Baltimore Diary

Suicidal Behaviors

Given Waldo’s definition of suicide below, I’m quite the suicidal fellow. However, this particular version of self-annihilation I’ve used as a springboard.

When I was at C. W. Post and working on my Master’s Degree, I was in a cohort with nine other students. Because we took all the same classes at the same time, we got to be quite the well-known little group among the Education Department staff, not to mention the Speech Department and a couple of others. And as we came to be a known element, we each slipped into our own roles within the group. One of us, the only other guy, was the rebel Bad Boy type. One was the Ivory Girl because she reminded you of the women in those commercials,  a sort of fresh-scrubbed All-American type. One was the Mom (naturally). One was the Organizer, who set up the graduation party we threw ourselves.

One of our professors dubbed me The Divergent Thinker, because nobody knew what was going to come out of my mouth at any given time. I had this odd habit, and a “tell” which the others learned to watch for: I’d take a point from the lecture and start turning it over and over in my head, run it through a few permutations and then suddenly I’d have a question. Of course, it was several minutes later, so the question, while reasonable, usually felt as though it was out of the blue. My tell was that I’d start biting on my pen. Once I did that, I was told, they knew that my hand was about to go into the air.

This is still a habit of mine, although I’m learning to channel it into making my own work better. Start with the intention of imitating, then work it and massage it and make it into something a little more mine. By the time it’s popped back out, the originator would have very little idea that it was their own work that was the nucleus of what I’d presented. And while good writers borrow, and great writers steal outright, perhaps it’s time that I spent a little more time seeking the Original Me.

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Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?

Sixty-to-One Ratio

First Soldier: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
King Arthur: Not at all. They could be carried.
First Soldier: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
First Soldier: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.

--Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

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When I was in college and working at the now-dearly-departed WBAU Radio, I got to be pretty good at producing short pieces for broadcast. I had a slightly different approach to the task from that of my colleagues, however: while most of them would create several discrete pieces and then piece them together into a coherent whole through editing (and remember, this was the days of magnetic tape, razor blades and splicing tape).

I was very good at editing tape, but I didn’t like to do it if I didn’t have to. So my approach was often to work with as little editing as possible, doing everything as though it were live and on-the-air, but with the safety net of knowing that I was not, in fact, broadcasting.

So I’d set up the music on turntables, reel-to-reel deck, instant-start tapes (called “carts”, short for cartridge), and I’d mix the whole piece as I went along, starting and stopping music or sound effects while reading my script into the mike. This wasn’t always easy, especially working with the carts, which were usually designed to fast-forward in order to re-cue themselves. When they did that, they’d often stop with a THWACK that the microphone would pick up. This meant that I had to stop the carts manually as I started something else. And, if I screwed up my recording, I’d have to wait for the carts to re-cue before I could take another pass at recording. Not a huge pain, but a pain nonetheless.

I was also remarkably self-critical when it came to my broadcasting work. Often I’d record over thirty takes and then settle on number seventeen as the one that “sucks the least.” But one rule that seemed to hold true was that, no matter how long the piece was that I was recording (unless it was an entire show for later broadcast), I maintained a 60-to-1 ratio of time expended-to-air audio. So, a thirty-second piece would take me a half-hour to cut. A sixty-second bit would take me an hour. The 60:1 Rule seemed to be immutable, or at least tolerated only small variations.

Flash-Forward to this century:

A couple of weeks ago, Wife wanted to work on a project with some of the students in her school. The theme was War, and she wanted to make a video. I wasn’t sure what kind of video you can make that would involve a bunch of sixth-graders, but I had a few suggestions for her, including something that looked like this:

This, specifically, would be a little ambitious for ten year-olds (especially the French at the end) and obviously you couldn’t use the same gags, but you get the idea. Wife liked the idea of doing some kind of lip sync, however, and started looking around for songs that she could use. Some of the songs she thought about were John Lennon’s “Imagine”, Edwin Starr’s “War”, Garth Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love”. She showed the students a set of lyrics for each song and they selected “Where is the Love”.

Over a few days’ period, she put together some kind of concept for the video: that it would start with a news broadcast, that there’d be a mock UN Summit, war protestors, kids getting drafted and a few other odds and ends, interspersed with images from historical conflicts. And anything that wasn’t an historical image would feature the kids lip-synching to “Where is the Love”.

She then borrowed a Flip Video camera and shot the students in these varied situations, often letting the same place stand in for assorted locations. For this four-minutes-and-change video, she shot most scenes twice, about forty clips in all. With that, plus the historical footage, there was plenty for us to work with when it came time to edit the video.

