Dave Goes on the IR

I pulled my hamstring this morning playing basketball-- it was kind of tight last week, so I sort of rested it . . . but not really-- and now I'm paying for it-- but I guess this is what you can expect when you play full court basketball at 6:30 in the morning on a humid day.

Should Have Known Better

Last night I met my friends and my son Alex at Tavern on George to watch the Knicks defeat the Pacers-- which was very fun-- but I had committed to 6:30 AM basketball, so I dragged myself out of bed and played hoops this morning, which was not so fun (until I made the last two shots to win the final game-- and that's all you remember anyway) and the lesson is: I will not combine alcohol and early morning athletics again any time soon, as that is a young man's game.

Prophetic Fallacy

I am teaching my sophomores The Great Gatsby and today we acted out scenes from Chapter Five-- the section when Nick arranges for Gatsby to meet with Daisy at Nick's little house for tea, the first time they've seen each other in five years-- and at first Gatsby and Daisy are awkward and embarrassed, while it is raining-- but then: pathetic fallacy alert!-- then the old chemistry comes back and the sun, empathetic to their emotions-- starts to shine (which is a fallacy, the weather does not give a shit about your emotions) so I made sure to have a student play the weather in that scene-- and he's a tall kid so he loomed over the other two actors, it was fantastic-- and then the natural world reflected the book; I stayed up to late last night watching the Knicks' epic comeback against Boston, then dragged myself out of bed for 6:30 AM basketball-- and it was a dark and rainy gloomy day and I was tired and hungry and had a headache from the humidity-- but I went to acupuncture after school, which usually loosens me up and when I got out of acupunture, lo and behind! the sun was shining, and there was a cool breeze, and I was able to sit on the deck in the sun and read my thoroughly joyful and entertaining book (Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon) so perhaps the pathetic fallacy is not a complete fallacy, it's just selective and relative-- the weather is always expressing someone's emotions, it just might not be yours.

D.P. Phone Home

So yesterday I believed that my crappy-Android-phone fell out of my pants pocket and was lying prone on the pavement in the high school parking lot, most likely run over by automobiles multiple times-- and once I realized this, when I got home from school, I decided not to drive back to the school and rescue my phone from this fate because 

1) I hate driving 

2) my phone is an ancient piece of shit

3) pickleball-- 

so I figured I would leave it to whatever fate befell it and then when I got to school today, I would see if someone picked it up and turned it in or if it was still intact on the ground near my parking spot-- but when I used Find My Android this morning, Google no longer reported my phone being in the school parking lot but instead just outside my house . . . weird . . . and so I thought maybe it fell out of my car when I got home-- and this would explain why the podcast played all the way home yesterday-- so I set my phone to ring and then went outside and it turned out my phone was not outside my car, but inside it-- it fell down under the driver seat-- and while I swore I looked in the car yesterday, I guess I didn't look in this spot and I also think I should get a different colored phone case (mine is black) because it blends in with the interior of my car and the main thing about this stupid incident is I won't be getting on iPhone anytime soon so for the foreseeable future my wife will have to deal with all the GIFs in the basketball group chat.

What Comes Around Phones Around

I confiscated a student's phone today, which is always an ordeal, but it's the fourth quarter, and at this point, they should know better-- and then when I got home from work, I couldn't find my phone-- but I knew it was either in the house or in the car because I listened to a podcast on the way home . . . but when I used Find My Android, the computer reported that my phone was still in the East Brunswick High School parking lot . . . which was weird but I guess my car downloaded the podcast and played it even though my phone fell out of my pocket-- and it definitely fell out of my pocket because I had it in this weird little phone pocket in my work pants-- usually I wear cargo pants that have velcro sealed pockets but I have this one pair of Dickie's pants with a weird little open pocket and this morning, I was going to put my wallet in it this little pocket but I was like: "my wallet's going to fall out of this stupid pocket" and so I put my phone in the stupid pocket, because I don't care about my cheap-piece-of-shit-Android-phone and it turns out I made a good decision . . . and I didn't feel like driving back to school and searching for my phone because I had a pickleball commitment so I'll find out tomorrow if my phone is intact and in the parking lot, or crushed in the parking lot, or in the school office-- and if it's crushed or lost, then perhaps I will get an iPhone so I can join the AM basketball group chat and my wife won't have to get so many stupid GIFs from all my basketball buddies.

