Long Saturday

One busy day after another . . . I can't wait for the dog days of summer-- yesterday we drove up and back to Muhlenberg for Ian's pre-registration and counseling-- this place is the exact opposite of Rutgers-- they really spell out exactly how everything is done and insist that your kid will be advised and counseled and will get through this experience-- it's really nice but kind of weird, after watching Alex learn how to navigate the many campuses, buses, gyms, cafeterias and bureaucratic snafus of Rutgers . . . it almost feels like this is our first kid going away to college-- because he's actually going away (a little over an hour) and not living up the road-- Catherine and I are also excited to explore the Allentown region-- you can walk to the city from the campus and there's a big Amish farmer's market along the way-- so long day up there-- lots of various sessions for parents and kids-- and then we went to a block party when we got home . . . this Sunday needs to be a day of rest.

New Shit Saturday

Unusual stuff for a pandemic, but my family was doing all kinds of new shit today:

1) I played my first official league tennis match at the East Brunswick Racquet Club; I joined the winter league and I was a bit nervous about it-- I'm a scrappy player but there are some serious holes in my game (Andre Agassi said, "You're only as good as your second serve" and my feeling about that piece of advice is it's not very nice of him to say that) and my first match was against Scott-- a club regular known as one of the better players in this 4.0 league-- and when I saw his serves, first and second, I knew I was in for it-- they were both excellent; he could hit the T or pull it wide and didn't lose much pace with his second attempt and his groundstrokes were very accurate and angled-- I had never played anyone like this before-- but he wasn't big or fast and though I threw away the first four games-- I learned that the net is a LOT HIGHER indoors than the droopy things at our local park-- but I started chasing down everythign and hitting the ball deep to his backhand and getting to the net and I actually took the lead at one point, eight games to seven . . . and this guy was very complimentary-- he said he had never played anyone who could get to all his crazy angled shots (one sequence, I dove to my right, punched a net shot, hit the ground, rolled, got up, and won the point) and though he ended up winning the match nine games to eight (you play for 90 minutes, no sets just games) I'm happy that I gave him a run for his money . . . I think with some practice I could beat him but hopefully, next week's match will be a little less grueling (and I didn't drink all week, in training for this, but I'm going to enjoy a few well-earned beers today . . . you know, for working hard at the racquet club)

2) my older son Alex has been up in his room all day at a virtual Model UN convention . . . he's representing Israel and trying to deal with domestic terrorism . . . yikes . . . I think he does five hours of it on both Saturday and Sunday;

3) my younger son Ian is in the kitchen making homemade rice noodles (as a birthday gift, we are cooking for my wife for two weeks) and in order to do this the boys and I had to take a trip to H-Mart, the quality Asian market up the road, to get rice flour and tapioca starch and some other Asian stuff . . . the store was totally packed-- kind of crazy for a pandemic-- and we had to ask for a lot of help (a Hispanic lady took us to an old Asian lady, who was about to take us to the tapioca starch when a dude cut us and asked where the kimchi was-- and he was standing in the kimchi section!-- there was kimchi literally surrounding him . . . 270 degrees of kimchi . . . anyway, we got in and out with what we needed and the noodles are working out, it's quite a process;

4) my wife and her friend headed down to Kingston and she brought back goodies from the Amish market: cheeses, pretzel and pepperoni rolls, chicken breast, turkey bacon-- the best thing there-- and (of course) whoopie pies.

This Gets the Dave Stamp of Approval

While I normally eschew passing along YouTube videos . . . because I'm far too significant, dynamic and brilliant a thinker to simply be a parasitic purveyor of internet memes-- Sentence of Dave is so much more than that . . . but I think the theme of this particular parody is "meta" enough for me to suspend my elitism about base forms of internet use and pass along, so shed your hipness and enjoy some music that is "pure and honest, bordering on weird and Amish."

I Am So Much Smarter Than My Students

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is a science-fiction short story by written in 1973 by Ursula Le Guin, and if you've never read it, you certainly should -- it's one of the most memorable sci-fi stories ever written -- but it is not a lot of fun; it is a philosophical allegory about a perfect city, Omelas, and the heavy cost of having such a society . . . because Omelas can only continue its existence if a single child is keep in squalor, ignored and isolated in a dark cell . . . and everyone in the city knows of the existence of this child, and knows that Omelas can only exist if the child is kept in this desolate state; most citizens of Omelas can live with the mathematics of this hedonistic calculus, but there are those that can't . . . those that "walk away from Omelas" because they cannot bear to live with this utilitarian bargain; so I made my students write about this and come up with examples of people who "walk away from Omelas," and though they came up with some decent examples (the Amish, Thoreau, people who join the Peace Corp) they couldn't compete with my examples -- I think I would do very well if I took my own English course! -- and so here they are: 1) becoming a vegetarian . . . most of us know that some animal was kept in a tiny cell, just like the child in the story, so that meat can appear on our plates, and we are willing to live with the system because meat is cheap and plentiful, but there are those that opt out for ethical reasons and stop participating in meat consumption 2) the genteel Southern plantation . . . women in fancy dresses, men smoking pipes and discussing issues of the Enlightenment, while the slaves worked the fields out back . . . some freed their slaves, but even great men like Thomas Jefferson couldn't walk away from that peculiar Omelas 3) the hippie I was talking to in Vermont at Thanksgiving, who lives off the grid in a solar powered house with a propane powered refrigerator, he spent six months at luthier school building his own guitar . . . and when I asked him if he liked to snowboard, he made me feel really bad about my lifestyle, because he said, "No, me and my girlfriend like to sled," and then he went on to describe all the sledding they do by their house, which is on a Class IV road, and I felt very bad about myself, since I require large corporations to tear apart a mountain, build giant trails, funiculars, bars, restaurants, snow-making equipment, and all sorts of other infrastructure before I can go and have some fun in the snow.

Amish Market Etiquette

I was sternly reprimanded by a customer at the Amish Market last Saturday, and I probably deserved it . . . but you would have done the same thing, I swear; my wife and I were trying to browse Beiler Dairy Farm's selection of delicious fresh cheeses, but the boys were running amok and I was a little hung-over and not thinking totally straight, and there were all these little sample containers full of cubes of different kinds of cheese-- farm cheese, smoked Gouda, goat's milk cheese, and horseradish cheddar . . . and when I read the words "horseradish cheddar," naturally, without thinking, I reached out and grabbed a cube and popped it in my mouth, and then went back to tending to my kids, but an older guy behind me noticed my breach of etiquette and said, "That's what the toothpicks are for!" and grunted and stomped off, and after a bit of looking, Catherine and I found the toothpicks, intended for spearing cheese cubes, but they were NOT prominently displayed and Catherine said that the last time she was there she grabbed a couple cubes for the kids with her fingers, so I'm thinking the proponent of toothpicks over-reacted a bit-- it's not like I double dipped a chip . . . and anyway, if you're eating any kind of publicly displayed sample food, you're playing Russian roulette with your immune system and you should know that and accept it.

Flattery + Humor = Parody

Someone drew the notable events of the year on the message board in the English office, and the parody of my blog went like this: "So I went to the Amish market to buy some meat and we contracted cholera and I decided to write a song about it."