Time and Tranquility

Brett McKay had Laura Vanderkam on his Art of Manliness podcast and she had some good advice about achieving tranquility with time management . . . some of these things I do and some I could improve upon:

1. have a set bedtime . . . I crush at this-- I try to stay awake until 9 PM each, but I often struggle to get past 8:45 PM;

2. move around during the workday . . . I'm lucky enough to have a job that isn't sedentary, but I also work in a walk-- perhaps even a backwards walk-- or a run or some push-ups or something during my free time in the school day;

3. have one small and one big adventure each week . . . this generally happens but not always-- I'm going to be more mindful of breaking the routine-- and my wife loves adventures (although not right now, the new COVID omicron booster absolutely crushed her);

4. three times a week makes something a habit-- not seven times a week-- so I won't get down on myself if I don't practice my guitar or work on my podcast every single day;

5. reverse the order of easier and more difficult "leisure" tasks-- this is one I'm really going to try to implement-- I'm going to read first or practice my guitar first, THEN play online chess or do the Quordle of the NYT Spelling Bee . . . because more often than not, if you do the easier, more mindless thing first, you'll never get to the task that needs more brainpower;

6. batch small tasks instead of procrastinating and spreading them out-- do a bunch in a row and then stop;

7. plan your week on Friday . . . that way when Monday rolls around you'll be ready to do the hard work and you won't have to plan ahead-- I do a good job of this with my lesson plans and such, but I could also do this for weekends and planning big and little adventures.

Work . . . Boo

We had an in-service teacher education day today, and while it was quite productive, I imagine this is what having an actual job is like: meetings, normal hours, lots of discussions with smart adults, some collaboration and turn-keying and such . . . definitely mind-numbing and soul-crushing-- I'll be glad to be back to the chaos of teenagers tomorrow.

Horse Shit

A new episode of my podcast We Defy Augury is up and streaming . . . the episode is called "All the (not so) Pretty Horses" and it focuses on a brilliant book by Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule, which is about a down-and-out horse track in West Virginia in the early 1970s; the book captures the language, the characters, the consciousness, the cons and the gritty feel of a run-down horse track . . . the podcast also features cameos from Michael Scott and Mike the glue factory guy.

Go Rutgers! From a Comfortable Distance . . .

I now believe the preferred method of going to a Rutgers football game is to bike over; attend a tailgate; eat, drink, etcetera; and then bike home after the tailgate-- without entering the game-- this was much more relaxing than our last adventure.

Hazy Friday

Although I love Mr. Pi' sushi, I am starting to have my doubts about the tap beer-- for the second time, after having two Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Things, I was rewarded the next day with a headache and some stomach issues . . . and, of course, as my punishment for drinking beer on a weeknight, I had to cover PE class today-- with the new block schedule, 82 minutes of high school kids playing "badminton" is a recipe for a headache.

Fuck Lantern Flies!

The maple tree in my backyard seems to be generating a never-ending supply of lantern flies-- every afternoon, I go out and squish dozens of them with a long-handled broom and the next day there they are again; apparently-- according to my dog-park buddy Bill-- they crawl up from the ground and go up the tree to try and lay eggs, which turn into scaly egg masses, and the lantern flies bore a hole into the tree under the egg mass, so the sap of the tree can feed the eggs and young lantern flies-- which will eventually damage the tree (plus the sugary lantern fly excretions, which land on the plants below the infested tree, attract aphids and black moldy gunk) and nothing seems to eat these critters (aside from praying mantises, and there aren't enough praying mantises to eliminate the never-ending supply of lantern flies) so if I can't figure out some way to quell these creatures, I'm going to have to cut this tree down and replace it with an evergreen (even though it's the primary shade tree in our backyard-- fuck these things!)

Joy

 A new season of Derry Girls is out on Netflix!

Fuck Capitol One!

Capitol One double charged us a week ago-- my wife paid $3823 two days early so she could sort out our budget and then Capitol One automatically took another $3823 two days later-- their auto-pay extracted that amount again, even though our balance was zero-- so that our bill was now negative three thousand and some dollars-- and when we called to rectify this, their customer service was atrocious-- NOBODY could do anything . . . apparently they can take your money but they can't give it back-- and the fucking customer service people just read and read from their script and no one could bump you up to anyone with actual power . . . we were finally promised that after an "investigation" they would return the money they stole from us-- at first they said they would return it in the form of a check, but we were like: "you fucking took the money digitally so you can return it digitally" so the rep said he would do that ASAP-- but he was a liar-- and then a week went by and we received nothing so I called again this Saturday-- and now we were in worse shape because our credit card statement no longer reflected that we were three thousand in the negative . . . but we didn't have the money-- and I must point out that we were lucky enough to have enough money to pay our Rutgers bill, as this double-charge was enough money to cripple some families financially-- and the lady couldn't even see that there was some weird payment correction pending and she also had no supervisor working she could refer us to-- so after much yelling she finally figured out that Capitol One had sent us a letter-- a letter!-- informing us that they would soon be sending us a check-- a fucking check, though they stole our money digitally-- and this is obviously because some percentage of people never get the check and never follow up, so Capitol One makes even more money by bilking people . . . so it's going to take a couple weeks (I hope) to get our money back that they stole by double billing us, though they extracted it digitally, so as soon as we get the money we'll be cancelling our account and I implore everyone to cancel their Capitol One accounts and forward this story and tell your friends and family to FUCK CAPITOL ONE because they are crooks with atrocious customer service.

Feeling Old

I covered for the special education teacher in an environmental science class today and when I walked in I assumed the skinny, masked child behind the desk was a student-- but he turned out to be the teacher, a rather diffident brand-new hire who looked no older than my younger son . . . and then one of my other students said, "I was telling my mom how you needed to use a phone cord as a belt because your pants were falling down and my mom's friend said that you taught her-- her name is Julia and her daughter is a freshman"-- so that's what's coming down the pike, children of the kids I taught in my early years . . . yikes.

Beers, Bars, and Stumps

This weekend was much mellower than last weekend, but Cat and I did manage to go out after the senior night game on Friday-- and though we were very tired, the scene at the bar at Mr. Pi's sushi place woke us up-- first we were chatted up by a very energetic lesbian couple-- Stacey and Nerissa-- and we found out that they were older than they looked (50 and 46 no kids will do that . . . and for Nerissa, black doesn't crack) and Nerissa played basketball at St. Peters back in the day and knew folks that my brother played with at North Brunswick-- Wayne Cruz and Daryl Banks and such-- and then it was more small world game, Nerissa runs the after school program at the school where my wife works, so they will run into each other again-- and there was also a book club happening and there were some younger soccer moms that we knew, and the Deatz family wandered in-- they were eating dinner on the restaurant side, and then Sleepy Dan ambled in to complete the bar scene . . . and the bartender was a trip-- she's planning all sorts of jazz and karoake and footabll specials-- and we talked to one of the chefs, a Japanese guy who was very hungover for the previous night's sake tasting; Saturday I actually went grocery shopping and succeeded in getting everything on the list and then we went to Flounder Brewing and the Bellemara distillery next door-- really the best beer and drinks around (but a little pricey) and Sunday morning Cat and I played pickleball and then I watched the Giants while she worked on curriculum for some program (and Ian worked, yardwork and he gave a tennis lesson) and we got sandwiches from Sapore Deli in Middlesex after pickleball-- this place is HIGHLY recommended-- I got a broccoli rabe, hot pepper and chicken cutlet sandwich, ridiculous amount of food for 13 bucks-- it's two meals-- and then I successfully killed and bagged a stump from a dead tree (see the trophy photo above).

Beginning of the End, Sort Of

Last night was "senior night" for the HP Boys Soccer Team-- Catherine, my mother and I went out on the field with Ian-- who gave my mother a bouquet of flowers-- while my dad looked on from the fence on his scooter (it would have been difficult for him to navigate the turf on that thing) and then Highland Park cruised to a 5-0 victory over Timothy Christian in the first round of the county tournament; little Michael Volpert was the hero, scoring all five goals; Ian gave him a nice header assist for the first goal and Ian started at left-back instead of wing so that all the seniors could start the game-- it was fun watching him play there (the same position Alex played last year) and while there are still a few regular season games left, another county game to play, and the state tournament, this is the beginning of the end of watching high school soccer with a kid on the field (although the stands were packed last night, with plenty of HP fans whose kids have graduated, so I'll probably be watching games in the future, but it won't be the same of course).

Gender Stuff

We read Jia Tolentino's "Athleisure, barre, and kale: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman" in College Writing class-- and the descriptions of barre class, while mildly erotic, are also depicted as training that helps "you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony," similar to the hyper-accelerated modernly optimized feminine lifestyle-- which led to a class discussion about why most women-- even if they played sports in school-- don't participate in pick-up basketball and soccer and other joyful sporting activities and instead subject themselves to yoga-pilates on a reformer (as my friend Cunningham does) and perhaps it is because-- as evidenced in the contrast between Tolentino and our other text, "The Naked Citadel," that men haze each other while women haze themselves.

There Are Two Sides to Every Conflict About a Rubber Doorstopper

Earlier in the week, my friend and colleague Terry was sitting morosely in the English Office (as he is wont to do, we don't call him Eeyore for nothing) and he said to me:

"Liz just called me a dick, in front of our homeroom!"

I asked him why this happened and he said: 

"We've got this stupid rubber doorstopper and I couldn't get it to work because you have to fold it over or something and after she showed me how to do it, I said 'I still don't like it,' just joking around and she blew up at me!"

I said that was odd and maybe she was upset about something else-- she was teaching an extra class and had a lot of different preps and maybe she was just in a bad mood-- and then for the sake of Denise, who was also in the office and hates all men, I said: 

"You know, not everyone is as calm and rational as us in these kind of situations" 

and then I went on my merry way

the next day, Liz said to me, "I don't want you taking Terry's side before you hear the entire story" and so I gave her a recap of what Terry said happened and then-- because she has a dramatic bent-- Liz acted out what happened-- or what she thinks happened-- and it was a bit more compelling than Terry's story . . . apparently Terry is the extra teacher in the homeroom and he doesn't contribute much to running the show-- and Liz claims he was hunched over the doorstopper, fooling with it and muttering and complaining for like five minutes-- and she showed him how it worked but he continued to complain so she told him to "fuck off" . . . and she did admit she got pretty pissed-- which can certainly happen to Liz, who generally exudes school spirit and positivity, but when she's confronted with enough masculine fatalism she can lose it-- longtime fans of this sentence may remember when Liz kicked me out of the department because I did not want to "dress like a holiday" . . . and now, coincidentally, I share homeroom with Haim, the guy who prevented me from redeeming myself in that debacle . . . anyway, something happened between Terry and Liz in homeroom and the catalyst was a rubber doorstopper . . . the rest is shrouded in a profane mystery.

The Orchard . . . You Know, Behind the Tennis Courts

Today the sophomores and juniors had to take the PSAT (interminable and the script that admin made for us was riddled with typos and errors-- it was actually difficult to read-- you had to correct spelling, verb tense, and actual wrong wordage on the fly) so we had a half day, and to escape traffic quickly I brought my bike-- right when the test ended, I ran out of the building and jumped onto it and rode over to the used book sale at the mall and bought some books . . . when I returned I saw one of my friends from the History Department walking to his car and stopped my bike and entered into a very strange conversation:

"Hey what's going on?"

"I just rode over to the used book sale at the mall, got some good cheap books . . . now I'm headed over to the orchard to bike the trails"

"The orchard? I don't live around here . . ."

"The orchard . . . behind the tennis courts? where the track team runs?"

"Cranbury Road is behind the tennis courts"

"Not exactly . . . you go over a bridge, there's a large piece of land, that used to be an orchard-- with trails-- it's high school property"

"I've never been back there"

"Behind the tennis courts? There's a bridge over a little stream?"

"I don't know man"

"How long have you worked here! Twenty years?"

"Twenty years"

"Well . . . there's an orchard-- I used to walk across it to the old Blockbuster if I needed a movie for class"

"Alright, sounds cool, maybe I'll eat my lunch back there"

"Watch out for ticks"

and then I went biking in the orchard, a place I often run, walk, and bike . . . wondering how he made it twenty years without hearing about the orchard, a large chunk of multi-use land on our high school campus . . . weird . . . I wonder what stuff I don't know about our high school.

Gross Stuff Part II

In the comments yesterday, Zman wondered if cleaning out the wood under my deck would eliminate cave crickets-- and my answer is yes, I think it will help-- they like to live under rotting wood; this afternoon I also cleaned out the bike shed, and found dozens of cave crickets in there, under a piece of spare plywood-- so I took the doors off the bike shed, cleared out the spare pieces of wood, smashed a bunch of crickets with a shovel, sprayed some insecticidal soap, and put down some bug killing powder-- both in the shed and under the deck-- so we'll see how that works, but I'm still annoyed by some out of reach lantern flies in my maple tree-- maybe I'll try to get to them today, I think I can hit them from the deck with either long distance wasp spray or some Neem oil from our pump sprayer . . . I'm kind of ready for the first frost, which should decimate all these pests.

Gross Stuff, Indigenous, Exotic, and Otherwise

I cleaned out all the wood under our deck today-- there were pieces of old fencing and rotting chunks of timber from past projects and all kinds of other crap that was under there before we put lattice up-- including a deflated basketball full of water and one hard seltzer can that must have been tossed in there by one of the kid-- and this stuff was a haven for cave crickets so hopefully this will cut the population down; I also killed bunches of lantern flies on our maple trees-- gross-- and then we watched The Dark Crystal:Age of Resistance, which is an awesome show and highly recommended, but also quite gory and gross.

Too Many Things

I usually don't do too many events in a short span of time because I start to lose my mind, but this weekend was an exception:

--Thursday night I chaperoned the East Brunswick Homecoming Dance . . . 1200 kids! fascinating anthropological experience to see so many children dressed up, many dancing, others trying simply to walk without falling in high heels;

--Friday I went to a Highland Park soccer game (until half-time) and then Dom's tailgate and then a Rutgers football game;

--Saturday I went to the gym, then bought a tree, then attended the Highland Park soccer game, then planted the tree, then biked over to the Boyd Park Food Truck Festival (and had a jerk chicken sandwich) then attended a party at Sleepy Dan's house;

--Sunday I played pick-up soccer, then watched the Giants beat Green Bay, then went over to the Rutgers women's soccer game, picked up Alex at his dorm, and then went to my parents for dinner . . . so six sporting events and five social events . . . and now I have to work all week?

