Kids Aren't Half As Annoying When You Are Playing Ping-Pong With Them

Nothing makes me happier than the fact that my kids are now proficient at ping-pong . . . cracking a cold beer and knocking that ball back and forth is as mindless and stress-free as parenting gets.

If Everyone Else is Juicing, How Can I Compete?

I recently learned that a number of people in my English department are "juicing" and have been at it for quite a while . . . they are drinking daily concoctions of kale, carrots, bananas, berries, yogurt, spinach, lime, and other healthy foods . . . and no one informed me of this shocking development (in fact, I learned about it rather randomly when a perfectly sensible guy said he was thinking about purchasing a $400 dollar Vitamix blender, which astounded me, but I then learned that everyone in the room -- five people -- were all liquefying vegetables and drinking them) and so now I'm wondering if I have to start drinking my vegetables just to keep up with the other teachers, who are obviously going to reap incredible benefits from these glowing green smoothies: clear complexions, full heads of silky hair, super-cognitive speed, boundless energy, the disappearance of hang-overs, and other various superpowers . . . but I don't really want to start slurping kale and carrots for breakfast, so I'm going to hope that it's just a phase, and that everyone will go back to eating normal crap soon.

Roger, Do It For the Children! (Or Most of the Children, But Not the Children in Shakespeare Class)

It's time once again for my annual epistle to Roger Goodell, beseeching him to move the Super Bowl to Saturday, and this year the impact of Super Bowl Sunday is worse than normal . . . typically, I start teaching Hamlet the Monday following the Super Bowl, which is difficult enough, but this year, because we've already had three snow days and the semester is off kilter, the Monday following the Super Bowl is an exam day . . . and a few of my students are stressing out because they have to stay up and watch the Super Bowl and they also have to take two exams the next day (luckily, this won't effect my period two class, though they have their exam on Monday morning at 7:26, because it's my Shakespeare class and they have admitted that they DO NOT watch football . . . when I asked if anyone knew the details of Peyton Manning's cervical fusion surgery, they all looked at me blankly, and a very smart girl said to me, "this is SHAKESPEARE class -- we don't know things like that.")

Lack of Sentence and an Idea for a T-shirt Wrapped into One Half-Assed Fragment of Thought

Last week, I had a really great idea for a sentence while I was talking to Alec at the pub, but the next morning, I couldn't remember it (and while that is an atrocious sentence, as far as content, the theme itself would make a great t-shirt: Dave went to the pub and all I got was this lousy sentence).

Facebook Stock Plummets! Dave Buys New Snowboard!

You don't need to read Dave Eggers' overly long and polemical book The Circle to know that Facebook is a vast evil time-suck that trivializes your life, robs you of your privacy, and makes you very stupid (and -- full disclosure -- I just sold some Facebook stock short, so I'm hoping that the rest of humanity reaches this conclusion too, and rapidly . . . and if this Princeton study is any indication, then -- like an infectious disease -- the Facebook epidemic will soon wane, as folks become immune to its infectious qualities and I will make hundreds of dollars).

FOOD!

Sometimes, I get so hungry that I've got to eat before I sit down to eat.

It's Good to be the Cook

The Danish film A Hijacking taught me three things: 1) if your ship is taken by Somali pirates, everyone on board -- including the pirates -- is held hostage by the ransom negotiations 2) if you're trapped on a boat, nobody in their right mind shoots the cook 3) Somalis and Danes drunkenly singing "Happy Birthday" in English is really creepy.

You Might Only Want to Read 1/2 of this Sentence

The folks at work claim that my braided belt is from the '90's, but that's not true -- my braided belt from the '90's disintegrated long ago, and this braided belt is relatively new and I bought it at Kohls . . . and I really tried to wear a more fashionable belt but the problem with non-braided belts is that there are a limited number of holes, and so if you gain or lose a few pounds, or eat a giant lunch, then there might not be an ideal belt setting for your particular girth at that moment, and I like to buy my pants a little big, and so I actually need a belt to cinch them at the waist, because I'm not buying the pants big for my gut-- which isn't all that big-- I'm buying the pants big for my butt, which is ample and round, and needs room to breathe.

