A Cold Day in Jersey is a Temperate Day in Minnesota

It's freezing cold here, and we got slammed with snow all day, but after three shoveling sessions, we have removed most of it-- the only problem is that now (because New Jersey sucks) it's sleeting or something and it's supposed to continue for hours, and it's 14 degrees-- so we're not going back to school for a couple days . . . but it's all relative: I'm drinking hot coffee, there's chili in the crockpot, we haven't lost power yet (fingers crossed) and there's football on TV, so it could be worse . . . I could be in Minneapolis, protesting in the freezing cold, because our government has become a dystopian shitshow.

 

Crokinole , Primetime

My wife and I were watching the wonderful Australian show Colin from Accounts, and Gordon and Gene were having some incomprehensible, awkward conversation that we couldn't quite parse because of the Aussie accent, but then we realized that they were saying "crokinole," the fantastic Canadian game that I bought our household for Christmas-- apparently, the game is growing more popular by the minute!

 

Little Girl With a Big Voice

 Last night's "battle of the bands' was very entertaining, but I did not realize that part of the responsibility of judging the contest was that I had to offer feedback to the bands after each song, American Idol style-- luckily, though there were three judges, I was the first to speak each time so I could grab the low hanging fruit and comment on it . . . and while all the bands were talented and fun, it wasn't really a contest, because the sophomore who was on The Voice had assembled an incredible band and she can REALLY sing, she just belted out her songs-- including Toto's "Hold the Line"-- very impressive, so much sound coming out of a little kid!

The Opera Isn't Over Until Dave Says a Bunch of Annoying Shit

I am judging a "battle of the bands" tonight at my high school, and apparently, there is a rubric to help us judge each band, but as the official English 12: Music and the Arts teacher, I feel it might be necessary to point out to whoever is running this event that musical taste is extremely subjective and depends upon how you perceive and value certain musical elements-- such as rhythm, melody, lyrics, authenticity, and timbre-- I'm all about timbre . . . but someone else might not value timbre the way I value timbre-- and then there's is how much novelty you can tolerate-- Ornette Coleman's free jazz isn't for everyone-- so in a sense it's almost impossible to judge music from a variety of genres-- you've got a better chance of making a qualified aesthetic assessment if you are only focusing on one particular genre: prog rock or hip-hop or boom-bap or UK trap . . . but I'm probably just going to keep my mouth shut and just check off the boxes.

Looming Precipative Dread

How can I concentrate on writing a sentence when an impending cataclysmic snowpocalypse is headed our way?-- especially when my wife's district budgeted ZERO snow days into the Edison school calendar (someone needs to tell her school board that the mandatory SEC warning applies for winter weather as well as stocks: past performance is not indicative of future results) and so she will most certainly lose days off her Spring Break-- and my district budgeted one measly snow day . . . I'll go out on a limb here (out on an icicle) and predict we will have three days off due to this storm . . . and it's not even February.

Headlines Fit for the Onion (If Only They Were Fictitious)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry lately when I read the Times . . . absurdity is hard to reckon with-- but I'm going to record a few actual updates and headlines for posterity:

Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim's Widow

U.S. Stocks and Bonds Fall as Trump Ramps Up His Threats Over Greenland

Trump Wanted a Nobel, Now It's Greenland

and, of course, the only fitting place for our dickweed of a POTUS in Greenland . . . unemployed.

Winter Verse

It is cold (and growing colder) and I have a cold (which is growing bolder).

Teenagers, They're (Coco) Nuts

Last Tuesday night, just before bed-- after a long day of fitness: I played basketball in the morning and then went to PT for my hamstring in the afternoon-- I suffered something new, a hamstring cramp-- I've had calf cramps in the night, but never a hamstring cramp-- it was a painful and frightening two minutes-- and when I told my senior English this news, two bros, Frankie and Nico-- a wrestler and a weight-lifter-- insisted that I needed to drink Vita Coco coconut water because it contains lots of potassium and keeps you from cramping-- and I always like to take the advice of teenagers, more for the humor than the sagacity, so I bought a bottle and drank some today before playing pickleball and I am going to give those two students a firm talking-to because Vita Coco is disgusting in both consistency and flavor (and I love coconut) so I guess I'll have to stick to eating bananas (and this incident, as zman cleverly pointed out, is nearly a mirror image of a previous, rather awkward moment of Dave).

Picaresque Pairing

We finished a picaresque TV show last night-- The Lowdown-- which is about Lee Raybon, a rogue journalist (played in masterful Lebowski-esque fashion by Ethan Hawke) who tries to uncover the sordid truth about Tulsa . . . and I just finished a picaresque novel today-- Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica, which is also about a journalist, but a washed-up, ruined compulsive liar of a journalist, who travels through conspiratorial America, trying to make sense of nothing, O'Brien narrating the tale in the manner of Charles Portis, hurtling from one location to the next, one character to the next, in broadly derisive but always entertaining absurdist satire.