The big problem was with several of the kids who, despite knowing that they wouldn’t be heard on the finished project, wouldn’t sing. Not at all. There’s no lip synch if there’s no lip movement at all, you know? And at the point where Wife brought her raw material home for us to work on a couple of evenings ago, there was going to be no opportunity for reshoots or pickup shots, or inserts, or anything else. Whatever we had as far as the kids, was what we had.

So Wife and I sat down and downloaded the clips to my laptop. Then, using the Windows Live Movie Maker, we stitched together a video that, in most places where the students are on camera, they actually look sort of like they’re singing.

We started working at around 9:00 PM. A little after 1:00 AM, we had a finished video. 3:49 for the song, 12 seconds for the intro and outro video. Total elapsed time including breaks: just a shade over four hours.

The 60:1 Ratio lives on.

Teachers Pet, But They Don’t Let Students

Dr. Kennedy: And how do see your place in this family?
Dewey: Well, I'm the favorite. You know, the one everybody loves the most. The cute one, the one everybody looks out for and gives presents to. And sometimes they even make the birds sing to me or the clouds spell out my name.

--Malcolm in the Middle, “Clip Show” (4/28/02)

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If you have a license to teach in Maryland, and you’d like to keep that license, the state requires that you take some courses in Reading every now and again. With all the time I spent working on my Administrator I endorsement, the reading courses fell by the wayside. In fact, I completely forgot about them until I submitted my paperwork for the Admin I. It came back with a note, telling me that I couldn’t get the endorsement because I hadn’t completed my Reading requirement. What’s more, my license was about to expire. But, no worries: the State has magnanimously given me a two-year extension to get the reading coursework done.

Cool, says I. I’ll take them this summer and all will be well.

Then the other shoe dropped. While the state was willing to give me two years, the City wasn’t. My boss told me that, according to Human Resources, I needed to have that coursework in-hand by July 1 or else I was going to lose my position. Nothing personal, it’s a city-wide requirement for certain level positions. The really bad news was, I learned all this in early January, so I not only had to get registered for class, I had to register for TWO similar classes for the same semester.

I started calling schools but kept running into obstacles, most of them related to the fact that the first week of January is a pretty crummy time to call a college. CCBC, Morgan, Coppin, BCCC, and a couple of others all added up to nothing that day. Either nobody was answering the phones, or the people I needed to talk to were unavailable. (To be fair, two of them did call me back later on but neither one could help me this semester.)

For whatever reason, I’d been avoiding calling the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, perhaps because I’d just finished there and just wanted to go elsewhere. I like the idea of going to different schools as a means of keeping one’s education from getting too inbred. But after all these No-Go phone calls, I caved in and called CND. Naturally, they answered the phone AND the person I needed to speak to was right there.

Bonus points: the courses were both open and, because I’d last attended in May, I was still considered an “active” student. So, no application fees or any of that rigamarole. However, CND is a relatively pricey school and the courses were going to be about $1200 each. I went in to register, and the registrar’s office, under the impression that I’d get a 50% reimbursement, took $1400 off my hands (including a couple of unavoidable fees) and let me attend the classes. I did get some reimbursement, but I also got a bill for $900 in the mail a couple of days ago. Booger.

Now, over the past couple of years I’ve heard complaints about these courses, about how they’re a waste of time and such. Not surprisingly, these complaints are coming from the same people who paid $75 to take the course on the fast-and-dirty track. I’m actually doing some work here, baby.

I’m not a shy guy in class. I do like to particpate and I’m one of those folks who actually enjoys going to school. But in one of my classes, most of the group is pretty quiet, so it sometimes seems like I’m the only person who’s participating. The teacher asks relatively simple questions and they all look at her like it’s a trick question. So I’ll pop up with the (obvious) answer. Lately, I’ve noticed that I’ve become the teacher’s “go-to” guy for answering some questions. She’ll ask the class as a whole, then call on me specifically. Tonight I got that feeling like I was monopolizing the conversation, and finally started burying my face in my notebook, taking copious notes which did little more than parrot the handouts we’d just been given. (This sort of activity helps me remember things, but still.) No eye contact means maybe I won’t be the guy who drags the rest of the class into the conversation.

At the end of the class, as we started to break up, the woman who sat behind me called me back to her. I leaned in to see what was on her mind. She asked me, “Have you had Dr. X before?”

