Better

It's amazing to comment on how far I've come so far this year. Time-wise. I mean, I'm already (almost) halfway through the 2nd quarter, and it's already almost December.

However, I still feel like my head's back in September. Am I doing any good to my students?

I got into this job hoping that I would have a constant impact on my students and to teach them something I knew that they didn't. But, apparently this is easier said than done. I am constantly longing for the discourse that I had as a student in college, being challenged constantly by my professor and thinking sophisticatedly and outside the box, expanding my brain. But, to achieve this in high school is near-impossible.

The first week of school I quoted to my students something from Plato, something Protagoras said to his students: “If you associate with me, the result will be that on the very day you begin you will return home a better person, and the same will happen the next day too. Each day you will make constant progress towards being better.” I truly believe that some one person can have this impact on somebody else. And I'd like to think I'm capable of that with my students. But, I don't know if they're capable of accepting that.

How do I get them to that point? How do I get them to be better?

Wander This World

Starbucks. Stuyvesant Plaza. Sigur Ros. My room is dark, but there is a glow from within. There are only sounds within my dark room; the outside world is mute. My days go by in slow-motion playback. Take the bus back to State. Walk by myself through Dutch and Colonial. Listen to Jonny Lang on my CD player. I'm wandering this world, all alone.

How come whenever I start something new, and I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, I always get reminded of Albany? If I had never gone to school there, would these "first-experiences" be even harder?

Sitting in Starbucks--Selden this time--I wonder how I got here. And I believe it is from those first year experiences; it is through the wandering I did and have done, the wandering that is just inherent in human nature, of which I am just trying to do my part.....But, I think I just need to keep wandering this world right now. Alone, or not.

My personal credo

I stand for equality - we are all different, but the same. The world may have a multitude of religions, colors, races, languages, but in the end, we are all humans with hands, feet, toes, eyes, feelings and a heart the same physical breakdowns as the next person.

I know people are inherently good. We are born GOOD, but as we progress in age, we regress in good-naturedness. However, all we have to do is think back to our earliest memory - there is good in that. One of my earliest memories is as a kid, one, two, three, years old, bib around my neck, cake all over my face and all these people who loved me surrounding me, singing to me. There is only good in that; in that circumstance I know nothing bad at all. Does that type of situation still exist?

I stand for love. Like the famous quote, "Love makes the world go around." Hatred just adds fuel to an already enraging fire. Love more, and there will be less to hate.

I know it's hard to love someone or something that's so full of hate. That is near impossible. But, if we learn to forgive people who are so full of hate, then maybe we can teach them how to love. I am reminded of the brother of Rachel Scott, the first person to be murdered at Columbine High School. He learned to forgive his sister’s murderers for what they did, so that he could have peace of mind back, and to start channeling all the negativity that strained from that event into positivity as a motivational speaker.

I stand for family. Without family, I would not be here. They are my home that I keep returning to, and they are the blooming forest of trees that were planted when I was born.

I stand for the power of information. There is nothing more powerful than one's mind. Yet, the mind is being ignored these days with the onset of video games, high def television, computers that think for you, and the indolent iGeneration. Pick up a book, read some quotes, and respond to them! Interpret the words to fit your life and your mind! Then, go and tell someone else about it! Then, after you've successfully molded your mind and helped mold somebody else's, then go and take a well-deserved break.

I stand for educating the mind AND the body, as Plato told his students to do. Both entities must be able to work together in order to function at all. Take time out to go for a run or a hike, break the old bike out of the shed and discover new terrain. We are not physically fit until we are mentally fit as well.

