Mike's Simple Life

30 and More...

2009-12-09T09:12:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple or three weeks since my birthday now. I started writing this post on my laptop while sitting in the Salt Lake Public Library, and to my horror discovered that my laptop battery is only good for about twenty minutes now. I was really frustrated by that, because I hardly ever run it on the battery. Truth to tell I just don't use it that much. Anyway, I've ordered a new battery already, but it hasn't come yet. Now I'm writing this as my 2nd period class writes about memories connected to music. We're working up to writing personal narratives.

Anyway, here is the post I was writing, then...

So, the other day I turned 30. I went to dinner with Mom and Dad at the Bombay house. While we were driving there Mom called Uncle Mark to ask him if we could come for Thanksgiving dinner. She forgot that they weren't telling people about the brain tumor yet, so that's how I found out, overhearing her talking on the phone with Mark. That wasn't a super feeling. She labored a bit to explain her confidence about the situation. It mostly had to do with the feeling that things were orchestrated devinely. I'm not as convinced.

I'm not too inclined to think that way these days. I felt very strongly that they were, before, especially as they all seemed to be around me going on my own mission. The next two years didn't offer me evidence of this and I had a hard time dealing with that for the rest of my 20's.

After dinner with Mom and Dad I went to Cache Valley, to Brady and Ondy's and we cooked. Steve and Jill Peterson, some other friends came, as well of course as Mike Foresberg. Mr. Forsberg asked me if I was depressed about turning 30. I said I wasn't. I couldn't understand why he would expect that I would be. My 20's were a bad decade. I'm glad to see them go. I have regrets, for sure, and they are the reasons that Mike spoke of for his own depression when he crossed into his 30's, no marriage, no kids, failure to make my mark on the world. But I'm better than I was in my 20's, and more likely to achieve the marriage and kids part, so I guess that's what makes me less than pessimistic about the new decade.

Unfortunately soon after we served up the food, around 11:00 Mike and Ondy fought and she threatened to kick him out. He got really hurt and left. Steve and Jill split too. The whole situation was pretty uncomfortable. Ondy went to bed and Brady got ready too. I'd planned on sleeping on their couch like Mike does each weekend, because the heat is off at Mom and Dad's house and I didn't want to shiver and wait for it to warm up.

Within half an hour Mike called me and asked what was going on. He had gone out walking around, and he continued to do so for a while then he came back and we sat on the porch and I talked to him till 3:00 AM so he wouldn't get in his car and leave. At that point we both felt ready to drive home. I got back to Salt Lake around 4:30, and slept in my own bed.

Not the best birthday, but at least I got to see some friends, for a while.

Anyway, I've had the whole week off from school and in that time I fell in love with audio books. Mostly it is an obsessive/compulsive thing. Putting them on my computer and writing the tags. It's lovely busy work, and it's always satisfying to bring order to something. So I have been doing that all week. It is fun to listen to them too as I do it.

I listened to Wyrms, by Orson Scott Card, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I did when I read it as a 14 year old. But there is some really good stuff there. There was an after word where he talked about the book. He said his books were mostly boring talk between two characters broken up by unspeakable violence. I liked that. He has some interesting stuff in this one about the nature of will. He talks about it being us. Was it President Packer who said that it is the only thing that is uniquely ours that we can give to God? Card seems to agree, and says more or less that since it is the only thing that we really have it is the only thing that can characterize us.

I listened to Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, which was good, fun, well written, but ultimately unsatisfying.

I also listened to The Body, by Stephen King, and I liked that too. I listened to Inventing a Nation, by Gore Vidal, and although he had some good stuff I wasn't as into it.

The one that far and away I liked the most was Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. I decided to go out for a long walk on Wednesday, and I began listening to it on my mp3 player as I went out. I walked from my place up A St to about 4th ave, then down the walkway into Memory Grove Park and up the other side of the canyon to the capitol. From there I went on up to Ensign Peak...

(this is new stuff from here on out)

then back down to the Capitol Building. From there I turned left and took the ring road that goes part of the way up City Creek then curves around and goes up the other side of the canyon. From there I walked along 11th ave to F St. and walked down it to the Smiths on 5th Ave, and followed that back to A St., then from there I went down to my place. It was something like 8 miles.

But that's not important. The story was what I wanted to write about. I listened to it until it ended at about 3AM, about 12 hours after I started. At the very first I didn't really like it. The introduction in the meadow wasn't grabbing me, and then the protagonist wasn't interesting to me as he was describing going to live in the dormitory in Tokyo. But then I got it. It was almost a cosmic thing.

I was thinking about being 30 as I listened to his date with Naoko on her birthday. She seemed so depressed about turning 20. She said how lucky he was to still be 19. I thought about my teens, then my 20's. I thought about Taru, the protagonist. When I was a teenager I was so concerned about becoming someone. Then when I was in my 20's I was angry because I hadn't become anyone yet. And I was bored by Taru because he wasn't anyone as a protagonist. Who wants to be start a reading relationship with a protagonist that isn't anyone? Then it all changed. I loved that Taru wasn't anyone. I've accepted not being anyone and I'm far happier than I was in my 20's. Good riddance to them. It was a bad decade, from which I have few if any happy memories. I'm glad to see the end of them.

Then what happens between Taru and Naoko happens and all of the sudden he's someone to her. At first that pissed me off, but then I accepted that too. I can live with the idea that we are only significant to the people that we become significant to, that love gives us meaning.

Anyway, I was hooked on Taru and Naoko's story till the end. And I'm 30, and I'm ok not being anyone, even though the story made me want to become someone to somebody.

Now...

2009-11-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Today I don't feel like writing much about what's going on, but I haven't felt like that for a while, thus the lack of new posts. That's ok I guess. Anyway, I thought I'd put up the map of the bike ride Dad and I took a couple of weeks ago. It was really pretty nice. It had been rainy, but we went out anyway and started in Richmond, riding up to Cove, then over to Cornish, down to Trenton, and back to our point of origin in Richmond. It was 26 miles, and I have to say, since in the last post I lamented Dad's mortality, he didn't have any problem riding the miles away. And it didn't rain on us. That was nice.

Sitting At Home, Watching Conference...

2009-10-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'm in Providence with Mom and Dad, watching the last session of Conference. It's been good I suppose. We'd planned to go up to the cabin this weekend, but we didn't because of the weather. It's been a kind of a rainy, blustering weekend.

I spent the evening last night with Mr. Foresberg, Brady and Ondy, and Steve, whose last name I don't know, at Brady and Ondy's new house. The house isn't new, but they've just bought it. It's in a nice neighborhood east of the University. I really like the back yard. I guess I like the whole house, except the kitchen, which seems like an afterthought, very small. I don't think that is going to work in the long run for Brady, who is a fantastic cook. Maybe it just isn't going to work for me at Brady and Ondy's. One of my favorite things to do with them is cook, and that kitchen isn't big enough for more than one person to work in. So, I'll set them to fixing it up for me. Now, laugh at my hubris.

Yesterday I tried to fix the clutch pedal ignition switch problem in my car. It has been working poorly for a while, which has resulted in me parking the car on a hill about half a mile away from my apartment so I could start it by compression the switch wasn't working. I drive relatively rarely, so it sat on the hill for several days without moving. I found a note under the windshield wiper last night that had been placed there several days ago. Someone was trying to protect their turf. They wrote for me to "please park somewhere else all day! Because there isn't enough parking up (there)." I kind of feel like parking it there again when I go home even though it is running fine now, with a new note under the window politely telling them where they can park their cars. That means hell. Laugh again at my hubris.

Anyway, the car is fixed. Dad suggested that we could use his volt meter to verify that depressing the button complets the circuit, allowing the starter to draw power. It did, so I just cut the wires and tried to strip the sheathing and twist them together to bypass the switch. But I couldn't get the sheathing off. Eventually I gave up and went in. I fell asleep in frustration on the couch, and as I covertly hoped he would, Dad went out and fixed it.

I'm a little surprised that I never guessed that I am ADD before I was diagnosed a couple years ago. I fool myself sometimes into thinking that I bring something that he lacks when we work together on projects. But mostly it is just obvious that he is the one who fulfills the circuit when I can't do it, like he did this time. I woke up when he came in after finishing. It's working consistantly so far. Dad's getting older though, and I can't help aknowledging to myself that when he's gone, and it could be sooner rather than later, I'll be somewhat at loose ends. But at the least my car is running right now.

Still in My Room...

2009-09-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a week and I'm still in my room. My principal talked to the registrar and she pointed out that we were going to have to hire a geography teacher part time next trimester and another part time health teacher since one is going to be out on maternity leave. The result being that even if they moved me over to the crappy room there wouldn't be room for the new people next trimester. The upshot is that special ed is cleaning out one of the store rooms. I'm not counting on anything, but I've got my fingers crossed that it's all over. At least for this year.

Mr. Foresberg came down and tried to help me out with my car. We started by cleaning the posts on the battery, then replacing the bad clamp. It still wouldn't start so he looked for the solenoid, and found it in a ridiculously inaccessible area. Having done so we jacked it up with the piddley little tire replacement jack and wedged a box of books under it in case the jack turned out to be as unstable as it seemed. He still couldn't get to it so we took off the wheel. By this time it was dark and he was working with a headlamp, and still it foiled him, so we put the wheel on cleaned up the tools and push started it again with the plan of me driving up to Cache Valley for a more thourough going over on the weekend.

We parked it on a hill on A street, and I left it for a couple of days. But as I was getting ready to go online and try to get a solenoid I saw the switch that doesn't allow the starter to draw if the clutch isn't depressed. I decided I was going to monkey around with that just to see before I bought the solenoid, so when I went home yesterday I walked up to the hill and did so. It started like a dream. I turned it off and started it again. I drove down around the corner, pulled to the side and shut it off, then tried to start it again. It wouldn't, so I got under the dash and played with the switch again and it started. Then I drove around some more and smoke started to come out of the hood.

That worried me so I called Mike again and told him the good and the bad. He told me to check my oil levels and add some if any had leaked. I drove the car to school this morning and there was no smoke, so I think it may be ok. At least for now. I think I'm probably just going to try to find something that permanently holds the button on that switch down. Or if I got ambitious I'll spend the $22 and buy a new one to replace it. Who knows. But if I get take out tonight it will be at a place closer to home than Curry in a Hurry.

The Fateful Day...

2009-09-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Friday after school my principal pulled me aside with the social studies teacher and told us that they'd tried to make it work, but one of us was going to have to move over into the worst room in the school so the special ed teacher could have my room. He avoided the issue by telling us we could decide among ourselves which one of us would move. My face immediately turned into a wooden smile. I hate this.

Later that day I went to Curry in a Hurry for some dinner, and when I came out my car wouldn't start. I was instantly panicked, but calmed down relatively quickly. I called Mr. Foresberg and he said to try to loosen the clamps on the battery posts and get some of the lead off, then I might be able to get a jump. I had no tools so I pounded on the clamp, trying to jiggle it. Finishing that, but accomplishing nothing, I asked everyone at the restaurant over the course of a half hour if they could give me a jump, but to no avail. I was a little resentful, as I started calling everyone I knew in the Salt Lake area. Two calls later I was done, and still out of luck, so I ate my curry in the car, locked up, and started walking home up State St.

After about a mile I got to a bus stop and a fellow was there waiting. I asked him if the bus was going to be along soon, and he said it must because he'd been waiting for about 45 minutes. Then he asked me if I had a phone so he could call a cab, and without even thinking about it I lied and said I didn't. I walked away, and felt instantaneously like a totally hypocritical jerk. I'd been miffed because no one could help me, and I could help this guy but I wouldn't. Then the bus came by and stopped for me, even though I wasn't at the stop. It waited for me to run up and when I got on the guy was there and he nodded. I think he told the driver I needed to get on.

The next day my home teacher called and I asked him if he could go out there and try to jump it with me. We bought some jumper cables and a new set of clamps for the battery posts. But it wouldn't jump. He called his dad and he said it was probably the solenoid. That was discouraging, but we were able to start it by compression and I got home and parked it. Mr. Foresberg is going to come down and try to help me fix it, which is super nice of him.

So I was back on my bike this morning and I got a bug in my eye. I wiped at it a lot then during lunch I wiped at it again and found the bug's carcass on my finger tip. It was weird and kind of gross.

I should get back to work...

Sitting in the Dark...

2009-09-03T15:51:00.001-07:00

We're almost through with our second week of school. The first week was rough. I though I might be looking for a job, but I had a good talk with my principal and things look like they're probably going to turn out ok. He was very understanding, which I wasn't expecting at all.

So, now I'm sitting in the dark in the library, which I will very likely be moving out of in the next week. Faculty meeting is over, and I think I'm more or less alone in the building. I was trying to get a new version of Windows Media Player installed on the circulation computer so I could synch my mp3 player and load a couple of audio books I downloaded from the Salt Lake City Library page. But there seem to be redundant layers of protection on them and if there's a way that I can get through our system's security, and the security on the files, and get them to agree that neither one is going to shank the other in the back on the way to my ears, I can't figure it out.

I no longer have internet access at home, so I'm doing things like this after school. That means until I have a new place of my own with my own connection, posts will be scarce.

About buying a house... As I was afraid of losing my job these last two weeks, I kind of dropped off of looking, but I guess I'm on again. But as the summer has come to a close the houses coming to market are in worse shape and worse locations. I think I may have missed my window.

I never posted about it, but the house on 13th East that I liked came back on the market and I made an offer on it about a month ago. We didn't hear back on it from the selling agent by the time I had set for the end of the validity of the offer. Rich kept calling the agent but never got any reply. Eventually a week after the offer was supposed to go cold, Rich got a hold of the selling agent's office. They said the selling agent went out of town on vacation the day my offer went in, and they didn't know when he'd come back. We've never hear anything more.

I don't think selling agents actually care about selling houses in my price range. Rich says many of them won't even list them because the stakes are so low. I'm frustrated by the situation.