I said, “No.” Then it hit me what she was getting at, so I added, “I don’t know why she’s calling on me so much, either.” She smiled. “I don’t know!” I repeated.

Just a few more weeks of class, and then…I don’t know. I need to figure out my next steps, educationally.

Head Line

Bart Simpson: That place is weird. A man in the bathroom kept handing me towels, until I paid him to stop.
Homer Simpson: [holding a stack of towels] Should have held out longer, boy!

--The Simpsons, “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield” (2/4/96)

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This evening, when I got home, Wee One told me that tonight was No Cooking Night.

“No Cooking Night” is a fundraiser for her school. Each month, a different restaurant in the area sponsors a No Cooking Night for the school. The idea is, the family goes out and has a meal at the restaurant, and the restaurant in turn kicks a piece of its take for the evening over to the PTA. It’s a pretty successful program, and it’s allowed the PTA to do some nice things for the school.

Wife was upstairs with a headache, so it was going to be just Wee One and me. And, because Wee One has her tumbling class, we had to leave right away. I didn’t have time to take off my tie, change into sneakers or much else. Back out the door we went.

This also meant that, by the time we got to the restaurant, I had to use the rest room. But since time was tight, I had to wait until after we’d ordered our meals. At that point I finally made the proverbial beeline for the Men’s Room.

At first, I was in there alone, using the only urinal in there. Shortly thereafter, a young boy came in, perhaps in the third grade. “Hi,” he said. Now, as it happens, I spend a lot of time in Wee One’s school, so I thought that maybe he’d seen me go into the bathroom and knew who I was. Plus, I was still wearing my ID tag from work. So I simply replied, “Hi there.”

Then he said to me, “My name’s Bobby*, what’s yours?”

I said, “I’m Mr. Call.”

Bobby went into the bathroom stall and said, “Hi, Mr. Call.”

I asked him, “Do you go to "[Wee One’s school]?”

He said, “No! I’m going to the bathroom!”

Made my night. Thanks, Bobby.

*Not his real name, of course.

Getting Faced

[In Frank's wedding video, Frank is about to cut the cake]
Trapper:  Look, even then he didn't know how to hold a knife. [Laughs]
Hawkeye: [Laughs] Watch the cake die of malpractice.

--M*A*S*H, “There is Nothing Like a Nurse” (11/19/74)

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Kim Lewis is one of the Bigger Wheels in the Baltimore City school system, and while I don’t work in her department, I do work with a lot of the people who are. Ms. Lewis will be participating in the Polar Bear Plunge this weekend, which raises money for the Special Olympics. Her goal is to raise $10,000, which will allow her to take the plunge 24 times in a 24-hour period. She’s pretty close to her goal, and it wouldn’t be too tough for you to help push her over the top.

Today, as part of her fundraising efforts, a bake sale was held at the Puzzle Palace. Among the goodies were cupcakes, doughnuts, homemade cookies, and, of course, cakes. One cake in particular was the centerpiece for this whole thing, but I’ll come back to that in a second.

As you probably know, money’s been a little tight since September, but Wife and I do our best to help out with some charities here and there. And since Special Olympics is rather close to my heart, I did want to contribute to Kim’s cause, but I wasn’t sure I could really afford it, what with it being post-Christmas and all. However, after doing my taxes this past weekend (what? Shut up), I decided that I could afford to kick in a few bucks to the cause.

Now, there are a few ways to help out if you work in the school system. You can go to the second floor and hand some money over to one of two people delegated to collect on Kim’s behalf. Boring. You can go to the website and do the electronic thing. Easy, but also kind of impersonal, especially inasmuch as I work in the same building with her. Or, I could do something a little weird at the bake sale, like buy an entire pie or something.

So there I am at the bake sale and they’re maybe two hours into the thing, so there’s definitely not as much on the table as there was the first time I looked. The centerpiece cake, however, was still mostly intact. The reason for this is that it was one of those half-sheet size cakes which had a photo on it. I’m sure you’ve seen that type. The photo on this one, of course, was a picture of Kim Lewis standing in front of a poster for the Plunge. For some mysterious reason, the ladies who were serving out food were cutting around the picture. This, of course, became my target. How could it not?

I came in close to the table and greeted the ladies. Then I said, “I want some cake.” As she started to make the cut, I said, “No, no, no, no. I want her face.”

They were actually a bit taken aback at this. They looked at each other and looked unsure, as though there was some kind of rule that would be broken. I persisted: “I’ll pay extra for it.” Now, I was going to haggle with them a bit. I had a set amount in mind that I was going to spend altogether, but I wasn’t going to give it up easily. One woman said to the other, “He will pay extra…” The other woman said, “Twenty bucks.”

