So tomorrow is an admin's observation which hopefully will go better than the previous one, which was marked mostly be negative classroom management comments, but this unit is certainly rather more exciting enough I hope. It's amazing the chaos I often need to deal with, the waning of my longer-range ambitions, and the guerilla warfare I need to constantly wage. I can be such an anxious pig most of the time--tonight I finished 7/8 of an entire Uno's deepdish pizza, the large kind which serves 2-3. So much for aerobic exercise and my training program. It's hard, in kendo as in anything else, to work without short-term goals, in-time-horizon demands, and other things pressing.

So it's time again

Asianboi roundup

Alric hasn't had a contributor's note in ages.

Brother has nothing but potential these days.

Lostin has chucked his fone, but not o'erthrown his folks.

Rob Chin has at least been trying.

Wifey still squeals in delight.



Unfortunate headline of the day (courtesy of the New York Times): Feeding Tube Inserted Through Pope's Nose. I suppose that's only funny if you're fond of and familiar with roasting ducks.

So I lost a post yesterday thanks to Blogger's poopiness. Nothing much has changed--I'm not very happy at work, and practice today was deeply exhausting--hot and humid and making very little real and tangible progress that I could really see or feel. I feel like retiring--I really need a vacation from all this, not more stress and more work. So I dunno. I should also go to bed early--staying up late, even if it's with Wifey, hardly helps the load. My blogguery has also fallen off--thank goodness there's no CUNY classes this week, or I'd surely explode.

So it's back to my school with my lazy ass tomorrow--it's a vacation that seemed longer at the beginning than it does now, somehow--I'm even approaching this blogging nonsense as an afterthought.

Last night, at least, was fun, insofar as it meant hanging out in the village in lieu of kendo with Wifey and his Guamanian chums with a cameo by Rob Chin who was so booze-emboldened that he offered some bum some pommes frittes. Beyond that, today's practice was met by a simple piece of advice from a godan sensei, just to "more practice"--somehow that seems necessary as well--I've been skipping freely of late, for no good reason.

Well, we have a new unit soon starting out--solid geometry, and lots of building and modeling, and exciting things like that--a week off from classes, at least--I prefer to come home after work, and this year I'm actually out more at night than I used to be, a year ago... It's odd, though, how close we are to June without really feeling it.

But aside from new-unit jitters, I'm feeling the normal lethargy and blah-ness. So it goes.

So I was quite relieved when work ended on Thursday, as I again feel overwhelmed--I don't know what it is about this year that enervates me more than the previous years, perhaps again this settling-in-ness and a having to face up to one's competence or lack thereof--it's easy to flit from one task to another, but to really sit down and realize that one might have a rank or a tier, and that it's going to stick, is something much harder.

My brother, meanwhile, has only now started out on this road, and it's unclear whta that will mean for him, as he's not got his heart in it, while at the same time, I'm unsure how this will change my domestic situation.

With Wifey Gone to Texas, I find myself revisiting all the loci of my former bachelorhood, though I suppose that I didn't used to do kendo, and that I couldn't always rely on Rob Chin around the corner either. And this has meant in large part digging deep into my comics collection again, a collection which is surprisingly deep in its own way, even though I stopped seriously some indeterminate date a year ago, just about when my Wifey expenses began ascending. In retrospect, it's both easy and hard to think about why I left off--such an expense and at the same time such quality secreted here and there. It's easy to get lost in it all.

So I really oughtn't make a habit of skipping practice like this, but given how Wifey will be gone for a handful of days, I figured he might as well enjoy some Thai food before heading off to the wilds of Tejas. It's bad, but I think a break will let me reorient and return with a greater intensity, even though it's pretty clear that there will be interruptions galore in April due to school obligations as well as travel plans. I have been instead thoroughly unsuccessful at getting anything done in terms of this paper draft due tomorrow and will likely just half give up and wake up around four or five tomorrow morningn to finish it off--more time to cuddle with Wifey tonight.

Beyond that, I missed probably one of the better days to buy before IRA-stopping time April 15th today, as I was juggling eighteen different things. It's nice to have the kids go and make posters once in a while, even though they learn very little mathematics by doing so. The amount of whiteout they use is simply copious. And on markered-up posters, too. As Wifey points out, I think too much about these things, especially since my time-horizon should be years and years off, but then again, I'm feeling the tug of co-op purchase and ownership again, somehow. I don't know quite what to do about all that, though.