Later Children, See You in the Fourth Quarter

Ahh . . . Spring Break . . . finally . . . and so I am drinking a beer, listening to Stereolab (very calming) and writing in peace-- my wife is napping on the couch-- and I am unwinding from a chaotic day with the youth: I started the day at morning basketball and we only had nine and then Frank, one of the older guys (but not as old as me!) went down with a calf cramp and so we played four-on-four full court until exhaustion, and then by the time I got out of the shower the first bell had already rung so I hustled (as fast as I could) to first period-- and I must say that THAT Creative Class is lovely and we read aloud the riddle poems that the kids wrote, guessed, and did a food metaphor fill-in and everything was fairly mellow-- but by my second 82-minute period, the kids were starting to feel it, they knew the end was nigh . . . so I read the end of We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my sophomores and then they made horror skits and enacted them-- and they had to have a couple of classic horror tropes in the skits plus some sort of get out/stay-in debate (lesson plan straight from my podcast!) and while they were loud and nuts, they actually got the skits written and performed them-- mainly because class is endless-- and then my last Creative Class was bananas, a lot of weird bickering and overly energetic teenagers-- and I can't express enough how much I hate block scheduling because 82-minutes is WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to have a class right before Spring Break (or basically any time at all) but I survived and someday I will retire and miss this?

Speed is Relative

Perhaps my new sprint-work out is having some sort of salubrious effect on my fitness-- because for a couple weeks now, twice a week I've been running four sets, 30 seconds each, where I run as fast as I can (without hurting myself . . . and I got my son Ian to accompany me on Sunday, which made me push myself a bit harder . . . although he was still much faster than me) because today at morning basketball, which was an up-and-back shitshow, I took off after a defensive rebound and received a long looping fast-break pass, that flew over the top of the last defender, and I caught it on the fly and converted the lay-up . . . the first time I've scored like that in a long time.

Pickleball Initiates the Severance Procedure?

During these troubled times, certain subjects are hard to bring up in social settings because of the controversy and awkwardness these topics engender-- for instance, I play a lot of pickleball with my friends Ann and Craig but we are NOT allowed to bring up pickleball in mixed company because everyone else gets annoyed, so Ann refers to it as "the game that shall not be named" and we do our best to keep our pickleball gossip on the DL . . . it's also hard to discuss current TV shows because of the general fragmentation of media-- no one is watching the same show at the same time and so you don't want to spoil anything, or talk about a show that no one has seen-- I truly miss Fridays at work the day after a new Seinfeld aired on Thursday night . . . there was something for everyone to discuss-- anyway, my wife is away in Savannah and so I hitched a ride to the brewery with Ann and Craig yesterday, so during the car ride, we were able to talk about pickleball and a TV show without being chastised-- we have all been watching Severance (but we had to curtail the conversation once we got to Flounder because we were meeting people) and then, at the end of the ride, Ann articulated her theory that synthesizes pickleball and Severance . . . she said that playing pickleball with all these various groups of people we've met, is like going to work in Severance . . . it's kind of wonderful, you just show up, you have these fleeting relationships with these people, but you really don't care that much about them because they're not part of you're "outie" life-- or that's not exactly true, your pickleball self cares about them quite a bit during the session and you see them quite often, yet you know nothing about their childhoods or outside lives and you don't think about them during your outie life and they don't think about you, you only know if they have a good backhand or fast hands at the net-- there's really no time or space to chat, it's not like golf-- it's a fast-paced game with lots of switching partners-- and then once the session is over, you barely remember what happened-- that's the nature of the game . . . it's not soccer or basketball where you might remember two critical plays, instead you hit the ball a zillion times, and you often felt like a hero and you also often felt like an idiot, so it all evens out and you remember nothing except it was a time-- but there are glitches in the severance, of course, because after Ann revealed her theory during the car ride, we saw a pickleball guy at the brewery!-- and we had a brief but awkward conversation about when and where we would next be playing pickleball and then he wandered away and we did not pursue further interaction, for fear of reprisal from Lumon.

