who’s name I don’t remember, but whom we will call Cyndi, as she needs a name at this point- was going to introduce all of the animals. My job was to take it after the introduction and walk along the semicircle of giddy preschoolers, and let them pet the animals. Did you get that? LET THEM PET THE ANIMALS. Me. Holding them. I guess iguanas, like most reptiles, are fairly predictable, but still, I can’t say I knew that then. I only knew the thing had inch long claws, and preschoolers are pretty soft. I guess it went OK for the first few times. I was then supposed to put away the animals while Cyndi introduced the next one. It was all going off with out a hitch, and Cyndi must have felt safe enough to start to introduce some of the more unpredictable ones, the ones I wasn’t allowed to handle yet. For this part, she would do all the work: introduction, petting, putting them away.

All I had to do was sit with all the rest of the animals and make sure they didn’t get into any mischief while the rest of the show went on.

You need to know first that snakes are kept in old potato sacks, the sort that hobo’s of the Mark Twain era were reputed to wear. The darkness and the restriction of space are supposed to subdue them. They have a pull tie at the top, like a satchel or a hoodie sweatshirt. I was supposed to knot it closed, but at this point in my life I hadn’t owned a satchel yet, nor a snake, and there really isn’t a need to tighten your hoodie so that your face is hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, except during really cold winters. I just didn’t think about it. I also just thought the weave of the cloth was pretty stiff, and that was why it was sitting rather upright. I did notice that I hadn’t pulled the tie quite tight enough and I grabbed the top of the sack at precisely the same moment that Cyndi cued me to grab the alligator from her, mid-show.

“And so, kids, we are really exited to show you all some other animals.” Said she, as I failed to show up.

The snake in the sack had, unbeknownst to me, apparently seen the Light at the End of the Satchel, and started to eek its way out. It had nearly reached the top when I grabbed the satchel, expecting to feel only slack burlap fabric. It surprised both of us, I think. He was smelling freedom, I job security, and it was alarming to have this yanked so cleanly from underneath the both of us, a result of a simple misunderstanding. I found myself gripping him just below his head in a strangle-hold. He found himself immobilized by an unseen deity, shaming him for wanting independence. I, not expecting to feel a rod of organic snake underneath the burlap, barely managing to not shriek like a demure-looking Asian girl and wet my pants. He choose to freak out entirely, wriggling and convulsing, defiant in the face of a vindictive God.

“Are you guys exited to see the Iguanas?!?” Cyndi was saying.

“YES!”, they squealed.

“You sure can, as soon as we move the alligator off stage.”

She cleared her throat, again.

His head wasn’t quite out of the bag, so the audience couldn’t see it. Nor could Cyndi. The snake was wriggling like a man confronted with immediate existential uncertainty, made all the more fluid by his extra burlap skin. I must have telepathically communicated the gravity of the situation, because she started to box the ‘gator, while the snake I and excused ourselves to the bathroom, satchel and all. I eventually had to lay the bag on the floor, release the anxious snake from my grip, and quickly pull the bag from the back around his head, before he had time to figure out that this was his last bid for freedom. I felt anxious for myself and a little sad for him. I was having waking nightmares about the fabled snake from the New York City sewers coming through the drainpipe up the unsuspecting businessman’s ass, should he escape down the toilet, and it being traced back to me. I also felt a little shame for not letting him realize his dreams, should this be what he aspired to do. It didn’t happen- but it could have.

On Traveleling Zoos 2: Landing a Job and a Binturong

2008-07-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

When I did call the zoo, a woman with the deepest, huskiest voice I have ever heard picked up. Perhaps it was some measure of trepidation on my part, a measure of anxiety that I felt about finding a job in an enormous metropolis, but I immediately conjured up some fever-driven animation footage of an enormous 1940’s era cartoon Boss Lady, sitting behind an enormous cartoon desk. In my mind, she had a cross-hatched 5-0’clock shadow, beady solid black pupils, a gnawed cigar stub sticking out from between her rear molars, and when she looked at me, little menacing emissions of dashed lines shot from her eyeballs towards my diminutive little self on the killing floor. As her gaze bored into me, I would shrink, the soundtrack a reductive “EEEeeewwwww”, until I collapsed upon myself, diminished to the size of a Smurf doll. She would shake her head in disgust, reach for the Big Red Lever next to her desk, and drop me through the trapdoor that I had so unfortunately chosen to stand upon. I would hover for second, scrambling for purchase in mid-air, before I disappeared with a freehand scribed “whoosh!” and a cloud of beige dust in the shape of microwaved marshmallow.

I was only a fraction right. As it turns out, she was stick-thin, but she did smoke Marlboro Reds at an alarming rate, hence the gravelly voice. In a rehearsed but friendly diatribe, she told me I would get a quick tour of the premises and an introduction to all the animals, and then would be put immediately on a show, basically to see if I could deal with it. She turned me over to a demure looking Asian girl for the tour*.

When I was introduced to her, she was wearing a cute but modest black tank top, and a tasteful Indian-print skirt, just above her knees, She looked nice and considerate, and I felt safe under her mentorship.

“What you need to do is,” as she stradled the larger of the two alligators to the ground- the six footer, not the four footer-and wrestled it to the ground,“ you have to clamp its jaws shut with one hand and duct-tape his jaws together with the other.”

It sounds trite, but I was young, and I realized that first impressions can sometimes be deceiving. Just watching her was an education in itself. I’d tell you more about how she handled the animals, but, in fact, she didn’t. She made me do it. A brief play-by–play:

THE BINTURONG

It’s probably safe to say that most people have no idea what a Binturong is. I certainly didn’t when I met it . It was housed in a converted walk-in closet, with an old dead tree branch serving as its jungle gym. This was a big animal.

“Go on. Go in and get it.” She said.

The Binturong, also known as the Asian Bearcat, is a peculiar animal. It looks something like a cat, with a splay of whiskers on either side of its nose, but its ears and eyes, as well as body language, are more like those of a bear, hence the name. Its incongruous feature is its long prehensile tail. It accounts for up to half the length of its body, and can grasp branches, limbs, whatever, with sufficient strength to support its entire body weight, not unlike a brachiating primate. In fact, it is an arboreal species, spending almost all of its life off the ground. It grows to over 3 feet in length-without the tail- and can cut off the circulation in your fingers- with the tail- although it has too gentle a disposition to do this maliciously. I didn’t, however, actually know this at the time.

“Don’t be shy.” Said Cyndi.

“You need to be comfortable with the animals if you want the job.” She explained.

I’m looking at this Bearcat, hanging out in its tree, wondering how on God’s good earth I’m going to ‘get’ it. It turns out, it wasn’t a problem. He was a curious fellow, and slid down his from his perch to sniff my toes.

“He said WHAT!?!” exclaimed the Asian girl, muffled, from around the corner.

“I KNOW, girl I couldn’t believe it…” Said Darlene, through puffs of Marlboro smoke, her voice getting softer as they plodded downstairs.

They were leaving me.

Alone.

With this animal.

Fuck.

He gingerly probed at my ankle, grabbed my trouser leg, and with sloth-like patience, began its ascent up this new, pliable tree. It must been unique to have the bark on these new branches give a little, and move to suit your trajectory. He made his way up to the top and settled on my head, much like the raccoon hats Daniel Boone wore, except that, as an accessory, he was far too big. I had to support him across my shoulders, while his prehensile tail wrapped beneath my armpit and around my bicept, leaving me to wonder how I was going to avoid dropping him while my fingers were slowly turning blue** . The other assistants were elsewhere in the complex, and so I walked out of its cage, binturong aloft, down the stairs to find someone who could explain to me how to remove him.
........................................................................

*Before I go any further, before I even introduce the demure-looking Asian girl, I need to claim a caveat. What transpires beyond this paragraph should be taken with the understanding that I was in a mild state of shock. I can’t explain how jarring it is to be thrown into the arena of a working traveling zoo point blank, with no experience whatsoever. In the remainder of this histoire, I may color this as if that the people who ran this business had no inkling or idea about what they were doing, and that is patently false- you can actually take a three-flat apartment on the west side and make it a working zoological park where the vast majority of the animals are happy, healthy, and well cared for. The immediate shock of seeing that this actually exists initially offended my sense of equilibrium, if only because I didn’t think any of this was even possible. But, with hindsight, it clearly is possible, and what seemed at first glance like chaos actually turned out to be a sensible tolerance for a little entropy in the name of flexibility. If you saw the place, or take any of what I say at face value, you might get the impression that things were crazy, and you would be right. But it was also a necessary craziness; a sort of acquiescence that any parent realizes is needed to get their charges to college/mating age/capable aviator, etc. Just know that these recollections occurred when I was still in the upstanding moral idealist phase that only the young and never-employed can afford to entertain.

**On a side note, 9-foot Burmese Pythons have a similar effect on your fingers.

On Traveling Zoos Part 1: Moving to Chicago

2008-07-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Folks, this is a long one, to be sure, so let's do this in installments.

Dinner conversation can be difficult. Whether it’s with an old spouse, a new girlfriend, or moving to a new town, we seem to have certain standards for introductory conversation, the most famous being “So, what do you do?” I’d like to offer another alternative, one that simply requires changing the tense. Go with “What have you done?”- It’s astounding what people have done with their past lives. The history teacher I worked with used to travel with a Serbian dance troupe, an old roommate, now a PhD candidate in public health, used to be a tour guide at Kellogg’s cereal factory, the computer programmer, a friend of a friend, toured bars across America organizing put-put golf competitions for Bass Ale. Now that I’m a public school teacher, my students are always a little shocked that I was a musician in a former life. But, well, a lot of people are musicians, depending on how loosely you define the term. It’s really not that uncommon. I don’t like to brag, but I think I can safely say that most people have never been an animal handler at an urban traveling zoo.

I have to offer first that I never expected to do this. I never had any real inclination to touch animals when I was a kid-I inherited my Indian father’s cobra paranoia, applied irrationally to the harmless garter snakes that inhabit most of Michigan. Nor did I ever voluntarily collect bugs. I love biology, but from a safe distance. I am the armchair quarterback of naturalists. Actually touching animals started when I moved to, oddly enough, Chicago.
For a suburban kid, moving to a major metropolitan area can be difficult. I used to date an Indian woman from Bombay, now in nationalistic lingo “Mumbai”, and when I moved to Chicago, I stayed with her while I searched for a job, a place to live, etc. Predictably, after about a month of sharing her apartment, her food, her leisure time, private time and sleeping time, she got a little distraught. I’m half-Indian, but the fact of the matter is I grew up in white suburban Detroit, raised on Sesame Street and Spaghettios. Still, given our common ancestry, I thought it prudent to use an argument forwarded by Salmaan Rushdie on an NPR interview, hoping our cultural overlap to a fellow desi might hold some sway. The thrust of his argument was that it easier to move from one metropolitan center anywhere in the world to another than it is for a small town kid to move to the City, as-even though moving from Bombay to Chicago is disconcerting- one still has the ability and knowledge to negotiate metropolitan living- public transport, crime, sprawl, neighborhoods and affiliations, all that stuff. It was a valid observation on Mr. Rushdie’s part, but a total bullshit excuse on mine to use it as a reason why I hadn’t found a job, and it had the convenient logical extension that of course I couldn’t move out of her place until I had a job to pay for one of my own, and how could I do that when I needed time to adjust, blah blah blah. What charlatan I was. Or, maybe just a little overwhelmed- I was young, the city was huge, I was a little scared, to be honest. If Judge Judy were here, though, she’d just call me an asshole.

I had come to Chicago with the intention of working in education of some form. I had been a camp counselor in Michigan and had taught test-prep classes for the SAT and ACT, and found that they, as jobs, were much more tolerable than pouring coffee at the Rotary Club luncheon every Wednesday for years on end. I was determined to find something at least related to education, and was extremely diffident about taking a food service job. I flipped through the Reader classifieds every day, until one particular ad caught my eye. The ad read something like this:

WORK FOR A TRAVELING ZOO. Assistant animal handlers needed for traveling animal show. We tour schools, after-school programs, private parties, etc. No experience necessary, teachers and educators encouraged to apply.

I had been in Chicago for over a month at this point, and I was sort of desperate for a job. My parents had shelled out a lot of money for a swanky biology degree at the U of M, and I had repaid their forethought and kindness by deciding I was going to be a rock and roll star. Also predictably, this didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped, and I found myself slumming around Ann Arbor after the band broke up. The problem with hanging around the ole college campus is that, while you have a “prestigious” degree, so does the guy at the tollbooth, the gas station attendant, and most of the meter maids. The waitress at the Fleetwood Diner had double masters’ degrees in anthropology and comparative literature, but could only pay her rent slinging French fries and corned-beef hash to drunken bar-flies at 3 o’clock in the morning. I tried a few lab rat jobs, but they invariably paid less than waiting tables, plus they had the additional detractor of working with neurotoxins, something you couldn’t be drunk to do, as opposed to bartending at weddings. These jobs had early hours, low pay, and of course were, as a rule, stone-cold boring. One job, working for OSHA-that being the Occupational Safety and Health Administration- required me to dry and weigh soil samples from a landfill for PCB’s. It sounds sort of nifty and important, but it really amounted to drying and weighing soil samples all day. The only exciting thing I remember in my three-month tenure was when the janitor watched my colleague taking the samples out of the dessicator- this being scientific nomenclature for ‘dryer.’ It was basically an expensive and rather ineffective oven.

“So, you done cooking your dirt?” she asked.

“It’s SOIL.” He was flipping out a bit.

“Looks like dirt to me”, She said. It looked like dirt.

“DIRT is what is found underneath fingernails. It’s soil, dammit, SOIL. Don’t you get it?!?”

Scientists can be a little uptight. Water is also wet.

It was winter when I started the job, and I got to the lab just before the sun rose. The lab had no windows, and I didn’t finish until just after the sun set. I used to eat lunch in my car, if only for the opportunity to photosynthesize for 45 minutes. The job paid $8.50 an hour, a dollar more than any of the lab rat jobs I held previously. The Wendy’s across the street was hiring night-shift managers at $9.00. I felt it was time to move to a better job market. Like the rest of Michigan, I moved to Chicago.

………………………

On Traveling Zoos- A prequel

2008-07-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to finish up a long ole' post, detailing my time spent with a traveling zoo, also a prequel to teaching in the classroom. As mentioned before, I've learned many blogs are considerably more tricked out than mine, so was trying to sink a video here, eye candy, you know? Couldn't manage to use a youtube clip, I'm sort of toopid that way. The clip was of cats- in a band. Playing Electric Avenue by Eddie Grant. Ahem.

So i'll put up the videos up on the video bar. Same thing, really.

This is the actual lady who runs the traveling zoo. She wasn't doing anything with cats when I worked there, but it is her main gig these days. I suppose if you are going to become a 'cat-lady', you might as well put them to work for you. Cats rarely earn their keep, unlike dogs, although they do crap reliably in the same spot, so I'm still more endeared toward them for this.

The entirety of 'on traveling zoos' soon to come- I'll have to finish it soon, now that I've posted this. Plus, I still don't have a wallet.

Next Blog

2008-07-05T17:23:00.001-07:00

I'm sorta stuck in Chicago. Left my wallet in the UP, and am sitting around, waiting for it to return....and so I'm going to save you all a little time. As I can't go anywhere for lack of cash, I've spent the better part of a hour pressing the 'NEXT BLOG' button. My advice? Don't. Here are the stats:

76% of blogs are written in a language other than English. I'm sure they are all great, but it gives me a headache trying to recall all 476 french words I once knew and trying to piece together some sense out of them.

58% of blogs are photo albums. I know, 'a picture says 1,000 words' or some such whatever, but mostly, all the words are in French, for all the context given.

of those 58%
42% are family/baby photo albums. Of course this is fine and good. One must keep the family informed, after all. I just have issue with he ones written for anyone other than family, the ones that assume that a sorry- ass like myself (read: someone who is spending his Saturday clicking "NEXT BLOG" for an hour) would still be desperate enough to willingly sift through 177 identical baby pictures from a stranger. I can barely feign interest in babies related to me.

14% of blogs are spousal dedications. Great. remind me I'm single again.

4% of blogs have automatic music cued up, or some pop-up questionnaire. They are both alarming, more so the questionnaire, as it is usually in French, and I never know what I am agreeing to.

28% of blogs/bloggers have figured out how to trick out their site much more than I have. How do I get the cool template? Am I that computer unsavy? How do you spell "unsavy" anyway?

89% of blogs are pretty f**king boring. I'm sure mine falls into this category. I'm beginning to worry that I am becoming socially retarded. Worse yet, that I always have been.

Enough ranting. Maybe I'll go out and get....well, some fresh air, for all I can afford at the moment.

On Science Fair: Part 1

2008-07-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've had the stupid video bar set to kids doing science fair- not that anyone watches the videos*- but still, I've been meaning to finish up a little doodle-whacky about science fairs for a while. Ain't finished it yet. Ain't edited it yet. But here's a peek at the start, anyway.
*Or reads the blog, for that matter

On Science Fairs

I nearly got my ass kicked thoroughly my junior year of high school. I blame the science fair.

I can’t logically blame the fair- I just don’t like to admit that I may have been being a dick, that my potential thrashing was deserved.

The kid, Ralph Perkins (a pseudonym, of course- I don’t want him to come find me and make up for lost time) wasn’t really an asshole, just a big, dumb jock. He was, however, the crony of Randy Wayne Clyde (his real name, only because I’m certain he’s probably in jail right now) who was an asshole, and considerably more intelligent than Ralph, to the tune of having him do all the dirty work when it came to threatening skinny little punk-ass-goth-lings like myself. I had clashed with the both of them over the years. Rich was scary, a freckle-faced, handsome bully, feared by the geeky masses and one you didn’t want to cross. Ralph, though, was an easy target, and since he had never actually struck me over the course of 6 years or so, I felt reasonably confident that I could mock him. He probably deserved it anyway for throwing his muscle around like he did- while he never hit a geekling, he was notorious for hip-checking us in gym class-, but it’s hard to place blame on someone for using their only feasible attribute to further their own interests.

It was the drawing that did it. The original drawing was destroyed just moments after its inception, but I did reproduce it. Scroll down to the bottom of the blog and you can find a replica I spent far too much time on (it is summer vacation after all). It was a take-off on the old science fair standard, that of the project where you wire up potatoes with copper and zinc nodules in order to power a light bulb. Probably I shouldn’t have passed it around the room, particularly as we were all seated in a circle, the one thing that would guarantee that everyone saw it. And by everyone, I mean Ralph Perkins.

He shot me a glare of complete and threatening malice, and promised that come three o’clock, when everyone had to cross the bridge over the highway on the way towards the schools buses, I would be pulverized. It was a bottleneck, this bridge,the only feasible route to get to the buses and consequently home. For this reason it was unofficially designated as The Best Spot for after-school boxing sessions. You couldn’t avoid your tormentor unless you wanted to walk home, and I lived on the opposite side of town, way too far to go by foot. It had the additional benefit that when it was crowded, teachers and administrators couldn’t get in to stop the fight.

