GNATS

Some people are worried about their next meal, their mortgage, their nation at war....I am bothered by gnats.

I so abhor gnats.

Cockroaches, stink bugs, slugs--none of these annoy me much. Even flies and ants are more tolerable than gnats.

Even the spelling of their name is stupid.

Nothing is so pesky as a gnat. Why? Perhaps it is because they swarm in clouds that I seem to have the misfortune of finding, always with my mouth open.

I hate gnats above all other insects because they tend to be more invasive, that is, they end up in my nose, my mouth, the corners of my eyes, even in my ears. Horrible little creatures, these gnats.

I need to find a good way to kill them, for I have been plagued with them now in my work environment. Nothing says "filthy" quite like an annoying gnat.

Ugh.

Boys on a Farm

Yesterday the weather was great, so the boys and I were outside all day. I was able to observe them as I worked on the pirate ship and milled about the property. Here's a few things they were involved in:

1. Riding the horse--their Papa bought one and gives pony rides on fair days
2. Playing with kittens and puppies
3. Brushing the beagle
4. Playing in a big mud puddle
5. Playing, swinging, swashbuckling on the pirate ship
6. Digging a fox hole--the recent rains renewed Carson's interest in digging
7. Moving muck to compost piles (7 gallons of old coffee grounds, in particular)
8. Building ramps to ride and jump over
9. Building a opossum trap
10. Tying one another up with rope (hostage situations)
11. Riding bicycles, trikes etc.
12. Rustling and herding chickens
13. Harvesting chicken eggs

...and most amusing:
One of the boys had a chicken lay an egg in his lap as he was holding and loving on the bird!

Whenever anyone asks me why I work double-load, why I go to work at 5am, why I have a blended household, etc. I should show this list. Farm livin' is the life for me, and it obviously enriches the lives of the kids living there (and I guess, honestly, I 'm just a big kid, too.)

Lust for Life

I got a lust for life.
Recently attended a funeral that was, for once, truly a celebration of life. The family and friends of the departed spoke of her true character, her true authenticity, and I had waves of epiphanies all through the service.

1) While sometimes some people strive for greatness and acceptance, try too hard with all manner of grandstanding and pomp, this individual was remembered and cherished for simply being kind and loving. While this might seem an easy accomplishment, she was so sincerely kind that it was unmistakably her trademark virtue. I am charged with a mad desire to be more real, more kind.

2) Live large, die humbly. This person lived so largely, on such a grand canvas, yet from any distance it might seem so 'normal.' By this I mean, she was large in heart, large and long suffering in love. She did not fly rockets to the moon or bathe in crystal springs in the Mediterranean, but she touched the life of every individual who crossed her doorstep. She left an indelible mark on we who were lucky enough to have known her. I am chastised for trying too hard to be Something, not trying hard enough to be human.

3) Just keep giving. Right up to her passing, this individual was concerned for her son, her husband, even for the nurses that cared for her. I have known the power of giving, but I've buried it under many layers of preoccupation lately. I am pressed to be more involved in the lives around me.

There are many more Take-Aways from that service, many things I'll be hoping to apply. I wanted to pen a few here, pin them down for posterity and accountability.

I'm a dad, always, for better or worse...

In the last 8 years, I've lived in 3 houses. I've cycled through 3 vehicles. I've used up countless pair of shoes, socks, underwear...I've lost two loved ones. I've spent innumerable hours in front of the computer. All that is gone. All that has left me.

Also, 8 years have passed before me. Time has been frittered, has flitted, has otherwise left the building. My hair is leaving me. My sanity is scouting the exits.

I am learning from all this. It's taken me a long, long time to get it, but as I was just looking at picture of my kids from these last 8 years, I realized something very fundamental (that I'm sure everyone else gets, upfront): My health, my life, my wife...all that may wane, but my children will be ever-with me. They will not divorce me or drop my class. They will not go away in foreclosure or be repossessed.

I find that both wonderful and alarming. It's wonderful that they will always be my progeny, my young'ns. They will always be little chemistry experiments with my DNA and creative ink. They will ever-be...me. On the other hand, it's frightening, for if I screw up on a grand scale (like, say, the 40 years of life prior to their arrival) what then? What if I am an utter failure? If they are to be ever-tied to this sinking ship, what good is that?

See why parents get wrinkles? We worry that we might be the Titanic, setting sail for an epic failure, bringing the kids down with the ship. Ugh.

Errrgggh!

