Dave is Still Standing (unlike his wife)

What a week . . . I had to make numerous parent phone calls to discuss AI issues in student work-- and this got in the way of my planning for my four preps and grading the vast amount of writing that needed to be graded, so I pretty much lost my mind and freaked out quite a bit . . . one of the downsides to knowing your work colleagues so well is that you're not afraid to melt down in front of them . . . I probably need to start working at a place where I am only professionally acquainted with my co-workers because I'm way too familiar with the folks at my current job . . . which I guess often happens to veteran teachers-- I also accompanied Ian to meet the orthopedic surgeon to discuss options and schedule his ankle/foot surgery to fix his tendon and the fact that his foot bone is 40% out of the socket-- and we met with the same surgeon who was soon to operate on my wife's foot so then I had to endure the stress and anxiety of knowing that my wife was going under the knife for Morton's neuroma . . . and now she's laid up for a couple weeks until her foot heals so it's up to Ian and me to do the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and general household chores-- but who is going to shave my back hair, which is getting out of control? and then-- hopefully-- my wife's foot will heal and we'll repeat the same ordeal at the end of March with Ian . . . what a week and what a year, already-- and I have made a wise concession to ensure that I can offer aid when necessary: I'm not playing any impact sports than could possibly reinjure my calf (which is feeling great!) until my wife is on her feet again, because if I go down from playing indoor soccer or basketball or pickleball, then we'll really be fucked . . . or maybe not . . . maybe we'll just wallow in our own filth and order lots of take-out, which could be fun.

 

Very Realistic Nightmare (Warning: Adult Content)

This morning, my alarm woke me when I was in the middle of a very adult, very realistic nightmare: I walked down the steps into my basement, and it was kind of dark, and I noticed that there was a half-inch of water on the floor-- and I was very annoyed and I figured the hot water heater had malfunctioned again . . . ugh! . . . and then I woke up and did that thing where you say to yourself: it was just a dream, it was just a dream, that didn't really happen . . . it was just a dream.

Welcome to the (AI) Jungle

Today a high school student in my friend's English class revealed the secret method he uses so that he doesn't get caught using AI to write his assignments: "I tell it to write like a seventh grader so it's not too smart."

Dave Beholds the End of Civilization (and Is Subsumed Into the Matrix)

I apologize for the hyperbolic title, but I'm truly at a loss for words . . . there are no words . . . but fuck it, I'll give it a shot: so let me begin at the beginning: last week, I ran into a spate of uncited AI writing submissions in ALL of the various high school classes I teach-- the same thing happened around the same time last year . . . kids are on good behavior at the beginning of the year, then they get lazy around winter break, then a few kids get zeroes for cheating, and then-- after seeing the consequences-- they shape up again for a few months-- then they get senioritis and fall apart again-- it's a wonderful cycle-- and while some of these uncited AI writing pieces were in my college-level writing classes, which is a serious academic integrity violation and requires all kinds of bullshit: phone-calls with parents; meetings with the students; emails and meetings with guidance counselors; academic integrity forms . . . it's a terrible and tragic timesuck (and both students and parents cry . . . which is both endearing and kind of funny) but I also got a couple of AI-written assignments in Creative Writing class . . . they were downright awful mock-epic stories-- which are supposed to be funny, but AI is NOT funny-- and with these kids I was more lenient-- Creative Writing is a relaxed elective class-- so I admonished them and told them to do the assignment again for half-credit . . . and one of the students who used AI was absent so I sent her a message explaining that I recognized her piece was AI (and so did Chat GPT Zero) and that she needed to rewrite it and this morning, I noticed a reply to my message in my Canvas Inbox and upon reading two or three sentences of this rather long apology for unethical use of AI to write her mock-epic, I noticed that her apology letter for using AI was definitely written by AI and that's when I felt my corporeal body being digitized and sucked into the metaverse-- and I let out a distorted, electronic scream . . . the very same distorted electronic scream that Neo let out when they were locating his corporeal body and he was being digitized and subsumed-- and then, just to make sure, I asked Chat GPT to write an apology note for using AI on an assignment and Chat GPT went right ahead and executed this task, without noting the hypocrisy and irony, and both the message sent by the student and the Chat GPT letter began with the same weird opening: 

"I hope this email finds you well," 

and then the student-- or actually the AI, posing as the student-- expresses "deep regret" and then, and this is where I just need to show you the money-- and I should point out that I would normally never exhibit student work for entertainment purposes, that's just lowdown and mean . . . but this is NOT student work, it's written by AI and it's amazing-- and while the message was longer than this . . . because AI is incredibly bombastic and verbose if you don't give it very specific limits-- this is the heart of it and it's amazing:

Your guidance and support have been valuable, and I want to assure you that your message has resonated strongly with me I am committed to ensuring that our communication reflects the genuine connection and respect that our collaboration deserves. Please accept my heartfelt apology for any unintended oversight. I value our partnership and the trust you have placed in me. Rest assured that I am diligently working on the assignment and committed to re-submitting it no later than tonight. I am grateful for your patience, and I look forward to delivering a thoughtful and meaningful assignment.

and so when I talked to this girl after class today-- and, to her credit-- she told me that she wanted to talk to me after class and I agreed that we'd have to do that . . . and when we met, I realized that she sincerely wanted to apologize and she didn't want the rest of the class to suffer for her mistake and she sincerely wanted to explain to me that she was under a lot of stress and pressure and had a lot of other school work to do and she was sorry that she took the easy way out and that she didn't take the time to do the assignment herself and all that boilerplate-student-crap and I was like: "That's fine, no worries, just don't do it again . . . BUT . . ." and then I asked her the million dollar question: I asked her if she used AI to write the apology and she said, "Yes, I just wanted to send you something to show how sorry I was" and I said, "You know the definition of irony, right? You know how crazy this is-- to send an apology for using AI written by AI" and she seemed to understand that this was an absurd action-- but now I'm wondering if she does know the definition of irony-- and I know if I need to explain irony that I now have the best example in the universe . . .and the saddest part of the story is that if she actually recognized the meta-humor in her action and acknowledged the silliness of using AI to write an apology for using AI, I would have thought it was hysterical and lauded her as the greatest creative writer in history-- but it turns out that she sincerely sent me an AI written apology note for using AI on an assignment, not realizing the hypocrisy of this methodology and I'm fairly sure this is the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

More Dog Shit

If you live in New Jersey, today is not a good day to own a dog-- the rain is torrential and not letting up anytime soon-- but if you do own a dog and you need to step out for a while and leave your dog at home, then you might want to put on "Jon Glaser's Soothing Meditations for the Solitary Dog" so your dog can have a stress-free meditative rest while you are gone (actually, you'll probably want to listen to this brilliant piece of sonic art with your dog . . . but maybe don't listen with young children, as there's quite a bit of profanity).

Uh . . . Etiquette?

Early this morning, before sunrise, my dog and I turned left down 2nd Ave for our usual constitutional to the park-- but we had to beat a hasty retreat because a pack of women was walking an even larger pack of dogs (some-- but not all-- of the women were walking two dogs) and I didn't want Lola to start barking maniacally at all these dogs in the early morning darkness-- no one wants to be woken up like that-- so I did the right thing, put the walk in reverse, and walked back up Second Avenue: back towards my house-- and I know the women saw me do this-- but then when they got to the intersection of 2nd and Valentine, they followed me instead going up to the next block and turning-- so I walked Lola up our driveway and had her sit behind the Mazda to wait until they passed and then one lady let her two dogs lead her onto my lawn and across my driveway, and I mumbled some passive aggressive stuff to Lola: You're such a good girl . . . I'm not sure why this lady is walking her dogs towards you when I obviously walked away from them to avoid a bunch of early morning barking-- she must be very stupid, unlike you, you're a good girl--and I don't really understand where this lady is going or if she knows what the fuck she's doing, but you're a good girl and if I see these ladies again maybe I'll be collected enough to tell them what's what with dog-walking-etiquette . . . or perhaps they will stumble on this post-- but when you see someone turn their dog away from your dog to avoid conflict, don't follow that person, and especially don't follow them and then walk onto their lawn and driveway with your dog, unless you want a bunch of early morning barking.

The Power Broker: Chapter 18 Rules!

