060222 I figured something out this morning. I'll be happy to tell you about it, but first I have to mess around with software, get a ASMR video going thru my SENNHEISER 6XX from MASSDROP, make some coffee, possibly take a shit because I had three donuts, fresh from the walmart bakery, hand delivered to me while cel and i were perusing the shelves before buying some brown lunch bags because she needed one for a school project and i said hey it's ok that you forgot to tell me to buy them, we'll just go in the morning, and we did, and it was fun, and it's sunny and breezy out and i saw a goldfinch flap across the road in front of my windshield as i was driving around the circle on my way back in here to type this. You see how it goes? This is why I can never remember anything. So but hang on a sec, let me just get the essentials down so I can pick up where i left off after i get back from what is surely going to be, after three of said fresh sugar donuts and my first cup of aeropressed coffee, going to be an immensely satisfying excretory experience: it has to do with what "live each day as if it were your last" means, and how it doesn't mean you have to go skydiving right now. OK. Back in a minute. A few minutes. Well, we'll see—hopefully I won't have a toilet-ring impression across my ass cheeks, hopefully it won't be one of *those* sittings. “As if it were your last” doesn’t mean you have to get manic and run around like a crazy person and jump out of airplanes and start a revolution in Spain. It just basically means don’t be a bitch. Unless you really want to be a bitch, that is. But I don’t—at least, not in the sense of how I’ve been lately. I don’t want to complain about everything. I don’t want to drink another beer to make the TV more interesting. I don’t want to hate everyone in Walmart. Did you know, this morning, while Cel and I were looking at the bakery shelves in Walmart, this old, slightly doofusy guy came toddling out from behind the counter and said, “I’ve got some sugar donuts too, if you want a box. They’re still warm!” And I said yes I would like a box of those, thank you, and he handed them to me. That’s what I’m talking about. That would be OK if that were the last little moment I had, do you see what I’m saying? And me and Cel ate donuts in the truck, my dad’s old truck, on the way to the middle school, to her frog test, to her Spanish quiz, to the hippos in her stomach, to not wanting to walk up to the door before the buses got there, to another day she’s going to be all right in after all. “As if it were your last” means maybe it is. You never know, right? That’s too obvious to have any meaning, everybody knows that. We all know that—“you could get hit by a meteor on your lunch break today” is basic middle-school epiphany material. Old news. And yet. There’s a couple of different states we’re talking about here, I think. There’s the state of “I *WILL* get hit by a meteor today,” there’s “I am operating under the assumption that I definitely *WILL NOT* get hit by a meteor today”—neither of those is optimal—and then there’s “I will live as if I *COULD* get hit by a meteor today but I’m neither ignoring that externality nor letting it consume me.” Or something like that. The point is, it doesn’t have to turn me into something I’m not. Like, is skydiving (to keep harping on that example) really the sine qua non of my full-life identity? Do I have a hole in my heart from not earning that certificate? Have I really been living all these 52 years just working towards being a ripped, sunglassed, devil-may-care person falling on purpose out of an airplane? Look, we’re all constantly falling out of airplanes anyway. We don’t all have to do the same things on the way down. I gotta wrap this up soon, cuz I gotta get back to work interfacing with the academic anxieties of high-school kids I’ll never meet in real life. This has to with love, too. I think I have an understanding of what Christianity might be about, what “Jesus” might be about. Funny, right? But it adds up. Check this out: No, I’m not going to start going to church or putting chapter and verse bumper stickers on my truck, give me a fucking break. But. It means loving everyone. I understand the strained but sincere smiles of middle aged ladies in yellow crepe blouses and done hair standing with respectable poise in the sun at the picnic on the town square. Dude, you blind idiot, she’s not being snooty and judgmental; she’s being patient. No, not with the heathens and the trash, but with herself. She’s being patient with herself because she knows she’s no better than they are and yet it’s too easy to feel like she is, like she must be, because let’s face it, people are gross and disgusting and annoying and they will piss you off and you will either feel superior to them or jealous of them or sorry for them or afraid of them and all of those things are OK, as long as you can somehow come back to remembering that all life is sacred or else none of it is. And that you are someone else’s someone else. All the time, every day. Even if that day is your last. So what do you do? You love them all. This is not an injunction, it is an essential element of your being. You can’t actually help it; you *do* love them all. You just didn’t fully realize it all the time. But this morning you did. Why? It kind of doesn’t matter why. Like Steve Geibel said: “What am I doing? I’m playing the flute. Why am I playing the flute? It doesn’t matter why.” You love all of them: the soloist and the chorus member. The award winner and the onlooker. The