So just one story. Today there was a confusing orientation procedure in which we were secretly doing a graph theory problem. The point is that my smallest student had his hobbies mangled, at which he insisted, "But I have two hobbies!!!!" I replied, "One is enough for anyone."

So it's the end of the summer, and I am most tired. Tomorrow is the start of orientation week, which is easy money, but still back into the flow. It's been a long weekend, and Wifey came over for what will probably be the last time this summer, amid videogames and humid sweat and a different set of restaurants. It's exciting to be going back, so long as I manage to fall asleep tonight, somehow.

So I've missed a few days, and it's been a blur, with this commute to Brooklyn I've been sleeping like a baby but I just don't want to get up and schlep all the way out there even in my Diesel shirt made in Italy. But it's been good working with these old buddies, and between the textbook and the redesigned classroom practices, I really do feel like next year will be a great year, which will really make me as a teacher.

It was satisfying tonight to have scored so many men off of Sensei, though his kamae was strange and too stiff today, and he wasn't controlling the center, so I don't know what all of that means. I know I'm too new to kendo to really do anything about it, but I wonder how it can shape some of my classroom practices. It's the sort of thing also where I just need to give in and join the gym at school so that I can continue my weight-training program. It's nice also to have cut back some of my caloric intake to a mostly-chicken-curry diet with lunches which I have also tried to reduce in size. So it's some amount of progress, though of course I should get a lot more serious in general. School doesn't make for good eating habits.

So it's official. Wifey just drew blood. The gash is 3 inches long.

So yesterday was one of those hot-practice (where Blackhead sensei bid us farewell, having finally achieved his life-long dream to live in Germany (a little scary)), heat-headache Sundays in which I just crawled into bed after getting home, watched PBS cooking shows with wifey, and read wikipedia until the computer was taken away from me.

Today, meanwhile, marks the return of the schoolyear, more or less, as it's another weeklong workshop which is to be followed by a weeklong orientation, after which it's right back into the grind again. No more voluntary office visits, though office-lingerings are still on the table, as they always were before, I suppose.

So Tom Wilkinson appears to be in every movie imaginable, which actually is a great thing now that he's not stealing Chinese treasures from the museum. Meanwhile, Bobby Lee might be my new hero.

So Red Eye is great, especially if you've ever had a conversation in which you just wanted to headbutt your interlocutor into unconsciousness without warning in a crowded public setting.

So somehow it feels as if this entire month has just zoomed away into a big poof of smoke and moderate productivity.

My dream last night consisted of my persistent attempts to burn a mouse, which is odd, admittedly, but it was thought of as a cremation and for sanitary purposes. The problem was that as much oil (linseed oil from shinai polishing??) as I was pouring, and as much paper as I was wrapping the little bugger in, it just wouldn't do any more than singe. Annoying, eh?

So the problem with working out more and eating less is that you end up hungry. I don't know when I made the slide back into sugared drinks, though, as somehow Gatorade is really in principle just like flat coke with salt and shit. But somehow that's ok now because I'm "doing sports" even though my sweat is not the color of the drink I'm drinking, which would be actually rather disturbing, come to think of it. It's also one of those psychological things in terms of what I'm willing to shell out cash for--a financial blindspot like comics used to be. Of course, I've never seen Shrimp Sensei drink anything, though Mountainshape Sensei does enjoy a nice cold beer after each practice, but I suppose that's different.

So it's nice to get back into the entire publishing world, if only at an arm's-length, to think about all of those other little options that we could have thought about and exercised back with the Magazine in college, something I have barely thought about the three years since I left it all behind, which now somehow seems like bujii-nonsense, but of course back then it was the sort of nonsense that makes sense. Meanwhile, I wonder whether it would be easier to avoid taxes, or to incorporate, or what, given that it'll be a good two years before I can hope to see any real returns. Lots of coil-binding manually ahead for me, I think.

So I feel a nice momentum building here. I'm actually excited that it's almost September and that I've been working like a maniac, finally finishing after twelve drafts the article I've been working on--even though Wifey claims that direction and productivity and work don't define who I am, which is his opinion, I suppose, as that prevents him from being impredicative.