After many pages of politics and politcal strategy-- mainly centered around NY Governor Al Smith vs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1928 Democratic primary-- Robert Caro's The Power Broker offers up something slightly different: "Chapter 18: New York City Before Robert Moses" and if you like Depression-era anecdotes, urban decay, Tammany Hall Corruption, and grand plans for improvement, then you will love this chapter- in fact, it's a set piece, and if you have access to a copy of this intimidating tome and you don't feel like reading the whole book, turn to this chapter and enjoy the disaster: half-completed skyscrapers; breadlines; tired and hungry school children; a corrupt and paralyzed city government; a vice-squad involved in racism, bribery, and graft; laid off teachers and other city employees; absolutely disgusting, dangerous, and despicable "parks"; politicians privately using public land for parties, housing, and financial gain; rotting unpaved narrow bridges and roads; extraordinary traffic; playgrounds unfit for children; Central Park full of dung and stumps and weeds and mud; a lavish city casino at the edge of Central Park where the elite and the mayor could frolic while the rest of the citizens starved; and a man with a plan . . . an ambitious, populist plan to link the citizens of the city to refurbished parks, to better roads, to New England and New Jersey . . . a monumental plan to preserve the last open natural spaces of the city and to make them available to the people . . . or particular people: people rich enough to own a car, the middle class, those people who had enough money to burn some fuel. 

Snowing, It Is?

It's not epic-- it's not even all that impressive-- but it is slippery . . . and for the first time in what seems like (and may very well be) years, it is snowing in Central Jersey and, right now, it's actually accumulating, so there are a few kids on the sled hill, Lola got to frolic in the park, and my afternoon tramp was far more enjoyable than the typical 42 degrees and muddy.

 

Too Easy

I walked out of my house the other night and there were four teenage vandals on my lawn, tampering with my wife's giant inflatable Christmas decoration (a snowman, penguin, striped pole, and holiday gift tableau) and so I yelled, "Hey, get off our lawn! Don't mess with that . . . it's the holidays for Christ's sake" and then, instead of booking away, the delinquents sheepishly apologized: "sorry sir . . . sorry" and then one of them said, without any prompting: "It's Mason . . . you know my brother Tyler," and I was like: yikes, that was the quickest, least compelled confession in the history of crime.

You'd Like to Go Second? No Problem . . .

THREE . . . count them, THREE-- that's right, I generated three great moments in education over the past two days-- for an average of 1.5 great moments per day; so without further fanfare-- because this is already too much fanfare-- here they are:

1) yesterday, a girl in my College Writing class asked me a strange question: she wondered if I knew anything about the PE mid-term . . . and though I told her that I did NOT know anything about the PE mid-term-- why would I know anything about the PE mid-term?-- but I told her I was totally willing to hypothesize about what I thought should be on the PE final, and then I went into an impromptu monologue about something I am fascinated with-- the sundry and miscellaneous rules of in-bounds and out-of-bounds in various sports . . . and while the girl that asked the question tuned out immediately-- before I even finished contrasting tennis and basketball!-- some of the athletic boys in the class got involved, and we went through a number of sports, hashing out when a ball or player was considered in-bounds or out-of-bounds and we agreed that knowledge of these rules would make an excellent PE final and we had a generally excellent time speaking on this topic-- especially because our hypothetical final monumentally annoyed the girl who originally asked the question;

2) in Public Speaking class this morning, we were about to present informational speeches and when I asked for a volunteer to go first, once again-- and this happens all the time-- a girl asked if she could "go second"-- this is a common and logical request in Public Speaking class . . . the kids are great-- they actually signed up for Public Speaking so they like to speak in public . . . but they still don't want the pressure of leading-off, so I'm always getting requests to go second or third-- but someone has to go first . . . and today, in another great moment of teaching, I finally solved that dilemma-- a girl asked if she could "go second" and another student quickly claimed "going third" and someone else actually claimed the fourth spot-- so we were all lined up and ready to roll, but someone needed to go first and then I had an epiphany, a stroke of brilliance and I said: "Ok . . . I will go first" and the kids looked at me like: "Wtf?" and then I drew a line on the board and I said: "Tennis" and, once again, they were like "Wtf?"

3) then I did an informational speech on the topic of "In? Or Out?" and first I went through sports where the ball is "in" if it hits the line-- soccer and volleyball and tennis-- and then I discussed the anomalous nature of basketball, where the ball is "out" if it touches the line-- and we also reviewed how the sides and top of the backboard are in-bounds-- but not the supporting braces up top; we talked about football and the fact that if your foot hits the line, you are out; I outlined the complication of pickleball: the ball is "in" if it hits the line, unless the serve touches the non-volley zone line, then that serve is "out"; I brought up darts and what happens if the dart splits the wire (you get the higher score) and that started a whole debate on if darts and bowling were even sports at all (they are) and then I broke down the weirdness of baseball-- the ball can roll foul but if it rolls back into fair play before the base, then it's a fair ball-- and if it hits the foul pole then it's fair, so yu should call the foul-pole the "fair-pole" and then I actually learned something new from the lacrosse girls in my class-- and this rule seems plumb-fucking-crazy-- in lacross, if the ball goes out-of-bounds after an unsuccessful shot, when the ball crosses the end line, then the team whose player/player's lacrosse stick is closest to the ball is awarded the ball . . . wild stuff-- and now I'm making this extemporaneous informational presentation into a Google slideshow, entitled "Is it IN? Or is it OUT?" so that next semester, when a student asks to "go second" the class will be in for a real surprise (and perhaps no one will ever ask to go second again . . . but maybe I need to prepare a number of these boring and technical speeches, so that any time I don't get a volunteer to go first, the entire class gets tortured . . . there so many great topics I could present on: Transcendentalist Philosophy in American Literature, How to Keep a Salubrious Sleep Schedule, Here Are Some TV Shows Old White Guys Like, Seven Ways to Improve Your Pickleball Game, and -- of course-- How Robert Moses and the Automobile Destroyed Our Once Great Nation).

Remembrances of Ween Past

Wow . . . fifteen minutes into 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: "Santeria -- Sublime, Rob Harvilla really gets off topic and, starting with a quick discussion of King Missile's "Detachable Penis" and then he launches into a passionate paean about the greatness of Ween (particularly the live version of "Dr. Rock") which brings me back to this particular Ween concert in Asbury Park, where it all went down.

One Resolution Down, Too Many to Go . . .

Two days into the New Year, and I've already accomplished one of my resolutions-- I laid this out in the new episode of We Defy Augury: Traveling Through the Dark, but in short, I was determined to inject some "reality" back into my classroom and bring back some of my weird social experiment trickery that fell by the wayside-- so today I executed the "bee in the cup" social experiment-- where, after reading a rite-of-passage narrative about a troubled kid who learns to be a beekeeper and has to endure an increasing number of self-inflicted trail stings-- I ask a volunteer from the class to undergo a rite-of-passage and get stung by a bee in front of the class . . . and I always get a volunteer-- this year the girl who came up, after asking if this was "principal approved?" and I said, "Not at all!" rolled her sleeve up and closed her eyes-- she was really nervous-- so she didn't even see that it was a fake bee in a paper cup, attached to the lid by human hair . . . and in the same class I also set up the poem "Traveling Through The Dark" with a specious tale at the start of class-- I told them that I was running late for work because my son left me the car with very little gas in it-- which was true-- but then I found a dead cat at the end of our driveway and when I went to pick it up and put it in the trash, I noticed that it was pregnant and full of kittens, one of them struggling to be born-- but I didn't have time to call the vet or do a C-section, so I threw the cat in my neighbor's trash-- a great touch that always gets them-- and while the debate about what I did wasn't as uproarious as in the past, it still generated some discussion . . . anyway, I kind of stopped doing these weird social experiments a few years ago-- around COVID? or when kids got addicted to cell phones and it was hard enough to pull them into reality-- but I'm determined to bring "reality" back into my classroom-- or some fictitious version of it and I'm also determined to have kids put their cell phones in the holder in the front of the room-- I usually get lazy and stop doing this a few weeks into the year and then get pissed off at the kids for taking out their phones, but I'm going to remain consistent for the rest of my teaching career and get those damned things as far away from the students as possible so that I can lie to them and trick them more . . . and they seemed appreciative of my efforts at trickery today, so I will carry on with my resolution as planned and try to execute a few more of these experiments (and again, if you're truly interested in this, listen to the new episode of We Defy Augury . . . I reflect on a full career of these weird moments).

