the patron saint of lost things

Something about the month of October always gets me down...I always have a horrible string of bad luck no matter how hard I try to go along. Tonight on the way home from tutoring, I discovered that I didn't have my wallet so couldn't get back home as I was too far from home to walk there. I had to walk back and sheepishly beg a ride off of the kid's mom, and live with the knowledge that the only place that wallet could have been was on the #6 bus heading for Vancouver, Washington.
Now oddly enough I've been really lucky in the past to get that darn thing back several times from the most unlikely settings. When you lose your wallet on the bus, you don't have real high expectations to begin with, much less on the night bus that goes past a string of drug treatment centers, pawn shops, homeless shelters and low income neighborhoods. Like most occasions, there might have been a dollar or two in there, but that wasn't the loss...losing my bankcard and monthly pass is the problematic element, and being without ID is problematic as well...I've gotta fly somewhere in about a month.
Luckily once again it got turned in. Now I'm not catholic but I'm starting to get superstitious as hell, so I'm giving mad props to Saint Anthony of Padua, because I don't know who's looking out for me, but I reckon I gotta start somewhere. (Or maybe I just have a helluva lot of good karma saved up from working with at-risk youth, years of volunteer work, and other good deeds). Anyhow...I'm not taking my chances.
Saint Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, thank you for helping bring my wallet back, which had been lost. Thank you for restoring to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss. To this favor I ask another of you: that I may always remain in possession of the true good that is God. Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good. Let me never suffer the loss of my greatest treasure, eternal life with God. Amen.
Peace.

thought of the day

On conservatives: Personally, I don't know whether to loathe them or feel sorry for them. The exact nature of my feelings about them varies, but generally my cynicism wins in the ends and I console myself with the fact that since most of them are old white men, they will all die in due time, which luckily will be much sooner than I.

But generally though, I don't hate them, I feel sorry for them. I can't help but feel sorry for people like these who go around being so afraid of everyone who doesn't look or think like them, that all they can do is react to their fears with mean-spirited hate. In fact they're so afraid that they get together and have a whole organization full of scared people. When people motivated by fear ge together with other people motivated by fear, the end result can be pretty irrational and scary. Say nothing of what happens when they get involved in politics...

What's sad about all of this is that they are completely unable to comprehend that the world is a diverse place (as if God would be so lame as to make everything and everyone the same) that thrives on difference and I personally think that is what makes life more interesting, and I would hate to be trapped in their narrow version of that life "should" be like. To life in a world where everyone talks the same way, looks the same way, and thinks the same way--now that would be tragic indeed. And that people actually desperately WANT this more than anything...

sigh.

a day of rest

some days call for actions, plans and goals.

other days call for taking care of yourself when you are down and out.

I turned off the phone, climbed in bed and slept almost all day with some breaks to drink fluids, cough some more, and blow my nose millions of times. When I was not sleeping, I read a good bit of Death at an Early Age.

Every so often, I get in the mood for a little moral outrage and some Kozol. It's not that I don't get enough of this sort of thing in my daily life, but it's nice to have some outside perspective. As someone who alternates between the poles of idealistic and jaded responses to the social evils that permeate my immediate world, I like hearing someone taking these themes and expounding on them with an eloquence that I personally do not possess. I'm not a crusader, just a quiet but steadfastly and defiantly stubborn person who plants trees and hates injustice, and acts upon my convictions on a more personal scale. So, I'm glad then, that there are other people who are able to say the things that I feel loudly enough so that others will listen, and I can be spared to do what I do best, which is patiently work with kids whom others consider difficult or unreachable.

But for now I am too sick to do much but lay in bed with my tea, so the harvest goes unharvested another day.

sniffy sniffle hack hack

it was a really nice weekend...but i was too sick to take much notice of it.

don't know what it is about this year, but i've been sick twice so far since september, and this one looks like it's gonna hang on to my lungs for dear life. whether i got it from my roommate or from one of the many snot-nosed kids that i've been around, the result is the same, i've had the hacking cough all week (the kind that laughs at cough drops and snickers at cough syrup), but now it's changing over to something more insidiously sinister and sinus-y and i'll probably have a bonafide sinus infection to carry me over into this week.

the problem with all of this is that i can't get out of going to work entirely, which is problematic when all i feel like doing is committing to a sleeping marathon punctuated by breaks where i wake up and insert another lozenge or drink another gallon of tea. naturally this week is orientation for tutoring at Marshall, a major project for a kid i'm tutoring after school, and who knows what all else...

aiya...

poor brian, i hope he doesn't get this.

saturday's woes and a riff on the purpose of insurance

so other than being tired, and having a nagging persistent cough, the day might've been alright for a saturday.

except sometimes it's really best to just walk away when it's time to go and not get involved in shit.

so as i'm leaving i see a woman come in the door with a painting.
this is just the sort of thing that you learn to dread...someone who wants to ship a painting somewhere. it's not like anyone has ever yet come in with a painting just because they want to show it to you before they take it over to the ebay store or the frame shop...oh no. that would be nice, but it hasn't happened yet. nope, this is just the sort of thing that is a sign of troubles ahead.
from what i've come to understand, people that want to mail paintings have no idea what they're getting themselves into, and no matter how much they may have spent personally on the painting, or on having it framed, they have no subsequent interest in spending what is necessary to ship it somewhere safely. if you left it up to them, they'd happily shove it in some rinky dink cardboard box with some newspaper, and bring it to you fully expecting the shipping price to be in the neighborhood of $10. The reality usually looks more like $100 and that's kind of a starting place. One the other week came to about $150 because not only was it oversize category 3, but it was also going to the most distant geographic point from here which happens to be Florida.

This is not the sort of thing you want to leave in the hands of the inexperienced. Not that i'm even remotely in the realm of expert, but i have an idea of how bad things can get. So instead of leaving like i should have done, I stayed, out of some naive belief that i could do some damage control. So in all of my tired delirium I pick up this massively oversized painting to put it on a scale, and whether my fatigue, lack of sleep or head-cold induced disorientation was at fault, I instead managed to steer it into the sharp corner of a counter and put a nice fat ding in the side of the frame.

At least she didn't start yelling, but this adequately illustrates the purpose of liability insurance.

In the future I will leave well enough alone.

At least I won't have to give her the insurance speech...

pumpkin carving party

I wasn't feeling too great at the end of the day, but was determined not to miss the only halloween-like event i'm likely to be exposed to this year. luckily the destination was very bus friendly so i scooped up one of my homegrown pumpkin babies, and stuffed it in my backpack and hopped on the bus.
I had amazingly good bus karma and arrived at my final destination rather early, and got to spend a little time talking to christie before everyone else showed up. i know how it is being the hostess of a party... It's been a long time since i'd done any group pumpkin carving...i think the last time was college sometime or another. and this is a fun group of folks.

it was nice meeting some more "ed" people and comparing notes. don't know what it is about teachers, but if you catch them feeling conversational at school, the last thing they seem to want to talk about is education...most of the talk in the staff room is about food or diets...which seems kinda weird to me, but oh well. outside of school they are more amenable to this line of discussion.

I stayed out waaaayy too late though and getting up the next morning to go to work was brutal.

the big rainy sunday

the aftermath of overindulgence ain't a pretty sight. crawling in and out of bed. waking up at noon. eating bland foods. oddly the day seems no less productive for having slept it half away.

i listened to it rain all last night, all morning, and all afternoon. evening looks like it's gonna be more of the same. being dry and warm is the agenda for the afternoon. cooking and eating food. taking care of myself. the basics.

i think i'm going to aim for a pleasant evening involving more of the same. some downtime is sounding good, my life has gotten a bit whirlwindy lately.

sushi party

brian had a great idea...it was high time for a sushi party, and frankly it's been years since i've instigated a party anyhow.
the whole thing went well, we made and ate enough sushi for three sushi parties, and now 2 more people know how to make sushi which is both liberating and functional. this is also a good outlet for all the vegetables flying out of our garden this month. hooray for sushi, which incidentally makes a good breakfast the following day.

worthy site of the day

I'm normally not a huge fan of online petitions since half of the ones that get forwarded to me are hoaxes, but a friend sent me a link for this one which is for a pretty good cause and is confirmed as real, so it seems worthy of space on my blog. As a teacher, child abuse is an issue near and dear to my heart. If you share my antipathy for child pornography/sexual abuse cruise on over and sign it yourself.

"The innocent victims of Internet child abuse cannot speak for themselves. But you can. With your help, we can eradicate this evil trade. We do not need your money. We need you to light a candle of support lightamillioncandles.com. We're aiming to light at least One Million Candles by December 31, 2006.

This petition will be used to encourage governments, politicians, financial institutions, payment organisations, Internet service providers, technology companies and law enforcement agencies to eradicate the commercial viability of online child abuse. They have the power to work together. You have the power to get them to take action.

Please light your candle at lightamillioncandles.com or send an email of support to light@lightamillioncandles.com.

Together, we can destroy the commercial viability of Internet child abuse sites that are destroying the lives of innocent children. Kindly forward this email to your friends, relatives and work colleagues so that they can light a candle too."


You do not have to leave any personal data on the site.

chilly chili

Whew, it's coooold today. So much for the warm weather we were promised...it ain't happening.
It rained almost all day, so i stayed inside except for a brief recharge mission over to Tiny's and baked an apple pie and a big pyrex full of enchiladas. Brian made the first
chili of the season, and hasn't lost his touch, although it's been quite awhile. The radiator is on and I'm sad to say it but harvest season is definitely upon us.

Time for some A-team and some apple pie, courtesy of the apple tree by the fishing hole.

cranium

after a tedious day at work, and an afternoon of unpleasant errands, it was nice to go over to A+J's place and unwind and play some cranium for awhile.

Then i made the trek back downtown to try to catch stan's show. unfortunately i got rather lost and by the time i found the venue, the show was 80% over. So I contented myself with resting on the sidewalk and hanging out with the band a bit afterwards. oh well. still not bad for a saturday.

the whit

As i recall, i was a whole lot more timid about jumping on these crazy trains last year. guess it was because i was such a newbie and had only been exposed to some pretty basic scenarios so i hesitated a lot and didn't always feel like i should pick up everything that came down the line.
This year i've lost alot of my subfinder inhibitions and i don't even hesitate--as long as it involves a classroom setting i'm all over it. Guess it's an entire summer of ups-ing that has me thinking variety is the spice of life. And really it's not like i gotta run the whole show anyway...

So i decided to get in on some middle school action to round out the end of the week.
i had no idea what to expect since it's been awhile since i've been around kids this age, but i recall them as being rather boisterous and incapable of sitting still for real long. i could say that my memories are still accurate, but i forgot what it means to be on the cusp of adolescence.

It's kind of a nice break from jaded teens though. 14 year old girls are something else though, and i pity them as i too knew how it felt to be trapped in a room full of immature boys. ;) Either way, they're pretty different from older teens, mainly in that there's even less of a sense of cause and effect relationships, and they're not as cohesive as tenth graders...they still segregate by sex alot more socially than they do later on in high school.

Working in all these different schools is kind of mind boggling for me sometimes. there is SUCH a difference between every school, and a huge difference between schools in upper class communities and lower class communities. It's like night and day. Funding formulas can't even begin to address the inequities that occur here. I defy someone to tell me that the kids at Marshall are getting even remotely the same educational experience as the kids at BHS. Just as my Junior high experience was nothing whatsoever like the kids I spent time with on Friday.

My jr high school was located in a pretty rough neighborhood, in a largely segregated school where the vast majority of kids were doing the free or reduced lunch thing. And it wasn't the clean and sparkling wonder that I spent time in on Friday. My experience was substantially different from what these kids have. This school was spotlessly clean, unbelievably orderly, well-maintained, and the kids appeared to come to school well fed, wearing clean clothes and more or less prepared for a day of productive activity.

What got me thinking of all of this social inequality was the Ron Saxton ads going in the background everywhere since it's nearly time for elections. He was blathering on about all the usual Republican ideas about education...and I do hate to be uncharitable but (since I spend more time in public schools in one week than Ron Saxton has probably spent in all of the past year), I tend to think he's spouting the same load of crap that Republicans everywhere spew. I would still feel this way even without help from Savage Inequalities.

If you have made it this far, you may be wondering if I do have a point...What do I think is the answer? Well it would sound like socialism, but let's face it, your economic resources overwhelming predict your chance at school success. Until someone seriously proposes wage parity, I don't want to hear one more fucking word about "test scores", "AYP" or "failing schools" because we all know that the real cause of all of these things goes back to the fact that the rich will always come out ahead of the poor in all areas of life: health, resources, school success, jobs, whatnot. But according to Republicans like our friend Ron Saxton blaming the poor for their poverty is still in style.

Back to the middle school classroom, one thing i really dug about this school is all the posters in the halls reminding of the rules and their catchy acronyms. The other thing I think the school does well is giving the ILC kids small but frequent breaks to go outside and let off some steam after long periods of math and reading and such. It really seems to help them if they have these outlets during the day and they seem to focus a whole lot better for having them. Stroke of genius. If it was my school to run, I'd mandate them for all of the classes...