Severance is so Fringe!

Warning!-- there will be some spoilers in this sentence concerning Fringe . . . which aired from 2008 to 2013, so honestly, it's probably past the spoiler statute of limitations, but there will also be some Severance spoilers-- and if you're not watching Severance, get with it-- anyway, in both shows there is an oddball sci-fi love triangle: the main character-- a guy-- has sex for the first time with a bizarre, malevolent version of his love interest and thinks it is the actual love interest, not a doppelganger-- in Severance, Mark thinks he's boinking Helly in the tent, but he's actually boinking her cold and evil "outie" Helena and in Fringe, Peter thinks he's banging fellow Fringe team member Olivia, but he's actually banging the other Olivia, known as Fauxlivia, from the Other Side . . . and in both cases, the original love interests are very upset that their evil doppelganger's jumped the line and made love with their love interest before they could-- it's a weird, awkward, and extremely bizarre lover's quarrel . . . so there's that, plus Peter Bishop's dad, Walter Bishop-- the Australian actor John Noble-- shows up in Severance-- he's Burt's "outie" lover Fields.

Speed is Relative

Perhaps my new sprint-work out is having some sort of salubrious effect on my fitness-- because for a couple weeks now, twice a week I've been running four sets, 30 seconds each, where I run as fast as I can (without hurting myself . . . and I got my son Ian to accompany me on Sunday, which made me push myself a bit harder . . . although he was still much faster than me) because today at morning basketball, which was an up-and-back shitshow, I took off after a defensive rebound and received a long looping fast-break pass, that flew over the top of the last defender, and I caught it on the fly and converted the lay-up . . . the first time I've scored like that in a long time.

What the Fuck is Wrong with a Mini-Symbol?

So I learned a lesson this morning: it's best not to walk into the English Office and ask a bunch of surly, Monday-morning teachers for some ideas about literary motifs-- for whatever reason, explaining what a "motif" is can get very heated amongst the English teachers . . . and apparently they hate the term I invented: "mini-symbol" and my entire definition: "some repeated-- so more than one-- images or elements or mini-symbols that add up to a theme"-- they all find the term "mini-symbol" vague and offensive, although no one was willing to give me a concise and precise working definition-- aside from Stacey, who gave me a definition over the phone when she called me from attendance duty to remind me to post my attendance and I posed the question to her-- but aside from her, mainly they just wanted to rail against my definition . . . my buddy Cunningham told me "I know what it is in my heart" but would not give me any specifics (aside from the fact that she said another teacher, Jansen, who is generally beloved because he's actually a soft-spoken nice intelligent guy-- so lame-- had a much smarter definition . . . which she could not supply because she did not remember it) but I think the term "mini-symbol" is fine-- a restaurant can't have a Mexican theme unless there's a bunch of mini-symbols that create the theme-- one sombrero does not a Mexican restaurant make . . . you need some Day of the Dead skulls and some cacti and perhaps a wooden parrot and a Mexican flag and some mariachi music and some maracas and a chalkboard advertising fresh tamales and some bold colors and tile floors, etcetera . . . and this pattern of mini-symbols adds up to the theme!

Pathetic (and I mean pathetic) Fallacy

A dark pall has fallen over the land this morning, a grungy, gray, and glum gloominess . . . clouds and rain and mud and rot and decay-- and this would be fitting, if the pathetic fallacy was not a literary conceit, an artistic delusion-- but, alas, the weather does not care about my mood, although this morning it is, coincidentally of course, mirroring the contents of my soul: last night, for one brief moment, after Florida beat Auburn, I was in pole position to win the BIG March Madness Pool . . . the 25$ entry, 150 person pool that pays out nearly all the proceeds to the winner-- all I needed was Duke to win over Houston-- and then I would be be the top pool member with Florida as the winner and it would all come down to Monday night-- I was so excited, so happy to have made it this far in, and sure that Duke's high-powered offense would overcome Houston's slow paced style of play . . . and it looked like that was the case, Duke had a 14 point lead in the second half-- and thank God I fell asleep because if I had to watch the catastrophic meltdown and Duke squander a 9 point lead with three minutes to play, I would have maxed out my ticker and had some kind of coronary event-- so at least I was fast alseep when that bullshit happened (although I watched it this morning) and when I awoke deep into the night and checked my phone for the score, that is when the rains came, both inside my soul and outside on my roof . . . so close, yet so pathetic.