I elected to walk home that day.

All of this I tell to you only because I still think the drawing was sort of clever, and it deserves a second airing. I now need to explain my own complicated relationship with the science fair. It starts out sketchily and never really escapes this orbit.

I remember participating in the science fair only twice, and only remember ever assembling 3 projects. The first was when I was still in the phase where I really didn’t have a grasp on reality quite yet- probably about first grade, if the kids I now teach are any indication. If I recall correctly, I had tied together a motley assortment of objects that I considered ‘scientific’- a battery, a fork, a flashlight, a paper airplane- all with my spare shoelaces. I must have known how to tie knots- let’s update that to elementary school 2.0. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but my mother was encouraging, as mothers are apt to be, rather blindly when their own kids are involved. My brother- ever the critic- did point out that what was actually going to happen was fucking nothing, and despite my mother trying to censor his disparaging comments about my first foray into the greater sphere of Science, I did have to conceded he was right. I didn’t enter it in the fair.

By fourth grade, science fair was required, and I decided to do my project on airplanes.

I was obsessed with airplanes as a kid, in the same way that other kids are obsessed with dinosaurs. I could identify the make and model of commercial airliners at 5,000 ft., by noting the placement of the engines and the wingspan. I had memorized all the tail logos of all the major carriers- Pan Am, British Airways, Air France, Air India- and I obsessively drew them, as well as all the major models- DC 10’s, 747’s 737’s. I even submitted one of my airplane drawings to Highlights for Children, to be printed in the last few pages, the section where they published drawings of kids from all around the world. I renewed a one-year subscription to the magazine, waiting to see my masterpiece acknowledged. They never did publish it, a pattern that persists today, and goes a long way in explaining why I have a blog.

Anywhoosle (a word which might also explain my lack of publication), I decided I would play on my strengths for this project, and it seemed natural and scientific to catalog all the tail logos of the major airlines first.

“What are you doing?” asked my brother.

“Working on my science fair project”, I replied.

“What’s it supposed to be about?” He inquired.

“Airplanes!” I retorted, clearly enthused.

“You, know”, he proceeded to point out “ the logos of the companies don’t really have much to do with science.”

“You leave him alone!” shrieked my mother from the kitchen. She was a social worker.

Again, I had to- with mounting distress- admit he had a point. There really wasn’t anything scientific about being able to identify the likely ethnic demographic of the patrons of the airline. I switched my project to “How Airplanes Fly.” I think I got a “B”.

My third and final project, in the 7th Grade, was my first foray into ethics violations and falsified data. I had chosen to study the effect of pollution on plants, and had convinced my parents to shell out loot for two fancy houseplants and their car keys, with the stipulation that I would only start the car in the garage, with the door open. The plan was to run car exhaust into a jar, trapping the ‘pollutants’ inside and upending the jar over one of the plants. The other would also be in a jar, but with clean air. I understood the notion of a 'controlled experiment.'

I didn't understand the notion of 'doing the actual work'. Through procrastination and a tragic miscalculation as to how long it would take a plant to wither and die (probably never, realistically) I found myself with two completely healthy rhododendrons two days before my project was due. I had not once exposed either of them to car exhaust, and found myself frantically holding one of them in front of the exhaust pipe, choking on the fumes, for minutes at a time. Predictably, it didn’t do anything. The plant looked as healthy as when we bought it, and I started to seriously panic. Fortunately, we were a suburban family, necessarily over-concerned with our lawn, and the solution presented itself to me right there in that very garage.

You’d think the judges would have recognized the smell of weed killer coming off in waves from the dead plant. I could smell it clearly, there in the library where the Fair was held, but perhaps that was just the odor of guilt. In fact, I ended up getting an Honorable Mention. These things are always skewed, and I now know why.

Some two decades later, I find myself in charge of the Elementary Science Fair at the private school. I’m entrusted with organizing all the projects, making a floor plan, recruiting judges, and devising a fair and equitable judging system. I can only say, I did my level best. If there is anything or anyone to blame, I can only point to Karma. I suppose I deserved it, but let it be known, I have now paid in full for my transgressions. This is my receipt, dammit.

On Hearing

2008-07-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

It isn’t only Kyra Phillips of CNN and George Dubya that have to worry about off-camera mics. For those of you who don’t follow the bland repetitions of the daily media broadcast-and cheers to you- Kyra, a CNN news-anchor, left her mic on while taking a pee, and chatted up the details of her brother’s marriage with a co-worker (which betrays a facet of her personality, that she is a ‘sit-n-speak’ sort of restroom patron). This was about a week ago (ok, a year and a half ago. These are re-runs). After hearing this, and given my situation, I knew it was only a matter of time before it happened to me. I just didn’t figure it would be a week later.
The Magnet School has a sizable deaf population, or at least I assume it does. The first day at work, the beginning of the school year where we don’t have to deal with children yet, the whole faculty met in the auditorium. It was a sort of ‘meet-n-greet’ the administration, at least for those of us new to the school. Seeing as no students were present, I figured they must have a big enough deaf population to need an extensive ASL speaking staff, enough to warrant an interpreter signing for the duration of the speeches. There were many ASL interpreters, and they had to switch a lot- I guess your hands get tired. This brings up some terminology questions- Do you ‘speak’ ASL? Is ‘signing’ the proper verb for ‘speaking ASL?’ Clearly, I am clueless.
So clueless, in fact, that when I was informed via 504- a classification for a student meaning s/he has special needs- that one of my students was hearing impaired, I had no idea what was expected of me or how to approach the problem. I read the 504, I understood the situation to some degree, but office memos, particularly in the Public School System, often have little to do with reality. I received an obscure graph, sent to me by the Hearing Impaired Coordinator. I only know it was her because she stapled her business card to the graph, and I only know that Hearing Impaired Coordinators exist, as a profession, because she had a business card to prove it. Now, mind you, school had started at this point, we had spent the last week of class going over graphs, what each axis means, how to be clear in what you are trying to present, to keep things easy and readable and scientific. It was quite fresh in my head, this notion of simplicity.

That said, I had no idea what this graph meant. It was an antiquated thing, clearly a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph from 1976. I even looked for the graph online, with designs on showing you how incomprehensible it was, but clearly it had been altered since, as I could at least somewhat understand the ones I did find. The graph in question had megahertz on one axis, pain thresholds on another, and some unaccountable measurement, unlabeled, on the third. Bringing a ‘third’ axis into a 2-dimensional graph is a dicey prospect- usually, it will make no sense unless you know exactly what you are doing, and is something kids are apt to do when they don’t understand exactly how to incorporate all the information they need to. However, this came from adults-adults who should know better, given that they were drawing a salary. As well as the mystery axis, there were also, inexplicably, various line drawings of various day-to-day activities in seemingly random places all over the graph. Some bear mention- the normal pets making normal pet noises, a man working a jackhammer, someone flying a kite- I didn’t get it. What kind of noise does a kite make, once it’s flying? Do I have hearing loss?

Given the Hearing Loss Coordinator’s rather hastily penned-in marks and circles on the graph, my best interpretation of it was that the kid couldn’t hear either dogs barking or candy floss being made, depending on the Megahertz value, but was fine hearing the sound of snakes slithering on concrete and Vespa moped engines built before 1967. As always, I was still clueless.

As it turns out, I didn’t need the graph. This kid was an expert at being hearing impaired, having done it his whole life and -initially- I was relieved. He had a high-tech hearing aid. So high-tech, in fact, that it was wired to a microphone that I wore around my neck, and transmitted my voice on an FM frequency directly to the hearing aid. I wore it dutifully. In the beginning, though, I didn’t really know how to shut it off.

You don’t need to be a genius or even a Hearing Impaired Coordinator to see where this is going. On the day of the Incident, I made quite sure I had given the class proper instructions and set them up to carry on without me for a minute. I felt safe enough to slip away from class to go take a pee. It wasn’t until I noticed the loud and telltale sound of urine filtering through the splash-guard at the bottom of the urinal that I realized that it was being broadcast. Poor fucking kid. I felt awkward seeing my teachers at the grocery store.

I didn’t even flush for fear of tipping him off more, just in case he hadn’t heard it. Still, though, if he did, I could see the blackmail opportunities for this kid immediately, should he want to expose me*. I envisioned myself ducking behind the file cabinet during the next test, saying “ Allright, Quincy, number 1 is C……number 2 is D…..number 3 is B….

*Pun intended

The Summer Re-Runs Part 5: On Dog Grooming

2008-06-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

Goodness, this is an oldie. I haven't bought a house yet, nor a dog.....

I was on my way to the fish store the other day, being as I had to pick up some snails for a classroom project (or rather a snail: they’re hermaphroditic, and need only a single individual to spark a population of thousands. I really only needed to buy one and just wait) It turns out that snail reproduction is actually a big orgy, where they all pile up on each other and, well, do it. Gender is defined by where you are in the pile: bottom/middle, female, top/outside, male. It occurs to me that while we consider invertebrates ‘simple’ animals, they probably have a more extensive knowledge of sexual politics than we do.

Ahem. Anyway, perched next to the fish store was a dog salon with perfectly rounded corner windows that extended almost half the circumference around the store, offering a panoramic view into the life and times of a pet grooming business. It reminded me of the new yuppies on the block that I had recently moved into (the block, not the yuppies), the local champions of gentrification*. Unlike the Latino population that lives in the area, the folks with hordes of roaming children and porch parties every Sunday, these people do not live on the street. At least not in the same literal way that their neighbors do. As a replacement though, they have allowed the neighborhood the privilege of viewing them as they live inside their new condos and townhouses. I’m not sure which architect thought of this, but all the new buildings on the street are almost entirely glass windows in front, both first, second, and third floors. We can watch them prepare dinner, yell at the kids, do the newest tai-bo-yoga-wholefoods-holististic-herbal-naturaopathic-aromatherapy exercise routine, and generally perform all the mundane activities of everyday living in the limelight of their track-lighting illumination systems by IKEA. I don’t know why they thought anyone would be interested, but apparently they figured they would exchange the intensity of their 15 minutes of fame in order to spread it out over several decades. If I’m watching them watch a virtual reality program on TV, and the virtual reality people are watching TV as well, what degree of separation is that?
This was all roaming through my head as I was dawdling on the sidewalk. Perhaps the fact that the dog that was receiving a blow-dry from a complicated apparatus on the left wing of the grooming salon- in full view- inspired this soliloquy. I just can’t imagine how this became a reasonable way of making a living, and the fact that there is probably a yellow pages category devoted entirely to dog grooming and pet manicures.

“So what are you doing this weekend, Bob?”

“Well, I was thinking of taking the dog and a pair of clippers and shaving off his fur in such a way that he looked like a complete twit.”

“No Kidding! You ever done something like that before?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“You should look into the place where the wife takes our dog. The last time I tried to sheer the poodle, well, he looked kinda dumb, but he didn’t have that red-hot-face-flushing kind of embarrassing hair-doo like only a professional can provide, you know what I’m saying? Took him to this upscale little place, and I won’t say I wasn’t skeptical. It’s true, it’s a little pricey, but I have to say the dog looked like a total asshole.”

“You don’t say? I’ll have to give it a try.”

*Although, I should note I have a steady paycheck, and while teachers –REASONABLY- like to complain about the salary, we really aren’t all that bad off. I will probably soon be one of the local champions of gentrification.

The Summer Re-Runs Part 4: Sex and the Single Teacher- THE SEQUEL

2008-06-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

This is part 2 of the project, and re-reading it, I do remeber that I posted it before. There were, um.....consequences. Let us leave it at that. Enjoy.

I know I promised CoffeeMating (ed. note- this is a relic from the original first post- ignore it.), but the newest foray into the world of online dating bears mentioning, even recognition as its own inning. I’ve been out of the sport for a while- I’m rusty. I was thrust back in recently, though, and feel it calls for details. First, though, so I’d thought we could do some…

PRE-GAME COMMENTARY:

First off, the problem with even doing a blog is that other people read it and get ideas. Actually, that is false. The real problem with doing a blog is the fact that, while no one reads it, EVER, you can delude yourself into thinking that you have expressed your feelings to the World, and the World will respond accordingly, with full knowledge that your musings are the center of everybody else’s World and that you can be self-referential with full confidence that all the World-shaking topics you write about are directly routed to the electronic billboard in Times Square, and that all New Yorkers, and indeed the World, are on pins and needles about the trauma you suffered when you missed your Triscuit® with your aerosol Cheez-Whiz® snack bottle, ruined your brand-new Etnies® sneakers, and chose to share your pain with us all, via post.

That being said, I need to be self-referential for a minute. Earlier, I had spoke of the time when, while online ‘dating’, one of my roommates caught me in the act (jeez, it sounds like I was masturbating or something) and commandeered my laptop, in order to ‘date’ on my behalf ( see “On Sex and the Single Teacher’, in, of course, the blog). Unfortunately, my other former roommate Eve actually read this. She is also in the business of online dating, and was thrilled for the opportunity to coach me through the process, i.e., get online and date on my behalf. I should say that, despite how much fun it is to make light of this, she had my full acquiescence, as I was glad for someone who could offer insight into the mysteries and foibles of this complex romance playground, the “virtual-flirting” simulacrum, if you will.

(I don’t know that I really used the world ‘simulacrum’ correctly, but it was fun to do. Considering I had to look up the word on the Internet to make sure I spelled it correctly, I’m guessing no.)

I should first precede the situation with some background. I had sort of let the online dating thing fall by the wayside for a hot minute. While writing about it is fun, subjecting yourself to it can be a bit exhausting, and I was ready to let it lie for a while. Valentine’s Day was coming up (in fact, it was yesterday), and, well, I didn’t want to be the sad sap who buys into the ‘single=unhappy’ paradigm of American romance. I figured, as I have- even when in relationships- that it is really a Hallmark Holiday, and any undue dwelling would only needlessly get me down, and for really stupid reasons.
I was fine with this, and had forgotten all about my weird project, to the point that it resided in an obscure folder somewhere on the desktop of my computer. I happened upon it some months later, and decided, “What the hell, this is pretty funny actually, why not post it?”

Mistake.

Eve is my friend as well as my Friendster, and she actually took the time to read my musings. I was taking a vacation soon, and by the time I arrived in Texas, where she lives and I was visiting, we sort of happened upon a similar intention. We decided to go shopping for a date for me. Now we need to get into the second part of tonight’s pre-game program, the…

STRATEGY ANALYSIS FROM THE EXPERTS:

Like most self-help books, Eve’s plan for finding true love is remarkably simple. I don’t remember where I read this, but a dietician once remarked that his plan for weight loss could be boiled down to half a page, and-even more so- “eat right, exercise, don’t smoke.” He said he just added graphs, diagrams and helpful hints so that he could sell it as a book, rather than a pamphlet.
Like most American consumers, I also need things to be spelled out for me, even though I think I know them anyway. And, like most things we all know, I have placed more importance in constructing a well thought out plan than in actually executing it, which may explain why things went so poorly. It’s like the damn gym- every winter I sign up for a YMCA membership, grab all the pool, gym and fitness-class schedules, highlight all the things I plan to attend, tape all the schedules to my wall for easy access every morning, write out detailed plans, and, ultimately, never go, with the exception of visiting the sauna so that, while sweating, I can feel like I exerted effort.

That being said, may I present Eve’s amazingly simple guide for finding true love, entitled:

“HOT MAMAS WANT EMPATHY” (Copyright 2006, Eve T., All Rights Reserved)

The Amazingly Simple 3-Point Plan For On-Line Dating Success Goes Thusly:

1: Study what your potential hook-up (my phrase, not hers) is interested in, and Ask a Question about It.

2. Give a Compliment about Something/Anything

3. Find a Connection about Something that You Do/Are interested in, and something they Do/Like.

Now, you would figure that, with shit spelled out as clearly as this, I could have at least minor success. Things didn’t go as entirely badly as I’m about to paint, but, on the by and large, I sort of fucked up some very simple instructions. I’ll get to the play-by play later, but for now I need to step out of linear sequence and introduce the….

POST-GAME INTERVIEW WITH THE LOSER:

Let me state the obvious: men and women are different.

That is not to say that communication can’t happen, and problems can be overcome. Let us take, for example, my struggles with the concept of empathy.

I know what empathy means. By that, I mean I can quote the dictionary definition. As opposed to sympathy, which, from what I am told, means extending feelings of sorrow, remorse, joy, enthusiasm, etc, from a sort of self-centered standpoint, empathy is, from what I’ve read, allowing yourself to put yourself in the other persons shoes, to imagine and feel the emotions of the person who you are concerned about, to allow the depth of their emotion to sway you. It is to essentially volunteer yourself to feel some of the pain/joy/worry they might be feeling in their situation in order to better understand what they are going through so that you can open up real, rather than superficial, channels of communication. And you hope that they will do this for you when you are down/up/confused- this is why we have friends.

I think the difference is that men can’t always say this. Not easily or freely, or probably at the core of the problem, verbally, which makes us look clumsy and unfeeling.

When Eve asked me what I liked about responses to my dating inquiries, I said, and I quote:

“I like it when they stroke my ego.”

I mean, it is true, I think everyone likes to hear about how cool they are, but after that fell out of my mouth, I figured I was up for a predictable-cliché-of-the year-award. I felt like a Typical Man.

Thank the powers that be for Eve and her ability to interpret dumb-boy speak. She patiently explained to me that, as opposed to what I was thinking- that my preference for women who would say really cool things about how great I was - might actually mean that I like women that invest effort to interpret who I might be and, if they found that interesting, would try to relate in some fashion that would make it easy for me to start a conversation.

I like when people rationalize my self-centeredness for me.

I understood her point and I thought it might be wise to adopt her philosophy. I was still feeling new to this, however, and I thought it would be prudent to try and borrow her playbook for the duration of the game. We were caught up in the spirit of the moment, and when I asked for permission to mimic her brain-patterns, she spiritedly acquiesced, even enthusiastically.

Mistake.

I was having problems thinking with Eve’s brain ( her ‘playbook’ so to speak), rather than my own. I’m used to mine, it’s comfortable, if not entirely efficient. I can’t say that I was put-off or really unnerved while trying to use Eve’s brain- her empathy is real, and I felt safe with the loaner brain she gave me- she trusted me to use it, and, of course I would be delicate and careful, as it wasn’t mine and didn’t want to damage it, as boys are apt to do sometimes. It was just sort of unfamiliar territory, kind of like learning a new public transportation system. All the rules were the same, but the directions were very different.

I have to be self-blog-referential again. Please forgive me. I never thought I’d say this, but I sort of long for the Yahoo! ‘Ice-breakers’, the pre-written one line greetings. They say shit like “you have a wonderful smile, let’s talk.” Or “I find you fascinating, maybe we should strike up a dialogue” or any such bullshit cheesy one liners that I found so easy to use during the first phase of this project. Granted, they are hokey, but at least you can’t really be held accountable for what they say. Friendster ‘smiles’ are different- you can attach a message of your own composition, and that, I think, ended up being my downfall. As you can peruse someone’s profile, and the profiles are more detailed than on Yahoo, It is generally expected that you have found something interesting about the person- you can’t just say any old thing. You have to seem interested and empathetic.

