The Cheez-it Chompspiracy
I'm not a big fan of orange foods (aside from oranges, which I love) and while I'll occasionally munch on a carrot or sample a sweet potato, purely because I know they are salubrious, what I really truly and passionately despise are orange processed foods-- especially foods with weird orange dust that coat your fingers, such as Doritos and Cheese Doodles . . . my children know they can't eat those two orange foods anywhere in my vicinity, without the consequence of receiving a nutritional diatribe; one of the orange foods that I am trying to (unhappily) tolerate are Cheez-its . . . they're totally disgusting and barely qualify as victuals but my kids like them and as long as they don't take them out of the kitchen or eat an ungodly amount of them, I try to withhold my ire . . . but the classroom is a different place entirely, a place of intelligence and education, so when I noticed a charming, athletic, and intelligent student of mine chomping away at some Cheez-its, I immediately launched into a processed food lecture . . . and then I noticed a girl behind her was also snacking away . . . and she had a bag of Cheez-its and when I asked if this was planned, yet another female student lifted her own bag, the third bag of Cheez-its in a fifteen foot vicinity and these students insisted that they brought the snacks independently, and that there was no Cheez-it conspiracy between the three of them, and they were good students, honors students, so I believed them . . . and I'd like to add that I really like cantaloupe, especially if there's a slice of prosciutto wrapped around it.
Republicans: Mad as Hell (Just The Way They Like It)
The Weeds provided a great explanation for the growing political polarization in our whacked-out nation with their episode "Republicans control everything, and they're mad as hell" . . . Republicans should be content and proud of their victories and marching forward on various conservative reforms with a coordinated consensus, but instead they are angry about everything-- the caravan, abortion, immigrants, environmental protections, the rights of consumers, football players expressing their first amendment rights, conservative voices being silenced on college campuses-- and the reason for this anger may be that even though they've galvanized their political party (through gerrymandering and the fact that rural areas are overrepresented mathematically in our voting system) they have no traction in the media and culture . . . despite, Republican political power, the media and cultural hubs of NYC and coastal California will not bend the knee; coastal elites and the entertainment industry (aside form Kanye) ridicule and lampoon Trump and his party; meanwhile, Millennials-- even conservative Millennials-- are less racist, more tolerant of gay marriage and transgender people, more open to immigration than older conservatives, and they are more willing to support socialist policies that might actually help young people navigate healthcare, college, and the labor market . . . many college campuses are more liberal than ever and the Republicans just can't seem to get anyone intellectual to respect them and listen to them . . . so they remain angry and embittered, despite the fact that they are running the country and could have a great impact (or perhaps will have a great impact in deregulating all sorts of business, banking, and environment policy) but instead of having an open dialogue about these issues, Republicans will keep pushing wedge issues like the caravan and the wall and abortion, so they can get mad as hell and lament the fact that the culture won't reflect their policies (conservatives may also be angrier in temperament due to psychological reasons, because most conservatives are concerned more about "purity, loyalty, and authority" than most liberals).
Thus Endeth the Week
Parent/teacher conferences, a couple of away games, a puking player on the bur ride to South Amboy, forgotten socks by my son at South Amboy (so he had to share socks) and a bleeding player on the way home from South Amboy, Pub Night, a hard fought loss this afternoon, dinner with my family for my brother's birthday, and a bunch of other stuff . . . an epic week, so I'm rooting for this blustery Nor'easter to cancel all the weekend stuff.
