tales from the rock

step 1:  do something that you’d rather not get caught doing

step 2:  keep doing it

eventually, a mistake will be made!

if tiger gets caught, ANYONE can get caught….

wow - a little over a year has gone by, let’s check the news.  Furlough Fridays are the hot topic, with the big bad state vs Joe Aloha and his kids.  forced to balance a bleeding budget, Gov Lingle cuts budgets across the board, forcing the schools to essentially shut down for 17 additional days a year.  it’s not enough to cover the gap, but it’s a horrible first step.I think it’s pretty obvious no one wants this.  lots of bullshit being thrown about the furlough days being used as a bluff the Gov didn’t flinch at, etc.  bottom line is, the state only has so much to spend, and right now, all the dept budgets combined exceed that total.think of the keeeeeds! - you say.  prioritize the schools and kids first.  save their budget, and cut other ‘non-essential’ programs.  well folks, if you think it’s that easy (or transparent), it would have been done.first of all, what’s non-essential?  I’m sure there are tons of weird looking line items, and of course a lot of pork in there too (what’s the Gov’s redecorating budget for the year?).  the problem is, most of what goes on is important to SOMEONE, and that someone may have kids too (if they aren’t kids anyway).attack the pork then! the simple fact is, when you have to find 10’s of millions to balance, you have to start with the sword before you move to the scalpel.  payroll and related expenses are at the top of that list, right next to facility operational costs.why not furlough on days schools are already off, like holidays or instructional prep days.  this would be better for the kids since it saves instructional days, but it hurts the teachers twice over, since now they have to work the same amount AND give up pay, and also does not allow you to shut a facility down saving those operational costs.2 things to recognize there - NO ONE is blaming the teachers individually (although as a union, there are definitely fingers a plenty), so asking them to take it up the ass FOR THE SAKE OF THE KEEEEDS is just wrong.  the other thing is that facility operation is more than custodians and electricity.  think of all the things you need if you own a house - insurance, consumables, maintenance, etc.  it doesn’t end with your mortgage and electric bill.so much anger!  let’s protest!  well, what the fuck are you protesting exactly?  it’s not like the Gov is just choosing not to print the money we need to operate the schools.  you know how you get more?  raise taxes - who’s in favor of that?  I’m no elephant, but at some point, taxing the populace becomes counterproductive.  cutting non-essential services?  if you aren’t actually in school, which service would you like to give up?  road repair?  trash collection?  (I recognize some of these examples are city and county issues, but the point is, no one is really willing to give up ANYTHING).so what do we do?  I know what I would do - start applying to private school!  only half joking there, but seriously, this is not a problem that solves itself overnight.  even with all the funding they need, the state has done a shitty job of educating the kids.  again, a complicated picture here since it relies on parental support, and classrooms full of non-disruptive kids, but if you could choose between optimal learning conditions, and a fucking crapshoot every day, I think the choice is clear.for those of you who think rims on your car is more important than education, and it’s all the state’s fault for failing you here, this is what I suggest - come up with a solution first, THEN complain.  if you look around the nation, no one else runs their schools like we do.  if we were top 10 in education, then maybe it would be something to hang on to, but we’re like 47th out of 50 - hardly something we need to be investing in.  for all those that think only the poorer districts would get left behind if we went to a more traditional operational model, fuck you too - all studies show that while the ‘poor’ schools suck, it’s not simply because they are poor.  it’s because the support system around the learning is lacking. look at what a rural school can do with something the community supports, like football.as it is, most if not all public schools have to fundraise to operate.  along with a more localized operational and fiscal model, formalize this effort also.  the ‘best’ fundraising efforts I have seen are the most structured.  these aren’t kids selling candy bars for $2.  they set school goals, and have family quotas.  these efforts can be rolled up into a district level.  if it were easier to support the ‘learning’ part of the educational budget, I would, and the rhetoric says most people would to.  no one likes new taxes because of the stigma, and the inefficiency, but money is the only thing that solves this problem.  still afraid of inequality creeping into the picture - don’t punish those willing to ante up I say.  setup some kind of luxury tax if you like - ask for a percentage of fundraising over a certain amount help fund schools less successful in their efforts.my mom (public school teacher for like 80 years) have this argument all the time - I shouldn’t thing private schools are ‘better’, and ‘look, you came out ok’.  well, times are different, and maybe ok isn’t enough for me.  fact is, the public school system in hawaii is fucked - I choose to not risk my kids in it.bottom line, public schools on the rock are covered in gravy - I’d do whatever I could to avoid them!