driver and the passenger. The gut and the svelte. The boy, the girl, the other. The human, the tick, the finch, the weed and the flower. Yes, even yourself. Even yourself, who woke up short of oxygen, certain that you will never have another partner because who thinks a CPAP machine is sexy? Are antihistamines anticholinergic? Are you losing IQ points? Are you in a fog? Can you afford to replace Libby’s retainer? How much does it cost to try to make her feel better about losing it? Are you still alive? Do you have another day? Is it the last one? Does it matter if it is? Not if you do the things you need and want to do, one after another, as calmly and freely as if that inevitable meteor were still lightyears away. Take a bike ride. Go see a play with Millie tonight. Send this to Megan. She might like it. This is for me what passes for prayer. 060322 she said i don’t need your social tips i said maybe you do. i like to think i know a little bit about what women find attractive and not because i’m this big macho lover but because i’m part woman myself maybe cuz i have four daughters or maybe it was always there and necessity called it out like a sense [or a scent] that gets stronger when you lose another 2044393 when you hear a screaming kid and you're about to get annoyed— remember it could be a dinosaur 2047439 as the water bottle rolls to the back of the bus, you realize (or remember) that things doen't always work out the way you wanted them to as the water bottle rolls to the back of the bus, someone in the seat behind you says hey let's go see FUC<BOY at the Coliseum tonight! to someone else who looks up from their phone and smiles as the water bottle rolls to the back of the bus, you dig another beer out of your knapsack watch the highway signs glide by and wonder why as the water bottle rolls to the back of the bus, you're like damn i wish i had some pizza and just like that the people in the seat behind you say hey you want a piece? we ain't never gonna finish all this (lol) and you say thanks and someone else from all the way in the back stands up and says is this your water bottle? and the sunset streams in through every little window and makes everything suddenly golden 2355209 who the fuck ever thought to put cheese and peanut together 060422 Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. By the way, I'm typing each of these out, not using copy and paste (it would be interesting if there were a way to indicate that so that looking at the document later you would be able to tell) in an attempt to help me remember it more effectively. I mean it's not as though I usually literally forget, I do remember, it's just that in the moment the remembering isn't convincing enough, isn't powerful enough—present-moment me doesn't give a fuck, figures tomorrow-morning me will forgive him for his need for indulgence. He just wants to feel good in the moment. He wants to continue that loose-limbed, in-the-zone feeling from the afternoon's bike ride, when he was humming along, the wheels were humming, the dragonflies and butterflies were humming, his mind was humming (no longer jangly, no longer erratically spinning), even his breathing was humming (no longer weird—no longer falling to the bottom and sitting there like a sunk ngtfirn needing to be reeled back up—no longer overly self-conscious, we're no longer having to stare at our breathing the wrong way thru a telescope), but hey, guess what? Ruth was right: "I just wanted more of the mood I was in so started drinking [and eating, in my case, maybe hers too but it wasn't part of the original quote], and pretty soon I was in a completely different mood." Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. plus the fact if you don't curtail this behavior, you're never going to even slightly alter the great blob that has become the front of your torso, the great lopsided donut that has taken up residency just above your hips, sagging there like a water-filled pool floatie Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Morning is better when you don't drink and eat too much at night. Call it a spaceship or whatever you want. Like in Conway's Game of Life, you know? The blobs of bits that traverse the screen, they call them spaceships, but they could be called anything else that would make sense; spaceships just seems to fit the coolness vibe of the game itself, the inevitability of logic, the astonishment of determinism, the thrill of human interaction with the neverending pulse and rhythm of information But teh-dsa keeps looking for me even if I'm not making it easy. It wants to find a way. Life finds a way. Information finds a way. Blah blah blah considers it damage and routes around it (or more accurately, sends metaphorical nanobots in to start repurposing it). If there's typewriters and index cards available, it rearranges those to form the spaceship that can get to me. Maybe it's not accurate to say "so it can get to me." I don't know what the "purpose" is. Like plastic bags acting like tumbleweeds: they didn't evolve "so they could get everywhere, even to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches." But the way they evolved did get them there. "Why" may be an artificial construct. "That" is the only thing of which we can relatively certain, within the bounds of how we dare define certainty. If there's a toilet-seat iBook and Mac OS 9, it uses those homely harmonious tools. And so on. Right now, it's poking up like weeds through this outliner app, so that's cool. I'm enjoying it. I always enjoy its iterations. It