“Done,” I said, and instantly plunked down a pair of ten-dollar bills that were in my hand. This, as it turns out, was what I’d planned to spend in total.

They still couldn’t believe it. “You’re really going to give us twenty dollars for a piece of cake?”

“If it’s the face, yes,” I said.

They went for it. In fact, they gave me a slice about twice as large as typical, because they had to cut way into the picture to get the face. If you look at the picture here, it’s hard to tell that there’s a seven-inch paper plate underneath that hunk o’ cake.

Neither of the women could remember my name, so I said to call it an anonymous donation. I took my cake and brought it into a meeting in the Board Room, which was right behind the bake sale table. About two minutes later, Kim came into the Board Room and said, “Somebody just paid twenty dollars for a piece of cake!” Of course, the piece was still intact in front of me (I’d just snapped the picture), so she figured it out right away. She gave me a hug and thanked me for supporting the Plunge.

Now, here’s the odd part. (Because eating a colleague’s face isn’t weird.) When I worked at Helen Keller, all of the classroom aides were Puerto Rican, and they had a superstition about birthday cakes. Specifically, you had to smear the person’s name across the cake before you cut it, so that you weren’t cutting into the person’s name and giving them all kinds of bad luck. This kind of carried with me, and now I do it. So I had to smear Kim’s face before eating the cake. My way of wishing her luck as she makes the Plunge this weekend.

And in case you missed it, here’s the link to donate once more.

Synchronicity, or, Back From the Dead

Peasant: She turned me into a newt!
Sir Bevedere: [suspiciously] A newt?
Peasant: [long pause]…I got better.

--Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

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Oddly enough, I’m not the only person in my universe whose health is in much better shape than that which was assumed by others.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine from high school posted to his Facebook account that one of the teachers who was around back then had died. Not only that, it was his understanding that this teacher had died a couple of years ago and he’d just learned about it. A few of us said some nice things and clucked with the retrospective sadness, much like some folks did when I posted that Garrison Keillor joke. Later on, he came back and noted that he’d been mistaken and that the teacher was still alive. In fact, said teacher even took the time to say “Hi” to everyone in the same thread.

I, like the others who were caught by the error, said a couple of kind things about him in that thread. In my case it was specifically that I’d learned a lot from him and that I still remembered most of his remarkably bad jokes. I also noted that I was disappointed that I couldn’t attend his surprise retirement party several years ago. As it turns out, he retired from teaching in Kings Park (New York), not from teaching altogether, and this may be his last year. After all, he’s been in the business for 44 years now. I wrote a piece that was intended to be shared with him at the party. I don’t have that piece anymore, but I hope he got to read it. I presume he did; I’d emailed it to his wife (whose name, oddly, is NOT “Raquel”).

At the time of his retirement, I was working for the Leader Newspaper Group in northern New Jersey. In addition to being a reporter for the group, I wrote an occasional column to fill up space on the Op/Ed page. I took the occasion to write a tribute to him around that time, and they published it in the July 6, 2000 edition (PDF document).  My column is on Page 5, and I’m only linking because it turns out that I was the guy who wrote that week’s editorial as well. So, if you click the link you’ll see part of my journalistic career. Remember that this column was pre-Facebook and pre-My Space, so Classmates.com was about the only way you had to get in touch with anyone from your past, and it wasn’t a free service.

Here was my column:

Sad news this week: I'm getting old.

Okay, perhaps you don't care about that. So are you, but I have a column to whine about it and you don't. The point is, it doesn't occur to me that often.

There's a big computer company (whose initials may stand for I'll Buy Macintosh) that's been using actor Avery Brooks in its television ads. Apparently Captain Sisko has gotten off of Deep Space Nine and has returned to Earth to hawk "serious software." In one of the commercials he explains to the viewers, whose vocabulary development has been repressed by watching too much TV, what an "epiphany" is.

Well, I've had an epiphany or two myself in recent times. Most of them are connected to the fact that I'm no spring chicken anymore. I'm not talking about the usual aches and pains that come with getting older; I can deal with those. It's when you suddenly realize that the song you're listening to, you heard for the first time when Gerald Ford was in office and it dawns on you how long ago that was. In my case, it was a note from someone I'd never met before.