Happy Arbitrarily Chosen Day in the Middle of Winter

While I mainly think New Year's Resolutions are silly and indiscriminate-- why are you going to stop drinking in January? it's the coldest and most depressing month of the year, the month when you need a drink or two to make it to spring . . . plus it's not like you're putting on that bikini for a few months so why are you so gung-ho about the gym?-- and maybe I would make and keep New Year's Resolutions more if I lived in the Southern Hemisphere . . . it's certainly easier to start a new routine when there's more sunlight-- but, despite all these complaints, it seems that every year, I make some absurd or half-hearted resolutions, so I will continue the tradition: I resolve to keep making my podcast-- I just finished a new episode: "Traveling Through the Dark: Reflections on "Reality" in which I discuss an educational resolution too complicated to explain in this sentence-- and I also resolve to make the episodes a bit shorter and more focused . . . I also resolve to focus on flexibility more-- I have a strained calf right now and it sucks-- so I see much stretching in my future-- which is a really, really boring resolution-- so I need to add a more exciting resolution: perhaps I will try to resurrect my idea for a string of TikTok videos (the only problem is that I need my calf to heal to execute these videos so this resolution is going to have to wait a bit).

The Books Dave Read in 2023

1) The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

2) The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

3) Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

4) Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

6) Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin

7) The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters

8) Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

9) The Revolutionary: Sam Adams by Stacy Schiff

10) How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

11) South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

12) Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

13) This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

14) The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

15) Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley

16) The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

17) The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

18) Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

19) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

20) Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

21) The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

22) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson

23) 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

24) If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

25) Ringworld by Larry Niven

26) My Murder by Katie Williams

27) Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

28) The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

29) The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker 

30) God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker

31) Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong

32) Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

33) Promised Land by Robert B. Parker

34) Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey

35) Counterweight by Djuna

36) Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker

37) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

38) Pet by Catherine Chidgey

39) Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste by Carl Wilson

40) Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

41) The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

42) Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

43) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

44) Wellness by Nathan Hill

45) Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

46) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

47) When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole.

10 Baby Punches Out of 10

If you're looking for a mash-up of Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, and a self-reflexive, autonomous, meta-Pygmalion (with the addition of a bunch of freaky sex scenes) then Yorgos Lanthimos' movie Poor Things fits the bill . . . Emma Stone should win the Oscar for her revolutionary and evolutionary performance; Mark Ruffalo is rakishly entertaining; and Willem Dafoe does his usual creepy thing; my favorite line: "Now I must go punch that baby."

Three Better be the Magic Number

Hopefully, the proverb "bad things come in threes" is accurate-- because we had three bad things happen in rapid-fire succession today-- in a twenty minute span-- and now I hope we're in the clear . . .

Bad Thing #1: I pulled my calf muscle playing pickleball today-- totally stupid because my calf has been really tight, some kind of spasm or cramp, and despite this, I played a bunch of basketball with my son earlier in the week, which didn't help, but then I rolled it and rested it and stretched it properly and all that and it felt good today-- too good-- so I stopped taking it easy and played hard and mid-jump something snapped, so I'll be out of commission for a while;

Bad Thing #2: Cat texted her principal something that was meant for her co-teacher and NOT meant for her principal (in fact, it was about her principal) and so she had to do some back-pedaling and apologizing-- this was a movie-like bad thing where you're like "WTF?" . . . than happened?

Bad Thing 3#: while we were playing pickleball, our dog Lola did a bad thing-- when Cat walked up the hill to get the car (because I could NOT manage to walk up the hill with a pulled calf muscle) she found our kitchen and living room all amess with plastic wrappers and powdered sugar . . . Lola got up on the counter and ate an entire bag of pita bread AND a bunch of pizzelle star cookies coated in powdered sugar . . . so her stomach is eventually going to be a mess and I can't even walk her.

Gentrifiers Beware!

If you're looking for a thriller that lambastes rich white gentrifiers, pharmaceutical companies, and government-subsidized business acquisitions-- and has the wildly surreal conspiratorial feel of Jordan Peele's Get Out, check out Alyssa Cole's novel When No One Is Watching . . . but I should warn you: I thought this was going to be a more realistic take on race relations in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood-- told from two perspectives, a black woman who grew up there and a white guy who is part of the new wave of property owners-- with a little mystery thrown in for plot . . . but this book is actually a full-fledged, over-the-top, everyone-is-in-on-it hair-raising horror story-- which, on the one hand, is a lot of fun-- with loads of Quentin Tarantino-style "Justified violence"-- but, on the other hand, the race and gentrifying issues lose all their nuance, they are sacrificed on the altar of plot, guns, and vengeance.

Moses = Moses?

As I was plodding through Rober Caro's The Power Broker yesterday morning, I wondered whether Caro will eventually pluck the low-hanging-fruit and make the pun I am anxiously awaiting-- will he compare urban planner Robert Moses, who parted the neighborhoods of New York City to make way for superhighways (including the Cross Bronx Expressway) to the Biblical Moses-- who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could get to the Promised Land-- if he does make the pun I'll be satisfied and my expectations will be fulfilled, but I'll also be disappointed-- because Caro is such a classy writer and this is such an obvious and rather stupid pun (Robert Moses implemented his projects by learning the ins-and-outs of political bureaucracy, soft power, and acting without permission-- and not asking for forgiveness either!-- while Moses was the recipient of an Omnipotent Miracle from an All Powerful Lord) plus puns are the lowest form of humor . . . I've got 950 pages to go, so the much awaited resolution to this sentence won't be happening for a while. 

A (Photographic) Xmas Miracle

Christmas morning, I remembered that months ago I had bought one of those mini-phone-tripods and never opened the box . . . so I gave myself a Christmas present that was entirely symbolic of the holiday-- I opened some random shit I ordered online in the summer and literally forgot about because we live in the land of plenty (I bought the tripod because I had an idea for a series of TikTok videos but I never really got started on them because . . . well, that's an insane thing to get started on) and when I opened the mini-tripod box, I found that not only did I get the mini-tripod, but I also got a mini-remote . . . so that we didn't have to do the phone-timer photo thing-- which is a random nightmare and rarely produces a good picture-- but instead I could trigger the phone-camera by Bluetooth-- a fucking Xmas miracle if there ever was one-- and so I was able to take these pictures and also be in the picture-- and I'm going to declare that these photos are probably my greatest photographic accomplishments in a lifetime of not really accomplishing very much photographically.

Top Ten Reasons to Read a Book

My handiwork is over on Gheorghe: The Blog today . . . some reading recommendations and a Letterman-style Top Ten List for why you should read a book. 

The Boys Do Good Stuff

A couple of pleasant holiday moments:

1) I picked up Alex from Rutgers yesterday-- he survived his engineering exams but in regards to them, he said, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life" but then we blew off some steam playing hoops at the Piscataway Y-- last night we just shot around and this morning we kicked some butt playing three-on-three . . . despite my sore calf muscle . . . I shot from outside and let Alex handle the athletic stuff;

2) while Ian can't play basketball with us until he undergoes his ankle surgery-- a fact which makes all of us very annoyed and sad-- he still made a clutch play last night . . . he's now working on the production end at Birnn Chocolate, a venerable candy factory on the north side of town, and my wife and I put in a couple of gift orders for some dark-chocolate raspberry jellies, as they are unequivocally the best around-- but they were all out . . . Ian said maybe they were going to make some today but you can't go to Birnn on the day before a holiday-- the line is too long-- but then when he got home from work last night, red-cheeked from biking in the cold, he plopped down three boxes on the counter . . . he made the jellies himself-- obviously he knows how to do that now-- he poured out the jelly onto a sheet, used some giant cutter than makes the jelly into little rectangles, and then dipped the individual jelly rectangles into the dark chocolate . . . a Christmas miracle!

AI Won't Replace Dave . . . Yet

It seems AI will replace low-level sports journalism-- AI can already do a serviceable job summarizing and analyzing the box score of a particular event and it will only get better at these tasks-- and this had me worried so I asked Bard AI if it would also be replacing ME and my personal blog, but Bard said no, that blogs like "Sentence of Dave" contain "the human touch"-- and thats true, I often really fuck up apostrophe usage-- and Bard says that personal blogs also possess "creativity and storytelling" but I feel like AI is catching up on that front and the last thing that Bard says it can't replicate is "community" and this is probably true-- until the AI is embodied and you can meet it at the pub . . . what would this blog be without the comments? and the correcting of my apostrophes?