Sports Potpourri

Catherine and I inhaled a lot of sports in the past two days-- with a mixed bag of results-- yesterday we stopped at the HP soccer game, just in time, to see Ian score a wild back-heel flick volley goal off a long shot . . . and this was an easy 6-0 win so we left at half-time to go to the Rutgers/Nebraska game-- we parked at the edge of town and decided to walk over (we had subs and drinks and we were meeting our friend Dom at the Greek Church lot to tailgate) but someone told us the entrance to the park was flooded, so we hightailed it through the train trestle tunnel (which has no walking path) and then walked on the muddy rutted path parallel to River Road-- and Catherine wiped out in the mud and banged up her knee (before even consuming any alcohol!) and then we realized that the walk along River Road to the church lot was not only miserable and muddy but also really long (3 miles?) and we were walking next to all the game day traffic-- but we made it to the tailgate, cleaned up Catherine's knee, had some food and drinks (Cat made our drinks in ziplock bags, so we could dispose of everything once we were done drinking!) and then walked back to the stadium and met my buddy Haim and his wife (who gave us the tickets) and watched an absolutely awful football game-- a million penalties and TV timeouts, just slow as fuck-- but Rutgers was in it so we stayed until the end, only to see them throw an interception on their last drive, down by one point-- blech-- and then because we stayed so late, the traffic was insane, so we walked back to the car . . . after a nearly four hour game (and I was only wearing a t-shirt because it was so hot walking over, but then it got really cold-- I've been to two Rutgers games this season and that might be it for me, football is fun to watch on TV, when you can do other stuff, but it's pretty drawn out in person (although it was fun to talk to all the Nebraska folk at the game . . . I only know one thing about Nebraska-- that the Ashfall Fossil Beds are one of the greatest paleontological sites in the world, just astounding-- so I brought them up and the guy sitting next to us said he lived an hour south of them, so I had something to chat about-- then this morning I went over to see HP play Timothy Christian and this was a wild and exciting game, which HP finally won 4-3 . . . and Ian scored a great goal, he received a through ball, took a couple dribbles, and then finished nice and early-- before the defense converged on him, and shot a rocket past the big keeper from the eighteen-- he should have scored a couple other but the keeper made a great fingertip save on one headed to the upper corner and he was about to finish a follow and got clobbered (no foul) so Ian is having quite a season-- he scored the game winner the other day against Wardlaw-Hartridge-- and most importantly, he's playing a lot of minutes and his speed and defensive hustle look really good, and-- knock on wood, because he's only 130 pounds-- he hasn't gotten hurt.

 

Huberman: Nice Guy, Smart Guy, But He Ruins Everything!

Andrew Huberman has a doctorate in neuroscience and is a professor at Stanford, and his podcast, Huberman Lab, is comprehensive, exhaustively researched, intelligent, and enlightening . . . but the last two episodes I listened to have been pretty brutal-- in a very nice, non-judgmental way;

1) the main takeaway in the two hour long episode "What Alcohol Does To Your Body, Brain & Health" is that more than FIVE servings of alcohol a week is really bad for your brain, mood, sleep, liver, longevity and telomeres . . . there's so much more in there but that's what I remember-- and for a guy who enjoys beer, it's a tough constraint to follow;

2) the big takeaways from "The Effects of Cannabis (Marijuana) on the Brain & Body" are:

-- people under the age of twenty-five should NOT use cannabis because of well documented decrease and thinning in gray matter-- that's the good stuff stuff in your brain, especially in the prefrontal cortex -- and an increase in future incidence of schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, psychosis, depression, and anxiety;

--pregnant women should never use cannabis;

--while there are some pros for people over 25 who use cannabis-- reduced anxiety, pain relief, increased focus and creativity-- if you use cannabis more than twice a week, then you lose these benefits, build a tolerance, reverse the anxiety reduction, screw up some receptors in your brain, and increase likelihood of mental illness down the line;

--smoking cannabis, or any drug, has a whole host of other negative health benefits that aren't even associated with the drug . . . and the same goes for vaping;

so while cannabis might be "better" than drinking alcohol, Huberman doesn't think this makes a particular good case for chronic use of the drug-- because that comes with its own costs.

Playing the Tomorrow Game

 

I recently finished Sudhir Venkatesh's new book The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them-- and, like his other stuff, this is required reading; you may know Venkatesh from the first Freakonomics book-- he details the crack cocaine economy in South Chicago from a close and personal perspective (and he turns this sociological adventure into an entire book . . . Gang Leader for a Day) and his new book is equal to the detailed, anecdotal, and economic reporting of his first-- but this is a tighter story and perhaps more relatable to anyone who has or works with teenage children-- it's a typical high school story of bullying, honor, friendship, and money-- but with the added shadow that is always looming South Chicago: gangs, drugs, and guns . . . and all the revelations about these elements of the inner city will surprise you; my latest episode of We Defy Augury is devoted to thoughts about this book . . . and Cobra Kai . . . check it out (and give it a good rating an Apple music if you have time, that makes a big difference . . . thanks!)