The Daily News

1   So...on FRIDEEEEEE I got off work pretty early.

2   Lately, I have been all over the place, like Mr. Chau.

3   I drifted to some Rite-Aid to pick up a couple of things, and wound up with around a bilion dollars worth of boushit.

4   Clearly out of my head stupid, as we've all been.

5   My mission, I think, was to get some coffee creamer, and then go home.

7  <basketball buzzer loud>

8   Somehow, I had brought to the check stand almost fifty dollars of boushit.

9   I KNOW, I KNOW!

10  But with worryin' about Dad, and gradiing bazillions of papers, I lost all sense of normalcy.

11  AnywayZ...

12  I wound up with fifty dollars of boushit, much of which were stress purchases and impulse buys.

13  Like, did I really NEED multi-colored paper clips?

14   Who knows.

15   AnywayZ again...

16   I approached the check-out person with all this boushit.

17   She began zinging my purchases through the checkout treadmill when I began yet another hallucination.

18   Suddenly, Hey Bit Spender from Sweet Charity began playing right in front of my nose. It was LOUD, and certainly not a figment of my frabjous imagination.

19  Now I was blasted, mind you, from heroic efforts all week to enlighten my students with books and books of The Odyssey, so much so that my mind was still there.

20   Yet all "on the sudden", Hey Big Spender blasted through my being.

21   I looked up.

22   I looked down.

23   I looked for store speakers.

24   Nothing.

25   And yet I heard it, and wondered if I had finally flipped. I wondered if everyone else could hear it.

26   I finished paying, and proceeded out the door.

27   The song persisted. I stood amazed, looked up at the stars, and then back down to this drunk fellow who lingered near an adjacent liquor store.

28   I thought I had finally gone alzy.

29   I FINALLY got logical.

30   For the record, I'm not used to modrin technology.

31   But when I realized that music suddenly had emitted from my left breast pocket, I decided to investigate.

32  It was then that I realized that in some mysterious way, my iPhone was the culprit!

33 To my credit, I've never kept a phone anywhere but in my pants' pocket, so this was something new. And this was around 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. I hadn't even gone home yet.

34  Second, in order for the iPod on my phone to work, I have to turn the phone on, touch a button that brings up my screen, touch the icon, find the song, and then touch the phone again so that it will play.

35  It's a series of moves.

36  That happened to me last week when I couldn't play a CD for my class because I had left my iPod deck at home. While looking around for a microphone, my phone played some other exotic music, and this was in front of an entire class.

37  I had an amp, and my laptop already was amped to some reasonably good Altec speakers, but the CD just couldn't get loud enough. So I pulled out an small Peavey amp that I have in my room, and looked for my mic, which is always right behind me in a cubby. It was gone. Frantically I began a series of searches, all of which must have looked ridiculous to the students.

38  And right in the middle of all of this, my iPhone started playing some weird music, quite loud enough for the class to witness.

39  I realized too late that it was my phone, but I was more worried about having five classes and no lesson plan.

40  I finally grabbed a book and read the stuff aloud, all of which was in one of my DN's from last week.

41  So it happened again on Friday afternoon.

42  I laughed because of the coincidence of spending around twenty times the amount of money that I originally thought I was going to spend, and Hey Big Spender came on.

43   It turns out that the iPhone 4 does that. It's a glitch. I looked it up online, being the logical person I believe I am. No hallucination, just a glitch that they are trying to fix, I guess. You shouldn't do things like that to people who have had odd things happening for the past month. Or maybe you should. Probably just the Agency messing with me.

44  Sidebar: As with everything in life, whenever you really need to find something you misplace, it appears the second you no longer need it.

45  Absolute Truth.

46  Yesterday I was looking around for a movie, and couldn't find it if I pulled my entire house down. But when I went to the garage, I moved one box and found the microphone AND the guitar cord attached to it with a 1/8" adapter, the EXACTthing I needed last Wednesday!

47  I did walk in and find the movie, so some things DO work.

48  And right back to it: So I'm now all ready for Monday.

49  If I could only find my keys...

50  You guys have a great day.

51   Fly low.

52   Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1   Holy Moly!