We did finally hear back from the selling agent on the house on 4th East. He said that I was still the highest offer even though it has gone to short sale. They think if I would pay $120,000 the sellers and the bank would go for it. That was very useful. It was a number slightly higher than the asking price I think. Even after that I'd have to replace the roof, trusses and all, and I don't like the neighborhood that much. It's about as low quality as the east side downtown gets.

I'm starting to think more and more about trying to build a house myself. Could it be any harder than trying to get someone to sell me one?

The No Place Like Home Blues...

2009-08-11T17:59:00.001-07:00

I'm having a bit of a Job week. That is to say that everything seems to be going wrong and I am feeling quite sorry for myself.

I was kind of bummed because the agents for the sellers of the house upon which I had made an offer had seemed to blow my offer off. It was significantly under the asking price. The frustrating thing was that my agent couldn't get ahold of the seller's agency. They had three different numbers and none of them were picking up when we called, and they hadn't returned any of the messages.

Rich seems to be losing heart in the search. If he spends many more hours he isn't going to have made much when the commission comes. I was ready to buy the house that I had decided on as a backup if the summer wanned and I hadn't found a house I really wanted. The asking price was only $49,000 and he didn't seem to want to move on it (presumambly because depending on how he values his time he might have actually come out behind on that commission.) Anyway, while he didn't talk to me about it it sold. So now I was without even a backup.

Then, this last Friday the 72 year old front office secratary who is going to be in the library during the 3 periods I'm teaching English and Yearbook this school year, called to say that she wanted to move her stuff in, but she thought that we should move the furniture around a little. I said that would probably be fine, but I wanted to come in and look at what she wanted to do. She handed me off to my Principal who said that he wanted to talk to me about my room. He asked me if I got his email and I said I hadn't. The nice folks who were providing my internet access moved away, and I'm not going to get my own connection since it is my sincere desire to move from here as soon as possible. I told my Principal that I was going to be coming in to look at the library with Ginger and he said he'd talk with me then.

As I was riding my bike in I got run off the road by a careless semi driver. I ended up riding hard into a sewer grate that popped my tire, and I had to walk the last two miles in my flip-flops, which rubbed holes in my feet. I got to school and told my Principal about it and he commiserated and proceeded to tell me that the Special Ed department wanted my room and he was going to move me to the worst room in the school to let them have it. This room is impossible to teach in. I know because it was my room the first year I was there. This was horribly, horribly dissappointing. This is especially so since after my first year he promised me a nice room next to the other English teacher with a wall of windows, then forgot and gave it to a new Social Studies teacher. I had to settle for the room across the hall, with no windows, and bad heat and air conditioning. Still it was a huge improvement over my other room, and I settled in. So, it is a great irony that I am now being kicked out of it and banished to what feels like nothing less than a gulag in Siberia.

I tried to convince him to give me the room I'd originally been promised after my first year, and send the new Social Studies teacher (the guy from the beginning of the year got fired (the Principal seems to fire or pressure out anyone who rubs him wrong, so that each year I've worked there we've had about a 30% turn over in the staff.)) over there. I don't think he bought it though. I thought I had him until he realized I was only going to be in that classroom for two periods per day. Anyway, it just kind of sucks.

So after all that I went into the library with the secretary and she told me that basically she wanted to make everything like it was before I'd changed everything when I moved into the library at the end of last year. I explained why I'd made the changes that I had, to try to improve the discipline in the library. As it was, the library was a place to go to avoid class. I was pretty adamant that it become a place of order. She more or less called me a tyrant and wondered why couldn't I just let her have it her way, and when I didn't relent she began crying a little.

I talked quickly and kept her talking, and eventually it came out that what she wanted was just to have a desk space that was hers and hers alone. The way I had it we were going to be using the same desk. She wanted a place that was her own where she could put her stuffed animals and her paper weights and her tape dispenser, and by implication, and place where she could root her identity. In the end that was why she was there. It wasn't becuase she needed the money. Working where she does, doing what she is doing is a statment of identity and purpose for which to live. Eventually we compromised by me setting up desks for us both at the front of the library.

And it came to me that that was exactly why I was having such a hard time. Things have been going worse and worse with my apartment to the point that I kind of feel like my place isn't here anymore. That's why I started looking for a house. I wanted a place that was mine, and could be a representation and even maybe a part of me. But it seemed with all these setbacks almost like a voice saying, "You see yourself here? No, you can't live here. Oh, your marginally interested in this place? No, here's a crap place in a bad neighborhood that doesn't meet your expectations or needs."

Now the same thing was happening at school. I was getting kicked out of my room and given the worst piece of real estate in the building, and I was being edged out a little in the library too.

The upshot of it was that I saw then that they house that I had been most interested in of all that I saw was still on the market. It's the house on 13th East in the gully with the south facing wall of windows. I called the only contractor I know in Salt Lake (one of the teachers who took his leave from the school after my first year), and tried to get him or one of his guys to go look at it with me. It was still on the market I assumed because it was in really rough shape, and I wanted his opinion on whether I could afford it with repairs. The thing was that he took a long time getting back to me. Finally this Sunday in the middle of the night I woke up and decided I was going to make an offer on it no matter what.

Remember how my internet is gone? When I went to the library and got my email there was one from Rich saying the seller's agent on the house I had offered on had finally gotten back to him and that my offer was the highest, but still not enough for the seller to cover their debt. As a result it was going into short sale and I could re-offer when the bank took over, and find out in six months whether I got it. Also, the house on 13th East was sold.

So, I've been feeling sorry for myself, and trying to fix my bike, which I might have broken more while trying to fix. At the least I've ruined $15 in parts. Whatever. I'm going to go get some more and keep at it.

Butterfield Canyon...

2009-07-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago Mr. Forsberg, The Incestuous Mr. and Ms. Doherty (Foresberg joke), and I went for a walk from the summit of Butterfield Canyon toward the overlook of the Great Big Hole in the Ground. We started late and had to turn back before we reached our destination, but walking up in the sunset and down in the twilight was really, really pretty. Here are a couple of videos.

Going Up...

Coming Down...

The Next House...

2009-07-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

I made an offer on another house. If you follow the link you'll see the listing with pictures. It looks neat from the outside, but inside is truly horrendous. It was being rented, and the renter just split. As Rich and I were looking around we found a note from the owner saying, "Hey, I'm assuming you've left because you haven't paid any rent for a while, but please get in contact with me."

We also found blood smears on the ground next to the stairs down to the cellar and in the cellar a couple of planters with a sunlamp. I wonder what he was growing next to the furnace. Anyway, we kept looking around and found that the source of the terrible smell was two fold. There was a little surprise in the toilet, and a dirty diaper on an entertainment center in the master bedroom. I was in the living room and heard a bump in the kitchen, and I thought someone might be there, but decided it was probably a rat in the cabinet.

A little more searching found a bench warrant for the renter, and it all came together. Anyway, the roof is bad. Its really bad. It will have to be replaced. There were three different places where the ceiling had fallen in because of water damage. Also, there looks to be some water seepage in the cellar stairs. But aside from that, the foundation looks pretty good, and the walls are straight, which is better than I could say for most of the other places I've seen this age, and the yard has some real potential. The kitchen has been re-done, and and the exterior paint, although cracking now was really elaborate. Also, there is some cement work with individual colored tiles. The front fence is really nice, and there are landscaped planters in place of a tree lawn. It looks like the owners put a lot into the place before they started renting it.

The offer I made is significantly lower than the asking price, and though like the other house I offered on, I'm not super excited about the place, if I get it for this price it will be too good a deal to pass up.

We put it in the contract that the seller's got to get rid of all the renter's crap. I hope he does. Literally.

No House for Me...

2009-07-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago the lady who was representing the sellers on the house called up and said that they had higher offers. I was a little confused because I thought she had told us my offer had been accepted. Actually I think she was confused, or maybe duplicitous, and told me wrong. She said everyone got one more final bid, and I raised mine by $6,500, but apparently I got outbid by about $6000 more. That meant the house went for $112, 500. That's still a pretty good price, and I probably would have paid it if they had just been upfront. The only reason that I can figure out that she would have dealt with it this way is if she was really incompetent (the asking price was way too low), or because she wanted to impress the seller by how much over the asking price she could get.

Either way it kind of sucks, because that's two weeks of my rapidly dwindling summer wasted while I waited around for this to work. Not to mention that emotionally it is just a big disappointment. I know that I wasn't that excited about the house anyway, but emotionally I was already kind of moving myself out of here, and down there. The whole thing just kind of sucks. It has driven me to start watching The O.C. on hulu. That's kind of like the bad tv equivalent of drinking. I hope she knows what she's done to me.

Identity...

2009-07-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

I have begun this week to study for my Praxis exam. I have to take it before my first two years of teacher licensure are up or my licence will apparently be revoked. I only know this because they told me this at the end of my teacher training. The state board of education has never sent me anything or really even acknowledged my existence. I suppose its possible that my employer never checked my credentials, and that the board never got my info when I graduated. Who knows?

Anyway, I'm studying for my Praxis, and I was reading about Erik Erikson, a Neo-Freudian who came up with an eight stage theory of human development. This is it, coppied from Wikipedia an minimally edited by me:

Hope - Basic Trust vs. Mistrust - Infant stage. Does the child believe its caregivers to be reliable?
Will - Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt - Toddler stage. Child needs to learn to explore the world. Bad if the parent is too smothering or completely neglectful.
Purpose - Initiative vs. Guilt - Kindergarten - Can the child plan or do things on his own, such as dress him or herself. If "guilty" about making his or her own choices, the child will not function well. Guilt is quickly compensated by a sense of accomplishment.
Competence - Industry vs. Inferiority - Around age 6 to puberty. Child comparing self worth to others (such as in a classroom environment). Child can recognize major disparities in personal abilities relative to other children. Erikson places some emphasis on the teacher, who should ensure that children do not feel inferior.
Fidelity - Identity vs. Role Confusion - Teenager. Questioning of self. Who am I, how do I fit in? Where am I going in life? Erikson believes that if the parents allow the child to explore, they will conclude their own identity. However, if the parents continually push him/her to conform to their views, the teen will face identity confusion.
Love (in intimate relationships, work and family) - Intimacy vs. Isolation - Young adulthood. Who do I want to be with or date, what am I going to do with my life? Will I settle down?
Caring - Generativity vs. Stagnation - the Mid-life crisis. Measure accomplishments/failures. Am I satisfied or not? The need to assist the younger generation. Stagnation is the feeling of not having done anything that is of value to the next generation.
Wisdom - Ego Integrity vs. Despair - Old age. Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and either conclude at satisfaction or despair.

Erikson believed that you had to understand and embrace both poles of each stage (ie - Intimacy and Isolation for the 6th stage) for it to come to the final conflict that would resolve the stage for you, at the end of which you would have the proscribed virtue or power.

So I was trying to figure out where I went wrong, and I was thinking about stage 4, thinking about comparing myself to others for self-evaluation. I did that for a really long time. I think that was the primary concern of my teenage years. It became an obsessive-compulsive thing. I have this great memory from the early days of my relationship with Cami when I was constantly trying to measure myself up against Peter, and she finally got tired enough of listening to it that she cracked and said rather sharply that she didn't care and didn't want to hear anymore about Peter. Its a fun irony.

I guess I'm thinking now that I didn't "go" wrong. I just had some conditions that screwed things up, the same as anyone else I guess. I had anxiety-attacks that made me rate myself very low compared to my peers in that 4th stage, and that dragged it out. I think I was going through stage 5 starting at the beginning of my 20's, really because of religious mis-conceptions. I was happy with my identity until then.

I'm banging away at stage 6, through depression and anxiety. I've got isolation down. I guess I just need to figure out intimacy, then I can have a crisis experience. Its tempting to believe in that, but I'm not sure I do. If I'm reading it correctly and Wikipedia isn't lying, according to Erikson I must have had these climactic crisis experiences to conclude each stage, but I don't know if I believe it. I spent years trying to force a crisis that would get me through this Love stage, and I think to a large extent I've stopped believing that there is any one climactic moment. I don't disagree with the idea of moving through the stages, but with the idea that the climaxes come.

I think more realistically that one day I'll look back and see that it happened somewhere out there over a period of time and I'll go, "Huh." And that will be it. It will be less like an hour long tv drama than like geology. Huge, largely indeterminable periods of time that only have just enough in common to call them ages. At least that's the way I'm feeling these days. Kind of sucks then that we're hardwired to look for narrative then, huh?

The 4th of What?

2009-07-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

So I didn't realize it was the 4th of July, but their are a lot of fireworks going off, so I kind of figured it out.

Anyway, here is a Google SketchUp of the house I might have bought. Where this is a short sale the bank has to approve the price the sellers have accepted. I don't know how long that will take. It could well be 6 months where I wait patiently and they finally say no. Not fun.

So, this is done from memory, but I think it's pretty close. I could be a little off on the size of the rooms, but I'm correct on the square footage of the house. The main floor is 696 sq. ft, and there's a dug out shelf basment that is big enough for laundry and a little storage.

This upper floor is about a hundred or a hundred and fifty square feet bigger than my apartment, but it actually feels smaller because of the way its laid out. If you have any ideas on how to fix it let me know.

Watching the videos that Nathan and Miriam sent of their new house kind of makes me embarassed. I'm realizing more as I've been trying to buy a house how much money I don't make. As it is this would be totally impossible if I were trying to support a family.

I watched the pilot on Hulu of a new show coming next season called Glee about a teacher who takes over his school's glee club. The big conflict in the episode is his wife telling him she's pregnant, and he decides he has to grow up and get a real job, so he gives the school his two weeks notice. A bit to close for me.

The truth is that most of the teachers in my school have second jobs or spouses who bring home the bacon.

Funny Things, But Sad Too...

2009-07-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

I don't really like it when people email me in association with everyone they know to tell me about the funniest thing they've ever seen for the moment, but here's this.

