SING FOR YOUR LUNCH

For some unknown reason, I decide that my first day back from break should be a teaching day on my feet.  This would be a wonderful idea if I felt well, but I don't.  My back and entire right flank are still giving me problems.  Maybe I fried a kidney.  Who knows?  All I know is that I'm not quite right.  I feel like my back has a perpetual toothache.

I start the lesson with some general housekeeping -- collect the reading logs that are due and handing out new ones due next week.  Then, I queue up six short videos on the Writing Process and the Six Trait Writing methodology.  The videos are homemade (not by me - I found them in cyberspace) using semi-advanced web-based programs, pre-set templates with cheesy soundtracks that sound like they may have been recorded inside tin cans.

No matter.  One of the videos is a rap-like rock song, with the lyrics and colorful illustrations to go with each transition.  The kids start singing along for some reason -- first thing in the morning, fresh back from break, fighting off boredom and disgust, or just because ... I don't have the answer. 

By the time I get class #3, the one right before lunch, I tell the kiddos that they cannot go to lunch until they successfully sing two choruses of the song.  After such a long break from school and each others' company, I'm not sure what to expect, but I am pleasantly surprised.

By the last class, the students have already heard what I've done and what they'll be doing.  We have to SING? they bemoan as they file in and take their seats.   

Yes, you HAVE to sing, and you're going to LIKE it, whether you want to or not.

I have the video all ready (I set it back up and pause it while they are working on their journals).  As soon as writing notebooks and text books are put away in proper places, the chairs go on the desks and the children stand around the room waiting.  They can see what I'm doing because everything is still being shown on my (useless and completely inefficient) white board projector.

I click the start arrow and ...

Now, I have to be honest here, because honesty is sort of my thing.  Okay, I like to lie and embellish, but stay with me for a moment.  I truly do not expect anyone to sing.  I didn't expect it earlier during first block when it spontaneously happened, nor before lunch, nor right now.  This, though -- this is one of those moments that make teaching middle school the absolute best thing in the entire world.

Suddenly the music comes up, the beat begins, and the students open their mouths and start singing (rapping) along and dancing, too.  They're writing; they're singing; they're moving.  Amazingly, they're truly working on day #1 back after the long holiday break. 

Apparently, writing really does rock.  Who knew?

UNPUZZLING THE CLOSET

Small closets infuriate and instill wonder -- infuriate because barely anything fits into small closets, and instill wonder because once you get through the overstuffed contents, you often find treasure.

Take today, for example.  Today a puzzle, unsolved for months, finally gets its pieces put together. 

All summer long I am missing two pairs of glasses: blue reading glasses and brown sunglasses.  I tell myself they'll turn up when I start reorganizing rooms, but after the furniture has been moved and, in some cases, broken down and given away, I still cannot find the two pairs of glasses.

I retrace my steps.  I swear I had them early in the beach season.  I start looking through various beach bags.  I tear the car apart, including looking under the seats and inside the cubby near the spare tire.  I check through old pocketbooks and school bags.  I wonder if I took them on a lacrosse trip, though my sunglasses wouldn't be in a suitcase, but no matter.  I look anyway. 

Nothing makes sense. 

Today I head out to a concert in Portland, ME.  I'll probably have to walk around the center of the city for a short bit, so I need a coat better than my shoveling jacket.  I wonder what I have.  I don't really own a nice parka. Just in case a better idea strikes me, I head to the magic, double-stuffed closet in the spare room, anyway.  There's nothing to lose.

I notice a coat with a large, fur-lined hood.  Hmmm, that's funny.  I could've sworn I got rid of that coat years ago when the zipper broke.  I grab it anyway.

Oh.  Surprise!  It's not my crappy old coat; it's a Columbia parka, long with a huge, warm hood.  I remember it now.  My co-worker gave it to me last year when she didn't want it anymore.  Still in brand-new condition, it became my lacrosse coat.

I put it on, so happy to have a decent parka to wear to the concert.  I won't look like one of the city's homeless now.  (Don't write me hate mail -- Portland has homeless people.  We all do.  Shut up and do something about it instead of pick on me.)  The pockets are bulging, probably full of tissues and dead camera batteries leftover from my last collegiate sideline lacrosse camera-mom experience. 

I reach into pocket #1: Driving gloves I totally forgot that I was missing.  Score.  I reach into pocket #2 and pull out ... blue glasses ... and ... brown sunglasses. I never thought to look in coat pockets.  All this time I've assumed I lost them early in the summer when, in fact, it was late in the spring. 