No, life is pretty good all in all, and it's just a short hop and skip away to summer again, which I think will have the freedom of last summer but hopefully also less of the vague anxiety.

So I am sad to say that it is confirmed that my brother has no prospects left to him on the grad school front, and that this means that the pressure is further on me to some extent as I have been just hanging out and not moving forward very quickly in terms of my more advanced degrees.

I guess I'm also more frustrating in talking to Mentor about the current situation in the math "department" as regards a four-year curriculum, program, and philosophy. It's an uphill struggle as my only reliable ally is retired, and the other is too dissipated to effectively argue for policy or to implement actually deep and successful math projects. I'm beginning to feel as if a strong traditional program might actually teach more than a badly organized but progressive one. I say all this as I'm procrastinating as far as this paper goes, but then again, I don't need to get into grad school again--here's to safety schools and checks that don't bounce.

Wifey, incidentally, is much nicer to me when he's less stressed and on vacation. We should probably start working out together, as all this kendo is none too good for my muscle tone and general bulk. I know, I know, Skaren, the shovel awaits...

So I should feel a little more guilty for having skipped kendo today, especially since I was supposed to have done that in order to work on this paper thing, but instead I just ended up snoozing with Wifey until nearly five in the afternoon, but then again, I probalby needed it as I've been on a depletion cycle, and working on Saturdays is great for the pocketbook but deeply draining in other ways. I've made some extra plodding progress today, and will probably be in the right place eventually.

This is precious... I just heard on the news that there's this "Blue Lagoon" clinic someplace in Jersey which is actually some sort of brothel. Their front was a "colon hydrotherapy center", and they were suspicious because only men went in, through the backdoor. That's only slightly paraphrased. There's a reason why I stopped reading local news.

This has been a weird March--most times Marches are terrible--the Long March of four or more weeks without any sort of break at all and the kids going crazy because the weather is getting better and sunnier and they are getting worser and hornier and so on, but this time around so far it's been very jumpy, in that I've yet to really teach a full week of classes (or so it feels, I guess)--there has always been some interruption, and this next week is a short one, thanks to Jesus. So I'm rather off-balance but grateful, even though there will be plenty of work ahead this week and I will be abandoned by Wifey who will be gone to texas, and not in the old-school Preacher sort of way.

Time to get back into the Maoist history. Maybe Trotsky is a better model. Just not George Washington, but then again, I've never really looked into him, not since first grade, at least.

So to quote America's Next Top Model, "She's got her eye coming out of one side of her head... it's like she's an antelope!"

I can't beat that.

So leaving work yesterday to go to this meeting was humbling and not a total trainwreck on the homefront, insofar as the kids got some work done, and actually purported to miss me upon my return. That's a lie, and they just wanted to go back to the computer lab, but the energy was pretty good, even if the day seemed super-long.

It's just sad--I've developed an adequate working relationship with this one math teacher, who's well on in years and seniority and deeply absent-minded, which has been a fruitful collaboration in that she's never met an idea that she hasn't liked, but of course the problem is that she's light on the followthrough and as much as I can sell a mathematically valid and rich approach to her, she'll fail to adopt it. It's this which I find so defeating in terms of my future program--even the willing pupils stubbornly resist, unswayed by any sort of mathematical argument--the Euclidean approach to the Pythagorean theorem absolutely fails to capture the point and be a valid proof for students. How many proofs will students ever see? There's some Emerson or Thoreau quote about this.

Anyway, it's foolishly still quite some time before I'm off with Wifey to go see the Ring Two. How good could that be?

So I have been negligent, but increasingly a little bit more confident, as I look around at what the other teachers are doing and I worry further about what I am actually managing to accomplish with my students and classes--I'm not half bad, somehow, adapting to the entire ELL thing without too much of an hitch, except for all the kids who still don't get it--I just need to reorient, repatient, and learn the truer lessons of kendo without thinking too much about kendo itself. If that makes sense. I do tend to be too hard on myself in most things, a sort of reflexive self-critical defense-strategy I picked up as a kid with unpleasable parents, somehow. Self-deprecating still better than self-defecating. No, it's troubling, this career thing, as I consider where my brother stands in terms of his entry into this profession, how I'm in this for the long term, and how I'm outearned by bujii nonsense folk. But I do feel old, it's at the point where my chronological age still surprises, while I have told every false age to my kids from 28 to 42. All this is against the backdrop of retirement--that somehow is my time-horizon, though I suppose that this occupation of mine, or some less tactical variant, is my life--there is no turning back now, and this is scary, as my parents are fond of pointing out how easily I retire from things--from comicking at 21, literary magazinery at 21, public speaking at 16, and girls at 12. Why not end up giving up teaching? Or, even more recently, kendo? It's easier to reach some nominal level of competence, the trophy level. It's harder to stick with something at the risk of long-term mediocrity. It's said that you should hold a stock for at least three years if it's worth buying. I've done few things for that long, and this here now the end of this schoolyear, is precisely such a turning time.