Its from a website where they guy digitally removes Garfield from the comics. It makes Garfield funny, but also changes the focus to how sad John's life is. What's worse is that as I was laughing uncontrolably I started to realize how much like John I am becoming, just with the dignity not to get a cat to assuage my loneliness. Funny.

There was this site too, to which people send awkward family photos. It had this lovely picture.

Browning...

2009-07-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

Well, my offer was accepted by the seller. Now on to the bank. I can't really decide if I'm happy about it. I think I am. Maybe. The house just doesn't have much character. There's another house I saw in a worse location for $28,000 more, but it captures my imagination. According to Rich I can pretty much get out of the deal anytime up to signing the loan. We'll see what happens. But I've definitely got to get rid of the rose bushes. That's the first thing.

Garbage and Houses...

2009-06-30T20:15:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I didn't do much. I was kind of bummed about it, because I had every intention of being a useful member of society, but I slept poorly the night before and spent most of the day falling asleep repeatedly on the couch. I've been stressed that I haven't relaxed from the last school year, so I don't sleep well. Ironic, huh? But I did do one useful thing yesterday. I was taking out the garbage and found that one of my neighbors had moved out, leaving some really nice stuff in and beside the dumpster.

This tabley-drawer thing was one of those pieces of furniture. In Cleveland we used to do what we called "tree-lawn shopping", which involved us going out on big garbage day and taking home the best of the really crappy furniture that was on the tree-lawn awaiting pickup. So I was no stranger to this pass-time. (So many hyphens! Need more perentheses!)

I looked at this tabley-drawer thing, expecting from my former forays into reclaimation that it would be made of cheap particle board with a thin vinyl veneer pasted on it, or if the tossers were high class that it would be a laminate wood. I was, however, surprised to find it was in fact hardwood. At least most of it is. I don't know for sure, but I think that makes it pretty nice. I mean I think you'd pay tens if not a ten of tens of dollars for this piece of furniture. I didn't really have any use for it, but I decided at the very least I should bring it inside and take it to the DI later.

The thing about hardwood and iron is that it is heavy, which meant that I wasn't really strong enough to cary it up to the door and down the stairs safely by myself, especially not in flip-flops. I figured this out when I stumbled as my flip-flops, dragging on the ground caught the toe and rolled as I started down the stairs. For a moment I was sure I was going to end in a broken pile ontop of a broken pile of what used to me furniture at the bottom of the stairs, but by bravely using my elbow as a brake on the textured plaster wall and heroicly wrenching my back to maintain balance, I halted my downward motion. Eventually, I got it in the apartment, and now it sits classing up the place, but still without any other real purpose.

So that was yesterday.

Today I went an looked at houses with Rich. We found one that I really, really liked, but that will be beyond me. There's little chance I could make it work. It is in a fantastic neighborhood, near Laird where Dad grew up, in a house that is now worth about a million and a half dollars. He checked because he recently saw it was for sale. It is right on the edge of the gully there, and is almost like a partially earth sheltered house. It's surrounded by woods and has these huge cool sky lights and an enourmous fire place.

The problem is that the roof is basically falling in, and would not only have to be resurfaced but probably restructured. There's dry rot throughout the exterior, and all of the parquet wood flooring is buckling and coming up. All of that said, it is priced at the top of my means, so if I bought it I probably wouldn't have money to fix it up enough to be liveable. But what a perfect house for me. I would love to be able to do it. I'd really, really love to be able to.

After that we looked at a couple of places I wasn't interested in, and that aren't very interesting, and as we were looking for one of them we saw a place that sold pupusas. I told Rich how good they were and he decided he wanted some lunch so we came back around the block to it. I think the place was just opening. The guy who was serving us was still fixing up the windows, and made some executive decisions about what should be on the menu while we were sitting there. I ordered two pupusas, and Rich got two pupusas and a tamale, and I was surprised at how big they were when they came. They were fantastic tasting too, as good as I've had.

When we went to pay the guy was embarassed when I gave him my card, and told me he couldn't run a card for less than five bucks. My total was only three eighty-something. It was an amazing deal, and Rich had to pay for me because I only had a dollar in cash. I'm definitely going back there. It's on the corner of 5th East and 27th South if you want to go.

After that we looked at a place around 33rd south. I liked it. It was small, but the guy who owned it was an artist, and he'd really done some great things with the place. The price was a little high for me, but besides being small I really liked it.

We went out to north Taylorsville after that and Rich showed me a split level that I think he wanted me to buy, because it was a good deal, but it was big, and in a crappy neighborhood, and I wasn't into it. It probably will be a good deal for someone, but the sureno graffitti at the entrance of the subdivision and the half wall out front that was new painted (presumably because of graffiti) pretty much sealed my decision.

Following that we went to a place further south in Taylorsville that was in a really nice neighborhood, and looked really good. It hit the market two days before and already had several offers on it, none of which had been accepted by the bank, and the sellers realtor was refusing to let it be shown anymore, which Rich thought was actually against the law. We couldn't go in it, but he thought we should submit a high offer and see if I outbid the other buyers. That scared me. He asked me how high I would be willing to go, and when I told him how far I could go he agreed that from what we'd seen I probably wouldn't be able to outbid the other people.

We were talking about the competition in this price range and he was really surprised. He just sold his daughter's house in St. George, and is helping her find a new one up here, and he said that things in my range are going really really fast, and they taper off up to around three hundred and fifty or three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, where houses seem to be languishing on the market for months until their sellers are forced to mark them down into the active range.

I think that all the people who can just pay a little over a hundred thousand, like me, watch the news and said to themselves, "Maybe now I can actually buy," and they all hit the market at once. Whatever it is, our experience seems to be that if you don't get an offer in in the first day or two that it is listed, and if it isn't accepted, that you don't really have a chance unless the money falls through for the person who did.

We had one more house to look at back near downtown on the east side, but we were both tired of it, and didn't have a lot of hope, but Rich said we were going back to my place and me might as well drive by.

For the price, and the neighborhood, I was expecting it to be old and in really bad shape. Besides, it was a short sale, which is good for the seller, and less bad for the bank than forclosure, but I don't think lives up to its marketing for the buyer. The price at which the selling agent lists it is pretty arbitrary. It can mean that even if the buyer offers more than the asking price, it is still subject to the bank's approval. They often end up spending up to six months maundering on whether it is better to sell at that price or forclose. It's not a quick process where you are paying pennies on the dollar like the market seems to want to portray it.

Anyway, for all of this, when we found the place I was blown away. It was in great condition, and priced even below the house on Roosevelt that I'd thought would be a great deal. What was better was that this was the first day it had been listed. We called the selling agent and she said that the sellers were expecting someone else to come look at it so to just go and knock. We did and got in to see it. The design is nothing to write home about, but it was well kept, and it was in the right neighborhood, and the asking price was amazing as far as quality to dollars as far as what we'd seen so far.

We were both pretty excited as we drove back to my place and we decided to make an offer on the spot. It took a while to make up the papers, but I submitted it tonight. I offered the asking price minus closing costs. By 5:00 PM tomorrow we'll know if the seller has accepted the offer. If they do, it will be off to the bank. When we talked to the selling agent as we were prepping to send it off she said she'd already got another offer on it, but it was a lowball offer. Rich said it was probably an investor. This area in the city and the price range has a lot of speculators buying up these houses and hoping to make cosmetic improvements and sell them for a profit as soon as "the downturn" ends. Anyway, I'm sure there are going to be several more offers in the next couple days, and if the other houses we've seen are any guide, I'll probably get outbid. But my fingers are crossed anyway.

Condos and Townhouses...

2009-06-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been avoiding looking at condo's and townhouses because my intent in getting out of my apartment was to get out of a situation where a landlord should be taking care of stuff but isn't, and where I don't have to worry about things making it so I don't get a deposit back. Also, I'm not that into the idea of neighbor's who share a wall or ceiling with me. Especially if they have kids.

But I thought I might make an exception for this place. It might be a little bit of a stretch with the money, but hey, its downtown. I'll be able to afford the monthly payment if I put a little more into the downpayment. Its not that far from 20% to 95%. By the way, can anyone spare a few bucks to help out with that?

Let me know what you all think.

Sheesh, with the houses...

2009-06-25T20:47:00.001-07:00

Rich, my agent (did I mention he mostly guides hunting and fishing trips for a living? That's a big fish,) called today at 12:30 and said he had appointments to see some places starting at 3:00, but that all but one of them were "under contract" which seems to mean that they have had offers that the owners have accepted and they're just waiting for the money to come through. I was still really anxious. I'm trying to be non-chalant, but this kind of thing is really hard for me.

The first house we saw was the one on Sunset Ave, and it was truly awful. It was really, really bad. The floor was about as rotten as the back bedroom in the cabin was when Mom and Dad had it fixed. The babysitter, who didn't speak english was the only one there and I had a hard time with her spanish, but she seemed to be saying that the furnace didn't work at all, that the electricity only worked sometimes, that the water came out brown half the time and then shut down. The design of the home was terrible, and the yard was really bad. The garage looked big from the outside, but when you went in it it was small. Then we saw a door on the side and opened it up to find that they were using half the garage as an illegal apartment. There was no bathroom or kitchen in it. It was really bad.

The second place we went was the one on 9th west (it seems to be so sold it doesn't show up on the website anymore). It was "under contract", so it was unlikely that I'd have been able to get it, but it was well taken care of. It was very out dated, and the furnace was ancient, and the addition on the back seemed to slant down a little, but everything else was in good shape. It was a little creepy. There was no one there and we used one of those remote key boxes to get in. The old lady who had lived there's stuff was all around still, like her clothes, and old pictures, and a bunch of catholic pictures and crosses, and it smelled like old people. But, like I said, it was the best place.

We drove by the one on Jeremy St., but they had wanted 24 hrs notice before anyone came by and Rich didn't get it. It was "under contract" too anyway. It looked ok from the outside, but the street definitely didn't look good.

Then we went to the one on Roosevelt (which is no longer showing on the website either) which had been my greatest hope, but when we went in it was really awful, almost as bad as the first one. It smelled terribly of cigarette smoke, and there were cigarette burns in two of the four different styles of bad carpet. The kitchen was pretty awful, and it was hard to imagine anyone fixing food there. There was a bunch of panneling on the walls, some of which was ripped out exposing pipes. The addition on the back was leaning pretty badly, and wen we went around to the front again we found that it was too. There was a big picture window in the front and as we were looking at it it looked like the window was a straight rectangle, but the hole for the frame was a parallelogram. The people who were there were inspecting the house for the buyer, and they'd left their level out, so we put it up there for confirmation. The window was in fact square.

Here are the other houses that I was interested in, upon which my hopes have bit the dust. The one on center street in Midvale (off the website aready, sheesh), the one in West Jordan, and the one in Sandy.

So, all in all, my first house hunting expedition to the interiors was pretty discouraging. If all of these houses that were bad, or in bad locations (for me at least) were being sold as fast as they were it doesn't bode well for my search. I think what it said to me was that I neither have, nor make enough money to be choosy about where or in what I live, as long as I want to buy a single family home.

Waffle Makers, Bikes, and How I Spent My Saturday...

2009-06-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

Mark LaRocco and I decided to go for a bike ride on Saturday. The chance of rain was 30%. Despite the fact that it had rained about every day for like a month we decided 30% was a safe number.

I slept poorly the night before, worrying about whether I made a poor decision in purchasing a waffle iron. It's an ongoing saga. I started out buying this one at Walmart. It was twice as much as the Durabrand one, but I'm a huge waffle fan, so I thought it would be worth it. It required a 3 prong plug, which I found I didn't have at counter level in my kitchen (actually I don't have any plugs at counter level, and use an extension cord,) so I cooked them on the ground. What I failed to realize is that the outside of the waffle maker is heated too. I can't figure out what possible function they have for that. People make waffles with little kids. Why would they make an appliance that burns you unless you handle it just with the little tiny handles? So I burned my arm when I reached over it for something. It burned the waffles even though you can supposedly adjust the heat, which I did to the lowest setting, and the waffles are square, which has always been a second-best waffle shape to me. Circles are tops. Anyway, it went back.

So rather than get the crappy Walmart brand which I'd done once before, and liked so much that I left it at my parents house when I moved to Salt Lake, I decided to search around. I went to a couple places before finding this one at Smith's Marketplace, (formerly Fred Meyer's), that I decided would be adequate. But I found to my horror when I opened it that the waffle patterna made a lot of little tiny divots rather than fewer deeper ones. That was totally unacceptable, so back it went.

In exasperation I bought the only other option at Smiths. This one. I was nervous about the stainless steel surface again, but it was round, and it says it has extra deep grids. So, even though it was $30, I bought it. I was so worried about the purchase that I got up at 4:00AM after tossing and turning, and started looking at it. It advertises "Cool-Touch" handles, which I think turns out meaning "extra-burning-hot other exterior surfaces". Not only that but the design makes it so that when you over fill it it leakes over at the lower handle, where there is an in-explicable opening in the plastic were the batter goes down into the interior and shorts out the controls. So, it's going back. Anyway, it's a big headache and I don't think the product I'm looking for is actually on the market right now. I've bought three other waffle irons in my life, for other people, and used two of those and the experience and product were great. I guess times have moved on.

So much for waffle makers.

I was awake anyway, so I took the early train down to Sandy to get the bus to Provo to go ride bikes with Mark, but to my chagrin, when I arrived at the bus both bike spaces were taken, and I had to wait an hour for the next bus. So I rode around and looked at houses that I'd mapped for possible purchase. But then I get lost and barely made it back in time to get the bus. This is the route I took. It rained the whole time I was riding around.

When I got to Provo I got off the bus and rode to Mark's place, and we decided to ride the Provo River Parkway from Utah Lake to Vivian Park in Provo Canyon. We read about it on a website by a guy who calls himself the Mad Scientist. He mentioned that there would be "BYU students and other young hardbodies," so we thought it was a pretty good choice. This is a picture of the guy that he put on the site. We smiled.