Spring: Time to Shed Some Clothes (and Some Body Fat)

As usual, with the end of winter comes the annual "it's time to shed a few pounds and get in shape" portion of the year-- my wife and I are going to stop eating dessert after dinner while watching TV . . . which was perfectly acceptable behavior this winter because it was dark and cold and bleak-- but now the dark-times are over and it's time to shed the fat-- and my wife listened to some lady on a podcast (who might be an orthopedist? I would ask her, but she's in Savannah on a ladies' weekend) and this lady doctor on the podcast said it's all about various types of movement and that during the course of each week you should:

1) do four 45-minute walks-- you don't need to do crazy amounts of cardio;

2) lift weights twice a week but lift heavier than you might normally lift . . . 3-5 sets of weight you can put up 4-6 times;

3) twice a week, do four repetitions where you run "as fast as you can" for 30 seconds, then let your heart return to normal and do it again-- so four sets of these each session for a total of eight sprints a week;

and I like this routine as I can work this stuff in around pickleball, basketball, and soccer, but I did the fast running on Wednesday, at the park, and while it was fun and not all that hard while I was doing it, it was a longer sprint than I've run in a while-- full court basketball requires sprints but they are three or four second sprints-- same with indoor soccer-- and on Thursday and Friday my right quad was occasionally cramping up, maybe every eleventh step-- which made for some humorour walking around-- but my leg recovered and I felt great at pickleball this morning . . . I did the heavy lifting Thursday and my shoulder is a bit sore, but again, I survived at pickleball today, although my shoulder started to hurt when I was hitting into the wind, there was a stiff breeze today, and you had to whale the ball . . . so we will see how this new routine goes-- my guess is I will either get injured soon and be a total disaster or I won't get injured and get super-jacked and super-fit and everyone will be so impressed by my physique that they will put a statue of me next to Rocky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Dave Clocks This Metaphorical Tea

Today was metaphor day in Creative Writing-- I reviewed the types of metaphors (simile, personification, etcetera) and I gave them a way to remember the difference between synecdoche and metonymy that I thought of this morning in the car-- and it is car related-- with synecdoche, you use part to represent the whole-- so "check out my wheels"-- while with metonymy you use an association to represent the idea, so "check out my ride" and then I gave them a couple of metaphorical quotations to unravel:

Language is fossil poetry (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Prose is the museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept (T.E. Hulme)