So tomorrow I go back to proctor, which is pretty easy, but which does mean I'll need to get up early again. It's been a good summer, though I guess I haven't been to practice as often as I would have liked, in that I greatly look forward to going into the office and tapping away for a day, eating my lunch special lunch with bad rice and great beans, drinking all the free water and pissing like a racehorse. It's great fun, like a real job, only people, albeit the semi-literate and lazy, actually go and read what I write, which is a good feeling in its own way.

Meanwhile, I've been formulating a business plan for when my textbook is finally ready. Most of the money you pay for a textbooks goes to The Man, by which I mean Whitey. There just aren't that many publishing houses out there. Now it seems to me that the textbook market is an iron rice-bowl if I've ever seen one--you have a guaranteed audience, public funds to spend on it, and the need for new editions these days with every change of administration & standards or whatnot. Ultimately, my goal is one of dissemination: to put my book in front of as many students and teachers as possible. But I also believe that texts are meant to be interacted with--no college student worth her salt would ever leave a page un-highlighted. And of course we must constantly improve and innovate with our texts, so no text should last more than a few years or a feedback cycle. And the entire textbook-in-exercises idea of course requires this type of graphic interaction with the text means that textbooks, which a student should keep as a record of her growing understanding as well, should be more like workbooks are today. And this lowers costs substantially--it makes the books retail for closer to $4 a piece, which means you could supply the entire city for less than half a million dollars, which is a hell of a lot less than the $50 million Math A cost NYC taxpayers. So I can only hope to clear a dollar a book. Which isn't an Alric-level salary, but it'll do.

So when Wifey and I embarked on our quest to limit our gustatory expenditures to but a fifth per diem, we found that it was pouring, pouring so badly that the Steinway street festival was rained-out, many of the tents lowered to half-staff to prevent the torrential splashage, so that only feets and the wet bottoms of peasant skirts could be seen, even the barbecue cage for country steak a la llanera, though we did make it to the ill-sitting grease of taco-bell.

So I have been having this recurring dream in which my parents are showing up too early to move me away since it's summer. It's funny because in the background now there's public television's plugging of Joseph Campbell Zombie, and I keep on hearing them talking about the "fairyboat" to Nirvana.

So this news is somewhat exciting--I'm currently in negotiations for my textbook to be adopted by a colleague of mine out in Canarsie. This is exciting, as it's the first time that my methods will be exported wholesale out of my classroom, and by a friend so that I'll have a good sense of how it actually goes, if it actually works in a context beyond my own charisma. Or whatever it is that I have. Unfortunately, there is to be no and can be no at this point remuneration. But I'll just chalk that up to development time. And it won't be easy to turn a profit given my highly-disposable, open-source, at-cost +$1, type of publishing philosophy. Time to call up Crody again and call in some of my old contacts in the non-profit publishing industry (well, only insofar as the entire literary publishing industry runs in the red).

So I think this entire recent run-up is all overblown, so i don't know what else to do at this point, other than to sit tight and wait. Which is fine, because I've been deeply engaged with other things, including closing out at least one of my major projects for the summer, a cute little linear algebra textbook. The other stuff should fall pretty soon, and my NCTM work feels like it's shaping up rather well, even if my practice skills don't quite work the way that they should.

I talking to Psychamyke who has been planning his classroom policies for the fall, which are a lot more fascist and organized than i could ever dream up, except I've been thinking too about bringing reiho to the classroom--if only my room was big enough to allow for sonkyo

So it's hard to know whether to put some cash in CDs or wait a little while for rates to go even higher up, somehow. But all of this rests on the extent to which I want to actually commmit and buy an apartment next summer, which seems like something of a stretch still and hardly worth it in terms of actual maintenance issues again.

The other thing is I've been so wrapped up in my mathematical crusades (which probably is not the best word out there), that I have been feeling increasingly envious of those who have been doing nominally better than I have, whatever that means. It's the growing pains again of someone who's been doing this long enough to either be deft or numb.

Speaking of numb, it's always a bad idea to miss a week of practice, see too many stains on the inside of your men, but then nonetheless proceed to tie it too tight. Those headaches are hard to bear, especially when you go up against a prancing but deadly Sensei. Not much of this practice time left, and I should really go jogging on occasion again. That takes a different kind of will.