The sky was relatively cloudy in the north but we were trusting in the 30% from the weather service. Mark went out with his bike before me and I turned back into the apartment to get something. By the time I turned around it was a pelting downpour and Mark was instantly soaked. So that was fun. It rained off and on all day.

The website said that the trail was 14 miles long. We failed to include the ride out to Utah Lake in our estimation of the ride, and we definitely failed to take into account all the times that we'd get lost. Also, I don't really think I thought about the fact that the 14 miles was one way.

We arrived in a downpour at Vivian Park. We sat under a pavilian and talked about things like pedophilia, desert reclamation, and Daisyworld for about half an hour until the rain let up a little and started back.

At one point on 9th east we went through an intersection where a woman was stuck in the left hand turn lane in a huge stalled camper. Mark and I started trying to push her, but it was too big for us. Everyone was honking and angry, but then a father and son got out of their truck and helped us get her to the side of the road.

After we got back Mark's girlfriend, Holly, came over and Mark made some breaded fish that he'd caught on a fishing trip to Cabo San Lucas the week before. I don't like fish, and only remember enjoying eating once before, when Mark's dad Rich made it. Mark's was the second best fish I've ever had, but just not quite un-fishy tasting to enjoy. He gets an A for effort though.

Eventually they drove me to the bus stop, because I was worried I was too late to ride, (and I was pretty tired of riding anyway), and after two more hours on public transit I rode from the Trax to my apartment building just as night was falling. In the end I think my tally for the day was about 46 miles. Not bad.

That wasn't even a very interesting story to me. Oh well.

Videos from the Trail...

2009-06-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

North of Ensign Peak...

Because Cami got the joke...

Houses and Bikes...

2009-06-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

I spent the first week after school lying on my couch feeling crappy because I wasn't doing anything about finding a house. I guess that's not true. I spent most of the week analyzing an mls site (cityhomessaltlake.com) in minute detail trying to figure out all I could without actually calling anyone and setting up appointments to see properties. I've spent the better part of this week trying to figure out how all of this works. It turns out there doesn't seem to be much chance of me being able to buy a house without a realtor, and there doesn't seem to be much for a realtor to do until I get pre-approved for a loan, so I buckled down and got an appointment to see the mortgage lady at my credit union. I still don't know if I'm suposed to shop around for the best pre-approval.

I've been in contact with two realtors by email, one of whom is really helpful, the other of whom is horrible, but when it comes down to it, I'd far rather use someone I know and like. To this end I asked Mark LaRocco to put me in contact with his dad, Rich. He spends most of his time guiding big game hunts now, but he's still got his realty licence, and does a little now and again.

I realized yesterday that 1) I was feeling guilty for not actively doing something, which indicated that lying around for a week didn't decompress me from the recently completed teaching year (at least for me that is very necessary), and 2) that sitting around totally sedentary and alone probably wasn't a good combination for my emotional and physical health. So I went for a bike ride.

I'd been curious for a while where the end of The Avenues was, and if the mountain behind it was accessible, so I spent some time playing on Google Maps and found the highest point (that I could see right then) was Terrace Hills Dr., and that beyond it were a couple of trails. I hopped on my bike and started riding up there with the intention of locking my bike and walking up the trail to the top of the mountain. It's not a very big mountain, kind of a big hill, and the road takes you most of the way up. So this is the ride.

I think it was about when I was crossing 11th Ave. that I realized my heart was about to explode. I mean really, it was doing very unpleasant and frightening things, so I got off of my bike and lay down on the tree lawn. After it felt like it was kind of like "normal way overworked because I'm not in as good of shape as I think I am", I got back on the bike and kept riding. I was about about half way up Northcrest Dr. when I realized my heart hated me. I walked then rode, then walked, then rode the rest of the way up to the top.

When I got to the top I got off of my bike and sat on a green electricity box and contemplated locking my bike and continuing up the mountain, (which the sign informed me was part of the Bonneville Shore Line Trail). As I sat there I found that blisters were spontaneously forming on my arm where I'd burned myself a week and a half before, and on my left index finger. That seemed really weird, and kind of freaked me out. I'd never heard of strenuous exercise causing that, so I just decided to ride home. I took a slightly different route, a couple blocks down for part of it.

When I got home I mapped the route on Bikely and was disappointed to see that it only showed an 873 foot climb. I thought it was more. It felt like more. Still, that's 873 feet over 2 miles (it was 4 miles round trip). I guess that really isn't that impressive.

Pride scarred (and bored and anxious) I decided to go for another ride today. I mapped out a route that seemed to take a back utility road from just below Ensign Peak above the Staker/Parson gravel pits and over the mountain to Bountiful (I guess its actually North Salt Lake, but Bountiful sounds better). It was pretty strenuous riding up above Capitol Hill. To my credit I rode the whole way.

This ride was a much more respectable 1890 ft. climb and just under 13 miles. I shot some little videos of some of the scenic bits of the trail, and one foolishly long sequence of me riding through a meadowy part that probably looks like what ended up on the editing room floor when they were cutting Cloverfield. But this post is too long already, so maybe I'll put the videos up later.

Let it suffice to say that it was really lovely in some bits. There was a storm chasing me from the south but the mountain stopped it and it was sunny on the other side as I came down from the summit. One part I was not pleased with was that on the Salt Lake Side I had to go around a gate that rich people put up. I was (self)righteously disgusted by the wealth, but it was far worse on the other side. The development has crept up the mountain since the satellite pictures were taken for Google. It was a sea of these terrible "mini-mansions" that all look very similar, cost obscene amounts, and are terribly wasteful. I felt some pleasure to see how many of them were for sale. However, I don't doubt that in my lifetime the development on either side of the hill will grow up to the summit and join. It won't be a trail ride then; just a ride through suburb streets, that is if they don't put better gates up to keep the riff-raff out.

Oh, by the way, I've been listening to this song today, over and over.

School's Out for Summer...

2009-06-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

So, school's over. What now. On Friday, our teacher check out day, I decided on the spur of the moment to go scout a route I'd come up with on bikely.com for a bike ride. I found a road that went up a canyon from Herriman and over to Tooele. The streetview on Google Maps showed what looked like a gentle ride up a flatish road, but didn't go all the way through. I assumed it was because the road crosses a spur of the Camp Williams Military Reserve, and it was some kind of no-no to photograph. So I drove it.

Bikely has a nifty elevation profile that you've seen on some of my ride maps. I didn't bother checking it

since it looked so docile on Google Maps. I failed to take into account that the Oquihrrs are some big freaking mountains.

Driving up it was amazing. The road is about ten feet wide, and

leaves the floor of the canyon to wind along the mountainside. There are some really steep pitches with tons of hairpin curves. It felt like driving in the Alps. (That's a suspect statement since I've never left the continent.) There was a lot of rock fall from the heavy rains we've been

having, so even through the road was paved it didn't seem paved. I definitely wouldn't want to try to ride on in on a road bike. Also, with the curves and

the steepness, there were a couple of close calls with other traffic. It's really just one lane. After one of them I had a huge adrenaline rush and wondered what I was doing there. It was scary.

The other side of the pass isn't paved, and I was really getting scared. I was praying that I was on the right road. There was no sign, and there were several other roads that went elsewhere. I just stayed with the widest one. But after falling fast through some tight curves it levels out and becomes paved.

I drove out of the canyon and past Tooele on a country road that dropped me in Stansbury Park, just south of where you catch I-80. I was looking to see if there was any way to get around having to ride on the freeway. I've done it before on some of the big rides we took when I was a little kid, but now that I think of it it is kind of terrifying. Anyway, there's no chance. I-80 seems to be the only road that passes on the north side of the mountains.

As I was driving past I saw the exit to Saltaire and decided to go out and walk down to the water line. I'd been to the water at the Great Salt Lake once when I was a kid and thought I'd regret it if I didn't stop for a moment. So I did. Walking down to the water was absolutely disgusting. I was wearing flip-flops and my first step on the half mile long "beach" resulted in my foot sinking in really foul smelling quicksand. This continued for a while, but eventually I made it to the water and washed my feet. The thing was that the water smelled just as bad as the muck I'd walked through. The lake was pretty though. There was a rain storm that squalled over while I was there, and the water was blowing in toward me. It wasn't like the tide you sometimes get at Bear Lake. Rather, it looked almost like a river flowing very shallowly toward and away from me at the same time.

Anyway, on the way back my flip-flops got stuck in the muck and I had to walk back to the water to wash them off. Then I walked back to the parkinglot barefoot. I found a shower station at the building that I'd missed before, and washed off, but everything still smelled, and I wished I had soap. Come to think of it I should sanitize my steering wheel and gearshift. I used my hands to get some of the muck off.

I found that there was a really bizarre frontage road that runs from Saltaire to the Airport by driving along it. At one point it is just a bunch of uneven unlined cement slabs. Strangely there was a bunch of very slow moving semi-truck traffic on it. I kept passing these weird little derelict buildings too, that were covered in graffiti. At one point I saw a tag that one of my stranger students had put on her class binder during second term. She'd written that it was some meaningful mark to her in one of her journals. I wondered how she'd gotten all the way out here to make it on a chunk of cement by this road, and with whom she'd come. I'd never heard any of the kids talk about this place.

Anyway, it was kind of a weird adventure that day. More stuff happened, but I'm tired of writing and it wasn't as interesting as the rest. Mostly it involved me driving around looking for houses that had for sale signs, but weren't listed. Not much to say on that. Then I got dinner and went home. Oh, well.

Now I've got ten weeks stretching in front of me, and it's both far too short and far too long, and I don't know what I'm going to do. Such is life. My life anyway.

Psychology...

2009-04-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading A Theory of Human Motivaiton, by Abrabam H. Maslow with my kids. Some of them got really into it, and some didn't. We read it mostly based on my only qualifying principle of curriculum development, which is whether I'm interested in it at the moment. I don't know if that's really good, but it seems to be about the only way I can run a dynamic class. If I'm curious about a subject we usually read about it. That's about it.

Anyway, I can't exactly remember what got me started on it, but I told the kids we were going over it for a couple of reasons, first being that it was good reading comprehension practice material, and second, that I thought an understanding of it could help them lead better lives. And I believe it's not inaccurate, but after about a wee

k of studying it I don't feel as strongly about it as I did in the beginning. In any case, at the end of it I asked the kids to do a free write in which they speculated on their levels of attainment of the five basic needs, upon which level of need they were living, and how they might achieve a higher level on the hierarchy. I thought it might be good to try to write about it myself.

There are a few principles you have to know to get it. First...

So I started writing this a while ago. Days? Weeks? I ran out of the interest, or the energy neccessary to finish it. That happens to me a lot. I find in t

he last few years that I get 3/4ths of the way through stuff and run out of gas. ADD? I guess. Anyway, instead, here are some pictures. I found this little video about aging pics to look like they were shot with a Holga, a kind of legendary cheap Russian medium format camera with a plastic lens. I bought one a few years ago, but it was just when the world was really making the transition to digital cameras, and I had my first, and all of the s

udden it just seemed like it wasn't worth the money to develop film. But I guess I can photoshop the pics to make them look like I shot them with the Holga, now.

Pics.

This one doesn't look as Holga-ized, but oh well.

Spring Break...

2009-04-10T10:14:00.001-07:00

So, it's Spring Break for me, which means mostly I've been laying on my couch reading and eating way too much. I read Brisingr, the newest Christopher Paolini book, which was more of his same, not great, a little geeky pretentious fantasy nerdy, but ok fun. I read a crappy graphic novel, A History of Violence, which is a very rare failure of the "book is better than the movie" rule. I read a really good graphic novel called Allan's War. It was just a biography of a GI during, a little before, and a little after WWII. I really liked it. The story seemed to be pretty much a transcription of the taped interviews that he made with the guy. The art was good. I guess I also finished the second book in the Maus series, by Art Speiglman. I don't know how to enjoy that one. It's a holocaust survivor narration, a biography of the author's father. It's pretty depressing, but good. I also read most of the Wheel of Time prequel, New Spring, by Robert Jordan. It's more of the same from Robert Jordan. Not his best, but far from his worst so far. I'll probably finish it tomorrow.

Also I watched the complete run (6 episodes) of a British comedy series called Hippies, starring Simon Pegg, and a one season American series called The Black Donnellys. Hippies was funny, but the Black Donnellys wasn't great, which was why it only lasted a season, and got pulled without a resolution to all the story lines. Oh well.

So, that's been my vacation.

However, Wednesday afternoon I did take this bike ride. I went as far as I could up City Creek Canyon, until I ran into the snow a little way above the water station. It was pretty, but not as nice as when I went up there last fall. I liked it better then.

Maybe I'll go for another bike ride today.

It's Been a While...

2009-03-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a while since I wrote on this blog. You could check my school blog which I update daily, but I suspect you'd find little interest in the journal prompts I give my kids and the sentence long summaries of what we did in class each day. Today I had them write about whether if they could choose an age at which to stop aging until their death at the end of their regular life span, they would, and if so which age and why. After that I read Howl by Allen Ginsberg aloud to them, and had them write their responses. Almost none of them actually did it. Mostly they just sat there and looked bored. I think that says something about my school and my kids. I can read Howl out loud without fear of parents and administration freaking out. But it's more. It doesn't get a rise out of the kids at all. Oh well.

Maybe it was my reading. I'm really sick with a cold and I was hacking my life out the whole time. Now I have a lovely sinus headache.

I'm listening to Elliot Smith right now. Needle in the Hay. I tried playing it for Nicole, the Special Ed administrator today. She was sitting in her office playing guitar during lunch, and I ambled in and played a bit with her. One of our students came in and played about a thousand times better than either of us. He just came back after being kicked out for a semester for getting caught with pot. He never did a single assignment when I had him during first trimester. He just sat around drawing pictures of drum kits. But Nicole says he's a lot better now since he's back on his medication.