Batting A Thousand (Sort of)

I saw three ex-students out-of-context in the span of three days and nailed all of their names:

1) saw a girl I had many, many years ago at a concert at The Saint in Asbury Park-- where her younger brother was playing drums in a band with one of my colleagues-- and though she is over thirty and has a kid and a house and a mortgage, she was far more surprised that I have kids and a house and a mortgage . . . "Mr. P. is all grown up!" was her reaction;

2) saw a dude I taught a few years ago stocking beer at the fancy beer store -- although I this one was a Texas-leaguer, as I only remembered his last name;

3) and, finally, an easy one . . . I saw a girl I taught last year lurking in the high school parking lot (there's nothing lamer than hanging around the high school once you've graduated, but -- to her credit -- I think she was waiting to give someone a ride).

Not Surprising . . .

Building a cardboard box in which to ship a banjo is harder than you think.

Despite All the F*%king Grading, There Are Some Fun Things About Being a Teacher

One of the great things about being a teacher is that you get to teach people things, and so when I show Marshall Curry's fantastic documentary Street Fight to my students it is ostensibly to teach them about politics, but the actual reason I show the film is so that when Cory Booker's campaign manager compares Sharpe James to former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, I get to pause the film and explain to my students about Marion Barry: who he was, what he did, and how-- despite what he did-- he got elected again (and it's a great excuse to say "crack cocaine" in class, which is always a crowd pleaser among the high school seniors . . . and I must warn you, if you're one of those people who like to watch movies in silence, with no pauses or interruptions, then you should NOT take my class, because I consider showing a movie in class more of a performance art: you are seeing a movie with Dave, who might pause it at any time to comment, or might not even bother to pause it . . . it's the educational version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, without the robots).

A Loooooooong Week for Ian

By Wednesday afternoon of last week, this was the list of Ian's infractions at school, as reported by his very forgiving and patient teacher on his behavior sheet: putting his middle finger down (instead of up, he claims he was taunted into doing this, but he knows better), putting the cap to the glue stick up his butt and then giving it to someone, getting caught erasing the details about the middle-finger episode and the glue stick/butt incident and so not only did his behavior sheet include an addendum (written in pen) describing those two previous incidents, but it also explained that Ian claimed that he "accidentally" erased that part of the note -- though he admitted to me that he did this in order to get in less trouble, and -- finally-- he got into an argument with Lucy and called her a "buttface buffoon."

My Wife and I Agree on How Not To Lose Your Shit

When I go to the gym, I leave my wallet and cell-phone in the glove compartment of my car because I think that there is a greater chance of my gym locker being broken into rather than my run-of-the-mill gray Toyota min-van, and I asked my wife what she does, and she uses the same strategy . . . for the same exact reason (though she drives our run-of-the-mill Subaru) and since my wife and I rarely agree on questions of logic, I am guessing that we are doing the smart thing for this scenario.

Sports: The Reason Why I Don't Invent a Bunch of Cool Stuff for the Internet

While reading George Packer's fragmented and arresting book about the fragmentation of America (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) I learned why I am not more like Peter Thiel -- who has a long list of entrepreneurial and technological achievements, among them co-founding PayPal-- because to get hired by Thiel you not only had to be "incredibly smart" but also "without distracting obligations like wives and children or time-wasting hobbies like sports and TV . . . one applicant was turned down because he admitted to enjoying shooting hoops."

If . . . Then . . . But

Wednesday morning . . . 5:45 AM . . . and it's so foggy that I can't see the end of the road-- if I wasn't with my trusty canine companion, it would have been very spooky and that's the great thing about having a dog, you always have someone to accompany you on a walk, no matter the situation -- but, of course I should point out, if it wasn't for my trusty canine companion, I wouldn't have been walking around in the fog at 5:45 AM, I would have been in bed, or indoors, and that's what's not so great about owning a dog.