I need to make a disclaimer here. In the same way that I claim that certain things I have posted are ‘fiction’, so that if and when my mother comes across them she can write-off the unsavory parts, I would like to categorize the following one-liners that I sent as “co-authored”, by Eve and I. In this way I can claim credit for anything charming that I may have inadvertently wrote down, as well as disregard anything possibly not-so-charming, as something she came up with. The reality is, I was in fully part of this, and, in fact, probably most were actually written by me. And, as I am wont to do, I’m making this look more ridiculous than it actually was (I hope….maybe not.) Possibly I will get the scold for this, and rightfully so, but I’m hoping Eve will find it in her heart to forgive me and take one for the team on this one; the team, of course, being me.

Before I expose my folly, I need to tell you about the one-liners that I sent. These may not make immediate sense, as you have had to have read the same profiles that I did to know what I was referencing. That being said, here is an actual list of the actual ‘smiles’-and accompanying one-liners- I sent out to various folks. Despite my obvious self-interest in this project, I like to imagine that I am doing this for The People, a stalwart soldier on the front lines of internet dating. It’s a load of tosh, I know, but humor me and consider this a public service if you will; feel free to use any or all of these magnificent one-liners at your favourite watering hole (the subtext shrieking, Not at all, EVER). You will probably have the same amount of success that I did. Remember these are ACTUAL THINGS that I said to ACTUAL PEOPLE.

STRIKES 1-8: A Poor Inning.

1. “Hey! What do you like most about fire escapes?”
2. “Hello, Nice Mustachio!” (note: this was a female)
3. “It’s a shame that I didn’t make the casting call for your movie, because I just found my 1983 adidas track shorts, and I was ready for it.”
4. “What do you know about bats that most people wouldn’t?”
5. “I like your pictures of empty lots.”
6. “Doilies.”
7. “Great to meet another gangsta-biker-teacher!!!!”
8. “Have you actually been trout fishing, or is it all just for show?”

Ahem. Um…yea. I don’t think there is much more I can do to defend myself here. Let’s move on.

POST-GAME SHOW: AN ANALYSIS OF STRATEGY FLAWS

Ok, first “doilies”.

After a few hours of perusing profiles, and after my brain was a little wrecked from trying to empathize with a brain other than my own, and I was feeling a little spent. We plugged on, though, following our original plan about numbers- the more feelers out there, the better. After the 35th or so profile, I couldn’t think of anything to say and Eve just said,

“Write the first thing that comes to your mind.”

I know I’m impulsive, and I understand that it occasionally causes me problems, and that I should probably think before I act sometimes. But, well, you get a directive sometimes, and you go with it. The first thing I thought of was a doily, the knit white lace tea cozy that grandmothers bring out for tea, and so I typed it in to the message box and sent it before she could nay-say. Man, I got the scold for this. My argument was that it was random, non-committal and relatively inoffensive. Initially, she didn’t agree, but after discussion, she did admit that this probably wasn’t as bad as typing in “heavy breathing” and hitting the send button. I’m a goofball, but I’m not a pervert. Unless you specifically request it, anyway.

As for “gangsta-biker-teacher”, well, while I’d be pretty hard-pressed to call myself a gangsta, I do bike and I do teach. I think it seemed sort of cute to roll all of these up-into-one at the time, but if I also recall correctly, this woman had upwards of 40% of her skin covered in tattoos. It could be I am making assumptions, but somehow I think it may be possible that she wasn’t looking for ‘cute’. I guess some women just aren’t looking for twoo wuv.

At the end of this all, like the last outing, I still have on strike left, count being 3 and 2. I’ve saved the first one for Coffeemating, but this round I can’t count as a washout yet. I did get one reply, from someone that I didn’t send an actual written message to. It should be noted that you actually can send an empty message, a ‘smile’ icon without text. It should also be noted that one of the few responses I did get was one in which I sent only a smile. Apparently, when I open my actual electronic mouth, it serves as an impediment.

Duh.

At any rate, she plays the tuba, which I feel should be a plus in anyone’s book, but that might just be me. I wish I could say that this counts as a base hit, but, as I didn’t even swing (i.e. send an initial message), I have to count it as a walk. She, as the pitcher in this case, must have decided that this here batter was interesting enough to throw a lob to. She actually agreed to meet for tea, so now we’re on to the face-to-face shit. It’s time for the inevitable

LUNATIC LITMUS TEST, in which you have to actually speak to someone in real-time, so they can discern whether or not you are a maniac. Blue means basic, and benign. Pink means volatile, an acidic personality, I suppose. I’d better brush up on my actual social skills, as I have a sneaking suspicion I might turn up pink.

The Summer Re-Runs Part 3: Sex and the Single Teacher

2008-06-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

I've ran this before as well, but coming off yet another failed relationship, WTF, why not post it again. It still rings true. I don't know if I ever ran the Sequel, so that is also Coming Soon....

It's about Internet dating, just to give you a heads-up.

On Sex and the Single Teacher

I feel I should precede this project with a poem. I’ve only ever written one that I like, and, outside of high school English classes, I’ve only ever written two poems.

The first one was when I was 15. This was about the age where I started sneaking out to drink beers with friends, and one late night, about 1 in the morning, I stealthily unlocked the front door of my parents’ house and plopped my fanny on the couch to drunkenly watch MTV. The late night programming was ‘alternative’ and after a few gothic videos, I was feeling forlorn enough to put my feelings down on paper. Reading what I had written with the clarity of sobriety the next morning, I could only say I felt good about recognizing my complete lack of prosaic talent early in life. It was all typical teenage angst, full of ‘How Black my Soul is Painted, like Mystical Tar, I will always be Alone’ type of nonsence, and I decided right then that poetry, like the accordion, is only for those that can.

My second poem, years later, has a straightforward quality that the first lacked, and is unencumbered by the very concept of prose, which is probably why I like it. It is based on real-life experience, entitled ‘Ex-Girlfriend’. It goes thusly:

I saw my ex-girlfriend the other day.
You know, the Crazy One?
And if it weren’t for that giant stone pillar
She would have seen me, too.

I am thirty-one and lonely, and so I’ve decided to start dating. Not ‘going on dates’, I have technically done that before, but dating, actual intentional dating. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I think it has something to do with a larger, more informed picture of the dating world, a more mature outlook, and a cool, clearheaded practical approach to finding someone with the same values that would be willing and happy to share them with me. It sounds terribly boring, but, as I’m getting older, and terribly boring seems to be what my peers strive for, I feel compelled to follow suit.

This is an inaccurate way of summarizing my dating experience. “Terribly boring” reduces my dating experience to seemingly little or no experience, and that is false. It’s just that at my age, anybody with similar experience knows that there are certain types of exciting that you must avoid. These types of exciting seem to attach themselves with certain types of experience as well. Like my friend who dropped a jar of mayonnaise at age six in the grocery store, and subsequently got cussed out by a passing elementary teacher, and henceforth can no longer eat mayonnaise, I can no longer have certain types of sex, listen to certain types of music while having sex, or even watch certain movies which led to certain types of sex that I am reminded of every time I have to see them. I have become peculiar. It’s almost like an anti-fetish; I’m up for anything, except what’s on this list of no-no’s, here it is, please call me if you fit all of my anti-qualifications.

And so I’ve joined a dating service. An internet dating service.

The idea sprung from a discussion with friends over brunch, in the most innocuous way. A friend was talking with a friend, and she offhandedly asked,

“So, what do you do when you aren’t responding emails?”

And it occurred to me right then that this was the perfect webspeak equivalent of a bad pick-up line. I decided it was time. I would catch up with the rest of humanity and online date.

Before I begin here, I should let you know I chose the most generic of the generic dating services. It’s not Facebook, it isn’t Match.com, it ain’t even Friendster. I’m a schoolteacher, after all, and the potential for bedlam- should students find my profile -is too horrific to even consider. I elect an old fashioned website.

I hear there are sites on-line that are strictly for casual sex. No pretence, no one looking for a ‘relationship’ allowed. We meet here, we get super-freaky, and we go home without even learning each other’s first names. I am intrigued, I want to learn more, I want to have super non-committal sex. I could handle it; I’ve done it before, and sex without strings can be wonderful. I think. It sure seems like it could be, and It worked before, once, right? That one time in college?

The problem with hook-ups is that they are really exiting the first time. Hugely exiting, and you think they will be as exiting, or close, forever. That’s the part about getting old, and seeing things for second, third, umpteen times. They become tired, lose a little glory, and, perhaps, with a little hindsight, they may not have been the brilliant idea you thought they were in the first place. Despite these early mistakes, you hope that someone else made them as well, a kindred damaged spirit, and perhaps they use personals as well. If folks can use the internet for a specific purpose like “Tired of pathetic husband, looking to find 3 well-hung black males to show me a good time” or “ My sex crazed wife wants piles of *** from a *****, which I will then ****off, while you tie me up and call me a d*****”, surely I can find someone with the odd aversion to raw tomatoes and a penchant for watching CSI, right?

Strike One:
I put up a personal ad on Yahoo! Personals. I have a hard time being too serious about this, not so much that I’m afraid it won’t work, but rather what to do if it does. I envision the next 100 dinner parties, and the inevitable “So how did you guys meet?” and the accompanying uncomfortable pause that follows the conversation killer “on-line”. So to actually sabotage this effort early, I put up a goofy photo with a goofy written profile so I don’t have to feel terrible when no one replies. I fill out the questionnaire, and press the scary-no-going-back-anybody-can-look-at-this ‘send’ button. I haven’t even started, and I’m already having commitment issues.

After about a week, I check my Inbox and, surprise, I have no new messages. I feel I should take some action, so I start flipping through my ‘Matches”. There is one girl whose profile starts of saying ‘Ok first off I’m fat, so if you don’t like big girls, don’t even bother.” The rest of her schpeal is similarly blunt, and I am amused. For her photo, she stuck her face right in the camera and smiled. It should be noted that she had slipped in a pair of ‘Billy-Bob’ plastic hillbilly teeth, the kind you find in supermarket toy machines. I scope through her other pictures and find that despite the self-deprecating humor, she is actually quite attractive, and so I decide to contact her. Granted, she’s and inch taller than me, and about 8 years younger, which may make me look like a pedophile, but, too late, I’ve decided. I soon find out that while you are allowed to post an ad for free, you actually have to pay to use the service. This is not unreasonable, as it is a service after all, but I’m a little put off by the idea, as it seems like paying for love. It’s not, but the microscopic and completely invalid parallel that could be drawn to prostitution makes me feel uneasy and desperate. I can, I find out, send what is known as an ‘Ice-Breaker’, a list of one line greetings, pre-written. I select the one that says, “You have a beautiful smile. Let’s talk.” I get no reply.

Strike Two:
The next time I open up my Inbox, I am surprised to find not one, but three new hits. The first and third are ice-breakers. Number one boasts the headline “Loves to work with children.” I don’t remember putting down on the questionnaire that I was a teacher, but I figure that must have done it for her, as we have little else in common. She is also looking for someone taller than me, like most. I’m beginning to receive confirmation of what I had long suspected was true: women dig tall men. This does not bode well for me. She also doesn’t include a picture, something I am suspect of. I don’t think, or at least I like to think that I don’t think that looks are a reasonable basis for selecting someone to hang out with. We are all a little ugly in one way or another, and those of us that aren’t tend to have personalities similar to celery. Lacks depth. Unfortunately, it’s the anti-fetish. You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on, but the lack of picture encourages a lack of faith. No one can be that ugly. Or can they? I don’t reply.

Strike Three (First Out):
The second is an actual email with an actual email address to reply to, and I am excited. Someone thought my profile was interesting enough to send a real message, and I open it with small hope and anticipation. I probably shouldn’t do this, but considering the circumstances, here is the message:

<>Hello my new friend!!!
<>I to find your profile on www.personals.yahoo.com and I have decided to
<>write to you this letter. I very much would like to get acquainted with you
<>closer. I have decided to write to you because you to me most of all another
<>loved. I would search such for the person who might understand and love me.
<>I want to find mine the satellite in life for the one whom I might expect at
<>the most difficult and difficult moments. I want to get acquainted with you
<>closer. I to search such for the person with that whom I my future life might
<>incorporate. I the first time get acquainted thus, and very much I want it,

Blah blah blah.

Someone used the online translation service and didn’t pay for the $29.95 version.

Strike One, One out.
The third message in my Inbox bears the headline “Love to Ride my Bike”. I’m intrigued, as I am an avid cyclist. She’s pretty in a sorority sort of way, the kind I can recognize as a generic American sort of pretty, but not the sort that I am attracted to. She also gets a lot of thumbs-down for anti-fetish; If ‘sports-nut’ were listed under hobbies, I could take it, but it doesn’t fly well under ‘television preferences’. Also in that category is “Reality TV Freak”, and although I’m not fond of TV but watch it anyway, I really have a problem with reality TV. If reality TV were real in America, it would be a close up shot of people watching TV. Fuck it, though, I guess I’ll send her an ‘icebreaker’ back. They don’t seem to matter anyway. She chose “Hey, how are you doing?” In reply I chose “I bet you say that to everyone.” No reply.

Strike three, (two out.)
It’s clearly necessary that I have to buy into the membership if this is going to go anywhere, which it ain’t. And that’s OK. Rooting around through profiles, I find one that actually sounds kind of interesting. She’s an attractive lady, either Indian or ABCD (standing for “American-Born-Confused-Desi”- an acronym used by the sons and daughters of Indian immigrants, ‘desi’ being the hindi word for ‘Indian’) . I decide to take the plunge, to become an active member, to actually pay for the services rendered, so that I can send her the email. This now feels a little weird, like I am officially socially inept enough to need a dating service. It shouldn’t. People spend more money and time than I have at the bar on a Friday trying to hook it up, while I get the use of this service, and it is a service, for an entire month. It’s just that before I could beg off, say that this whole thing was a lark, a bit of fun, but now that I’ve shelled out actual dough, I am officially involved. At any rate, I sign up, write a brief, noncommittal email, asking a question or two and being generally clever, or so I think. I wait two weeks. No reply.

Strike One, Two outs.
While I am fiddling around with this previous lady’s profile, my housemate strolls in and pokes her nose in my business. I tell her what I’m doing, and she immediately commandeers my laptop and starts sorting through various profiles and sending them ‘icebreakers’ on my behalf. I think she sends out three, although truthfully I bail from the room and let her do her thing, because if I don’t, I am liable to become finicky and slightly embarrassed. Only one ever replies, with an icebreaker that says ‘Sorry, but I’ve met someone else…”. Oh well, at least she had the decency to inform me. As I had nothing to do with these particular selections on the jukebox, I’m only counting this as one collective strike.

Foul Ball (strike 2) ( a few weeks later…)
I’m returning from a bike trip, and I’m hoping a thing or two happened with the ole personals. Sure enough, I got two hits. Upon examining the profiles, however, I am unimpressed. Both have written fairly generic statements about themselves, of course they are seeking a man who is into honesty and not a game-player, and I’m very sure you are a sincere likeable human being who enjoys theatre, long walks and candle-lit dinners. Who doesn’t? I don’t reply.

Do you have to shackle up with someone for life, find your Soulmate, in order to become blissfully fulfilled? Is it OK to mess around a bit without becoming officially committed? Other people don’t, my Aunt whom I love and respect included. Maybe this mating business isn’t for everyone, and, despite the current paradigm, it may actually be possible to be happy and fulfilled on your own. Truthfully, I had suspected this for a while, as some of my most fulfilling spiritual moments were spent with me and my brain, working things out in a way that made sense to me and me only. In a small way, I feel less than a true manly-man, that perhaps if I had secretly elucidated the secrets of the universe, that I should’ve created a family to share this inner wisdom with. Things don’t really work like that, though. I teach teenagers in public school, so I am painfully aware of the disillusionment of the parents of adolescents. Do I even want kids, a domestic lifestyle, a minivan, a mortgage and a sullen kid around the house? Do I just want sex from time to time? I’m not so sure, now, but, like a parent, I started something I need to finish.

COMING SOON: On Sex and the Single Teacher- THE SEQUEL

On Sensitivity Training

2008-06-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

You will, soon enough, experience the mixed blessing that is a Professional Development Day, should you be embedded in the education profession. It is known by many names- A PD, an in-service, a f**king waste of time for the more cynical among teachers, whatever. It depends on your perspective, really. It will, however, be blessedly child-free, and if you have any sort of tolerance for beauracracy, extended meetings, and sharing your feelings, it can be a mini-vacation of sorts. If you don’t, I suggest sitting behind a pillar, one that prevents the speaker from seeing you. Bring some papers to grade, so that the time is not wasted. If you do enjoy this sort of thing, you are probably reading the wrong blog.

If you aren’t a teacher, you’ve still done this. On a good day in Corporate America, it’s the ‘bonding’ session, the retreat where you play paintball or do trust games or some such team building activity, although I’m unsure how paintball encourages team building rather than perpetuating office rivalry. No matter, I’m just speculating; I’ve yet to hold down a corporate job, and all these projections are hearsay from people in the Business, stories told to me from friends. What they do tell me, though, is that we all share a common thread- everyone, in any profession, must eventually suffer through “Sensitivity Training.”

I understand the theory behind training like this, and the need for it too. A brief excerpt from a Thanksgiving in high school will do the trick. We- a half British/half Indian sort of family- were eating with our friend, her friends, her friend’s friends: basically a lot of strangers. One woman- whom I will call Claire- was just being polite, trying to make small talk with my dad, who hails from Calcutta. I should note that my dad is pretty shy, and it wasn’t until years later that I understood that he got this line of questioning all the time, which must have been painfully awkward. I admire him for his patience.

Claire: So, Malay, what is your background?

Dad: I’m Indian

Claire: Really? What tribe do you come from?

Dad: Umm, we don’t have tribes. I think you are thinking of American Indians.

Claire: So, you are like Soux or something?

Dad: Umm, no, East Indian, As in ‘another country’.

Claire: Oh, so you are, like, from Mexico. Shouldn’t you be West Indian, then? Mexico is west of here. Can I help you with your directions sometime? I know English is hard.

Dad: Umm, no, across the ocean is what I mean. Not here, on this continent, is what I’m trying to say. You know, the sitars and the dots on the forehead? That kind of Indian.

Claire: OOOhhhhh, I see. Like the incense and the curry. Boy, I sure love curry. You people sure make some tasty food. Are you sure you don’t want help with your English? I can help, you know.

Dad: I speak English just fine.

Claire: You sure do! I’m impressed! So what do you guys usually cook for Thanksgiving? What was the ‘original’ Indian Thanksgiving? I’m dying to know. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you know.

Dad: We don’t have Thanksgiving.