Since I last wrote I have finished with my tenth graders, and am teaching the eleventh graders their second trimester of English. I had them all in two periods, but they were overpacked, so I moved my yearbook class down to the media center during one of my library hours, (I also took over the media center since I last wrote) and opened another english class.

The media center is fun. I've changed things around a fair amount. It is starting to reflect my personality. I'm making everything more basic. I rearranged the collection, moved all the couches into one area, and started weeding. The first thing on the chopping block were the many harlequin romances that were choking our fiction section. I have no idea why they were there. I checked to make sure that they weren't ever checked out before first, which they weren't, and started pulling them. The other English teacher and I are having a Read-a-Thon on Wednesday, and we're going to run little contests and games, and I think the harlequins are going to be prizes. Last time we did it the prizes were just bits of garbage out of our desks, so maybe this is progress.

Anyway, I was thinking yesterday as I was coming home from church, (I've been going pretty regularly again) that it's not inconceivable that I've been pretty intensely depressed for the last couple of years and haven't really been able to see it. I mean I pretty much shut down all my relationships but two, I haven't made even an acquaintance, at least not outside school, and I have been relatively happy to spend ninety-nine percent of my free time alone. I think if indeed I have been depressed generally that I haven't noticed it that much because I can't. I can't really seem to do anything about it, so I think I've come to not let it intrude in my daily life that much. I mean there have been short periods where I was really acutely depressed. The whole Christmas holiday was really obviously awful for me, for example. But what I mean is that although it kind of directs the course of my life, I don't let it spoil my day. If I did I'd just be a wreck all the time. I think instead I just shut down all non-critical systems in my life, anything that isn't really necessary to the continuation of it, and just continue on. And although I'm depressed, I'm not really unhappy.

Anyway, I was just thinking yesterday as I walked that I couldn't really decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe its neither. Maybe it is just a thing. Maybe it's part of what Hamlet designated as neither good nor evil, but thinking makes it so. Hamlet was the last thing I did with my tenth graders. Whatever.

I'm going to bed.

I Need a Golden Helmet...

2008-11-30T21:42:00.000-08:00

I need it because this is how I feel. I got a little teary when I looked at this guy's expression. This is how I really feel tonight.

Somewhere Inbetween...

2008-11-30T19:54:00.000-08:00

Do you ever get the feeling that your life has paused between key frames in a film. You feel blurred, in motion from somewhere to somewhere. But for the moment you are paralyzed, and you can't see who you were a moment ago or who you're going to be when the motion ends.

I've been feeling that way yesterday and today. I numbed my mind last night with all the stuff I use to distract myself from myself, but felt horrible in the morning, like I always do when I'm like this. The morning usually brings a little clarity, but only a little.

In the night I was in the shower and decided to shave my face into a new shape. I was going for a kind of Buffalo Bill look, but I think it came out more like a prison inmate. What I was really thinking was that I wanted a real Van Dyke, like I was a character in a Rembrant painting. The goatee is too round though, and I was too chicken to trim the sideburns higher and more pointy. So it became Buffalo Bill, or more realistically, prison inmate.

So I'm I shot the photo, and it was very blurry. I didn't want to set the camera up again, so I just photoshopped it until it looked lookable. And now I have to try to figure out how on earth I can teach the kids something tomorrow.

PS - This is what I have been listening to this evening.

Playing with Bikes...

2008-11-25T20:53:00.001-08:00

So, you might not realize it but you're looking at about two pretty solid days of work. Yesterday I spend the better part of the morning, all of the afternoon affixing the brake levers to my satisfaction on the home made bullhorn bars, then scraping all of the decals off of the bike with my thumbnails. The bullhorns and brake levers were ok, but the decal removal was awful. I tried using an exacto-knife at one point but it brought up about as much paint as decal, so I reverted back to the thumbnails. They hurt terribly.

In affixing the brake levers I realized a couple of things. When I cut the drops to make the bullhorns I should have left more of the vertical part. They're too short to be able to support the levers and allow for one course of bar wrap above. Originally I was assuming that I could get some mountain bike style brake levers, because I'd seen single speed bikes with them. Well, I don't know how they work them out, but I couldn't find them online anywhere, and the old levers were fine. In any case they work ok. The other thing I realized was that the cable housing for the brakes was so old and weathered that it had cracked at the point of insertion into the brake lever on both sides, and I'd need to replace them.

I'd bought some new cables previously, because the cables on it were scary rusty, but I hadn't put them on yet. The yellow housing was one of my favorite parts of the bike, and the housing on the new cables was the dull black you see on it. Oh well.

Before I started on the cables I decided to run to the library where I had some items on hold, and to stop at a bike shop on the way to buy some of the cushy jell inserts that you put under the bar wrap these days. But the bike shop didn't have them. I'd struck out with them before on Slime tubes to fit my 27" x 1.25" wheels. Maybe I should go back to the other shop up in the avenues. This one is just so convenient.

Anyway, after my trip, with bare bars and cracked cable housing, I came home and started working on the rest of it. The first cable I changed was for the front derailleur. Due to bad design, the cables had been totally exposed and they were really rusty. So I switched that our and bent the metal bits that routed the cable to try to fit the whole housing along the cable's route. It didn't work well, and when I was trying to fix it I got sidetracked adjusting the derailleur. I'm no good at it. I never have been.

But this time was worse than most. I was playing with the clamp position on the seat tube, and while trying to loosen the bolt that held the clamp closed I inadvertently tightened it until it sheared off at the midpoint, leaving the threaded in the clamp. So, I'm going to try and drill it out, but I might have just given myself an excuse to update the drivetrane. What a mess. I was very frustrated and angry, and watched Topgear for a couple of hours to calm myself down, then went to bed.

This morning I decided that the fact that I'd crippled it wasn't a reason to finish the cables, so I set to work on that. It took a surprisingly long time, mostly because the bolts for the brakes are located in places that are about ten millimeters too short to be able to get my little ratchet into. Then when I did get to them the fell apart unexpectedly, pieces flying over the dirty floor, and getting lost under all the mess. Eventually, however, I was able to finish it all.

Following that I was going to secure the cable housings with some zipties, but when I looked for them in the store I found only neon colored ones, and decided to pass for the time being.

The next thing upon which to work was the helmet. I purchased the retro-reflective tape some time ago, but hadn't put it on the helmet as an excuse not to ride my bike to school in the morning. I hate riding in the dark. If I'm not visible, then I don't have to. Anyway I decided it was time to begin remedying the situation, so I pulled the tape out. I was thinking of making a skull out of small square pieces at first, but moved on when I couldn't design a pleasing one on my computer. I couldn't figure out what to do instead of the skull and sat thinking for some time when it came to me all at once and I started making a pattern to cut from. It's not perfect. I made it from two strips of 1.5 inch tape, so it's 3 inches wide, and the sides turned out not to be perfectly symmetrical. But it was close enough for me.

Anywho, so much for the first two days of vacation.

The Ride I Intended to Take...

2008-11-02T22:33:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday I took the ride I intended to take last week. It's turned stormy and cold here, and yesterday was the preview of it. It was just on the edge of cold, and they sky was that steely version of a clear sky in fall. It's like the impending cold bleeds the color out. Today it stormed, and the sidewalks were full of brightly colored leaves. Maybe it's a water color, all the paint running toward the ground as the water comes down.

Anyway, I slept late, then spent the morning working up a group of songs for a new music mix around the mood I was getting from this one song by The Mountain Goats, called So Desperate. It's this really beautiful, sad sort of song. You can hear it here. But this was before the ride.

I finished amassing the list of songs without mixing them, and it was already the mid afternoon, so I got my new bike and left the building. It was lovely out and there were lots of people walking in the park at the entrance to the canyon. Soon I reached the entrance to the upper canyon, the part to which I've never been, and I was expecting more of the same. There wasn't nearly as much foot traffic on the road, but there were several bikers that passed me. I wasn't going very fast.

About three miles up the canyon I passed what looked like a water treatment plant, and the road narrowed and became less evenly paved. There were bits where the ground got marshy on the north side and water ran across the path, turning the dead leaves into a ground up sop. There was a stream running on the south side of the path. This path made sharp turns sometimes, and curiously steep jogs. It seemed like the engineers who plotted it didn't want to mess with the nature much. It fit, because not long after that the deciduous trees gave way to tall pines and the air became cooler and far more aromatic.

Among these pines I saw the creek far below to the right, moss covered boulders that are more brightly and darkly colored than the ground around them. These were nice little vistas, opening and closing as I went along. I kept thinking that I should tell the film teachers at school about this place. They'd be great locations that might give the kids films a bit more depth.

The top of the canyon is full of picnic areas established by and dedicated to Rotarians. There are big plaques in each one, and a couple of big gear monuments, then at the very top is this great pavilion with a very sharply pitched roof, covered in pine shakes. It looks vaguely swiss, and the trusses must have been in trouble because it was warped in a very picturesque but dangerous looking way. It was really fantastic.

I've been thinking I'd get rid of the drop bars on my bike and replace them with a homemade pair of bullhorns, but I might have to reconsider after riding down the canyon. I got in the drops and kind of let it go, speeding down the narrow pavement in a way that surely would have frightened anyone going up, (as the people passing me on the way down had frightened me a couple times), but it was late in the afternoon and there wasn't anyone still on the way up. The bike was really quite stable at speed, really a joy to ride. It was exhilarating, but I was careful not to let it get away from me. I realized early on that the brakes need to be tightened up even a little more. On the other hand, they're great brakes; far smoother than on my mountain bike.

From the upper canyon I went up to the east side into the avenues, as I did last week, then on down to my building. The sun was setting, around six, as I came out of the canyon, and it was twilight as I walked my bike up the steps to the building. It was night when I stepped out soon after to go get some dinner. Writing this post I realize that it was a singular kind of evening, as today is the end of daylight savings. I guess every evening is singular. This was just one of the ones that let you know it. It was a beautiful day.

Just Another Manic UEA...

2008-10-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was UEA and I think I went a little manic. I did a whole lot of stuff, and bought a whole lot of stuff, and in the end, although I did a whole lot of stuff and bought a whole lot of stuff I really didn't do or buy much of anything. I didn't spend more than about a hundred and fifty bucks, and I hardly left my apartment. In any case, it wasn't a really great weekend.

I think the one thing that I am pleased about that did come from it was that I finally bought a road bike. It's a late '70's to early '80's Bianchi Sport SS steel frame with suntour components. I've been looking for a bike since the beginning of the summer, starting with new bikes, being blown away by the prices, scanning craigslist and KSL Classifieds hourly and finding nothing, resigning myself to spending a thousand bucks on a new Surly bike, then going back to the classifieds. I figured out from calling immediately when I saw something I liked that bikes were going in the first fifteen minutes they went up all summer. But last weekend I was the first caller.

I went out and looked at the bike, and the girl seemed to have misrepresented its condition in the ad. I couldn't even take it for a test ride because tires were flat and the chain was off the rear derailleur and rusted. Also, the back tire was so out of true that I thought it might have been in an accident and bent. It looked pretty rough, and I was frankly a little miffed that the girl didn't tell me this before I spent $10 in gas to drive out to Murry for a test ride.

She advertised it at $100 dollars, but I told her that I didn't know if I could resurrect the drivetrain. She said to make an offer so I said $70, then she countered to $80. After thinking a moment and realizing that even if I did have to put a new drivetrain I probably wouldn't find a deal this good again for another year, so I took it. Then she wouldn't take a check, which pissed me off more. But I went and found a branch of my credit union and came back and bought it.

As the day went on and I made a few stops on the way back home I kept looking at it and feeling better and better about my purchase. The cloth bar tape was moth eaten, the cassette and chain were rusty, the decals were peeling, and the gum sidewalls on the tires were dried out, but the bike had been stored in a storage unit from what looked like soon after it was bought. Then, when I got it home and looked more closely I saw something that made me feel like I hadn't gotten such a deal after all.

On the top of the topbar partially obscured by the rear brake cable was a pretty significantly sized dent. That really brought me back down. I wasn't sure then if the bike was worth anything at all. The plan all along had been to salvage what I could of the components, but losses were ok because the frame looked to be in such good shape.

But researching on the web I found that dents in steel frames don't seem to be such a big deal as in aluminum frames or more significantly carbon. Actually I guess carbon just cracks, but anyway, I think it will be ok.

Anyway, I spent most of last evening and this morning working on it, then I rode up City Creek Canyon then up the east road to A St. It was really beautiful with the leaves in the elevation of the valley changing, and the bike rode fairly nicely. I got home and made some minor adjustments and it was even better. I'm planning some fairly significant changes for it, but all in all I'm pretty happy with it. I feel like I got a deal again, and I like the bike.

Self Actualization...

2008-10-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

I was just reading a few articles on The Economist. I read the new stuff on the web version about every day, and I came across this kind of random article on Maslow and the Hierarchy of Need. In it Maslow is quoted as saying, "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation."

I started thinking that maybe the reason I find life so unsatisfying is a deficit of self-actualization. I guess its not a new idea. I've been a fan of the Hierarchy for a while, but this bit is new I think. I don't see myself as anything, so there can be no actualization.

I went through this weird period for a few years when I was younger where I became a few things:

I was a writer, and I wrote. I wrote a few short stories I liked, several journals I thought were full of meaningful stuff, and finally a book. People read what I wrote and I got reactions; mostly good. I felt like my writing made me significant.
I was a friend, and (there's no verb for this; maybe friended?)... Anyway, I was the confidant of a lot of people, and I felt like my friendship served them good stead. I felt like I made their lives better.
I was a boyfriend, and I loved. For better or worse (probably usually worse) I loved. My relationship made me feel worthy (for a while).

Anyway, I don't really have any of these anymore and for whatever reason I haven't developed any new roles for myself. In a wierd way, most of the time I don't feel like any of these roles would mean anything anyway.

