Hooray for Learning! Boo for Humans! Hooray! Boo!

I am reading two books right now, and it's like riding a mental rollercoaster; one is called How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey; it's a breezy, fun and scientific approach to all the counterintuitive things science has learned about memory, and it is full of handy facts about when to review for tests, the importance of testing on recall, how long after learning something you should review the material, and the percentage of time you should spend reading and the percentage of time you should spend recalling if you want to memorize lyrics or a poem; the other book is called The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen, and while the tone of this book is also breezy and it's full of fun facts (some jungle frogs sit on their eggs like chickens!) it is mainly about how humans have done irreversible damage to the planet and we are really in for it in the near future: our soil is almost tapped out, we can't sustain the growing population, there won't be enough protein for the burgeoning middle class, we are in the midst of a great extinction, and the diminishing biodiversity is having all kinds of awful effects on the planet, with less biodiversity, diseases have an easier time spreading, new microorganisms are resistant to nearly every antimicrobial drug we have (and we aren't rapidly developing more) and the oceans are overfished, acidified, and low on oxygen (which is bad for fish but good for the giant Humboldt squid, which can survive in low oxygen zones, and also good for sperm whales-- which like to eat the squid-- and other breath holders such as elephant seals, and while this part of the apocalypse sounds awesome: an ocean full of giant squid and fish, it's still a major loss in biodiversity . . . and while I like calamari, I'm not sure I want to eat giant squid steaks every time I want some protein).

Mea Culpa?

Martin Seligman, who wrote Learned Optimism, asserts that it is mentally healthier to sublimate rather than ruminate-- if you suffer a setback, blame an outside force instead of yourself . . . this is how you avoid depression; I may have taken this to the extreme on Sunday, when I stubbed my toe on the short flight of stairs leading from the study into the kitchen (stubbed it hard, hard enough that I crumpled into a ball) and immediately blamed my wife for the injury, claiming that it was her fault because she "talked to me while I was climbing the stairs" and -- in my throes of pain-- I told her she shouldn't engage me in conversation until I was in front of her and stationary or that it could result in injury . . . I recognize the absurdity of this logic now, but it did make my toe and my ego feel better during the incident-- instead of being a comically injured spaz, I was an indignantly wronged victim.

Governor Christie, Try Cracking One of Those Old-Fashioned Books Of Which You Speak

Governor Christie makes some interesting claims in this video, including the opinion that teachers are "getting paid a full time salary for a part time job" and then he demands that, for the sake of the children, teachers work longer hours-- despite the fact that we are getting paid less every year (because of increased health care "donations" and increased pension payments . . . even though Christie refuses to pay what the state owes to the pension fund) and while he also believes that we should get rid of all those antiquated school books and instead give every kid an Ipad, he should try reading Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher so he can appreciate the productivity of American teachers, who spend far more time in the classroom and teach far more students than the countries that are tops in education (notably Finland and Japan) and while one of my recent goals is to follow politics more closely-- to start, I'm listening to Dan Carlin's podcast Common Sense-- but perhaps this is a bad idea if I'm going to be an effective teacher, as it's hard to teach when your blood is boiling.

Pool Anxiety?

My friend and colleague Kevin recently exhibited what I believe is a new mental disorder-- and not only did I identify this disorder, but I also figured out how to cure it; I'm calling the malady "pool anxiety" but the neurosis does not center around swimming in pools, it is an obsession with pool maintenance, so much maintenance that someone suffering from "pool anxiety" doesn't even find time to swim in his pool, because he is so consumed with maintaining the water clarity, the algal blooms, the filter system, and the chemical constituency and Ph of the water-- Kevin even claims that he possesses a strange pool precognition, a watery clairvoyance . . . he will point out a "cloudy" section of water to his wife, and she won't see anything wrong with the water, but then the next day that particular patch of water will be obviously cloudy, even to a layman . . . so he is somehow hyper-sensitive to these events; I am hoping my new disorder (which actually plagues people other than Kevin, he opened the floodgates on this topic) will make it into the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) someday, along with my simple cure: fill in your pool and join a swim club (I don't think the college kids who test the water chemistry at my pool have any anxiety at all).

This One is For You, Ben Franklin

Fellow English Instructor Kristyna was Appalled at the Lack of Capitalization in her Students' Essays -- her Students Claimed that unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs does not Capitalize Words Automatically and these Students could not be Bothered to hit the Shift Key-- and my Postulation-- that Capitalization was Not Long for the World, was met with Ridicule and Scorn-- but if Ben Franklin were to read and Modern Prose, the Good Inventor would certainly think that the Future had already Eschewed Most Capitalization and He would probably agree with my Hypothesis.