Good Students = Actually Having to Teach

My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.

Wet and Data-driven Monday

Today was very Monday, a caricature of Monday-ness, beginning with a torrential storm that soaked Lola and me thoroughly on our morning walk-- I was so wet, I actually had to change my underwear-- and then, after a long day of helping kids revise their expository essays, we had a department meeting, the most Monday of all meetings, the one where we analyze data from our grade books-- and Stacey said her reaction to looking at everyone's data-- the number of grades, the grade breakdown, the averages-- is that she either cries or acts like an asshole . . . but she did neither, so that was a win, I guess . . . anyway, we'll try it again on Tuesday.

Thus Endeth the Streak

All good things must come to an end, and so much like Linsanity, The Tommy-Devito A.K.A. The Cutlet Kid Winning Streak has run its course . . . fun while it lasted.

The Holdovers: Old Walleye Does It Again

Chalk it up to Paul Giamatti (pun intended) to portray the most curmudgeonly, yet compellingly human grouch of a private school ancient studies teacher in cinematic history . . . a bitterly disappointed educator with one glass eye, trimethylaminuria, hyperhidrosis, a tendency to drink too much, and a habit of insulting the students with various elevated vitriol-- troglodytes, fetid philistines, hormonal vulgarians, etcetera-- but despite this, and because of Giamatti's brilliance, The Holdovers has just the right amount of sentimentality and just the right amount of angst . . . the tone reminded me a bit of Catcher in the Rye, told more from someone like Old Mr. Spencer's point of view.

Dave Learns Some Shit on a Penultimate Friday in December

Here's some shit I learned today:

1. you're not going to get much done with a regular-level senior English class on the penultimate Friday before Winter Break . . . and the stupid 82-minute block period exacerbates this . . . I might have been able to maintain my patented veteran-teacher level of anger/motivation/self-deprecating humor/patience/flexibility/resilience/persistence/sardonic mockery/wittiness/intelligence for 42 minutes but there's no way to keep that shit up for 82 minutes;

2. both my wife and my older son Alex have a Pinterest page?

3. very few people know how and why the Northern Lights occur;

4. I really hate it when teachers stop in the hallways-- and they tend to be female teachers-- and complain about how overwhelming and tough the holidays are . . . because from an outside perspective, it sounds like they're complaining about how grueling it is to buy things and cook things and eat things-- but I keep my thoughts to myself (and my students, who are a captive audience and therefore must listen to my rants about the rampant materialism, environmental devastation, and unnecessary stress and traffic of the holidays . . . and complaining about this stuff is the only thing that alleviates the weird stomach-ache I have until Xmas is over and done with and we can go back to appreciating political stability and hot water and heat and basic miraculous conveniences)

5. if you do a bunch of one-legged squatting exercises from random YouTube videos, you're going to be sore for a couple of days.

A Stupidly Tilting Planet

Once again, it's the time of year when I wish I lived on the equator-- sunrise and sunset in Quito are always around 6 AM and 6 PM, respectively, which is the way to do it.

I Have a Wife Who Makes Her Own Naan

Last night my wife whipped up some Indian food-- chicken tikka masala and daal tarka and some other lentil thing-- and then she realized we didn't have enough naan in the freezer and so I suggested we use some tortillas-- chicken tikka tacos!-- and then, satisfied that I had really helped out with dinner, I went back to drinking my beer and listening to music and watching her cook . . . and then Ian got home and I talked to him for a bit and then I saw that Catherine was doing something weird with flour on the counter and I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I'm making some homemade naan from scratch" and I was like WTF? and a Troy Barnes moment from Community popped into my head: after behaving abominably in the video game competition for the inheritance, Pierce's half-brother Gilbert says "Family can make a person do a lot of crazy things" and Troy answers: "I understand . . . I have an uncle who makes his own pizza."

Blame It On the Glasses

I shot poorly again at basketball this morning, the second week in a row-- so it must be my glasses-- I haven't had an eye exam for a long time and I think my vision has gotten worse, so I booked an appointment, and there's also the fact that I'm playing in progressive lenses-- while they're great for switching from driving to reading, but they are a little weird for sports . . . my brother got LASIK surgery years ago and it worked wonder but I'm trepidatious about someone, even a licensed physician, shooting a laser at my eyes, so I don't think I'll be going that route.

Blame It On Robert Moses?

Escaping the city on Saturday night was damn near impossible-- and while my friends blamed SantaCon for the volume, there's also a more historical reason-- the power broker, himself: fucking Robert Moses . . . here's what Robert Caro has to say on it:

To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons -more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville, or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be--perhaps forever an area in which transportation--getting from one place to another would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.

Blame it On SantaCon?

Approximately three years ago, in February of 2020, we went into the city for my friend Connell's 50th birthday-- we went to Turntable Chicken Jazz and sat in a low-ceilinged room and ate Korean fried chicken and drank beer and then sang karaoke in a small crowded private room in a Koreatown fifth floor karaoke bar-- several weeks later, the world shut down and it was a miracle that we all didn't get COVID from this trip to the city . . . but perhaps some of us did-- and Connell reenacted this trip last night for his wife Lynn's fiftieth and the city seemed more crowded, chaotic, noisy and crazy than usual-- the train ride was slow and crowded, Penn Station was absolutely nuts, the streets were packed, as were the bars and restaurants, our Uber ride home was through bumper-to-bumper traffic. . . we should have just waited for the train, although we did get to witness an altercation from our slow-moving cab: a young guy on foot  kicked or bumped or did something to a parked Tesla and an older guy, a big older dude, got out of the car and started beating up the younger guy and pinned him to the ground and I think he was strangling him when a bystander broke it up-- and as we inched away, the peroxide blond wife was yelling at this young guy as well, for doing something to their car-- my friends blamed this ubiquitous insanity on "SantaCon," which pulls in a weird, drunkenly stumbling holiday crowd into the mix but I think quite a bit of the perceived chaos is because I am getting old.

The Most Malodorous Game

Before I left to play pickleball yesterday afternoon, I got a whiff of something stale and sweaty and I had to play a most malodorous game: what on my person was exuding a bad smell? my socks? nope, the knee brace on my right knee? nope, the knee brace on my left knee? nope, how about my shirt or my shorts?-- sometimes the laundry smells weird because it didn't fully dry . . . nope, my breath? nope, my pullover, which gets several wears before I wash it because I always take it off after three points of play? nope, my shoes? nope . . . with most of the sports I play-- basketball, soccer, and tennis-- I'm so old that I can't play them two days in a row, so most of my stuff is clean before I play again, but I can play pickleball two or three days in a row before my knees and feet give out, so sometimes my stuff starts to smell-- but I went through everything and couldn't find the odor . . . except . . . the brim of my hat? the call is coming from inside the hat! yuck . . . so I switched hats and washed the offender and next time I will check my hat first, as it is the closest thing to my nose and so if it smells, then it's going to seem like everything smells.

Rejected By the Youth

A few weeks before Winter Break, there is some festive "door decorating" in our school building and the homerooms are responsible for this; I've now been with the same homeroom for three years and I know some of the students quite well-- I've taught them in actual classes and such-- so when a pair off them volunteered to decorate our homeroom door I thought they might actually listen to my suggestions . . . I told them I wanted our door to feature a rapidly melting snowman saying to an elephant-- the symbol of the Republican party-- "There's no such thing as global warming, right?" and I also wanted a bunch of elves clear-cutting the rainforest while Santa loads the illegally sourced timber into his magic sleigh-- but they rejected both my ideas and instead decided to go with the image of a multicultural scarf with a bunch of nations on it or something . . . and they gave me three reasons why my ideas were verboten:

1) the door decorations were supposed to avoid religious imagery . . . but at this point, is Santa religious? or is he just a symbol of rampant consumer culture?

2) they decided you were probably supposed to avoid overtly political stuff as well and I conceded that this was a good point;

3) they told me I was the Grinch.

