Sentence of Dave

2/14/2009

My son Alex said that his friend's nanny died, and so I asked him if he told his friend he was sorry; Alex looked at me and said, "Why? I didn't do it."

It made me happy that I put the drawer slides upside-down in our new TV stand, because I was forced to reach into the drawer recess and unscrew them, which gave me an opportunity to use the tiny flashlight at the end of my power screw-driver, something I just discovered (though we've had it for ten years) the other day by accident . . . and when the tiny light popped on because I hit the little switch I had never noticed before, I wondered: "When the hell am I ever going to need a tiny flash light at the end of my battery powered screwdriver?" and now I have answered my own question.

I Unwittingly Give A Pregnant Student Anxiety

You would think that after yesterday's debacle, I'd have learned my lesson, but today in Creative Writing class I was demonstrating some point about sensory detail and-- spurred by a line in the instructive essay we were reading that portrayed birth as a wonderful, joyous event . . . I decided to provide a counter-example-- and so I launched into a graphic description of my son Alex's birth, which was pretty hairy: the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around his neck and the staff had to toss Catherine back and forth like a sack of potatoes to try to loosen it so he wouldn't suffocate, and then the doctor said, "You've got three pushes to get this baby out or we're going to have to do an emergency C-section!" and somewhere in the middle of this visceral tale I looked down and noticed that one of my new students, a chubby girl, was turning green and looked like she was going to pass out, and then I noticed why . . . she wasn't chubby, she was very very pregnant, but it was too late, I was already deep into the story and so I had to finish it (and I talked to her later and told her I was sorry and that I didn't meant to scare her and she said the story wasn't as horrific as she first thought it was going to be) but the real question is who am I going to target tomorrow?

There May Be Something Wrong With Me

Warning: if your opinion of Dave is already low, this sentence may make it subterranean, so proceed at your own risk . . . yesterday was the second day of my new Creative Writing Class (we switch at the semester) and one of the students wasn't quite in his seat when the bell rang, so I yelled in what i thought was a playful but slightly admonitory tone, "If you're not in your seat when the bell rings you're late!" and the student limped to his seat-- and I thought hmmm, looks like he has a limp and then got on with the class; later in the period we went on a "field trip" to the cafeteria, and the same late, limping student was the last one out of the classroom-- so I had to wait for him before I locked the door-- and I noticed that he had a brace on his hand, so I asked him, "Hey, how did you get injured?" and he quietly said to me "It happened when I was born" and then, in a humiliating rush of cognition, it all came together in my very stupid little brain-- he wasn't limping from a skate-park injury, he was crippled, and that wasn't a brace because he jammed his thumb playing hoops, his elbow joints were inverted-- and so I apologized to him about how I managed to put my (left) foot in my mouth not once but twice in a manner of minutes-- and though I said I was sorry, this kid must still wonder how he drew such an insensitive and cruel teacher for an elective (unless perhaps-- and I'm rationalizing like a madman here-- perhaps the disabled student liked the fact that I didn't notice his disability and was just as callous with him as I am with everyone else) and the class, which is composed almost completely of sweet girls, must think I'm a complete lout, and so, to remedy these faults in my personality: I swear here in this Official Sentence of Dave (TM) to START PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO MY SURROUNDINGS AND TO THINK MORE CAREFULLY BEFORE I SPEAK.

Dave is Transitioning . . . Slowly

After interviewing many friends, students, and co-workers, I have decided to switch to a Mac; I told my students it feels like I'm getting ready for a sex change but they said it isn't that severe-- so now I'm ready to switch teams (or switch back, as I once had an Apple IIe) and now all I need to get this transition going is for some charitable soul to buy me an iMac.

2/9/2009

Building your own custom bookshelves is easy . . . you just saw the wood, sand it, and then screw it together . . . it's so easy it makes me laugh-- HA HA HA HA HA HA-- it's so easy you should buy the cheap grade of lumber, because you can just push real hard and then it will fit together squarely, everything snaps together just like Legos, pardon me I have to laugh more because I had so much fun building my own book shelves--- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAH!

2/8/2009

Whenever it's under fifteen degrees, the driver side door of my 1994 Jeep Cherokee Sport freezes, and everyone in the school parking lot is treated to the sight of me sliding my butt onto the glove compartment, spinning my torso, and then ejecting myself out the passenger side door.

We're Number One! (In Middlesex County)

Good news for my property values: New Jersey Monthly just came out with it's top one hundred high schools in New Jersey, and Highland Park is number 31 in the state and number 1 in Middlesex County; only the gods know how they frakkin' determined this, they claim to have used some kind of complex algorithm, but who cares?

My Apologies

Yesterday, I got some kind of virus on my computer-- it did something weird to the blog and it made it impossible to surf the internet (every time I tried to navigate to a page it would take me to a used car site or something equally as ridiculous) and I spent five hours following some directions I found on a tech site, editing the registry, deleting random files, uninstalling things, etc. but the only option is reformatting; I think I'm going to get an iMac.

2/6/2009

One of the benefits of playing soccer is that it keeps you vigilant about your toe-nail maintenance.

