This Is Not News

To celebrate my effort to return to frequent blog writing, I’m going to take a moment to discuss other things I have not had the time to do, particularly in regard to the category of having fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I haven’t had any time to enjoy myself. I know the whole All Work and No Play thing. Especially in the summer, I can not complain about my leisure time. What I have noticed is that regardless of how much time I have, there are infinitely more things I have the opportunity to do than I have time to do them.

I have DVDs in my cabinet that I have not watched, months after I bought them. Most of them were in box sets, and I’ve watched some of the discs in the box, but there’s still stuff I could watch.

I have computer games and Wii games that I could keep practicing. One of these days I’m gonna score 100% on the guitar part to Driver 8. Steam had a ridiculous sale where I bought a bunch of games I have not tried to play yet, because I’m still trying to figure out how to kick the computer’s tail in Civilization IV.

I have Netflix and a Wii. Good heavens, that could keep me busy forever. Lost. Battlestar Galactica. Doctor Who. How many more shows that I haven’t seen yet?

I could always get the Harry Potter books out of the library again if I need to go on a two-week reading bender. And there are plenty of history books downstairs in my basement that I could read. (No comment, Pattie!)

I don’t always get to these things because Pattie, Alex and I also like to hang out with friends. And if no friends are available, we go hang out at Barnes and Noble, where there are MORE books to read.

I go through this litany in part to remind myself of how lucky I am. (Hold on to that thought, we’ll be getting back to it this week.) But I also go through it in the hopes that I will, perhaps, reduce the number of ADDITIONAL leisure activities that I pay for.

I mean, given that DVD and Netflix account, why am I still paying for cable? I spend more time following baseball on MLB.com than I do on TV! By the time I work through my backlog, there’ll be at least a year or two’s worth of new programs for me to watch! Do I need Food Network that badly?

And even with the games library that I have, I am looking at two BioWares coming down the pike, and I’m practically ready to throw my credit card at Amazon.

To some extent, this search for new experiences is a reasonable one. But as I get older, I’m getting to that point where I gotta prioritize my luxuries. And maybe someday soon I’ll have the sense to use my time and other resources more wisely.

That said, I don’t regret the plastic guitar for an instant.

Chris Lehmann has a new post where he discusses the time demands of his job as principal of Science Leadership Academy, how he balances those with his family responsibilities, and the unrealistic expectations for self-sacrifice that are created by media portrayals of educators. Now, I follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter, and I have no idea when he switches his educator brain off to let it recharge. (Case in point – the blog post in question went up around midnight.) So if he’s saying there need to be limits, someone ought to listen.

I also think it’s worth it to zoom out from the school issue a little – is there any profession where the work doesn’t expand to fill all your available time plus, let’s say, 10%? There’s always that one-more-thing that we would like to do if we just had a little more time or a little more energy. We all have to find that line where we say “This is good enough.”

That said, I think there are two big factors at work making this the problem that Chris identifies in society at large and also within education.

1) We are, in many ways, a work-driven society. There’s very little pressure to be a successful person compared to the pressure to have a successful career. So instead of our professional standard of excellence being what you can accomplish in a 40 or 50 hour week, it’s what you can accomplish in a 60 or 70 hour week or more. So the people who meet that standard are the people who either don’t have families or personal lives to sacrifice, or who are willing to curtail the time they put into those areas. Once upon a time this was fodder for the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” now it lurks behind our discussions of gender equality in the workplace and a host of other issues regarding the balance between work, family, and personal life.

2) Society at large has so many problems, and so many of those problems have a direct impact on schools and students, that even if the most dedicated professionals like Chris found a way to double the time they spend working, it would not be enough. I think this makes it harder for teachers and educators to feel like they’ve reached the “good enough” point – especially when there are people who prefer to criticize the individuals who are already going above and beyond to try to fix the problem rather than criticize the society at large that has made the problem so daunting. Demanding that someone else fix this – without providing the tools to do so – somehow comes across as leadership. (And of course, there are educators and teachers who do the very same thing to their students or their colleagues, so I’m not saying any group is without fault there.)

