Once the oceans and the robots rise up and destroy us, after the nukes and the supervolcanoes have exploded, and the straggling remainder are finished off by antibiotic-resistant pandemics . . . once the human race is wiped off the face of this planet, we will not be remembered for our intelligence or our foresight, but hopefully some future civilization will appreciate the thing at which we were the best . . . our sense of humor-- and it is for this alien culture that I write this sentence: yesterday in Creative Writing class I had my students play Scattergories as a brainstorming activity and then told them to apply the methodology to their own imagery piece-- go deep into your brain for details, avoid the obvious, and the sift through what you have and choose the best-- but one girl got obsessed with the game itself and kept searching for categories on her computer:
Student: Dairy products . . . that's a good category . . .
Teacher: That is a good category . . . but you can't just list dairy products for your piece, what kind of tone would that be?
Student: (without missing a beat) A little bit cheesy . . .
and we all rejoiced and then the kids taught me this joke:
why did the mushroom go to the party?
because he's a fun guy!
Stacey Again?
It's rare that an outsider makes my blog twice in one week-- I have so many fascinating thoughts and opinions that it's hard for interlopers to dent my consciousness-- but my friend and colleague Stacey so perfectly described our hot, humid cesspool of a high school that I've got to put it in print . . . she said being in our school is like being at a crowded public indoor pool, perpetually, except of course there's no water to jump into . . . it reminds me of when my kids were little and they took swim lessons over at Rutgers in the wintertime, and I'd have to wait around for them, sweating and overdressed, everything moist and slick with condensation . . . I'd try to read but it was just too gross to concentrate-- luckily, the weather has broken and fall is here, but I'll happily (and indignantly) use the same analogy at the end of the school year.
The Best Fun Fact Ever
The Guinness Book of World Records was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of Guinness Brewery . . . in 1951, he got into a Monty Python-esque argument while hunting (about the airborne speed of two birds: the red grouse and the golden plover) and realized that bars would benefit greatly from a book to settle absurd arguments, so he tasked the McWhirter brothers with the project, with the promise that he'd stamp the Guinness name on the product, and in 1955, a perennial bestseller was born (a bestseller which is undergoing a transformation . . . listen to this episode of Planet Money for that story).
If It Wasn't For You Meddling Post-Traumatic Young Adults . . .
Edgar Cantero's meta-novel Meddling Kids is an interesting fictional experiment: a Scooby-Doo-like gang of kid detectives are reunited as adults to try to solve the one special case that traumatized them all, a case so nefarious that it sent them hurtling towards suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, and nihilistic depression . . . and while this conceit works for a while, it eventually it becomes a slog: too many hijinks and amphibian creatures; too much sorcery; too much plot and not enough jokes . . . but I still give it a B+ for the effort and hope Cantero's next effort is just as weird.
You Got a Choice, Dishwasher
My friend, colleague, and podcasting partner Stacey was taking a run at Capik Nature Preserve in Sayreville last weekend, and she spotted a group of boy scouts setting up camp near the trail; the scoutmaster and some other adults were supervising, and when she got close to them, the scoutmaster-- a middle-aged man-- looked at Stacey, an attractive six foot tall woman in athletic gear, and said, "Hey guys . . . here's our dishwasher!" and then he turned and addressed the young scouts, in case they hadn't heard his chauvinistic witticism, and repeated it to them, "Hey boys . . . look, our dishwasher is here!" and it took Stacey a moment to process the remark-- she mumbled something to the scoutmaster about them probably making a big mess, but then, as she ran on and replayed the scene-- the fact that the scoutmaster remarked on the beautiful weather to the guy that was ahead of her on the trail walking his dog, and waited for her to appear to make his "dishwasher" joke-- and she grew more and more incensed, and like Ransom Stoddard, she realized she had a choice: she could turn around and give the scoutmaster a piece of her mind . . . ask him if he had earned his badge in misogyny or if he still lived in his mother's basement, or she could take the high road and put the stupid remark (literally) behind her . . . but she did neither, instead she ran for an extra forty minutes, planning exactly what to say to this sexist scoutmaster who was supposed to be a role model for young men, but when she looped around again, the scouts were gone-- she had missed her opportunity-- the French call this l'esprit de l'escalier-- the wit of the staircase-- but a staircase is shorter than a running trail, so I'm sure some fantastic things ran through Stacey's mind as she ran-- it's too bad we don't have a transcript.