and some of them got the  collective point-- that a dinosaur is older than a fossil and the weapon is older than the museum and so living breathing interesting poetic language becomes dead fossilized prose and we barely notice it--then we had a fossil poetry fill-in-the-blank challenge-- I have a quiz with fifty body part metaphors-- eye of a needle, head of lettuce, safe by a hair, save face, sticks in your craw, etcetera-- they are easy for old people but quite difficult for highschool students . . . and then I went over how there are dead metaphors all around us-- when you call someone bright or brilliant or a clear thinker or lucid, you are comparing them to the sun or a lightbulb-- and when you call someone sharp or keen or they have an acute wit or make a good point, you are comparing them to a blade-- and thus the word "clever" derives from the word "cleaver"-- and we went over runny noses and running faucets, which run like a river-- but running motors run like a horse . . . which is why car engines are measure in horsepower . . . and then things got interesting because my first period class is smart and they started thinking of recent examples: many of them paradoxical . . . if you're "the shit" it's great but if you're "a piece of shit" it's bad . . . you can spill the tea or you can clock that tea . . . someone said, "I'm not a monster" because being a monster is bad -- unless you're a "beast" on the basketball court; the party can be "lit" or "fire" and those are probably related to smoking weed and those are good, or you can be on fire, which is good, but it's not good to be fired or burnt or cooked-- those are bad-- although if you're "cooking" then that's good; being hot is good and being cool is good, but being "mid" or cold is not so good; if you "ate" or you "served," you did well-- but if you got "served" you need to appear in court-- and "ate" is so popular that if you did well, they might say "4 plus 4" or "one more than seven" and if you're chopped, that's bad-- you're ugly-- and the chuzz are chopped whores, and if you did it well and finished strong, they don't say "mic drop" anymore, the kids say "period" or "point blank period" and there's a new one for old people that I really like, when you are playing pickleball, if someone speeds up the ball at you and you bend your body out of the way and dodge the ball and it goes out of bounds, you "matrixed it" and then we speculated about how the kids of the future would be doing a fill-in quiz about "clocking the tea" and "that party was lit" in the same way that they did a quiz on old phrases like "skeleton in the closet" and those kids would be using some new incomprehensible metaphorical slang and the cycle would continue.

Bar Stool Sporting Spectating Spectacular

Yesterday afternoon, my son Alex and I took the train into the city to have a beer and some food at a sports bar (he just turned 21!) and then go to the Knicks/Wizards game-- so we watched NCAA basketball on the train and then more college hoops while we ate and drank at Goldie's Tavern, a spacious place with good food and drink close enough to Madison Square Garden-- Goldie's was full of Knicks fans and a couple of beautiful people-- a dude who looked like he was right off The Bachelor and his date, who was a young Jennifer Connelly look-alike-- and then we walked over to the game, but we had some trouble finding our seats, which were in section 219 . . . but we were in row BS6 . . . which did not seem to exist . . . and then we learned we had Bar Stool seats, right on level with the concession stands-- with a temporary wall behind you and a nice little bar for your beer in front of you . . . and these tickets were pretty cheap, considering, probably because the Wizards are lousy (although Jordan Poole was fun to watch) and March Madness was happening-- but anyway, these seats totally spoiled me and I don't know if I could ever sit anywhere else-- there's no one in front of you or behind you, you have space on your side and can swivel, you can stand any time you like, you don't have to put your beer on the floor, and -- if there's a close college game you want to keep tabs on, you can rest your phone on the little wall above your personal "bar" . . . I guess the secret is out about these seats, to some extent, but if you can ever nab them, they make for a comfortable, non-claustrophobic game experience-- you don't have to rub elbows with the masses or ever stand up to let someone through and you have easy access to both the concession stands and the bathroom . . . pretty sweet.

Conference Madness

Tonight is the dreaded parent/teacher evening conferences, from 5 PM to 8 PM-- but, luckily my schedule is light (or perhaps not luckily because I implore my students to simply talk to their parents about how it's going in my class and remind them that all their grades are on the computer and that I know how to use email fairly well, so if their parents actually have a pressing question, it's much easier to email me than to drive to the school and talk to me, especially since I will be watching NCAA basketball games on YouTube TV while I speak to them so I won't be giving them my full attention).

Madness

I filled out my NCAA brackets today and Venmoed various people money, but I did not use the proper emojis-- which my friend Terry showed me-- he uses the combination of the basketball followed by the trashcan . . . because that's generally where your basketball brackets end up after a round or two.

My Allusions Grow (Even More) Dated

 

Today at morning basketball we were lamenting the absence of Jeff, due to a groin pull, and I broke into a bit of Sam Malone's "groin injury" rap and no one knew what the fuck I was referring to.