So I really do find briefing.com cute--only they could talk about how 10-years are dancing around 4.4%, and how crude is flirting with 64. I hope Alric is taking notes.

So I've got this snazzy new GC computer account with a U: drive to put my stuffs, and Joephet is logged in as me next to me, and I'm trying to figure out whether or not to actually start on the other texts I'm writing this summer or whether just to focus on this scale-model stuff. But what I'm really trying to figure out now is now that I'm no longer in the center-aisle of catalog computers which are doubling as all-purpose Korean kiosks, how exactly the fluorescent lights in this area work--I've been seeing them turn ona nd off periodically, and I wonder whether that's just because they're defective or whether it's actually because they are being rotated to save on energy and prevent overheating. I should google that.

So my benchmarks are falling--on those Saturday drives in my youth in Miami, I remember once we'd clear the turn off of Sixth Avenue onto 163rd Street, toward the eponymous 163rd Street Mall, I remember thinking as a 10-year-old on my impending mortality. To stave off such thoughts, I said, well I can wait to worry about such things until the cast members of the Original Series of Star Trek start to die off, or at least until Peter Jennings dies. And so now I should be a good deal more morbid, I'm afraid.

So I says to lostin I says--

drewBERTHu (9:11:59 PM): even though the fucking national teacher of the year
drewBERTHu (9:12:04 PM): the fucking national teacher of the year
drewBERTHu (9:12:19 PM): teaches his black kids by taking sugar cookies and fucking icing the edges with green food coloring
drewBERTHu (9:12:23 PM): this is the fucking circumference
drewBERTHu (9:12:34 PM): he wouldn't get away with teaching white kids like that, that's all i'll say
lostinyee (9:14:08 PM): Hahahaha
lostinyee (9:14:58 PM): Coloring sugar cookies is what the "white man's burden" amounts to these days?
drewBERTHu (9:15:21 PM): lol
drewBERTHu (9:15:31 PM): well, they really should be chocolate cookies, right?
drewBERTHu (9:15:35 PM): or black-and-white

So if there's one other thing I've learned from all this Flushing-bound work this summer, it's that maybe, just maybe, there's hope for the young--it's too late for me, too short and too young amidst these hairy barbarians, the brainiac who took up sports less than a year ago, with no chinky peers against whom to compete but also breathe a sigh of relief that someone else can take up part of the yellow man's burden which is to do better than the white man but not actually outdo him--who bounce basketballs, who wear cut-off sleeves though straight, who rap, who are noisy, who read Harry Potter, who kibitz, who do not read on the train, who are happy to hang out with all Asians, but also all not.

So I love the entire rushing from one Chinaplace to another, but somehow it'll be good come Friday when I can just sit around and hang out rather than trying to go home to lift before finally settling in to wait for Wifey to cook his secret dinner which I'm not allowed to see, but he's yet to ever disappoint, with his cooking at least. I will, however, miss the steamed meat buns that come from under the smelly smelly LIRR bridge, fresh from the steamer.

Unfortunately, we Asians are not getting along so well with each other, or so it seems, what with the Nips and Chinks at each others' throats. I guess I haven't noticed, what with all of this kendo training. That, and the South Koreans have finally cloned a dog. No further comment.

So I have fallen off the horse again, which means that you've all been missing out on great things like Asianboi roundup and of course vignettes such as these:

[ATM lobby chamber]
Guy: I don't get that. Did you see that?
Girl: What?
Guy: On the screen, they write "ingles".
Girl: So?
Guy: Well, I don't understand why they would do that.
Girl: So that people can know that it's English.
Guy: But if you speak Spanish and can read English, why do you need to know it's "ingles"?
Girl: But they translated 'Spanish' into Spanish too.
Guy: That's exactly my point--I don't need to know the other option, just the one I can read.
Girl: It's not a big deal.
Guy: I just don't understand who their audience is, is all.

So several subway stories:

Friday's inspection of my bag produced no contraband, as the cops didn't notice I was carrying around a revolutionary way of teaching all of algebra.

A charming and refreshingly Asian though distressingly bepimpled Asian was doing some loud country-music harmonica-guitar act wowed most of the car, and I was going around collecting tips, but the battery seller had nothing to give but some batteries.

Apparently those long oversized plain T-shirts are the for use of faciliating flashing. This much I've learned.