Female Hillbilly Escapes the Heartland
Sarah Smarsh's Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a more poetic, even harder luck version of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and while at times I got mired in the details I still think this is a worthwhile and important read, especially for effete liberal middle class folk like myself that can barely understand the way 60 million rural people live in our vast and economically imbalanced shitshow of a country; the image that becomes a metaphor for Smarsh's youth is when she goes to pet some half-feral kittens, though she is worried that her scent will repel the mother cat from her young: "I reached out and patted a furry head . . . the head rolled away from the small body, leaving a track of blood on the concrete floor," and her dad explains that "a possum or a fox got 'em" and gnawed all the heads off the cute little kittens; while in suburbia, we care for and protect our puppies and kittens, on the farm in Kansas, that's not the case . . . Smarsh has a true "free range" youth and she was lucky to survive it and move into the middle class; while there are moments of unadulterated fun and her parents are not stereotypical rednecks, nor are they stereotypical conservatives, she is often surrounded by drunks and addiction, violence and transience, and she has a hard time-- despite her great intelligence-- finding her educational groove; the foibles and flaws of the folks surrounding her could generally have been softened by money, but there was no money to be found and so Smarsh realizes that "I was living in an environment full of what society had recently discovered was dangerous: the smoke, the fried food, the unbuckled seat belts . . . but I didn't know the half of it: sugary diets that led to cavities, noxious glue in the walls of cheap houses, nitrates from farm runoff in our drinking water, insecticides on the wind that shimmered down from crop-dusting airplanes" and-- without the ability to move, seek healthcare or help-- that these problems have blossomed into "obesity, diabetes, meta-amphetamine addiction, and opioids overprescribed by the same doctors who were supposed to help," and Smarsh grapples with the fact, that due to shame, racism, and pride, people where she lived voted against their best interests and backed Reagan and the Republicans, who were interested in gutting environmental protections, ending the possibility of small family farms, and erasing the promise of affordable healthcare and rural school funding, and anything else that would help the people in her impoverished predicament; America-- especially the Republican party-- has shamed the poor for being poor, despite the fact that we've created a system that has incredible benefits for the winners and incredible costs for the losers, even if the losers work hard every day, so hard that their bodies disintegrate and they have no way of healing themselves; Smarsh points out that there wasn't stereotypical sexist behavior in this world; women suffered violence from drunken and broken men, but they also made the big family decisions, left when they felt like it was time to leave, did work that was just as difficult as the men, and partied as hard as the dudes . . . it's a good book and beautifully written, but it's a tough pill to swallow and the easy answer is for us economically stable folks on the coasts is to say: "they voted for this and they got what they voted for," but these policies aren't good for any of us-- there by the Grace of God goes I-- and the newest one is how the Trump administration has undervalued the social cost of carbon emissions . . . absurd, awful, and will hurt those that live close to the land and don't have the option to up and leave it more than it will hurt the rest of us.
A+ in Chest Hair
Yesterday we had a half day of school with the students and then had to return at 5:30 PM for the dreaded parent/teacher conference night . . . before I left for work for the second time, I threw on the same clothes I had worn in the morning: khaki pants and a festive red plaid button down shirt, I then drove back to EBHS, watched some of the soccer game-- the weather was warm and beautiful-- and then headed to my classroom to chat with parents; after six or seven conferences, I had a break, so I went to the bathroom and when I looked in the mirror, I noted that my button down shirt was unbuttoned beyond my normal level (and my normal level of unbuttoning is already in the "casual" zone, as not only do I have tenure but I also have a thick neck) but tonight I was unbuttoned to a place most people would call "club" and I had shown these parents some serious chest hair . . . and it's well past beach season, so it was pretty unkempt.
A+ in Stealing
I had a bit of a Willy Loman moment yesterday when my son Ian opened his book bag and produced one of the soccer balls I instructed him to steal from gym class, and I then commended him for his initiative . . . I had just finished teaching the play and quickly remembered the moment when Willy condoned Biff's "borrowing" of the football from the locker-room and then later wondered why Biff ran off with Bill Oliver's fountain pen; I'd like to think this situation is slightly different but you will have to be the judge; last week, my soccer team told me that the gym class has been using three balls that belong to our travel soccer team-- we have practice at night on the school turf and sometimes we leave a ball or two behind, and these balls are then impressed into service for the school (despite the fact that they have our team name and the assistant coach's name on them) and so I told my team that we have to get those balls back, as the ball bag is rather depleted . . . and, of course, Ian was able to smuggle one out of class and bring it back to its rightful home . . . it was probably a bad way to go about getting the balls back, especially because in the past Ian has been involved in some sketchy situations at school, but I'm still proud of his moxie (and glad to have another ball in the bag).