I spend some time every week on a website called Classmates.com. You go to the site, put in some information about where you went to high school, and you can communicate with a whole bunch of folks you didn't want to associate with back then. The site has a bulletin board system wherein you can send notes to everyone from your home town.

A short while back, I saw a note that said that Mr. Weidig, my Algebra teacher, is retiring after this school year, and that a surprise party was being arranged for him. What! Mr. Weidig is old enough to retire now? Why, he was such a young fellow when he taught me back in...back in...

...1978??

[The reader will please note that this is the part where I cut out a bunch of words that one doesn't ordinarily see in a family newspaper. But the gist of it was: "Golly, it's tough to believe that I was in ninth grade that long ago.”]

Mr. Weidig was one of the reasons I became a teacher. He was one of the few I knew who actually seemed to really enjoy the job. So many others seemed to be going through the motions. Mr. Weidig had a gentle way of prodding you along without pushing the issue. He had ways of making you pay attention without your knowing that that's what he was doing. And his jokes were soooo corny that you just had to repeat them later on. I still know most of those shaggy-dog stories. And yes, I have told some of them to my students in the past. I'll probably burn in Hell for that, thanks a lot.

So the retirement party has come and gone: Mr. Weidig is no longer teaching Math in Kings Park, NY, and it's up to somebody else to take his place. That's not as easy as it sounds. Mr. Weidig was part teacher and part clown. In either role, the shoes to be filled are very large.

In addition to the corny jokes, Mr. Weidig also had a habit of “asking himself questions” as a means of moving a discussion forward, or perhaps letting everyone know that this is something we should be wondering about. He’d walk to the back of the room and sit in a vacant chair, then raise his hand to get attention. Then he’d walk up to the front of the room and call on himself. Then he’d walk patiently back to the seat and ask a question. Then he’d walk to the front again and, before answering, say (and here’s where the entire class would chorus in): “I’m glad you asked.” I’ve pulled that stunt a couple of times, too.

Frankly, I don’t remember what I wrote in the piece that I sent to Mr. Weidig’s wife, other than to suggest facetiously that he tell a story called “The Parade Joke” one more time. And no, I won’t tell it to you here. Maybe I’ll relate the Parade Joke as the last post ever to this blog…

Atonement

Alvy Singer: [addressing the camera] There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

--Annie Hall (1977)

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Housekeeping Note: this is another post I started several days ago and didn't finish until just now, so I'm clearing out some mental cobwebs getting it out there. 

 One of the things I've noticed about having a blog, and later on a Facebook account, is that you never know what's going to spawn a response and what isn't. Usually when I do a FB post that's related to The West Wing, I'll get a couple of "likes" and maybe a comment or two. This year I got nothing. On the other hand, an offhand reference to an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati launched all kinds of conversations. Likewise, another comment I made about watching TV on Thanksgiving Day launched a similar number of responses. 

A short while back I did a post about the high school friends I have nowadays, and the relative lack of overlap that the modern-day group has with the friends I had then. It's not a big deal, just something I noticed. And while the post itself has no comments attached to it (at present), it has engendered several responses. Most of them have been about what a funny/witty guy I am, and how they never suspected that in high school. (My stock response is that I was funny but not especially witty, which I think is more or less true.) But there was one brief conversation I had with someone that actually touched me, a little. Much of what you'll see here is heavily paraphrased. My memory isn't that great. 

A few days ago someone took the time to send me an Instant Message on Facebook. She opened with "I owe you an apology." This actually confused me, since I didn't recall her saying anything odd, or mean, or unusual, in the recent past or ever, really. 

She went on to say that she'd read my post, and it had gotten her to thinking back to high school. And the bottom line was that, if she'd said anything rude to me, or purposely ignored me, or done anything mean in my general direction back then, then she genuinely apologized for it. 

What do you do with something like that? 

In my case, I thanked her and told her (truthfully) that I hold no ill will toward anybody from school. She noted that there were some people from those days who seem not to have changed at all, and others who surprised her by going a long way in life. (Apparently I was in the second batch.) We chatted a little bit about some of the people--not by name--who pretty much peaked in high school and how you never really know. At that point I had to sign off so I thanked her again and bade her good-bye. 

You know what? That was a pretty brave action on her part, and you don't get a lot of opportunities to do something like that in life. I tried once a couple of years ago: I wanted to re-connect with someone from my past so I wrote a letter and sent it out. I never got a reply. But at least I took that opportunity. 

So thanks to you, RFP: you didn't do anything to make my life more miserable back in the past (that I know of, anyway), but you did brighten my week a little bit in the present. 