You may understand already why I don’t think discussing how people talk will really change how people feel. It’s a cynical attitude, I know, but one thing about cultural differences is that we all aren’t all that different. I’m lucky in that, with both of my parents being immigrants from two separate countries, I got to travel a lot from an early age. As a result, I was able to realize pretty quickly that there are certain cultural themes present everywhere, a major one being obnoxious mother-fuckers are available in every culture; it’s not a black thing, a gay thing, a Jewish thing, or an Anglo-Indian thing- it’s an asshole thing. And so I prefer to dislike people on an individual level, rather than by category. But of course, that still says I retain an essential dichotomy, and isn’t that what we are trying to avoid with sensitivity training? To unearth our deep-seated prejudices that we don’t even realize we have integrated in our personal philosophies? Eh. Fuck it. I still think I’m right.

Anywhoosle, I clearly have strayed. I was trying to talk about the efficacy of the training as applies to teaching. The problem with lies with this fact: Using your time wisely is the hallmark of a good teacher. Time is your enemy, and you must battle it on all fronts.

Some days, though, this is simply impossible, due to the agenda, and Sensitivity Training is one of those days. These days will usually involve outside consultants coming in with a Program. These consultants will have zero classroom experience between all of them, which, as you can imagine, does not endear them to the faculty. They will start the day with some sort of marginally relevant “ice breaker”, which will inevitably involve moving around the classroom with some word or phrase written on a piece of colored construction paper, and your job will be to find your fellow ‘people’ – people who are somehow tangentially related to you via the word written on their piece of colored construction paper. Discussions will then ensue; at least until it is time to convene into our ‘break-out’ groups. The outside consultants will watch all of this with fixed grins, immobile disingenuous half-watermelons and wavering pupils, and they never blink. This is because they- outside of being brittle and uncomfortable - are waiting, like scavengers, for the Teaching Moment©.

Have you come across this term yet? If you are nearing the end of your “Education” education, chances are you have. It is ostensibly a moment that arises, through natural classroom discourse, that you can draw attention to as an impromptu ‘mini-lesson’ of sorts.

Herein lies the problem with jargon. Good teachers will recognize the moment without needing a special term for it. Bad teachers- and no teacher thinks he/she sucks- will grope for the moment, consciously hovering over the class, waiting for something interesting to occur, like a vulture or a life-coach. The analogy doesn’t end there- like a vulture, they usually only intervene in an argument just as a student is about to get verbally slaughtered. This is considered ‘educational’.

Our professional development day was hosted by Sensitivity Inc.* I knew they were coming, and at this point- being at the school for four years- I was, if not seasoned, than at least reasonably marinated. I just got tenure that year, so I abused the privilege and showed up late. Really late. I was hoping to be forgiven.

A word of advice- don’t ever reason like this. From an individual point of view, I could construct a reasonable argument about how it might be useless for me to be there, but the obvious extension is that it would then be useless for everyone to be there, and why should I enjoy the privelege of absence?

The thing about these meetings is everyone who has to suffer through them expects some amount of solidarity from you- if they have to put up with it, so should everybody. And such is how mob mentality is formed.

When I did finally get with the Program, all teachers were in their assigned rooms in all parts of the school. I tracked down my assigned room, and found all the teachers lined up in rows at their students’ desks, each with a folded piece of construction paper with their name on them, placed prominently from the morning icebreaker. I rather awkwardly slipped into a seat in the back, a habit I retained from my high school years, and started silently handing out packages of Reese’s Pieces as bribes, hoping to buy forgiveness for missing the earlier meeting excruciation.

Another handy piece of advice- bribes work. All the candy was received warmly, and no one even questioned the fact that I had actually paid for them, as they came from the stash that we use as a fund-raising tool. Perhaps I should feel bad, violating some sort of principle about money, but, well, fuck money. None of us were teaching in the public school system to get rich anyway, and if $2.75 worth of reeses’ pieces bought peace among the masses, so be it.

So I had a seat, by the people I always sit by, and other sub-groups were sitting with all the people they usually sit by, and it was all very cliquish, in a way that you would naturally expect from people who literally never left High School.

That was the theme of the meeting, really, people representing their sub-groups. I think people feel the need to represent, to explain the trials and tribulations of their own upbringing, thinking all the while that they are unique to them only. I am certainly guilty of this. It may be, though, however much we want someone to understand exactly what it is like to be us, it might never happen. Someone might try, explain at length that someone else won’t ever understand what it feels like to be a an

Afro-Portuguese-Bi-sexual-Jewish-by-conversion transgendered former professional wrestler;

and of course they are right.

But we kind of knew that already.

I can only illustrate this properly by giving you a view into some actual discourse from the meeting. This may take a minute- bear with me.

Let me set the stage first; We were sitting in the classroom and an argument was developing. It is between the Black Gym Teacher (BGT) and the Gay White Algebra (GWA) teacher.

I don’t know much about the BGT, other than he wears a whistle around his neck and a sweat suit at all times. He looks like gym teacher, the relevant exception to the rule being that he looks as if he could actually do something physical, as opposed to the fat, red-faced, paunchy manly men that were the gym teachers of my youth. Still, though, he is set in his ways, a poster child- or adult, as the case may be- for not being too quick to decide Who You Are and What You Believe In. He was, in a word, inflexible. And kind of a Dick.

The GWA I knew a bit better, as he was tangentally related to my department- and so I’ve actually talked to him before. He was young, idealistic and earnest in his desire to educate. He was also, as many gay males are in this profession, SASA; this is an acronym from the dating classifieds, standing for ‘Straight Acting/Straight Appearing’. It is a necessary coping mechanism for gay educators, as the stigma of appearing gay in the public school system is amplified by the abuse hurled at you by 14-year olds. I am clearly more sympathetic towards him; I am neither black nor gay, but he, in plain language, wasn’t a Dick.

I digress. The argument I speak of had been boiling for a while, and was about the use of the word “gay”. Kids still use this term all the time, and it’s true, they don’t mean ‘homosexual’ per se, just some permutation of ‘bad’ or ‘weak’ and the GWA had, reasonably, issue with this.

BGT: “When my students say something is ‘gay’ they don’t really mean it is gay actually, just that it was kind of wack, you know, just kinda dumb.”

GWA: “That’s just the point I’m trying to make. The word is associated with ‘wackness’ and ‘dumbness’ and it really shouldn’t be.”

“Do you see my point?” he asked.

The black gym teacher did not see his point.

GWA: “ Well, can I use the word ‘nigger’ and not have it really mean black, just, you know, synonymous with wackness and dumbness?”

BGT: “ Hell No, not if you don’t want your faggoty white ass kicked so hard you can taste what you ate for dinner last night.”

GWA: “Well then, there you go. It’s because I’m white that I can’t use the word “nigger”.

BGT: “You’re damn right** you can’t!”

GWA: “So, by your logic, if you want to use the word ‘gay’, you’ll just have to bend over and-"

The Sensitivity Inc. representative abruptly cut him off, which I thought was a shame, as I was definitely seeing a Teaching Moment© coming on. We were then diverted, instructed to join our ‘break-out’ groups, to talk about what just transpired.

The discussion, as far as Sensitivty Inc. was concerned, had already transpired years ago. We used to joke, Papolous and I, about all the measures the students would take to promote their vision of equality. Our school had problems, sure, as any large public school does, but there were hallmarks of a new kind of tolerance- there was interracial dating, plenty of mixed ethnicity kids, and a fraternization among different classes and groups that I can’t even remember growing up. Papolous was the sponsor of the club “Students Against Racism” and we laughed about his, figuring that I should sponsor similarly moot social movements like “Students Against Murder” while Ms. Jackson could sponsor “ Students Against Anally Raping Their Grandmothers” We were pompous, assured that we were on the cutting edge of a new progressive educational setting, one that accepts everybody into the fold equally and without reserve.

It occurs to me now, though, that maybe we really did need this training. We were naïve to think that through this particular school, and through our outstanding*** efforts as role models, that we had solved the classist crisis, that we were the cutting edge of societal discourse, when really, we were just a reflection of it. I think we all would have considered ourselves as accepting- willing to see each other’s differences, but mostly, we didn’t make the effort. All of our bleating about tolerance and understanding tended to manifest itself as a self-important struggle, a knowledge that we possessed the most even-handed analysis of racial and societal tensions bestowed upon us by our intellect and that fact that our parents could afford to send us to get university degrees. We want to think that we are thinking for everyone, that we are using the Great Social Equation that is Just and Unbiased, derived from numbers only, an excuse that let’s us think that we are being fair, but our internal dialogue screams “Why doesn’t any one understand me?” and for that reason we may be more alone than we thought.

It is the real nature of the American melting pot, that good ole’ individualism- you can be anyone from anywhere under any circumstances, and we, the Elite will happily accept you, provided you did it solo, pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, elbowed your way into the nobility. By doing this, by accepting the stoic frontiersman as our ideal, we have given up a sense of community. We have betrayed our own people in exchange for a winning lottery ticket, a chance to Be Somebody. I’m happy to cut down the Sensitivity Inc. company, probably because I don’t want to consciously admit that they are underscoring a deeper loss in our culture, that of being able to rely on one another when the chips are not just down, but out. At least the Sensitivity people acknowledge this, and have dedicated their time and effort to give us something that teachers really need; and, like most people who really need something, we weren’t having it.

Perhaps it isn’t all that bleak, though. People do draw together under adverse circumstances. As teachers. we are apt to behave badly during off-hours, and I chalk^^ it up to hazards of the profession. Like cops, we become corrupt after being exposed to bad behavior- we smoke, drink, swear, engage in ill-advised liaisons. Being a ‘role model’ is largely false- we are under the confines of social acceptability. These mandates dictate that you can’t expose students to profanity, but you can cram 35 of them in a classroom, effectively negating the teacher’s ability to monitor each and everyone of them, which leads to fights, cruelty, and all the unsavory parts of your own education that I’m certain you remember. But you did already know how to swear, and that is the irony of the profession. We collect these prohibited items like quarters in a can, one for every curse word. We pretend to be squeaky-clean for 5 shows a day, 5 days a week, but the problem lies with all the quarters we’ve collected- they must be spent, or we will go insane. This goes a long way in explaining how we behaved after the meeting.

I came across the Chemistry teacher chastising the History teacher in the hallway, saying he could smell his greasy olive-oil Mediterranean pompadour from a mile off. He calmly retaliated, putting forth an argument that the Chemistry teacher’s Polish/Republican background compelled him to drink vodka and smoke cigars, and perhaps that made him agitated. I suggested that we all relax; maybe talk it over at the Discothèque that the History teacher obviously owned, him being a member of the Chicago Greek Mafia, after all. They nodded, noting that little Indian Camel-Jocky-Towelheads are smarter than they look. The black english teacher strolled up and inquired about what we were considering for an after work get-together; we stated our plans to hit the Discotheque and invited her, with the caveat that she might want to change, as that was a fairly obvious watermelon juice stain on her blouse. She suggested that we go out for some fried chicken, as we all might meed the protein to bolster our protein levels- we were going out for the evening after all, and as males, we tended to lose 14 IQ points each time we ejaculate, should our sorry asses be lucky enough to get lucky. The gay algebra teacher had, by this time, glommed onto our little clique, and volunteered to buy the first round, as he wouldn’t need to spend the money on protein-we were going to a Breeder bar anyway. He stipulated that it would have to be fru-fru fabulous Cosmopolitans in chilled Martini glasses with a lemon twist, but later he’d be happy to do a round of Budweiser when our inbred-hick tendencies kicked in, and we started to consider fornication with our first cousins. We all agreed that this was a good plan, and headed out the door for a drink.

* Not their real name, but close enough.

** He actually said “You’re damn straight you can’t.” There was a relevant pause, as we all considered his use of the word ‘straight’.

*** There is a bar called “The Store” directly across the street from this school, which shared a street corner with the bus stop that took all of our students home. We held absolutely no qualms about pushing through these crowds of kids on Fridays, loudly proclaiming “It’s you guys who drive us to drink.”

^^ Pun intended.

The Summer Re-Reruns Part 2: Of Mice and Pants

2008-06-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

Clearly an oldie, but hopefully a goodie. Posted on many a blog many a time, but so what. I did say re-runs.....

Of Mice and Pants

There’s no way I can adequately describe the singular sensation of having a mouse crawl into your trousers. In the many times I have told this story at social gatherings, inevitably someone always quips in with “oh my GOD, I would TOTALLY freak out”, which is accurate enough, but, like police raids and first-year teachers, you can’t really know how you will feel and respond until you’re in the thick of it. Despite this, I’m going to try and describe it anyway. Some history and set-up is needed here. We need to go back about a decade or so.

I fell in love with brushed-cotton pants in college. Let me say right off the bat, I am not a ‘clothes’ person. Those who know me will attest to this fact. I am happy to wear the same T-shirt for days, even weeks in a row, providing no telling stains occur (wasn’t that spaghetti sauce there last Thursday?). I also feel the need, being as I’m bearing my wardrobe soul, that I am not a disgusting slob. I bathe two, sometimes three times a day. I even wash behind my ears occasionally. It’s just that I’ve worked out this system of organization that requires a knowledge of :

A) Where my pants are, and

B) What they contain AT ALL TIMES(i.e. keys, wallet, breath freshener, pencil eraser, quarters for laundry, pennies for fountains, get-out-of-jail-free card, etc., etc.)

This is a serious commitment. I know few people that have the kind of bond that I do with my pants. I have even bought equipment to accentuate my pant habit. I have a pant key-ring, a pant belt, even a specific pant hook, where I hang my pants everyday. I can’t go to sleep at night unless I know that my pants for the ‘morrow are prepared for what the good lord sees fit to send my way. I keep my lunch in my pants, a wilderness survival kit in my pants, and an extra pair of pants in my pants.

I was not always this concerned about my trousers. I used to have less responsibilities, less commitments, less keys, and, in general, less experience in life, not knowing that is always prudent to be prepared, and that, to be prepared for life, you must have all your necessary accessories and accoutrements firmly secured to your pants. I had procured the brushed cotton pants I was wearing the day of The Incident at my catering job in college. We often left out clothes at work, and just changed when we got there. Eventually, because of rampant pant-theft, we moved over to a systematic pant-placement system. One guy, about 6 inches taller and 10 inches wider than me had left his pants there some weeks ago, and then decided the food service industry wasn’t doing it for him. These were the pre-pants system days, and so I was always on the lookout for a good pair. Granted, I had to roll up the cuffs several times and wear a belt, and I always felt slightly naked as the pants in question floated around my chicken legs in roughly the same proportions as the walls of the Carlsbad caverns around float around a spelunking cable, but they were quality trousers nonetheless, and, being a broke college student, who was I to say no to a free posh pair? I kept them and wore them often. The fact that I wore them often is central to this story; however my affinity for pants is not. In essence, I told you that story so that I could tell you this one.

I was wearing these very pants on the Day, a late afternoon in early April. I had an early schedule. Teachers are expected to do five classes a day, with three off-periods, one for planning, one for conferences, and one for lunch, although no one I know adheres to these guidelines. We have nine periods in the day, and I finished my last class seventh period. Meredith, another biology teacher, had the room for eighth period, so I usually left her to her devices and Xeroxed the materials I needed for the following day.

The copying room is one floor below me, on the mezzanine level. It’s called the mezzanine level because it is technically illegal to conduct class in the basement of a public school building. See, semantics are your friends! The science copy room is right next to Bruscato’s Grotto. Bruscotto is the AP English teacher and probably one of the most sarcastic people I’ve ever met. Her door is the last on the hallway, and she loves to make fun of me whenever I try and borrow a pencil or use the English department’s scantron machine. Considering the abuse she hurls at me, I’ve learned that it’s easier to just go back upstairs and borrow an eraser from someone who doesn’t delight in humiliating me. I’ll grant you, it is kind of funny, albeit mostly for her, and I usually just roll with it, but some days I just don’t want to deal, and this was one of them.

I unlocked the door to the copy room, let myself in, and let the door slam shut behind me. I wasn’t in there more than 10 seconds before I heard a frantic ‘blam blam blam!” on the window. It’s art deco glass, difficult to see through, but I could still identify Bruscotto’s silhouette. I figured she was bored and looking to antagonize me, so I ignored her.

BlamBLamBLAM! “Shumit! Come on, you have to help me!”

She was panicked and something was amiss. I opened the door.

“ There’s a mouse in my room.”

She pronounced the word mouse with clenched teeth, sort of like a ventriloquist, but without any masking of lip motion.

“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.

“Well, you’re the biology teacher.”

Notice how ‘biology teacher’ is used as a thin cover-up for ‘exterminator’. I guess the logic is, you work with animals, you must actually like them, right? Therefore I can ask you to pull some pied-piper manouver and dance your fellow ‘people’ right out of my classroom. I think people assume that because you study the mechanics of existence that you have a ‘respect for all life’ and are willing to put ‘greasy little vermin’ in a cage and make some sort of ‘leaning situation’ out of it. I understand that some scientists choose a particular species and make a career out of studying them in minute detail, but we’re high school teachers. That’s like breeding mosquitos; no fun and a dumb idea.

I went into her room and she pointed out the hole from whence the mouse had come, and its trajectory along the floor. The hole was cartoon-perfect: it was bored out through the baseboard, a Tom-and-Jerry half-circle, with gnaw-marks around the edge.

“Well, aren’t you gonna go get it?”, she said.

I think she expected me to pull out my “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” machine, the pocket version that all good biology teachers carry, grab a sharpened toothpick, now the size of a spear in my shrunken hands, and get in there and slay the evil dragon-mouse in it’s lair. I looked at her blankly. She blinked a few times. During this silent negotiation, the mouse chose to stick its furry little whiskers out of the hole, and Bruscotto saw it. She screamed and bolted out of the room, just like a 50’s sitcom.

Exit English teacher #1.

Lacking any better ideas, I grabbed a roll of masking tape from her desk and taped up the hole. I fished her out of the hallway and assured her that the mouse no longer had access to her room, or method of recourse. She begrudgingly accepted this, and I finished my copies and headed back up to my room, just as the kids were leaving for the day.

We liked to bitch and complain, Meredith and I, as we were new teachers feeling our way around the system. As we were in the same place at the same time, just after her last class, and as the room was void of children, we unofficially reserved this slot to do just that. She cleaned up detritus from her lab, and I organized my labs for the next day, all the while blowing off steam. It was a ritual, one that I had become accustomed to and fond of. We also parlayed with other teachers, and this day Faraj, another English teacher, came by. She wanted to borrow a video from me, an ocean documentary with Marlins in it, as she was teaching ‘the old man and the sea.”

Now at the time, I kept all my files and videos on the floor so that we had more counter space to do labs. I don’t do this anymore for reasons that will become painfully clear, but at the time, there they were, so I hunkered down to my milk crate to try and find the thing she was asking for. I was in the corner of the room, and my brushed cotton pants had relaxed the rolled up cuff that I had put in it at the beginning of the day, hitting the ground and just barely tucking itself under the sole of my shoe. While flipping through my files, I felt a disturbance in the force around my ankle, one with slightly furry undertones. It was a peculiar sensation, one of trespassing coupled with fuzzy cuteness. I probingly touched my ankle, over the top of my pants and I swear I felt the odd and completely unique sensation of a life form just underneath brushed cotton, yet pressed up against my stylish tube-socks. Despite the distinctness of this sensation, I was unconvinced that the evidence could support an event so ludicrous. But given the data, I had to consider this as a possibility.

“Hey Guys?” I said. “I think I might have a mouse in my pants.”

It’s worrisome to watch people’s eyes bulge in disbelief, especially when you are the subject. I grabbed my pants just under the pleats, as if I was just about to curtsy to the queen, and started shaking them vigorously, while jumping and dancing around in circles, trying desperately to dislodge the potential mouse. Like quantum physics, it was still potential at this point- I didn’t have enough solid evidence to claim that the existence of the mouse was a plausible theorem, rather than merely hypothetical at this point. At any rate, it must have looked ridiculous, and the soundtrack was of me screaming “OK! OK! OK!” in a desperate attempt of self-placation, to convince myself that everything was OK, that I didn’t really have a rodent in my trousers, and that the image of my colleagues staring at me in wide-eyed disbelief was only a bad dream that I would laugh about in the morning. The mouse didn’t fall out, I was still confused as to whether this was really happening, and then…

Everybody has had a visit from the plumber, the cable guy, any blue-collar specialist that actually makes tons more money than a professional educator. Being self-employed, I guess you can just wear what you want, but the old stereotype is true. We’ve all spent some time in the kitchen with the fix-it man, and wondered why, given all the options, they would choose pants that exposed parts of their flesh that is considered taboo. I think you all know what I’m talking about. I want you to do something for me. Take your hand right now, reach around to your backside, and gently place it at the top of this unnamed anatomical feature.

Now guess where I found the mouse.

As I can’t show my derriere at work, and you are familiar with my penchant for belts, gizmos, and securely fitted pants, the mouse was still below the boundaries of my waist, unreachable by conventional means. Now I had proof though, It was on, I surely was rodent-infected and my worst suspicions were confirmed, I think it was evident on my face, as both Meredith and Faraj’s eyelids peeled even further back into their skulls.

“OKOKOKOK!” I shouted. “I think I have to take off my pants!”

Exit English teacher #2.

Meredith stood by me, though. Well, near me. She stayed in the room, at any rate. I undid my belt, stripped off the pants, held them by the waist and shook. A little brown mouse tumbled out, rolling end over end on the tiled floor of the classroom. I think that when I reached back towards my backside, I must have, in my panic, hit the mouse pretty hard, because it was clearly wrecked; it’s ribcage smashed, only able to breathe in thin, painful sheets. It’s legs were clearly useless- after the momentum of the tumble, after gravity had settled, it wasn’t going to skitter off anywhere. I would imagine that if my students were in the room that they would gingerly pick up the mouse with a spatula, gently place it in an aquarium lined with soft bedding, and place a nourishing carrot next to it, in the hopes that their effort would somehow inspire the little guy to find the strength to heal itself. Meredith and I both knew the truth, though. This mouse was going to die. It was unexpected, this kinship I suddenly felt for the mouse. We had shared a pair of pants, after all. This is considered grounds for marriage amongst your own species. We shared trauma, me and this creature, probably the most bonding event between two organisms. And, thinking about this, and my role as a professional biology guy, and the look that Meredith gave me, I knew what had to be done. I grabbed the thickest textbook I could find, held it parallel and aloft over the wheezing mouse, and released. I don’t know if it makes me a better, more sensitive human being, but I did at least flinch at the sound of the thump. I left my room, punched out in the main office, and let the maintenance staff know that there was a dead mouse underneath the textbook on the floor of the room, and went home.

The Summer Re-Runs Part 1

2008-06-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's summer, folks. I am blissfully away from the classroom. I don't know yet whether I'm going to return. The California Educational System has kicked my ass.

Still though, I have a Master's program to finish, some traveling to do, a lot of thinking and culling and so forth- but I'll still be posting. I have some old stories to re-work, maybe some new stuff as well. Some I've posted on previous blogs, some never, we'll see how things roll.

So this is a stop-gap posting. If you are at all interested, I also write for a music webzine. You can find all my posts here. I'll be seeing ya. On to Chicago, and from there, Michigan.....

ON SIX FLAGS AND SWOLLEN KNEES

2008-06-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

My knee is swelling. I knew it would.

I injured it over a year ago. Like Sonny Bono, I crashed into a tree, although the significant differences being that A) I was snowboarding and B) I fared a little better than he, may he rest in peace. My knee hit the tree directly, my leg elongated and perpendicular, and after the initial agony wore off, I lay there thinking, “So this is what it’s like to break your leg.” I fully expected to see great shards of fractured femur sticking out of flesh and fancy snowboarding pants.

It hurt, but I didn’t fracture the bone, per se. A later MRI would show that I just gave myself a nasty contusion. Really, the most agonizing part was the embarrassment. I was found by a ski instructor, her leading the 6-year olds down the bunny- hill all in a row, like little ducklings, and they just stopped, gaped and stared. I was conscious, and I kept feeling like I should say something, give some sort of moral lesson, so I said

“Yea, so, be careful out there. Um. You could be me. Um. And that’s bad. Um.”

It didn’t end there. I was hurt badly enough to have to be hauled down the rest of the mountain by sled, and usually when this happens, the victim is waylaid completely, covered by a blanket, indicating a real possibility that this may not be an injury, but a corpse. People gape and gawk, rubbernecking and even stopping in their tracks to get a good look. I know. I‘ve done it before. I was awake and sitting upright, meeting their gaze, a feeling a little apologetic that I wasn’t more interestingly injured. I was wishing I had a bottle of ketchup or something to spurt out in intervals, leaving little ‘blood’ slicks in the snow, just to keep it worth their time.

When I returned to school- this snowboarding trip being my spring break vacation- I was limping heavily, and all my students asked why, so I filled them in on the details.

This was a mistake.

It was a Magnet school, and the kids were clever. They also like routine, and so I had to endure one girl asking me daily about how well the tree was faring, after its terrible accident.

Over a year later, I still am having problems with my knee. I can’t really run on it- no soccer, no more mini-triathlons, even biking long distances will cause it to flare up, and I have to wonder if this is it, if I am now permanently damaged. Being of Indian descent, I’m blessed with the type of skin that hides age- and I certainly capitalize on this, acting as if I am still a ripe, young, early twenty-something- but through lack of physical activity and beer consumption, I’ve grown a little paunchy, looking more and more my real age.

My knee is swelling now because I ran on it. It wasn’t my idea. We took all the kids to Six Flags Amusement Park for the big “End of the Year” party. This being private school, we all climbed aboard a chartered bus and parked at the back of the behemoth parking lot. There is a tram that will funnel all the kids to the front gate, and there were TONS of them- apparently every kid in California gets to go to the amusement park come June. We lined ours up in the queue, but there is only so much room, so the math teacher and I elected to walk. Well, I elected to walk. He elected to run.

He is fit, a mean volleyball player, as evidenced by his performance on Field Day*. He decided to race the tram, and I had no choice but to follow up.

It was OK at first- the tram was way behind us, we were shoving past tween-aged couples on the walkway like we were chasing a thief, but as soon as the tram caught up, the catcalling began. I receive the brunt of it, as I am far behind the math teacher, the only visible authority figure scrambling along like- well, like a man wearing a backpack who hasn’t ran in over a year, and is trying to simultaneously maintain his dignity while keeping the backpack from flipping over his head and eyes, blinding him to the point where he runs headlong into a tree and knocks himself out cold. There is no simile that can be applied here.

Our own students were actually cheering me on, yelling “BEAN!BEAN!BEAN!”, but the tram was full with other students from other schools. They were yelling “RUN, Forrest, RUN!” over and over again, and it’s the tram driver I blame for this, the tram being so long and the speed being so close enough to my own that I feel like the Eiffel Tower on a French bus tour. That’s not true. I’m more like a square patch of sidewalk that Kurt Cobain once puked on, such is the novelty value coupled with the grotesque.

As far as the Forrest Gump comments go, I tried to chalk it up to exuberance. Kids say all sorts of odd stuff, and I have to admit, most of the time, it is funny. The type of educators who find the kids’ off-color comments an affront to their dignity probably take themselves far too seriously- this is a friendly way of saying that they entirely lack a sense of humor. Really, you have to just let it roll off your back.

Still though, the tram was slow, and I could keep up; I could even run faster, just by a hair, and I was giving it my all, my tongue wagging out of my mouth like a Golden Retriever, my backpack threatening to fly off into the stratosphere, ambling along with a hackneyed crab-wise scuttle, and my lungs were burning. The kids were all hollering and screaming, and-ours being a small school- the Run Forrest Run kids were clearly out-classing out our own students in terms of volume. I was again feeling a need to apply a lesson, and I wanted to say to them

“Study hard. Make yourself into something. Plan ahead, pick a major, a career, something dignified and important, or you will end up like me, a galloping fool, skittering along solely for the sake of entertaining you. I’m here to make sure you realize your potential, and I’m happy to this; to watch over you, to careen around like an idiot so that you all have a reason to make fun of me later, to mitigate my demands of you in the classroom. You have to know that I can see you, I can hear you, and even though you may not worried about it right now, I want to let you know that I am OK, I’ll live, I’ll get over this embarrassment. But be careful what you ask for in life, and don’t let this lesson go to waste. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a fucked-up situation, running alongside a Six Flags tram, trying desperately to please a car-full of teenagers, and all you can do then is barrel on through, to keep running forever. This is called a career, and I can’t even tell you when you will roll out the other end. I haven’t got there yet.”

The Harmony Festival Blogs

2008-06-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

The blogs went live to the website- you can check them out here- but they are intermingled with other posts, in such a way that fudges continuity. For clarity's sake, I'm reposting my contributions here, in sequence. Enjoy, my friends.

IF ONLY FOOD WERE WIRELESS

It flabbergasts me, this wireless world.

First, let me welcome you to the live blog coverage of the Harmony Festival. I do not know if there are web-cams, if you are at home at your laptop, or even if you are watching yourself on your blackberry via live web-cam while concurrently reading about the festival you are ostensibly attending. Should you be any of the aforementioned, look for me- I’m the guy who looks like a Pakistani Shel Silverstein, although I probably am wearing what appears to be an abnormally large black dress sock on my head. Mosquitoes, you know. I’m probably over by the press tent. Look, I’m waving now.

OK, I am ,quite frankly, full of shit. It is 9:39 in the morning, and the festival doesn’t start for another 4 hours at least. I am at work. Still, though, wireless technology is astounding- I’m writing this entry now as a test sequence to send to a man I’ve never met and only known to me as “Inflata-Bill” so that he may upload the entry via email to multiple-author blog he’s created, which will then feed directly- via RSS or Atom platform- directly to the Harmony Website, which you are reading right now. Didn’t that sound fancy? I have no idea what I just said, but unless you are the ethereal and omnipotent Inflata-Bill, you will just have to take my word for it.

At any rate, I will likely be by the media tent, assuming they are providing free food. If not, find me over in the food court and say hello, chit-chat, give me your opinions on the food, the festival, the music, the food, the people and the food. We’ll stick it up on the blog. You can even watch me type it. I’ll sit below a web cam and train it on the screen, so you can dial up the Harmony site and watch me type it via your blackberry. Let us hope when we close that wireless loop, we don’t accidentally sever off a chunk of the universe and create a parallel ‘Harmony Festival Only’ feedback loop; while the festival promises to be a great amount of fun, if we tear ourselves off from the natural space/time continuum, the food would eventually run out and we will have no where to empty the port-o-potties. See you there!

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VURTUAL BECOMES REALITY

It is actual, I am here, I have crawled my way backstage at the Harmony Festival. My blogging counterparts are here somewhere, including the elusive Inflata-Bill, and it feels covert and not just a little High Tech and Mission Impossible to be posting, considering I haven't a clue about what the people who hired me to do this look like.

On a complete aside, I have a confession to make. I am a corn-fed midwesterner, born and bred, and have only been in California less than a year. We of the Midwest always envisioned the West Coast to be an oasis of Ocean Pacific surf wear, bleach blond groovyness, and cops wearing Ponch-style sunglasses and beige uniforms.

Imagine my surprise to find out it was all true, exactly to form- even the CHP- CHiP’s really, still wear the type of motorcycle helmets redolent of The Great Gazoo on old Flintstone episodes. It's all a little surreal, the authentic hippies, the colorful tie-dye, and the big furry animal hats being sold by the vendors. Walking backstage, I came across- I kid you not- Wavy Gravy, the real deal, a person I should associate with his role as a Woodstock era activist, but sticks out most in my mind as a Ben and Jerry flavor. You know, the caramel swirls and such. He is carrying a stuffed platypus- a plush one mind you, not a real one- on a leash. For you born and bred on the West Coast, this may be part and parcel of life out here, but for we un-acclimated to the hippie vibe, it is thrilling.

So, I move now to a film presentation on another legendary West Coast staple, one that ranks among the foremost in the panacea of party-legend that circulates in the Great White Midwest- the Burning Man Festival. What an education I am getting.

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THE DESIS ROCK: AMBIOTICA LOUNGE PART 1- ALI KHAN

These are my people. Sort of.

I'm half Indian, the other half British, and when push comes to shove, I speak only Michigan. Still, though, if you haven't gleaned, my name really isn't Mr. Bean, it's a proper Indian to-do, a real Bengali mouthful, so you have to know I'm stoked to catch this fusion act, this dovetailing of East meets West so common in California. I speak of course of Ali Khan and his motley crew.

The band-leader- I assume this is Ali himself- is adorned in a Wild Bill Hickock hat and rocking the harmonium, tablas kicking the backbeat- all while soundchecking. As he points out, it is typical Desi style- Desi being the Hindi word for 'Indian'- to be loose about this. And late. Desis are always late. I can't look at this man's hat without cracking up, this single manifestation of Cowboys and Indians.

Ali Khan and his crew will follow the Burning Man film, and they have left the stage, finished with the soundcheck, and a man with a heavy French accent is telling us all about the film he has made, all about Burning Man. He proceeds to show us his work.

For someone not yet indoctrinated to this, it is fascinating. The desert flats on the festival site are absurdly vacant, and the purveyors of the festival are driving what looks like a pimped out version of Mr. Skywalker's Land Speeder. By 1989, they had gathered only 300 people for the festival, whenst* it was still held next to the Bay. Watching what I will diplomatically call 'scantily clad' women** swinging fire around in huge arcs, years later in the narrative, I am enraptured, I need to go, I have to see this phenomena. I know it has become a little spoiled, to the point where the fool who prematurely Burned the Man made national news, but still, I've got to get it before it goes away. Maybe I can blog for that, too, though I doubt the desert will facilitate this. I'll have to ask Inflata-Bill. I'm sure he knows.

*I don't care if it's not a real word. I'm too fond of it to let it go. It is what I will call the Particular Past Participle of “when”, used when describing an event in the past tense that has gained a measure of notoriety and meme status. I'm going to use it as much as possible throughout the evening.

** And by ‘scantily clad’, I mean naked boobies. I know, I sound juvenile, but remember I’m from the Midwest- for 5 months out of the year, a good portion of dating etiquette revolves around what gender the person in the hermetically sealed Eskimo outfit is.

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WAYLAID BY OUTLAWS

And by outlaws, I mean the Outlaw Dirvishes. They are on a side stage, and, like a raven or a small child, I am attracted by all the pretty spinning lights. I am soon treated to all the pretty spinning ladies, donned in, once again, rather scantily designed costumes.

The Outlaw Dirvishes apparently have an arrangement with these women, whose names are Spiral, Brigette, and something else I don't quite capture, but the band leader does point out the obvious. In his own words,

"These women are HOT!"

He’s right. They are hot. I don't want to come off as a greasy pervert, but you have no doubt realized that I am easily waylaid by scantily clad women. And it's fine it's great, we can say this here at the festival and not feel awkward.

Something about the conservative nature of the midwest -and often the east coast as well- prevents people from being open, from acknowledging the fact that sex exists, people are attractive, flirting is fun, and beautiful things are beautiful things, whether or not they are sanctioned by the Bible. It is wonderful , and I can't help but wonder if the Industrious North has lost something by not acknowledging and embracing this freedom, this outpouring of creative energy, replacing it with financially successful pig- packaging plants and monitored interest rates.

Still though, I must get back to the Ambiotica. Goodbye, attractive Hula-Hoop girls, dressed in gold lamay bikinis. Know that you are forever burned onto the silver-coated photo-plates of my visual consciousness.

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Ta-Ki-Ne-Ta-DA!

In classical Indian musical tradition, particularly as the Tablas are concerned, drum strokes follow syllables. That is to say, as you learn Tabla, Ghatam, or any other drum technique, you learn an assortment of syllables that are directly correlated to specific drumstrokes. Ta Ki Na Ta Da sounds remarkably like Ta Ki Na Ta Da when you strike it on the drums.

Ali Khan and Co. are doing this now, calling out a series of drum patterns as the Tabla player hits them in real time. This linkage, this symbiotic relationship, this synergy- I can't conceive how they do it.

Still, though, I'm not entirely flabbergasted by what I'm seeing and hearing. Being a musician myself, I feel a need to be honest here, and the music and stage presence is just a touch on the pandering side. They are kicking a bhangra beat, which I'm always terribly fond of, and it's getting people on the dance floor- but I want more sick rhythms, complex syncopation, stuff that blows my mind simply because I can't understand it. Stuff I can file away in my brain for later, examine, tease apart like a 7th grade frog dissection. I know they can do it- they are clearly proficient and talented musicians, but I guess it is part and parcel of fusion- things change.

But this is a real time blog, and still again, they have shifted gears- they are doing a number in 7/8, my absolute favorite time signature. Heck, I'm in no position to complain about fusion- my life is defined by the word. They really are mixing it up, crossing and expanding phrases, and I am assuaged into a groovy state once again. It works with the audience as well, and suddenly it feels good to be on the same page as everyone else. The slim gentlemen shaking his booty on the dance floor is, I'm almost certain, wearing the the cowboy hat previously donned by the lead singer, as he now sports a Derby hat and a Punjabi style shirt. I am enjoying this flux, these ebbs and tides that the Harmony Festival is offering. Did I mention how astounding this education I 'm getting is?

WAYLAID AGAIN

I have strayed again, dear readers. I was sucked in by the artwork- labaryinths of intricate designs, canvases filled with patient colors and lines and detail, and it spit me out in, as the signs tell me, the Eco-village. Again the Inner Kid takes over, and I'm drawn like a moth to the pretty lights and sounds eminating from the cloth geodesic dome set up in the back.

It is also again the Desi music- this time around played by a dreadlocked crew of Caucasian hippies, and I'm not so concerned about the authenticity of it all- it just sounds good, and even the folks behind me are aping the peculiar strains of vocal modulation so characteristic of the Indian classical style. It's silly, these dudes behind my head, but heck, I learned how to cook a proper curry from an English woman named Isabel. They are even singing in proper form, a language I don't understand, as all I speak is Michigan. Mentioned before, know, but relevant.

