A Few Truly Random Short Musings...

• IRONY - Yesterday I spent a very long time writing an extensive essay about rage. See, I'd noticed that while I used to pride myself on being a particularly cool-headed person, I have been really heating up over things more and more. I extensively guessed about the root of this change (a situation and person who have pushed me farther than usual earlier this year), and expounded specifically on some of the little things that really agitate me. I explored at length the effects that all the unchecked anger were having on me, and hypothesized a practice to vent and release. The entire work took me two hours to write, edit, and save, and was a fairly significant, polished tome by the time I finished. I saved it to disk (on alternating days, I'm in a room here at the school whose PC isn't internet-capable) and brought it home to post... where I found, upon loading, that the file was corrupted and lost. Naturally, I was enraged. Only I can successfully enrage myself over losing a raging rant about how my own rage enrages me.
• MY PLACE IN MY WORLD TODAY - Today, I am experiencing a constant parade of students coming into my room. They're all seniors, and each time, I think, "Oh! Students I haven't seen in awhile! I wonder what they're coming for!" And each time they just want my keys to go into the costume attic and select pieces to use for an English class project with a colleague. Kind of pathetic, I know... but somehow it keeps disappointing me. *sniff sniff* I see how it is. No, wait, strike that... as I was typing this, Molly and Haley stopped by, and not for costumes. They needed me to sign sheets for CAS hours. That's what I am... a resource unlocking autograph machine...
• ENTROPY - My world is becoming far too entropic. My largest and most involved group of students are graduating and leaving in a few weeks... my last close bachelor friend is getting married... I just learned that two of my English teaching colleagues will be gone next year, one to a transfer and the other retiring... Things are breaking down, changing, moving on, and ending too fast to do enough building up and beginning to fill the voids. Is this what being old is? Yuck.
• FATE'S NON-SEQUITORS - I've noticed that, just to make absolutely certain that I don't ever feel totally secure, fate makes sure that very non-sequitorial Twilight Zone-esque things happen in my life. Yesterday's contribution: I arrived at my classroom and heard what sounded like a circular saw in the direction of the back hallway. I ventured into that hallway (behind the auditorium), where I now revised my assessment of the noise to that of a "raging waterfall", and tracked it to the locked men's room. I investigated and found that, apparently completely on its own, the men's room toilet decided this weekend to begin flushing and not stop. The quantity of water also seemed slightly amended, perhaps to a tune of about four or five times the usual volume of a regular flush, and instead flying through the bowl in a constant stream. Weird. So, now I have no bathroom at work.
• DODOS - Today, there is an annual health exhibit going on in the auditorium lobby. To me, this means one thing: a day of students who otherwise I am saved from being exposed to having a reason to venture down into my wing (the event is set up in the auditorium lobby) and further erode my belief in the intrinsic good of humankind. Are they that bad? The majority, no... but a select few, ones that usually never come down to the performing arts wing and from whom I am therefore usually insulated, are real pieces of work. Case in point: as I sit here in the pit of the auditorium typing this entry, some random fool ducked into the main door of the auditorium and threw, as hard as he could, a couple empty plastic bottles and empty snack food bags into the seating area, and then, dashed back out. Something is very, deeply wrong with people like that.
• POINTLESS AUTHORSHIP - Isn't it incredible, the sheer quantity of people out here with websites writing pages and pages of text, explorations of all the areas their heart leads them... and I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of us are writing for an audience of barely a handful. I virtually did cartwheels when a student actually posted a comment on one of my other blogs, an online callboard for the school theatre group... prior to that comment, my last evidence of anyone actually reading any of my blogs was some person with severely divergent political beliefs to myself wasting his own time writing angry rebuttals to some of my old posts about the absurdity of the "War Against Christmas" nonsense and a hint (and just a hint, mind you) about my opinion of the current U.S. president. I think it would be safe to say that I'm writing this without an audience, and it is unlikely to suddenly spawn an audience after it is written, too. It feels a little like a variation on a famous axiom... "If a blogger types in the internet and there is no-one around to read it, does it make a difference?" And yet, I'm still typing... you know, I just don't get me sometimes.

My Midlife Crisis Begins?

Each day, we all age 24 more hours. There are no 24 hours that we age that are any longer than the others - 24 hours is always 24 hours. But, when we age the 24 hours that bring our life total to 262801 hours, many of us react with dread, grief, loss, frustration, emptiness, and a re-examination of our life thus far.

Yeah, I turned 30 recently.