Brains are Very Silly

Every semester, I show my Creative Writing classes the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where the knights discover Joseph of Aramathea's writing on the wall in the Cave of Caerbannog-- and I do this to show the illogic of having a first person narrator who dies at the end of a narrative, because Aramathea carves his last words into the wall: "he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the castle of aaarghgh" (perhaps he was dictating?) but I always show the entire sequence leading to this scene, with the killer rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade and even though I have seen it many, many times (I usually have multiple Creative Writing classes each semester) the rabbit and Brother Maynard's speech before the lobbing of the holy grenade make me laugh every time I watch, which seems strange to me-- I should get inured to the images-- but I'm wondering if something else is at play when we rewatch things, if our brain anticipates the joy from laughing and knows that this thing is associated with laughter, and so we laugh despite knowing exactly what is going to happen, or even perhaps because we know exactly what is going to occur . . . weird but also wonderful.

Just In Time?

When I pulled up to the gym on Tuesday, I saw flashing lights, a fleet of police cars, and an ambulance-- all parked in front of the dollar store . . . obviously something had happened and I had just missed it-- and while part of me wanted to duck into the gym and get on with my workout, another part of me wanted to rubberneck-- and that part of me won out-- so I wandered closer to the flashing lights and asked a youngish dude what happened and he said there was a fight between two women and that it was pretty epic and then he showed me a video of the fight on his phone-- so even though I missed the actual event, I got there just in time to see the video-- but this guy was no cinematographer and there was a glare on the screen so it was hard to see what was going on, but when I tried to bail on watching, he kept urging me to check out the next sequence, and while there were a couple of nice moments-- one girl maced the other and a guy in the background (a boyfriend?) kept saying "rock her! rock that bitch!" and then the fight moved into the dollar store and I could hear objects being thrown into walls (I made a joke to the guy and his girlfriend about how the damage wouldn't be all that expensive) and then the police arrived and got everyone involved to lie on the floor-- but it was tough to watch the altercation on such a tiny screen and I would have preferred a quick verbal summary instead of a rather long and unwatchable video, but once my nosiness got the best of me and I started watching this dude's phone, I entered some kind of compact with him where it was impolite for me to stop watching; perhaps we should give up on trying to get folks to read and write and speak more fluently, and just teach everyone how to perfectly frame a cell-phone movie.

Totally Hypothetical Situation

So a friend of a friend of a friend asked me about a situation-- and he said the situation is completely hypothetical and in no way, shape, or form based on any kind of reality: this friend of a friend of a friend wondered if a person wanted to line his back fence with large rocks, and he found a wonderful pile of large rocks at the park near his house, and most of them were below the tide line of the river . . . and suppose this person also had an old internal frame pack, and he (or she! it could be a she!) didn't mind destroying this pack while hauling the hypothetical rocks back home and suppose, every time this person took the dog for a walk, he went by the large pile and put a few large stones in the pack, until he had mined quite an enormous amount of rocks and put them along the fence, suppose this was the situation, then:

1) what is the legality of taking rocks from the park? . . . especially rocks that mainly reside below the tide line of the river?

2) how much damage could hauling large rocks in a backpack do to this hypothetical person's back and shoulders?

3) how much could the hypothetical rocks improve this hypothetical person's property value?

4) is this hypothetical person crazy?

Dreamland: You've Got to Try This Shit

You might find it ironic that I'm pushing a book about drugs this hard, but Sam Quinones non-fiction tour-de-force Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic is truly addictive . . . you won't be able to put it down, you won't be able to go a day without reading it, and you'll do anything to make some time for it-- if you can't afford it, then I recommend throwing a brick through someone's car window and stealing the change from their ashtray, or perhaps you could "find" some copper pipe and sell it for scrap; the book moves fast, short chapter spiraling through various settings in America and Mexico, and by the end you'll know more than you need about heroin production, heroin distribution, pill mills, the history of pain management, the Oxycontin economy, the gutting of industry in the American heartland, methods of rehabilitation, and methods of narcotic policing (and I'm giving this book Dave's Highest Rating in the Universe-- which is certainly a suspect rating due to my tendency towards hyperbole-- but I guarantee that it's better than all the other "land" things that I love: Methland and Adventureland and even Copland . . . although I do love Copland, especially when a half-deaf Sylvester Stallone portentously shoots the bulls-eye at the carnival) but if you don't have the time to read the book, here are a few of the things I learned:

1) black tar heroin comes from the smallest rural Mexican towns, called rancheros, mainly in the state of Nayarit;

2) nothing is harder to kick than the morphine molecule, and while you are addicted you will be constipated, and when you suffer withdrawal, you will get "ferocious diarrhea";

3) a perfect storm in the '90's kicked off America's mass addiction to opiates: health insurance stopped paying for multi-disciplinary treatments for pain, pharmaceutical companies lobbied to convince physicians that opiate based pain-killers were not addictive, and-- in the name of efficiency-- doctors took on huge caseloads of patients and there was a "defenestration of the physician's authority and clinical experience";