I can't get over- and my Chicagoan friends will slay me for this, as they consume their pork-tubes and check their interest rates- the peaceful vibes of this whole endeavor. I can't believe I just used the phrase 'peaceful vibes' - from whenst* and where I originated- it was a cardinal sin to use anything even vaguely resembling 'hippie talk'- But I just plain feel comfortable, soothed, not in the least constructing a mental protection zone, wherein I have to worry about being jumped, extra-drunkness and associated behavior, violence in any fashion. It sounds silly and odd, I'm sure, but it is an indulgence, this vibe here at the festival. I don't really want to go home.

*OK, not so ‘meme-ish”, my origins, but I did promise I’d work it in.

NOTES ON PRESS PASSES AND GEORGE CLINTON

Get one. A press pass. They are astounding.

I should admit that I may have talked myself into something I didn't deserve- at the Will Call booth, I put on my most Official Face and Expressed My Concerns about stage accessibility- all I know is that I'm wearing a leopard printed wristband, one that seems to be a 'go everywhere' pass- every door is open. I'm now sitting feet from the main stage at the George Clinton show, behind the fencing, where the Fancy People sit.

It's a little asinine, I know, to feel privileged to sit on a cold stone floor no different from the main floor- even a little lamer because of the lack of great fun that is clearly washing over the audience- but still, the notion of VIP-ness is cool. To sit and blog so close to the action is a thrill.

Mr. Clinton is a Midwesterner. Perhaps not by origin, sure, but he does- or at least did- live outside of Ann Arbor, MI, where I spent my formative years, and we would see him in the music stores, all blazing neon hair extensions, flowing robes, every rock and roll inch of him in full force. You know how funky he looks on stage? He leaves the house to buy eggs and a carton of milk in the same uniform.

The music here in the Pavilion is full force as well- Massive screens are set up, people are screaming, George's clipped up dreads like a dandelion behind his head, as he spits, and I quote:

"Skeet skeet skeet, skoo skoo, to the walls to the the floor, to the shake............Awww S***.....Are you ready to party? All that is good......is nasty..........."

In fine form tonight, my Funkadelic Mr. Man.

………………………………………………..

ON FUNNY HATS

I'm harping on the Midwest thing, I know, but bear with me. Before a three-week long cold snap in Chicago that had us playing rock/paper/scissors for who had to go get the mail, we would just bundle up and trounce around the city oblivious to cold. After the three-week cold snap, I finally got fed up enough to move out here. But there is one thing I do miss about the chilly climes- the freedom to wear funny hats in the name of warmth. You could perch a dead wolverine on your head, and no one would bat an eyelash, as long as it looked snug and toasty.

In front of the Ambiotica Lounge, there is a charming young lass selling some of the funniest hats I've seen in years. They put me in mind of furbies, the fetishists who dress up like animals before they...uh...well, I won't speculate on what they do, but the hats are tremendous. They are all fur-lined, reversible-including the ears- and they are some of the most comfortable items I've ever slapped on my head. I don't recall the name of this woman's business- something like 'Foxy Hats' or "Sexy Foxy Hats' or perhaps "Hat-Wearing Sexy Foxes" - whatever, the point is, after chatting with her a bit I find that THIS IS WHAT SHE DOES FOR A LIVING. She travels from festival to festival selling her wares, and she must do a good turn of business, because I'm seeing them all over the fairgrounds. At $65 bucks a pop, they may be a bit pricey for something you might not wear on your morning commute- this not being the frigid Great White North, but I'm tickled that she makes this work for her. God, I love California.

AT THE AMBIOTICA PART 2: LATE NIGHT

I don't know how I missed this- Ok I do, I got caught up with the stars and flash of a press pass+George Clinton- but this latin groove is the most authentic stuff I've heard all evening. By authentic, I don't mean pure to form, exact adherence to recipe, an unflinching fossilization of the 'proper' tradition- quite the opposite. These cats are free, having the kind of fun that only middleman can. They aren't famous, there is only a small but dedicated crowd present- notably the man with the cowboy hat is still shaking his stuff religiously- and it's all about late night freeform booty-scootin'.

It's the looks on their faces whilst and whenst* they play- there are gleeful wagging tongues, eyes wide open and showing the whites of their eyes, on par with seeing chicken eggs, a local feel, an acknowledgement from the musicians and the crowd that this is the best music happening anywhere in the world at just this moment. The clave player moves his cowbell to different levels, just for effect, and the crowd eats it up. The keys player bumps up and down on his stool, acting like he is trying to escape from a powerful magnet encased in his butt. It is clearly the after-party to be at, and I'm thankful that I have found my way back to my assignment, finally relaxing after many pleasant distractions. If you are here at the festival, or just watching via web cam, look for this spot. I'll help you out- after I press the 'publish' button on this post, look around- I'll be the one waving, saying, "Come in, come here- this is the Place to Be."

* Come on. Cut me a break. Everyone needs a hobby.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

2008-06-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Harmony Festival posts can be found here.

Although I would point out it is joint effeort- there are 4 bloggers all contributing, and you'll just have to figure out who's who, there are no taglines given. What great fun.

On Live Blogging: The Harmony Festival

2008-06-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true. I've been assigned to live blog the Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa tomorrow night. I'm doing the Jazziz Stage. As far as I know, I get a press pass, and access to the media tents, upon whenst I shall post comments to this blog, which will be uploaded to the Harmony PR website in close-to-real time via RSS feed. Doesn't that sound fancy? I'm talking out my ass. I had to look up what RSS meant, and 'whenst' isn't even a real word. Despite this, I'm planning on taking full advantage of the assignment. If I don't get a fancy looking press pass, I'm bringing a derby hat replete with hat-band, a note card and a magic marker so if needs must, I can scrawl the word 'PRESS' on the notecard and shove it in the hat, so that the world may instantly recognize me as a representative of The Media.

So yea, the blog will be given over the Harmony Festival, provided I can find out how to do an RSS feed by tomorrow night. Wish me luck.

A definition of sorts

2008-05-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

Disnepomorphisizm (n) roots- Disney, Anthropormorphize: To imply sanitized intentions, a predictable plot, and maudlin sentiment to a group of animals whose true base instincts- eating, fucking, killing and sleeping- are much closer to actual human behavior than we would like to admit.

On Middle School Dances

2008-05-24T21:20:00.001-07:00

MIDDLE SCHOOL DANCES

I can remember the first time I walked into a high school as an adult. It was for a tutoring gig, and I- fresh into the big city- found it all very surreal. The endless hallways lined with rust colored lockers, cracking waxed tile, stone steps up stairwells, each one sagging in the center as result of decades of being pressed into service for the greater good of public education. What really drove it home though, what transported me fully, was the cafeteria smell. The cafeteria food is a source of endless bittersweet humor while in school, and a great party line as an adult, but only because it is all so long gone. When it is immediately present though, that smell- it drops you right back into a pair of converse sneakers and an inferiority complex. I was 15 years old again, for only a moment, but a totally and completely. The actual cafeteria smell is, I’m sure, the scent of government-issued reconstituted cheese. I can immediately picture it in a grainy, semi-solid blanket clinging futilely on to some semblance of French Bread, and it has little to do with actual cheese. Perhaps the organism it was rendered from had a passing acquaintance with a dairy cow, I’m not sure, but it comes powdered in foil packets, and needs a measure of water added and stirred to get it to at least a cheese-like slurry. I know that smell.

I am sitting now in a wicker chair at the admission portal of a middle school dance at the school I work at. I tell you all this smell-memory connection stuff simply to express this point: If a kid comes in to this middle school dance engulfed in a haze of Drakkar Noir, Ralph Lauren’s Polo or Farenheight cologne, I will lose my shit completely.

For you who have forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, blocked it out, let me set the stage of the middle school dance. There are balloons, both hung from shiny tendrils and loose on the dance floor. There is a fog machine, spewing ethereal swathes of cool, moist carbon dioxide at ankle level. This is meant to be romantic. There is a disco ball and associated donut-shaped globules of evenly spaced light rotating around the room and covering the walls. Shreiking teenage girls who thrash their heads and their hair wildly while they hear their favorite pop song are also present. It is, in a word, atmospheric.

I am the chaperone tonight. My job is to monitor, be present, and yet not be present- this is their time, after all, and I represent Authority. I have to find the middle ground, make myself only semi-scarce, close enough to call out wanton behavior, but far away from their private mental sphere to allow them to make their first groping* steps towards romantic independence.

It is early yet, and this is a small private school in the suburbs. Social events are few and far between for both parents and children, and so kids show up fairly early, well before the sun has gone down. The younger set show up first, and by ‘show up’ I mean ‘come from another classroom’ – many have not even left school for the day.

I’m milling around, trying to act adult, and this is difficult because I am only semi-welcome. The kids realize I am doing them a favor, chaperoning a dance on a Friday night, and they are trying to be sensitive, but I know they don’t want me privy to their conversations, their gossip, their private world. I do understand- I remember the days of being constantly monitored. The difference is, I understand what it is to not be constantly monitored, to have people assume all is well and you are a capable adult, that you can manage by yourself. My live-in girlfriend of two years left me abruptly two weeks ago, and it is still raw and painful. I’m finding myself wishing people wouldn’t assume that I am OK, that I can manage by my self, futilely wishing that someone would come and check in on me.

Nonetheless, I have a job to do, and so I am keeping tabs on the early stages of the dance. It’s mostly the 6th graders at the moment, and they are mostly bantering around balloons, treating them somewhere between volleyballs and footballs. The sixth graders are too young to really feel properly self-conscious, and so, between volleyball sessions, are on the dance floor doing the Spastic Colon or some such dance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be callous or condescending- I did the Spastic Colon for years, and still do when my roommates are out of town and I suspect my neighbors are all at their day jobs. It’s just amusing to watch.

It is, in fact, pretty tame. The presence of the 6th graders has relaxed the 7th and 8th graders, the ones with hesitant designs on Finding Love, and there are so few of them that they really can’t afford to get too embarrassed, lest they seem too adult in front of the younger ones. It is nothing like the seemingly enormous dances of my own middle school years, filled with false opportunities to engage in potential groping, including, of course, the dreaded “Snowball.”

The Snowball was a middle school standard, wherein the DJ** would line up a couple of slow songs and command the most popular couple to start dancing. Each time the DJ said “Snowball”- I distinctly remember an unctuous baritone, redolent of calling Dr. Love on on a late night radio Advice/R&B program- the couple was supposed to split, girl grabbing a different guy, guy grabbing a different girl, doubling the number of dancing couples, growing exponentially each time until, theoretically, everyone at the dance was locked in that “6-inch minimum of space” that is the junior high embrace. I don’t know why, given my motley crew of friends (brought together only for the reason that no one else would have us) thought a 13-year old girl would choose to have a change of heart and dance with a card-carrying member of the Spastic Colon Varsity Dance Team, but we waited at the edge of the boy side of the crowd, thinking that our immediate visibility would somehow override normal female sensibility, that they would choose us for the convenience of proximity over social suicide. Thinking back, I believe the DJ must have had the sensitivity to not let it go so long as to over –snowball, but as the pickins grew slimmer and slimmer, we last remaining few played out the scenario in our heads, wherein the inevitable last snowball came up and Mary the walking acne commercial takes one look at you, spits on the floor, and turns on her heel toward the punch bowl. The searing hot red ears that follow, along with every single pore on your face opening simultaneously is what is known as Building Character.

……………………………….

The kid DJ-ing the Dance comes up and starts talking to me. He’s explaining how he’s going to public school next year, how he visited the school already, made lots of friends, and how many of them were, in his words, “Totally Hot.”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this. 13 is a little young to sit down and chew the fat about attractive women. I can’t see this happening at Public School- the line is too well demarcated. If a boy/girl were to call another girl/boy (or girl/girl boy/boy- let’s not be exclusive here) ‘hot’, he/they/she would probably understand that the student that they speak of would probably be another student of mine, and they understand that this is creepy. Perhaps there was distance in this kid’s mind, this other city allowing him to talk as if we were having a sausage party. It threw me. Things are a little too casual at small schools.

…………………………….

I’m listening to the middle school version of the Macarena happen . The lyrics are such:

Right foot 2 stomps

Left foot 2 stomps.

How low can you go

How low can you go,

Can you bring it to the top?

Can you bring it real slow?

Sliiiide………. to the left!
Sliiiide………. to the right!

Reverse! Reverse!

Ev-REE-ba-DEE clap your HANDS!

They are all dancing in sync, albeit with some fumbling. This is the dancing equivalent of painting by numbers, but it works, the kids are all participating and forming their own sense of community, and mostly having fun. Part of me is a little worried that they won’t have the same opportunities that I had to Build Character, but I’m understanding now why parents choose to send their kids to private school, and why I was sent when the public school system became unbearable for me. Watching growing pains happen to your own kids- and I’m speculating, as I don’t yet have my own, but being a teacher is the closest thing- might just be the only thing more painful than going through them yourself.
………………………………..

It is the last slow dance of the evening. By now, there are a few established couplings, and the kids are doing a fair job of monitoring themselves, in terms of hanky-panky. They are well away from the ‘6-inch’ rule- a good foot apart by guesstimation- holding their arms in the stiff-elbowed way that only touching someone else’s hips and shoulders in a possibly suggestive way for the first time can elicit.

I can’t say I much like teaching middle school. My memories of it are too disturbing. Still though, I think sometimes that the effective teachers are the ones who can see through the eyes of youth, and the very best can take them on and off like goggles- they can glean the perspective, and then, as is needed, pull them up on their forehead and offer a different path, that critical guidance that the kids really need but will never ask for. I’m having a difficult time with the second part, but the first- the empathy- is coming in spades. And believe me, I wish it were just sympathy because then I could remove the goggles, but no, I watch them and all the awkwardness and flinching and the sense of going through life with a flock of tiny hummingbirds all named Hormone flying around thier heads is too ‘there’, too actual, too present. My palms are flushing, I’m swatting imaginary bugs, I feel the eyes of 137 people staring at me, carefully evaluating How I Eat My Potato Chip. I try to breathe, let it go away, understand that I really don’t have the type of job that is written about in the NewYorker. I tell myself that no one is watching how I consume snack food. I manage to talk myself down, and it’s a little depressing, because I’m back to feeling small, hoping someone will come and check on me, see how I’m doing, tell me all the feelings I’m having about my own failed relationships are part and parcel of growing up. But I’m supposed to be grown up. It’s ugly, this emotional pendulum, but it does provide something, watching from afar, this peeping-tom version of empathy. I understand that the kids don’t dislike me, that they are actually grateful that I gave some of my time to allow their dance to happen. Come Monday, though- and Monday always comes on a Monday, no matter how much I want it to take a fucking day off- when they roll their eyes at me, when their arms are folded across their chest so tightly that I feel they might displace their internal organs, when they glower and try to act like adults, with misplaced words and mean spirited actions, I can remember this moment, watching them slow dance and fumble and posture and be consumed by the odd sensation of being suddenly adrift without a life raft, cast into the unfamiliar ocean of adult sexuality; perhaps then I can empathize, excuse their breaches of etiquette, and remember what it was like to be 13. Only from afar, though- God knows I couldn’t do it again.

Disembowling with Chidren! Part 4

2008-05-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DISSECTIONS

We start this morning. It has not been a good morning.

First off, I made the Civilian Alarm Clock Gaff, which was to set it 12 hours askew, fudging the AM/PM function so that it won’t go off when you need it to, but will inevitably go off after work, when you are taking a nap after a trying day, predicated by the fact that you showed up late because your alarm clock didn’t go off.

I get up in a panic and pack Howard gingerly into my messenger bag and light off for work. In case you haven’t gathered, I didn’t have the heart to slice him open. I figure I’ve got the website handy, with all sorts of gruesome views of disemboweled sharks*, and we’ll just wing it. It isn’t until I reach the train station that I realize I’ve remembered my pickled shark, but I’ve forgotten my wallet, and so I have to turn back and grab it. Things aren’t shaping up well, to say the least.

The train ride was also filled with mild aggravations. It usually is pleasant enough as not too many people are habitually heading toward Podunk Ville Oaks where my school resides, but the handful of folks in the train car were doing their best to aggravate for many. One fellow was loudly gibbering on his cell phone, stating loudly how he was too self conscious to wear these shoes with those dress pants, but if he was so self conscious, why was he informing a car full of strangers about his dress preferences? Another kid, maybe 18 at most, swaggered in wearing pants hanging just below his left nut, no shirt, and a visor on what the kids call a ‘gangsta lean.’ It’s the posers that stick out the most. A real ‘gangsta’ wouldn’t bother trying to look thuggish at 8:00 AM on the train to Podunk Ville. What would be the point? Who, exactly, is he trying to impress? I usually try to be sympathetic to growing pains- god knows I’ve still got a few to go through that I missed growing up, hence all the juvenile behavior, but well, this kid can probably vote, and that spooks me. Even more he can probably drive a car, which generates actual fear. At any rate, I don’t need to see his nipples so early on a Monday morning. Of course, who am I to be critical? My best friend at the moment is a shrink-wrapped dead shark, looking all the world like a kielbasa sausage. I need to get out more.

The beginning of the day was similarly irritating. There was an email from the 1st grade teacher, bitching to administration as to why her science lab was cancelled last week when I was out sick, why no one had informed her, blah blah blah. She’s got a point actually, but frankly you could get this lady’s panties in a knot by sneaking into her room and rotating her coffee mug a quarter turn clockwise. I thought of defending myself, but the fact that she nearly had an aneurism when I again left writing on her dry erase board (why not just…. erase it? Am I being unreasonable here?), I figured I’d better let it lie. I was late anyway, and had to set up the dissections.

My first concern is Howard. I know, it should be the children, but like I said, I’ve become attached, and so I want to stash him somewhere where he does not have to witness his brethren being desecrated in such a primitive fashion. I briefly consider setting him up on the wall outside my classroom, but it’s a sunny locale, and I haven’t brought any sunscreen with me. Dogfish do prefer shallower waters, but can be found at depths of up to 650 feet, and I figure with the added factor of him being acclimated to diffused sunlight, Howard may not have the complexion to deal with direct rays. The fact that I actually looked this up is beginning to worry me. Do I need to get out more?

I elect to stow him in a cardboard box. I figure the sound will be muffled, and since sound travels up to three times more efficiently in water than in air leads me to deduce that Howard may have a difficult time discerning the noises of hairless monkeys gleefully disemboweling his kin. He may ask later what all the fuss was, and currently I don’t know what I’ll say, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A knock on the door. Oh, God, they are here.

They file in, already paired with lab partners, and not for the first time I’m noting how lucky I am to work with professionals so dedicated to their work. The kids are organized, science folders at the ready, diagrams in place, familiar with the anatomy, probably more so than I. It’s the fifth grade teacher who has primed them so well, and I am indebted to her.