I read this short story by Jose Donoso yesterday called Paseo. It's told from the point of view of a child remembering childhood at home with a father, two uncles and a spinster aunt. They lead this painstakingly carful life together, the intent of which is never to inconvenience each other. The narrator says at one point that that was the concept of love he inherited, that it was never to incovenience another. I'd never seen that sentiment on paper, and I was struck first by how wrong it was, (although the story never gives any resolution on the subject) and second, how I feel that way myself. Probably my biggest ambition in relationships with the people I love is never to inconvenience them.

I guess this has been what I've gone with recently. Oh well, it made sense in my head for a minute.

Feces From the Heavens...

2008-09-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon cleaning my upstairs neighbor's feces from the many surfaces in my bathroom.

About nine months ago I came home to find a strange rusty looking stain running down my bathroom wall and into my medicine cabinet. The pipes in my building are old and rusty and I thought that it might just be a bit of a leak. I threw away everything in the cabinet, complained to my landlord, and after he'd come and looked embarrassed and assured me it wasn't waste water I ignored it.

A couple of months ago, after the upstairs neighbors left their kitchen sink on, overflowing and flooding down through my kitchen cabinets (they've done this twice more, once damaging my living room ceiling) I started looking up, and realized that there was a leak in my bathroom ceiling that was becoming occasionally bedewed. Eventually it began to drip occasionally and I complained to my landlord. He didn't do anything, but then I caught him one day showing the apartment across the way to some prospective renters, and I took him in to show him the problem. By this time it had begun to drip when the neighbors flushed their toilet. I thought it was a leaky feed pipe because the water seemed to be clear, but I didn't want to deal with it anyway. He said he'd come in and fix it.

The next day he came and ripped out my ceiling to the lathe, but didn't do anything else, and didn't leave me a note explaining what was going on. So, rather than having a drip of clear water when the neighbors flushed I had a small stream of sediment filled dirty water. Unpleasantly, once or twice over the next week I was using the bathroom when the neighbors upstairs flushed, and the water came down on me. I hate confrontation. I'm terribly passive aggressive, but this was it for me. I sent a letter along with my rent check saying that if he didn't fix all the stuff wrong with the apartment I was going to start looking for another place.

The next day he showed up with the plumber (which he'd been promising for three months to fix the bathtub). I came home from work at 5:30 to find them still working. There was a big hole over my toilet and bits of crap (literally), mortar, and drying toilet paper all over everything. They said that the waste water pipe had just rotted away, and was emptying into the ceiling when the neighbors flushed.

When they knocked off at 6:30 they had finished the pipe, but not the bathtub. I asked them about it and they said that they were going to have to come back in and tear out all the tile to fix it. They made a cursory vacuuming with a shop vac in the bathroom before they left, which got the big pieces of mortar, but left everything else.

So yesterday I stripped (I didn't want to get any on my clothes even though I know that it'd wash out) and cleaned with a big bucket of bleach and a scrub brush. There's still a big hole in the ceiling and the cold water knob on the bathtub is still a rusted broken mess, but at least there's no more feces.

Someone even came in and tried to fix the ceiling in the living room. Of course they did it by tearing chunks of the paper off and patching it (incompletely, so there are bare spots) with joint compound. It means I have big three-toned splotches that look worse than the sagging cracked paper did before, but I guess he should get partial credit for trying.

I'm still thinking about moving. I don't want to because I just moved into a new ward, and I'm settling in, and it's just a pain to pack up and deal with all the crap you accumulate. But I might just have to suck it up and do it. It might be less trouble than staying.

A Haiku to My Students...

2008-08-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

We've been having orientation meetings for the last three days (since Wednesday). Last night was Back to School Night. I never went to a Back to School Night when I was a kid and I don't think that we did one last year. We didn't really know what to do. Mostly parents kind of milled around and whenever they showed up in our rooms we gave them a short verbal version of our syllabus. It was a little weird, but ok.

I'm in a new room on the south end of the building. I talked to the boss at the end of last year about moving into one of the big rooms with the windows, and he said ok, but then he forgot when he hired a new social studies teacher, and gave it to him. Matt moved into the other big window room, so they gave me his old room. It actually works out ok. I'm not averse to it, but it presents me with a problem. There are a couple of bulletin boards. I haven't got a clue what to put on them. I don't really know what I'm going to put on my other walls either, but I've kind of felt like I should do something. I spent almost all of last year with bare walls. Only at the end did I start putting students work up on them to cover their nakedness.

Maybe I'll take some of my supply money and buy a couple of posters. I do have the enormous poster of Shakespeare in a half-tone that Matt bequeathed me.

Anyway, we finished our meetings at noon today and went to Golden Coral. We all ate a few plates of fried foods then came back to get stuff ready for Monday. I have composed a haiku to commemorate the occasion:

Metal-studded glares
Mohawks brushing the ceiling
The children return...

The Night Before...

2008-08-19T19:17:00.000-07:00

Orientation meetings are starting for school tomorrow. I guess monday the kids will be there. I'm trying to relax tonight. I spent the day at school moving all of my crap from my old room up in the old weather station (our school is in the old KUTV news building) and into a bigger and better one. It's nice because the ceiling is more than twelve inches above my head in the new room. I mean it was neat to feel tall for a couple of minutes, but I'm quite looking forward to my projector not burning out every day and my room not smelling like a dirty clothes hamper. That's what we used to call my old room, "The Hamper".

There have been some problems and a lot of unpleasantness at school over the summer, especially in the last week, and I fear that this year is going to be even more challenging than last year was. I was very anxious about it, but I realized that the things that have changed are entirely out of my hands and there's nothing I can do about them. I'm trying to take the advice of the Dali Lama in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. Poorly paraphrased (I haven't seen the film in years) he says that if it is something you have control over you don't need to worry, and that if it's something you don't have any control over then there's no reason to.

Anyway, I have a pretty good idea about what I'm going to lead with once I get all of the beginning of the year, beginning of the trimester crap out of the way. I've been reading about Wittgenstein (not reading Wittgenstein, although I got Philosophical Investigations at the library today), and I'm going to start out by reading one of my favorite bits from On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which eventually ties into Wittgenstein, uses some Truman Capote, then pulls back around to Kerouac.

In the passage Kerouac has arrived in Denver where he finds all of his friends from back in New York. Alan Ginsburg and Neal Cassady tell him that they are performing an experiment, which he subsequently witnesses. Ginsburg and Cassady sit across from each other and talk, and they talk and talk and talk, and they try to describe what they are thinking in such detail that the other will truly understand what they mean. Finally Ginsburg brings up something that Cassady doesn't want to talk about, saying, "There's one last thing I want to know-". So Cassady deflects it and says, "But, dear Sal (Kerouac's character), you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal. What would he say?"

Kerouac replies, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo (Ginsburg's character). Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all."

So, the question is whether true communication is possible. This ties into Wittgenstein (I think) in this way. An individual names a particular sensation, on some occasion, 'S', and intends to use that word to refer to that sensation. So, this is an example of a word in "private language". Holly Golightly in Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" uses the term "mean reds" do express a significant emotion to her. I might call it anxiety, or ocd, or add, but although my analogues may describe her "mean reds" none of them really are "the mean reds".

Wittgenstein would say that even "the mean reds" isn't really "the mean reds". The mean reds simply are, and though Holly Golightly calls them the mean reds they exist outside of her name for them. What's more, her name for them, "the mean reds" doesn't really mean anything to someone else until she further describes them in sufficient detail that the person can associate it to the sensation or emotion with which they would associate it. It's private language, so until Holly Golightly and the person with whom she's speaking agree upon the association of "the mean reds" with a specific emotion or sensation then it's not really language at all.

Meaning is a social event; meaning happens between language users. As a consequence, it makes no sense to talk about a private language, with words that mean something in the absence of other users of the language. A private mental state like "the mean reds" cannot be adequately discussed without public criteria for identifying it. Wittgenstein argues, if we can talk about something, then it is not private. And, conversely, if we consider something to be indeed private (unique to the individual), it follows that we cannot talk about it.

This illustrates that we are fantastically alone.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to communicate. It's my belief that all of the great literature out there is a collection of humanities best effort at communicating "that one last thing". Even if we can't communicate our private experiences, can't make someone feel exactly what we're feeling, with words, we can still inspire them to feel. We can stimulate their imaginations and emotions, and that's still pretty good, and pretty important. At that point I'll read them another passage from On the Road. Maybe the one where he says that it's always been the mad ones for him, or how his favorite word is manana. I still need to work on the dis-mount a bit. But that's the basic idea.

Just Another Brick in the Wall...

2008-08-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it's Monday afternoon and I'm kind of going out of my head. Rough weekend. I didn't do anything at all. I may as well have been in a coma. I've been thinking more and more about the divisions of the Myers-Briggs personality test. I took an abbreviated version of the test on humanmetrics.com. I came out as a very strong introvert (79%), intuitive (38%), thinking (25%), and judging (33%). A lot of people think this test is great, and others think of it as kin to fortune cookies. At the very least I find it interesting.

I've seen a large shift in my personality since high school. I think I would have scored much stronger as an intuitive then, that I would have landed more on the feeling rather than the thinking side of the spectrum, and that I would have scored far stronger as intuitive than as judging. Maybe these are my ideals. I don't know for sure. But I believe I was far happier with who I was then than I am now.

It's frustrating, because I've spent the last ten years trying to be that guy again, but I can't. My values have changed, whether I've willed them to or not. For example, when I was a kid I was fascinated by the whole hippie ethos. I really liked the culture and the mood, (although I never did any drugs or anything), but this last Thursday I went with some friends to a free concert of The Yonder Mountain String Band and Keller Williams. I was floored by the behavior of all of the hippies there. They were utterly horrible. Granted they weren't the hippies I had in my head, but even the culture pissed me off. I felt like they were all just a little too cool to be real. It's the same vibe that makes me absolutely hate New York City. I'd as soon punch them in the nose as go to a drum circle with them (or a Starbucks, not to short change those atrocious East Villagers).

It's like this old Calvin Kline sport coat I have. Sometimes I wear it, even though it doesn't really fit, because it reminds me of who I was. It's a relic of better days. When I put it on I can still get the aftertaste of that younger me, and feel a little bit of how I felt then. But if I really looked in the mirror I would see that I've entered the beefy years, that it stretches too much, and that it's beginning to look a little shabby. I can't wear that coat much anymore, and as time continues to go by the memories will become memories of memories, and so on, until they mean nothing at all.

Maybe I'd be happy to become who I'm becoming if I felt like there was a chance that I'd feel as good about myself as I did then, but I don't see that happening unless somehow my ideals changed as much as my values have. But I still want to be that kid. He seemed like a better person.

My Weekend...

2008-07-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

This week I was maybe a little foolish in my physical exertions. I got an email from Josh Chambers on Wednesday saying Jordan Singleton and his wife were living at his parents this summer before going to med school in Wisconsin. He was going out of town this coming week and Jordan was leaving soon after, and he wanted to get together for lunch. So, Thursday afternoon I was sitting around doing nothing and decided to look up the UTA routes to see how far north I could get on my bus pass. Turns out there was a commuter bus that runs from the train in Ogden to Brigham City. I figured I could ride my bike over Sardine Canyon, so I immediately packed my bag and dashed out the door. I only had about seven minutes to ride from my place down to the Salt Lake station on 6th west, but surprisingly the lights almost all went in my favor and I made the train.

The Frontrunner takes about an hour to go from Salt Lake to Ogden. From there the bus took like an hour to get from Ogden to the intersection of 11th South and Main in Brigham City. That's the light you never make when coming down out of the canyon on the way to I-15. I got off of the bus at about 3:Something in the afternoon. It didn't take me a really long time to figure out that I might have been a little foolish to go at this time. It was very hot, about 93 degrees, and I probably didn't have enough water in my bottle. It was a hard ride.

By the time I got to the Stake Center Hill in Millville I'd had it, and I walked up it. When I got to the top I went over to Jordan's parents house. Jordan was in and we sat around and talked all evening while he worked on a commercial appraisal for his dad. His dad is an appraiser. Anyway I spoke and spoke and spoke. It's weird for me. Jordan is actually becoming pretty good with probing questions. He was a dual major in psych and philosophy, and I think the idea is that he's going to med school to do psychiatry. It's kind of funny because he didn't believe in it at all when we were kids. I remember waking up in the night once when we were having a sleepover at his house when we were kids. I was having a small panic attack and was getting ready to go home. He was angry, (this was what happened about every time I slept over in those days), and he said, "It's all in your head!" It's interesting to see him choose this line of work.

Anyway, we ended up playing Wii (my first time) till like 1:00AM, then made plans to go to lunch with Josh the next day, and I went home. Jordan can be a little ADD, and I couldn't get a hold of him Friday and I had his cell phone number down wrong. I didn't know Josh's number, and I didn't think to simply look his law offices number in the book. So, instead I spent the day working on that old Peugeot that I'm converting to a single speed. I actually got it more or less running, but then I decided to true the back tire. A spoke broke and that ended the project till I can get some new ones. After that I spent a few hours working on cleaning out the trench in yard where I shall soon lay the foundation for the rock wall I'm going to try to finish before going back to school. So that was good, but involved more dehydration and very hot weather.

The slept poorly that night and decided in the morning that sooner was better than later for riding home. I had to pick my Mom and Dad up at the airport at about 8:30PM, and I was thinking of sticking around till the afternoon to see of Jordan and Josh would want to get together, but instead I just left. I rode out around 9:15, and found that Sardine Canyon is easier from the Cache Valley side. You can see on the elevation graph on the route map that you descend more than you climb when going from Cache to Brigham.

Anyway, I figured on catching the bus back at that intersection, but when I arrived I was feeling pretty good. I could ride on down highway 89 I thought. I would have to sit around for 45 mins if I waited for the bus there. Why not ride on to the next stop, then the next if I was ahead of the schedule. So I did, and eventually I was thinking, "I could just ride into Ogden to the station."

