Dave Makes a Radical Change and the Consensus is: Genius!

Last Friday I made a radical kitchen move that took twelve years to discover: I moved all of our mismatched tupperware-type plastic containers and lids from the lazy-susan corner cabinet (where they caused me undue stress and frustration because I had to bend over and spin the lazy-susan in order to find what I was looking for and I could never tell which tops matched which containers, a visual problem that no amount of practice could improve) to the big, deep, and easily accessible pots and pans drawer by the stove, and I put the pots and lids and colanders on the lazy-susan, where they are easy to see and grab and even my wife and children agreed that this radical change was brilliant, because now you get a comfortable, birds-eye view of the plastic containers, so you can size up the lids and match them to the proper container . . . and I will sadly concede that I might not have an idea this good for the rest of my days.

A Story With No Moral (But Plenty of Splattering)

Alex punched Ian in the back when he came up the stairs because Ian was being annoying about how much money he had made doing gardening work for my wife, so I explained to Alex that it was a free country and Ian could say what he liked about how much money he made, and Alex could answer him back or be the bigger person and choose to ignore him, but he couldn't hit him; then I got in the shower and heard some screaming but decided I would let them figure it out-- there's nothing more ridiculous than a wet, angry dad in a towel trying to discipline his children-- and when I finally got downstairs to hear the story, I noticed there was red crap all over the cabinet and ceiling and this was because Ian was cutting some strawberries and Alex wanted some but Ian told him to wait until he was done cutting them-- he wasn't keen to give him any because Alex had recently punched him in the back-- and so Alex put Ian in a headlock but then remembered that he wasn't supposed to get physical with his younger brother, so to express his rage in a nonviolent matter, he threw some strawberries at the cabinet and they splattered onto the ceiling-- but, though he admitted this was very stupid, he pointed out that it was better than hitting his brother, which was probably true (and while I was annoyed with him for a moment, once I heard my wife yelling at him for throwing strawberries instead of punching his brother, I had to laugh . . . and though we tried to make him clean up the mess, he wasn't tall enough to reach the splatter . . . so maybe it would be easier for everyone if instead of sublimating, Alex just went back to punching Ian).

Comedy = Women to the Rescue/ Tragedy = Just Men

If you're dismayed by the state of the state, I highly recommend you read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, a conservative classic from 1987 that open-minded liberals and conservatives will enjoy because of the tone, it's quaintly intellectual (and quite crotchety and moralistic) by today's inanely polarized realpolitik standards of political discourse; Bloom is not afraid to actually say something and then back it up logically . . . and even his dated attack on the raw power of rock music will ring true to those old enough to remember when rock music meant something; I'll do a full review once I finish, but I was struck by his analysis of sex roles and Shakespeare-- Bloom pragmatically discusses the costs of feminism, of making both sexes the same, of stripping them of their mysticism and their courtship contrasts-- we know the benefits of feminism, of course: more brains in the economy and higher education; more empowered women; women that don't have to depend on men; women that can pursue a career as ambitiously as they can motherhood and childbirth; women that can participate fully in politics-- not just behind the scenes-- but Bloom also describes what it lost when we blend these worlds and these sex roles, and he uses Shakespeare to help; he explains that the difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy is that in the comedies, when the men are inadequate at restoring a civilized and peaceful order to things, the women dress as men, leave their feminine world, sort things, and then return to their feminine roles-- but with a sense of delicious irony in that these roles are simply there to make civilization operate and sometimes they need to be broken by clever women that can play the part of men better than men can (Portia from The Merchant of Venice is the perfect example) but once the sexes are mixed together and uniform, whether as soldiers or lawyers or pilots or statesmen, then there is no civilized feminine world to come to the rescue (Hillary Clinton is the perfect example-- she needed some savvy woman to edit her "basket of deplorables" speech) and this is incredibly evident in Hamlet . . . if Ophelia was a bit zanier and clever, instead of depressed and broken, she might have disguised herself as a man, befriended Hamlet and Horatio, exacted a less violent revenge on her meddling dad, and mopped the rottenness right out of Castle Elsinore . . . but woe is me (and her) as that was not to be . . . and now that I've expressed myself fully, I'll get back to cleaning the sink.

