Tickets, Time, and Anxiety
I am not a big fan of live events -- a shortcoming of mine -- and this is because I'm not a terribly flexible person and I don't like the lack of control a live event entails . . . so last weekend was quite a test for me; Friday night, I saw Louie CK at the State Theater, and despite having to wait until the 10 PM show, which is far past my bedtime (unless I'm throwing darts in a bar) it was well worth it -- Louie killed and he did entirely new material and performed for ninety minutes . . . a long set, but he pulled it off (though it was a bit dry and hot in the theater, not this hot, but still, it made me sort of parched, and I couldn't pause the show so I could get a drink, another reason I don't love live performances) and then on Saturday night, Whitney and his step-brother picked me up and drove me up to Chatham, where we were meeting a bunch of guys and then going to Montclair to the Old 97's/ Drive-By Truckers show . . . but when I got in the car and asked Whitney what I owed him for the ticket, he said, "I don't have a ticket for you" and after some heated discussion and a review of texts sent (he texted "I'll check on tickets" and I misinterpreted this as "I am getting tickets") I realized that I didn't have a ticket for the show, which made me very nervous, as I don't like live performances to begin with, and I especially don't like them when I'm unsure of some component (I'm still angry about trying to scalp INXS tickets at the Spectrum 1987, and instead buying expired '76ers tickets) but luckily the show wasn't sold out, and I was able to get in . . . but then I had the opposite problem . . . there was no leaving: both bands were great, though I was more partial to the Drive-By Truckers . . . but the show was FOUR HOURS LONG . . . which is really testing my attention span, and another reason I'm not a huge fan of going to a live performance (and these night-time live performances were bracketed by two daytime travel soccer games, one of which I coached . . . in the snow . . . and I didn't plan very well for this live-weather event and my young son nearly froze, as my wife was getting her hair done and so I dressed him for the weather, but I dressed him the way I would dress, and I am a 190 pound hairy man, and he is a fifty pound hairless seven year old).
The Most Athletic Thing I've Ever Done (and Possibly The Most Athletic Thing ANYONE Has Ever Done)
You may have completed a triathlon or done a "tough mudder," or perhaps you've scored a hole-in-one or climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro . . . and while these are all impressive athletic feats, they pale in comparison to what I did late Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning) after a long evening of beer drinking with the boys -- Zman was nice enough to let us crash at his house after the Old 97's/Drive-By Truckers show, but Zman was not nice enough to adult-proof his house . . . and I thank him for this (and his very young son . . . if Cole were a girl this probably wouldn't have happened) and so here's what hapened: while I was carrying an open jar of Grey Poupon mustard to the living room -- for use on some pepperoni and cheese -- I stepped into the box-bed of a Tonka toy dump truck, and when the truck rolled forward, with my foot on the bed, this propelled both my feet into the air, so that my body was three feet aloft and horizontal to the ground -- and it was in this moment, parallel to the hardwood floor, that I thought to myself: "the mustard! I can't spill the mustard!" because I didn't want to get Zman in trouble with Zwoman, because his insensitive fraternity brother stained the couch with mustard . . . and so instead of breaking my fall with my hands, I took one for the team, fell flat on my side (with a resounding thump which brought everyone running) and I spilled not one drop of mustard . . . nor did I suffer any lasting injury, and though I don't remember this, Zman reports that in my stunned state, I said to him: "I just did the most athletic thing anyone has ever done."
Another Note to Self . . . This is How to Create an Infinite Loop
An easy way to hear my wife use profanity is to spill some granola on the counter, and then instead of cleaning it up, simply sweep it off the counter and onto the floor where "the dog will get it" but the dog gets scared when my wife uses profanity, so this created a infinite loop of me calling the dog over to lick up the granola, my wife yelling at me for my slovenly habits, the dog skulking away because he thought he was in trouble, the granola mess still being on the floor, and so -- once again -- I call the dog over to eat the granola, my wife yells at me for my slovenly habits, the dog skulks away because he thinks he is in trouble, the mess still on the floor . . . and so finally I swept it up, and I won't do that again (in front of my wife).
Why Are We Living Like This?
