October 3, 2006
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The Daily News
1 Global Warming, Dept: So I take a look at today's weather report, and guess what?
2 You guesed it. More rain.
3 I don't know what I'm going to do with all of it this year. Last year it seemed it was raining every day, but I was also sad quite a bit, having missed my good ol' Class of '05, whom I advised several light years ago.
4 I was sad quite a bit last year, and it seemed that the rain was exactly what it felt like inside of me all year. Somehow, I'm not feeling all that umbrella angst I felt last year. I've actually been having a ball trying to handle a job that nobody on this planet could handle.
5 Still, I'm handling it. I had my first public failure last week when we had this huge election for School Site Council members. My job was to get some students elected to that, so I set it up to happen during their 5th period classes.
6 Well, if anything could go wrong, it would. I was told that there were something like 40 teachers less than there were, so I didn't have enough ballots. When the ballots were printed, the instructions said two different things. Students were left OFF the ballots. Distribution of the ballots was slow, so around half the faculty didn't get them on time.
7 I could go on, as well as explain why each category went awry, but it wouldn't matter: fact is, it just looked disorganized and stupidly thought through, even though it actually WAS thought through. It was just an information collapse.
8 Fortunately, most of the teachers understood, and anyone else hurt by it seemed understanding as well. To me, it was embarrassing, but I just sort of shrugged it off. Of course, some teachers got ridiculously angry. You always get them:
10 It's funny, as a younger teacher, I would have fretted all weekend, and felt idiotic about those things, but in my new role as the voice of experience, I really didn't take any of it personally. When teachers would ask, "Who took them?" I'd look at THEM as though THEY were the idiot.
11 "I don't know."
12 "But who DID that?"
13 "OH! I'M SORRY! THIS GUY NAMED BOB. OLD FRIEND OF MINES. I MUST HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD YOUR IDIOTIC QUESTION! M'BAD!"
14 Yeesh.
15 Who took them. That killed me.
16 Let's do another, the one about the ballots: "Why do some of the instructions say to vote for 5 and the others to vote for 8?"
17 "OH! I'M SORRY! I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE CLEVER TO FOOL EVERYBODY AND NOT ENCLOSE THE CORRECTION IN YOUR BOX ONLY, JUST BECAUSE I WANTED TO MAKE YOU ASK THAT QUESTION. EVERYBODY ELSE SEEMED TO GET THAT MESSAGE. MUST BE MY FAULT THAT YOU COULDN'T READ SIMPLE CORRECTIONS! I'LL RE-PRINT ALL 2500 BALLOTS SO YOU'LL BE APPEASED!"
18 You get the idea. It's funny because no matter where you work or what you do, it seems someone out there wants to point out that you are a knucklehead.
19 My answer to guys like that is pretty much this: "It's not my fault that you hate your father."
20 They usually walk off wanting to pin something on me, like an anvil.
21 Nah, I never actually SAY that. I sure think it though.
22 As I've said many times over the years, there's a reason I have a job.
23 Other than that, I've been doing well up on the Chill on the Hill. As I've said, I sometimes feel like the Birdman of Alcatraz, confined to that place as though it is a certain prison. I've made it comfortable and nice, stereo, huge office, refrigerator, couch, and free reign, but I still look out over the twinkling lights of our town and often wish I could just hop in the TOONDRA and fly through the hills just above me, as I always could.
24 Well, the job has made me a lot more restricted in my schedule, but it's also a lot of fun and is challenging beyond all measure! Anyone who knows me knows I don't flourish very well when confined. So although I'm confined right now, once I learn the ins and outs of this place, I'll be ready to fly. Or at least to pick up a guitar and sing some Coldplay.
25 So yeah, I miss certain things. Most of the teachers who left YB agree that the students and staff are never quite as good as we had at YB. If you ask anyone who left, that's the good word on good ol' YB.
26 But the entire new world and new experience has blown the doors wide open for me to soar and to fly, and to make things happen in a brand new place. And it's very exciting because almost everyone up there is new, so we ALL are making fools out of ourselves as we begin to take a school that has been almost foolishly new and to bring new ideas and traditions into it.
27 So I view my first failures as successes, because as cliche as it seems, you learn more from one failure than you do from a thousand successes.
28 That's it for today. I'll stop updating really soon I hope, so that I could start making the DN more goofy. It is overdue for some fun. I just thought I'd share some early experiences in my early days up here. So no, rumors that I jumped off the roof at Cougar Hall are unfounded. I tried to jump out the windows when I saw morons approaching, but found that the windows are ten feet high, with slit openings that certainly wouldn't fit a big brown bear like me.
29 So nah, I'm all right. I just keep bouncing back and kicking the critics upside the head, like always. Some things never change.
30 Stay the course.
31 Peace y'all.
32 Out.
~H~
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