The actual dissections go…….splendidly. The kids are excited yet dutiful, following instructions when needed and, given the go ahead, delving into the sharks and squids like bib-adorned pro football players tearing into sirloin steaks. One kid opens up the stomach and finds it full of krill, the very organism he did his report on for Marine Week. Another discovers the female gonads, something she is familiar with after the Sex Ed class. Even the other teachers, the very same who were squeamish about even having the organisms reside in their classrooms, shrink-wrapped and boxed nonetheless, were up to their knuckles in entrails, pointing out this and that. Did you know that the lens from the eye of a shark looks like an alien planet? It’s all cream and magenta swirls, the kind of marble that was the prize of the collection, back when these sorts of things were still in vogue. I had no idea. Plus, as an added bonus, they bounce.

It may sound barbaric; this gleeful tearing into guts and such, but it really is exciting to see the kids so fascinated by the whole event. Enthusiasm is difficult to culture in a system termed in the media as the ‘Abattoir of Education’. The fact that school can be a crushingly depressing cross to bear for a lot of kids has not escaped me, least of all for myself. This small occasion, though, brings me satisfaction and hope. Most gratifying is the fact that the teachers are into it- their normal ‘teacher voice’ is betraying a childlike wonder at the opportunity to see the mechanics of the natural world, and if I’ve got them hooked- pointedly with their heir help and hard work- I feel as if I’ve done my job correctly. I know ‘correctly’ may sound sterile and uninspired, but pairing scientific accuracy with the kind of enthusiasm I saw today, well, I’m going to sleep soundly tonight, knowing I had a part in a job well done. At least until 6:20 PM, when my alarm goes off.

*Of course, Howard was in the other room as I was strolling through the websites. I didn’t want him to get wind of what I was up to.

Disemboweling with Children! Part 3

2008-05-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE SHARK

Howard. I will call him Howard.

I refer, of course, to the expired and pickled dogfish shark I’ve been carrying around with me all weekend. We’ve certainly spent a lot of time together these last few days, and I think at this point he needs a name.

I brought him home because we- the fifth graders and myself- need to dissect Howard and others of his ilk come Monday morning, and I haven’t the faintest idea of how to go about this, as I’ve never seen the insides of a shark before. I mean, I suppose it has all the normal entrails and accoutrements found in most vertebrates- stomach, liver, gall bladder, duodenum, etc- but unless you know exactly what you are looking for, they all appear to be rather indistinct blobs of grossiness. I thought I’d practice on Howard this weekend.

Friday after work, I’d shoved Howard into the saddlebag of my bike, along with a spare squid, and immediately forgot about him. It was an insanely hot day of the blast furnace variety, and I had worked up a sweat and a parched throat by the time I boarded the train. I knew I had a bottle of water in the saddlebag- although I can’t for the life of me figure out how I managed to forget about the rest of the contents- and reached only to find that I was gripping on the face and skull of a shrink-wrapped ichthyoid. Although ichthyoid means fish. Maybe. I probably just made that up, but no matter, suffice to say it wasn’t pleasant. Howard gave me quite a start.

Earlier, I had texted my friends in some Tom Sawyer-esque attempt to try and get them to dice up this shark with me. They did sound interested, with the exception of Abel, who thought he was getting spam text, although I can’t imagine what sort of company would send a mass message that read “ anybody feel like dissecting a shark tonight?” I wouldn’t reply, either.

And so I brought the shark with me over to the warehouse, the social hub of the peculiar artistic community that I mill around in from time to time. I’ve trotted Howard out several times over the weekend, and by default- the fact that he has been riding shotgun in the saddlebag along with my laptop, books, and toothbrush- he has gotten quite a tour. We went swimming up at the lake, and yes I was tempted to let him ‘free’ strictly for the absurdity of the gesture, but there are small children up there. We drove around the city in a 1961 Chevy Nova painted primer gray and blue and attempted to look cool. I’ve had to stash Howard in lofts and on top of refrigerators to make sure the dogs don’t get at him while we weren’t looking. We even went to see The Mumblers play at the The Guilded Chicken, although Howard had to listen from outside as it was $10 a head to get in, and I didn’t think he’d appreciate the music enough to rationalize spending that kind of money. He’s more of an R&B sort of shark.

I’ve tried to summon both the wherewithal and the moral support to cut him open, but it just hasn’t materialized. I got a few fellows at the BBQ last night interested*, but this being the west coast, they opted to partake in smoking illicit foreign substances before they committed to gutting the shark, and I thought better of it. They were nice guys, but it just felt a little tawdry and violating to let them consider the entrails of Howard as a party trick. Plus it was a BBQ, and that would just be plain inconsiderate to all the people trying to enjoy themselves.

And so, it is Sunday morning, and Howard and I are at the Whole Foods Market, picking up ginger ale, vegetarian ‘chick’n’ patties and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, and I realize I’ve become quite attached to my shark. I'm wondering if he'll be fooled by the fake chicken, being a carnivore. Now that I’ve named him, it’s going to make it that much more difficult later in the afternoon when I have to slice him up. That and the fact that it’s a fucking disgusting thing to have to do anyway.

*Although everyone is pretty interested when you tell them you have a shrink-wrapped dead shark in the other room. If you ever have trouble starting conversation at dinner parties and the like, I highly suggest bringing your own. You may not get invited to any more of them, but people will definitely talk to you.

Disembowling with Children! Part 2

2008-05-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE CLAM

First off, these clams are huge. They weigh about the same as a softball, and are only slightly smaller. They are covered in a fine grit, which I later find to be the pulverized remains of the clams on the bottom of the bag- apparently they don’t do so well with UPS.

I’ve decided I’m going to acclimate the kids to the animals beforehand, as it’s likely to be the first time many of them have carved into a whole animal, save at the dinner table.

They smell. You know the smell. I’m passing them out to the third graders on those familiar trays, lined with that unknown rubbery substance. They are already in hysterics at how yucky they are, and frankly, so am I. I make a note on my hand in dry erase marker- the poor man’s blackberry- that says simply “trash.” I have to make sure there is a trash can available when we actually break these guys open, so that when, inevitably, one of the kids decides he needs to retch, it’ll be ready. I’m sincerely hoping that I don’t retch. You know how open to suggestion 8 year olds are.

And so the general freak-out continued, to the point where I had to call them out on bad behavior, something I am not wont to do, as I generally find it amusing. In fact, to illustrate this, I need to make an aside here, and talk about Australians.

I’ve never visited Australia. I’ve never seen a live Kangaroo, save at the zoo, or snorkled the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve never even received a postcard of the Opera House in Sydney, but I did spend a summer with Australians, and so I feel more qualified to comment than your average American, who equates the continent only with Foster beer ( which I’m told they consider to be piss in a can) and a few various sound bites from various public figures associated with crocodiles ( “That’s not a knife!”).

I learned some things about Australians that summer. I learned they call haemorrhoids “piles”, I learned how to properly throw a rugby bladder* (not a ball) correctly, and I learned that if you cup your hands into an ad hoc megaphone and shout “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” they are genetically compelled to respond with a fevered “Oy! Oy! Oy!” I also learned above all that despite their inclination to leave a trail of debris and carnage behind them while on vacation, they are a damn clever bunch.

Let us examine the ping-pong ball lab for proof. The idea was to test friction of different surfaces by rolling a ping-pong ball across them and timing them until they stopped. We visited several locations- the gym, the carpet in the music building, asphalt, waxed floor, etc. Apparantly this wasn’t exiting enough for the Australian kid, though, as by the end of the lab, when we were back in the classroom, he had constructed…well it’s hard to explain, really, unless you are familiar with Mousetrap. It was a game circa the late seventies, or at least it existed then, but may be older, in which you roll a marble down a a complex edifice of channels, slides, spirals and gizmos to the end result, which was to knock away the support beam of a little plastic cage, causing it to fall on your mouse. He had constructed such a mechanism, insomuch as he could with impromptu materials- the ping pong ball rolled down the edge of his desk, across the spine of one textbook, dropped onto the chair, rolled over to the floor and dislodged a pencil holding up a textbook, all carefully timed to squash an approaching spider. I know that in typical American education lore, my role was to flip out and chastise him for wanton behavior, but I just marveled at his ingenuity, and watched, fascinated. This is why I lack clear classroom management skills, but how could you not let such creativity flourish?

It is this same kid who is now holding the clam and alternately bring it closer and farther away from the face of a little girl going

“WhOOoooooooWhOOooooooWhOO”ooooooo!” – if this were an old Batman episode, there would be a spinning spiral as a backdrop, the type that is supposed to indicate vertigo. And it gives me vertigo, via flashback- I’m suddenly transported back to Ms. Mercuro’s 9th grade biology class.

I was not a great student. In fact I got D’s in both high school biology and chemistry, which may make call into question the qualifications of today’s educators, and that is reasonable. I wasn’t dumb, though; I just didn’t like the teacher. She was young and physically attractive, and it was her first year teaching at an all-boys Catholic High School in Detroit. Perhaps it was first-year teacher jitters on her part, but she started the first class by striding into the classroom and stating

“I know what you all are thinking, so CUT IT OUT.”

This did not endear us towards her.

She made similar blunders throughout the year. She gave Shelby a detention for chewing gum, even though he clearly was chewing on a pen cap hanging doggedly out of his mouth. She regaled us with tales of her sorority, noting how they gave a girl they didn’t like named Shannon the ever-so-droll nickname of “Shannon-head”, and tried to engage us in tales of her wild-and-willy party days when they used to bite wintergreen lifesavers in the dark and watch the sparks. Even at age 14, I was gaining a solid notion that some adults were freaking idiots. We couldn’t speak out much- this was a Catholic High School, and some of the priests were disciplinarians redolent of the glory days of the Inquisition, and so we took out our frustrations on her rather blameless rabbit by feeding it the erasers off the tops of our pencils. It acquired a taste for them, and the day she found it lying on the ground breathing in thin painful sheets because it had chewed off all the erasers off a box of pencils she kept in her back office, we could barely suppress our snickers. Did I mention that kids were cruel?

Perhaps her attitude was what made me act out during the fetal pig dissection. Sure, I learned about the internal anatomy of a piglet. I removed the intestines as instructed and placed them in the bag’o’ intestines set up on the lab table, I found the vas deferens, I poked around with the spleen and the liver and the heart, but the dissection lasted three days, and so I was getting hungry for some additional stimulation. To whit, the other useful tidbit of knowledge I gleaned from the dissection was that if you pressed the cold snout of a fetal pig to the back of the neck of one of your unsuspecting classmates, he will jump approximately 9 feet into the air and make a sound like a gazelle about to be impaled by a pack of lions. I should have stopped at one student, but this discovery was too precious to limit to only one test subject- this was science class after all, and to properly test a theory, you need a large data set. Soon enough, the whole class was desperately skittering around the classroom holding their fetal pigs like loaded sausages, trying to eek out the one kid who hadn’t cottoned on to where the intermittent strangled yelps were coming from. I received a detention for this, wherein I had to clean the tarantula cage with the tarantula notably still in it.

And so I’m watching the Australian kid attempting to ruffle this little girl, and she is indeed flipping out a little bit, but I am just watching distractedly, knowing full well I need to stop him. I imagine I’m experiencing parents must deal with all the time while they watch their own kid that is

a) clearly behaving out of bounds and
b) doing something they did as well, or similar, and find it extraordinarily amusing and clever.

You have to call the kid on it, but I always feel I’m being a bit false, lying almost. Who’d of thought being deceitful was a necessary skill in dealing with our most vulnerable citizens?

*Some of the first sports balls were essentially just an inflated pig’s bladder, which was then covered with leather in later years for shape retention. I find this fact remarkably apropos to the nature of this modest histoire.

This is only a test

2008-05-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Please wait while we fuck with all the doodle whackies..........

The blog is not malfunctioning, just routine maintenance....thank you for your patience....

Disemboweling with Children! Part 1

2008-05-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

I don’t do dissections.

I can’t really say how I’ve managed to teach biology for 7 years without doing one, but I have. Anatomy really isn’t part of freshman biology anymore, at least not by Illinois standards, and isn’t even part of a university degree in biology for the most part- at least not molecular bio, which is what most of it is these days anyway. A hundred scripts for corny high school humor flicks have it wrong- there are no more opportunities for ‘marked’ frogs to make a desperate bid for freedom by jumping out of second story school windows in droves.

I don’t want to be misleading. I’m not trying to say dissections aren’t done -plenty of teachers do them. Just not me.

Until now.

I have to, per my job description, do the dissections for Marine Week, notably clams for the third grade, squid for the forth, and sharks for the fifth grade. It has not escaped me, the irony of the prospect of being up to my arse in salty, slimy fishy creatures so soon after finishing Sex Ed. This promises to be a comedy of errors, not the least of the reasons being that I don’t do so well with the little kids. And the fact that they are, well, little kids.

They probably wouldn’t agree. I get along with them quite well, and they seem to really enjoy science lab, but possibly for all the wrong reasons.

The problem is, I don’t quite get the younger set. I’ve blocked out most of my elementary school days . This is called ‘selective memory loss’.

High school for me was marginally tolerable, for the most part. I didn’t really like it a good deal of the time, and anyone who ever reminisces on this era being ‘the greatest time of their lives’ is immediately suspect. I can’t say it was all bad- sure there were bullies and I got into fights, but at least by this age I fought back, and there were plays and band and opportunities to behave badly.

Elementary school was different. As I’d prefer not to think about this much, one salient detail will do the trick into explaining why I was a bit of a social outcast. At age six, I wet my pants atop the jungle gym surrounded by a crowd of jeering 1st graders.

Kids can be cruel. Reputations stick. Enough said.

The end result is, I don’t really know how to talk to them, especially from an adult perspective. I’ve cottoned on to some elementary school teacher techniques, but I am far from expert, and tend to mislay the emphasis. By emphasis, I mean that sing-song ‘Hello Boys and Girls and Good Morning To You!” – the painfully obvious stress that indicates that this is a cue to respond “Good Morning Mr. Bean!” This is the prescribed elementary routine.

And so, I’ve learned you have to be really obvious when presenting stuff, and use the contrived,

“Isn’t this AMAZING Boys and Girls?!?”

I just can’t seem to get the emphasis right. Take the owl pellets, for instance.

I found them while hiking. For those of you who have never had the privilege of pulling one apart, owl pellets are regurgitated lumps of animal parts that the owl cannot digest, mostly the hair, teeth and bones of rodents. They look conspicuously like turds, but in fact if you pull them apart, you can tell what the owl was eating, and even reconstruct skeletons. It’s pretty neat, actually.

So I brought them in, intending to show the little kids. I had my “I’m so Excited!” contrivance program on, but I jumped the gun- some circuit blew and so the emphasis came too early.

“So, Boys and Girls, did you know I went Hiking?!? And I found….these….

“HIKING!?!”, they wailed,

“He went HIKING!” Exalted they.

“I can’t believe you went HIKING!!” they extorted, giddy with excitement over the notion of actually walking somewhere.

To their credit, they are little human beings, and the synapse closed for some; after their initial exuberant response, a wavering of the eyes passed among them, wondering, perhaps, if they had been duped by The Voice. I can only imagine that this has happened before.

In addition to my Premature Voice problem, I can’t seem to grasp the notion that you really need to walk them through activities, lest they get themselves into trouble. I’m used to high school- you tell them what to do, and they get it done, or not. Consequences on them, at that age. It is occurring to me, though, that even the most prudent students will fly off the deep end, if not given explicit instructions to not flip out. Let us take, for example, the stream tables.

They are, in theory, a wonderful tool to observe erosion, river formation, deltas, all that good stuff. They are essentially a miniaturized version of all the various canals, reservoirs, castles and armaments you built at the beach when you were young. The trick here is that they are miniaturized- you can’t use sand, as the particles are too large, and so you need diatomaceous earth. This earth is finely pulverized, gritty grains of expired algae- the same stuff that gives your toothpaste its abrasiveness.

It works great in the tables, like miniaturized sand, and you can really spend hours playing with the stuff. What I failed to recognize is that, like sand at the beach, if you add small children to the equation, the stuff gets everywhere.

And by everywhere, I mean all over the children. 20 minutes into the exercise, they were howling, running cups of water back and forth from buckets, dropping it onto tables from heights of 6 feet or more- and these kids aren’t 6 feet tall, so you can imagine that this took some ingenuity- and slapping the surfaces of the diatomaceous earth, splashing it on themselves, the ground, their clothes.

Did I mention this is a private school?

Did I happen to let on that the kids wear uniforms?

Could you imagine how uber-wealthy parents feel about dirty school uniforms that they have to pay the maid overtime to wash and press?

Suffice to say, we had to stop the exercise, but the damage was done. The water dries, the powdery white earth will wash out of cloths, but when I lined them up with their backs to the playground wall to have a look at them they were coated- streaks of white on their cheeks, their sweaters, their hair, their skirts and their pants, looking nothing less than a line-up of 8-year old coke-habit-having third graders who had found a pile of blow 8 feet high and dove right in.

And now they trust me to give them knives?

I can’t say I feel like this is a good idea.

Nevertheless, let the disembowelment begin.

SexEd Part 7: Day 3

2008-05-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

Day 3:

I’m not sure what happened. I got the email from the 5th grade teacher, saying today’s session would be short, half an hour, could we do it in your room again? I read it, understood it, but I don’t know, I somehow managed to forget it was happening. This is what they call ‘denial’.

So when she showed up with all the boys in tow, I was a little taken aback. Fortunately, this lady had a plan. They were to sit down with scraps of paper, and on each one write down something they learned. When they were finished, after a 15-minute time limit, and we would go from group to group and they would read one of their scraps of paper. If they mentioned something no one else came up with, they got a point. If they didn’t, everybody would have to tear up their scraps and move to the next group. It was like a game, you see. The 5th grade teacher would leave, and do the same activity with the girls. Notably, Larry hadn’t shown up yet.

So, needless to say, the first 15 minutes went great. They wrote, I checked my email and graded papers. They did ask if they could write own things they learned about girl puberty and I said this was fine. So far, so good. Time for the game.

They really wanted to give the groups names, and I said sure, that sounds like a fine idea.

It was not a fine idea.

They were as follows:

Team 1: The PLA, standing for The Puberty Learner’s Association. I thought this was cute.

Team 2: Somewhat inexplicably, The Pizza Men. I dunno, I guess 5th graders like pizza.

Team 3: The Puberty Association Underdogs. They like to copy each other.

Team 4: Dr. Puberty. Again, cute.

It was all fine and good, but Team 3 was in mired in some sort of intense debate. I asked what was up. They asked if they could use the word ‘Penis’ in their title.

Ahem.

It seems obvious that I should have said no. I’m not quite sure what was going on in my head, but it something to the tune of, ‘well , sure, I mean we have to say the word all the time anyway, and let’s just be honest and open, and if that was what they wanted to use, how could it hurt?’

This is how Team 3 came to be called “The Penis Bandits.”

And Team 5? Once they heard this, they, of course, had to trump this and called themselves “P.P.P” which stood for, you guessed it…

Penis Penis Penis.

I brought this upon myself.

On to the game.