4) if you liked "The Chicken Man" from Breaking Bad, then you'll be glad to know there was a real version (named Polla) who, besides being a wealthy heroin kingpin, worked as a cook at a Mexican restaurant;

5) one of the best ways for a junkie to pay for heroin is with Levi's 501 jeans, which are coveted in the Mexican rancheros-- they are more valuable than cash;

6) it was really hard for addicts to hate the Xalisco boys, who were nothing like the archetypal drug dealer-- they were friendly, sometimes even personable and charming, they always offered "deals" to their users and they delivered, so people didn't have to hang around back alleys, and they never cut the product-- because they were paid on salary . . . the Xalisco boys prided themselves on customer service, they generally avoided violence, and when other folks from the rancheros opened up new "cells," which are like franchises, there would be friendly price-competition, or the cells would use junkies as "guides" and move on to new towns and cities, so they could avoid the gang-warfare that is traditionally associated with drug-dealing;

7) Chimayo, New Mexico is the Lowrider Capital of the World, and it has powerful cherry-red heirloom chiles, but it might be most famous for it's insanely high rate of heroin/opiate addiction, which has gone on for generations;

8) the number of Ohioans dead from drug overdoses between 2003 and 2008 was 50 percent higher than all the U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War;

9) the destigmatization of opiate drugs was based on academic papers without much real evidence (Porter and Jick is the most famous of these) but drug companies were looking for some way to green-light all their new opiate based medication;

10) in a three month period in 2012, eleven percent of Ohioans were prescribed opiates . . . one in every ten people in Ohio is legally on an opiate based medication, and-- because of this-- one of the best places to score heroin is not New York City or Los Angeles, it's Columbus, Ohio . . . and while the book presents a lot of alarming investigation, drug companies are getting the message, and making pain-killers that can't be smoked or snorted, and doctors are prescribing them less, and in Portsmouth, Ohio (where the book begins) while there are still junkies and hookers and dealers, there is also " a confident, muscular culture of recovery . . . a community slowly patching itself."

Dave Enjoys Chick Lit!

There are definitely some emotional womanly feelings in Liane Moriarty's novel The Husband's Secret (and some passages about marriage and friendship, and you have to keep track of a number of names and relationships) but it's totally worth it because Moriarty's plotting is fast-paced and tragically fun, and there's a fantastic sentence every couple of pages: for example, when hyper-organized super-mom/Tupperware saleswoman Cecilia Fitzpatrick learns an incomprehensibly implausible secret about her husband, she realizes "all these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language sitting off to the side in her head, and now she'd opened it and all those crisp crunchy words were lovely and fresh, ready to be used."

Two Questions, No Answers . . .

Two questions I have been pondering:

1) does possessing a smart-phone make this generation of youngsters more adventurous with travel and food? . . . my wife and I went to Atlantic City for a one night vacation, and having a smart-phone made it easy to get off the beaten path and not get lost (we ate lunch at Wingcraft and watched soccer, and then later on, for dinner, we had appetizers and several kinds of raw oysters at the bar at Dock's Oyster House and then walked through Bally's Wild West Casino, which is a bizarre hodge-podge of architectural mayhem, including a completely inappropriate beer pong section, then wandered into the heart of Asbury for Dominican food at La Finca-- the lemon chicken was excellent and the mofongo was tasty but salty-- and then next morning we had an incredible breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall called Brittany Cafe down on Ventnor. . . we covered an insane amount of ground walking to these places, but we never got lost and they were all worth it, the smart-phone made it easy; I will be polling the youngsters to see if my hypothesis is true;

2) while we were at Brittanyy Cafe, we watched Serena Williams destroy Lucie Safarova (despite the fact that she had the flu all week) and I wondered what level of men's player Williams could beat; apparently when she was 16 she played Karsten Braasch (who was ranked 203rd) and he beat her 6-1 (he also beat her sister Venus) so the question is: what level male player could Williams beat? . . . could she beat a top ranked male college player? . . . could she beat a male club pro? could she beat a decently ranked male pro with a sprained ankle?

Kids Need to Learn Stuff

Recently, I've been a font of wisdom for the young people: I coined a new aphorism about poison ivy for my oldest son-- leaves of three, do not pee-- and I gave some invaluable advice to a student of mine, who stashed his very expensive philosophy textbook on a cart in the corner of the classroom, so he wouldn't have to carry it around in his knapsack . . . I told him: never hide something valuable on a thing with wheels, hide it in something stationary . . . because the cart is gone, someone wheeled it away-- as people are wont to do with carts-- and I've asked around, but no one seems to know who wheeled the cart away or where it is-- so this lesson is going to cost him some cash; my most committed readers will recognize that this lesson about not putting valuable things atop things with wheels is the seminal lesson from this blog, the thing from which all other sentences sprung (and those committed readers might also remember that I was far less prolix in those days).