2   Ah, just kiddin'.

3   You shoulda seen what happened to me yesterday.

4   No dude, SERIOUSLY!

5   Okay, ya ready?

6   I'm finishing up The Odyssey, did something like six or seven more books than our lit book has.

7   Took a LOT of work preparing the lessons, and training myself to tell the students all of the stuff that is not in the lit book.

8   My deal is that more is more. I taught them about the golden age of Greece, of Pericles and Socrates, and of wisdom.

9   Our lit books short-change the story ridiculously, so I want them to hear the stories of ships turning to stone and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and of walls bleeding as the suitors mock Telemachus, who sees the bleeding walls and the blood dripping off their faces. Our lit books leave a lot of the great moments of the story out. I don't want my students to learn on appetizers; they deserve a light entree.

10  I tell these tales to them, and it exhausts me, but it is worth it. I tell them these great stories from antiquity, but it is lunacy attempting it. I still so, because the stories are so colorful and wonderful.

11  But the last three books (actually there are four) I blessedly have a CD with professional actors doing the work for me.

12  The challenge is that class sizes are so huge now that the CD isn't loud enough. I play it from my computer and cord it out to an iPod dock in order to make it considerably louder. I avoid movies until the unit is completely done, so that the story is already defined in each student's mind. So the CD is a nice compromise.

13  But if they can't hear it, they won't listen.

14  If they CAN hear it, they will be riveted. And I can grade papers while they listen.

15  Win-win.

16  AnywayZ, yesterday I was around seven or eight minutes down the road, a bit late for school, when I realized I had left my iPod deck at home!

17  I thought to myself, "No prob. You have an amp and a mic in your room, which no other teacher does. Just mike the existing speakers and amp it up."

18   Still, I was upset because I have been pretty much on top of my game, and that was a huge omission.

19  When I got to school, I thought, "Maybe my small Altecs will be enough if the classes are quiet." My first class is by far my most cooperative in that regard, so I explained to them what had happened, and they agreed to listen attentively.

20  I put the CD on, and within seconds, I knew it was not going to work. I knew that two days ago, but thought I'd give it a shot anyway.

21  With brash cockiness, I opened a cabinet, took out my mini-amp, and set it up swiftly.

22  I then turned to the cubbies behind me where I always have a microphone, and...

23  Gone!

24  I had taken it home for the summer, and never brought it back.

25  It was then I panicked. I looked in every cupboard I could. They began talking, chatting, and laughing.

26  I looked at them and explained that my microphone was home.

27  They couldn't care less. They just knew this was a ticket to relax, not stress, and talk with friends. I paced, nervously looking into every nook and cranny in the room. I decided swiftly that I must have looked like a lunatic, saying things like, "I ALWAYS have a mic!"

28  To me as a teacher, it was like fumbling the opening kickoff in the Super Bowl. This was IT. This was the climax of the entire unit, which began around Thanksgiving!

29  I felt like a quarterback who had already been sacked twice, and was scrambling in the pocket.

30  THEN irony and the gods reared their ugly faces. My iPhone 4 started playing some sort of strange music. It was in my pants pocket, so this weird music played from my pocket. I felt like I was on fire, or at least my pants pocket was!

31  I pulled it out, and tried to figure out how to stop the music. It wouldn't shut down! So even if I decided to lecture, this weird music would play in the background.

32  Well, I relaxed, became patient, and held the off button down. It finally went off. Duh.

33  I thought, "What would a good quarterback do here?" I looked out at the sky, at the gods, at Joe-the-Bear, at the Muses, and at Mom for strength. And it worked.

34  I grabbed a lit book and fiercely approached the podium.

35  You run for a touchdown is what you do. You take all your strength, seize the opp, and run with it.

36  "I think the gods are messing with me," I smiled. They smiled back. Good students.

37  "I think that I'm destined to deliver the end of the Odyssey to you the same way the bards did in ancient Greece. Turn off the lights, and let the daylight in. We will have no digital anything, no electricity, no CD's. I will do a dramatic reading of the end of the story, so that you will hear it as it was originally delivered."

38  The lights went out; the daylight came through the windows. I opened the book and became a legend. I knew this had to be one of my finest moments.