I have been trying to develop/find a good barbecue sauce for pulled pork and barbecued brisket for a while now – the thinker sauce that I use to glaze chicken can overwhelm the meat when I want a BBQ sandwich. Tradition appears to call for a vinegar sauce, but I am easily overpowered by the taste of vinegar. Today I mixed 1 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3/4 cup ketchup and about half a cup of Coke and got a pretty good base. I added some molasses (2 tablespoons) and some of my Alton-Brown-inspired barbecue rub (3-4 tablespoons), along with some steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce. I think the last two additions were a mistake – if I’m trying to balance out the strong vinegar, I shouldn’t be adding flavor liquids with a vinegar base. So I think next time out I’ll go with a cup straight of cider vinegar, Coke, and ketchup (or maybe tomato sauce), then add in the rub and the molasses.

I also cooked the sauce a little to thicken it up and let the flavors blend a little more. I’m sure that’s sauce heresy, but it works for me.

• Dave Thomer posted on May 31, 2009
  No, I just have very contemplative barbecued chicken. :) Seriously, that ought to be thicker, but the typo is too ...
• rjmason posted on May 20, 2009
  the thinker sauce that I use Interesting thing about this is that it might with equal likelihood be a typo for ...

Another thought that’s been running through my head, in part based on the idea that I heard in last night’s presentations and elsewhere that these days twenty-somethings are more likely to spend some time after college in an extended period of gathering their thoughts and figuring out where they want to go – possibly returning home to live with parents or taking some time before beginning their careers. In an odd coincidence of timing, I had just been talking to one of my officemates at St. Joe’s about how many of my future options and choices were shaped by the decision I made to major in philosophy as an undergrad: a decision I made at the age of 18 in large part because as a college freshman I had a history class I hated and a philosophy class I loved, and I couldn’t drop the former without dropping the latter. I never took another history course as an undergrad. So when I decided to pursue a graduate degree, philosophy seemed the most logical course. And when I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in secondary education, all of a sudden I found myself in a graduate degree program that did not match up particularly well with my overall career goals. So now here I am finishing up a second graduate degree. How different might all of that have been if I had loved the history course and disliked the philosophy class?

Read the remainder of this entry »

So my urban ed class tonight was full of presentations on various books/reports on what the heck is wrong with schools and kids these days. I actually have a number of thoughts/rants based on mine that I’ll try to roll out over the next couple of days. Two different classmates discussed a book that complains about how all this technology is making the Millennial generation more insulated, concerned with self-image, and unable to pursue and retain real knowledge. The subtitle of the book was Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. So in a small act of rebellion I decided to update the Facebook profile that I have mostly left dormant, and so I accepted a few friend requests and made a few of my own. I admit I was a little taken aback by how much information I suddenly had about what was going on on my friends’ sites, so I can tell it’s gonna take a while for this whole social network thing to click with me. And, of course, I am now blogging about social networking, which is all hopelessly recursive and probably still a couple of years out of date. But to hell with it, I’m too wordy for Twitter.

• Earl Green posted on December 5, 2008
  I've got about two weeks of Facebook experience on you, and yeah, it does throw an awful lot of stuff ...

If this study gets further verified, I’m bringing a pillow to my office. I often like to say that mentally I don’t feel like I’m older or see the world very differently than I did when I was 21. I know I am and I do, but it doesn’t feel that way, especially when I start singing along with my 90s playlists. But I think lack of sleep hits me earlier and harder than it ever did back then, and I really gotta train myself to accept that I just need to go to bed earlier. (Like, say, now, instead of blogging.) Now if the world would just agree to shut itself down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, think of how much more we could get done.