The Universe Likes to Shoot Spicy Stuff into My Left Eye

Monday at lunch, when I opened a container of salsa to put on my taco salad, some of the salsa shot into my left eye-- but I scoffed at the pain, because it was nothing compared to this terrible incident-- but then later in the day, just after I had left Wawa, the universe punished me for scoffing at the pain, and when I opened a bag of jalapeno flavored chips, a piece of spicy chip flew into the very same left eye . . . and that hurt a bit more than the salsa, but I still scoffed at the pain and drove back to school with one eye, and so I'm sure the universe is extremely angry at my insolence-- and I'm also sure the universe will take this out on my left eye-- so don't be surprised if the next time you see me, I'm wearing an eye-patch.

Not Quite Eternal Recurrence

By June, I really start to feel like Phil in Groundhog Day . . . but (fortunately) the school year ends whether I perfect my attitude towards mankind or not (and it's looking like "not," as I'm just getting grouchier and grouchier . . . but this is good for the seniors, as it makes for a clean break without reminiscence or nostalgia; on a much happier note, my wife and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage yesterday, and that's a merry-go-round that I don't want to get off).

World's Most Talented Dad!

Initially, you might be impressed by my younger son's ability to simultaneously hula hoop and catch/throw a football, but after a moment of reflection you'll realize the real talent belongs to me, and is illustrated by the perfection of my tosses, which are both accurate and well-timed.

Horticultural Aphorism Revision

We've all heard "leaves of three, let it be," but my new and improved adage about poison ivy is even more vital-- my son Alex learned the hard way and he's taking Prednisone because he neglected to follow this simple rule: "leaves of three, do NOT pee!"

Sometimes Parenting Gets Weird

Usually, when we go somewhere as a family, I drive (because I can't do much else in the car or I get motion sickness) and my wife tells the children to stops punching each other, but Friday night, my son Ian-- an inveterate cheater-- illegally punched my son Alex during a game of "yellow car/punch buggy" . . . I wish I could explain the exact infraction, but I can't make sense of the byzantine rules of this never-ending game (Catherine also plays and there is a score and something crazy happens when you see a yellow Hummer or a purple car); anyway, apparently because Ian cheated, Alex was allowed to punch him twice in the shoulder, but Ian wouldn't let him and so Catherine, in very un-mother-like fashion, let Ian have it: "Stop being a baby and let him punch you! Give him your shoulder!" and I supported her position, but Ian still refused and when Alex got to close, Ian kicked him in the mouth, and now Ian is banned from the game, which is fine by me, because I was going to ban everyone from playing it, but maybe Catherine and Alex can do it in a civilized fashion.

Bucket List: 1) Make a Bucket List

One of my students-- a senior-- recommended to the class that they make a "bucket list," and she reminded them that it didn't have to consist of extraordinary accomplishments and events (summit Mount Everest, win a Nobel prize, circumnavigate the globe, etc.) but could instead be fairly mundane (see the sun rise over the ocean before attending school) and then I polled the class and it turned out that about half the students had "bucket lists" of things they wanted to accomplish; I was in the no-bucket list group and I'm wondering if I should be concerned about this-- maybe I need to focus on some specific goals in order to achieve more in my life; I'd like to finish recording my album and I have some vague ideas for a sci-fi novel, perhaps if I put them on a bucket-list, then I'll work harder on them . . . but two things does not a list make, so I'll be taking suggestions for other things to put on this hypothetical list and then I will post it and then I will accomplish everything on the list . . . or maybe I won't (I did accomplish one specific goal a few years ago: I ate more tacos).

Kids Ask the Darndest Damned Things About the Letter "D"

The dinner topic was WWII (not my choice), and my boys decided that things would have turned out better if the Germans had played some RISK before trying to conquer the world again (because they would have realized how difficult it is to achieve world domination, and they would have given up before they started) and then Alex asked me one of those questions that I thought I knew the answer to, but immediately realized I didn't: "What does the 'D' in D-Day stand for?" and while I gave them a few guesses that make sense, if you read this article, you'll learn that the "D" was essentially a variable.

Don't Worry About That . . . Worry About This

Though the recent Amtrak derailment was an awful and tragic event, it's not something you should worry about . . . in fact, there's a school of thought that say that anything that you hear about on the news isn't something that you should worry about-- abductions and drive-by shootings and gas explosions and lead poisoning and looting and bear attacks-- because if it's in the news, then it is probably rare and unusual, and thus news . . . so what you need to worry about the things that aren't on the news-- like gum disease and kidney stones-- and it's much more difficult to worry about things that aren't on the news, so perhaps it's best not to worry about anything at all.