d.c. politics saturation

the funny thing about this city and the surrounding 'burbs is how saturated with politics everything is. everyone has an opinion about this or that and feels the need to share it when a tiny opportunity presents itself. case in point, last night as i shopped for the contents of a care package for an old friend. he's a marine, deployed in afghanistan. it's his fourth tour overseas; the previous three were in iraq.

i asked romona the cashier to keep my two bags of stuff separate, as one was a care package for a marine. we got to talking about his duties and deployments when out of the blue, "well, he's got bush to thank for that!"

silence. crickets. i didn't know how to respond. many of you don't know brian. he's a character to say the least. as long as i've known him, all he wanted to do was serve our country. as i thought more about it, it became clear to me why i'm so conflicted about the war.

do i think we were misled into iraq? more than likely. do i think that guys like brian bemoan their multiple deployments? absolutely not. if it weren't iraq or afghanistan, it'd be some other theater and far more covert. he'd be bored as hell stuck behind a desk, and while special ops guys are an anomaly, it is what he signed up for. he wouldn't still be at it after 11 years if he weren't good at it, and sad as it is, there's plenty of work for him to do. we're in too deep in iraq to cut and run. i don't think there's an easy answer, but i'm glad that there's been more positive news lately. hopefully, we can help straighten things out and our next president gets all the credit.

fall saturdays are here at last!

after a summer of lazing away on my bike or reading in the sunshine or climbing the rocks, football season just plain snuck up on me. i can't wait for the big games to come along, oh, next week.

start off the day walking around eastern market. people watching, sidewalk musician listening, art appreciating. go to the deli, munch on an incredible chicken salad sandwich, read a book in the sunshine.

walk down pennsylvania avenue towards the pour house, orange and blue around me. belly up to the bar, and make some friends while waiting on bubba and liz. rawls & mary pam show up first. watch some of virginia tech's first half before our game kicks off. worry a little in the first half, then the gators pour on the points effortlessly. say my goodbyes to the friends old and new, walk towards the capitol with the happy couple.

hop on my bike and take off down pennsylvania, weaving through tourists and tour buses and traffic. past the capitol dome, museums, the white house. cross the key bridge back into the old dominion and take a beverage break. weather couldn't have been nicer. low 80s, cloudless skies. eight mile ride or so.

hit the showers, lay around on the couch, watching football. if i can't be at the swamp, i guess saturday was a damn fine alternative. go gators!

fauxtography? oops!

yesterday, whilst i was trying to get my room situated and squared away, i was wasting time on the class computers, trying to differentiate them for the kids. what should i use for computer wallpaper? why, my photos, of course!

rather than have the URL in the address bar for them to see whenever they use the computer, i googled "fauxtography" to see if it would appear. (if you've been hiding under a rock lately, check out my pictures. the link is at right, "my foray into photography".) first result that came back was a definition from the urban slang dictionary. being inquisitive by nature, i checked it out to see what they had to say.

first definition of fauxtography:

Fraudulent photography. News images that have been faked by various means, generally to promote an ideological agenda or to manipulate the emotions of the viewer...The word was first used to describe the doctoring of photographs by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj during the Lebanon War of 2006, and has since been generalized to mean any dishonest or faked news photo.

Methods for creating “fauxtographs” include: using Photoshop (or similar software) to digitally alter the photo; photographing staged scenes or simulated news events and presenting them as real; interfering with or manipulating photo subjects to creat a “more effective” picture; adding inaccurate and/or misleading captions.

well, that certainly doesn't apply to mine, though the etymology is certainly where i came up with the idea, albeit two years after the word was coined. my photos are all natural, no doctoring necessary. the second definition was more concise, but pretty much the same idea of propaganda. let's see that final one:

the crappy pictures of the sky or dead plants that scene kids take with their digital cameras and call it a hobby. They say photography is their passion, but we all know it's really fauxtography.