Now, humans are a competitive breed, even the youngest of us. Brother of 20-30 Times a Day’s group has employed a strategy that is called a ‘squirrel’ in debate circles- that of an obscure argument, or in this case, a fact. They’re basically going with the girl puberty stuff, like “girls have a vagina” and it’s working for them. They are racking up the points.

And they all are doing well. Despite the fact that I’m praying no other teachers are hearing the cries of “Penis Bandits ROCK!” emanating from my classroom, I’m rather impressed with how much stuff they remember- they even get the scrotum notion correct.

In college, when we found ourselves milling around the living room, beers cracked and our bellies laid out for fresh air, my roommate would don the occasion a ‘sausage party.’ It’s a crass title, to be sure, but women do the same thing. They drink wine and call it Girls’ Night, but it really just amounts to being free to saying whatever you want and need to without the social pressure of being genderifically correct.

It occurs to me that this, in essence, is what just happened- I’ve kind of walked them through their first sausage party. In a profession where men are an oddity- especially elementary school- we are suspect because of this. What kind of man- save a pervert or a pedophile- would want to do what is, even with today’s politically correct ostensibly gender neutral society, still often considered women’s work? But it’s fun, really, and when all the changes come to play in what I remember to be a difficult- and at its worst, miserable- time of life, I hope they remember the weird guy who let them call their team the Penis Bandits, and that it wasn’t actually too mortifying of an experience. And mostly I hope that all the lumps of puberty, when the come barreling down, at least don’t come as a surprise. I am feeling kind of protective of my charges, and dare I say it, a little…..paternal?

What are these changes that are happening to me?

An Ode to Mom

2008-05-10T14:29:00.001-07:00

Lest we forget, amongst all this talk of reproductive organs and blunt- perhaps flirting with crass- talk of Sex Ed and what have you, it’s the reason we are all here today. And so, I am home dying cloth for my mother the quilter, as she’s been encouraging me to do for probably a decade. Sorry about the delay, ma. Better late than never? Love ya.

SexEd Part 6: Day 2

2008-05-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

It’s the day the boys are supposed to learn about the girls. I’m blessedly not required for the first half of class- I have 7th grade to teach- and so the fifth grade teacher and Larry are taking care of the first part. I’m supposed to leave the transparencies on the overhead projector, and just for fun I leave the penis diagram cast on the screen so the kids will have something to talk about when they get there.

I spy in a few times, as I’m right next door, and the fifth grade teacher has really got them going. She’s throwing a ball around the room, and if they catch it, they get to answer a question. It’s brilliant, this Tom Sawyer approach, and the kids are all ape-shit about wanting to answer a question and get the ball. How come this doesn’t work in my high school classes?

I duck out, finish class, and join them. They’ve moved away from the pituitary gland and all the relatively benign stuff, and are full on taking about the Parts, and their names. This woman has not an ounce of shame, and more power to her, because she’s got them saying everything.

“Say ‘cervix’ ,” she’ll command.

“Cervix,” they’ll reply.

She does defer to us on all things male, and at one point, sort of alludes to the scrotum being the same thing as the testicles. I interject- we should be anatomically accurate here- and explain that it’s the sac that holds the testicles. I may even have made some comparison about marbles and the bag they come in, which may have been a good analogy circa 1909, but sort of fails here. Still, though, I’m getting the hang of what fifth graders will understand, and bring up something that will cross the age gap- shrinkage.

It works- we naturally roll into a discussion of why the testicles need to be kept at a lower temperature, and how the scrotum modulates that by alternately bring them closer and farther away from the body- the heat source- hence the shrinkage in cold water. Even typing this, I realize I’m becoming the embarrassingly honest male version of the Sex Ed teacher. It should feel a little creepy, but in fact, feels fine. They are actually understanding this stuff, and don’t seem too scarred by the discussion

We’re on a roll, and the fifth grade teacher deftly switches to female anatomy by way of the Transparency, rather abruptly for my taste. One minute were just getting comfortable with saying ‘ejaculation’, and the next, there it is, on the screen in black line anatomical correctness, the female organs, hovering above us like the disembodied head of a praying mantis, ovaries on what look like alien eyestalks, and conspicuous labels with words like ‘fallopian tubes’, ‘cervix’, and the dreaded ‘Vagina’.

“Who can say Vagina?” She asks, “Teddy, say ‘Vagina’.”

“Vagina!” extorts Teddy.

“You can say that really well!” she compliments.

“It’s like saying Spaghetti!” offers Teddy.

She goes on for a bit, and asks me if I have an overhead pen. I’m scrambling through my desk drawer- the one you were only allowed in if you were the teacher’s pet, although that I think holds true more for women than men, because mine is essentially a school supply junkyard. I finally dig up a black marker and hand it to her, and there is just a touch of derision in her face, as if the marker were encased in a rubber chicken. For some reason rooted back in my elementary school days, I really want to please this lady, and so I’m scrambling around for a different color. All I can find is red. Her face lights up.

“Perfect!” she says, and immediately starts coloring in an ad hoc menstrual lining on the uterus.

“This is the menstrual lining. Everyone say ‘menstruating’”, she commands.

“Menstruating”, they chorus.

She goes on for a bit, ad libbing her speech as well, and I’m just watching, wide-eyed and a little disconnected, although I’m shaken a bit out of my own private thoughts when she starts talking about boobs.

“Just like you have a penis that grows, girls have breasts that grow.”

I thought that was going to be the show-stopper, but no. She actually throws down The Line.

“You may start feeling different about girls during puberty, and perhaps you are noticing their boobs more now, and that’s OK.”

I spy out the two kids who I thought may just barely be in the early throes of puberty, to see if they had the same response as I did to this statement. Sure enough, they were wearing that universal male expression of trying very hard to look as if they are not looking at boobs. I felt immediately vindicated and, a beat later, a little mortified that I shared this impulse with 10 year-olds. What can I say? Boys will be boys, even when we’re supposed to be men.

SexEd Part 5: Day 1

2008-05-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

10:37 AM, Day 1 of Sex Ed.

And so it's the day of Sex Ed, the day where we show The Video, and it's really a train wreck. At the very first meeting, ole Larry the gym teacher- whom I now love like a brother, such is our shared trauma- asked if our upper school classes would be taken care of.

"Oh yes!", they promised.

"Not even an issue.", said they, assuaging our fears.

"Consider it done.", they pledged.

They didn't do it.

The kids are arriving at 2:00. They will be late. We will struggle with the projector. We will show the video with the line drawings of the penises and the erections and all the little globs of sperm traveling up the urethra. It will go until 2:30.

At this point Larry will leave, as he has a golf match. Well, he coaches the golf team, so it's more legitimate than it sounds, but still, I wish I played golf so I had the excuse. They didn't take care of his duties like they promised, and so I will be left with a bunch of 5th graders, alone, with something I only just found about today: the Transparencies.

I don't know what the Transparencies are or what they show. On some level I really wish they had mentioned the Transparencies earlier, but on another, I guess it's just as well that I don't know. I just know it's something awful, though, and I will be left alone to have to make sense out of them.

Just like a real brother, I want to f**king kill Larry right now.

I get to show up late tomorrow- they 'forgot' to get me a sub, and so I must teach me life science class- but I'm guessing all the most embarrassing stuff will happen today. All I really wanted was Larry’s presence- just to look on approvingly as I give all the speeches. Alas, it may not be so.

2:00 PM: The Talk.

They arrive. They are seated. The fifth grade teacher outlines the game plan to me. She is earnest, she is trying to exhibit full confidence in Larry and I, and she’s faking it pretty well, but I do detect a hint of concern, one that may not be unwarranted. I’m trying to act casual, but I’m not sure how well I’m faking it. She hands me the Transparencies in a plain beige folder. I don’t look at them.

Class begins.

I start giving the introductory speech, hey, here we all are, let’s get right into it shall we? Larry looks on approvingly. This is his role much of the time.

Now, I remember puberty talks being awkward and hesitant, and I’ve got this idea in my head that it really shouldn’t be that way, we should say what we have to say, be forthright, say it all out loud, break the ice, the tension, tear down that forth wall right away. This is what leads me to say,

“OK, well were going to have to say it sooner or later, so here we go.”

“PENIS PENIS PENIS.”

As you may have foreseen, it really worked. That is to say, we sure broke the ice. To say the kids were amused would be an understatement. They started HOWLING, slapping their hands on the desk, rolling over into fits of laughter, now shouting PENIS PENIS PENIS at the top of their lungs.

Larry looks at me and stage whispers,

“Wow. Things went downhill really quickly, huh?”

He is not looking on approvingly, as I really need him to do right now.

Despite all this, once the kids settle down, it has the intended effect, as least for me. We show the video, we talk about what we need to talk about, we bring up wet dreams and the importance of washing your junk. We talk about why wet dreams aren’t like wetting the bed- I seem to recall some vagueness about the topic myself at their age, and weirdly enough, it isn’t that weird. We are actually doing OK.

Possibly it isn’t entirely as freakish as I thought it would be because most of these kids haven’t hit puberty yet. It’s still just factual- they aren’t, on the by and large, experiencing any of the peculiar hormonal episodes that usually accompany these sorts of talks. In fact, they are rather unembarrassingly asking some questions that they must have gleaned from somewhere else.

“Mr. Bean,” starts one kid- notable the younger brother of the 20-30 erections a day kid,
“My brother says girls’ attitudes change when they hit puberty and they get mean.”

At my core, I really don’t know how to answer this, and Larry deftly swoops in.

“Well,” he starts, “Girls are going through a lot of emotional changes, like you guys, but they’re probably a bit different in the way they react to them. We, as males, have to be sensitive to that.”

Go Larry. I did not expect him to pull that out at all.

We carry on, do OK as far as I can tell, and it isn’t until we’re finished, watching some educational video to pass the rest of the time, when I realize I totally forgot the Transparencies. They are just sitting on my desk like an IRS audit. They have to be opened, I know, I just don’t want to do it now. Well, we do have two more days of this. It’ll happen sometime.

SexEd Part 4: The In-Service

2008-05-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

We- all the teachers- are sitting in the computing lab. We have just finished some sort of training that I’m not entirely sure about, and we are bantering back and forth. The conversation turns toward all the school events happening soon. Sex Ed is brought up. I am suddenly receiving all sorts of interest, even though I’m not saying anything. I don’t have to- everyone knows I was roped into it. This is called ‘hazing’.

Dave, the middle/high school director that had to do this last year, is having great fun at my expense, although he has the right, as he gave the ‘talk’ last year. He steadfastly refused to do it this time around, and he’s dropping bits of dialogue from last year’s meeting, much to the amusement of my colleagues.

Kid: “ So …I woke up with all this sticky stuff all over my pyjamas. What is up with that?”

Dave: “Umm, it’s called a wet dream. It’s perfectly normal.”

Kid: “ So what’s it called, you know, when your penis fills with blood?”

Dave: “It’s, umm, called an erection. It is perfectly normal.”

Kid: “MAN, I get like 20 or 30 of those a day!”

Dave: “Um. Yes. Uh, that may not be perfectly normal. But you may not be perfectly normal, and that is perfectly normal. Next question.”

I know they chose the wrong person to do this.

SexEd Part 3: The Parent Meeting

2008-05-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

I was asked, as a part and parcel of the whole Sex Ed thing, to attend a parent meeting. I think the idea was that they could check out the curriculum, view the video, and be generally assured that we aren’t totally incompetent. I represent the boy’s half- I’m supposed to be calm and reassuring, the sort of educator that can say ‘erection’ as naturally as ‘radial tires’.

So, yes, we showed the film to the parents. In it kids are talking about increased sebum production, odor, hygiene, and all sort of topics during their class presentations. At other times, they cut to kid-parent conversations, having perfectly natural unembarrassed dialogues about periods, the efficacy of winged maxi-pads, etc. If you haven’t guessed yet, the video was sponsored by an unnamed feminine hygiene product company.

We are pausing the movie at points telling them that this is what we intend to focus on, they’re in fifth grade blah blah blah, hygiene hygiene hygiene. We are avoiding direct allusions to sex, babies, anything they might deem awkward. We are describing how we will give every kid a ‘puberty’ kit, pads and deodorant for the girls, plain old deodorant for the boys. I’m gleaning that hygiene is clearly a focal point of 5th grade Sex Ed.

Here’s the problem: Frankly, I stink. Mind you, this is at around seven o’clock in the evening, and I’ve been at school for nearly 11 hours, but it’s the damn California hippie no aluminum deodorant that has me humming- it has no harmful chemicals, inorganic ingredients, uses locally grown hops to stave off competing bacteria, etc, but the fact is the shit really doesn’t work that well. It’s fine for about 6 hours or so, but I’ve been ripening for a good 11 at this point and the whole time I’m clamping my armpits shut like someone taped my upper arms to my torso. I can’t imagine I’d inspire a whole lot of confidence in the parents smelling like a used sock on the locker room floor. I hope this doesn’t foreshadow some dire circumstances.

SexEd Part 2: The video

2008-05-03T15:39:00.000-07:00

OK, they sucked. They sucked BAAD. Really, they were exactly as I remembered them to be, and frankly, given the mid-eighties feather hair-dos with they kind of heat insulation usually reserved for ear-muffs, they probably are exactly as I remembered them. This just got a lot more daunting.

I mean, I guess the whole thing about deodorant really is important- the current7th grade certainly has a few reliably pungent members, so much so that you can tell who taught them last by the almost physically tangible ‘7th Grade Funk’ that remains after they leave a room. But really, the focus on hygiene just seems like a filler, a way to avoid saying the words “wet dream” in front of a bunch of snickering 10 year olds.T he whole film was soooooo ham-fisted and predictable.

Even the name was predictable, if a little confusing. I don’t know who thought of “Always Changing About You”, as a title, but it sounded exactly correct title for a film of this ilk- a vague allusion towards content while still being grammatically perplexing. Is the Change always around you, or are you “all about Changing?” I prefer something more descriptive and less vague, like “You’re Changing, and That Sometimes Feels Kinda Fucked-Up, but Don’t Worry, It’s Supposed To.” Or something like that. I can’t even finish watching the video.

…………………………………………………….

I finished watching the video. Good lord, it even has some of that “Saved By the Bell” type of soundtrack. And it does, in fact, have a line drawing showing a cross section of the human penis and vagina, ovaries, testicle, all the business. It even shows a stop action drawing- and by this I mean cheap animation- of an erection and ejaculation, little teardrop shaped globs of sperm moving up the urethra with the animation quality of a flipbook, and splashing in all directions upon egress from the penis, like broken sprinkler head. I’m going to giggle, I know it.

SexEd Part 1: Roped in.

2008-05-02T18:23:00.000-07:00

I have been informed today that I am going to teach Sex Ed to the fifth graders.

I shouldn’t say I was informed- technically, I was asked to do it, and technically I could’ve had said no.

Technically.

But the reality is, I’m still new at the school, less than 60 days in, and taking over a job from someone who was well liked. It’s an awkward situation, and I’m finding I really have to bust ass to get accepted into the fold here.

You remember Sex Ed. It was that time where things were implied, where the class was divided into boys and girls. The girls went with the popular elementary teacher, the nurturing one, the one that is embarrassingly honest and forthright about her feelings, the one kids would go to if they had real problems, because she was an emotional rock they could tether too. The boys went with the gym coach, the same one that called you ‘girlies’ went you were running too slow during gym laps. I don’t really know what happened with the girls, but the boys were sat on a cold gym floor and shown slides of line drawings of genitalia, of penises and vaginas, of the internal plumbing of ovaries and vas deferens and all the odd canals- all of this alluding to, but never saying, that somehow babies and sex and some sort of illicit adult activity was involved.

They called me down to the organizational meeting where the fifth grade teacher, the elementary Asst. Principal, the kindergarten/P.E. teacher, and- duh- the gym coach were all seated. I can’t say I know much about the gym coach- he seems nicer than I remember my own coaches to have been, but that isn’t saying much. He is a little red-faced and paunchy, which is an odd characteristic that all gym teachers seem to share. I don’t know why physical education jobs are given to people who couldn’t run a mile if chased by a tank, but there you go. Its true, things really don’t change.

Before I can explain how this meeting felt, I need to make a relevant point; being a school teacher is weird enough as is. Every time you bring the fact up at a social gathering, people will start recalling their own school days, and the pictures they paint are clearly in soft-focus. A hazy memory is implied, and it’s difficult to listen to, as you are still, for all intensive purposes, in high school, and the distance and nostalgia they attribute to these visceral images is not one you get to enjoy. We, as teachers, all full well remember what it was ‘like’ in high school, because we just got to leave a few hours ago, and have to go back in just a few more hours.

This meeting, though, was different. I DID feel that odd nostalgia- although ‘nostalgia’ implies a pleasant sensation, whereas I just had a flood of awkward emotion, sweaty palms and other unmentionable physical reactions to the subject matter- and it made it peculiar to sit in a room with a closed door discussing the education of sex for small children. I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a good part of the meeting breaking out into 12-year old snickers. I couldn’t help it. The fifth grade teacher, a middle-aged mother who clearly loves children, was putting forth most of the ideas, being rather blunt and unembarrassed, as someone who spends every minute of every day with kids is wont to do. She’s coaching me as to how I should talk to the boys, suggesting I say things like,

“Well, you may start feeling different about girls as well, and perhaps you are noticing their boobs more now, and that’s OK.”

Man, It was difficult enough to suppress a huge 12-years old guffaw at this point, but she had to choose to day to be wearing a rather low- cut blouse, and it felt as if someone had filled my eyeballs half-up with liquid mercury, such was the gravity of my line of sight swinging directly to her cleavage. I was sitting directly across from her, so I just had to muscle through it, but it wasn’t easy, and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded, but at least I didn’t linger long enough to warrant comment or blushing. Not that I could embarrass this woman. I meant me blushing.

I really wonder if they chose the right person to do this.

I’ll admit, I did entertain a small hope that they would rethink their decision to ask me to do this and pass it along to the gym teacher- present at the meeting, of course- but there was some measure of just dumb fart-joke, penis penis penis vagina residual juvenile humor that I have not yet been able to expunge from my personality. I figured I’d give it a shot. I can’t believe I have to talk to 10-year olds about wet dreams.

And so I am about to check out the DVD’s given to me, the ones I must show on the metaphorical cold gym floor. I hope they don’t suck.

An Introduction

2008-05-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

As a teacher, I agonized over where to place the relevant apostrophe in the title. Points off for bad grammar, you know.

But as much as I hope for this to be a forum- and I'm still figuring out how to do this, so bear with me- realism must come into play.

The fact is, if you are even reading this, you are doing it alone. No one shares computers concurrently. Laptops are the new TV remote, upgraded and personalized. And so, I stuck with the singular. You can shut it off anytime you like. I understand that. I hope you read this anyway.

But still, the idea holds water- I 'm hoping teachers, students, former teachers and former students- everyone really- can glean something from this, this odd glimpse into the world of the professional educator. And I hope you say something- education is a messy business, and only moved by those willing to be labeled 'outspoken' . Please, comment, argue, foster discussion, whatever you like, really. No more babbling, though. Let's just do this.