When the Cat is Away, Dave Gets Sleepy

Catherine is away on a lady-hiking-trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so it's just me, Ian, and Lola in the house . . . Ian is eating pizza and watching "The Regular Show" and I'm drinking a beer, and writing this sentence and then I'm going to play a game of online chess and fall asleep at 7:30 PM, most likely (I've been staying up late all week watching the second season of "Fargo" with my wife, that is one intense show).

Dave Will Soon Be Drowning (Figuratively Speaking)

A few days ago I decided to read Eleanor Catton's giant literary tour-de-force The Luminaries, but then 99% Invisible announced a year-long podcast "book club" in honor of Robert Caro's much-lauded 1200-page biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker . . . and I've always wanted to read The Power Broker but I could never pull the trigger and buy it-- it's expensive and I think you have to read it in hardcover because the font would be too small in paperback but now Conan O'Brien has convinced me so I ordered the book from Amazon as a Christmas present and soon enough I'll be reading TWO gigantic books for a long long time.

Dave Journeys From Irony to Sincerity . . . Damn!

I played 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- and I played poorly to boot, missing three lay-ups and most of my outside shots-- so I figured I'd just do a tongue-in-cheek sentence and go take a nap . . . I was going to claim, with my impeccable dry wit, that Sugar's song "Hoover Dam" is probably in the top five songs about dams (and probably the best song about the Hoover Dam) but then I got to poking around on the internet and the internet's giant digital mega brain reminded me that the song "The Highwayman" has a verse about a workman who slips and falls into the wet concrete of the Hoover Dan and is buried "in that gray tomb that knows no sound," which is as dramatic and evocative a blue-collar death as they come and so now I've got to decide if Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a better song than "Highwayman," which is a tough one-- I certainly like Sugar's song better-- and I've been listening to "Copper Blue" quite a bit recently-- and "Highwayman" merely uses working on the Hoover Dam as one stop in a journey of reincarnation, from brigand to sailor to worker to starship captain to drop of rain-- the dam is not the main image of the song-- while Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a vertiginous cinematic yawp about existence, purpose, and perspective that begins:

Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam 

I'm on the center line, right between two states of mind 

And if the wind from the traffic should blow me away 

From this altitude, it will come back to you

and then, after much existential meandering, the song ends "standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam"-- and this is repeated over and over, it's quite catchy-- and now that I've really thought about it and done some research, I am going to sincerely claim that Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is the best song about the Hoover Dam.

Dave Sets Sail into a Deep Literary Sea

Let it be noted, that I, Dave, with unwavering resolve, have determined to embark upon an arduous literary journey and read a most voluminous tome penned by Eleanor Catton-- The Luminaries-- a work upon which was bestowed the illustrious Booker Prize-- and if you would like to join me in consuming this weighty tome, I invite you to join me in a most erudite book club, which will convene in one month time on the goldfields of Hokitika-- South Island, of course-- so mark your calendars, bibliophiles, and we will unravel the threads of this intricate and byzantine literary tapestry, together, despite the obtuse astrological symbolism and the antiquated prose and when we are finished, we will achieve enlightenment of some substantial kind and content, until then there will only be the sound of turning pages.

Top "Golf"

Yesterday, in honor of my wife's birthday, we went to TopGolf . . . and while TopGolf is a fun place-- with loud music, Angry Birds style range-target games, surprisingly good food and drink, and a WIDE variety of golf swings-- the things that are happening at TopGolf are only tangentially related to the sport known as "golf."

Get Out? Or Stay In? The Choice is Yours . . .

 

The new episode of my pretentiously titled podcast We Defy Augury is called "Get Out? Or Stay In?" and I took some notes from the Colleague-That-Was-Formerly-Cunningham-But-Now-Goes-By-O'Grady and tried to get more organized and start in with the book sooner and then slowly delve into my bombastic tangential ramblings-- anyway, this one includes thoughts (loosely) based on Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the Special Guests are The Allman Brothers, The Eagles, Uncle Henry, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Andre Heyworth.

The Perfect Ending to this Piece of Shit Story

It's dark and cold and rainy and gray, but I still had to walk the dog-- so I put on my rain jacket and we took a stroll through the park and on the way home, I noticed a perfectly appropriate symbol for the moody, ominous weather: there was a dead squirrel in the road, right in front of my house . . . and so I embraced the spirit of this ugly day, went inside and found a plastic bag and put it over my hand, took our half-full garbage bag into the road, hefted the dead squirrel by the tail with my plastic-sheathed hand into the garbage bag, and tossed the bag into the trash bin . . . yuck.

That's a Lot of Birthdays!

Thirty-two times now, I've celebrated my wife's birthday with her-- since she was twenty-one . . . and while she appreciated the flowers and the card and the quality chocolates from Birnn, apparently I should have learned that you can't also put the awesome glass lunch and leftover containers that you bought from Marshall's on the table with the other birthday gifts because they do not count as a birthday gift, they are a gift for the house and should be construed as such.

2023, That's a Wrap? Spotify Says Yup

Lord knows why the Swedes at Spotify like to wrap up the year November 29th, but whatever-- it's Spotify Wrapped Day-- and apparently I listen to the same music as people in Burlington, Vermont (Waxahatchee, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and the Grateful Dead) and this year was one of obsessions-- 100 gecs, Waxahatchee, Easy Star All Stars, and-- lately, so the data won't be counted-- Oingo Boingo . . . four of my five top songs were Waxahatchee tracks from the album Saint Cloud . . . I listened to 34 thousand minutes of music and 1500 artists-- and my number one artist was The Brian Jonestown Massacre, followed by Waxahatchee, Easy Star All Stars, perennial favorite The Talking Heads and finally, 100 gecs . . . my main podcast on Spotify was 60 Songs That Explain the 90s and apparently I like to listen to albums all the way through, an unusual trait in this fragmented day and age-- anyway, enough about me . . . how did your Spotify wrap up?

Double Van Key Character Building Bicycle Bonus

This morning at 7:45 AM, minutes before first period and just after I got out of the coach's room shower, my phone rang and my wife asked me if I had both of the van keys and I realized that yes I did have both van keys-- last night I drove over to Rutgers because Alex had mistakenly retreated back to college with my wife's credit card and the van key and when I picked up Alex and Ava- they needed a ride to College Avenue-- he put the credit card in my wallet and van key on my chain for the safe-keeping of both objects and then I kept them there safely until this morning, when I took my wife's car to school because Ian needed a car to go to a job interview and we try not to let him use the nice car, so he was supposed to take the minivan but since I had both van keys, my wife had to bike to work and my son had to bike to his job interview at Birnn chocolate-- and my wife got to work on time and my son got the job, so obviously biking places-- even if it is very cold and windy-- builds character and works out in the end (even though when I walked out of the school building this afternoon, my first thought was holy shit, I would not want to be biking in this kind of cold, windy weather).

Double Birbiglia Bonus

My wife and I just watched two Mike Birbiglia one-man shows on Netflix . . . and though we watched them in reverse chronological order, I think that may be the way to do it-- or else you might be kind of pissed off about The New One, like this NYT reviewer . . . but if you start with the more recent piece-- The Old Man in the Pool-- you'll be better prepared to handle some of the existential gripings in The New One-- because if you've had kids, you've been there . . . and might still be there-- and you also have to remember that while Birbiglia is a stand-up comedian, these shows are slightly different than pure stand-up-- the minimalistic sets both come into play at times and there's more of a character arc to his persona in each-- but mainly, while there are dark and desperate portions of each show, on the whole, they are hilarious, profound, and well worth watching.

Futility and Dog Hair

I vacuum the house and two hours later, my wife asks me if I vacuumed the house-- because our dog sheds so much hair . . . and don't even get me started on the bathrooms-- you clean a toilet and the next thing you know, someone is spraying urine all over it-- I think for a day or two after you clean a bathroom, people should have to urinate out back in the yard.

Dark Black Friday (for the Planet Earth)

I hope people are being mindful of their consumption today and not buying unnecessary goods . . . but I guess nothing dispels Thanksgiving gluttony, overconsumption, and hangovers like buying some useless shit.

Snakes in the Rite-Aid?