Gone To The Fair

Don Eppes: [picks up paper airplane off floor] Who made this?
Charlie Eppes: Me. Why?
Don Eppes: Well, wings are a little thin here, buddy.
Dr. Larry Fleinhardt: Hey, wait, wait, let me see this.
Charlie Eppes: Forgive me if all my years of advanced applied mathematics take issue with that assessment.
Don Eppes: Yeah, well, you'll forgive me if all my years of high school detention say I'm right.

--Numb3rs (2005)

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Housekeeping Note: this is one of a few posts that I started and, for some reason, didn't finish recently, so I'm playing catch-up to get it out there.  

One of the big advantages of a school system that's in a city of some size is that there are lots of specialized city-wide programs which appeal to students of all stripes. Digital Harbor, for instance, is a technology-oriented school and most (if not all) of the academic courses are bent in that direction. Hell, the LIBRARY looks kind of like an Apple store. Mergenthaler (Mervo) has a Hospitality program, where students can learn the hotel business, or learn to run restaurants. And so on. Some schools have Junior ROTC programs, others don't, some are designed for college-bound students and others are dedicated to students who are likely to need more than four years to graduate. 

Consequently, choosing a high school can be a daunting task. This is why Baltimore City Schools recently staged a High School Fair over at Poly. All of the high schools got a chance to make a pitch at eighth graders who were pondering the high school they'd be applying for in a few weeks. 

Yes, there is an application process for high schools. Some of the schools, like Poly or City, have entrance criteria based on grades, MSA scores, attendance and so on. Other schools do not, but take their students through a lottery system. Still others have no specific criteria but will take all comers. 

I was asked to help out at the High School Fair. Originally I was going to come in early, around the time the whole thing started, but I was told that bodies were needed for the late shift. This worked out well, since it turned out that Wife was also going to be working the fair, from the other end: she was escorting eighth graders from her school around. 

I was told that I'd be on the registration table, and that my shift would run from 1:00--3:00. I made plans to get there by 12:45 so that I could learn the ropes, but the traffic to the fair thwarted me: the place was thick with students! I got in at exactly 1:00. Also, they didn't need anyone for registration by then, so I was put on the exit door as a kind of bouncer. Students who hadn't registered couldn't re-enter through my door; they had to go through the entrance. 

The other bad news was that, in arriving at 1:00, I'd missed out on the food they'd given the other volunteers, AND I didn't get a High School Fair T-shirt. This is two events for which I've come in and not gotten a T-shirt. I'm starting to feel a little ripped-off, here. Also, the event only ran until 2:00, at which point schools started taking down their tables and displays. Nobody seemed to need any other assistance from me, so I was gone by 2:15. 

But the Fair itself was a huge success; about four thousand people were in attendance throughout the day, and the exit surveys that I got to see (given to me by people who'd missed the place they were supposed to leave it) were almost all very positive. I'd say I saw about fifty surveys and only one was negative in any way. So that's not bad, and the folks who organized the fair did a great job, except for feeding and clothing me. But then again, that wasn't really the point of the day, so I can just suck it up. 

And, of course, make a point of showing up extra early at the Middle School Fair in a couple of months. 

Clean Up Your Room, the Parents are Coming Up

Eric: Okay, guys. Road trip checklist. Car--Check. Okay. We're good.

--That 70s Show, "Canadian Road Trip" (5/8/01)

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 This weekend, I'll be heading up to New Paltz, NY to visit Daughter at the SUNY New Paltz campus. It's Parents' Weekend, so once again I guess they're be sprucing the place up, sending us on all kinds of fascinating adventures and telling us we look pretty so we'll keep our kids in their school for the duration. 

Daughter recently learned, incidentally, that between AP classes, college courses she took in summer a year or so ago, and high school classes that her school designed collaboratively with Adelphi and Molloy, she's already considered a sophomore based on her credit count. Woo Hoo! 25% Tuition cut! 

This time around, there's not much in the way of campus tours and such; we've already done that part. On Friday, both Hillel and Chabad are holding events for those of the Jewish faith, and if we get there early enough (not me), there's tennis and soccer to see. 

Saturday promises a "coffee hour" with the school's president, who I presume is primed to talk about nothing but the H1N1 virus for the entire hour. I, for one, hope they'll be serving tea as well. The Science Building will be staging several planetarium shows throughout the day, and the school's art museum will have some exhibits going on. There's a tour of the town, a boat tour of the Hudson River, which as I'm sure you know was named after the famous explorer Henry Hudsonriver, and in the evening there's a comedy show by the Second City Touring Company. 