Hot and Cold

Saturday night, my son left the oven baking at 450 degrees all night-- he heated up some late-night pizza and then forgot to turn it off, so I awoke to a very warm kitchen (but luckily, the house did not burn down) and then two days ago, my wife came downstairs for breakfast, and it was freezing cold-- because my son left the sliding door open all night . . . perhaps his next mistake will make things just right.

Magical Micrographia

I have taught for a long time, and this is a record: the smallest legible handwriting I have ever seen (the student was creating Art History flashcards on 3 x 5 notecards).

We Exist in an Afterthought

Today, after we watched a TED Talk about how bad architecture has ruined American cities, suburbs, and public spaces, I took my students on a "field trip" the the English Office, the cramped, claustrophobic, cluttered, and windowless space designated for the twenty English and Special Ed teachers that live upstairs in our high school to eat, socialize, plan, and rest between teaching class-- it's truly a soulless and ugly space and the fact that some paid adult with an architectural degree actually designed this space as an office for teachers is mind-boggling and very sad.

Out of My Depth

After attending morning basketball for the first time in a few weeks (the steroid shot in my knee seems ot be working) I am covering a Senior Health class today-- a number of students and teachers are out of school because the service for the student that got shot and killed is in Paterson today-- and I'm not sure if I could actyually teach this class with a straight face:  there's a handout on the teacher's desk and the first words on it are "fetus" and "semen" and the kids are doing some project about contraception-- my only advice was that children are very expensive, especially if they drive a car or go to college.

Quite a Monday

Today was a long and emotionally taxing day at school—but there were emotional support dogs.

Ugly Monday Looming . . .

Not looking forward to going to school tomorrow: apparently, an East Brunswick senior was shot and killed yesterday by another teenager in Sayreville-- it's going to be a sad day, not sure how the seniors are going to react to this.

To Prepare, I Took a Long Nap

My friend is having a 60th birthday party tonight, and it starts at 8 PM . . . that's nearly past my bedtime, and I'm only 55!

Some Good TV

Some high-quality TV recommendations:

1) if you're looking for something dark and artsy (and filmed in Italy in beautifully rendered black and white) and you don't want a ton of unnecessarily loud special effects (e.g., Stranger Things), then check out Andrew Scott as Ripley;

2) if you're looking for a different kind of alien apocalypse and some phenomenal acting from Rhea Seehorn, check out Pluribus;

3) if you love The Big Lebowski, then check out Ethan Hawke playing a shambolic character loosely based on the Tulsa citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman in The Lowdown.

GoldiDave

As I get older, I like the cold less and less-- I used to love it, but now it makes my knee ache and my body stiff-- but because it was unseasonably warm today and our school building's heating system is ancient and defective, the English Office was HOT . . . roasting hot, hot enough that we were sweating while eating lunch-- and thusly I remembered that I don't like the heat either . . . I'm only happy when the temperature is just right.

Poem of Dave

When I get old and pass away,

this is all I want them to say:

there was a guy named Dave

and he wrote a sentence every single fucking day.

Dave Mans Up in Front of the Ladies

I'm hoping that this doesn't become more frequent than an annual tradition, but I once again went to the sports medicine doctor-- Dr. Navia-- and (once again) she said that the best way to fix my knee was to stick a giant needle in it, full of some kind of steroid (cortisone? I didn't ask) and once again, she had an intern with her-- and while Dr. Navia is young, her intern appeared much younger-- childlike, a female Doogie Howser-- and, on a positive note, things were better than last winter, when my knee was full of fluid and also needed to be drained-- this time, I was more proactive-- and (once again) because it was two young ladies diagnosing me, I agreed to let them stick a large needle in my knee (I didn't want to look like a coward in front of them, but I think if it were a dude, I would have passed) and then Dr. Navia asked if it would be okay for the intern to administer the giant needle, and while my brain was saying "NO!" my mouth said, "sure," and then they talked some shop about where to stick this big needle-- I'm not sure if the intern ever did this before-- and my hands were sweating, as I gripped the examination table, and I looked at the wall instead of at the big needle-- but they numbed me up pretty good, so all I felt was a bunch of pressure-- not all that much shooting pain-- and then it was over and I limped back to the car and went home and fell asleep early and then woke up in the middle of the night, totally amped and hyper-- that's one of the side effects of getting a steroid injection-- but miraculously, today my knee feels great and I can run again and I'll be playing pickleball this Friday and basketball next week . . . so it looks like a I won't need gel shots for a couple of years, unless I really fuck it up.