Yelling After a Quiet Place

Another rainy day, and my wife and I had no desire to endure the crass humor of Deadpool 2, so instead we took the kids to see A Quiet Place; I certainly recommend the movie for family viewing: it will keep you on the edge of your seat and it's also artfully done (although there are a few plot holes that gape as wide as the aliens viscous yawning earholes) but my family's favorite part of the movie was that I missed the fact that one of the characters is deaf-- I thought the Abbot gang learned sign language during the course of this quiet apocalypse and missed the fact that not only is the character in the movie deaf, but Millicent Simmonds, the actress, is deaf in real life as well; so there was a whole lot of yelling at me after the film ended, when they realized I missed this very important plot point. . . I attribute this to the fact that due to the silent nature of this story, the audience is required to be unusually quiet for the duration, and I like to talk during movies: ask lots of questions, make clever jokes, inquire about motive and plot, and generally interact with the folks around me . . . this keeps me from spacing out and missing significant stuff (although I did whisper to my son Ian a few times about the nail in the staircase, which someone really needed to pound flat) but the fact that I missed this apparently most evident piece of the puzzle gave my family so much pleasure that I'm glad it happened (though I really need to watch the movie again now that know this).

Thanks, CIA!

Jazz is the abstract expressionist version of music (and, improbably, the CIA helped promote this primarily theoretical art form which mainly grooves and meditates on the shapes and intervals and sequences of raw sound and rhythm, rather than the more traditional narrative arc framed by verses and choruses).

Testing 1,2,3 . . . 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11

We did our Faculty Follies soundcheck today and then, while we were up on stage and everything was miked up through the PA and the soundboard, we were able to run through our six song set several times, and I learned that anytime you see and hear a live band in an auditorium or large hall and it goes off without a hitch, there was a lot of preparation to get that to happen.

Giving a F*ck About Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson's breezy, philosophical and surprisingly profound millennial self-help guide The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life might be less surprising if you're a cynical Generation X'er like me: life is pain, so don't try to avoid it-- just focus and prioritize on problems you can solve or at least take a crack at . . . avoid distractions, lower the bar, figure out what you truly value and stop comparing yourself to everyone else on social media, stop obsessing about all the things and instead give a fuck about a few things that you truly deem important and forget the rest . . . I've built a happy life on these precepts-- I give a fuck about spending time with my wife and kids and playing guitar/recording music/podcasts and reading books and writing this blog and coaching soccer and doing as many sports as I can with my kids and colleagues and trying to get together with friends to drink beer-- and though these things often stress me out and beat up my body and mind, I know that I value social interaction and physical and mental exercise more than I do money and expensive items and political power and this will always be the case: Manson has just learned this-- he recognizes that after a peripatetic tour of the world that included 55 different countries, that visiting a few countries opens your mind and changes your perspective, but the 51st and 52nd country don't add much to the experience . . . and sometimes lack of choice and commitment is the best choice of all, because certain things can only be experienced when you live in the same place for five years or ten years; anyway, the book is full of crude language and entertaining anecdotes, and it's such a quick read that you won't even realizing you're examining your values and your philosophy of life until you've turned the last page (and it might be a sneaky way to get your children to read something deep-- I just gave it to my son Alex and he read 25 pages and came downstairs all excited about how much he likes it-- especially the story of Charles Bukowski).

Lyrics We Wrote

Today, I was obsessed with finding some song parody lyrics from the last Faculty Follies house band performance three years previous ("It's Fun to Guess on the P.S.A.T.) but I searched all my different Google drives and looked at Word files in various locations, hard and cloud-like, but I had no luck . . . and then a co-worker thought back three years ago, remembered that out boss introduced me to Evernote, and I checked there and found the file: digital mystery solved (but I worry how many platforms I will go through and how much digital detritus will collect int he next ten years . . . and then there's the passwords, all those ever-shifting passwords).

Playception!

So everyone with even a modicum of education knows that there is a play-within-a-play at the center of Shakespeare's Hamlet-- The Murder of Gonzago-- and some might remember that Hamlet has asked the players to insert into this play-within-a-play a "speech of some dozen or sixteen lines" which Hamlet has written, with the express intention to emulate his father's murder so as to spook his Uncle Claudius . . . so Hamlet has inserted a smaller play into the play-within-the-play, so essentially a play-within-the-play-within-the-play and tomorrow, when we discuss this scene in class, I've written a sixteen line play about this play-within-the-play-within-the-play, which I will premier while we are discussing Hamlet's inserted lines, and thus my piece will be a play-within-the-play-within-the-play-within-the-play . . . I told the kids that some people like this sort of meta-drama (myself included) and everyone else can go watch Macbeth.