About the south side of Willard I lost it. I was done, and I guessed that the bus should be coming soon. The stops were a few miles apart now, and I stopped and waited at a couple before going on. It was too hot and I was too sore to stand in the open on the side of the highway. My legs started cramping when I did. In my head, also, was a voice saying, "Ride on. Ride on. Be a man. Make some progress. It's only about 10 miles to go." I was thinking about riding with my Dad when I was a kid. We'd be dying, but he rode on and on. I always thought of rides in increments, but for him it seemed to be binary. Either you were done or you weren't, and you weren't done until you reached your destination. So he'd ride on, and on, and on.

So I was riding on, and was in between two bus stops in Harrisville when the bus passed.

I stopped at a Chevron and lay on the grass under a tree until my heart stopped racing. When I got up I was sore all over, so I finished my water bottle and went in to refill it, then got back on my bike and rode. I play these tricks on my mind when I'm riding. I say, "Man, I'm tired, but I can make it to that mile marker up there. Then I'll decided whether to stop and rest." When I reach that point I convince myself that I'm fine, that in fact I'm getting a second wind. So with that renewed energy I choose the next mile marker. I tried doing that with the stop lights, which in Harrisville and North Ogden are relatively far apart, but my body kept betraying my mind. I was done, and no manner of mind trick was going to change it. But I didn't have a choice so I kept going.

I was feeling kind of foolish. Somewhere there's a picture of Peter, Dad, and I in Roy getting back on our bikes. I was probably like ten. That day we rode all the way from home to Salt Lake. I'd managed that at ten, and here I was, almost thirty and dragging myself into Ogden. It felt a little pitiful. But I got there.

I had forty-five minutes until the next train left so I went into a gas station Burger King. I figured I could buy some food and wait in the air conditioning. I should have known better than to choose Burger King. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed anything I've bought there. I bought a hamburger, a chicken sandwich, and a small chocolate shake from the value menu, and went to sit down and watch CNN on the wall TV. I got through the shake and it gave me a little stomach ache. I probably consumed it too fast. But I'd bought the sandwiches and felt obligated to eat them. I started with the hamburger. I think it was about 30% bun, 10% meat, 1% cheese, and 59% mustard (0% ketchup). It oozed out all over the place, and eating it was unpleasant. The stomach ache grew. The chicken sandwich was similarly comprised, but substitute mayo for mustard. I made it half way through and knew I couldn't take anymore. I imagined I was throwing two quarters away as I all went in the garbage. It gave me a twinge of guilt, but it was a fair price not to have to keep eating.

Anyway, I got on the train and went home after that, but I'm bored of the relation of this story. So that's all you get.

This Week's Ride...

2008-07-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

So, durring the week I decied I was going to do at least one big ride or hike per week. So my ride for this week was going to be to go up Emigration Canyon. I went yesterday (Saturday), and all the way up to the UofU campus I was wondering if this was a good idea. I thought, maybe I'll take it in steps. Today I'll ride to the top of campus. Next time I'll ride to the mouth of the canyon. Next time I'll bla, bla, bla... You get it. Anyway, that is usual for me, to feel doubtful as I begin. Then I ignore that and say, I'll just go till I can't anymore and see where that gets me.

I continued on up the canyon at a fair clip, but there were people in spandex passing me pretty regularly. "Oh," I thought, "to be a person in spandex. To have slightly less air resistance." Ok, not really, but I was thinking how nice it would be to be on a road bike and have less resistance on the ground. But I carried on.

Eventually my lower back got so sore that I had to stop for a moment and stretch. As I was doing that one of the few people in spandex that I had passed passed me again. When I got back on the bike and started to ride again I approached him relatively quickly and overtook him. As I passed him by and looked at him as I went I began to feel a little sorry for him. He looked about 40, and was well rounded. He was riding a flatbar Trek roadbike, and looked uncomfortable in his spandex. I figured he'd been sold the whole getup and had chosen the flatbar because he wasn't quite sure he could commit himself to a full dropbar road bike self. He was buying the dream of being fit, but probably knew a comfort bike was more his speed. Its the struggle between the desire for the image of fitness and the reality of the need for better health.

I knew from how easily I'd passed him that he probably had felt bad when I had gone around him before and was pushing to get back where he thought he belonged, in front of me. After all, he'd bought spandex, and a relatively expensive bike. He wasn't that old. Being in front of me with my baggy shorts and my fat tired mtn. bike would prove it, would justify the purchase. So when I passed him again I knew I was disheartening him. But it would be just silly to fall back because of this, and I put it out of my head as I went on.

Originally I had planned to ride to the first switchback. I thought it was a reasonable distance for me. But I was running out of juice. I was most of the way through Purple, the second album by Stone Temple Pilots, and I decided I'd ride to the end of the album. So I continued on for three songs, flagging, and when the fourth began I thought, "That's it. I'm done." (I'd misremembered how many songs there were.) So I stopped, and rested for a moment while I fought myself over turning around. Eventually I decided to go on. I rode for about a hundred yards and the trees opened up and I found myself at the switchback. I'd almost turned back when I was about a block away.

I got off there and sat on a concrete guard and drank some water, and thought about my near failure. It made me a little ashamed of myself and raised my ire. At that moment the well rounded 40 year old in spandex passed with a triumphant gloat in his eyes. "Good for him," I thought. "And shame on me." I decided that I would ride on. After a couple of minutes I got back on my bike and started on my way up.

Here the shoulder widened and so did the view. More people in spandex passed me now, most of them spindly tall guys about my age on very expensive bikes. There were a few women too. One of them I thought was a guy, when I saw her arms and shoulders (they were bigger than most of the guys I'd seen riding), then I saw her breasts. She was scary.

The view was really nice at this point in the canyon. All of the sudden you are above the bottom of it and you can see back down toward the valley, and how and high you have come.

I continued on for a couple of miles, and at one point the well rounded fellow passed me coming down, wearing a satisfied smile. Eventually my second wind was running out and I saw a summit, hoping it was the top, and as I rode up and over it, it was. There was a scenic pull off and about twenty five or thirty bikers were standing around smiling and chatting with each other and the other members of their parties. I smiled and looked out at the reservoir below, and then I turned around and rode down.

I ran a couple of errands in town on the way home, and when I put my route into Bikely it came out at about 30 miles. I'd planned on doing 22. It was a very nice way to spend a Saturday morning.

A Ride Through the Mountains

2008-07-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've been going home to Cache Valley to help my parents out for a few days a week. They've been watching my sister Miriam's four boys while Miriam, Nathan, and the girls move from Florida to Alabama. It's been a little rough on Mom and Dad. If they could institute a mandatory four hour nap for the boys I think they'd have done it on the second or third day. It doesn't have to be as hard as it has been, (Abe, you know who you are), but it has, and I end up running interference.

Anyway, I got this brilliant idea that I'd ride my bike there and back to keep from paying $4+ a gallon. I wasn't about to try riding all the way, at least not on my first time, so I planned rather to ride the Frontrunner to Ogden then ride up one of the canyons and go through Liberty, over the mountain and down to Avon where I'd have someone come pick me up. Well it so happened that Mike Forsberg was going up the day I intended so I hitched a ride with him and spent the 3rd (yea USU fireworks show, ((not really, (((fireworks don't appeal to me like they did when I was a kid))) )) ) and the fourth (yea getting second degree burns from a blow torch ((not really, (((burns don't appeal to me like they did when I was a kid, ((((reference posterior of right hand)))) ))) )) ) (too many parentheses?) up there.

So at 3:30 in the afternoon on the 5th, Dad dropped me off in Avon. I took my bike out of the trunk and started to ride up state road 162. I'd ridden it once when I was a little kid on a road bike, which seems insane to me now. Maybe it was graded then, but even on a mountain bike, with cantilever brakes and a front shock I was sometimes worried a little.

One of my goals this summer, since I don't have a whole lot to do for school, is to ride my bike and hike a lot, and to take a lot of pictures that I can post of Panoramio for Google Earth. Anyway, by the time I got to the top of the pass, which is by far the most senic part of the ride, I was too tired and sunburnned to really care about photos. Anyway the top is really nice, and you should give the ride a try sometime. The wild flowers were just starting to wilt, and there are these long rolling meadows full of them. It looks like Switzerland. Its really very beautiful.

The descent was kind of scary. It goes down into Liberty pretty quickly. The terrifying part was how people in ATV's race up it. That sucks too because if you didn't bring enough water, as I didn't, the inside of your throat gets coated in dust. It's two or three inches deep in a couple of places. Also there were a couple partial washouts on the switchbacks on the road. There were several 4-wheel drive vehicles on the road on both sides, and strangely enough I saw about three or four passenger cars. I pity their parts.

I rode through Liberty and Eden, around Pineview Reservoir, and down Ogden Canyon. Even though I've been riding around town a fair amount, it hasn't built up that much tolerance to the effects of spending hours straddling a bike seat. By this time my crotch hurt. Alot. Anyway, I foolishly followed the map on Google rather than the address of the train station and common sense. When I hit North Ogden I knew something fishy was happening. I stopped and asked a guy spraying weeds in his driveway. The station was something more than 24 blocks the other way. I think Google was going by county road numbers or something.

The guy was super nice. When I asked him if I could fill my water bottle from his hose he went in and got me a bottled water. Looking like one of those bums who ride around on thriftstore mt. bikes with a Colt 45 oz. I rode the last couple miles to the station. I was very tired and covered in dust and grime. I boarded the train, strapped my bike in and plugged my earphones into my head. I was pretty much done for the day.

The worst part came afterward though. We were about to pull into the Salt Lake station when this girl came down the aisle and sat across from me. She looked at me and I kind of tried to smile. She started talking to me but I was too tired to want to take my earphones out, and I couldn't really make out what she was saying. So I just nodded a little, smiled and said, "Umm." Then she kept talking and from her tone I could tell she was asking me something. I'd have to take my earphones out.

When I did she started telling me about her troubles. She said she was so stressed out she felt like she was going to lose her baby, (she looked about 18, rundown and dressed poorly). Her husband had got hurt at work and had burns from his fingers to his bicep, and he couldn't work anymore, so they were moving in with her parents. The way she said it made it obvious it was the last thing she wanted to do. What was worse was that her husband was super depressed now because he didn't feel like he was helping his family. There seemed to be the implication the way she said it that he felt like they'd be better off without him. So she was starting to cry, wiping tears and holding her stomach with one hand, and I knew it was my turn to speak, to make her feel better.

And I couldn't. I was so tired that I decided not to muster up the courage to offer anything real by way of advice, or simply commiserating or sharing her feeling like a good human would do. Instead I said in a bland voice, "Things will work out." And then I looked away uncomfortably, in a way that would make her feel that I was embarrassed by her tears and her forwardness in telling me about her problems. It worked. She left me alone after that and a moment later I got my bike and I transferred over to the Trax.

The whole way home, riding the Trax then walking my past the reflecting pond and all the fountains at Temple Square and up 2nd Ave, I was thinking of the things I should have said to her, the experiences I should have shared, and feeling bad about it all. What bothers me is that this is becoming a pattern with me. Somewhere along the line I was offered some human contact and I said no. The next time it was easier to ignore, and the next, and the next. And now I've become one of those people who are shut off from everyone. I was thinking about my picture on my profile. The older one was monochromatic. No color. This newer one is even more honest. I look a little like a ghost.

So anyway, I've been trying a little to change that. A little at a time. I hope one day to be the type of person who would give that girl whatever she needed, the type that would make her feel better.

About That Last Post...

2008-06-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

So I was going to relate like three stories, one of which was the real thing. Then that story stretched out and got too long and then I wanted to go do something else, so I just published it and left it alone. The real story was that I was riding my bike home from school and got hit by a car. And for my troubles I was rewarded with a $70 traffic ticket.

I was heading east in the bike lane on 8th south, and I turned left to go north on State st. A couple of the other teachers from my school were waiting a few cars back at the light and they honked and waved. I was waving at them as I turned, and didn't realize that the light was about to turn. I looked up and saw it change as I was crossing the first lane of eastbound traffic. As I entered the second lane I looked to my left and realized the car that had started toward me wasn't going to stop. He didn't.

So I got kind of mashed up and someone called an ambulance. They took my up to LDS Hospital and they cleaned me up and put six or seven stitches in. I have to take them the forms from the other guy's insurance. I've been putting it off as is my custom when dealing with forms. I don't know why, but forms make me anxious.

Anyway, school ending has been a good excuse. Graduation is on Wednesday evening and Thursday is the last day of school. After that I'm going away to California. Things are going to be a little weird when I get back.

This has been a strange year for me. I'm probably mis-remembering Moon Palace, by Paul Auster, but the beginning seems to me to have been an overly long but cool description of a guy who looses his grants for school and decides to just see how long he can last without any income. He starts rationing his food, then his energy, and in the end he almost starves to death.

That's what I did this year, but with human contact. I guess it's been going on for a couple or three years. I had a lot of friends around me when I graduated the first time and moved to Logan. Then that whole group of friends seemed to graduate all at about the same time and move away. I tried to keep relationships going for a while...

This is the type of stuff that it seemed like it was important to write in the past. Now I can't imagine anything duller. I guess I stopped caring at some point.

The other day Mark LaRocco was telling me about this first date he went on the other evening where the girl is really free spirited and just asked him to stay up all night with her. He did, and they talked for like eight or nine hours straight and told each other their whole stories.

It made me think of a few weeks ago when I went to one of Mark's parties at his house and I was hiding from people by making burgers and manning the grill. This girl came out and sat down and started asking me about myself. In less than two minutes I ran out of things to say. We lapsed into silence, then about fifteen minutes later, when all the burgers were cooked, I went home and watched old episodes of Law & Order on my computer.

Oh well.

Anyway, my face is better now.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

2008-05-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

So this happened on Wednesday. I figured out pretty early on that I didn't really want to explain it a thousand times when I went to school, so I started thinking of stories to explain it. Here they are. You can choose your favorite.

Story #1 - I was feeling restless on Wednesday night. All evening I'd felt like there was something happening down in my sub-conscious, something I couldn't see or understand. It frustrated me. So around 10:30 I got up out of my chair and I went for a walk up into the Avenues, climbing higher and higher up the hills.

Eventually, near the top of the hill, where the streets peter out and the mountain climbs on, I came to a cemetery (I don't remember the name of it right now). I decided to go in and walk around. I was still feeling like I was in the middle of something on the inside of my head and I guess I felt like maybe looking at the graves might fit with the moment. I was walking along, looking at some of the really old headstones, folks who might have been among the first pioneers into the valley, I remembered a personal narrative that one of my kids had written when I was doing my student teaching. This kid was super quiet and truthfully, I didn't think he was very smart. But one day I was reading these narratives and his popped out at me. It was a story about him trying to start dating and having this really embarrassing experience taking this girl who was much more popular than him to a dance and for the date they helped his mom, who was the PTA president decorate the gym for it. He wrote about how he felt foolish because his mother treated him like a little kid even though he was supposed to be on this date. His story ended with him going out for a walk while remembering the experience and deciding to climb a tree. He got to the very top and felt very free, swinging around as he leaned back and forth.

I saw a tree and wondered if I was still up to climbing. I'd been pretty good at it as a kid, maybe even better than most. I thought the view from the top of a tree must be amazing, so I decided to climb a very tall pine tree that I was passing on the little road.

It was hard to get to the bottom branches. I tried to run up the trunk and jump to catch at them, and it took several tries to get it, but I finally did. I was scratching my wrists and knees on the rough bark as I climbed, but I went up, twisting and stepping through the limbs. It was gigantic tree, probably planted around the same time as some of those old headstones below. I went up and up until I got as high as I dared because the narrow trunk was leaning and I was worried about the branches being able to hold my feet.

For a moment I didn't feel like I was almost thirty years old with a life curiously devoid of the status markers I usually missed (wife, kids, house, even a car whose title was in my name). I felt like a kid. The view was fantastic, the valley a sea of lights that showed the shape of the low puffy clouds underbelly's. There were a few places where the overcast broke and you could see the night sky above. It was beautiful, and I was feeling so good that almost unconsciously I began to sway around in a lazy circle, like my old student in his story.

The circles got bigger, and all of the sudden I realized I was too high on the tree and it wasn't very stable as the top began to lean out farther over the ground. Panic was rising because the arcs kept getting larger, and no matter how I tried to restore my balance I couldn't get the tree top to quit swaying. In fact it was moving faster, and creaking loudly.

Then there was a loud crack and I don't remember very well what happened after. I think I remember hitting the branches on the way down. There was a really good whacking branch that caught me on the left leg and left a bruise as thick as my hand, and one that dug some ruts in my left shoulder. I think it might have been the truck that dug out my face, but I'm not sure. I remember hitting the ground and having the breath knocked out of me. It seemed like forever before I could breathe again.

Almost immediately I got up and walked started walking around, maybe a shock reaction to the fall, but I thought better of it and sat down. I ran my hands over myself looking for the injuries, and found where I was bleeding. After a while I staggered out of the cemetery and flagged down a passing car, which took me to LDS Hospital and dropped me at the emergency room.

Bla...

2008-04-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I was at the library checking out the Viking Portable Jung. I had been reading something else on the internet and it was making references to archetypal characters identified in Jung's writing and I got interested. I thought it might help me figure myself out a little. Anyway, while I was scanning the shelves around it a children's book caught my eye. It seemed a little out of place in the psychology section. So I picked it up and began reading it.

It was titled something like "Let's Make Some Friends!" At once I began to mentally criticise it. It was like so much other self help literature that I don't trust. "Follow our proven program to happiness..." But I continued to flip through it. One of it's first admonitions was that if we were going to make friends then we had to like ourselves. Why would we ask someone else to like someone we didn't, even if that person was our self? It was an interesting question; one to which I've struggled to find the answer for years. I'm still looking.

Anyway, as the solution to the problem of self-esteem, the book suggested sitting down and making a list of everything that we did well. The illustrations on the page showed a little black kid with a curly hair sitting at a school desk scribbling on a piece of paper with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration.

From there the book went on, but I was kind of stuck there. How did the boy determine what he did well? What did "well" mean? By what standard was he measuring himself? To whom was he comparing himself to determine his worth? Could it be arbitrary? I am the best at brushing my teeth the way that I brush them, but I am horrible at brushing them the way the dentist wishes I would.

When I was a young boy I compared myself to members of my family. If I was better than Peter at something then I was thrilled and exhilarated. I knew I was good, but I was scared too, because it upset the natural order of things. Later on I compared myself to my classmates. I was all about being better than them at the things I wanted to be good at. There were a lot of problems with that standard too, the least of which was that I kept running up against the fact that no matter how good I became at anything that you'd turn over a rock and find someone else that did it twice as good without even trying.

At that point being the best at anything started to become meaningless to me. I couldn't compare myself to anyone and try to be better. I tried to go by the standard of pleasing myself with my efforts for a while. I guess it didn't stick, or I lost it along the way somehow. Obviously it didn't make enough sense to me to try to really run with it.

My mission changed things a lot. I got stuck on the idea of justification. I just wanted to be good enough, to be a good enough person to please God. I didn't ever feel so good about how I was doing though because of that whole "Be ye therefore perfect," thing. I know everyone who reads this is going to think, "But that's what mercy is for, because no one can live by that standard at this stage of life". Sadly, mercy doesn't make sense to me. I kind of get it intellectually, but it's like most math to me. I can see how to do it how to do it sometimes and why to do it, but it doesn't make much of an impression on my mind, and I resist it. That analogy doesn't work all of the way, but hopefully enough that those among readers will remember having tried to explain math concepts to me and get it. If you've stumbled here accidentally and are reading incidentally them mazal tov, welcome to my life.

Anyway, bla bla bla. So, the standard was perfection, I wanted justification, I don't deal well with the concept of mercy, and I didn't go anywhere for a lot of years with that. Somewhat recently I got tired of trying to be anything and kind of gave up. So all of this leads to Friday.

Mark invited me to go to an International Dinner with his ward. I was picturing going eating some food and going back to his place to do something else. We made some Thai peanutbutter grilled chicken. Somewhere along the way Mark was talking about going on a date with a girl the other night. I asked how he felt about her and he just kind of shrugged. He said he should have known because it was almost a year between when he asked her out the first time and took her out again the second time. He said he just couldn't feel that interested and that he had tried. I asked you could ever really honestly make yourself feel anything by trying. He replied you probably could not but then said maybe just by force of will. I didn't tell him I disagreed. That's why I stopped trying to date about a year ago.

I felt weird pretty much from the moment that I walked in. I haven't really been to any church activities at all for a while and I just felt a bad feeling being there. I felt really uncomfortable, but I tried not to let it get to me. Mark wandered around talking to girls and I sat at a table surrounded by people I'd met incidentally but didn't feel like I could talk to. The children's book was in my mind. So was Dad's comment to me the other day that he thought that my discomfort when I went to church wasn't with church but transference of my own feelings about myself. I tried to think of things to say to people, and tried not to feel as bad as I was beginning to feel.

I couldn't tell Mark outright that I wanted to leave and get on with the evening, but I tried to let him know. Then someone found a basketball and my heart sank. Half an hour later I was sitting alone, and a bunch of guys were alpha-maleing. Mark asked me if I wanted to play and I told him that I felt like I was flashing back back to p-day's from my mission. He didn't get it. In that moment I was feeling about as depressed as I tried not to realize I felt most of the time on my mission. It was a trapped feeling. After a while I realized that I wasn't on my mission and asked Mark if he could find a ride home, and I left. I was really miserable as I drove home. I went immediately to bed even though it wasn't quite nine yet. I had to get away from feeling as bad as I felt.

So it's Sunday night, and I'm realizing why this was all so disturbing to me. Mike Forsberg lost his job at the DA's office last week and is probably moving back to Cache Valley, and Mark is going to be moving to Provo again to work as a law clerk. Summer is coming and I won't have school to distract me. I see another crack up on the horizon.

Anyway, in the grand tradition of Mike-ness this is all pretty pathetic, and I'm tired of it myself. As sang Billy Joel, "The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems." I'm sure things will be fine. It just won't seem like it, but that's probably just because I'm me.

Holy Crap, People Read This...

2008-04-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

I spoke to my brother Peter on the phone the other day and he said that Cami had put up a new video of Calvin on their blog. I went to it and watched it, and realized two things. First, their life is far more interesting than mine. Second, Cami really kind of has a knack for blogging. Maybe I'm biased because I'm interested in their lives, but she really seems to put things together in an appealing and intriguing way. In any case, I was looking at all of the links on the side of the page and saw one to my blog. Following this link I found that I hadn't posted in a very long time. Also I noticed that there were some comments on the last post. I was astounded to find out that people actually read the blog and checked it from time to time. That kind of blew me away, and I decided that on the off chance that anyone was still checking back here from time to time that i should really post something new.

So, I went out and got in my car and drove to the Albertsons to buy some milk. This is an illustration of how I feel about writing and about sharing anything about myself these days. If there's anything else I can distract myself with, I'll do that instead.

On Sunday I looked at my phone and realized that there was a message from Mark LaRocco. I called him back and he told me that there was going to be a birthday party for a girl he'd introduced me to a year or two ago and he asked me if I wanted to go with him. I guess I was lonely, because I said yes. We arrived at her apartment and there were about five people there. We sat down and I watched Mark talk to people, then the room was filled. A few times girls came and sat down next to me and asked me who I was and what I did, so I told them and when I didn't ask them anything about themselves or try to figure out what we had in common they would drift away. Then this really pretty girl came in and all of the guys in the room immediately approached her like iron filing to a lodestone. It was really kind of funny. It looked choreographed. They all broke their conversations and walked directly to the center of the room where she was standing and encircled her.

After a while she sat down next to me and didn't speak to me. I thought she was waiting for me to speak to her, assuming that because she was the pretty girl that it was my responsibility to be the aggressor and she the defender. I really enjoyed ignoring her as we sat there, less than six inches apart. I could tell it was throwing her that I didn't even look at her.

Finally they cut the cake and I ate a piece, then Mark and I left. As we were getting in Mark's truck we started talking about the pretty girl. He said that he'd gone out with her once before, but hadn't asked her out again because he figured that she was too pretty and he didn't want to deal with that baggage. I told him about how much I'd enjoyed not talking to her, and watching her squirming when I didn't pay attention to her. He said that was kind of too bad because it wasn't that she was conceited, but rather that she was notoriously shy. In that moment I realized that I had acted kind of like a jerk, and also that I'm hopelessly far from being capable of developing a significant relationship with a girl and that I won't be doing so any time soon.

Anyway, that's probably enough about me for just now. So, I guess I should put a picture up. I haven't taken any for the last couple of weeks, but here's the latest of me. There's a good chance you've seen it elsewhere.

Sunday Morning

2007-11-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

These are minimally photoshopped pictures of me this morning:

Me more.

More me.

Today my head is a pinball machine, my attention the ball. It's all sound and fury, but if I don't let it run like this I'll be fighting a panic attack. I've started lots of things this morning, but the only thing I've finished is folding my laundry. I'm terrified of going back to school tomorrow. My kids are supposed to be ready to start the editing process on their personal narratives and only one in ten of them is going to have written it.

About 70% of my kids are going to fail this trimester. I can't help but feel like I've failed them. And I feel bad about it because I feel like I've done about the best I can and it's not good enough. I've never realized my inadequacies as a teacher like I do now. I don't think I'm very good at it.

I don't have enough patience, and I don't understand why they can't do the things I can do easily and have always been able to do easily. I don't have a high opinion of my capabilities. I haven't since high school. So the fact that I can do most of these things without trying, when I think I'm no great shakes, makes me feel like there's something really wrong with these kids.

I just don't know how to get them to do what is expected of them. Either they just don't want to, or I've failed. It's hard for me to believe that the whole lot of them but for a few are ok with failing and don't care about the future, so it's easier to believe it's my fault. I don't feel like there's any objective way of determining the truth of the situation, so I'm kind of stuck feeling awful.

One thing I'm more certain of than ever. I don't think it does much good to have compulsory education. I can't force anyone to learn anything, so for many of my students school is like training prison. It's just a place they're confined to before they get started on the real thing. I've already had about 10% of my students get started on it because of drugs in this trimester alone. From what I can tell, about 25% more just haven't got caught yet.

Here I Am

2007-10-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to put this up for a while now, just to let people know I'm alive. I am still alive. Mostly. I'm kind of having a rough time right now, and I thought it might make me feel better if I pointed my continued existence out to the world.

I know I've got email from some of you and haven't replied. Sorry about that. I've been pretty wrapped up in school, and probably enjoying my anonymity of being new in town too much. It's coming back to bite me. Anyway, here are some pictures with some descriptions.

This is the front of my building. It's old. I think the art deco entry is the newest thing about it. I kind of like that it's old.

This is looking down 2nd Ave toward the church office building, taken from just above my building.

This is the rear of the building. I'm on the bottom.

I was told by the landlord that the garages were built for the width of model T's. They seem wider in the old films than anything I can imagine fitting comfortably in these stalls. I'm glad I drive a small car.

This is the view of the capitol from the garage area behind the building. There's about a twenty foot drop here to the parking structure for the apartments in the foreground.

This is the living room with the shelves I made, the futon I bought at the DI for $20 and the camp chair I've replaced with an uncomfortable but expensive looking micro-fibre office chair, also from the DI. The chair is in front of my computer.

This is a composite of the kitchen. The sink and counter are parallel in real life, not angled toward eachother on the wall.

Oh well. That's it for this post. Maybe on the next one I'll post pictures of myself. I've got different facial hair than I've had before. Some of my kids say I look like an Irish Biker. My kids are weird.