Very interesting article at The New Republic about the possibility that air travel – and air freight – might be getting a whole lot more expensive over the next several years. The basic thrust (hah!) is that air flight requires enormous amounts of fuel, and there’s no equivalent of the Prius or the electric car coming down the pike any time soon. So rising oil costs are really throwing the aviation industry for a loop. The article’s a worthwhile read for the thoughts about the future, but also as a reminder of what our current lifestyle requires to sustain it. For example:

Air freight now plays a huge role globally, carrying, for instance, one-third of the value of all U.S. imports. And the system relies heavily on cheap fuel: Every night, FedEx keeps a number of empty planes up in the air, to better respond to requests at a moment’s notice.

There is something hugely scary to me about the idea that we would just leave a bunch of planes up in the air, burning fuel, for the sake of convenience. And I’m sure I make a host of similar decisions on a much smaller scale every day, like when I leave my PC on during the day or fire up a charcoal grill or order something from Amazon that’s gonna wind up getting split into who knows how many shipments. I’m trying to make as many little changes as I can to be less wasteful . . . but I still feel like the world’s getting ready to force us to make some big changes.

• Dave Thomer posted on August 26, 2008
  And that's not even factoring in the energy cost to produce and transport the donuts and coffee. I admit, I'm pretty ...
• rjmason posted on August 23, 2008
  I did quite a lot of traveling this year. The great majority of it could have been replaced by ...
• Dave Thomer posted on August 20, 2008
  I have nowhere near the physics or the math skills to argue with the back of your envelope, although I ...

A brief aside here – I’ve been bemoaning the lack of lemonade in my fridge this summer, in part because I don’t like the taste of a lot of store-bought juice, in part because I’ve been trying to cut down on the high fructose corn syrup, and in part because the price of lemons has gotten so ridiculous that a pitcher of lemonade would cost me something like fifteen bucks. But over the last week or so, I’ve become quite fond of Simply Lemonade, made by the Simply Orange Juice Company. It’s a little on the strong and sweet side, but there’s no aftertaste and it is quite refreshing on a hot day. I can also say from followup testing that their Orange and Grapefruit varieties are very nice as well.

As he picked up his hammer and saw . . .

(No, I do not get tired of that joke. Yes, I know it’s not particularly funny.)

Had an eye exam today. Got off to a good start when the doctor took a look at my glasses and said “I had forgotten how nearsighted you are.” Went downhill from there, as my prescription had to get stronger – again – as my vision had deteriorated to 20/50 with my old glasses. Walked home in the sunlight, and even though I had the protective shades, I am stunned I did not walk right into a moving car. When I could keep my eyes open, I saw the whole world through a haze.

Then my first attempt to get new glasses failed when the closest LensCrafters’ machines were broken. So we drove to another one and discovered that my current health insurance doesn’t cover glasses. Unfortunately, I had already donated blood earlier in the day, so trading plasma for the glasses was impossible. Visa is very happy with me tonight, lemme tell ya.

On the other hand, when I finally did get the glasses, I was amazed by how much clearer things seemed, and by how light the glasses were – lenses have apparently gotten even thinner in the last few years, which is great. I hope that lens-thinning technology manages to at least keep pace with my deteriorating vision for years to come.

So, long story short, if you haven’t replaced your glasses in a few years, and have a spare kidney, check out what’s available.

Oh, and if you can at all persuade your optometrist not to have Rachael Ray’s talk show on in the waiting room, go for it.

I was up at 5:30 this morning and went around the corner to pick up some milk. I’ve managed to avoid any kind of nap since then. I got up pretty early on Monday, and did the same on Tuesday before falling back to sleep for a nap. Still, it has me thinking that maybe my body clock has shifted and I’m not so nocturnal any more. So now I need to find my new optimal working hours. And then I need to find some way to convince my daughter to let me take advantage of them. I don’t see that last one happening in a hurry.

Still, this does give me hope that I can function in this crazy daytime world I’ve heard so much about.