January 24, 2012
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The Daily News1 Time to move on, people. Heidi and Seal are breaking up, and I am soooooo hurt.
2 Dude, really?
3 Who give's a rat's ass?
4 Honestly.
5 No news.
6 Moving Backwards, Part One: I have to make a public apology. In my lilting embrace of the Niners yesterday, I mentioned that they converted zero first downs. The statistic was wrong. They converted one. The team needs work, but so do all the teams, which includes the Packers. All have flaws. I just think ours has the fewest. And they will be back. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron.
7 Moving on, Part the First: I've loved the rain. My cough almost vanished because of the moisture in the air. Yesterday was pretty gloomy, but sort of perfect in a soothing sort of way.
8 It was pretty wonderful seeing students coming to school dressed in their Niner best yesterday. It was a bit funereal, but very sweet. They were genuinely crushed.
9 I was born in San Francisco and raised the first ten years of my life surrounded by Niners' fans. I didn't even know the Raiders existed, or that anyone in the Bay Area was anything but a Niner's fan. I lived in South City, a wet punt away from Candlestick Park.
10 So if the Niners ever got close and then lost <ahem>, the entire neighborhood would mourn, and shout the immortal phrase, "Wait 'til next year!"
11 But Sannozay is a bit different. It has much more diversity when it comes to sports teams. Nearly EVERYBODY in Sannozay is a Sharks' fan, but with football, it's pretty diversified. We are mainly Niners and Raiders, but we have Steelers' fans, Saints' fans, Broncos' fans, and on and on. So the students who were Niners' fans showed up representing yesterday, and many had to experience high tech mockery because of it. They were SO crushed, and the day SO mournful that I had to step up.
12 I should preface this with the fact that on Friday, I wore my Montana 16 jersey, a gold shirt and tie underneath, and a Niner straw hat. I got an earful from a lot of different fans, but I stood tall, and boasted, "Niners by ten!" I truly believed that as a good prediction. I laid out the reasons in Friday's DN. I would predict it again if there were another game.
13 But that's all water under the turf. What it did was put smiles on all the young Niner fans' faces. We had a right to peacock it a bit. We had been through a lot, and now it was our turn. That's sports. That's what being a fan is about.
14 Yesterday was so exquisitely painful for those kids. People yelled at them, called them names, and railed at them. But they wore their gear proudly, and I was proud of them.
15 Each period, I said this: "There was New Years. There was Christmas. There was Thanksgiving. And now there is The Niners. It is time for us to put that season behind and to move into the season of Love."
16 Corny? Okay. But to a whole bunch of them, it put it gently into perspective.
17 I should have said it was the season of New Years, in order to really make it work.
18 It worked. I saw it in their faces.
19 There are worse things than your team not making it all the way. If I may embrace the Occupy thinking for a brief second, ninety-nine per cent of sports teams don't win the championship. One per cent do.
20 Okay math whizzes. Go ahead. Hey, I majored in English, not counting. I have the right to be an idiot. We ponder.
21 Moving on, Part the Second: Are other people planning your life and taking over?
22 I'm pretty tired of spending every waking moment I have grading papers, going to meetings, and putting up with the demands of every Tom, Dick, and Harry who thinks their stuff is more important than mine.
23 Yesterday I KNEW I had to hit a meeting after school. I also had to write a recommendation for a student. I also had about six-thousand papers to grade. I also had to somehow get home at seven, deal with some REAL issues, cook, eat, clean up, and somehow manage to sleep without hauntings.
24 The meeting became a bit of a filibuster, so anything I had to say I simply didn't say. Why ever prolong a meeting? When the meeting ended, a couple of teachers criticized me because of my silence. They were the ones who kept talking, and I respected that their concerns far out-distanced my own.
25 I won't go into a long diatribe about what it was all about, but I faithfully stayed late at the meeting because there were some serious issues being discussed.
26 When I got home, I immediately hopped on the computer and gathered all my info for that student's recommendation. I flew past a few emails with other students asking for their recommendations, but each one takes a little time to do.
27 By the time I was done, it was time to have some food and go to bed. I opened the fridge and found some leftover meatballs from the Niner party. I speared a couple of cold ones, speared them with a fork, chewed them, and got them down safely.
28 That was dinner. I finished the recommendation, sent it to the student, and waited 'til ten for a response. The deadline was midnight, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that the letter was good enough.
29 I finally gave up, hit the couch just to goof off on my laptop, and fell into a distant slumber.
30 I awakened at around two a.m. to roam the halls with my chronic insomnia, and to think of ideas for this folderol.
31 I goofed a bit on how our lives are frittered away by detail.
32 When I was in high school, I wanted to pollute Walden Pond with a spray can, head to Walden, and tag any monuments to Thoreau. At the time, reading Walden was the hip thing to do, but when it became an assignment, I just couldn't wrap my head around the guy. I thought he shoulda been jailed for being boring.
33 I remember my teacher, the immortal Sandy Jackson, teaching us about simplifying our lives. I later worked as a sub for her, and was struck by the lack of papers and pencils and paper clips she had. I remember opening her desk drawer and seeing a ruler and a pencil. She lived the life.
34 Fast-forward to my desk, which is actually a small metal filing cab. Stacks of papers everywhere. Paper clips, boxes of pencils, erasers, bottles of Visene, cough drops, staples, rubber bands, post-its,urgent memos: you get the drift.
35 It is a Nervous Wreck Headquarters. I'm thinking of hanging a sign over my desk that says, "NWH" just so I have a title.
36 I think last week I told you that I had actually toyed with the idea of taking a baseball bat to my computer.
37 Fortunately, I have Sandy and Thoreau to allow the idea of simplicity to settle in and to calm my frabjous nerves.
38 So I guess Walden worked after all these years. I loved Jackson. Stole her style and improved on it. She engaged students, and made me love literature and writing. I was lucky enough to have returned to Capuchino High School and work as a substitute. I ran across Sandy several times through the years, and it was always great.
39 I could go into a lot more about this, but the hours are moving like sand.
40 Eight or nine years ago I wrote a virtual yearbook on Xanga. It was all about Cap, and of teachers who inspired me. It had pictures, and it was a fantastic piece. I worked on it one summer, and had the time to make it real. I'll try to dig it up. As I recall, Xanga kept removing the pictures for whatever reason, so I eventually left it. I'll try to retrieve it and share it when time.
41 Right now, the clock is ticking; it is almost 4 a.m. and I must needs gather up some sleep.
42 Stay tuned. More to come.
43 Peace.
~H~
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