The Butterfly Effect Is Silly
James Gleick's new book Time Travel: A History is strange and uncategorizable: it begins as a history of the idea of time travel-- H.G. Wells was the first to marry those words together-- and then the chapters twist and turn through philosophy, physics, literature, memory psychology, technology and the meaning of the digital world . . . the book invites you to think about time as much as it details all the thoughts that have come before, I found myself deciding that the "butterfly effect" is rather silly-- ecosystems are more robust than that and one butterfly isn't going to throw all that much off . . . and our minds are probably similar, one change here or there in the fabric of our timelines wouldn't do all that much to our personality and fate (if it were a butterfly sized change) but we'll never know of course, because the most important thing about time to conscious individuals is that we live through it, our perceptions prisoners to the moments, and no matter what the physicists tell us about the reversibility of cause and effect, time is a one-way street for our bodies and a layered labyrinth for our brains . . . anyway, the book is full of quotable quotes, long summaries of time travel books and movies, philosophical implications of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of food for thought . . . it makes me want to go back and reread some of Gleick's other great books, Chaos and Faster and The Information, and rereading is a method of time travel as well, one espoused by Nabokov, you return to a text knowing the framework and then start to observe it as a whole, outside of the timescape of flipping pages and forward progress, and know it differently . . . and if you like thinking about such things, then you'll love Time Travel: A History.
Humans: Impressively Stupid
Considering how important our keys are, it's impressive how reliant most of us are on very crappy keychains (mine are held together with a cheap faux mini-carabiner with no locking mechanism).
Vermont + Chick Peas = Delightful Geographical Culinary Anomaly
It's no surprise that Vermont has great local cheese and beer and wine and apples, but the victual you really want to procure is Yalla brand hummus and Yalla brand pita . . . this stuff rivals what we ate in Syria (minus the civil war and the intestinal parasites).
Ouch
While Cat and I were hiking this morning, a wasp stung me on the calf-- and after a reasonable amount of swatting and yelping, I think I handled the pain fairly stoically.
Taking a Break From the Seltzer
My wife and I are in Brattleboro for the long weekend-- sans children-- and we just did an impromptu micro-brew pub crawl . . . here are my notes:
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
This Sentence is Not About Salsa
I can't pinpoint exactly when this happened, it just crept up on us-- but I think my family is indicative of a larger American trend in that we drink a shitload of seltzer.
A Matter About A Mattress (Dave Turns the Corner)
My neighbors have five kids so they're are always cleaning out their house and their garage, getting rid of clutter, and tossing items their kids have aged out of, and all the cleaning and organizing and property maintenance seems to be done by the lady-of-the-house-- she certainly doesn't get much help from her husband and kids-- so while I feel bad that she has so many responsibilities, I also like to complain to my wife about whatever junk is cluttering up the sidewalk, as it's unsightly, it blocks my way to the park, and it detracts from my wife's beautifully maintained front garden; I used to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, the kind of guy who didn't care if people neglected to bring in their garbage cans promptly from the curb after garbage collection (I once got into a passionate debate with my friends Dan and Dom on this issue-- they were homeowners at the time and disdainfully-- and accurately-- called me a "renter") but I think I turned some kind of crazy corner this morning-- the neighbors threw a twin mattress on the sidewalk in front of their driveway on Sunday (right where I start my morning walk with the dog) and bulk trash day isn't until September 27, so after gamely walking over the mattress several times yesterday, I decided that instead of complaining for a week and a half and driving my wife bananas, I would take matters into my own hands, and so before I went to work this morning (I wanted to get it done before the storm soaked the mattress) I threw the mattress on the roof of my van, drove down to the park, and tossed it in the dumpster . . . and while it's sad to wave good-bye to good-natured, easy-going Dave, I'm going to try to embrace New Crotchety Dave, the Dave who has Initiative and Interest in Property Values, the Dave who has realized sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself, instead of complaining about it, because I think this is the Dave of the future, the Dave that will eventually succumb to that wacky lunatic, Senile Crank Dave.