Last night I was thinking of zombies. I had a pretty good idea for a story/novel, nothing innovative, I'm sure (but then, I'm not current on my zombie literature, so I don't really know yet). I'd like to write something first person, intimate, about the woes of a zombie in a world of pink, fleshy types. I don't know the premise as to why he'd be a zombie and those around him would be unaffected, but hey, it's a work in progress. I remember when keeping my hair out of my face was the thing. I had a habit of tossing my head back like a horse trying to keep her mane out of her eyes. If I were to do that now, my neck might snap. Like I have any reason to anyway--I struggle to keep the hair plastered down to the puss and scabs. One week I lost an eyebrow, a whole eyebrow! I was rummaging through a dumpster and lifted my head out of it too suddenly, lost my balance and raked my face from ear to scalp. That's just it. Pinks don't realize how hard it is keeping your footing when you don't have the blood pressure to even think straight. They laugh when I shuffle. They make fun of me for holding my arms out at my sides or in front of me to break my fall. Every fall takes another layer of turf with it. I saw one old gray a while back that had his elbow hacked open to the bone. Didn't even phase him, but I could tell his bicep was about to just slough off. I don't know. It's just (oddly) amusing to me to think like a zombie. Maybe it's Halloween coming. Maybe it's the way I feel as I roam the halls at work. Maybe it's the people that populate too many seats in classes.

Hey, where 'you at?

It's been too long since I've been here, about 2 weeks, in fact.

Frustration levels with students continue to rise; it seems to correlate with the effort I put in. I am less concerned on days I just generally prepare--much MORE worked up on days I put 3 hrs prep into things only to have people (mentally) dozing off.

Regardless, I love my job.
I love my family.
I love my life.

It's all good--just not too newsworthy right now. (And, I don't have a free moment to even BLOG).

*sigh*

Horse...water...drink

You know the old saw: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

This is what I am resigning myself to this week when I am giving out what I consider to be my very best content lectures of the year. People are doing their nails, doing their other homework, doing time like convicts....doing anything to really keep from engaging in the content.

I'd say 1/4 of any given class did not even have pen/paper out to take notes. I consider this the greatest showing of disrespect, as if to say, "You're not even going to say anything noteworthy in these three hours."

The material was on research, and what I shared with classes has saved me literally thousands of hours of agonizing research. I'm offering them tips and techniques to have research automated, where search results are constantly piped directly to the researcher who bothers to set up RSS or GoogleAlerts. I told them how to use databases better, how to build a smarter search, how to outsmart Google itself. All of it was good stuff. I know it was all lecture, and I know the research paper is over a month away, but man....what a heart breaker to face such utter apathy for 3 full hours.

*sigh*

The '90's

IT'S THE 90S! from Everything Is Terrible! on Vimeo.

Discipline

Well, my best friend warned me of this. He said that my kids would turn on me. (He predicted this when kids strike the teens, however, and it's happening NOW.)

I am not prepared for this. Neither is my wife. No one is, I have learned. We all need more schooling on parenting. Why is it always considered to be a seat of the pants, trial and error enterprise? Why do we all just shrug and "do our best" when we can?

I want to get a degree in fatherhood. I want to learn from someone who's really good at it. Instead, I take time out of my free time to watch movies, work on the pirate ship, sleep...when The Most Important facet of my life, parenting, is neglected.

I know that every situation is full of variables, and I am aware that no two kids are the same, let alone parallel households. None of that should serve as an excuse, however.



I listened to a great TED talk in which a father set up cameras throughout his home to document how his child acquired vocabulary. It was a very intricate study over the course of a year. I wish there were MANY more such studies on EVERY aspect of child rearing. Sometimes I wish I were always on camera, always accountable, for it might make me a better parent. (I've had too many embarrassing outbursts in these 8 years, already, and I regret them all.)

How can I attend to my calling, parenting, when life is so cluttered with everything incidental? How can I find reliable resources, not some quack cashing in on anxious parents?

Right now my kids are needing discipline, and I liberally apply it, but I think it is not done well. A friend of mine never raises his voice (when he and family visit) and yet his kids are shiny-well-behaved. I want to know his secret.

I want all the secrets of parenting....NOW.

It's talk like a pirate day!!

So, you should check out the other blog I keep: PirateShipPlayground.

Meanwhile, here's some jokes I shared with me students:

1. What kind of ships do pirates have trouble with?
2. What do you get when you cross a pirate with a zucchinni?
3. What do you say when a pirate sloop runs aground?
4. Why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet?
5. A pirate walks into a bar wearing a paper towel on his head. He sits down at the bar and orders some dirty rum. The bartender asks, "Why are you wearing a paper towel?" The pirate replies...

Answers are below decks...

Ohhhhhhh, it's one of my favorite holidays, indeed. Everyone should get worked up over it. Years ago, I pointed readers to the best primer online for talking pirate, but just in case ye missed it:



Answers:

1. Relationships
2. A Squash-buckler
3. Ship out of luck
4. Because they can spend years at C
5. "Arrrr...." says the pirate, "I've got a Bounty on me head!"

Enjoy!

Darius Rucker

We were fortunate to be able to attend the State Fair concert Tuesday night performed by Darius Rucker. If anyone is unfamiliar, he's a country-western singer. I would offer, he's a great country-western singer. More than that, he's a great song writer.

People know him as the former front man for Hootie and the Blowfish. They also know him as "that black country singer."

That's what bothers me. Sure, it's novel that he crossed over from pop/blues to country. Sure, he's the only African-American since Charley Pride to make the c/w charts....but that's what's so bothersome.

I get tired of people giving him mention as the black guy who sings country.

My point is simple: Darius Rucker is a great musician in his own right, by his own skill, regardless of his background or race. I like his singing, sure, but his lyrics (that is, that he writes) are outstanding...yes commercial, but still, outstanding!

Too many pictures?

I have been divided on this for some time: can one take too many pictures?

I grew up in the days when one had to make quite an investment to purchase and develop film. (Developing pictures took a week, postage, patience...). In those days, I think people took pictures more mindful of the result, more attentive to the content. I have never been a photographer, but I was always frugal in my photography, snapping what I considered meaningful photos. (There was, I must admit, a period in my youth when I shot everything! I developed rolls of film from my little Kodak Instamatic yielding nothing much, just lots of cute girls spotted on my vacation, etc.)

I also respect those who by faith and tradition do not like their photos to be taken. See Aniconism. I think we need to be considerate of people who, for whatever reason, do not want captured on film, whether it is just vanity or because they are wanted by authorities. I am also worried whenever my children are photographed, knowing there are (literally) hundreds of their pictures on the Internet now. I fear stalkers, pedophiles, etc.

All that said, my wife is a shutterbug! She takes photography classes. She has a photo-a-day website. She has thousands of pics on facebook, etc. She probably has many gigabytes of photos on her hard drive. When people attend parties at our place, they are surprised if there are not pictures being taken constantly.

On the bright side, there are no gaps in the chronicle of our lives. Everything even remotely significant seems to be immortalized in (digital) film. Whether it's a new Lego castle some kid built or graduating from college, it's all there. Kyle back from the war-Snap. Disney on ice-Snap. Even my kids are in on the act. Chicken lays a big egg-Snap. Chicken poo looks like Italy-Snap.

Our eldest has had so many pictures taken, so many scrapbook pages made of him...he uses these to recollect days gone by. The others have not been forsaken, but they are surely not so thoroughly documented as the eldest.

This, then, leads me to the question I'm wrestling with. When Jax reviews these pictures, how much of what he rattles off is truly memory, and how much of it is reconsititued by pictures he's looking at? Is it memory or is it "photographic memory," pardon the twist on the phrase. I wonder sometimes if making it easy to "remember" by capturing everything in digital images might somehow make it harder to really forge memories.

It's the same information retrieval question I was working on a month or more back. In this era of electronic memory and information, how much content is going to find some traction, some stick, in our true meatspace memory? If it's so easy to access every cake, candle, and present ever received, why would one go to the labor of really remembering it, when it can just be retrieved on a file and reviewed.

I like fond memories and special pictures. I am not so partial to what I am considering an over-documentation of life.

Hmmmm.

Slideshow experiment

1. miss you two smore-eating fools
2. camp out fire pit
3. too many cameras dilute memories
4. ever get tired of hot dogs
5. birthday cake seems out of place outdoors
6. candid
7. we're watching animals, they're watching us at the zoo
8. beware of the wallaby
9. wrestling leads to carpet burns
10. Darth brooks
11. hit me with a noodle again, I dare you
12. masks...we wear masks
13. a bandanna makes the man
14. in this picture, he's only 4 (now 8)
15. before Afghanistan
16. face-off
17. I miss that house in Andover

Nothing meaty is coming of this, but here's the experiment: fire up your digital photos in random slide show mode and caption/comment on them. Mine are on a 5 second rotation right now for this venture. It's a good free-writing exercise, and after completed, one would mine the list for something worthy of elaboration.

In this case, I think my general thoughts on cameras (#3) might merit further study (but not now).

Some jokes from my students...

Why did the farmer bury all his money?
So his soil would be rich.

What did one wall say to the other?
Meet you at the corner.

What do you call lice on a bald man?
Homeless.

What do you call a dead parrot?
a polygon

THESE HANDS

This is a great exercise. I first did this at a workshop for Intergenerational service, for it works best at helping older people recollect some moments and skills...

These hands...
have shaken hands with presidents and senators
surprise me with creativity
are scarred and calloused
have built many model cars
once performed in a percussion ensemble
killed pets (in mercy)
visited the Atlantic and Pacific
have punched through walls in anger
grasped for meaning
shook many baby bottles
directed traffic
have applauded at over 50 concerts
have made beautiful music
have made armpit farts
are never idle
like to tickle the keyboard (computer, not piano)
built a pirate ship
helped sandbag against a flood
wrote award-winning grants
have pulled a calf
milked cows
cleaned rabbits
shot many, many guns
held hands with children and grandparents and all in between
win at rock, paper, scissors
wish they knew ASL
are good at building camp fires
know dirt and grease and work
have never failed me

Told'ya So

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

The pencil

SO, I recently attended a gala of techno-geek teachers and IT professionals from around the region. I was given the Innovative Teacher of the Year award (only my second trophy in my whole life). I also had to give a little presentation there to a full house crowd. It was altogether humbling and flattering and--well, it made me feel special.

I do a good deal with varied techniques and media in class. That's a fact. However, I have a little talisman on my desk, a touchstone to another reality...and it keeps me coming back to the basics.

In a little Altoids tin I have a two-inch pencil that has been sharpened down from both ends. I picked up the pencil in a grade school classroom in an impoverished part of Mexico back in 2000. (I was part of a Rotary, International, Group Study Exchange program, touring part of the nation on an exchange from my district and theirs....essentially an ambassador, even though I am not a member of Rotary.)

The pencil symbolizes how some people have such a hunger for knowledge and such an eagerness about them that any teacher would just love to encounter in the classroom. Those kids did not even have a steady stream of school supplies; they got the good out of every scrap, right down to the last inch of a pencil. It reminds me that education, learning, is not about all these bells and whistles, all these digital bangles and apps. Learning takes place when the learner is ripe for it, when s/he is receptive and the content is relevant. Anything else might be swapping knowledge, but it's not really transfer of meaning and significance.

Digital Hoarder

I am going to make a confession here: I am a digital hoarder. I discovered this yesterday, when I finally applied myself to an item that's been on my to-do list for years--tidy up digital files.

First, some context... I write, I teach writing, I spend lots of time online finding what I consider to be valuable content of every stripe (from composting toilets to social media in the classroom...sometimes these are much the same, I guess...from etymology to how to build a hen house). I have a shutterbug wife and thus several gig of digital pictures. I have five USB drives and a 500 gig external hard drive. I have thousands of mp3's of music and hundreds of podcasts I record for my online classes...

...and my desktop was something too much like my physical desk top, a catch all pile of clutter. It alone was the laughing stock of the computer staff where I work, for even those with decades of experience and exposure had not seen so much junk on the desktop.

In the past, when shifting from one machine to the next, from one classroom to the next, from one textbook to another...I would just bundle up files and shove them into some vaguely named folder (course files, oldlaptopstuff). Obviously, I've not done decent back ups, for they would simply take too long, be too inconvenient.

You'd think I'd know better, since at another job we had a data loss when my brother toasted a hard drive. Data recovery took days and would have cost thousands of dollars if done out of house.

To make a long story short (too late) I have so far purged over 20 gigabytes of digital diarrhea, and I'm not yet done. I have made many sensible folders and a good "tree" to mount all this new-found structure upon. I have a nifty synch feature that I am going to use, which will not only provide backup, it will also give me access to some of my classroom files "in the cloud" as they say.

Today I'm going to tackle the USB drives.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Yes, you have probably heard by now, Burger King is retiring their creepy mascot King, planning to aim at a more mature audience than the King was supposedly reaching.

That's just sad.

It took me over a year to warm up to him, and now that I have a bobble head of him, several bookmarked sites of him, etc...he's gone. Like Elvis before him, the king has left the building.

*sigh*

Click here to review the 2009 Everyday King sightings. ...before they, too, evaporate.

Click here for the source story and some good Wake Up with the King video.

Seasteading

I heard on the radio that PayPal founder Peter Thiel has invested 1.25 million in seasteading, along with several other multi-millionaires. Wired ran the story here back in the 2008. Updated version here.

Stationed in International waters, sovereign colonies may some day feature:

• alternative energies
• abundant gardens
• unrestricted guns
• tiny houses (300 sq ft)
• no welfare

all in a tidy libertarian environment with less government overhead. The first colonies are to be on refashioned oil derricks, which I admire (re-purposing).

While I worry that these will again just be resorts for the rich, I do hope for something more equitable. I admire such experimentation in social systems, and I just don't understand all the cynicism. I'm keeping a weather eye on this evolving concept, at any rate.

I wonder if they need a good wordsmith?