Alexander Plumbing came to the rescue this morning-- on FaceTime-- we had some work done Wednesday afternoon to stop the leak in our tankless water heater and the plumber also showed me how to rinse off the magnet filter that removes the iron sediment from our water-- but this morning our forced hot-water radiators were cold and winter weather is headed our way and I couldn't figure out the issue-- the hot water was on and the heating pumps were pumping; I bled the radiators but there was no air in them, just cold water-- it was a mystery so my wife gave it a shot and texted the guy who was at our house yesterday and though it was Thanksgiving, he called us back and took a moment to have her FaceTime the various valves around the tankless heater and he guessed-- correctly-- that he forgot to switch both dials back to green that surrounded the filter-- so it was a quick and easy fix and a Thanksgiving miracle that we have both heat and hot water (and no leaks) for the holiday weekend; I then went to play pickleball while my wife prepared several Thanksgiving dishes and when I got home, my wife assigned me one simple Thanksgiving chore-- go get a good bottle of wine to bring to Jim and LouAnne's place (my brother's inlaws) so I went to the Rite-Aid, found a good bottle of wine, and while I was paying I noticed that the young lady behind the register had a serious case of the hiccups and I was tempted to go into my whole "hey, hold still, hold very still, there's a spider in your hair" routine-- which always works on my high school students (and scares the shit out of them) but there were people in line so I went with something more economical and said, "Hey there's a big snake behind you!" which didn't make much sense inside a Rite-Aid-- the only things behind her were cigarettes, vapes, chewing tobacco, and little airplane bottles of liquor . . . so my ploy didn't work and she said said she wasn't scared at all, not even . . . hiccup . . . a little bit.

Tanks a Lot

I brought my son Ian to New Brunswick last night so he could get an MRI on his ankle-- he may have a lacerated tendon-- and when I arrived home, sleepy and ready to watch some TV and fall asleep, I found my wife in the basement, spewing profanity and amazement because not only had she discovered a large and growing puddle of water on our basement floor, but she also discovered the source of this water-- and it wasn't due to the rain storm-- our tankless water heater and the surrounding pipework was leaking from all sorts of places-- so we got the wet-vac and some towels, put a large container under the heater, and got up several times during the night to wet-vac the water from the container and dump it in the sink . . . hopefully we can get a plumber over today, but the lesson here is: just because it doesn't have a tank, that doesn't mean it can't leak.

The Subtle Art of Feeling Stupid

I found the breezily philosophical book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck entertaining (and so did my son) but I probably didn't read it as closely and critically as Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri-- because that's their job on their very funny podcast, If Books Could Kill . . . it's big fun but if they tackle a book you've read and kind of enjoyed, get ready to cringe at the silly stuff your brain will readily consume when it's not paying close attention to the details.

Monday Transforms from Wednesday to Monday

Monday is normally bad enough . . . but I was trying to maintain a positive attitude and think of this particular Monday as more of a Wednesday-- since we have off Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving so we're already nearing the end of the week . . . but I don't get on the email platform much, and so I found out this morning, just after I resolved to be optimistic, that we had a department meeting after school and then the Monday that I had transmogrified into a Wednesday did a Mr. Hyde and turned back into an ugly and malevolent Monday.

Capitalism . . . 1980s Style

 

Took me a while, but I finally finished this episode of We Defy Augury . . . it is called "Capitalism . . . 1980s Style: Capitalism Sucks (But It Sucks Less Than the Alternative)" and it is my thoughts on capitalism (loosely) based on three novels published in the 1980s: Carl Hiaasen's Tourist Season, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park . . . and the special guests include Oingo Boingo, Lloyd Dobbler, Conan O'Brien, and Anthony Bourdain.

There's a New DeVito in Town!

Let it be known: for many many years, the reigning DeVito from Jersey was, of course, Danny DeVito . . . but for one special day (Sunday, November 19th, 2023) Tommy DeVito wears the crown-- in his victory over the Washington Commanders, he threw three touchdowns and his passing rating was 137 . . . more than double his typical passing rating-- and he did this behind the worst offensive line in football . . . congratulations Tommy DeVito for winning the MVD of NJ today . . . Most Valuable DeVito of New Jersey (and I thought I was done watching the Giants this year but if DeVito keeps tossing touchdown passes and quips about living with his parents in Jersey, such as "I don't have to worry about laundry, what I'm eating for dinner, chicken cutlets and all that is waiting for me when I get there" then I'm in for the long haul).

Two Good (But Dark) Stories

I recently finished two horrific stories-- one fiction and one true-- and both tackled systemic corruption, immorality, and overreach . . . 

1) the first is quite fun and I highly recommend it: the Netflix mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher . . . which reimagines the gothic world of Poe through the sepia-toned lens of the filthy-rich Fortunato family and their opiate empire; 

2) the second is the new Serial production: The Kids of Rutherford County . . . a fine piece of journalism that uncovers incredible and absurd legal overreach in Tennessee-- Rutherford County juvenile court was illegally jailing children for over a decade, mainly due to a conservative judge, Donna Scott Davenport, who decided to run juvenile justice by her ethical tenets instead of the actual laws on the book . . . and it's also the story of the two underdog lawyers who challenge this insane but entrenched system and finally get some retribution and resolution for these much-maligned children . . . but you'll have to decide if it's enough retribution for the shit that went down.

Note to Self: Take a Break

At the start of this week, I played 6:30 AM pickleball Monday morning-- a healthy and vigorous start to the week-- and then the weather turned balmy . . . what was once known as "Indian Summer," a term with ambiguous origins that the historian Daniel Boorstin believes originates from the "raids on European colonies by Indian war parties that usually ended in autumn”-- but because of the genocide perpetrated on the indigenous tribes of North America by the European settlers, there is no worry of raiding parties taking advantage of warm weather and scalping me and my family, so it's quite safe to play pickleball late at night at Donaldson Park, where the Lenni Lenape once roamed-- so I played Tuesday night with my adult friends (and my wife) and then figured I would rest my knees and ankles, but Wednesday I got a text from my young pickleball friends-- these 23-year-old pharma and med kids who switched from high-level tennis to pickleball, so I went out and played with them for a couple of hours Wednesday night-- I played until 9 PM! . . . which is pretty much midnight for me-- and then the weather got even warmer so I played again Thursday night-- the first time I've ever played pickleball four days in a row, and by the end of Thursday, I pretty much couldn't move-- my ankles hurt, my hips hurt, my knees hurt-- so even though the weather is beautiful today and everyone (including my wife) are down on the courts, I'm drinking some beer and taking it easy, because my game really deteriotates once I can't hustle.

Note to Self: Lisa!

There is a window of opportunity to learn a new colleague's first name and then, abruptly, that window slams shut-- and even if you see this person every day for a few minutes, it's still tough to pry that window open, and make the required effort to relearn the name that you immediately forgot after perfunctory introductions-- but today-- months into the school year-- with the help of another colleague (thanks Liz!) and her ability to access a list with the names of every teacher in the school on it, alphabetized, I smashed that window open and climbed through, and while I my brain may have gotten a bit bloody and abraded during the process, I'm now going to prop the window open by calling this lady that I share a homeroom with "Lisa" tomorrow-- although I hope I remember her name tomorrow, as I can't think of a good mnemonic device for the name "Lisa," as it's a fairly plain name and not epiphanic, like the "Dolores!" moment in Seinfeld . . . I suppose she looks more like Lisa Lisa from the Cult Jam than she does like Lisa Simpson, so I'll have to go with that . . . the idea that our homeroom is chaperoned by Lisa Lisa and the Dave Man (not that I'm going to tell her any of this).

What Does Dave's Dog Think?

Every morning, my dog anxiously watches me retrieve her can of food from the study, pour it out, use a fork to scrape out the last few chunks of food from the can, add a little dry food, and then serve it to her-- after she sits and gives me a paw . . . which has evolved into an enthusiastic leaping high-five-- so does she think she's eating all her meals at one of those open-kitchen restaurants where you can watch the chef prepare every step of your meal?