There are numerous other activities listed as well, many of them not sponsored by the school but some I'm sure were staged to coincide with this weekend. So it all sounds quite interesting and maybe even a little bit fun. Meals for this whole thing, by the way, are "on your own", which I'm perfectly comfortable with. They offer a local dining guide but we're welcome to use the dining halls. In fact, one of my favorite blurbs about one of the dining halls reads thus: "Enjoy an ‘all-you-can-eat’ brunch in the dining hall. The lunch price for guests is approximately $8.00; students use their meal plan." I'm just curious what "approximately" really means, here. 

So Daughter, who has known since before she moved in that I'm planning on coming up, calls me this past weekend and asks, "Are you registered for the Parent Weekend?" 

And I very confidently reply, "Um, we're supposed to register?" 

I have to get back to her on this. I ask Wife, "Did we register for this?" She tells me we did not, so I go to the school's website on Monday to get the details. Hey, you can register online!

Only, no you can't. There's a message that the computer system is down for upgrading through Tuesday. Since it's so late, I figure I'd better call the school instead and register that way. I call the office and get a voicemail message. I leave a message and wait about five hours.

I call again and get through to a woman and, let me tell you what: this woman could not be any less interested in talking to me or anyone else. I tell her I'd like to register for Parents' Weekend, and she tells me that I can't register because the system's down. Uh, yeah, that's why I'm calling. She can't register me either. Fine. I decide to wait and see what happens. 

Tuesday: My cell phone rings. It's a perfectly perky young lady who got my message and wanted to see if she could help. I mention the computer thing and she apologizes for it, as though it were her fault. She tells me that a lot of people are having trouble still, but it should be cleared up either late in the day or Wednesday at the latest. As long as I don't want to go on the boat cruise--and I don't--it should be OK. Late that night I get registered and secure tickets for the comedy show. 

So I'm all ready to go. Tomorrow after work, all I have to do is grab my bag, then...um, fill it with clothes for the weekend. Then go to the bank and make a car payment. Then put more gas in the car. And then I'm on my way!

28 Hours on the Road

Matt Kelley: Flight's delayed?
Toby Ziegler: Yeah.
Matt: Me too. I'm going to St. Louis.
Toby: Washington.
Matt: I'm with my daughter. She's upstairs in the room but we were out here looking at Notre Dame.
Toby: Yeah?
Matt: You got kids?
Toby: No.
Matt: Wait'll you take your oldest to look at colleges. It's an incredible feeling. You wish they'd go to college across the street from your house, but you know...
Toby: Yeah.

--The West Wing, "20 Hours in America" (9/25/02)
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A couple of weeks ago, Daughter told me that she'd decided that she didn't want to go to Towson but rather to the State University of New York at New Paltz. I wasn't thrilled with the idea but I do realize that both schools have excellent reputations in her chosen major. However, I did think (still do) that there were some advantages to Towson that weren't necessarily going to happen at New Paltz. So when I was up on Long Island to see Daughter's last high school production, I took the time to visit with her mother and spell out my concerns. It was one of those good news/bad news situations in that her mother seemed to have some of the same concerns, however when she raised them with Daughter, it was a conversation that apparently began with "I talked to your father last night..." so you know that the heels dug immediately into the floor.

The other thing that her mother didn't share with me was that Daughter was pretty much set on New Paltz by this time. I learned this later on when she invited me up for the "Accepted Students Open House" a short while back. This was going to be a whirlwind tour for me. After work on Friday I headed up to Long Island. I was going to spend the night on my ex's sofa, and we would get an early start to the school. Let the clock start ticking at 7:00 PM, then.

Traffic, for a change, was fairly light all the way up (with a slowdown in Brooklyn for an accident, of course), and I kept the stops brief because I was getting the late start. I got to West Hempstead, NY at about 11:30. Daughter presented me with a late birthday gift, because when I'd seen her last (at the play), she wasn't exactly toting it around in anticipation of my arrival. Among the items in the gift bag was a "SUNY New Paltz" keychain.

Sandbagged, I'd been. All right.

The next morning, after sleeping rather poorly (in Daughter's bed, since she was worried that her stepfather, who gets up very early to go to work, would awaken me), I got up and had to wake her up. We got our respective acts together and were on the road shortly before 8:00, stopping in at 7-Eleven to get some hot beverage and a microwaved  sandwich (now, them's good eatin'). By 9:30 we were in the town of New Paltz and looking for the entrance to the Open House, as there was more than one event going on at the school that day.