Layers and Layers of Irony and Failure

Nothing makes me more unhappy that enforced pep (you may remember my difficulties when I was compelled to "Dress Like a Holiday") but rather than suffer the ire of certain female members of my department, I now begrudgingly go along with whatever spirit theme is chosen, and so on Wednesday, I wore the required uniform -- black shirt and pants, glasses, and a beret (I only wore the beret momentarily, for "check in," but that's still pretty spirited for me) -- and our department followed suit . . . we were supposed to be Beatnik poets, but I thought some people looked like French painters and others looked like college graduates . . . but we did well enough with our department unity to tie the business department, and since the math department came up with this contest idea, they administered the tie-breaker . . . a math test . . . mano a mano . . . by someone chosen from the department, and so --ironically -- my department chose me to take the test, because though I am the least spirited member of the department, I am pretty good at math (and even taught it, long long ago) and so this set-up the wonderful possibility that the person who really didn't want to "dress like a holiday" would end up being the department spirit hero . . . and so I e-mailed the math teacher administering the tie-breaker and we set up a time and she told me to bring a calculator . . . and that's when I realized that this might actually be a math test and not some math riddle or math trivia quiz or something fun and spirited . . . as we were dealing with the math department, not the English department, and this made me a bit anxious, and it turned out I was right: I had to take a ten question quiz with algebraic equations and number lines and solution sets . . . and this test, in mathematical terms, was 0% fun, but I still felt confident taking it (which means nothing . . . I always feel confident when I take math tests and I've gotten some really abysmal math grades in my life) and I remembered all my acronyms: SMATO (subtraction means adding the opposites) and Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and FOIL (first outside middle last) and was proudly reciting them to the proctor of the test as I did the problems, and -- for a moment-- I thought I just might be the least spirited department hero ever . . . Cinderella story, underdog victory and all that, but my lack of spirit must have caused some kind of karmic justice; I got a 90% on the quiz-- pretty good, but not good enough, as the guy from the business department got a perfect score (and I really should have got them all right too, but I missed a pair of absolute value bars in the first question, I think I saw them as parentheses, and -- always my problem in math -- I didn't check over my work well enough) but I'm going to try to parlay this ostensible failure into a success . . . I am so distraught and humiliated at my crucial role in our defeat that I can't bear to take part in any other spirit days, or it will remind me of the trauma of this one (that's my story and I'm sticking to it . . . and if there is a moral to my woeful tale, it is this: if the math department says that they are giving you a math test, it's going to be a math test).

Persistence and Patience Pay Off (When You're Dealing with Poop)

A few months ago, I rode through some dog-poop and the poop got all wedged in my bike's knobby tires, and I didn't feel like scraping the poop off the tires with a stick, or spraying the poop off with the hose, so I decided to let the poop alone (winter was approaching) because it was cold, so I figured it wouldn't smell, and I knew once I rode my bike enough, the poop would take care of itself and fall off on its own . . . and now -- months later -- my tires are finally poop-free (aside from a few globs of poop on the edge of the front tire, but I'm sure that will work its way off soon enough).

Caloric Categorization

The only healthy snack that satisfies me is a quartered apple with globs of peanut butter on each slice-- but sometimes I pour chocolate chips onto the peanut butter, and then I'm not sure if it's still a healthy snack, or if it has crossed the line into the territory of a "dessert."

Two News Stories People Can Relate To . . .

I'm plugging away at After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead and though I've read more than a few books on this topic, I'm still learning a lot from Alan S. Blinder (did you know that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act probably didn't have much effect on crisis? fascinating, right?) and while understanding the never-ending saga of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of 2008 is close to being a job, not all news stories are so dense and difficult; last week was especially good for engaging and easy news . . .  first there was the "polar vortex," which everyone enjoyed talking about-- I enjoyed all the fun facts: parts o Minnesota are colder than Mars! New Jersey is colder than Antarctica! and Alaska!-- and the other great story (especially if you live in New Jersey) is Bridgegate, and while I don't think Chris Christie is stupid enough to be directly involved in this fiasco, I sure hope he is . . . and everyone I know is rooting for this outcome as well-- it just seems like the act that will define him-- and it's so much easier to understand traffic and revenge, as opposed to economic policy . . . and if you're one of the seven people in America who hasn't seen the John Stewart bit on the topic, check it out.

If I Could Leave You With One Profound Thought . . .

If you like "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" type stuff (men are waffles and women are spaghetti?) then you have to listen to the first act of This American Life Episode 14 (Accidental Documentaries) where you will hear a husband and a wife sending an audio "letter" to their son in medical school -- the tapes were made in 1967, but they were discovered long after the parents died and the son gave Ira Glass permission to use them on the air . . . but if you don't have time for the entire episode, then go twelve minutes in and there is a fantastic Carlin-esque baseball/football type point-to-point comparison of how men and women communicate . . . mom is discussing spirituality, her depression, and how much faith her husband has, and then there are quick cuts to the dad telling corny jokes and talking at length about some weird machine he is building in the basement for the family business . . . though these two are married, they aren't even living in the same universe and then twenty four minutes into it, dad leaves the son with one last "profound" thought, which is priceless (I played these bits for my high school classes and they loved them).