Americans can't sleep as it is, yet we spring the clocks ahead so we stay up later, consuming more fuel and stuff, and get alarmed even more than usual by our alarms -- and then there's the children, of course, who we claim to care about -- but we send them to school at an ungodly hour to begin with (a school district in Minnesota that switched to a later schedule found many positive benefits, including a boost of over 200 points in the tope students average S.A.T. scores) and then we screw them even further and wonder why they can't pay attention, and then, to top it all off, we put the Superbowl on late at night on a Sunday . . . why, Chronos, why?
It's The Fortnight of Time
Due to a serendipitous confluence of influences -- including the annual "spring ahead" of Daylight Saving Time, the fact that I'm a few hundred pages Neal Stephenson's epochal science fiction novel Anathem, the coincidence that Stacy and I just showed the most realistic time travel movie ever made (Primer) in philosophy class (it's also the most difficult time travel movie ever made -- it's fun to team teach something that neither teacher understands . . . and then we have the students read Chuck Klosterman's time travel essay, where he confesses that he didn't understand the movie either) -- anyway, due to this convergence of time-themed stuff, my mind has been preoccupied with all things chronological . . . and so when I asked my class on Monday "How is today an example of time travel?" they instantly got the answer: that we had all travelled into the future an hour because of Daylight Saving Time . . . and in some more rational parallel universe, where they don't practice such absurd manipulation of the clock -- we were all still sleeping in our warm beds or perhaps just waking up and sipping coffee, instead of sitting in class, bleary eyed, wishing we had time machines so that we could go back in time and sleep more . . . and I'm probably going to keep obsessing on this theme, and my wife won't let me talk about it any more at home -- the blog is my only outlet -- so I apologize, but there is probably going to be a fortnight's worth of time posts.
My Children Need to Visit New Guinea
Jared Diamond, in his new book The World Until Yesterday, claims that among New Guinean hunter gatherers, the Andaman Islanders, and the Piraha Indians of Brazil, children of nine or ten years old often leave their families to journey to other villages and live with foster parents, cousins, or other various allo-parents -- these children are autonomous, entrepreneurial and adventurous . . . meanwhile, my kids can barely tie their own shoes.
Strategic Birthday Logistics
When carpooling children to a birthday party, always offer to do the drop-off -- it's much smoother than pick-up, when things can run late, and you have to deal with goody bags and social niceties (I learned this the easy way last weekend, when we got a text from our friend Ruth, who was picking up Ian -- the party was supposed to end at 7:30, but we got a text from her at ten of eight that said: "things are running late here" and I thought to myself: sucks to be her . . . trapped in a room full of eight year olds hopped up on sugar, while the wife and I are starting an episode of Game of Thrones).
A Plea to Cronus: Obliterate Daylight Saving Time
Monday morning, I had to use the light from my cell phone -- which prominently displays the time -- to locate my dog's poop so that I could pick it up . . . and, of course, two mornings previous, at the same time, I was able to accurately locate my dog's poop without the aforementioned device . . . Cronus, Greek Titan of Heaven, strike down the mortals who have profaned your domain!
My Kids Are Weird (and not with the program)
Basketball season has come to an end, and soccer has begun -- despite the snow -- but you wouldn't know it in my house . . . for the past two weeks, my boys have spent every moment of their free time shooting mini-basketballs at a nerf hoop on the closet door; they really should have been doing this all season, as they are a couple of chuckers (but they can both handle the ball and play defense, so I can't complain) but, oddly, during basketball season all they wanted to do was toss around the football (and since Ian's soccer game was cancelled on Saturday account of snow, we went out and played tennis).
This Metaphor is not for the Weak of Heart
In my "Year as a Week" metaphor, we have entered Thursday -- Spring Break is around the corner and then there's just the sloppy slog through the last two months of the year -- Friday! -- and the weekend is here (summer vacation) . . . but in my "Career as a Week" metaphor, I'm only in the middle of Wednesday: I've got to work as long as I've already worked before I can even consider retirement, and that's only if the pension system remains self-sustaining -- if it collapses, then I'm probably still in early Tuesday in my "Career as a Week" and I will never reach the weekend (retirement) and instead will simply work until I keel over and die in front of a class full of teenagers (who will most likely have the internet implanted in their brains, so they can text each other telepathically, while I am trying to teach them Hamlet).
Dumb Phone
I am being technologically taunted into getting a smarter phone; when my friends send a barrage of group texts, my phone only gets "receipts" of the messages, but can't retrieve them -- and this is worse than not receiving the messages at all, because the receipts alert me to the fact that everyone is making plans and making jokes about the plans, but (unless I annoy people for a summary) I'm not privy to the actual information.