caught the 1986 blockbuster (not really) Lucas tonight.  that’s some pretty good second tier smack from the 80’s man.  most lesser fans will only be able to recall the winona ryder, corey haim, and charlie sheen appearances, but the hardcore also know this is one of the great jeremy piven’s first roles.  that guy has about 80 roles in between ’spike’ and the current ari gold, and let me tell you, he hasn’t had much hair on his head for any of them.lucas is really the original rudy, and the end scene, while not a tear jerker, is a nice sports related feel good moment.also present in that sequence, the first appearance of ‘menacing asian guy’ - very rarely seen in the mid 80s. 

communication is an art, and like a more traditional art like say, painting, when practiced by an amateur, it is painfully obvious.  take written communication.  I for one, clearly have no passion for it, hence, the large breaks between posts here - a place where I was supposed to be practicing how to communicate.  I still send 50 emails a day, but they often looks like this:

• “yep, sounds good.”
• “let me get back to you”
• “…..” (ignored email)

spoken communication is even trickier, because so much of it is made up of context, and subtleties that are expressed through other means.  intonation, rising and falling pitch, excitable gestures, etc.

 for example, the word “conflict” takes 2 basic forms.  the first is that of a noun, (a fight, battle, or war).  it’s easy to pick this usage out due to the accent and extension of the first syllable;  CONflict.

the other form is that of intransitive verb, (competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons) b: mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands.)  again, fairly easy to pick out due to the accent on the second syllable;  conFLICT.

you would think this is straighforward enough for any reasonably skilled adult to handle - doesn’t take Tony Robbins to pull this one off in front of a crowd.

however

if you are the fucking hack bitch that insists on saying the fucking word the same way in either usage (conFLICT), especially when you mostly use it as a noun, then the fucking act of sound coming out of your god damn mouth inflicts pain on every other person in the room as we are forced to translate english from your mother tongue of dumbfuck because you keep saying things like, “the conFLICT between the vendor and us is mostly due to a previous conFLICT that involved another person, and that conFLICT is what is causing this new conFLICT….”

like a needle through the ear into my brain.

check out this article on finding passion in your job.

Tom pretty much lives his life by those 5 steps, and as we all know, he is the most passionate man on the planet.

wow - one month blows by.  just goes to show you how easy it is to fall off the wagon.  once you allow the weakness to take over, it’s a snowball effect.  the 10:00 am tickler on the calendar hasn’t been working this summer, since that happens to be the time where everyone is finally in work mode, so stuff starts to happen.  I think I’ll have to try an earlier time.

topic to get me going again was this dude.  5 years from Poland, he gets into every single Ivy league school (MIT turned him down.)  doesn’t say if he goes to a private school, but he does pretty much imply the school itself wasn’t that tough compared to the gulag he was in before.

now, contrary to some beliefs, this is not the goal for the baby - not the sole goal anyway.  there’s a lot of life to live after college, and being accepted into a bunch of ivys becomes irrelevant on day 1 of whichever school you go to.  we’re looking for ways to prep her for life, and hopefully success and greatness throughout.  one side effect of working for the P, is seeing more than a few wasted $500,000 educations (k-college).

however, that’s  not the amazing thing about the article.  the amazing thing, is that some editor thought that this pronunciation guide  - Lukasz Zbylut (pronounced Loo-KASH Zbeh-LOOT) - was going to clear anything up.  maybe I is not properly edukatid enough to know how to pronounce ‘ZBEH.’

see - public school sucks.

been a little while.  I’m so busy with work & life, I just choose to not write my thoughts down.  this actually runs counter to the GTD approach I’m trying to take to managing my life, so today I push some work aside, and insert this task.

I’m also trying to twitter - maybe even with jott.  I’m not sure I’ll continue though, since one of the main points of this was to practice writing, and the sms approach doesn’t really support that.  it may help with brevity, but in the long run, I don’t want to devolve into lolcat speak.

the problem though, is that with yet another open loop in my head, I’m starting to lose my mind.  add fatigue from not enough sleep, and some basic OCD tendencies, and some mornings I go absolutely batty.

for example, in the shower, I often forget where I’m at in the washing process.  often as in probably 2 times a week at least.  more than that if I’m in a especially hectic state, but rarely less.

my evening shower is pretty routine.  get wet, wash hair, wash face, wash body, rinse off, exit.  hard to fuck that up.  for some reason though, when I get to the ‘wash body’ step (or when I think I’m there), I start to second guess myself, and wonder if I already washed my face.  this would not have been a problem in the past, since I used 1 bar of soap for all skin, but for whatever reason, I now use face soap, so I can’t just go extra crazy with the dove.

anyway, so to help solve the mystery of the clean face, I have to investigate - I look for clues like soap on the wall, or just feel my face for ‘cleanness.’  when this starts to happen, I will often see no soap at all on the walls, so now I wonder if I even washed my hair.  I’m back to square 1!!  let me tell you, this is some maddening shit.

I’ve tried lots of things to help me out - moving soap dispensers out of the shower after I use them, etc., but that only helps if I’m lucid going in.  If I’m already tired, and start showering before moving the dispensers IN, then I have no idea if I’m coming or going.

the final slap in the face is the rewash - when you wash your hair or face a second time, it’s immediately obvious that you’ve already done it, usually through some combination of feel, or because he motion of my hands brings the memory back (doesn’t work with empty hands - tried it.)  I will also say that I’m almost sure I’ve ALWAYS rewashed - I’ve never actually skipped a step.  almost sure, because if I actually did forget, HOW THE FUCK WILL I KNOW!  it’s like deja vu in reverse.

this is the pain of my life.

so the baby has been in school for almost a year, and it’s amazing how quickly she learns by playing with all these other bright kids.  some of it is no so goo, but some things are diabolically cute.

part of the daily ritual of school, is the daily progress report.  mostly just a 1 sentence recap of the day’s activities, but also a breakdown of mealtime - how much was eaten of each food category (entree, veg, starch, fruit, milk, juice, etc.)  the baby usually does a bad job at vegetables, but she makes up for it at home, so we don’t really pay too much attention to it.

at some point, she would occasionally get a star drawn near the food section, and she started reporting that she was a ’star eater’.  I guess coincidentally,  we probably noticed on days when most or all of the vegetables were eaten.  Because she was a star eater, we’d treat her to something - maybe some jumba juice, or french fries - whatever.  (maybe not such a great idea to reward good eating habits with junk food!)

anyway, since I usually do the pickup, I also noticed there wasn’t much of a consistency to the star eater award, although the baby ALWAYS knew she had a star on her report.  Sometimes only ‘few’ vegetables were eaten and a star was rewarded, sometimes EVERYTHING was eaten, but no start.  I thought maybe there was a behavioral component, or maybe the effort exuded in conquering a tough food item was given extra credit.  her actual teacher isn’t always there when I pick up, and since it wasn’t such a big deal, when she was, I would forget to ask.

so I was picking up the other day and happened to pull out her report next to a mom whose son is in the same class, and while they had the exact same eating boxes checked, my report had a star, and hers didn’t.   I asked if she knew the criteria, and she claims to have NEVER received a star.  this now concerns the mom, because when you are using this kind of pre-school to inject your kid into a private school, the last thing you want to be is short on stars!

the teacher happened to be there, so we went in to resolve the mystery of the ’star eater’ once and for all!  so I basically ask, what’s the criteria for being a ’star eater?’

and teacher responds, “the kids ask me to draw stars on their papers, so I do…”

these diabolical 2 and 3 year olds MADE THE WHOLE THING UP!  there is no ’star eater’ award.   seems like it’s mostly the girls (which is why the other mom had never seen a star), and when a teacher is sitting near them at lunch (they will sit in different spots every day), they ask them to draw the stars, and they call themselves star eaters!

the teachers thought it was hilarious of course, since we have been basically using this as a reason for praise for the entire year - kind of typical of the private school parent neurosis, over analyzing everything the kids do.  they had just thought it was innocent fun the whole time.

we haven’t really broken it to the baby that the gig is up, but she is having a tougher time now when she is a ’smiley face eater’, or a ‘christmas tree eater’, and not just a star eater.

although part of me thinks she deserves just as much reward for manufacturing this scam all on her own….

french fries for everyone!