Warning: Pedantry Ahead

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing (especially when it resides in my head) so I'm warning you ahead of time: I just learned that when you say a process has a "steep learning curve" you actually mean that the process is easy to learn-- because as you move along the x-axis of time, you zoom up the steep y-axis of learning proficiency, and before you know it, you can make brownies . . . if you want to say that something is difficult to learn, you say it has a "long and shallow learning curve," thus as you move along the x-axis of time, you barely go up at all on the y-axis of learning-- ten years later, you're middling fair at the oboe-- so I'm begging you, please don't say the phrase "steep learning curve" anywhere within my earshot, because my inner pedant is lying in wait, ready to pounce and explain this silliness, and, as much as I'd like to, I don't think I can control the impulse (although I've been doing great with the whole "lie" and "lay" fiasco, I heard several people screw it up royally on Friday and didn't say a word . . . but this "learning curve" thing is too rich to pass up).

Brotherly Love/Fatherly Rage

I guest-coached my older son Alex's travel soccer game today and they were short-handed (short-footed?) and so my younger son Ian had to guest-play on the team to give them 11 players; we were in North Plainfield, playing a scrappy Hispanic team and there was only one ref instead of the usual three, and this ref pretty much took a laissez faire approach to calling the game (except offsides, he called a goal back on a play that was clearly not offsides) and the other team took advantage of this-- they elbowed, grabbed, tossed, and two-handed pushed our players often (frequently after the play was over) and when our sweeper was grabbed by the shoulder and chucked and then the ref called a penalty kick on our team, I ran out onto the field to complain and he immediately red-carded me and sent me packing . . . I then had to get phone updates and watch the game from afar and it just got worse and worse, one of our players got elbowed so hard it bruised his ribs, and the opposing coach screamed at him to get up and insisted he was faking the injury and delaying the game-- at this point, our team was ahead 2 - 1 but the other team had 18 players and our 11 were exhausted and banged up, and the attack was pretty much relentless, corner kick after corner kick, cross after cross, and then my younger son Ian got two-handed shoved to the ground by an opposing player, and his older brother Alex ran to his rescue and punched the kid in the stomach, and a general melee erupted, the opposing coach ran onto the field and may have pushed one of our folks (a high school senior that was running the lines, a sibling to our sweeper) and, luckily, the ref actually listened to my younger son when he explained what happened and give the kid who pushed him down a yellow card . . . and moments later, the ref blew the long whistle to signal the end of the game, an epic and epically ugly win for the Eagles, with no subs and a lot of insanity (and I will say that after the game, the North Plainfield parents that I talked to were quite nice and quick to forgive me for getting a red card-- and apparently they apologized to our parents for some of the rough play on the part of their players-- and they certainly understood just how high emotions run during a soccer game, but I'm going to really try to calm down and take some deep breaths-- God only knows if I'll even be able to coach my own team tomorrow, or if I'll be suspended or something).

Good (Enough) Friday

In the end, this will be the day that it all happened ( if we're talking about 6 AM basketball, 7:30 AM folder review with the Rutgers guy, the teaching of  Hamlet . . . including some phenomenal acting by yours truly, a summative review with my boss, book club, an Uber ride into New Brunswick for more socializing, and a brisk walk back to Highland Park . . . I will be the first to admit that this is far too much of everything for one Friday and I'm glad to be back in the confines of my safe American home).

The First Rule of Book Club

I finished the classic Ursula Le Guin science-fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven earlier this week but I can't discuss my thoughts about it until Book Club tomorrow afternoon . . . because the first (and only) rule of Book Club is that you don't talk about the Book Club Book until Book Club.

A Significant Amount

What percentage of the passenger seat in my car is Jalapeno Chip seasoning?

Easily Distracted = Easily Amused

I had trouble writing my sentence today because of all the ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong.

