Yesterday - Teacher Dispatch II

Wednesday was great, productive even. Thursday started out great.

I'm at my desk and it's early, checking email, swigging coffee. I get the email.

The kind of email that makes the walls touch your elbows, an email that turns your world into a goldfish bowl, bent around the edges, nothing else on your horizon.

In short, the video announcements I've worked so hard to curate, the team training, the proposals for equipment, all of that called into question.

Five utterances of the same word. An Andrew Dice Clay Concert, on the air for all staff, students, educational aids, janitorial staff, security,everyone.

That expletive, the five instances of the same fucking expletive, the person who said it, the host is gone for who knows how long. But the Announcements have a more distinct, mature face, and its mine.

One would think with my flare for the dramatic, and my tendency towards hyperbole, that I would welcome this kind of attention. But I don't. I hate their judgment, I can feel it, floating around my mind like a fever, and while most are supportive there is so much silence from so many others.

The bottom line, I didn't do it, it wasn't my fault, but it was.

So a videotaped mea culpa for all to see. Take ownership and bring it to the masses.

I know this will all blow over in a few days, but for now I want back to where I was behind the scenes, making my moves, shaking the waves underground.

Teaching Disptach

It's not a snow day.

It's the day after a four-day weekend. It's a sweaty late morning, and I've just finished my lunch. There's a feeing that teachers get, right before a tough class, where one ponders the mood and temperment of the students on a given particular day.

Will they be rambunctious after the weekend or not? Is it a high volume energy drink day or not?

It's always hard to say, especially after a four-day weekend.

A co-worker shaved his moustache. He still strokes his chin like he still has hair there.

Visualize a new bumper sticker.

Has hair there.

The writing stalled and died this weekend. I spent a part of a morning taking things away, but not adding any new information. Not a phrase, not a new word. Nothing.

Something hit me yesterday, when I awoke, that I felt, maybe for the first time in 2007, fully rested and refreshed. Maybe it had something to do with the sky light and the slate grey sky?

Sometimes words come to me in waves, humming thrones like bees well up in my blood, urging the synapses in my brain to talk to the fingers already, and see if we can't do something about this 'lack of writing thing'

Oh, and Michael Chabon is writing a serialized novel within the splashy colored confines of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

All for Now