Dave Does NOT Break New Educational Ground (But He Thought He Did)

I've been reading three classes worth of Rutgers Expos synthesis essays-- the kids can take the class at my high school and I made the mistake of teaching three sections-- and it's brutal, most of the first attempts are awful, mainly because they don't synthesize-- they don't use evidence from BOTH texts to support an argument-- they summarize one text and then summarize the other text and then call it a day-- so I reminded them that to pass the Rutgers Rubric, EVERY synthesis paragraph needs evidence from BOTH texts and a kid asked me if you could get an NP (Not Passing) if you DID use text from both sources in every paragraph and I said, "Yes you could" because I had a student alternate summaries of the texts within the same paragraph-- no connections or argument-- and then I saw some dry erase markers on the ledge of my whiteboard and I had a brilliant idea-- and it worked out perfectly . . . there was a red marker, and I said this represented the Jia Tolentino text and there was a blue marker and I said this represented the Anand Giridharadas text-- and I did not not mean to assign stereotypical gendered colors, but subliminally I did just that-- and then there was also-- serendiptously, miraculously- a PURPLE marker-- so I drew an essay that had a blue paragraph and a red paragraph-- and then I drew an essay that had alternating blue and red sentences and then I told them that those essays would not pass and to do synthesis, the paragraph had to be purple-- you had to blend the texts and make a new color of your own-- and you could control the darkness or lightness of the purple by how much of each text you used-- that was the artistry of the synthesis and then I felt quite accomplished with my spur-of-the-moment color-coded metaphor so I told the ladies (Stacey and O'Grady) and they laughed and laughed and laughed and told me they had been doing this activity for years-- and they had been telling ME to do it for years-- but I had ignored them-- they always had their kids color code their essays so they could see how much text they were using and then I told them I didn't do it as an activity-- I showed them after they finished and I was grading and they both concurred that I was an idiot (and they also said that telling the kids about shades of purple right after the first essay was way beyond them) and so I am going to pay more attention to the ladies because it seems they have some good ideas (but I still had a really good time in class, especially when I saw that there was one purple dry erase marker and I remembered that red and blue make purple and I still think my diagrams were spot-on).

Watch Your Step

Two teachers I know have fallen and broken limbs (both elbows, I think?) at school this year and I've heard these things come in threes so I'm watching my step (unlike Arvin and Josh, who hit the deck hard several times this morning during pickleball-- I'm of the mind that there's no reason to dive in pickleball unless you're going to hit a winner-- which rarely happens-- because the speed of play is so much faster than tennis . . . you're not going to have a chance to get back up and hit another shot, so why bother diving in the first place?)

Do You Know Your Dog's Date of Birth?

Another beautiful day in the Catskills-- and we ended where we began our vacation, at the Mud Puddle Coffee Roasters & Cafe-- we took a hike out of New Paltz and then got some delicious coffee and breakfast sandwiches (I recommend The James: 2 EGGS, BALSAMIC ONIONS, BACON, GOUDA, ON FRENCH PEASANT ROLL . . . it's the best fucking breakfast sandwich I've ever eaten) and then we hauled it on home because Lola has a UTI and she needed some antibiotics but to save time we had our vet call the prescription in to our local pharmacy so we didn't have to drive to Sayreville but it turns out that in this ever-changing world in which we're living when you try to save time, you might well create a chaotic imbroglio-- so I ended up spending a good hour at our pharmacy today, calling the vet, pacing the vitamin aisles, trying to recall my dog's birthday?-- because you need to give the date of birth to pick up a prescription-- but our vet couldn't get through because they called the wrong number but then when they called the right number-- which I provided-- it was busy and then-- after many phone calls to the vet by me . . . and-- I'm proud to say-- no losing of the patience-- I never lost my patience, I kept it on my person the whole time because my pharmacy was doing a great job and the ladies at the vet, well . . . they were far away and on the phone and I had to be very diplomatic with them-- but in the end, after the pharmacy had to call the vet office to confirm some handwriting and some other shit-- I finally got my ten dollars worth of Sulfamethoxazole and I also had a lovely conversation with the fourth pharmacist I spoke with-- because I spoke with all the pharmacists-- about how to get dogs to swallow pills . . . but seriously, do you know your dog's birthday?

Diet Soda, Beer . . . It's All the Same in the Catskills

We did several scenic hikes today and had a good meal at the Truss and Trestle but my favorite moment was when we were having a beer at the Creekside Bistro and a lady came in and sat adjacent to us at the bar and asked for a menu-- this was around 1 PM-- and when the bartender asked what she wanted to drink the lady said "a diet soda" and then, without skipping a beat, she said, "but what do you have on tap? Any Oktoberfest? Actually, I'll have a Smuttynose brown ale" and it made me wonder what turn her day was going to take because she switched from diet soda to beer.

 

Must Have Made a Wrong Turn at Albuquerque

This morning, my wife and I drove on some winding mountain roads to a winding hiking trail that looped around Onteora Lake-- and along the trail, we stumbled on an old car wreck-- there really should be a plaque explaining exactly what the hell happened.

Self-aware Dave Distracts Annoying Dave

I'm writing this sentence so I don't stress my wife out while she's packing for our trip to the Catskills . . . I tend to pack fast and loose and finish well before her and then I want to get in the car and get going! traffic is building up! I don't want to eat lunch at 2 PM! I want to go on a hike! it gets dark early now!-- but she's a bit more methodical than me (which is why we make a great team).

Dave Redefines Refrigerator Blindness

Like many men, I have difficulty finding things in the refrigerator and on our pantry shelves and I often require assistance from my wife to locate what I'm looking for-- but today at school, I took "refrigerator blindness" to an unprecedented level-- on my off period, I drove over to Mancini's and got two slices of pizza to-go and by the time I had driven back to the school-- the two slices riding shotgun, filling my car with delicious scents of brick-oven baked crust and sweet marinara sauce-- I was salivating and ravenous (I played 6:30 AM pickleball this morning and probably showered in raw sewage-- because did they really flush out the shower in the coach's room?) and so I entered the school with my slices and made a beeline for the English Office, grabbed a seat, and inhaled my pizza-- and then I heard someone mention the word "fridge," which is a sore subject because the administration confiscated all of our department mini-fridges and microwaves over the summer (because of a toaster fire) and I said, "Are we getting a fridge soon?" and the other five teachers in the room stared at me in disbelief and then I followed their collective stare to the utterly gigantic white refrigerator looming right next to the doorway that I had recently barged through with my pizza slices and my boss Jess said: "You know how men can't find stuff in the refrigerator? Dave can't even find the refrigerator!" and she was right.

Things I Learned After It Was Too Late Volume 427

When you're making a pizza, you need to inspect the cheese for mold before you enthusiastically toss it all over the sauce-covered crust-- tragic loss of a pizza-- but here's something I learned late in life (today, actually) but not too late . . . I just read on the internet that when you have a light coating of dry fallen leaves on your lawn, you should mulch them with the lawnmower instead of raking them-- and shredding leaves with an electric mower is far more fun than raking and bagging them.

90% Pleasant Bike Ride

Yesterday, to end our week of virtual teaching with something joyful, a few of us decided to head over to On the Border, a cheesy Mexican chain on Route 1 that offers a happy hour of cheap beer and free chips (no pay) and it was such a beautiful day that I decided to bike over-- and as the crow flies (if I had a kayak and some cliff-climbing gear) the restaurant is right across the Raritan River from my house-- less than a mile-- but to bike there I had to do a more circuitous three mile trip: I biked across the Albany Street Bridge to New Brunswick, then through Boyd Park-- along the river and south on Route 18-- and that section of the ride was quite lovely, then up the big hill to the Route 19 crossing into the Cook/Douglass section of Rutgers, where things got a little dicier-- there was the usual "you're not driving? fuck you" section of road where the sidewalk and the bike path disappeared-- but on the whole, it wasn't too bad-- there were a fair amount of college kids around, so plenty of pedestrians, and the cars weren't going too fast because of this-- but then things took a turn-- I wanted to head across the old Sears parking lot-- the quickest way to the restaurant, but I had forgotten that this was now a massive construction zone-- they are building an enormous mixed-use complex of town-homes, apartments, a grocery store, and shops-- but that was my only way to get to On the Border-- unless I looped around and biked on Route 1-- which would be suicidal-- so I followed a dump truck down a dirt road into a chaotic maelstrom of dirt piles, concrete and steel building frames, and construction equipment-- to my right an enormous metal plate floated in mid-air, held there by an enormous crane, and to my left were some completed town-homes . . . I was able to make my way across this site without being forcibly removed and then I went over a little temporary bridge that spanned a culvert and took my son's bike (a commuter bike, not a mountain bike) across a jagged rock field and finally I was able to enter the back of the On the Border parking lot-- I locked up my bike with a U-lock . . . I figured I might leave it there and pick it up the next morning because there was no way I was biking drunk through that site in the dark-- but luckily Catherine came to meet us, so I was able to throw the bike into the back of the Mazda and get it home safely-- and happy hour was a blast, it was nice to see Chantal, Terry, Liz and Stacey in the flesh and we all talked about how we had COVID-school flashbacks and would forget that the rest of the world was open while we were virtual teaching-- then once you got off the computer you'd realize . . . oh, the gym is open and we're not in a pandemic, our school is just a decrepit shithole.