Hrmm.. I wonder if I can turn that in for my self-evaluation.

So I am a horrible racist chink of a teacher--I refused to let a Latino student who was feeling really sick go to the bathroom, and as a result he vomitted all over himself and now is in the hospital on an IV, and his dad called is threatening to sue. Or so, rather, the student told his father, as this is rather difficult for me to do given that, well, I didn't have his class today, so it would be impossible for me to inflict my racist shit. Hrmmmm.... it's still troubling, though, that I would come up so specifically in his story. We'll see what happens.

Oh, yes, on a worse note, I am terrible, because today is the first time I have ever forgotten pi day. Oh, well.

Ahora, en español:

Pues, soy un profesor racista y chino--no permité un estudiante Latino mio quien se sintió muy malo ir al baño, y entonces se vomitó y ahora está en el hospital con un IV, y su padre llamó y esta amenazando a demandar. O, sin embargo, esto es lo que mi estudiante le dijo a su papá, porque esto es poquito dificíl para mi para hacer, porque hoy no tengo su clase, y entonces sería imposible.

So today has been solidly unproductive, as I feel as if I should be trading more. Or something... I can see how easily Alric got sucked into this constant calculation, even as I'm amused that he's only now discovering the Magnetic Fields. But then again music is one of those things that I have absolutely no insight into or appreciation for. But then again, I don't feel bad as my bond fund has exactly 1/100 of the expense charges which Alric's hedge fund does. That's just a cavernous gap.

I find my dedication to kendo a little wavery these days, but that's probably the loomingness of this paper that's due in a couple Wednesdays. I hate papers, and always wait too long to write them, but they also tend to turn out just fine--this has been such a fast-moving March, and each week has had its separate interruption, blissfully enough. I'm just too old at this job, I've seen it all before, and it's all been done before, it feels...

So I'm told that my grammar is too poor for admission into graduate programs, while I deceive inveigle obfuscate too much--but in any case, I've skipped practice tonight after realizing I was too exhausted to shlep out and back and again--easier to ride the ferry with my kiddies to Staten Island and right back again--spunky Central South Asians, uncommunicative Central Americans, and puzzled Chinese.

So Sensei was on today as he usually is when there are as many beginners as there were today--half the dojo, almost. Though his closing comments about paying federation dues were cryptic--"This is something you have to do for yourself, like going to the bathroom. I cannot go for you. So you must make sure to do it promptly and accurately every time."

So it's scary to think of it, but it's been essentially four months since I've made any updates at the sister blog I made for my would-be November novel. It's sad. I also miss The Nation somewhat, ever since they stopped delivering sometimes in August when my mail stopped and I missed the 2004 lows. I think too much about money these days--I have become addicated to Morningstar's Classroom, as unprogressive and unconstructivist and multiple-choice as it may be. I couldn't resist the lure of sleeping over at Wifey's tonight, hence the extra-post. We'll finally getting enough sleep--it makes a big difference.

So in being reunited with my Bulgarian math coach and working on a problem, I have discovered this tidbit--currently Pepsi offers a contest where 1 in 3 bottles win--now one might naively expect that this would only require you to buy 3 bottles to win, but of course if you buy 3 bottles your probability of winning is only 1-(2/3)^3, or 21/27, roughly about 70%. What happens if this continues? When will buying n bottles not be enough? The answer, naturally, is the limit of 1-[(n-1)/n)]^n, which is of course 1-1/e, which may or may not have something to do with our derangements. So I guess you could say in this case your naivest intuition is still about 60% correct.

More disturbingly, one of my contacts did rip, apparently in my eye, today, so that was a little painful and hopefully none too scratchy, but I'm committed to them, even if it means an inconvenient detour tomorrow between school and kendo.

So by mistake today I stole my motodachi's kakari-geiko, and it felt pretty good--not the stealing, but the double-session and the breathlessness.

It's too bad that things at work are headed south as quickly as they are currently--I really need to get a grip as far as those things go, but I find myself short-tempered these days, and I don't know what else to do about it.

So I need to learn not to open pdfs, but I keep on trying, and so I lost a whiney post about how I can't ever seem to have a good Monday, and how my teaching has been half-assed and I've been more worried about my IRA than my students, or something lame like that. So I guess this is what I get for a weekend during which I did absolutely nothing productive except sign up for accounts that now live in the ether beyond my grasp.

What ever happened to my work ethic? Even in my comicking days I used to turn something out everyday, and now I am just letting myself get flabby--well, not entirely but I just feel much lazier, much more ready to coast, but then again this is probably just an overestimation--yesterday walking home from Rob Chin's by the NYU dorms I was struck by one of those periodic senses of loss of possibilities and freedom without real responsibility--something about those open windows on a busy city, of strangers whose significances flutter by--there's something much more romantic (or horned-up) about going to college in the city, but that's just probably my wistful thinking.

Enough dithering--to Wifey and bed.

So this has been a ridiculously laidback weekend in which I have accomplished nothing, nor tried, somehow, while exhausting all of the many comics I have purchased. It's tempting to get back into all that, while at the same time I must admit that I have made no real progress in terms of diversifying my paltry portfolio.

Wifey has discovered (for a second time) that one can buy naked icecream cones from Baskin Robbins for but a quarter a piece and that this leads to a bottomless ice cream cone which is deeply thigh-thickening.

So Beary has gotten rather out of control, as he keeps on commenting on how many day-of-the-week underwear is so often the wrong day of the week, somehow... That would be bad enough, but today he had the gall to comment as I was changing to my street clothes that I had lost a lot of weight--when I first came in, he says, I looked like a tomato! Shit... I mean, that's just ridiculous.

So being stranded in Manhattan for three hours after the GC shut down but before I could get back to Wifey's to take him to a French restaurant for dinner, I went off and started browsing comics again, and while there is precious little that holds my interest these days, I am reassured that there are still two or three things still satisfactory--the relaunch of Swamp Thing, for instance, did not appear too impressive to me when I first read it, but it does hold up rather well in trade form. Not Alan Moore, but then again neither was Rick Veitch, and that worked out fine too. Planetary is also in fine form, as bandits die of shame and quicksilver (heehee... gotta love Ellis).

The real tour de force though is still the relatively new series Walking Dead which is one of these black-and-white numbers, making it at times difficult to tell everyone apart, but which is much more human in its focus, what with all these zombies and all, and yet marked by such issues of abiding tragedy--it's customary for three or four characters to die of a sudden and for these sorrows to pile one atop another. There's also all manner of scary choices that need to be made and a much more ominous feeling throughout than anything in Dawn of the Dead, for instance. Maybe Shaun of the Dead, though. It's a good thing kendo trains you to strike the men.

So turnout was low today--just a high-strung overachieving Indian girl and a fastidious quiet Chinese boy--like my entire romantic history in high school, but that was good, as it meant that today was very lowkey and much more free-wheeling than one would normally think for a math class. Sadly I am rather unmotivated to get really that far ahead on my work, and it's too much of a pain to go in on Sundays, especially since tomorrow happens to be Wifey's bday.

I even had an update with Alric, which provided no real news or realizations really--we've both entered deeply stable periods of life, more or less.

So here are some fragments:

So it's almost homefree again this week--just another day before a trip and then another weekend, which will still be work, but it's that much closer to summer, even though I have been much more assertive in class--I haven't been as firm as I could be, mostly because I prefer to be a little lazier when I can afford it.

So it's official--I'm butch, at least to the Tagaloguey HIV counselor who asked if my girlfriend had also been tested recently.

And really I feel as if I have neglected Asianboi roundup

Alric, like Scorsese, is still waiting. But are his best films past?

Brother is looking to follow in my footsteps, but is not exactly a math pioneer.

Joephet is working much harder these days.

Lostin is diligently slogging away, just not blogging away.

Rob Chin is tired of my bullshit.

So it's March, which is scary--it's really a much crueler month than April and the fact that the Latina and Little Slavic posses decided not to show up today was actually much worse, as that just makes them that much more out of synch tomorrow and difficult on a day when I see a doubleheader of the same class, from Excel cladograms to four definitions of slope. But it was a good keiko today--it has been pretty good of late, but the main issue is that I need to modify my diet to take it up another notch. It's just odd the sharp pains in my right arm and elbow, and the circle of skin missing from the base of left pinky, which thankfully has not completely destroyed my tenouchi.