This is Why I Rarely Run Errands
Saturday morning, I got up and went out into the world, alone, to do some things: I drove out to Pennington to buy a craigslist bike for my son Ian; took a detour to visit the Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Preserve-- a beautiful reserve with a large environmental center and plenty of hiking trails through meadows, forests, and floodplains-- promptly got lost in the woods, ended up at a farmer's market on a road I did not recognize-- where I got conflicting directions on how to get back to the Watershed parking lot, and then used Google Maps on my phone to figure out the best way to go-- it's incredibly accurate, if I took ten steps or so in the wrong direction, I could tell-- then I stopped at Joe Canal's in Lawrenceville, but my little keychain bottle didn't work-- each store is independently owned and so I needed to sign up for another little red keychain bottle so I could get the discount, and then when I stopped at 7-11 on Route 1 for a snack, the friendly young dude behind the counter offered me a plastic bag for my potato chips and cheese-stick, and I refused-- I always try to refuse plastic bags, because they are an environmental scourge and most of the time you can just carry your shit or put it in your pockets, but the dude behind the counter was doing the hard sell-- he held up the bag and said, "It's free!" and if he wasn't such a friendly, good-natured young dude, I would have given him a lecture on the environmental cost of handing out non-recyclable plastic bags with every minor purchase, but that would have been obnoxious, so I just said, "Save it for the next guy" and he said, "Okay . . . then do you want a Squishy? It smells like food when you squeeze it" and he pointed to a display of little nerf food items in plastic, which were listed at $2.99 each and I wasn't sure if he was up-selling me one of these, or offering to give me one or what, so I just said, "No thanks but that's really funny" and I'm not sure what I was referencing: the fact that Squishy food items that smell actually exist and are sold in stores: or that he thought because I refused a plastic bag, I might want one of these; or that whenever I run errands, people say weird stuff to me (the last time I was at Kohls, the little old Asian cashier ordered me go back into the store to get more underwear to take advantage of a sale, complained about the high taxes, and said too many Indian people were moving into town).
Dave is on a Collision Course . . . with Himself
There's nothing better than the Tina Fey flick Mean Girls . . . I reference it at least once a day-- I especially like to say "You can't just ask someone why they're white"-- and there's nothing worse than musical theater, I disparage the genre no less than thrice month, and these two passionately polar opinions have got me in a real bind, because a musical version of Mean Girls is opening on Broadway and I'm not sure if I want to see it or not . . . it's a Hegelian conundrum: I'm afraid if I don't see it, I'll regret it for the rest of my life, but I'm afraid if I do shell out the cash and willingly take my wife to see some musical theater, I'll spontaneously combust.
The End of the Road
My Week Was More Epic Than Yours (Unless You Were Involved in a Flood or Hurricane)
It is the first real Friday of the school year (last week the students only attended school for three days) and while I know many of you work long hours, have tedious commutes, and are responsible for many tasks and duties on a day-to-day basis (and I also recognize that many of you are without power, living through natural disasters) but still, you've got to understand just how epic a week this was for me-- and you've got to realize I had the whole summer off, so I got used to a certain lifestyle and rhythm of existence, and second, you've got to understand that I'm a rare and delicate flower, with many hobbies and interests and peccadilloes, and working gets in the way of this groove I've cultivated, and third, it was hot and humid and there's air-conditioning neither in my classroom nor on the soccer fields . . . anyway, here are my stats, in case Governor Christie wants to peruse them:
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
The Hotness/Fashion Calculus Inversion
I can dress more casually for work than my colleagues because I'm so good looking.
Millennials are Weird (but Fun . . . and Imagistically Fungible)
Punt-cam
The travel soccer pre-season has been fairly exhausting because we've gone digital with all our registration, player passes, game cards and scheduling . . . it's been a lot of information to input into the cloud, but everyone realizes that digitization should make things easier seasons to come . . . despite this bold leap into the future, this rather ominous email from the coordinator of the tournament we participated in this weekend felt very apropos:
"The PSC (Piscataway Soccer Club) has hired a photographer with a Drone to take footage of the games Saturday morning between 8 am and 10 am;
Please share with your parents so no one is concerned."
Good Motivational Techniques = Therapy
We bought two 36" by 12" laminated mural sized team photos this weekend at the tournament-- one for Alex (The Eagles) and one for Ian (The Vultures)-- but while I was chatting with my friend in the bleachers, we decided that a more fitting purchase would be to buy a shot of the winning team in each respective age group (The Cranford Timbers came out on top in our flight, we came in third, with 2 wins and 2 losses . . . respectable, but perhaps not laminated mural-worthy) and make each child put up that laminated mural sized team photo in their respective bedrooms and make them stare at that team all year, to inspire them to win the tournament and then receive a laminated mural sized team photo to commemorate the victory . . . but motivational techniques like that, though they might be effective, probably aren't worth the hassle of pediatric psychological counseling co-pays and the bad press in the tell-all Agassi-like autobiography.
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