I do a little happy dance and wrap myself up in my magical coat from my magical closet.  Treasure discovered!  Puzzle solved!  I do start wondering, though, if perhaps I should dig a little deeper into that closet.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll find Geraldo's secret content from Al Capone's vault; maybe we'll find Jimmy Hoffa!  Wonders never cease.

SWASHBUCKLING NEW YEAR'S

New Year's Eve ends up being a multitude of adventures.

In addition to finishing my capstone paper that's due this week, I also sit with friends and watch Clemson's football team kick ass.  In between these events, though, I am involved in some swashbuckling.

I go to a champagne tasting where sabres are involved.

That's correct: Sabres are used to open some of the bottles.  Several people, both employees and customers, under supervision, of course, are ushered out to the parking lot to open bottles of champagne using swords.  It takes a few tries, but eventually the corks go flying and the champagne bursts out like fountains.

What's strange about this whole sabre-opening technique is that in addition to making missiles out of the corks, it also shears of the top of the bottle ... cleanly.  So we pour and we drink from the sabre-sheared champagne bottles.  Glass shards, be damned (there are none, by the way).

I'm not going to lie.  Knowing we killed those bottles before we ... um .. killed those bottles made this some of the best champagne I've ever tasted.  Okay, to be fair, some of the sabre-sheared bottles were just plain old sparkling wine and Brut, and some of them were the real champagne deal.  My wallet may recognize the differences between these wines, but my palate is not so discerning.

When I go back to work and am asked how I spent my break, it'll be fun to say with all honesty and a perfectly straight face, "Swashbuckling," and mean it with all of my bubbly heart.

FIRST DAY IN BOSTON

First Night in Boston --  Actually the last night of 2015, New Year's Eve, hundreds of thousands of people, ice sculptures, a giant tree, and lots of celebrating.

First night of 2016 -- The true "first night" of the year, New Year's Day, hundreds of people, ice sculptures, a giant tree, and a fair amount of celebrating.

There's something magical about the city during the holiday season.  This is especially heightened by the addition of First Night.  But, I despise crowds. 

The beauty of First Day in Boston is that all the cool stuff and decorations are still up, but the throngs of people are not there.  It's just a regular tourist day, which is almost hard to believe since the major hoopla happened less than seventeen hours prior.

Here's a little something to whet your appetite.  Enjoy!

HAPPY 2016

2015 is gone.  Finally!  :)

Actually, it wasn't so bad, and, when I have more time, I'll tell you about the New Year's sabre and champagne experience, and how friends fed me and stuffed me full of pizza.

But, in the meantime, I dozed off at the keyboard and woke up just as the ball was dropping in Times Square via television ... but I was on the wrong channel, so I missed it.

Oh, well.  Apparently 2016 is going to be a year of "Ooops, I just missed it."  I can live with that.

Happy New Year, kids.  Thanks for another wonderful 365, and here's to 365 more.  You're the best!

WINTER: IT'S DUCK AND COVER TIME

I thought I lived in New England, Home of the Blizzard of '78, Land of the Record Snowfall of '15, The Great White Tundra of the Northeast.  Apparently, though, I live in Wussyville.

First of all, it sleeted all day on Tuesday, at least where I live.  No snow, no rain - steady sleet.  All day.  Sleet, sleet, and more sleet.  Inches and inches of sleet until it looked like snow.  But it wasn't snow; it was piles and piles of ice pellets.  Big-ass, slushy, whomping-heavy sleet.  Vehicles everywhere became cement-like blocks of frozen slushy muck, each car like an ice cube for Goliath.

I think they plowed.  Once.  I believe this is true because the end of my driveway suddenly and inexplicably became a giant igloo of razor-sharp, six-inch tall ice mountains with enough credibility to pop car tires.  However, the plows never came back. 

Never.  EVER.  Not to my street; not to any street. Now, every street around town is a frozen mess of ice doodoo. 

Tonight, for example, after dodging a giant chunk of ice the size of Baby Huey that flies off the SUV in front of us, my son discovers that he is a Master of Defensive Highway Driving.  We also discover that every side road intersection is covered with ice obstacles.  The conundrum of the evening becomes, "Do I drive across the center lane and hope I don't kill anyone, or do I drive onto the Frozen Patch of Death to avoid smearing the idiot jogger who is out on the ice in the street after dark in black gear?"