I know I’m not significantly older today than I was two weeks ago. But when I was twenty-something, the mental estimation that I had suggested there was still more ahead of me than behind me… now, my mind estimates that I could be crossing into a point any moment now where there is more time in my natural life behind me than that which is ahead of me… and there is no way to ever know when that moment is… or was.

Here are the three major thoughts that I found myself having on turning 30:

1. Can I really handle the great curse of my profession and philosophy for another 25 years or more? I teach upper end high school, and my particular philosophy is that I am teaching young adults who deserve to be treated as adults and who most benefit from a combination of adult colleague and coach, rather than any longer from the parent / authoritarian model for child students. I strongly feel that my students need people who will welcome them into the real world, seek to include them in adult life (and expect them to respond with adult responsibility), and are ready to be colleagues, friends, peers, and collaborators with them. I know that my philosophy is not popular, but I feel I have some particular success with my theatre arts students and my senior English students that can back up my choices. However, the result is that I am in a constant state of watching groups of people I view as colleagues, friends, peers, and collaborators move on to great things in the real world beyond, while I am destined to always remain here. The ride is great, and I am so very honored to make so many great acquaintances, colleauges, friends, etc., and even to feel that I have, in some small way, made contributions to the final adult they solidify to be in the world when they leave… but I miss so many of them a great deal. Certainly there are two or three whose path in life have led them to places where I still get to remain colleague/friend with them (Yay Meg! Yay Zack! etc.), but the vast majority are off, and that’s the way I do want it… that’s what we’re preparing them for, to be off and to fly… but still. It does hurt. I’m losing a very special group in a couple of weeks, including four or so that I find it difficult to even imagine my job without them as a daily part. I know, they weren’t around in year one for me, but it still feels like they’ve always been an important part of my world here at work, and I’m going to miss them quite a lot. Ironically, I don’t have such a good way of communicating those feelings as my colleagues who have a more authoritarian/parental relationship philosophy; similarly ironically, they tend to pass me over when doing things like distributing senior pictures - I received exactly one this entire year (although I also attribute this to being male and the misconception that somehow being male means I wouldn’t appreaciate nostalgic items like that). Well, this could turn into a blog of its own rather than just one point of three, so I’ll stop myself here…
2. Have I whistled away too much time… will I have major regrets before too long? No doubt, there are tons of things I want to do and accomplish, but have yet to do. I have several books started, none finished. I only just finished my first play this year, and it is a mediocre one act play that will likely never see the light of a stage. I have an army of websites that I gave a great start but now don’t update anywhere as often as I should (and besides, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody is viewing or reading them anyway). There are things that I’ve done of which I’m proud, but they’re always on small-scale… I direct and produce plays - at a small community theater with an average attendance of 30… I write - things that few or no people ever read… I have developed and run a robust high school theatre program - at an urban school, and only for five years, and putting on exceptional work that only those within our school community ever see. Am I making a positive impact on my world? Am I doing enough? I expend an awful lot of time on myself and hobbies of latency - television and film, music, video games, poker… is it too much? Is it indulgence to the level of greed?
3. Is it too late already to pull out of the tailspin my health is in? I weigh over 350 lbs. I remember when I weighed 220 exiting high school and wished to lose weight so I could feel okay about my looks… I remember when I weighed 314 for the longest time while away at college, and set a minimum goal for myself to never weigh more than “pi”… I remember when I first had diabetes strike me upside the head a year ago, and I was just under 340… I started a blog related solely to my weight last year when I pledged to struggle, and at least stay under 350. I excitedly looked forward to finally having a treadmill and starting a major push, and finally had one set up and ready to use in the living room on Sunday. Then, on Monday, I puttered around the house doing errands before eating Chinese (worst weightloss choice possible) last night, then having leftover Chinese for lunch today along with leftover cheesefries from Zebbs this weekend, and I’ll be heading almost directly from school to go out to dinner at Ichiban tonight. My health already killed several dreams and experiences… I dropped quickly from my one try at a DCI level drum corps before aging out because I couldn’t keep up physically and would have been holding them back… I go to once-in-a-lifetime opportunity theatre shows and sporting events, and spend more time paying attention to the intense pain in my sides and legs due to the size of the seats compared to the size of me than I do to the show… I miss out on memories with friends when we go camping and I can’t make the hike, or when we go on vacation and I tire out from the walking by mid-day. I must be, on some subconscious level, such an embarassment for my wife. If we do eventually have kids, at this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do all the things a father should be able to do with them. I disgust myself, and it may be too late to do anything about it.

Wow. This is even a lot more pessimistic than I had any imagining it might be when I started. I hope I find a way out of it - we just paid for a new used van and major surgery for one of our pet ferrets… I can’t afford a midlife crisis toy like other men.