Now, I knew that this event was still a recruiting tactic, and that the people I spoke to were mostly going to say what they thought I wanted to hear, and tell me I was pretty and whatever else, but I let Daughter know that it was her job as well to sell me on the school. First we went to a central location in the gymnasium, where we got maps of the campus and some information about the First Year Initiative and a list of the wheres and whens with regard to tours and the receptions that the various departments would be holding. Daughter had already seen the campus and the Theater Department, but hadn't seen the dorms. I hadn't seen anything at all, so we elected to see the dormitories first.

New Paltz has two styles of dormitory: the traditional "corridor" dorm, which is what you probably think about when you think of a college dorm; and the "suite" style dormitory, which is a group of three or four bedrooms which have a common area to them. So you'd open the door from the hallway to this sitting area, then go through another door to the bedroom. It's not a new idea but it's not an especially common one. I know that when I was in college, most schools only had this setup for upperclassmen. Our first stop was a corridor dormitory. Later, we got to see the suite style. I don't think there were any parents in my group who liked the suites; the general feeling was that they tended to cloister students away from each other. And, unless the suite was on a corner of the building, the common room had no windows. It was quite cave-like, even though you knew intellectually you were aboveground.

There are some things about dorm life that have not changed since the early 1980s, when I was in school and Dinosaurs Were Walking The Earth. The doors still have all kinds of oddball decorations on them, along with the requisite whiteboard for messages (which, I imagine, were policed for the benefit of the tours). The rooms are still cramped affairs for two people (and many of the students wind up tripled now). And I'm sure that when it's not a Parents Touring the Campus kind of weekend, the individual room doors tend to remain open to permit passage of people in and out of the rooms. (In fact, we were told that this was often the case.)

There are some other things that definitely have changed about the dorm life. Scamming change for the washing machines/dryers is no longer a problem, because it's part of your dorm fee. So the laundry room is free. The rooms are already wired for internet and cable (all we had was a phone line--remember, the Internet was maybe ten years in the future for us). SUNY is working on making the campus a Wi-Fi kind of place, but in the meantime students are issued an Ethernet cable to work in their rooms, or they can go to a computer lab in the basement. The dorm labs don't have a printer, but there are several labs all over campus which do. Students are given an allotment of 500 pages' worth of printout each semester; after that you have to pay for another 500, and so on. Since you use your Student ID to log into the computer system in the first place, this is how they keep count.

Actually, your Student ID is your life, now. It's your library card; it's your computer pass, it gets you into your dorm at night (the building, that is--you still need a key to get into the room itself), or into other buildings at other times; it's your Meal Plan card, and it also maintains a record of how much you have in your "Hawk Dollars" account. "Hawk Dollars" can be used in any dining hall on campus (the Freshman dining plan allows for only one hall to be used; if you eat elsewhere it's either cash or Hawk Dollars), in the bookstore, in the library or in about thirty of the stores in town. "Town", incidentally, is pretty much any part of New Paltz that isn't the school, and is immediately outside the campus, literally a five-minute walk away. It's not like Penn State, where it's tough to tell where the school ends and the town begins, but it's close.

Later, we got to do a tour of the campus itself and then we went to the Theater Department's reception, which turned out to be not so much a reception as a prelude to auditions to be held for students who hadn't yet auditioned for the program. However, the department chair was gracious and agreed to give a tour to anyone who wanted it. This turned out to be a bigger group than he expected, but he took it with good humor and gave a pretty comprehensive tour. He was also able to give some substantive answers to rather pointed questions that parents had.

By the time we finished it was about 1:30, so we headed into town for a bite to eat. We went to a place called P&G's Restaurant, which is one of those places that rides the line between casual restaurant and bar, and which I'm sure will see-saw between one and the other depending on both the time of day and /or the day of the week. If you go there, check out the urinal in the men's room. It's pretty interesting.

We also took a stroll through some of the blocks adjacent to the restaurant and then headed back to Long Island. On the way down we stopped for awhile at Stew Leonard's, which is kind of like a mashup of Wegman's and Disneyland. We finally got back to West Hempstead around 7:00 and I took my leave shortly thereafter, popping into a diner for some supper, and back on the road to Baltimore. It was not meant to be, however, as I was too sleepy to make it all the way, and I wound up stopping at an EconoLodge in Delaware around midnight.

Yes indeed, I spent the night in a hotel only an hour from home. It was pretty peaceful.