Breaking Nose!

I know many of you have been following my attempts to turn off my phone alarm using my nose with bated breath-- wondering if my Android screen could disregard the "grease, sweat, and snot" on the tip of my nose and register an intentional touch-- and the answer is a resounding and miraculous YES! . . . but you can't "bop" the phone with your nose, you've got to squish your nose into the STOP button-- but that's not the big news of the day . . . the big news of the day is that black is white, up is down, and the deer in my neighborhood no longer behave like deer; on my way back up the hill from Donaldson, just after I successfully turned off my phone alarm with my nose, I noticed a few deer standing halfway down the hill-- and this is always the perfect scenario for my dog Lola-- I let her loose and she chases the deer down the hill into the park and then loops back up the hill to me and we walk home-- and she's always quite proud of herself for driving off the deer-- but we've had so many weird encounters with intractable and obdurate deer blocking our path that when I let her loose, she jogged ten yards up the sidewalk, towards our house . . . in the opposite direction of the deer . . .  she was like: no fucking way am I dealing with these insane creatures-- so that is the big news: the deer, they have no fear and they have effectively reversed the order of the natural world.

A Proboscis Endeavor

If you're walking the dog in the cold-- with lightweight cotton gloves on-- and your phone alarm goes off, if you press the "STOP" button while wearing your gloves the phone won't recognize your fingertip . . . and, as I found out this morning, the phone also won't acknowledge the tip of your nose-- and I must have looked pretty stupid, repeatedly bonking my phone into my nose, trying to press that button-- before I finally took my damn glove off and silenced the stupid thing (maybe Apple phones recognize nose tips?)

Virtual School + Halloween Candy = Nap Time

Another wonderful day of online teaching-- accompanied by a proliferation of Halloween candy, which is an unavoidable temptation when you're talking to a screen-- but there was one highlight and I thank my colleagues (and the candid and comical WhatsApp English teacher chat) because they warned me that admin was popping into virtual classes . . . and they weren't popping in at the beginning of class, when they could catch us setting up creative lessons; making Channels and break-out rooms and other virtual groups; communicating instructions clearly, and all that good stuff-- they were popping in for the last five minutes to see if teachers were ending early or teaching online until the bitter end of class . . . so I was prepared and told my students, that had some work to do in the Channels, to come back to the General meeting with five minutes left and-- lo and behold-- an administrator showed up in the waiting room and I let him in while I was teaching the most English teacher thing in the universe in the chat-- MLA format citations and punctuation-- and kids were asking questions on how to cite oddball situations-- quotes within quotes and all that-- and I was demonstrating all this in the chat . . . it was a great moment in American education-- because generally, whenever an administrator walks in your room, virtual or not, even if you've just executed the best lesson in the world, they come in at some weird awkward moment and you get all pissed off that no one ever sees you teaching properly . . . anyway, virtual school still sucked but at least there was one nice moment, and once it was over, I ate a bunch of Halloween candy and took a nap, and now I'm off to the pickelball scouts for my third day in a row-- I miss early morning basketball and I can't believe we did this kind of shit for over a year, I think I've erased most of it from my memory (but luckily it lives on the blog!)

Scary School Day . . .

Not the most impressive day of virtual school for me: while most of my students managed to give speeches in Public Speaking, one kid had to do his with his camera off-- it was blocked-- and so I told him "Pretend you're on the radio!"-- which dated me considerably-- I probably should have said, "Pretend you're on a podcast!"-- but whatever-- and then ten minutes into the second period, my school-issued device took control of itself and turned off the cursor and any sort of track-pad control-- but I could use the touch screen, which turned into a comical sequence of me touching windows and tabs and essentially screwing up the entire Teams meeting-- then the computer decided it needed an update and shut itself down-- I hope no parents heard me cursing it out-- but I was able to boot up the meeting on my iMac-- though Teams has gotten markedly slower since the pandemic-- which is weird and dumb-- and it really slows to a crawl if you share your screen-- so for my final period, instead of doing my slideshow lecture (with loads of musical and artistic examples!) about Modernism and Post-Modernism and then giving the kids a digital quiz, I had the kids do a goofy and barely educational group project that they could present next class . . . I really hope they fix our building soon-- for the sake of the children and the sake of me (and the sake of my podcast-- it's the last thing I feel like doing after a day of talking to a screen).

Suits Don't Suit Me

Several people have recommended the show Suits to me, so my wife and I gave it a shot but I couldn't make it through the pilot-- too many slick-talking good-looking people in silly scenes like the one I posted-- when Mike Ross tells Harvey Specter about his eidetic memory: 

"I like to read and once I read something I understand it, and once I understand it I never forget it"

yuck, how annoying and boring-- and I'll bet that's going to help out in a lot of clutch plot situations-- not that I'm ever going to find out . . . how about a character that says something a little more realistic: 

"I like to read but most of the time while I'm reading something, I fall fast asleep, but sometimes I stay awake and make it through a few pages and then I probably understand 30 percent, forget 30 percent, and misunderstand 30 percent . . . and what happens to the other ten percent? if you look up your ass, you'll find out."

Fuck Driving

My wife and I don't drive much-- we both work close to where we live; we bought a house in a walking town; and we hate being in the car . . . but the past few days have given us a taste of what many Americans do on a daily basis-- my wife drove out to Muhlenberg and back on Thursday evening, so Ian could see his friends and go to some Halloween parties with his girlfriend (apparently kids now wear a different costume for each party . . . I'll try to post some pics, but Alex and his girlfriend were Elvis and Priscilla and then characters from Ratatouille and Ian and Layla were a deer and a hunter, two superheroes, and then Shaggy and Scooby . . . absurd) and then on Friday, Cat and I drove out past Trenton to go to an Italian place for my brother's birthday-- it took an hour to get there-- and then we drove Ian back to school on Saturday (with Layla) and we all did some parent's weekend stuff-- saw some football-- going to a Muhlenberg football game is very low key-- and we watched some Sex Education style a capella singing and then we went to a really good restaurant (Union and Fitch) with Layla and Ian for dinner and then they went out and Cat and I crashed at the Holiday Inn, then I took Ian for an x-ray on his weird ankle injury-- no information, he needs an MRI-- and then we drove the hour-plus home . . . way too much fucking driving, I hate being in the car, it stresses me out, makes me sick--I have to drive and chew gum-- and when I get out my knees and hips hurt . . . but I don't even have to do my twelve-minute commute this week because I'm on virtual school because of the water main break in my high school, so I won't have to drive anywhere this week, which will be wonderful.

Back to Not Normal

East Brunswick High School is going to be virtual all next week-- apparently, fixing the water main break is going to be complicated-- rumor has it the pipe is eight feet underground and there may be an old oil tank involved as well . . . but all this is hearsay, the main thing is that we're going to try to do this virtual school thing again, which is annoying-- and this makes me wonder what would have happened twenty years ago . . . would they have crammed us into the middle school or something? or would we have had to make up the days in the summer? who knows-- but this is the best alternative to that stuff, though I hate staring at a screen all day.

We're in the Shit Again

Apparently, a shit pipe broke in our rapidly decaying high school, flooding the 1500 hall with sewage, so we're enduring the inanity of virtual instruction today (and perhaps tomorrow) because we can't go into the building . . . and I definitely have PTSD from the bonging sounds of people entering the Teams meeting; I've completely forgotten how to share my screen, run break-out rooms, and generally teach online; and there's a dude in my neighbor's yard with a gas-powered leaf blower making it impossible to hear anything-- the only up side is we get to do parent/teacher conferences on the phone, and not in the building.

Our Hero: Pickleball

A priest, a bunch of med students, some frat guys, the requisite old dudes and ladies of various races and ethnicities, and a guy with a mullet walk onto a pickleball court . . . and everyone gets along and plays pickleball-- this sport may just save America from polarization, tribalism, fake news, misinformation, income inequality, obesity, and reality TV.