THIS is My Secret Purpose

Up until last night, I thought my secret purpose was to see a fairly obscure actor/actress on TV and say to my wife "I totally know that guy/chick" and then struggle to remember their name or what movie or show we previously saw this actor/actress in and then use my phone to track down their name and the roles they played-- and usually my hunch is right and I celebrate my facial recognition acumen-- but my wife is also very annoyed that I'm doing this instead of watching what we're watching-- especially if I pause the show to do my research-- but now I know my secret ability is not to identify faces, it's to identify diners . . . because I am 100% in recognizing diners on a TV show, whilst with actors/actresses I'm probably more around 80 . . . but last night, while we were watching season two of the show Severance, and Mark met his sister at Pip's and they showed the outside of the diner and the mountainous backdrop and I said to my wife "that's the Phoenicia diner!" and then I looked it up and "Pip's" is the Phoenicia Diner, a wonderful place to eat in the Catskills.

 

Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig johnson

The only thing better than a Craig Johnson Longmire mystery with all the usual fixin's-- the vast and desolate landscape of Wyoming, a well-plotted police procedural, some emotional stuff about Longmire's family, some Native American lore and legend, a moment of deus ex Henry Standing Bear, and some mystical Native American visions-- is a Craig Johnson Longmire mystery with all the usual fixin's plus not one but TWO prehistoric creatures . . . one species that qualifies as a living fossil, with 90 million years of staying power, and the other that is legendary in the fossil record; Danny Long Elk is found floating face down in a farm pond filled with snapping turtles, who have done some damage to the dead body AND a paleontologist discovers a complete tyrannasaurus rex skeleton on his property-- which is a very valuable find-- and also a legal conundrum because the find is on land that belongs to the Cheyenne nation . . . and if the plot of Dry Bones plot sounds enticing, then you should also read Michael Connelly's City of Bones, which features the La Brea Tar Pits and perhaps the first human murder on record (I'm a sucker for mysteries with some forensic paleontology thrown in for good measure).

Sophomores are Sophomoric

As we trudge along towards this year's (very late) Spring Break, my sophomores grow more and more unruly and annoying . . . they can barely concentrate, even during a quiz-- which led me to insert questions like these amidst the actual comprehension questions on Shirley Jackson's masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

2. When you are finished with this quiz, you should:

1. Turn and chat with your neighbor about the answers

2. Make strange faces at people

3. Sit silently until the entire class is finished

4. Poke someone

4. You should take AP English because:

1. You genuinely enjoy reading and analyzing literature

2. Your friends are taking it

3. It looks good for college admissions

4. Your secret crush is in the class

9. Draw a picture of the Blackwood house. This is not worth any points, but simply to occupy you and prevent you from being obnoxious and annoying while the rest of the class finishes the quiz.

and, oddly, this strategy worked and they were much better behaved during the quiz today than they were last class-- when I had to deliver a profanity-laced diatribe to get them to stop pestering each other while some students finished the quiz . . . now mind you, a profanity-laced tirade does work, but it's exhausting-- so this was a more efficient strategy and I will be putting "behavior reminder questions" and random word jumbles and picture prompts (that are not worth any points) on all their quizzes in the future.

Money, It's a Gas: Squandering Economic Victories

My new episode of We Defy Augury is a rather epic meditation on wealth and its consequences, at both the human and national scale; my thoughts and theories are (loosely) based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner's novel The Long Island Compromise and Andrew Bacevich's political critique The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory . . .

Special Guests: Tana French, Pat Martino, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Ayn Rand, Bret Easton Ellis, Gordon Gekko, Noam Chomsky, Ross Perot, and Miley Cyrus.

A Whale of a Prank

Today in my Grade 10 Honors English class, I distributed copies of Moby Dick-- which I found mouldering away on a high shelf in the book room-- and then counted the days of Spring Break on my fingers and did some long division on the board: eleven divided by 822 . . . the days of Spring Break divided by the number to pages in this great behemoth of a novel and I arrived at 74 pages a day . . . but I told them that would be the easy part of their Spring Break assignment-- the hard part would be the vocabulary in the enovel, which is erudite, recondite, and archaic-- and I told them I was halfway through and already the vocab list was over 150 words, and they would be quizzed on those words (and the entirety of the novel)on the day we returned from break . . . and then a couple kids started laughing and the rest of the class realized that I was April fooling them . . . but I did convince a couple of kids to actually take the novel and give it a shot-- I promised them the opening hundred pages would not disappoint, but then they might want to "skip a bit, brother" and make their way to the final sequence-- and perhaps this reverse psychology might work, the joke assignment might be more appealing than an authentic, graded task-- one kid said, "Better this book sits on my shelf than on a shelf in some closet."