Rule #1: Do Not Read War and Peace in Public

I defeated the premise of sociologist Dalton Conley's new book Elsewhere USA: how we got from the company man, family dinners, and the affluent society to the home office, blackberry moms, and economic anxiety, he illustrates the economic "red shift" in America, how for the first time in our history (and maybe the history of the world) people who make more money also work more hours, and how they are usually married to someone else who makes more money and works more hours, thus the divide between rich and poor is growing quicker than ever, and if you are in the "top half" than though you are doing materially better than anyone at any time in history, it still appears as if the other people in the top half are moving away from you in economic class, because now we have the ability to work all the time (home office, Blackberry, cell phone, outsourcing around the clock, etc.) and those of us who are making money realize that all our time is billable and valuable, and so we become fragmented, and we pass this "weisure" ethic on to our kids, and the result is we can rarely focus ourselves for a long enough time away from work, technology, social networking, etc. to read an entire book in one day unless you are a teacher and it is exam period, which I love, because you get a duty where you are sentenced to guard a hall for several hours, and then you have to sit in a room and proctor an exam, and then the school day is over-- so it's an excellent time for total reading focus, in fact, several years ago this is how I got deep into War and Peace . . . but the only problem was that when people walked by me in the hall, and saw the giant book I was reading, they jokingly asked, "What are you reading? War and Peace?" and I would have to say, very apologetically "uh, yes, it's really good, actually" and show them the cover . . . but they would still look at me like I was a big asshole, because who goes around reading War and Peace when you can update your Ebay and your Facebook and your stock portfolio and your tutoring schedule and your kid's activities from a cell-phone or an I-touch, unless you're some kind of deviant miscreant up to no good?

2/4/2009

So I'm at gymnastics, and Alex's class has begun, but Ian's class doesn't start for another ten minutes and so he's playing on the mat and the balance beam and this other little kid (who is going to have an Earnest Hemingway complex, he wears long braided blond hair and Ian always calls him a girl) spits a big loogey onto the mat and his mom, a butch Rutgers psychology professor who was busy grading her blue books, tells him that it's rude and she would prefer him not to spit, but she doesn't wipe it up-- and it's right on the mat where everybody walks, not in the corner or something, and it's not like this is a kid's play gym or something, there's college and high school gymnasts walking around as well-- and I'm sitting there hating the fact that I care about these things now, but I'm also thinking that if my barefoot kid steps in your kid's spit, I'm going to punch you in the face-- and if I had any balls I would have went to the bathroom and got a paper towel and wiped it up but instead when Ian said, "That kid spit there" I said, "Yeah, that's gross-- don't step in it" and I'm wondering if I'm going insane now that I'm a parent, but isn't it common courtesy to wipe up any bodily fluids your kid produces?

2/3/2009

Yesterday I wrote a lame sentence, and this is what Eric commented: "I usually wait until they make a movie about the Nobel or Pulitzer winner, then, if the actor playing the role the Pulitzer or Nobel winner is worthy of acclaim, and only then, do I consider them noteworthy, and commit them to memory, like when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford won the Pulitzer," which I think is really funny (and also saves me from having to write my own original sentence today, which is important to me-- not to do any good work on the day after the Super Bowl, because I want to contribute to the country-wide post-Super Bowl malaise in hopes that someday the NFL, in the interest of national productivity and for the good of the economy, will move the damn thing to Saturday.)

2/2/2009

An irony of illusion and reality: nearly everyone can reel off the movies and actors that collected an Academy Award, but who can recall the winners of the year's Nobel and Pulitzer prizes?

Anti-social Notworking

What Facebook needs (I'm not sure why I am prescribing this, since I don't have an account) is a list of enemies to complement the list of "friends"-- otherwise, the term "friend" has no meaning, plus, you really know someone when you know they people they hate, and, more significantly, the people that hate them; perhaps someone has already thought of this . . . is there a social networking forum that shows both sides of the coin?

A Sentence Wherein I Poorly Imitate Lester Bangs

Hey kids, hipsters, dudes, etcetera, I've been dosing on the loopy speculations and discursive postulations of Lester Bangs-- the collection is called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and it consists of rock'n'roll reviews and opinions on the rest of the universe, and though I don't always recognize the bands he's talking about (The Fugs?) I certainly grok his groove, if only because he digs Iggy Pop and tears Jethro Tull a new one . . . he's all about seeing how many pop culture allusions, meta-cognitive delusions, and political anti-solutions he can juggle at once, he's the Philip K. Dick of pop music, the Jack Kerouac of Creem, and he's a kindred soul of mine, as he's not afraid of the incoherent run-on sentence.

Snakehead = Coyote?

Bad Traffic, the new crime novel by Simon Lewis, is supposedly the only UK book ever to receive a cover blurb by Elmore Leonard-- who calls it a "honey: suspense that never loses its grip" and I certainly don't disagree, the book is exciting enough to incite a stomach-ache, and-- like every good crime novel-- you learn a new term from the underworld . . . "snakehead."

1/29/2009

After reading this, you'll either have the urge to call DYFUS or the Patent Office: the other night we made the mistake of allowing our three year old to eat Cheezits on the couch; of course by the time he was through he had gotten Cheezit Brand crumbs all over his pajamas and the cushions, but I had one of those epiphanies that only happens in a Joyce novel: I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the dustbuster, ordered Ian to lie flat and then vacuumed not the couch, but vacuumed him . . . and he loved it!

1/28/2009

You know you're living the high life when you buy the shredded cheese instead of grating it yourself.

1/27/2009

I just read a conspiracy theory that claims that George Bush Jr. was actually a Manchurian Candidate type patsy placed in office by the DEMOCRATS, so that when the Democrats inevitably took office after him, they would have an easy time taking the moral high-ground, and then, of course, the country would be receptive to their policies-- think about how easy it is to galvanize the support and spirit of the country and the rest of the world when you get to abolish TORTURE during your first week in office . . . (actually I didn't read that conspiracy theory, I made it up).