as, after all, what feeds me. 060522 Last night i had my last beer for the forseeable future. I'm so scared of complex (that's obstructive + central) sleep apnea, which I clearly have even though I haven't gotten the overpriced diagnosis yet, that I need to anything at all I possibly can do starting now, before I start trying to get the moribund health care system to get me a cpap or one a them nerve zapper thingies. And that, seems logical enough & backed up by some cursory website browsing, includes cutting out alcohol. I wonder what else I could change that might make a difference? What and when I eat? How often and when I exercise? The bike ride the other day definitely felt like it leveled out my heart and lungs; not sure how much effect that carries into the night, but it sure can't possibly hurt, right? The good news is, thc is still a "maybe" and could possibly even be a plus! So you know, if I had to pick one, that's the one I would keep anyway, so, bright side and all that. Last night also I took Lib and Cel to Pridefest (well, actually I took Lib and Cel's friend's dad took her and her friend, but the dad wanted to leave early (and never really seemed too thrilled about being there in the first place; picture pale white face with small round eyes staring out somewhat vacantly, we nodded and said hi to each other at the beginning but were never actually introduced nor never introduced ourselves, and then basically he loomed about, pale white calves sticking out under comfortable white man shorts, staring at his phone most of the time with that hunched, slumped, downward-looking posture that most people have most of the time these days and that makes me want to scream and set shit on fire and break everything and i'm not even sure why)), and there's plenty I could say about that, including how many fat people were there—are there that many everywhere? I mean I know there's a lot in general everywhere these days, probably because of how fucked up our food supply is and how fucked up and unevenly distributed our economy is and how fucked up our collective national psyche is, but geez! It just seemed like there's a correlation between being "pride" and being, I don't know how else to say it, kind of uggo. Sorry, I know that's a thoughtcrime. I'll stop. but for now I'll just mention that on an impulse, right as we were leaving the thumping, booming, reeking, jouncing, beautiful, weird dance pavillion where i witnessed lib and cel witnessing something they'll probably remember, deep in their bodies, including just the way the bass thunders right through your body, makes your whole body literally beat, forever, we decided to let them go on the skyglider one more time. I got a perfect picture of them on their way off the ground (faerie tiktok!!), and just as I was doing that, they said, no! dad! look over there!!! and the fireworks were starting! and so they got the watch the show from high above the festival grounds, with all the lights twinkling and reflecting in the pools of light rainwater all over the ground. Their smiles were genuine (that's why it was a perfect picture). Also dreamed i was at someone's house and this old (gay (or something)) guy was giving a friendly speech/folklore about this school that he had started back in the day, as an alternative to some of the different kinds of bullshit, and i said to him, "I wanted to say i wish i could have been there to be a part of that fight, but i realized the fight's not over, and i'm here now, and i still want to fight it" and he said "fight it in small parts" and offered to let me apply to be a student teacher. 1930353 my next personal challenge: how do you retrain your brain to remember to keep you breathing at night? (but before i typed all that, autocorrect accidentally typed dad) a writing practice isn’t forcing yourself to do it every day it’s giving yourself permission to do it any day 060922 yes of course there’s fucking aliens out there. fucking duh. why the fuck wouldn’t there be? we just think we’re so smart, explaining away any kind of sign or signal with our preposterous assumptions, backed by math we may or may not have invented. we can’t see them because we assume the most boring thing always has to be the truth 060822 i truly don't know whether jordan klein is a complete swindler or completely sincere. that's one of the more interesting and maddening things about my job right now. 060922 but you know, even if he is acting, he's so thoroughly committed to the part, even beyond when he would be able to relax cuz he got presumably the desired result, i'm going to go ahead and go with sincere. i always used ta think i had to write like a man that's a big part of what kept tripping me up (times when i'd get tripped up) 061022 You must remember this: it doesn't matter how much or whether or not Jason "likes" you. All that matters is if your presence on staff makes him look good in his professional role. So if you don't do the EQ and rubrics and include the right UDL vocabulary in the right ways in the right places, your position is not secure. YOU will be the one to get dropped when eAchieve can no longer support four full-time English teachers. Doesn't matter if you've been here longer. Need some proof? Just look at Kris, you moron. You absolutely must remember that you are not special, no matter how many beers and avocado toast moments you may have had together in San Diego or anything else. Never forget that, in this job or any other. Until you learn how to make your own job and be your own boss. Are you too old? Is it too late? Are you too lazy? I dunno, it's no big deal either way, as long as you know what you're dealing with and aren't in some kind of stupid denial. Plan B, baby. Unless you're jumping in a volcano, you should always have a Plan B. And you don't have one right now, and that's one of the many things making your chest get resonant and sing its tortured little stupid song instead of just breathing out and moving on. And here's another thing: Even if you (and you will) start fixing up the things that he noted in the "mini observation feedback" about Brit Lit (essential questions, reasons for what we're doing, clear rubrics aligned specifically to targets including which elements of an assessment go with which target, UDL engagement and multiple different options for final product besides just which mentor text you chose, etc), even if you do that, that's still not an insurance policy. Remember, your ACTUAL effectiveness as a teacher probably has some impact on your success from a monetary/professional viewpoint, but it all flies out the window if there's a need to axe someone or you fall out of favor. All these little eval things can be wildly interpreted any way they need to be by the guy that signs off on them. Again: Kris. And yes, some of Kris's stuff did in fact suck pretty hard. I'm just saying, you tend to focus in on and obsess over the wrong things sometimes. Like, how awesomely can I write this description or how awesome is this story (for people that already like reading stories), or how cool is this research rabbit hole I just went in (for people that like doing research), or whatever. THE PENULTIMATE LINE IS, IT HAS TO *LOOK* LIKE WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE, AND THE ULTIMATE BOTTOM LINE IS, YOU HAVE TO SOMEHOW MAGICALLY THREAD THE INVISIBLE NEEDLE'S EYE OF PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL "FIT" AND APPROBATION. REMEMBER, NO MATTER WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ACT LIKE YOUR JOB IS ABOUT, WE ARE ALL JUST MONKEYS DOING MONKEY SHIT IN THE WOODS. Who are you grooming and who's grooming you? Play the game, or get the fuck out, but if you get the fuck out, there's going to be different games. Also you have to remember not the JUST blame everyone else. What aspects of your perceived decline in performance or fitness may be perfectly legit, and due to things you've done or habits you've formed? 061222 Stressed about ambiguous work stuff, paranoia, perhaps justified mistrust, getting mixed signals but an undertone of "you better have a plan b." Look I'm not 25 anymore, I know better than to ignore these things. HOWEVER, you still gotta treat it like a game. THEY can't make YOU miserable unless you let them. PLAY THE GAME. "If you're not amused? You're not doing it right." It's not some dire, essential YOU that's on trial here; it's your character going through their adventures. If you can't laugh about it with your friends as you eat cheetoes and roll the dice, why are you even here? i felt like i strove all year with udl-inspired principles... and yet, this shit.... creative writing: a whole new class based on choice am lit: choice end of brit semester 1: choice (check out final unit for example) brit semester 2: choice (check out first unit (4) for example) And yet the only feedback i got to take away is the commentary on the observation that amounted to “there’s no choice” and I didn’t spell out essential questions or standards (which are actually on the pace chart btw) for them, plus a weirdly specific comment about targets not being described that wasn’t even accurate. There were no unqualified positives. (You’re hyperfocusing on a couple of specific terms from udl and blinkering yourself to everything else. Even Katy N said not every assessment has to have a list of choices.) I don't believe "choice" means EVERY ASSESSMENT has to have A LIST OF THINGS YOU CAN DO. It can also mean, given the assessment, there are multiple paths to success, including working with your teacher on how to interpret the project. Your teacher is adaptable. The rules can be changed. Your teacher will listen to you. Not everything has to be a "menu" from the get-go. But then again, what I believe, and the philosophical underpinnings of all this stuff, aren't really what we're talking about here. We're talking about Jason's paycheck. Therefore, the "truth" is a matter of optics. “there isn't much purpose given for the lessons or texts other than that's what's next” -- we all know the real purpose is to get credit and graduate. Can we not read books and learn about them and is that not good enough while we’re doing what we have to do to get through it? and later: “a description of what they are learning is provided (not the reason for learning it).” what the fuck is the reason for learning it? This is the shit that drives me fucking crazy. The reason for learning it is the fucking standards, right? What the fuck do you want me to say about this? OK fine, I’ll take what’s already on the pace chart and stick it everywhere. Same with the fucking targets and rubrics. Fine. You literally looked at one tiny piece of my work this year and took a shit all over it. Thanks. regarding the emulating the mentor text assignment: “scaffolds provided that essentaily create the same product as all other students with the exception of which story they choose as their mentor text” -- not true. There was tremendous variation. I worked with individual students on how they could interpret the assignment. “all stories need to be ‘like the mentor text’” -- nope, you have misunderstood the assignment “Units have learning targets posted but they are for the entire unit and labeled by T1, T2, etc (not the actual target, ie "reading")” -- simply false. The descriptions are right there. curious: does a math class have to have choice on every assessment and explain the reason for learning math at the top of every fucking page? You know I didn't have one student complain because they had to look at the top of the unit for the definition of what "T1" means? And I didn't have one student ask "what is the purpose for learning this?" The purpose is reading and thinking and talking and writing about reading. If that isn't good enough, I really and truly may not be in the right profession—or at least not in the right job. Also, I checked the box that said "we had a meaningful conversation blah blah blah" BUT WE NEVER DID. FUCK ME. It's like I have all these notes and ideas and plans and outlines and videos to edit and all these conversations with AKL about all this cool stuff we can do, and now I'm just demoralized. Like instead of working on what is actually exciting, I feel like I have to go back and spend my whole summer nervously dotting t's and crossing i's while the sword of damocles hangs over my head. am i overreacting? JS would probably say "we have to do what's best for the students, not just what we think is interesting" but i am pretty god damn fucking sure that the reason i think these things are interesting is that i'm pretty fucking god damn sure the students will too. That's being a teacher, to me. If that isn't being a teacher to you, then again, maybe I don't belong here. And yes of course there's a middle ground, yes of course I can listen and take criticism and be guided but I DON'T FUCKING TRUST YOU. That's the bottom line here. I just feel like I have every legitimate reason to suspect some shit is going on and it is so distracting trying to juggle now how much energy to spend on what. It's maxing out my CPU's when I preciously need those cycles to work on the REAL shit, the NON BULLSHIT shit. Am I completely misguided about what is and isn't bullshit? Maybe a little but not completely. I KNOW it's not completely. I'm not incompetent. I'm a flake sometimes, sure, but I'm also a good fucking teacher. If you can't see that past your script, then fuck you. I'm JUST NOT A HUGE FAN OF EXERCISES IN FUTILITY, you know what I mean? Just fucking be straight with me. But I know you won't. It's not in your nature, or anyway it's not in your self-percieved self-interest where you are right now. Could I be wrong? Sure. Am I? I doubt it. just make sure every assessment has clear rubric describing which parts of it go with which target, i guess put the full written out targets on every fucking assignment, and spell out an essential question for every week (can we make them come up with some??), and have "the reason for learning it" (i guess gank it from the standards, shit you could probably find that in studysync) come to think of it, why was nancy (i guess fucking forget the book publishing project, right??) asking me that weird hard to understand question about whether infinite campus showed the act-style standards or whatever the fuck? I wasn't even sure what she was asking but SOMETHING IS FUCKING GOING ON and i honestly am feeling overwhelmed by all the niggling little shit. every week it's like a different jargon zap fucking bullshit thing you're supposed to have stuck here or there or somewhere else and it's just so fucking chaotic like a fucking nest of bees. YOU CAN'T SATISFY THIS BUREAUCRACY is the feeling i'm getting, it's like a CONSTANTLY SHIFTING SECRET CODE that can and will be used against you, as soon as it's expedient to get rid of you, the correct code will shift to be whatever it is you're missing; as long as you're flavor of the month, they'll shift the code to accomodate whatever it is you're doing that might make them look good. 062222 If there's one thing I've learned (and that's a big if), it's that there is no miracle drug. There is no drug without side effects. Hence, the Huey Louis song. Well, I guess that's where I must've learned that from. So much for that mystery. JOB SKILLS: loves to say silently to self, "I'm so lonely;" not so fucking great at doing something about it (working on that) One thing I learned about JS is that he absolutely will NOT stand behind me if I commit too hard to this "It's stupid people wasting our time" stance. There's plenty for me to question myself about, including how well did I think it through and how much am I trying to blame other people for my shitty performance, but at least I got a good thimble full of reality syrup about THAT aspect of office politics. Always remember: student can fake thinking you're a benevolent genius as easily as woman can fake orgasm for some of the same reasons, weirdly I THINK I'm doing the best I can?? with what I have to work with??? 062522 Whole political philosophies are built on the need to look at all you've failed to accomplish and say, "This is not my fault." "This is not my problem" is probably pretty high on the list of fundamentals, too. Do people with more power tend to value teamwork less? Can this devaluation result in a blind spot of some kind that could potentially be used against them by teams of the less powerful? Realizing you're dreaming is either total power or the most heinous liability—depending on whether you're a "teams" person or a "fuck you as long as I got mine" person. Truly understanding that you're going to die is a form of lucid dreaming.