End of an Era

My dad passed away last night, down here in Naples, Florida-- a place he loved-- and he will be missed, by his friends, family, wife, and colleagues . . . he truly led an illustrious life-- a distinguished career in corrections and as a criminology professor . . . his progressive ideas, consultant work, jail design, prison educational implementation with football great and activist Jim Brown, and his work as an expert witness in prison logistics and best practices-- I often helped him with the writing of the expert culpability report and wow, you want to stay out of prison if you can help it, some wacky shit goes on in there-- but my dad did his best to allay those awful prison stereotypes and make prison a safe place for rehabilitation, not mayhem . . . my dad was also a great athlete-- a star-swimmer, a lifeguard, and a baseball, basketball, and football player and he taught me and my brothers to catch, throw, bat, shoot, and hit a golf ball . . . he loved family vacations at the beach, Cape Cod and Sea Isle City in particular and he was a patient and supportive father and the same as a grandfather, and always such a fan of my boys Alex and Ian, always at their tennis and soccer matches, and supporting them in all their endeavors-- he always expressed how proud he was of his family, he had a wonderful relationship with all my cousins, and he had a plethora of friends in both Naples and Monroe-- he made the best of the rare form of parkinsonism that plagued the last five years of his life, and even while suffering through all that bullshit, he was larger-than-life and his attitude and sense-of-humor were exceptional . . . we were lucky he passed the way he did, without becoming a tragic figure and truly burdening my mom beyond her cababilities, and instead he will remembered fondly as the legendary "Guy" from New Brunswick, who went a long way . . . I will truly miss you Dad and I couldn't have asked for a better father, and as my son Ian texted me: "he was the best Poppy I could have asked for."

Dave's Shot is Breezin'

 

Two good things;

1) today at the gym, while I was shooting around, I made thirteen three-pointers in a row-- and all of them were solidly beyond the arc and I didn't have anyone feeding me the ball-- I was retrieving my own rebounds, tossing the ball out ahead of me, collecting, shooting, rinse, repeat-- and while this is a worthy accomplishment in any shoot-around, it's especially notable for those of you who know my blundering, unskilled basketball origin story (go Nicks!)

2) if you have the winter blues, George Benson's 1976 instrumental song Breezin' is the cure-- I certainly heard this song when I was a kid, and so when I relistened to it yesterday, I remembered the melody-- but I did not remember the miraculous groove (nor did I have the aesthetic sensibility to appreciate a miraculous groove when I was six-years-old). 

Friday Potpourri

Today felt marginally better than yesterday-- the sun was out and it warmed up to 40 degrees-- but we were still fairly chilly when we had an unexpected and rather lengthy fire evacuation because something started burning in a cooking class-- I was about to call it a fire "drill" but it wasn't a drill, it was an actual fire-- albeit a very small one-- which interrupted an important discussion in Creative Writing where I was informing my students that The Beatles were not fro the midwest, they were from England . . . seriously . . and I today also introduced my sophomores to the idea of a "very special episode"-- a concept from the 1980s and 90s where a normally humorous TV program tackles a delicate or controversial event with the appropriate gravity . . . the one I'll never forget is the WKRP in Cincinnati episode about the Who concert where 11 people got crushed to death . . . a total bummer . . . we had a very special episode of class today about the LA fires-- and it is to be continued next class!-- perfect . . . I'm going to try to make the lesson into a very special podcast because it would take too long to describe here and I've got no time to sit and write because I'm about to finish my week-long triathlon of old man sports on a bad knee-- I played indoor soccer on Sunday, morning basketball on Tuesday, and now I'm about to go play some indoor pickleball-- if my knee holds up, I'll be very pleased.