Mainly Lame Day Off

No school for me today because of Eid al-fitr-- my wife had no school as well but she's on a lady's long weekend in Savannah, so I decided to optimize all my terrible shitty chores into one day: I did some lesson planning (I'm underwater) and our taxes (we owe a shitload) and went to Costco (costly trip, but on the bright side, it wasn't particularly crowded) and cleaned up the house, then I took a break and went to the gym and shot baskets and lifted weights and played some pickleball-- but now I'm in the home stretch, cleaning the bathrooms and then, finally, I need to shave, shower and do the netipot-- allergy season has arrived . . . and THEN I'm going to lie on the couch and read my Longmire mystery.

Pickleball Initiates the Severance Procedure?

During these troubled times, certain subjects are hard to bring up in social settings because of the controversy and awkwardness these topics engender-- for instance, I play a lot of pickleball with my friends Ann and Craig but we are NOT allowed to bring up pickleball in mixed company because everyone else gets annoyed, so Ann refers to it as "the game that shall not be named" and we do our best to keep our pickleball gossip on the DL . . . it's also hard to discuss current TV shows because of the general fragmentation of media-- no one is watching the same show at the same time and so you don't want to spoil anything, or talk about a show that no one has seen-- I truly miss Fridays at work the day after a new Seinfeld aired on Thursday night . . . there was something for everyone to discuss-- anyway, my wife is away in Savannah and so I hitched a ride to the brewery with Ann and Craig yesterday, so during the car ride, we were able to talk about pickleball and a TV show without being chastised-- we have all been watching Severance (but we had to curtail the conversation once we got to Flounder because we were meeting people) and then, at the end of the ride, Ann articulated her theory that synthesizes pickleball and Severance . . . she said that playing pickleball with all these various groups of people we've met, is like going to work in Severance . . . it's kind of wonderful, you just show up, you have these fleeting relationships with these people, but you really don't care that much about them because they're not part of you're "outie" life-- or that's not exactly true, your pickleball self cares about them quite a bit during the session and you see them quite often, yet you know nothing about their childhoods or outside lives and you don't think about them during your outie life and they don't think about you, you only know if they have a good backhand or fast hands at the net-- there's really no time or space to chat, it's not like golf-- it's a fast-paced game with lots of switching partners-- and then once the session is over, you barely remember what happened-- that's the nature of the game . . . it's not soccer or basketball where you might remember two critical plays, instead you hit the ball a zillion times, and you often felt like a hero and you also often felt like an idiot, so it all evens out and you remember nothing except it was a time-- but there are glitches in the severance, of course, because after Ann revealed her theory during the car ride, we saw a pickleball guy at the brewery!-- and we had a brief but awkward conversation about when and where we would next be playing pickleball and then he wandered away and we did not pursue further interaction, for fear of reprisal from Lumon.

Spring: Time to Shed Some Clothes (and Some Body Fat)

As usual, with the end of winter comes the annual "it's time to shed a few pounds and get in shape" portion of the year-- my wife and I are going to stop eating dessert after dinner while watching TV . . . which was perfectly acceptable behavior this winter because it was dark and cold and bleak-- but now the dark-times are over and it's time to shed the fat-- and my wife listened to some lady on a podcast (who might be an orthopedist? I would ask her, but she's in Savannah on a ladies' weekend) and this lady doctor on the podcast said it's all about various types of movement and that during the course of each week you should:

1) do four 45-minute walks-- you don't need to do crazy amounts of cardio;

2) lift weights twice a week but lift heavier than you might normally lift . . . 3-5 sets of weight you can put up 4-6 times;

3) twice a week, do four repetitions where you run "as fast as you can" for 30 seconds, then let your heart return to normal and do it again-- so four sets of these each session for a total of eight sprints a week;

and I like this routine as I can work this stuff in around pickleball, basketball, and soccer, but I did the fast running on Wednesday, at the park, and while it was fun and not all that hard while I was doing it, it was a longer sprint than I've run in a while-- full court basketball requires sprints but they are three or four second sprints-- same with indoor soccer-- and on Thursday and Friday my right quad was occasionally cramping up, maybe every eleventh step-- which made for some humorour walking around-- but my leg recovered and I felt great at pickleball this morning . . . I did the heavy lifting Thursday and my shoulder is a bit sore, but again, I survived at pickleball today, although my shoulder started to hurt when I was hitting into the wind, there was a stiff breeze today, and you had to whale the ball . . . so we will see how this new routine goes-- my guess is I will either get injured soon and be a total disaster or I won't get injured and get super-jacked and super-fit and everyone will be so impressed by my physique that they will put a statue of me next to Rocky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Friday Bed Magnet

It must have been a long and tiring week throughout our school, because there was a good inter-disciplinary crowd at happy hour this afternoon and we talked a lot about sleep -- how much people sleep . . . some people don't sleep much!-- for how long people sleep, what time they go to bed, what time they wake up . . . and all I can say is that I need sleep and writing this sentence is making me sleepy.