Not My Purview

Sunday morning, I got on my bike and rode across town to the 5K Volunteer Meeting; received my Volunteer t-shirt and little cardboard STOP sign and yellow police tape; was informed that I was in no way deputized as a sheriff or officer of the law and if there was any trouble at my intersection to call the police and that I should NOT attempt to actually stop and arrest any bull-headed drivers who made their way onto the course and then I made my way to 7th and Park to put up my police tape and man my post; I was stationed at a secluded intersection about three quarters of the way through the course and I only had to blockade one street with police tape as the other side of the street bordered on a stream; then I sipped my coffee and chatted with the family across the way, who were out with the kids waiting for the runners and in a few minutes they came through, sporadically at first, and then en masse and I cheered on the folks I knew (including my wife!) and had no trouble with traffic . . . until things started petering out and a woman with a thick accent (Russian?) wanted to know when she could pull her car out of her driveway because she had to get to an appointment and I told her to ask the police over at the next intersection and she said she had asked them and they said that she couldn't leave until all the people in the race came through-- she would know because there was a police vehicle bringing up the rear . . . and I told the woman that if she came my way, I could lift the police tape and she could shoot up 7th but she was going to get stopped at the other end, on Abbot, because the runners were looping around and I could see why she was getting annoyed because we were getting down to the end and people were walking and pushing strollers, one guy was wearing a dinosaur suit, and there seemed to be no end to it and so she said to me, "These people are not running . . . can you tell them to go faster? To start running?" and I informed her that I didn't think I had the authority to enforce any kind of pace on the runners and her answer to that was, "This running . . . I don't even understand it" and then she got in her car, pulled out of her driveway and came my way, against the grain of the race; the police at 8th and Park yelled at me to stop her, so I waved my little cardboard STOP sign at her but she drove right by me and made it two blocks, to the 5th and Park intersection and the police pulled her over there and gave her the business and she had to wait there until the bitter end . . . I'm glad no one was injured but I'm also glad that I saw some action and had a chance to use my signage, though it was to no avail.

The Grand Budapest Florida Hotel Project

The Florida Project is streaming for free on Amazon Prime right now and it's a sad and magical movie, a trashy, rundown, one-step-away-from-homeless version of The Grand Budapest Hotel . . . a six year old girl (Moonee) and her urchin-like friends have weird, slightly dangerous, and almost completely unmonitored adventures in the impoverished shadow of the Magic Kingdom, while Moonee's very young mom-- a tattooed recently unemployed exotic dancer-- tries to make ends meet; Willem Dafoe plays the hotel manager of the Magic Castle, a cheap hotel that mainly serves as way-station for folks that can't afford better housing, and his job is impossible-- especially when actual tourists show up and want to stay at the place; the movie's rhythm is the beat of a child's brain on summer vacation: every day is epic, every day is a chance to meet new people and do new things, then routines are established, and all of this is oblivious to the adult world, which is proceeding at a different, harsher pace . . . I loved it: ten ice cream cones out of ten.

Hey Man, Stop Blowin' Up My White Font Spot

I was covering a physics class last week and a nerdy kid offered me some valuable information on how to cheat the word count on an assignment (and word count is one of the stipulations of the college writing class I teach, their synthesis essays have to be at least 1500 words) and his method is brilliant:

1) you check the word count on the assignment and you're a bit short but you've got nothing else to say;

2) so you type a random sentence-- which contains no spelling mistakes-- then copy/paste this sentence enough times that you've met the word count requirement for the assignment;

3) then shrink these random copied sentences a bit so they don't take up much space and they are difficult to find;

4) then select these extra random sentences and change the font color to white . . . so the teacher can't see them but your word count now meets the requirements (and the other students were NOT happy that this kid told me about this method, so obviously kids have been doing this).

Dave Comes in First Place for First World Problems

My outdoor ping-pong table is arriving for pick-up at Sears tomorrow . . . one day after our Cuatro de Mayo Happy Hour (I guess we'll have to make do with corn-hole).

Catherine Goes Rogue

I arrived home from work today at 3 PM and noticed that my wife's car was parked in front of the house; at first I imagined the worst (my father underwent heart surgery yesterday-- successfully-- but I figured something might have gone horribly wrong) but I didn't walk in to bad news . . . I walked in to no news at all, and no sign of my wife; then I figured she got sick and took a half day, so I went upstairs to see if she was sleeping-- but no Catherine-- so then I figured the car was broken, but I went outside and the CRV turned over . . . so I called her school to ask if she was there and the secretary said she was in her classroom teaching . . . and that she had walked to school (a little over two miles) in order to get some exercise, a possibility I hadn't considered because of the unseasonable heat (and she walked home as well: impressive, but I told her to leave a note the next time it's 92 degrees she decides to go walkabout).