I Don't Care If You Can Find Your Hometown on a Map, But You Should Know This . . .
If I were able to get one message across to the people of America, it would be: the left lane is for passing.
Does This Make My Property Value Rise Or Plummet?
To make up for yesterday's ultra-nerdy post, today I present you with something visceral and easy to understand -- a sea monster! -- the creature pictured above was caught two years ago in the Raritan River, the same river which flows a few hundred yards behind my house -- and the horrific beast is called a "sea lamprey"; they are apparently fairly common in the murky waters of New Jersey's least scenic river and while my children think this photo is the bee's knees, I'm not sure if it's a selling point for the location of my house -- I will have to ask my realtor.
A Very Nerdy Connection
Here's one for all the dorks out there: I was reading Jared Diamond's new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? . . . and not only that, but I was reading it on my new Kindle -- and so I made an electronic bookmark when I ran across this passage: "a traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast: documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused attention on eating and drinking" because it reminded me of the infamous Red Wedding in George R.R. Martin's third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series . . . and my internet research revealed that Martin's Red Wedding (not to be confused with Billy Idol's White Wedding) was inspired by an actual historical event -- the Black Dinner , a treacherous feast in Scotland in the year 1440 . . . indeed!
Lunch of Champions?
Note to self: after the kids stay up far past their bedtime on Saturday night and need a two hour nap before their basketball game on Sunday, do NOT feed them cake (and only cake) for lunch to "wake them up"-- Ian played defense with one hand in his pocket, and Alex -- after we won the game -- got in a kid's face from the other team and taunted him (Alex does claim that the kid made fun of him for his dimunitive stature at school, but it was still very embarrassing for me, as I am his father and the coach of the team and thus feel a twofold responsibility for his behavior).
A Reason to Endure Static
I am a fan of FM radio -- despite the fact that I end up hearing a lot of sitar music (WRSU) and pleas from Alec Baldwin for money (NPR) and dissonant noise-jazz (WPRB) and classical flute (WQXR) and (even worse) Jethro Tull style flute (Q104.3) -- because once in a while you hear something so wonderful and unpredictable that it makes your day; Saturday morning on the way to the gym, I was listening to Newark's jazz station (WBGO) and I heard this tremendous couplet, in a song by Bobby Rush called "What's Good for the Goose" . . . in which a woman makes a calm ultimatum to her cheating husband: "Eye for eye, tit for tat/ if you give away your dog, I'll give away my cat."
Honors High School Students Say the Darndest Things
I thought the line of the year (from one of my high school students) occurred when I was teaching an excerpt from The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, and we were reenacting the play when Lawrence Taylor cracked Joe Theisman's femur in half -- we had a football and a number of students set-up to execute the infamous flea-flicker, and I asked the class which way the running back should go and a fashionable little senior girl yelled, "Backwards!" and when I questioned her as to why the running back should run backwards, she said, with total sincerity: "He's the running back . . . running back" and we laughed about that for a few days, but I think I've got a line to top it; I was doing a bit of improv slapstick while teaching Hamlet, and during the portion when Hamlet instructs the players not to laugh at their own jokes, I spilled some water on myself -- and kept a straight face when the class laughed -- and then I misplaced my water bottle too near the edge of the desk, so that it spilled all over the floor . . . and then the students realized that I was doing this on purpose, to mirror the words in the play, and another student realized that there was a puddle on the carpet in another section of the room -- because I had done the same thing third period -- and one concerned student, yelled -- before thinking it through: "But now you spilled all your water . . . how are you going to do it last period?" and I got to explain to this eighteen year old honors English student that we have running water in our school -- in both fountains and faucets, and so there was plenty more of it to spill on the floor.
Me and the Doctor: Together Forever
If Seuss were alive, he'd be very old,
one hundred and nine years I am told;
I doubt very much that I'll make it that far --
but I have a tattoo of a fish in a car!
Dave Coins a New Verb
Tuesday after school, while I was walking the dog, I blair-witched myself in the small patch of woods between Donaldson Park and the Donald Goodkind Bridge . . . but after twenty minutes of walking in circles, I was able to extricate myself (and my dog) before Rustin Parr slaughtered us in his shack.
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