I say, "The jogger is worth ten points.  Hit him!" 

Alas, Master of Defensive Highway Driving is now also Master of Defensive Back Road Driving.  The jogger lives to run in the street and risk death for yet another day.  Personally, I never even see him.  He'd be a hood ornament in running gear by now if I were driving.

For a region that prided itself Monday night on how it was already salting and sanding as preemptive care (which is bullshit because that doesn't even work), they sure fucked up on the actual storm clean-up.  Explains why one of my homies went after a plow driver with a gun. 

Wait.  Wait a sec.  He actually FOUND someone PLOWING during the storm?  Must've been some dumbass who didn't get the memo: This is Wussyville.  It's winter.  Prepare to duck and cover.

WHY POETRY AND PAPERS SOMETIMES SUCK

I'm trying to write a paper for a class.  This class has been the most disorganized and irrelevant thing I've studied since attempting to take a poetry writing class at college.  Not that writing poetry is irrelevant; but this particular professor preferred poetry about grandmothers being raped than anything actually meaningful.  Not that grandmothers being raped isn't meaningful ... See?  This is why poetry sometimes sucks.

Anyway, this paper has no directions (plural).  Oh, it has direction (singular), it's just that I have no idea how to format the thing or what is actually required because the several references to this paper throughout the course have been ephemeral, at best.

"You should all be working on your capstone paper," the instructor (I hesitate to call her a teacher) says.

Ye Mighty Oracle of Ignorance, Ye Great Cahuna of Catastrophe, on what shall we be working since we've had no explanation as to what the final paper should be?

"It'll all roll together in the end," she assures us.

What will roll together in the end? Our grades?  Our skulls?  The weed you seem to be toking?

Between the six of us taking this course, we have five different instructors, and not a one of them has been able to give us a straight answer on this capstone paper: It's one lesson; It's six lessons; It's an entire unit; We can use previous work; We can't use previous work; Quote from the readings; Don't quote from the readings; Here's a sample; Don't use the sample; Follow the forms; The state changed the forms. 

On and on and on it goes; where it stops, nobody knows.

I've spent the entire day putting together the paper to the best of my ability (it's about 1/4 of the way done), and texting back and forth with another teacher who has a different instructor and is equally confused by the opaque participants' manual.  Here's a relatively (semi-relatively) clean version of our texts.

ME:  The trail mix you made me for Christmas is totally saving my sanity through this capstone paper.

SHE:  You like it?  It's healthy, too.

ME:  Freakin' LOVE it.  I won't let anyone else eat any.  It goes equally well with beer, wine, or gin.

SHE:  Do you have the capstone rubric?  I'm using that as a guideline.

ME:  And tea.  The excellent trail mix goes with tea.  I'm not a complete fucking alcoholic.

SHE:  I am.  Embrace it.

ME:  I haven't started drinking yet.  YET.  A key word we should know in every language.  That and beer.

SHE:  This is a nightmare!  It's going to take hours!

ME:  Fuck my life.  I went out and shoveled this heavy shit (slushy ice/snow) with a bad back.  That is how much I want to get away from it.

SHE:  Just one lesson?  Mine said all six.  This is so poorly presented.  She said it should be a journey through the unit.

ME:  Shit.  I just need a 50% to pass.

SHE:  I don't even care if I'm doing this right.  I'm going to get my hair done in an hour.  Thinking I'll be almost half done by then.

ME:  (posts a picture of my papers everywhere and sharpened pencils all over the place)

SHE:  (posts a picture of her lap top)

ME:  Fuck.  I just whacked my knee sooooooooo bad.  (table leg attacked me)

SHE:  Please murder me.

ME:  If it weren't solid ice outside, I'd meet you somewhere.  I just went to get the mail and it's a skating rink.  (first winter storm and it sucked -- 4 inches of sleet instead of real snow)  We have to include the readings, too, right?

SHE:  It doesn't ask for it in the template or rubric.

ME:  THIS FUCKING COURSE SUCKS ASSHOLES.

Now that I look back on the conversation, it is a little bit poetic.  Maybe I'll just burn the paper and turn my text messages into poetry.  I could make a fortune on my text messages and IM's.  I should start a blog!  I should ... I should ... Oh, frig it.  I should write this frigging paper.  After all, it beats grandmothers being raped.