It is in this new terrain that we can open our eyes to see things differently, the way others see them. With others’ help, the world can be a good place, the way it was intended. Remember - let one hand wash the other, but both hands wash the face. And it is because our hands each have five fingers, and all of our faces have two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth, that we can all do this cleansing together, as one body and one mind.

a new day

today i broke up with my girlfriend. a girl named hali, whom i've been seeing for about the past month and who has treated me absolutely wonderfully.
i, however, can't say the same of myself. i hold myself up to a relationship standard, always have. this time around, i am also dealing with my life with a full-time job as a first-year teacher. the work never ends for this job, and i feel the effects day in and day out. and one area of my life is dragging the other down. so, i had to make some choices. and that's how i got to where i am.
also today, we had an assembly at school based on the life of rachel joy scott. she challenged people to make a difference from day to day, to keep a journal, and to appreciate the people in your lives whom you love the most and whom you will always keep close to you. during this part of the presentation, the presentor asked the audience to close their eyes and picture the 4 or 5 people in your lives who absolutely mean the most to you day in and day out. each one of these people for me was a member of my family. no one else was really in this category right now.
family is #1 for me, and right now, work is a close second. i dedicate almost all of my day, my waking hours, to school and my students, and it is not easy. but, as i will keep saying, and have already said, "the ends justify the means."

Paralysis

I am feeling paralyzed. I want to write, write, write, but all I can do is grade, grade, grade.
I want to read, read, read, McCourt and Sartre and Tsu, but all I can think of is Poe, and Pigman, and Piggy.
I want to think about music and movies and more, but all I can think of is Mike Mancuso, Mark Mason, and Marisa Martinez.
I want to sleep, and wake up when it's light out.
I want to go out at night, party till the morning light, and not have to worry about homeroom at 8:02.

But, I want to inspire, invent, and invigorate.
I want to motivate, mitigate, and mesmerize.
I want to make students try, trust themselves and me, and then try again.

I want to teach.

Only teaching three weeks, I have already had a milestone in my career. Monday morning, thoughts of Office Space and the "case of the Mondays" inevitably running through my mind, in addition to a million other things, I ran into a rainstorm, and left my umbrella at home. My large Dunkin Donuts coffee--just milk, no sugar--toppled down off of my armful of paperwork, and landed all over my brand new shirt, Dockers, and students' notebooks. All before first period!

My discontent was radiating from my coffee-stained pores. I wished General Zaroff would leap out of the pages of "The Most Dangerous Game" and shoot me with his pistol right then and there. End the embarrassment and ridicule.
But, fate stepped in, and I was saved by understanding co-workers, who told me to go home and change. On this hiatus, I took a step back, and realized that the students were not learning anything from my low-energy. Just because my morale was low due to my coffee stain did not mean my students should have to suffer. I returned to my classrooms re-energized and enthusiastic, and my students responded more favorably than earlier that morning.

That day, I was the one learning a lesson first period, even if my students didn't. Every day, I must teach as if I haven't spilled coffee all over my shirt, for if I am miserable like I was after the coffee incident, the students will not learn anything, and they, too, will be in a state of paralysis.

The Elasticity of Life

This is exactly how I had hoped the night would end up.

You see, I've been feeling creatively stagnant lately, like the water that gets backed up in your garden after heavy rainfall, the water that has yet to settle into the soil. I had hoped to drink, and drink until I hit the point where I experience the "click," as Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces likes to call it. And this drinking, as I remember Professor of British Literature Charlie Robinson saying, makes us more worldly, so that we talk about more important, more scholarly things than if we were to just drink a case of Natty Light, for instance.

I was thinking about possibilities for my creative banter even before I went out tonight, as I was lying down in the foyer of my house, waiting for my buddy Dave to pick me up and take me to the bar. I was staring up at the ceiling, thinking about rubber bands.

Seriously, rubber bands. Until a few days ago, I had been wearing a light-green thick rubber band on my right wrist for a few weeks now, since right before I got the job at Sachem. I felt some kind of importance with it when I met my new boss for a drink and he was wearing the same color rubber band on his wrist. And just last week, when my cousin, another wrist-rubber-band-wearer, had asked me if there was any significance to my rubber band, I hesitated and had to ponder an answer to his question.

I couldn't come up with an answer.

But I know quite a few people who wear rubber bands on their wrists. And I wonder, what is the symbolism in this piece of elastic? As I was lying in my foyer, waiting for Dave to pick me up, I was looking at the chandelier right above me. This chandelier has been in this house ever since I've been here, which is now 18 years, and probably even before that. Yet, it has been held up by the same cord the entire time. This one cord, which lasts decades, has been holding up the light above us without fail for almost 20 years now. But, I never pay attention to this very important cord. Instead, I--like many other rubber band-wearers--place the importance on the elastic cord I place around my wrist every so often. The same rubber band that breaks after being worn out after so many days. Imagine if the cord holding up our light wore out as often. Our light would come crashing down on us.

As I was thinking about this cord-conundrum, I was staring out my screen door at the sky, which was being bombarded with strikes of heat lightning. I was thinking about what would happen if lightning struck as often as rubber bands break; if, like the chandelier cord, light could just fall down and strike us with a drop of a dime, or, a snap of a rubber band. I wonder why people place so much significance on something that can snap and be ruined at any moment.

I suppose, however, that maybe that's how we should be living our lives. As if they could break from their spiral routine any minute, from being too worn out, or too weak to carry on.

I suppose that was what was going through my head when Dave picked me up, and I decided to go out and live up my life to its full elasticity, securely fit and strong around my wrist each and every day.

Measuring Life in Odometer Miles

Do you ever pay attention to your odometer? I always look at my odometer; it's like my crystal ball. The miles I travel in my car are symbols for my life.

I remember pulling out of Ralph's two summers ago, after managing my first year there, at 45,000. I remember crossing the border between Queens and Nassau County on my way home from school last year, at 55,000. I'm constantly looking at my odometer in hopes of noticing these little coincidences.

Often, I will look at my miles, and the mileage will match the temperature exactly. For instance, tonight, as I was driving home from Border's, my odometer read 71,710 and it was 71 degrees out. How do these coincidences keep occurring? And why do I keep noticing them? I tell you what, though: I'm not going to pass them off as merely a chance occurrence.

My 71,710 drive tonight was kind of significant. Well, my odometer reminded me to check the significance of my drive and my night. I was at Border's reading up on some education and teaching material, preparing for my double-dose of interviews that I have tomorrow. I ran into the mother of a friend of mine, whose husband happens to be an assistant principal in one of the districts where I am interviewing tomorrow. Another coincidence.

Nervous as I was in preparation for tomorrow, I did, however, manage to crack a smile with the Border's employee who rung me up. Straying from the normal clerk-customer pleasantries, she responded to my "How are you" inquiry with, "Just a little sunburnt," (obvious from her lobster pigmentation surrounding her blue tank top), "but working through it." Continuing to catch me off guard, since cashier-banter is rare and mostly banal these days, she commented on my shirt, an image of Ben Folds that says "Sham On." We got to talking about Ben's touring schedule, and I asked her if she's ever seen him in concert. She remarked that she "hasn't had the privilege" and when I responded that he comes around the area pretty regularly, she said so matter-of-factly that she's "kinda from Kansas." And her fun, teasing matter made me laugh in an unexpected, much-needed way, that it made me wish that every interaction with a stranger should go this way, with a friendliness and a worldliness that proves each of us is inherently good and sincere, something I've been wishing would be proven to me for a long time. Unfortunately, I'll need some more experiences like the one with the lobster-colored Kansan to truly be convinced of that.

Earlier today, before 71,710, I was discussing with a friend of mine "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, wherein I was trying to remember the line, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" So simple, yet so profound. Upon a reread of the poem, I am struck once again by the line, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," and it makes me think of how I've been measuring my life with the miles I travel in my car. There are so many metaphors I can discuss from here about the road of life, and as Martin Sexton says, "It's in the journey that we find that there is no destination," but I'll save the road metaphor for another place and time.

Backtracking just a bit, I will return to the topic of coincidences, on and off the road. Whenever I think of coincidences, chance happenings--a run-in with the parent of an old friend, a random encounter with a stranger, the alignment of my odometer--I can't help but think of James Redfield's novel, The Celestine Prophecy, in which Redfield discusses nine insights into human culture. A few of these insights revolve around a certain recognition of coincidences that occur in our lives from day to day. According to Redfield, we are to proceed forward from these coincidences until our awakening to life's coincidences opens us up to the real purpose of human existence on Earth, and the real nature of our universe in which we live. Whenever these things happen to me--at Border's, in my car, or wherever--I am always trying to place their significance in my life as a whole, or the story of my life as others might see it.

As I see it, my story is constantly changing, with new chapters beginning and ending with each (you guessed it...) turn in the road.