Dave Clocks This Metaphorical Tea

Today was metaphor day in Creative Writing-- I reviewed the types of metaphors (simile, personification, etcetera) and I gave them a way to remember the difference between synecdoche and metonymy that I thought of this morning in the car-- and it is car related-- with synecdoche, you use part to represent the whole-- so "check out my wheels"-- while with metonymy you use an association to represent the idea, so "check out my ride" and then I gave them a couple of metaphorical quotations to unravel:

Language is fossil poetry (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Prose is the museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept (T.E. Hulme)

and some of them got the  collective point-- that a dinosaur is older than a fossil and the weapon is older than the museum and so living breathing interesting poetic language becomes dead fossilized prose and we barely notice it--then we had a fossil poetry fill-in-the-blank challenge-- I have a quiz with fifty body part metaphors-- eye of a needle, head of lettuce, safe by a hair, save face, sticks in your craw, etcetera-- they are easy for old people but quite difficult for highschool students . . . and then I went over how there are dead metaphors all around us-- when you call someone bright or brilliant or a clear thinker or lucid, you are comparing them to the sun or a lightbulb-- and when you call someone sharp or keen or they have an acute wit or make a good point, you are comparing them to a blade-- and thus the word "clever" derives from the word "cleaver"-- and we went over runny noses and running faucets, which run like a river-- but running motors run like a horse . . . which is why car engines are measure in horsepower . . . and then things got interesting because my first period class is smart and they started thinking of recent examples: many of them paradoxical . . . if you're "the shit" it's great but if you're "a piece of shit" it's bad . . . you can spill the tea or you can clock that tea . . . someone said, "I'm not a monster" because being a monster is bad -- unless you're a "beast" on the basketball court; the party can be "lit" or "fire" and those are probably related to smoking weed and those are good, or you can be on fire, which is good, but it's not good to be fired or burnt or cooked-- those are bad-- although if you're "cooking" then that's good; being hot is good and being cool is good, but being "mid" or cold is not so good; if you "ate" or you "served," you did well-- but if you got "served" you need to appear in court-- and "ate" is so popular that if you did well, they might say "4 plus 4" or "one more than seven" and if you're chopped, that's bad-- you're ugly-- and the chuzz are chopped whores, and if you did it well and finished strong, they don't say "mic drop" anymore, the kids say "period" or "point blank period" and there's a new one for old people that I really like, when you are playing pickleball, if someone speeds up the ball at you and you bend your body out of the way and dodge the ball and it goes out of bounds, you "matrixed it" and then we speculated about how the kids of the future would be doing a fill-in quiz about "clocking the tea" and "that party was lit" in the same way that they did a quiz on old phrases like "skeleton in the closet" and those kids would be using some new incomprehensible metaphorical slang and the cycle would continue.

Venerable Leisure Goals

 I'd rather shoot my age than shoot my eye out.

Strange Things Afoot All Over the Place

My stomach hurt, and I had a low fever on Sunday night into Monday, but I suffered through the school day and then collapsed on the couch after school-- and after eating nothing but plain noodles and oatmeal, I finally felt better by lunchtime today (and ate a chocolate donut to break my bland food fast) and then I went to acupuncture and Dana crushed my traps and neck and shoulder-- they were incredibly tight from an extended pickleball session on Sunday-- and even though I was sort of sick, I also graded a bunch of essays Monday and today, which means I was hunched over my computer screen (and to add to the pain and suffering, the underclassmen are nuts lately: I think they're finally coming out of their shells, which is annoying-- I preferred when they were quiet and awkward . . . and soon enough the seniors will go berserk) and then this afternoon when I was walking the dog in the park and I let her off leash, she raced over to a large object and then jumped away from it-- for good reason-- as it was a giant fishhead, perhaps a monstrous carp or some other riparian behemoth, that some animal must have dragged into the middle of the grass field, several hundred yards from the riverbank.