A Confused View of Law

There is a great paradox that I see in many of my students, and it frightens me. I observe behaviors and overhear in their conversations attitudes that suggest they have somehow taken a personal behavior choice that is direly illegal and view it as normal, everyday, nothing-wrong-with-it behavior, and they have taken a common, everyday behavior choice (granted not universally accepted, but also not illegal) and view it as so direly wrong that it excuses and even necessitates illegal behaviors simply in response.

• THIEVERY - I can’t get over it. It is the most common wrong that students engage in (in my observation), and it is incredibly pervasive. In my first five years of teaching, I have had two cell phones, an MP3 player, several props and costumes, and an entire backpack stolen, and that’s just what *I* own - students in my room have had a giant quantity of itemst stolen. When it happens, people act as if I am somehow strange for being so upset, rather than just accepting it nonchalantly and moving on. In other circumstances, I overhear conversations from students discussing things they have stolen, and expressing the worldview that everyone, literally everyone steals things, and that makes it okay. I have read many works of student writing that express this same worldview, both in recollections of personal experiences in stealing, and in opinions of hearing others having stolen things. Today, I actually watched a student, very bright and polite and (I thought) a model student and very trustworthy, place a baseball cap that was sitting on a table in my classroom in his bookbag, and then remain motionless and silent for a few seconds when the owner came around looking for it, waiting until I loudly made it clear that I knew someone in the room had taken it before he gave in and returned it to the table from his bag… and even after all that, his demeanor was smiling, sheepish playfulness, as if it was just a joke. So many of my students view theivery in the same frustrating light that many adults view speeding - there is nothing wrong with it bad enough to hold it against the perpertrator as long as they don’t get caught, or are willing to pay the “fine” when they do, almost like paying “dues” that allow them to freely break the law all the rest of the time.
  
• HOMOSEXUALITY - This bothers me just as much, honestly maybe more. These same students who freely admit to theivery and consider it a normal thing everyone does that has nothing wrong with it view homosexuality - just being homosexual - as a transgression so heinous that it excuses some of the most disturbing behaviors in response. At least once in all of the past three years, I have overheard a student, when he didn’t realize others were listening and was relaxed and just swapping stories with a friend, brag about mugging someone they percieve to be a “homo.” In all four instances, the story never included any provokation from the victim - nothing said or done that hurt the perpetrator, not even the lousy excuse I’ve heard used on television before that the person acted or spoke in a manner to show personal interest in the perpetrator - but rather were instances when the victim was in circumstances when he had no reason to believe they were in danger and were completely blindsided (that they catch their victims by surprise is usually a note of boast for them). The perpetrators speak in frightening detail and with shocking pride and fond recollection of the physical harms that they visited upon their victim. And finally, the braggings always close with a statement that is an approximate conjugation of the phrase “He deserved the beating he received because he is a ‘homo’.”

What a terrifying world we live in where the sociology surrounding urban youth, combining economic desparation, deranged fundamentalism, and violence apologists, have produced a worldview where thievery is a daily norm for all people, but simply existing and having an interest in the same sex is grounds for public beatings.

"Overkill"

Well, we're finally on the back of the wave of programming created for what the television calls "sweeps" and what I call intensely annoying. For the past month my DVR has been smoking with the friction of mad recording frenzy, as it struggles to keep up with the flurry of new episodes being aired by all programming as they close out their seasons (in most cases not to return until the fall).

Of course, I know that it felt so frenetic for me partly because May was a very busy time for me with my most recent show runnning at Appleseed, followed by the last show of the year at Corcoran. The result was that my poor DVR was usually weeping under the weight of the backlog of recordings we have yet to watch, and several times found itself shouting out warnings as we neared the 30 hour capacity with many hours in the queue to be filled the next night. We combatted it with several strategies, including a couple of surreal "we have to stay home and watch television tonight" plans, a couple of instances of sacrificing the least important recordings in the queue, and eventually the final surrendur to the knowledge that we can't watch it all before the space runs out, dubbing six of the final seven episodes of "The West Wing" onto an old fashioned VCR tape (the seventh is still on the DVR), a task that eventually ultimately convinced me to purchase a DVD-R.