Like Father (Unlike Father)
Alex took his sweatshirt off at the restaurant last night and I was sitting on the same side of the table as him and I said, "Look at this!" and then I took off my fleece and-- surprise!-- we we wearing the exact same powder blue "Moab Utah" t-shirt, but Alex wasn't as excited as I was . . . in fact, he put his sweatshirt back on.
A Good Day to Fly a Kite, Not Chip a Ball Over the Flat Four
Wind: the hot sauce of weather (we had to play on the waterfront in Elizabeth today and while the temperature was a deceptive 47 degrees, the high winds really spiced things up).
Less Drama, Crisper Salads
Winter skipped the whole "coming" thing: it's here (especially in the English Office, which lost heat this week because a boiler pipe went . . . it was so fantastically cold inside that I was bringing random teachers in the hallway in just to feel it . . . our boss had to leave because she couldn't bear being there for an extended time, and we felt really stupid complaining it was too cold because we spent so much time last month complaining that it was so hot).
Nothing Like a Captive Audience (When You're Feeling Your Oats)
My first period creative writing class is comprised of eleven girls and one boy (and me) and this one boy wrote a wonderful personification piece (inspired by Sylvia Plath's "Mirror" and this gem from the New Yorker) from the perspective of a diamond engagement ring that was rejected once, stored away for a few years, and then got a second chance and found success . . . after the author read it aloud, I heard a few grumbles from the ladies, so I asked them-- knowing it was a loaded question-- if anyone had a problem with a recycled diamond ring, and then the festivities began . . . because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned with a secondhand ring; apparently, you should buy a "new" diamond specifically for the new person you have in mind (despite the fact that this "new" diamond is already 1 to 3.5 billion years old) and this led to a lot of good-natured early morning debate, and the ladies had to endure my various rants about strip-mining, the DeBeers conspiracy, the overhang, blood diamonds, rampant materialism, and the influence of the media on a saturated, overpriced market . . . in the end, we all agreed that it was a fun way to start the day, though I had little or no success convincing any of these women to forego engagement rings (and then, as an added bonus, a senior in my comp class said that people were getting sick because the weather dropped forty degrees in two days, so I got to call her "grandma" and lecture the class about why we actually get sick more when it's cold (it's mainly because viruses survive better in low humidity . . . although I also found some reasons that contradict my lecture-- perhaps when our feet are cold then our immune system doesn't work as well . . . so I'll have to apologize tomorrow for calling her "grandma," as perhaps the whole old-time "don't go outside with your hair wet" faction is right).
I Need to Stop Losing My Temper (But My Kids Also Need to Stop Doing Stupid Shit)
Catherine was at a cooking class last night, so I was in charge of dinner-- but she kindly ran to Costco and bought us two rotisserie chickens, so I didn't have a whole lot to prepare; I made some green beans and heated up some store-bought mashed potatoes (yuck) and put one of the rotisserie chickens on a baking sheet in the oven, and a few minutes later, once it was hot, I took it out of the oven and told the kids to come-and-get-it . . . meanwhile, as the kids started spooning out green beans and potatoes, I carried the other rotisserie chicken down to the extra fridge in the basement, not thinking that anything could go wrong during my momentary absence, but when I got back upstairs, my fourteen year old son Alex was carving the rotisserie chicken with a big knife-- and this was not the problem . . . his other hand was the problem-- as he was holding the chicken in place with, of all things, our big red fabric oven mitt, and once he carved some meat, he grabbed it with the thumb and paw of the mitt, and this mitt was absolutely filthy-- it's an oven mitt, for Christ's sake-- so it was filthy before he started fondling the chicken with it and now it was moist and filthy and soaked with rotisserie chicken fat and this simultaneously grossed me out and pissed me off, causing me to launch into a profanity laced tirade about common sense and culinary hygiene, after which I showed him how to use a fork . . . and then I apologized and told him I shouldn't have lost my temper over something so ridiculous, and he apologized for being really stupid and we all agreed that the oven mitt is NOT for handling food.
