Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Bugs

Gaah! Is it on me? Get it!

It's beginning to look a lot like summer around here, and among other warm summery things that means bugs. Sweat gnats and no-see-ums swarm us like planes on King Kong when we take Willow out to the swings; mosquitoes in the dorm lounge; biting flies in the house.

I like bugs -- they're fascinating, and not just from afar. Ladybugs may take over the screen door in their weird vertical mating rituals, but I don't mind much; houseflies leave their droppings everywhere, but their entrance to the house panics the dog more than it panics me.

But I don't like being itchy, and I don't like knowing that there's an itch-maker buzzing around just under the radar somewhere that I can't yet see. Just seeing a mosquito makes me break out in psychosomatic hives. Is that weird?

Engrish As A Second Language

I'm on duty, but had a moment free at the dorm's lounge computer to check email and listen to some tunes (Sheryl Crow covering Guns 'n Roses fave Sweet Child O' Mine, if you must know) off the who-needs-KaZaA-when-you-live-in-a-lan-and-share-your-music-files network. I had to get up for a moment to let some locked-out kid into his room, and when I came back, I found a book on the chair I had vacated.

The title? The Grean Gatsby.

Yes, I said Grean. The rest of the book is in some sort of pictographic language: Korean's most likely, given our dorm population. Odds are good some ESL kid's trying to get a jump on his english course by reading Fitzgerald's classic in his native language first. But, seriously and ominously, how can you trust the translation of a book if they can't even get the title correct? This kid's in for a world of trouble, with a capital N.

Remaindered Thoughts

With a tip of the hat to webraw. Those remaindered links never cease to amuse.

Here is how I occupy my mind: I subscribe to two weekly magazines -- Newsweek and the New Yorker -- and regularly read McSweeney's, The Onion, Customers Suck, and a small h a n d f u l of blogs. For meditation, I do the shockwave.com jigsaw puzzle ever day, and the Boston Globe sunday crossword every week.

I like ham and cheese croissants. And Bakery Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont, makes the best ham and cheese croissants ever, so I bought three.

Darcie won't buy herself CDs she wants because I end up leaving them in the car all week after I borrow them for my radio show, and she doesn't like the radio on in the car. Who doesn't like the radio on in the car? She also won't let me in a record store for a two-week period immediately following any CD or music purchase, but that's probably for my own good -- I already have far too many CDs.

If it were up to me, I'd wear jeans every day. And why can't I find a good soft light-weave chambray dress shirt that doesn't have button-down collars?

Dorie, the about-to-retire math teacher who coordinates student prizes, called tonight asking me to be the presenter for some award for overcoming obstacles. I'm a natural choice as presenter because the recipient is Sam, a wheelchair-bound senior with mid-to-late-stage-Ataxia who's been an advisee of mine since he arrived as a Sophomore. I think Sam will appreciate the cash, but I hope he feels okay about being singled out as somehow worthy of praise for how he handles his illness.

I haven't seen the deer in a couple of weeks because I haven't been going out at dusk, and because they probably don't come out of the deep woods so much now that the trees are budding. Also, it's raining, and who wants to stand out in a field when it's raining?

I prefer local coffee and microbrew beer, but not that flavored crap.

My daughter as a porcelain doll. I figure you only get one perfect shot like this, so the pressure's off.

Zen Blog

There will be no more blogging today because everything in my life has happened already.

For the moment, anyway.

I'd Sure Like To See That

Reuters reports that Villagers in southern Taiwan are strapping bras to their faces to guard against the deadly SARS virus due to a shortage of surgical masks, and I'm really disappointed with them for not including a picture of this fun phenomenon to accompany their story.

Cause, hey, I wanna know what you do with the other cup.

Lazy Thursday Three

Since I'm trying to start one of those "answer the question on the right day" memes myself (see my Monday Mosh post below), I figured it was only fair to try answering a few. That, and I'm feeling a bit lazy today after a nice afternoon on the couch in Mocha Joes with the wife and baby, drinking free vanilla lattes and watching the world go by. So here's today's Thursday Three:

1. Have you ever had a nightmare?
Surely, but not for a long time; ever since I started drinking way too much coffee and not getting enough sleep, I seem to be sleeping right through my nightmares. Most of my memories of early nightmares are about not being able to get away in time from something vague and undefined but intrinsically evil and horrible, or not being able to get "there" in time to save something beloved but equally vague in its definition.

2. What was the last dream you can remember having?
As I said above, it's been a VERY long time. In my early childhood for some reason I used to have nightmares that I was trapped inside the clothing rack at a store and my mother was going to leave without me. I also used to wake up with no memory of my nightmare except that of moving as if through water, trying to get away from something, unable to make my legs move faster. I guess I must fear the unknown, or fear that I am unequal to my fears or something. This is much less interesting than my brother's nightmares -- he used to wake me up screaming "No, Spiderman, stay away! He's going to get me! Aaah!" Fear of Spiderman seems much worse than fear of the unknown, I think, but we all have our fears, however irrational.

3. Do you think it is possible for two people to have the exact same dream?
No. I think, though, that it is possible for two people to have a dream similar enough that, in the harsh light of day and concrete language, it could end up being described identically.

Hmm. Well, to be honest, that wasn't very successful, but there you go -- at least I tried. Don't forget to come back on Monday and let us all know about your Monday Mosh!

My New Job

For the last five years I've been a Media Specialist here at NMH, running a media center, teaching classes (first in Video Production and Theater, later in Media Literacy, Mass Media Messages, and Web Design), and working with faculty in and out of their classrooms to help them think about best practice pedagogy in the context of digital tools and technologies -- in addition, of course, to all the usual dorm residency and advising responsibilities commensurate with prep school teaching at its finest and most exhausting.

Next year, things are going to be different. I still get to teach my favorite courses -- media literacy, mass media messages, and an advanced web designer's workshop -- in the afternoons, but as seminars with no homework to grade; more importantly, my mandate has become much higher-end, my expected audience has broadened to include the entire curriculum, and I will actually be expected to produce the kinds of position papers and case studies that I love to write and publish but haven't had time for in a year or two. Check out the job description I was handed today, note that information literacy is interpreted broadly here at NMH to be inclusive of media literacy, epistemology, semiotics, and other constructivist approaches that make explicit the nature of knowledge-sharing and knowledge-creation in a variety of settings and with a variety of tools, and then congratulate me, because this is my dream job, and I seem to have earned it without even realizing it.

Northfield Mount Hermon School
Position Description:

Information Literacy/Academic Technology Coordinator

The coordinator works closely with the Directors of Academic Resources and Information Technology to help teachers integrate principles of information literacy and best technology practices into their classroom activity planning. This work involves a combination of faculty development, training, curriculum planning, assessment, teaching, and departmental planning.

Responsibilities
1. Assist teachers to develop lesson plans that achieve curricular goals associated with information literacy.
2. Work with instructional librarians to develop instructional modules that achieve curricualr goals associated with information literacy.
3. Assist teachers and administration using educational technology resources and media resources.
4. Assist the directors of academic resources and information technology to set goals and to allocate information and electronic resources to teachers and facilities.
5. Be present in assigned media and library facilities on a regular basis to assist with effective use of those facilities and create connections that promote the integration of information literacy into the school's curriculum. A portion of this work will be on evenings and weekends.
6. Assess the effectiveness of teachers' classroom activities that incorporate information literacy components or educational technology.
7. Serve as a member of the educational technology group.
8. Teach minor courses in relevant topics as needed.
9. Assist librarians in collection development.
10. Perform house and advising duties as assigned.
11. Report progress towards information literacy and technology integration goals regularly.
12. Other tasks as assigned by supervisor.

Quote Of The Day

Donnie: I am too Turkish!
Me: Oh yeah? What's the capital of Turkey?
Donnie: That's easy. Thanksgiving!

For Best Lucky Wash, Use Mr. Sparkle

Another hilarious Engrish lesson from Fark:

Photographstore you this advertisement English, then you are star Fark now!

Think Globally, Eat Locally

It's three and a half weeks until the end of the school year, a hardly insignificant time period when one teaches and lives at a prep school. As graduation nears the pomp and circumstance grows to a feverish pitch, cubing overandabove the usual bustle of the ordinary 70-hour residential workweek. To do lists get longer each day; weekends and evenings fill like Mondays. To turn a phrase presidential, the pie grows higher -- only this pie isn't the fat economic goodie Bush envisions, it's the horrible, horrible soylent green kind, all sticky with people and workplace stress.

Mostly, we've been eating in the dining hall, both to save money and because the meetings and tutoring sessions which fill our evenings are always planned around dining hall hours -- a necessity, most students having neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to procure their own food. But tonight we found ourselves uncommonly free by 4:00, wallets still mostly flush from the sale of the hardly respectable, sadly uninspectable bed-in-the-back camper van and the arrival of a startlingly large check from the IRS. Partially a celebration of free time in the midst of chaos and mandates, and partially a desperate attempt to flee the pace-of-life for a few, we ended up with the baby at The People's Pint, a local microbrewpub.

Although downtown Greenfield, home of "The Pint," isn't exactly a sprawling mecca of health conscious neohippies, its downtown area, centered around a small intersection park complete with cannon and christmas creche, has a nice cozy feel to it; The Pint is joined on the street by a Cooperative grocery store, a new funkycouch cafe, a verysolid record-and-CD store and a huge clothing-and-crystal store with the best in hemp and valour, and this local hangout fits right in. Oak and open, counterculture trancejazz emanates from above the fastmoving ceiling fans. A bright BreadandPuppet paper mache sun grins cheekily from the far wall, and two smaller goatish purple beasts leer at you over the bar.

Ultimately, The Peoples Pint is what would happen if a brewpub grew up around a farmer's market. The food is fresh and local, what the best of bar food must have been like in an older utopian gourmet's vision: simple handmade sausages stuffed in localcheese quesadillas, fat burritos with real grilled sirloin, pulled pork sandwiches in season. Pickled eggs and a rough bread and coarse cheese platter are available at the bar, along with peanuts boiled in their now-dusty-grey shells. The menu is written in stylized chalk on a series of chalkboards that cover the back wall of the ample bar.

And the beers! Lined up on the bar waiting for the waitresses they look like an earth-toned rainbow, the sun shining through them from behind as it sets. Their descriptions use colorful adjectives only the true beerpub fanatic truly understands: chocolate, hoppy, wit. For fifty cents you can get a cherry in your beer, an intriguing novelty I've yet to try. I had something amber tonight, rich and malty with a hint of bitter IPA bite to it; I cannot remember its name, but I'll always remember its glow.

We left reluctantly, Willow's no-sauce ziti and plain grilled chicken in a take-out box for a morning stroller snack. In three and a half weeks we'll have these wide open spaces practically all to ourselves, save for our fellow resident faculty, sparse and reclusive families and bachelors at the ends of their own finally-empty dormitories. We'll have fried chicken and supermarket potato salad and lemonade picnics on the shaded lawn, under the maple tree; maybe this year we'll get a real gas grill, and sit on a blanket outside with the dog and the cat and the baby blowing soap bubbles at each other. Here's a pic our school webmaster Craig took of us on the lawn last week on a warm day, dreaming of summer to come.

Tiny Planet; Big Red Sun

According to a Reuters press release, The planet Mercury will pass between Earth and the sun this Wednesday in a rare astronomic event that occurs only a dozen times in a century.

Of course, Mercury is too small to see with the naked eye, and looking directly at the sun will burn your retinas to a crisp. However, if for some reason your life is so entirely meaningless that you'd like to see tiny, pixelated, slow-to-refresh images of a small, perfectly round, black dot slowly moving across the surface of a digitized sun, NASA will broadcast the event online.

Or, if you are willing to forego the whole see-it-online thing, you could just hold your breath until you're about to pass out and then look up reallyquick. It looks about the same, and it even works inside.

We're Not Making Hay

It's been a meta-day, full of self-referent and navel-gazing: a Media Literacy class on hypertext which used hypertexts about hypertext to discuss hypertextuality for an upcoming hypertext assignment on the digital individual; a long evening faculty meeting at which the Northfield Mount Hermon school faculty voted to approve four new requirements -- a health course, a writing course, a history course, and a 1-term competitive sports requirement -- for next year's 9th graders, and then heard a mostlyfiscal report on the state of the school from the Head. Throughout, a surprising discussion with Darcie and the faculty housing director about a slight possibility for a housing upgrade next year, about which I will report more if and when something actually comes of it. Basically, I spent all my time today thinking about what I do and how, rather than doing, or even just thinking about what I am supposed to do, if you catch my redundancy.

The double-layered life continued into the evening and tonight's radio show, where, due to a very exciting buying spree this weekend in Harvard Square, I played much new music, mostly covers (metamusic?), including several XTC covers from an entire album of the same. I was too busy to get coffee before the show, but we said so on-air and were rewarded by a fellow faculty member tapping at the window with two big ol' cups of joe a few minutes later -- seems he was driving home and heard our plight. Playlist follows; as always, cover songs are starred, and anyone who can correctly identify more than half of the original artists wins, oh, I dunno, a free plug and a cup of coffee.

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
Barenaked Ladies -- Hello City
*The Verve Pipe -- Wake Up
Juliana Hatfield -- Slow Motion
Eddie From Ohio -- Let's Get Mesolithic
*Chris Ardoin and Double Clutchin' -- Your Love Keeps Lifting Me (Higher and Higher)
Lizzie West -- Sometime
Keller Williams -- Best Feeling
*Freedy Johnston -- Earn Enough For Us
*Cry, Cry, Cry -- Fall On Me
*The Dixie Chicks -- Landslide
Trey Anastasio -- At The Gazebo
Salamander Crossing -- Trip Me Up
*Skavoovie and the Epitones -- Bli-Blip
Robert Randolph and the Family Band -- The March
*Sarah McLachlan -- Dear God
*Timbuk 3 -- Born To Be Wild
Doug Matsch -- Dream
Norah Jones -- Turn Me On
Patty Larkin -- Different World
*Maura O'Connell -- Crazy Love
Great Big Sea -- Ordinary Day
*Brooks Williams -- May You Never
*C.J. Chenier -- Falling Up
Alison Krauss -- Forget About It
Warren Zevon -- Don't Let Us Get Sick

Monday Mosh

There's a quizlet for almost every day of the week, near as I can tell: the Thursday Three, the Friday Five, the Saturday Six, and more. They're useful for some, I suppose, as a generative exercise, and I read a few each week, although I've never really taken to them enough to try my own.

Note, though, that these tend to cluster around the end of the week, as things wind down. Mondays being Mondays, there's no equivalent quizlet to start the week off. And maybe there shouldn't be. But Mondays still being Mondays, we need something, I think, to drag the dredge up, to overspill the brain. So I propose we start a meme, just you and I and all our friends and all their friends. We'll call it...

Monday Mosh

All you have to do is, every Monday, put on some music -- nice, loud, dancing music -- on near the computer, and then, in the privacy of your own home, with a partner or alone, thrash around the room to it. Then, post the following three things in your blog under the title Monday Mosh:

1. What song did you mosh to?
2. What did you step on or bump into? (bonus points will be awarded for breakage)
3. Why did you stop?

That's it. No website or cool graphics necessary, just a nice low-stakes way to start the week with a bang. Here's mine for today:

1. Pocket Full of Kryptonite, Spin Doctors.
2. The ottoman, the baby's play enclosure. No breakage today.
3. Hurt knee on baby play enclosure (it's made of metal), woke up baby.

When you've done your Monday Mosh, post your blog address in the comments below, so we can at least offer sympathy for any broken bones or horrible music choices.

Ready? Go.

But Can It Play Guitar, Too?

Twice in the last two days, someone has found their way here via a Yahoo search for the keywords computerize traffic sings.

Surely a typo -- it's easy to imagine someone searching for computerized traffic signs, after all, although the word "computerize" is a bit unusual -- but heck, if I could harness the world's search engines to make poetry from this sort of stuff...well, according to a recent opinion piece in Newsweek proclaiming poetry dead I'd still be broke, but I might be even happier than I am right now, remembering the soft sigh of traffic singing in the distance through the open apartment window on a hot Somerville summer night.

I love rural life, and maybe everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, but every once in a while, I miss the traffic singing.

No More Munchies

Anti-drug protesters pelted pro-marijuana protesters with eggs and tomatoes at Budapest's first pro-drug rally and rock concert earlier today; although the food-throwing caused the rally to end early, low-blood-pressure stoners thankful for the Western omelets.

Old Man Down

NH landmark Old Man of the Mountain before and after the fall.

Living less than ten miles from the NH border, one sees the familiar outline everywhere. On road signs and license plates, postcards and flags since as long as anyone can remember, his rocky visage has been a useful symbol for the fierce, craggy independent spirit which gave rise to a state willing to actually use "Live Free or Die" as their motto.

And then yesterday, Franconia Notch park rangers looked up after several days of fog to see a crumbled rockface where once the proud lines and beaked nose of the Old Man of the Mountain once stood.

The Old Man will surely live on for a while through its ubiquitous iconography. ''The Great Stone Face'' immortalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne was surely not an unknown quanitity. But unlike the images on other state quarters -- like the Massachusetts Minuteman, or Helen Keller on the back of the Alabama Quarter -- the Old Man was not taught in history books, and an icon with no referent cannot last forever. New Hampshire will probably keep his image around for a while out of loyalty and rememberance, but one day something new will arise, and people will be ready to move on. Road signs will wear out and get replaced; license plates, too. Imagine if Old Faithful stopped spouting one day: how long until it faded from the cultural memory -- ten, twenty years? One day, the NH quarter will go out of circulation, and the Old Man of the Mountain will become but a historical footnote, a once-proud national landmark.

We'll miss you, old man. Somehow, The Old Pile of Rocks of the Mountain doesn't have the same ring to it.