But here's the main reason I'm writing - what really got me frustrated with the season finale sequences this year (at least 60% of which I still haven't seen and only know from the commercials) is the overkill. And here I don't just mean the usual overuse of cliffhangers, a phenomenon I've been frustrated with for years... I actually mean Over Kill. A ridiculously large percentage of the shows we watch decided this year that they have to place at least one primary character in a hospital under mortal peril, and an unreasonable number of them went ahead and killed off a character. Sure, it's got to be done occasionally to be realistic and support the plot, but the cumulative effect was draining and exhausting, both from the standpoint of an audience member engaged in the plot and an artistically based fan of television engaged in the quality performances of particular actors. The cumulative effect, also, is that it feels ultimately UNrealistic... when every story the television tells you in the same one month period puts people in the hospital and morgue. Sure, I know, it often feels (although this is a psychological illusion) that "fate" often delivers these tragedies in batches in real life, but not this pervasively.

I also can't help but mention that I think that the very sad real-life passing of John Spenser, the outstanding actor most recently playing Leo McGarrity on The West Wing, strongly contributed to my not caring for seeing other unnecessary television character offings, all of which feel sort of shallow and tacky next to The West Wing having no choice but to deal with death in its final episodes ever, simply out of necessity. It's how draining I'm percieving the final sequence of episodes of The West Wing will be that has made me thus far select it first for temporary relegation to videotape to save for later.

Four of the most frustrating mortal peril or death moments (remember, in isolation, any one of these might have been okay - but together in the same month, it's just too much and hurts all the shows in believability and entertainment value):

(1) LOST - Okay, Michael goes wacky and turns out to be acting for the moment as a double agent - I'm okay with that development. I even think I understand killing off Anna Lucia (in real life, the actress can't keep herself out of jail, which might be worrying the show's producers). But as a charter chubby member of the chubby hero fan club, of which Hurley is currently one of the favorites on all of television, they were developing a whole subplot involving Hurley and his place in the group, his struggle with friendships, his struggle with addiction, all largely built around the foil of his emerging "girlfriend" - so we're gonna kill her off too? I suppose it was getting too threatening that we might not be spending enough screen time on the pert little thin people. Ugh. I will prevail on the writers, while they are busy writing the next Star Trek movie during the offseason this summer (no joke there), to carefully consider where Hurley fits into this larger picture, and make sure he's not getting a demotion in favor of attractive, less interesting and less real characters. In the grand scheme of things, I will give the folks at Lost a "pass" on this one because I still appreciate their selection of the last victim, the most annoying whiney supermodely character in the main cast.

(2) GHOST WHISPERER - Now, I will grant you, isolated from the larger television context of many other deaths, the skillful writing of Angela's death was a real Shyamalan-worthy twist, normally a very difficult to execute device that I respect and adore. However, even so, this was perfect for the end of season four or five, not so early. Just long enough so far to really appreciate the character and performer, not long enough yet to feel it makes sense for the actress to move on or the show to need a "change". I now find myself with a dicotomy of a reaction to this development... on one hand, I don't want to see the actress written out of the show (likely to move on to a new, pathetic show - a-la Debra Messing moving from Prey to Will and Grace), but on the other hand, every plot development I can imagine now to deal with these circumstances cheapen a story that has thus far had such impressive writing as to make me continue to choke down Jennifer Love Hewitt performances on a weekly basis (no small feat, indeed!).

(3) CSI - I am very glad that they didn't do something really stupid in the end, but I don't mind sharing that I did not enjoy watching the two episodes following Lt. Brass' shooting much at all. Sure, it was suspense, but for me the suspense was more "I really hope these writers don't blow it because I'll be really pissed" than any artistic type of suspense. In the end, CSI simultaneously gets big demerits for wasting the final two episodes of the season like that, while it gets credit for dodging both the primary stupidity temptation to kill him off and the secondary stupidity temptation to make us wait until next season to find out.

(4) NCIS - I was very ticked when The West Wing first hired the very entertaining Mark Harmon on and fully developed him in the pretty interesting Secret Service agent role and subplot, then promptly killed him off. Now, I never watched JAG (where Harmon's NCIS character first began), but I gave NCIS a try solely as a Harmon fan, and wasn't disappointed. So, let me just say to the NCIS writers: putting Harmon in the same status as CSI had Lt. Brass for the last two episodes evoked only the following reply from me: I am not amused. Especially after you already have one giant strike against you for killing off Sasha Alexander ("Caitlyn") in a previous cliffhanger and replacing her the next season with the much less entertaining and rather contrived Cote de Pablo (Ziva), making me literally fear what stupidity in end-of-season writing you are capable of.

And remember, those are just the most notable of them, and the ones I've watched so far (I know for a fact I've got a few more waiting for me on the DVR.

So, television writers: stop trying to hold my viewership hostage by threatening the lives of my favorite characters! This TV terrorism has the same effect on me that real terrorism does on the general public - I turn against you rather than more to your side, and often it makes me even less interested in doing your desired outcome (in this case, watching your shows).