Cold and Gray Thursday

I took a mental health day yesterday and it turned out to be quite productive-- I cleaned two bathrooms, went to the gym with Ian-- he was actually able to play a little basketball on his reconstructed ankle-- and then Ian and I fixed a broken light pull switch in a ceiling fan, a two-man job if there ever was one (he flipped fuses in the basement until the fan stopped and then it took four hands to take the fan case apart; hold it the bottom part; strip the wires; remove the old pull string switch; replace and reconnect the new pull string switch; and then reassemble it) and we rewarded ourselves with a sushi lunch and then I took a nap-- later my wife and I watched episode two of Get Millie Black-- highly recommended-- but then reality loomed its ugly head . . . when you take off a Wednesday, you have to go to work the next day-- and it's not even Friday!-- and this morning was frigid and dark and bleak and I am really struggling to see the dim light of Spring Break, which is many months away-- so I started my class today with the movie clip to symbolize how I was feeling: Bill Murray giving a "Groundhog Day" weather outlook, "You want a prediction about the weather . . . I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life."

Our Team Only Had Nine Available Hands

Yesterday morning I made my triumphant return to 6:30 AM basketball, and while I was certainly limited in my movement because of my gimpy knee and unable to "help" on defense (which is my euphemism for fouling the fuck out of anyone who enters the paint in my vicinity) I was in fine shooting form (at least at the start of the session, my shot got progressively worse as my knee grew stiffer) and I drilled three long three-pointers in a row to lead our team to victory in the first game . . . and what a team it was-- I was limping around, Jeff has a strained calf-- and Frank, the old and venerated retired AD who is in his 70s and probably shouldn't be participating in the first place was coaxed into playing one game-- and I didn't notice until we began that Frank was wearing one glove, one green fluffy winter glove . . . and this is because he recently had surgery on his hand and needed to protect it-- needless to say, he did not shoot, dribble, or touch the ball-- but then he gracefully bowed out, undefeated, and we picked up Kyle, a fast, strong twenty-five-year-old athlete-- so all was good-- and then I learned that another player on the court was in his twenties and I was like: this is not fair, I think anyone in their twenties should have to be handicapped, like a jockey that's underweight, and wear a weighted vest. 

I Hate Fucking Cars

The boys and I were having a lovely Orthodox Christmas-- we went to the Y and played some basketball and then hit La Catrina for lunch, but on the drive home, when we got to the intersection of Hamilton Street and George Street-- where Hamilton turns into Johnson Drive-- the Zimmerli Museum was on our left-- we got a sober reminder of the ephemerality of life . . . the light was green and I was just about to enter the intersection when a medium-sized red car came FLYING down George Street (and this is a street with college dorms on it) and this red car smashed into the back of a white car that had just proceeded into the intersection-- the very car in front of us, and this spun the white car into the concrete wall in front of the Johnson and Johnson property (thank god no one was standing at this intersection waiting to cross, a spot that my son Alex walks through every day on his way to work) and the airbags went off inside the white car and I got out and (carefully) crossed the intersection to see if the people were all right and Alex and Ian called 911 but luckily there happened to be a couple cops nearby who immediately took control of the scene-- maybe they were already in pursuit of this vehicle? which would explain the high speed on this road?-- and because the white car got clipped in the rear of the car, not the driver side door, the two women in the car looked like they were in decent shape-- the passenger was fine and the driver looked stunned but she responded to my voice and the side airbag probably kept her from hitting her head-- meanwhile the red car that ran the light doing 40 or 50 mph on this 25 mph street was up ahead on the side of the road-- it hit another car and came to a halt and the the police checking that out-- and the weird thing is this wasn't a yellow light turning red situation, the red car had a solid red light-- so Alex surmised that perhaps the red car driver panicked and hit the gas instead of the brake-- something that occurs all too frequently and is often blamed on "sudden uncontrollable acceleration" but is actually caused by someone stomping on the wrong pedal . . . whatever the reason, this crash scared the shit out of the three of us and we all agreed to take it slow through every intersection, whether driving a car,  on foot, or riding a bike-- because of the existence of idiots and the half-assed manner in which our automotive based world is designed-- although honestly, this happened so fast and chaotically that it would have been difficult to avoid even if you were paying close attention nd driving defensively and all that and we were very lucky that we weren't in the intersection when this happened-- we were moments away-- and the last time I saw anything like this was over a decade ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.