ah, we're getting closer to the point. one, i'm not a scene kid, so that doesn't work. two, no pictures of the sky or dead plants. three, i know that my crappy digital camera doesn't produce amazing art. does being self aware of this make this definition fit more or less? too late to change the name of the phlog now. oh well. time to go find some dead plants or rainy skies or crying puppies or something else emo...

school daze

oddly, i'm not too tired this week from getting up early. my overly bright bedroom helped me keep close to my school sleep schedule all summer. however, my energy level to actually work in my classroom this year is low low low. i'm struggling to get it all together, as usual, but this year seems slower than most. moving classrooms and begging borrowing stealing materials since i changed grade level is eating up a lot of time. then, of course, my attention level is decreasing my focus. a summer spent being lazy for the morning, checking email, watching the daily show, resulted in a lack of industriousness. no matter how many times i felt motivated to do a lot in a day this summer, i never managed to finish a manageable task list on any of them.

this does not bode well for the intensity that i've gotten myself into. i'm simultaneously excited and terrified at feeling like this is my first year teaching all over again...

why michelle rhee is ill-suited for the job

this isn't the first time i've heard of something like this, but it's certainly one of the most misguided and broadly applied to raise attendance and test scores. what am i talking about? paying kids to do well in school. no, not by their parents, as it were. by a school district. first off, a little background. michelle rhee is the oft-maligned school chancellor for d.c. public schools. since taking office, she's closed schools, fired teachers, reassigned many more. she's a reformer, and the press seems to have a love-hate relationship with her policies and ideas.

so, i see this on the news last night.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced plans yesterday to boost dismal achievement at half the city's middle schools by offering students an unusual incentive: cash...Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior

the biggest problem i see with this is that it switches motivation to do well from intrinsic to extrinsic. intrinsically, we do things we enjoy without obvious external influences. the best students are intrinsically motivated and actually enjoy learning. granted, the targeted kids don't have much of either, but is giving them an extrinsic reason to learn in their formative years really the best solution?

she reasoned in her press conference that this will prepare them for the work force because school is their job. this is where the parents come in, not the government. school is school, not a job. it prepares you for society and (hopefully) a job later in life. parents are the ones that are supposed to instill the value of education in their kids. sure, i knew kids who got money for good grades in middle school and high school. they did what they had to do to get good grades. did they retain much of what the learned? i doubt it. my parents never even considered such measures, nor did many of my friends'. those friends and i are the ones who still read books for pleasure in adulthood, can carry on intelligent conversations, and take pleasure in being well-informed. i'd venture to guess that many of the intelligent young professionals that populate this great city fit the same mold.

i had a student in florida several years ago that was wholly unmotivated to work hard or participate in school. he bounced between the homes of his oft-jailed father and his never-quite-sober mother and his grandmother. my year with him, he was mostly with his mother, and it was all he could do to make it to school on time with a good night's rest and something to eat for breakfast. he had repeated first grade and was still far below grade level in most subjects. during career month, the students all had to learn about what they wanted to be when they grew up. his lack of motivation in school showed, "why should i pick a job? i'm just going to go to the mailbox once a month just like grandma."

no, it's not easy to motivate kids these days, even with good parenting. that's the point, there's no easy solution to making kids want to learn. great teachers, role models, and parents all fit into the equation. school chancellors that make it rain so the kids behave? not likely.

roots

since high school, i've been rootless. the longest span i've stayed anywhere since then was two years each in room 27, the laurels, and 3913 with lee. moving is apparently in my character. mind wandering today, bored in class, i realized a few things.

i wish i weren't so rootless. growing up in south florida, my classmates uprooted and moved quite a bit. not often somewhere to a new school, just bigger and "better" houses trending westward and northward towards parkland. i'm thankful that my roots stayed put for ten and a half years, then about eight more until college. my new friends around here are locals. by locals i mean that they returned to their hometowns, more or less, following college. i'd venture to guess that aside from it being expected of them, most of their friends did the same. it sure makes it easier to go home (or near there) if your good friends do the same. while my roots have become more like spanish moss, theirs are like oak trees. it's hard settling roots in rich soil when you're used to the silty sand down south. tropical trees grow slowly in mid-atlantic winters.