Identity and Alcoholism, Sci-fi Style

If I were to choose one genre-- and only one-- that I would have to read and watch for the rest of my life, I think it would be science-fiction . . . while I love a good mystery/crime thriller, you can could inject that element into a sci-fi plot-- but I just love seeing how writers and directors explore our modern problems (and problems that we can barely dream of) in a story where the setting, the technology, and the alternative reality is the main character . . . so here are the two most recent sci-fi stories I ingested, sauce and all:

1) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis-- the author of The Queen's Gambit, Tevis struggled with alcoholism most of his life, and this beautiful, sad novel uses a single humanoid alien on a mission to find food and water and resources for his advanced but dying race to explore loneliness and addiction-- Jerome Newton, the industrious, resilient, and polite alien slowly builds an empire by introducing advanced technology to earthlings, but along the way he experiences futility, ennui, and profound disconnection-- and alcohol seems to assuage this;

2) Bong Joon Ho's new film Mickey 17 is a fun and satirical journey into space and the ends of identity-- we go to the far reaches of the galaxy, where a hysterically Trumpy Mark Ruffalo is leading a band of colonists to settle on the ice planet Niflheim and one of the members of the expedition is an "expendable"-- which means they can send him to die over and over and then reprint him with most of his memories intact . . . Mickey Barnes becomes an expendable because of money issues-- and this criminal/mystery subplot is underdeveloped and a bit silly, but that is no matter-- because it gets us out into space and exploring what it means to be a unique person . . . or what philosopher's call the "Ship pf Theseus"dilemma-- because (spoiler!) not only is there a 17th version of Mickey at the heart of this movie, but also Mickey 18-- and so the usual "multiple" hijinks ensue, with Pattinson doing a great job face-acting the subtle differences between the two Mickeys and his girlfriend Nasha showing true love for both her soulmates . . . because they really are both versions of Mickey-- but which one deserves to live . . . and the aliens of Niflheim kind of steal the show at the end, an added bonus that makes this epic satirical sci-fi not only a philosophical conundrum but also an entertaining and snowy visual maelstrom.

Bar Stool Sporting Spectating Spectacular

Yesterday afternoon, my son Alex and I took the train into the city to have a beer and some food at a sports bar (he just turned 21!) and then go to the Knicks/Wizards game-- so we watched NCAA basketball on the train and then more college hoops while we ate and drank at Goldie's Tavern, a spacious place with good food and drink close enough to Madison Square Garden-- Goldie's was full of Knicks fans and a couple of beautiful people-- a dude who looked like he was right off The Bachelor and his date, who was a young Jennifer Connelly look-alike-- and then we walked over to the game, but we had some trouble finding our seats, which were in section 219 . . . but we were in row BS6 . . . which did not seem to exist . . . and then we learned we had Bar Stool seats, right on level with the concession stands-- with a temporary wall behind you and a nice little bar for your beer in front of you . . . and these tickets were pretty cheap, considering, probably because the Wizards are lousy (although Jordan Poole was fun to watch) and March Madness was happening-- but anyway, these seats totally spoiled me and I don't know if I could ever sit anywhere else-- there's no one in front of you or behind you, you have space on your side and can swivel, you can stand any time you like, you don't have to put your beer on the floor, and -- if there's a close college game you want to keep tabs on, you can rest your phone on the little wall above your personal "bar" . . . I guess the secret is out about these seats, to some extent, but if you can ever nab them, they make for a comfortable, non-claustrophobic game experience-- you don't have to rub elbows with the masses or ever stand up to let someone through and you have easy access to both the concession stands and the bathroom . . . pretty sweet.

Teach Your Teachers Well

In a recurring feature that SHOULD recur more often, here are a few things I learned from my high school students recently:

1) chameleons do NOT change color to camouflage themselves, their color indicates their emotional state or can be used for social signaling-- so they are more like reptilian mood rings than reptilian spies;

2) Bill Belichick (72) is dating a slender 24-year-old named Jordon Hudson and he poses for some very silly pictures with her, including doing some athletic "beach yoga" and dressing as a fisherman and "catching" her while she is dressed as a mermaid;

3) "brain rot" phrases such as "the Balkan rage" and "the German stare" and "the rizz";

4) the slangy subjunctive hypothetical "Would you still love me if I were a worm?"

5) Several US coins have a front-facing presidential face instead of a profile, including the 1861-65 Lincoln dollar.

Conference Madness

Tonight is the dreaded parent/teacher evening conferences, from 5 PM to 8 PM-- but, luckily my schedule is light (or perhaps not luckily because I implore my students to simply talk to their parents about how it's going in my class and remind them that all their grades are on the computer and that I know how to use email fairly well, so if their parents actually have a pressing question, it's much easier to email me than to drive to the school and talk to me, especially since I will be watching NCAA basketball games on YouTube TV while I speak to them so I won't be giving them my full attention).