Hey Stacey, A Good Podcast is Better Than a Bad Book
Jonathan Goldstein's podcast Heavyweight is by turns poignant, acerbic, mock-epic and-- of course-- funny . . . it generally has a very different tone than Malcolm Gladwell's often epically profound podcast Revisionist History, but each series has an episode that tackles the fickle and arbitrary nature of human memory; Gladwell's take on this theme is "Free Brian Williams,"a heavy tale of an NBC news anchor who told a war story that wasn't true and the consequences this false memory had on his career and reputation . . . Goldstein's version is a comic masterpiece, "#16 Rob" is about character actor Rob Corddry's attempt to convince his family that when he was a kid, he broke his arm (or did he?) and it's worth saving for a long drive with the kids . . . it's exactly an hour long and worth every minute (and I would recommend this podcast to my stupid friend Stacey, except that she's given up listening to podcasts and instead started reading/listening to books during the time she used to listen to podcasts-- she made this resolution because she started listening to a bunch of stupid podcasts where comedians waxed philosophical about how important comedy is and she wanted to break the habit, but I think she threw out the baby with the bathwater-- of course it's admirable that she's reading so much and I'll begrudgingly admit that she's compiled a huge list of books she conquered this year-- but still, listening to a good podcast is better than a reading bad book . . . and "Rob" is a really good podcast, certainly better than the last book I read).
Don't Blame Me . . . I Was Doing Laundry
I would like to point out, for the record, that I finished Christina Dalcher's dystopian feminist novel Vox in a laundromat . . . because the first half of this book seems designed to make women really angry at white men, for oppressing and subjugating them-- so I found it both ironic and appropriate that I was doing the kind of work that men in the novel freed themselves from when they shackled their women's voice boxes . . . women in this Fundamentalist Christian/Extra-Trumpian near future of this novel are forced to wear word counters on their wrists, which only allow them 100 words a day-- if they speak over the limit, then they get shocks of increasing severity . . . this book is the opposite of The Power in scope, quality, and theme; The Power is true sci-fi, the world is the main character and it is comprehensively evoked by Naomi Alderman, while Vox is a bit half-baked, the Pure movement version of Christianity and the surrounding corrupt politicians more of a caricature than a possibility-- although perhaps that's what people said about the Taliabn when they were just getting started-- and the larger themes of the book get lost in the plot, big ideas about how society can make children become monsters, how communication is the cornerstone of our society, and how Socratic dialogue between all people propels knowledge and civilization forward are pushed to the wayside as the story becomes a laser-focused, plot driven thriller (where, ironically, in the end, a bunch of men come to the rescue . . . it's a bit out of nowhere) and the science-fiction is lost in a world of chivralic fantasy . . . I finished because I wanted to know what happened-- which isn't saying much-- and while the premise had some potential, if you're looking for a dystopian feminist manifesto, try the aforementioned book The Power or the classic The Handmaid's Tale . . . or even the wacky Charlotte Perkins Gilman fin de siecle utopian novel Herland (I'd also like to point out that out of the several dozen people I saw come through the laundromat, I was the only one with a book . . . everyone else was either watching the weather on the TV or poking at their phones).
Capsule Reviews
I almost forgot to write a sentence today because Cat and I got so wrapped up in the Amazon series Forever . . . I can't tell you about it without ruining things (unlike the fantastic Netflix show I watched with my kids earlier in the evening, Adam Ruins Everything . . . a show in which Adam everything everything about everything, ruining these things but also enlightening you) but my advice is this: watch the first three episodes of Forever in one sitting and then decide if you're going to proceed.