39  It worked. I became each voice in the story, taking everything I had ever done to a new level. I became the voice of Odysseus, as he exacted revenge on the suitors.

40  No bravado. In fact, I'm humbled that I had forgotten the CD, and was a little upset that I had to stand and do this for five periods. It is exhausting, and I wasn't getting any papers graded. But sometimes gifts come in mysterious ways.

41  I simply had to do it. It worked famously! The students were amazingly quiet and attentive all day. I got semi-applause in three periods. You know, the kind of applause that everyone wants to give, but that they need a prompt.

42  I said each time, "No, give yourselves applause for being polite and awesome listeners!" The applause then came through. It wasn't me; I was just surviving. We have been working on listening skills for around two weeks, and it paid off in spades.

43  So I went from looking like some fool who lost his keys to enjoying listening to my own narration by the end of the day. The story ends romantically and beautifully, and when I stopped, it was as if the Earth itself stopped.

44  Great teaching moment, and it could have been an all-day disaster.

45  Thank goodness the students respected this classic, and this Old Brown Shoe, who still managed to get it done. By the end of the day, I looked up at the sky and thanked the gods, Joe-the-Bear, the Muses, and Mom. The sun pierced the clouds and sent hope smiling down. A golden moment.

46  Thanks to all. My students learned. And I collapsed.

47  On the ride home, I enjoyed the sunset, and the tranquility of a day of wisdom and intelligence.

48  There's hope. And we all won. All of us.

47  Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

37   I just thought I'd bring in a blast from the past. Nearly every DN was that short, which gives it some energy. I'd throw grenades on each item and let people chuckle at the randomness.

38   Hmmmmm.

39   I may get back to that format. This stuff takes way too long.

40   It was always fun concocting the thing, and I feel to this minute that I don't write all this drivel.

41   Well, it's well past 4:30 a.m.

42   Time to put my insomniacal ravings to sleep for hopefully a good hour or so.

43   Wednesday already.

44   Have a delicious one.

45   Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1  Is it Spring yet?

2  I don't personally know, but on Sunday I began Spring cleaning at my office at home.

3  Do not underestimate what that means.

4  I have a cabinet that I hadn't cleaned out in about a hundred years. I received almost as many gifts as I got at Christmas!

5  Here are the treasures that emerged: A U2 CD of No Line on the Horizon. I have yet to listen to it! I think I bought it one morning at Starbuck's or something, but yeah!

6  A VHS-to-DVD converter I bought when I saw that VHS films of my dottas were starting to fade. Bought it on a whim, and threw it in the cabinet. Got busy and forgot about it. It's still in the cellophane.

7  About three containers of Kodak photo paper, unopened.

8  A journal writing book from Barnes and Noble that is entitled Daily Sparks for my students. I forgot all about it. I got GREAT writing pieces from that last year. Probably some incredible topics for Socratic Seminars.

9  The box containing all the stuff I needed to make great pics with my "new" camera, which I bought last year! I've had camera issues all year because I didn't know where the thing was. It had a CD and a book! I could have gotten all that info online, but who's thinking about that while you're doing a million other things? Fun photo time.

10  A clean agenda so that I could plan this Spring's semester. Couldn't find it for the life of me.

11  Two folders of resume' paper, which isn't important to me, but is to people who might need it. Well, the way things are going with the economy, I MAY need it!

12  A pristine T-shirt that is the exact same one the Giants used when they celebrated their World Series' clinch, one for which I have been looking for well over a month now. It still has all the stickers on it and stuff, brand-spanking new! It's a four-for-you-one-for me Christmas gift I got for myself. I've been looking for it for a month!

13   A yet-to-be-opened pack of guitar strings, and four brand new guitar picks!

14   AND one of those digital picture frames that works with flash drives, or directly from your computer, a gift given to me last year by a student.

14   Yay! I felt like going out to the garage and finding bows and ribbon, and throwing it all over meself.

15   There's a lot to be said for being over-worked and too busy to get organized.

16   All that stuff.

17  I was like, "DUDE!" "REALLY?"

18  OMG!

19  You buy things sometimes, and then the world throws them into an abyss, I sweh.

20  Heaven knows what other trinkets and boushit I bought for myself this past year. I'm already starting on cleaning the garage.

21  Can you imagine?

22  In many ways, it's great to have moments of dysorganization.

23  Sidebar: So you know, I get irritated with the letter "y" suddenly replacing the letter "i".  Some new issue, I imagine. Aren't there big enough issues already?

24  Don't know why, particularly, but it just annoys me when the word "women" suddenly becomes "womyn". Or some offshoot of that. I've seen it only about twice, but really? Is that truly an issue?

25  Dude.

26   If you're going to change it in the name of empowerment, them go with "wimminz." So much jazzier!

27  I mean come ON!

22  And back to it: The cleansing of that cabinet was symbolically significant as well.

23  It meant that once again I have turned the corner on being overworked, and had a little time to meself. That's quite rare these days. I even went out to the garage to organize a few items yesterday.

24  I found a treasure out there too!

25  I found a box of hard-copy DN's dating back to 1996!

26  AND the first fourteen or so were already organized by date.

27  They look amazingly brand new, because I went through a phase early on where many of them were done in Astrobrite colors.

28  I was thinking of scanning many of them, but my scanner at home is not working. I think one of my printers at work scans, but I'm not sure. I seldom scan things. One cheap printer does have glass to copy, so it may.

29  Unfortunately, I have no time even to worry anymore. It's the mid-year teaching blues. We get summers off, yes, but during the year, we make up for those months in spades.

30  Grading papers takes up a bunch of a teacher's time. Most people think the hard part of teaching is dealing with the students each day.

31   The students are always enjoyable. Yeah, they'll be wiseguys and people trying to drive you nuts, but that happens in every job. They're also some pretty good students. Lot of ears and braces.

32  The hardest part of teaching in terms of irritation is the massive amount of time it takes to grade papers and to plan lessons so that they're relevant and updated to modern techniques.

33  And yes, we get LOTS of time off, but much of that is spent catching up with all of the paperwork. It's sort of like when college students get a day off, but have huge projects due the day after the "rest", which either eats up all the person's time, or it looms over them like a gargoyle.

34  AnywayZ, the discovery of the box of old DN's worked perfectly, exactly one month after Christmas Eve.

35  I think I will annually do that from now on. Spring cleaning, dude. You get rewards galore!

36  AND an organized mess.

37  Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I may be able to share some of the classic DN's with you.

38  It seems that I'm getting the time. I am up-to-date on two of my five classes today, which is monumental. At this pace, I may be caught up by Friday, and grades aren't due for a coupla more weeks. That NEVER happens.

39  I tell beginning teachers who stress about all of this: "If you're a week behind, you're a week ahead." They always sigh a huge sigh of relief and say, "You're right. Thanks!" Great advice. Young people stress too much. And you have to live your own life. No job or schedule should keep you away from real life.

40  We wiser sorts have been around the block. Know what we're doin', even if it partially involves boring people deliberately to quiet down a room.

41  I'm a gunslinger.

42  I enjoy workin' the room and having answers to nearly anything thrown my way.

43  I give vocab tests where I say the word and they have to spell it, and then write the def.

44  The other day a kid said, "How do you spell that?" Joe Slick, trying to get me to spell the word out loud. Old trick. Old gunslinger.

45  "T-h-a-t." And then I slowly tossed a Judge Judy glance that made the guy shrink, and the class look up and smile.

46   Sidebar 2: Hey. Does Judge Judy have a right to tell people to sit up straight? Doesn't that in some way violate Constitutional rights? Don't get me wrong, I actually LIKE JJ, but what's up with THAT?

47   T-h-a-t?

48   And back to it: Anyway, it's 3:30 a.m., and I've already logged in seven hours of sleep. I'm just getting to bed earlier these days so that my days are alive and happening. I was exhausted yesterday after knocking down around six sets of papers. I went out at around 8:30, my earliest this year. I've been going down at around 9:30 and waking up in the middle of the night, and then going for another hour or so in the morning. It actually works rather nicely.

49   So it's moving on 4 a.m. I already awakened the dog and let her out. The OW cat has yet to make a sound, but I'm guessing at around 4:07, the very moment I nod off, he'll be up and howling.

50   Hope you guys get through Tuesday well. I think I'm rested and planned, but Tuesdays can really get all over you, so keep a vigilant eye out for people who grate on your nerves. They come out in droves on Tuesdays. Just an observation.

51   Have a great day.

52   Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1   Yesterday I saw an article on AOL <I KNOW!> that said California is going to have a super-storm in the near future.

2  The article included a picture of a grey sky with a funnel cloud coming down, and had records that prove we are way overdo for a storm of biblical proportions.

3  The first thing that came to my mind was, "When? In February???"

4   Well, the records showed that since way back when, like 400 a.d. or something, we have had devastating floods every 200 years, but that there hasn't been one in like 600 years. Or something. I didn't take notes, and the article seems to have disappeared.

5  As the day progressed, I realized that this was just a huge fear thing. I'm guessing it's probably true, but they made it look as though it were going to be really soon.

6   Fortunately, I don't believe most of what I read, with the possible exception of sports, and even there I can't help thinking a lot of that isn't all it seems.

7   Kind of refreshing, in a way.

8   Anyway, I started yesterday with the jits.

9   It got better, but yeesh! It really did scare me.

10  Moving on, Part the First: Friday I was having lunch in a restaurant and saw a news story about two guys in Austin Texas who got arrested for drunk horse and donkey driving. I looked up and there was a horse, a donkey, and the drunkest guy I've ever seen.

11  Like at first I didn't really see the danger in driving a horse or a donkey drunk. It's not a car, so nobody could get hurt except maybe the drunk guy. But if you could have seen the look on this guy's face, and the dents in the donkey, you could see why I changed my mind.

12  Evidently they both were having people pose, but eventually they were a little too drunk, and were becoming a public nuisance.

13  Wid.

14  Moving on, Part the Second: On Saturday, I attended the best party I've been to in quite some time. It was my cousin Diane's birthday, and they somehow rented Pier 35 in San Francisco! The theme was rock 'n' roll and everybody wore T-shirts of their favorite bands ever. Absolutely everybody in my entire family was there, and it was "off the hook" fun!

15  Even I danced, and that NEVER happens! Had a complete blast, laughing, dancing, singing, eating, and enjoying the entire experience. Sunset, and the lights and the entire thing just rocked. This was the entire Tahoe crowd, so we have done this stuff before, but hardly ever during winter.

16  My cousin Diane is one of the coolest people walking around, and we all let loose.

17  We stayed at the Sheraton, which is about two blocks away from the Embarcadero. Sunday we hit Pier 39, and had a wonderful time. Gorgeous day, absolutely splendid.

18  Following that, a trip up to the hospital to see Dad, and then somehow getting home to recuperate and to re-group. We took the coast road at sunset. Nicole's boyfriend Matt played the Rolling Stones all the way home, and it made sense the whole way. Obscure songs like Moonlight Mile. Lovely stuff.

19  I'm still buzzing from all the enchantment and fun.

20  I did get bumped on the dance floor and took a bit of a header.

21  More like a kneeder, but got up gracefully, an absolute swan, as you may well imagine.

22  But it was just a flesh wound. 

23  After all the stress of the past week, that all went nicely.

24   And after a little stress, Dad is home again. It ain't gonna be easy, but he is home safely as of this writing.

25   A nice weekend, all in all. I'm a bit more relieved, but it is going to be interesting.

26   Well, there you go. The Jets beat the Patriots. Aaron Rodgers looks like the real deal. And the Packers might be the team to beat.

27   This is a bit fun: the restaurant we were in had the Chicago/Seattle game on, and the large screen teevee had the game mirrored on our side of the restaurant.

28   At one point, the score was 28 to 0. But since we could see the screen backwards, it looked like it was 85 to 0! After Seattle kicked a field goal it looked like it was 85 to E!  I just thought it would have been funny to see the look on some guy's face who might have had a few too many thinking that Chicago was winning 85 to 0.
Or worse. 85 to E.

29  Pretty fun.

30  Anyway, that's it, sports fans.

31  Slow news weekend, but that's what happens when things go reasonably well.

32  Slow news is good news!

33  With that, I'm gonna try to get through what might be a tough Tuesday.

34   You have a great day.

35   Thanks for listening; it was nice to smile a little this week.

36    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington