Floatmobile

Fractured?

On the topic of who should chair the Democratic National Committee, the media seems to enjoy painting the party as a fractured mess. If you're a populist/moderate, you want Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa. If you're a crazy left-wing radical, you're more inclined towards Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont.

The thing is, I don't think the party is divided much at all:

We think that terrorism is bad, but that the invasion of Iraq was wrong (or at least for the wrong reasons, conducted under false pretenses).

We believe women should have the right to choose whether they want to carry a baby to term.

We believe that gay men and women should be allowed to enter into a union, probably separate from marriage, that allows them the legal rights of a recognized partnership.

We believe that science is good and that religion should be largely kept out of government. If one is truly interested in a 'culture of life,' then why not want to do the stem cell research to prolong and improve life?

We believe that having students take national exams and then holding poor-performing schools hostage when they don't do well enough is not even close to substantial education reform.

We believe in civil rights and affirmative action, in that minority status should be one piece of a larger picture in choices involving admission and employment.

We believe that deficit spending is reckless, and that $300 tax cuts for every family in the middle class does not make up for the loss of jobs or for skyrocketing costs of various public services.

We believe that health care ought to be affordable and accessible to anyone who wants it. Speaking of public health, we believe that it's unrealistic to censor any form of disease or pregnancy prevention besides abstinence in sex education curricula.

We believe that judges should be able to see room for interpretation in the laws they are asked to enforce or change.

Can the Republican party truly say that they are united in opposition to all of this?

No. Therefore, the DNC needs a chairman who rallies the base of people who support all of these things I've just listed. That's not extreme or moderate. It's essential.

Howard Dean is the best choice to galvanize the voters.

Amazing.

Go here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html

This is a transcript of today's episode of 'Crossfire.' Jon Stewart is the guest, and he rips the show a new one. It is the most incredible thing I have ever seen on any cable news network.

Please read it.

Been a While

So this is my first post-26th-birthday post, I see, not because of any particular meltdown on my part. I'm just in the process of retooling the site with help from much more knowledgeable friends so that Floatmobile reflects me a bit more accurately (i.e. not the scary urgency of my close-up eyeballs). Until then, you'll have to bear with me in a home that is always felt a bit temporary.

Since last we met, summer has come and gone. I spent mine up in New Hampshire again, at the camp where I've worked for eight years. I got to hike Mount Katahdin in Maine, which was amazing; I'll put a picture or two from that up on the site. The week after I returned, I managed to herniate a disk in my back. The discomfort was almost as frustrating as the slowness of the diagnosis. The day after I hurt myself, I went to see a doctor, who had me strip, walk tenderly around his office in one of those paper gowns and briefs to the x-ray room and back (no worries - I have no shame), and then tested my knee reflexes and declared that I'd probably just pulled something and I'd be fine in a few days. I went back to him three days later to insist that I was feeling no better at all, and he scheduled an MRI for the following week, during the last week of camp. Luckily, the physical therapist I started seeing guessed correctly what my problem was and I was able to start running for the cross-country season a week earlier than even she expected. But still, I was pretty much better before I even had the MRI to determine what was wrong with me. This seems backwards.

And now Bush and Kerry are running against each other. The thing that makes this election unappealing to me is that it's based on terrorism and the war in Iraq. These aren't issues that I feel like are going to have a direct impact on my life. I'm more concerned with where these candidates stand on the environment, education, civil rights, health care, Supreme Court nominations, etc. From that standpoint, Kerry is the clear winner for me. Also, Bush is an incoherent boob. That's another thing.

Off to coach cross-country. More about that later, I suspect.

Good to be back. Go Sox.

26

It's my birthday and it doesn't feel that bad. Twenty-six is still in the mid-twenties. It's comfortable, and still a full election cycle away from the dreaded thirty. I'm not much of a planner in terms of timelines (well, in terms of anything), but I do recall having certain ideas about certain things that should be accomplished by certain ages. Nothing was supposed to be done by twenty-six. Twenty-five, maybe. But I'm in the clear for another year now, I think. I remember thinking that I wanted to have children by the time I was twenty-eight so that I would be fifty when they graduated from college. I officially recognize that as a rather silly scenario, and one that I hope I don't actually play out, if for nothing else than the state of my finances. It is odd to think that half a lifetime ago, I was getting bar mitzvahed; then again, it does seem like that was a while ago to me now, and not just 'a few years back.'

Anyway, I'm headed down to New York this evening, and after two days there, it'll be back and forth between Southborough and Hanover before camp begins. I hope all your own beginning-of-summer travels are the way they should be.

Not Bad, I'd Say

It's 10 on a Friday morning. I'm sitting at my recently mostly-cleaned table in the drafty study at the end of my apartment. There are five stacks of unfinished grading - four of them exam-related - and one and a half stacks of completed work. And yet I feel remarkable calm. I don't have any more classes to teach for a few months. Instead, I can pretty much just enjoy being around the kids in my dorm and around the school. Yesterday, I went running with one of the cross-country captains and another lad from the dorm who currently does crew and is planning on running in the fall. I was pleasantly surprised that we all hung together pretty well — we did just a shade under eight-minute miles for a little over 4.5 miles. I was pretty happy with feeling decent, considering that I hadn't run in four days; of course, when we got back to school, I was sweating like a pig with hyperactive sweat glands, and neither of the kids were all that drenched.

Anyway. McSweeney's #13 came yesterday — McSweeney's being a literary journal to which I subscribe (you can find their website on my list of links on the left side of this blog). It's their comics issue, filled with visual renderings of literary ideas. If only I'd had this volume four months ago when I was teaching the astounding book 'Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,' by Chris Ware, to my American Lit sections. Oh, well. I don't have to worry about that again for a while, because I'll be teaching freshmen and sophomores only next year (that's Survery of Literary Genres and Expository Writing, respectively).

I had dinner with Armand, one of our just-graduated kids, last night at Bertucci's. Armand is pretty conservative — he thinks Ann Coulter's got some really good ideas — but we're both good when we debate about seeking out the meat of the Venn diagram of our positions, if that makes any sense. We mostly focused — probably out of habit by now — on the war on terror (which Bush pronounces 'terra,' so I like to think of it as his war on earth). One thing that came out of our discussion that I'd like to teach about in the fall: the use of words and spin to control the political landscape. For instance, I think Kerry is having a difficult time being substantive and thoughtful because he's running against a man who isn't either of those things. Thus, if Kerry actually gives honest answers to questions, answers that show he might care about people and rights, then he can more easily be characterized as Gore-esque. Speaking of Gore, though, Bob Herbert ran a really well-written column about Gore's latest Angry Speech in today's Times that's worth checking out: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/opinion/28HERB.html?hp

What I was trying to say here is that it was so nice to have a discussion about politics that wasn't filled with empty rhetoric or subtext. That's what the campaign season needs more of.

Graduation

So the seniors (sixth-formers here) graduate this weekend. The odd thing to me is that the other students stay through next week into the week after for review and exams. I think graduation ought to be the culmination of the entire school's year. I see why it's in the calendar this way — seniors are far more likely to get in trouble during exams when they have all sorts of unstructured time and less and less accountability to the school — but while the seniors are in their last week, I'm also trying to finish up all the stuff I've tried to teach (and to grade, an ever-growing mountain that I've never really ascended the entire way this year). Selfishly, I don't get enough time to hang out with them 'one last time.' Of course, the last time you do something shouldn't be the most meaningful. But you always want the end to be right.

I know this probably seems like a reiteration of my previous post, and there are a lot of other things I'd like to say, but I'm not sure where to start. That seems pretty similar to how I've been living lately. Should I sleep? Should I stay up and grade and sacrifice that sleep? Should I go for a run? Should I pick up any number of books I want to be reading? Teaching at a boarding school certainly makes one realize how little time there is to get everything done, especially if you're wildly inefficient...

Sleep

So I've fallen into this unfortuante pattern of sleeping from 2-7 am and then crashing about every other day for a three-hour nap from, like, 3-6 pm. This is how I'm getting my sleep. I get the impression that jet lag would have no effect on me right now. I also feel very Spanish, what with my helpless siestas.

This school year, by the way, can't end soon enough. I'm tired of dealing with politics and I really need a summer to recoup my sanity and reassess my priorities. Looking forward to that, at least.

Need To Know

It's been a while, again, since I've put up new words and ideas. I thought that the spring would bring more time in the afternoons — an unlimited sense of freedom — to get work done and then get more done that I wanted to tackle. Not true. I've been running pretty diligently so I can get in shape to coach boys' cross-country in the fall, and that eats up quite a bit of the post-classes period, both in terms of the time I'm running and the time it takes me to motivate. I didn't drink any water before I went out today and felt much heavier and slower today. It's probably good to be reminded of such things.

Probably the most exciting part of my week was getting an email from my second cousin's husband, who occasionally writes for The Believer, a relatively literary magazine to which I subscribe. He said they were a little short on letters to the editor for their July issue (the music issue, with accompanying CD, featuring interviews with Eddie Vedder, Ani DiFranco, and Billy Corgan). So I was up until 3 on Tuesday night writing out a few possibilities. I'm hopeful that something'll work out with that. My other creative writing outlets have been frustratingly slow — I'm trying to write a movie with a friend from camp, Ben, who's pursuing his Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard. He's carless, which means that I'm the one who always has to invest the time (and price of parking) to get into Boston so we can spend time talking and laughing but not writing quite as much as we want. We'd set a goal of a rough draft by June 1, but that's clearly a pipe dream.

Grading is more manageable, but still a constant presence. Two and a half weeks of classes to go. One thing at a time. Hope you're all doing well, both of you who read this.

Play

There's been a student-directed one-act festival at school for the last three nights. One of the plays was one I wrote, the first time anything I've written has been staged beyond a simple read-through. The drama teacher and I had to first go through the process of making it one-act-length, which meant trimming about fifteen minutes/pages off of it, and editing out things that were fine for my comparatively raunchy playwriting class in college, but maybe not so appropriate for high school students. The play wasn't really about anything — I've figured this out lately, while I've been collaborating on another writing project with my friend Ben, from camp, that I do characters pretty well, but the plot is pretty secondary to the whole effort. Anyway, I'm certainly appreciative for all the students — thirteen of them — who took on being in something I wrote. Especially the first night, when the audience wasn't sure when to laugh. Below, I'm including a few pictures that the good-ship Mr. Chen took.

Since I'm on social duty this weekend, I got to 'supervise' the student-run coffeehouse after the one-acts were done. There were a few impressive and brave souls who read poetry or performed songs. I will say this, though: if you have not rehearsed something (and I'm talking music here), I can pretty much guarantee you that no one wants to hear it yet. Wait until the next coffeehouse. There were a whole bunch of acts last night that started with someone saying to the effect of, "We've only practiced once, and that was three weeks ago during study hall, when we couldn't actually make any noise." There will be other opportunities to showcase your talent, my friends...after you run through it a few times. I won't say none of the 'impromptu' stuff was endearing, but...well, just keep my advice in mind next time there's an empty stage and no one to fill it. Sometimes, silence is actually pretty much golden.

Who Knows?

I'm starting this post without any particular aim or goal or other synonym for aim or goal. It hasn't been a bad weekend. Last night was the fifth form (aka 'junior class') dance — somewhere along the way, it became a tradition for them to have one for the whole school. I heard from another faculty member that it used to be held on the same night as the senior prom, so the 'sixth form' would go off in their tuxes to somewhere off-campus and the rest of the students would hole up with a DJ in some sweaty corner or the school. Yesterday's theme was 'Animal House.' Up until last week, I was pretty sure that the only preparation for the dance was to have everyone show up in togas. The fifth form surprised me, however, by actually putting together better decorations than that (this is important: dance decorations). There were banners spray-painted with various Greek symbols, a trophy deer head draped with underwear, Christmas lights, a painting of a mermaid with round stomp lights covering her breasts, and strings of aluminum cans hung along one wall. No one seemed in any way inebriated, the DJ was good (and from New Hampshire, which is a bonus), the kids on work detail cleaned up pretty quickly and, aside from a few people who seemed to grump about the nature of the dancing, everyone ended the evening happily. Even I went to bed content, after the Lakers won ugly over the Rockets.

To celebrate National Poetry Month the week after next, the English department is requiring every student to memorize a poem of no fewer than eight lines. I'm trying to decide which one I should choose.

The Boston Marathon is tomorrow; it's Patriots' Day in the Commonwealth, which we had off last year but which is inexplicably in session this year. While I will never, ever run a marathon — the stress that it puts on your body requires an insanity that I lack — I really like watching marathons. Tomorrow should be interesting because it's supposed to be really hot out. Which, I can only assume, means that the school's irrational furnace will be on full blast.

Oh, and I got invited by the sixth form to their prom. I am...giddy. More about that later.