It Would Be Thirteen Years
Here's some more house stuff that you might eventually learn, but-- unfortunately-- by the time you learn it, you won't get too many future chances to put your knowledge to good use . . . but perhaps some lucky homeowner will stumble upon this post before it's too late: if your contractor installs the stacked washer/dryer laundry center and then builds the bathroom cabinets, then thirteen years later, when the stacked washer/dryer laundry center breaks and you need to have it removed so a new one can be installed, there's no guarantee that the stacked washer/dryer laundry center will fit between the sink and the cabinets and then you'll have to rip out the cabinets, reschedule the installation, and make another visit to the laundromat.
Thanks Weather Gods!
The weather gods have responded to my plea for some decent fall weather, so I'm going to go outside and enjoy it; I'll write something profound once it starts raining again (and I have a feeling my sentences would be a lot shorter and a lot more vacuous if I lived in San Diego).
Dave Appeals to the Weather Gods
Hey Weather Gods . . . I know you're listening . . . I'm on a sentence-writing-strike until we get some fall weather up in here!
Touch Typing = Coffee with Sugar and Creamer
The unemployment rate is low right now, but there are problems with the numbers-- they don't accurately represent all the people-- and it's a lot of people-- who have dropped out of the job market entirely: these people aren't retired, they aren't employed, and they aren't seeking employment . . . and they are mainly men; a recent episode of Hidden Brain attempts to explain one factor of this phenomenon . . . some of the sectors of the economy that are booming are regarded as "women's work," and men are having a hard time moving into these jobs; the episode-- entitled "Man Up"-- focuses on nursing, and how the men who have made the transition often need to compensate with extra-manliness because (unlike femininity) manhood is "hard to earn and easy to lose"; I never thought about this all that much until I listened to this episode, but I certainly work in a field that could be considered "women's work"-- I teach Creative Writing class!-- and I'm used to working side-by-side with women, and-- more often than not-- I've had a woman as my boss; I always thought of this as a perk of my job-- we have lots of smart, charming, attractive women in my department, but I also might compensate about certain things to accentuate my manliness: whenever my buddy Bob types anything-- he's a fantastic and flamboyant touch typist-- I give him a hard time for excelling at something so feminine, and whenever my friend Terry puts sugar and creamer in his coffee, I tell him that a man drinks his coffee black . . .on the whole though, it's fun to work with a bunch of women and it's easy to be the funniest person in the room (because women aren't all that funny) and if there's ever a heavy object that needs lifting or a tight jar lid that needs unscrewing, I'm at the ready.
Dave Tries (Awkwardly and Unsuccessfully) to Use an Interrobang‽
The interrobang is a very specific unit of punctuation, designed for use at the end of question that is both exclamatory and rhetorical; I attempted to use one the other night but-- perhaps because of lack of practice-- I did not meet with any success; my wife and I had just rolled in from a night of comedy at the State Theater and I was very thirsty-- it's always hot and dry in that theater-- and so I took a quick of slug of the first bottle of seltzer I found, which happened to be "mint lime" flavor, a flavor which i find detestable, and so I yelled, "WHO BOUGHT ALL THIS MINT FLAVORED SELTZER‽" and as soon as this exclamatory (and rhetorical) question left my lips, I knew I was in trouble . . . because my wife does the grocery shopping and so she bought all the mint flavored seltzer; apparently, she likes the various types of mint flavored seltzer that appeared in our kitchen recently (and the boys and I hadn't gotten around to gently breaking the news that we did NOT like this new-fangled mint flavored seltzer) and so she let me have it-- both for my exclamatory and rhetorical tone and for the fact that I never do the grocery shopping and therefore, I shouldn't be complaining about the products that miraculously materialize in our kitchen for our consumption, and I deserved all this vitriol and more (and then I found a great use for this seltzer that I formerly found detestable: a splash of it goes perfectly with mezcal on the rocks).
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