i miss roots. i do miss the familiarity of home, though in my case, it seems the old adage is true, "you can never go home again." not because i got kicked out or my folks wouldn't love to have me, but it's never the same. the nostalgia of what it was overshadows what it's become.

my first car

what should be elation over driving something a little sportier, a little roomier, a little newer quickly turned to sadness last night, thanks to a chevy silverado commercial. you know the type. "i've had this truck since i was 16, and i'm 120 now. it has 2,000,000 miles on it, and it still starts right away." the thing that hit me hardest were the guys that had less than 180,000 miles on their trucks. less than my danger ranger. i remember going home for the chili cookoff, her first tailgate, nights spent asleep in the cab or in the bed, hauling ridiculous construction or landscaping materials, getting stuck in mud or sand, going coast to coast. now she's gone. abandoned to a new home. rolled off into the sunset with someone else behind the wheel and a fistful of c-notes in my pocket.



there's an alan jackson song about his first car called "first love." it tells about how excited he was to get her at 15 years old. he sold her to a pilot in north carolina and was a wreck. many years later, he still holds a special place in his heart for that old car. his wife and daughter find it many years later for a christmas gift. i used to think it was ridiculous. now, not so much.

comment me a story about your beloved (or not so beloved) first car and when you had to let go. small comfort maybe, but it might make me feel better...

quibble

"you haven't gone more than a week this summer without a new injury," she quips. i took it as the joke it was intended, but then i realized, there's a good bit of truth to it.

for the better part of the summer, i've been going to physical therapy for a snowboarding injury reaggravated by running when i was home for mom's birthday. the toll: four weeks of physical therapy, two times a week. the benefit, a stronger lower back and the beginnings of a six-pack.

as that injury abated, i did something to the middle of my back. not sure what, but the vertebrae between my shoulder blades somehow torqued itself out of place. amateur home chiropractics did not help the situation. two weeks later, i woke up magically feeling better.

my subconscious compensation for the initial back injury apparently wore out my left leg. no sooner did my back feel better than my joints all screamed, "hey, my turn!" last night at the gym, my first real climbing injury in quite a while.

quirky V5, confounding us all. big, tensiony first move. bump left hand up to bad sidepull, adjust feet, go big left. ceiling right heel hook, suck in the core, and reach for a bad sloping edge. left foot out of sight, turn that drop knee and POP! i crumple to the ground, motionless on my face, holding my left knee in agony.

so here i sit today. just iced it, some vitamin I, wrapped up tight, gingerly moving. man, it's hell getting old!

random movie quotes IV

it's been a while. there's been a lot of movies added to my brain in the past few weeks. i upped the netflix account to two-at-a-time, went to four out of five screen on the greens this summer, and managed to hit a few new movies in the theater. oh, and then there's 80s movie night madness. the top 5 list. i'll make them short.

1) "Bastian made many other wishes, and had many other amazing adventures - before he finally returned to the ordinary world. But that's... another story."

2) "...you know a lot more about planes than guns. That's a Smith and Wesson 45, and if you fire at me at this close range, the bullet will pass through me and the fuselage like a blowtorch through butter. The cabin will depressurize, and we'll both be sucked into outer space together. If that's how you want to enter the United States, you're welcome. As for me, I prefer the easy way."

3) "Now look. The Post: "It Flies." The News: "Look, Ma, No Wires." The Times: "Blue Bomb Buzzes Metropolis." The Planet. We're sitting on top of the story of the century here! I want the name of this flying whatchamacallit to go with the Daily Planet like bacon and eggs, franks and beans, death and taxes, politics and corruption."

4) "A UFO landed in my pool and they captured me but we made friends and I fed them Pop-Tarts and they're here now but Ted's coming home tonight so we've got to cut their hair."

5) "For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide."