The final mile

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

Sigh, is it me or has Blackboard has lost its mind? I'm starting to dread the damned thing and fear it going down before I can post my final articles. I should state for the record that the cheap eats one is done and the final article is now in the "Ewww!! Stop pickin at it, you're making it worse!" stage of editing. Maybe it was the earthquake, perhaps it rattled their server or something. I was out riding my bike when the big one hit and didn't feel a thing. I'm demanding a do-over, this time I promise to be shelving precious china or building a model ship or something.

So I feel like this is just about the end of our run here so I should tie up a few loose ends or at least update some stories.

Let's see - oh yeah my tooth is doing fine according to the three week check up. The bull bone is being absorbed into my jaw, how badass is that? It cost me a lot of money unfortunately, and I have insurance, but what is a good upper front tooth worth? Back to eating corn ON the cob!

My exchange student, the man-from-Japan, has checked out. For the record he found America and Boston to be awesome but thought UMass was really boring and hard to get to. We really liked him and had a lot of good times just hanging out and sharing our cultures. The agency called up today and asked if we'd like to take a Chinese student taking a similar program at BU, we took a pass because of the school start insanity but we'll be back.

That awful double murder down the street turned out to be related another shooting in the nearby housing project. The gang suspected the kid in the apartment was cooperating with the DA about the first shooting so they shot him, his mom, and her boyfriend. That news brought me no comfort at all- these kids can't win.

I got the detailed results for my English MTEL back today, well, they're not really detailed, but they're as much as you can get. They only give you your score if you failed, how weird is that? Those two essays I wrote? Never to be seen again. I must have done better than I thought because I managed to earn the highest ranking in every section of test! As far as the state and UMB are concerned I couldn't have done any better. Reading those study guides and taking the practice test really worked.

My mom came up to for a week long visit from Florida and ended up having her gall bladder surgically removed! So she's spending three plus weeks with us recuperating. It's been a very unusual role reversal to be caring for my mother, and in a strange fate way, I think it has helped us to be a better family.

Life never pauses around here! Best of luck to everyone, thanks for all of your comments and great writing. See you around the three-dimensional Wheatley very soon.

MTEL Hell and Back

On Thursday an email arrived to inform me that on Friday another email would be sent to let me know if I had passed the MTEL English test or not, talk about building suspense! So the email appeared, and I was so afraid of what it might say that I shut myself in the bathroom to read it. You might have figured that if I'm writing about it I must have gotten good news, and you'd be right. Go me! MTEL stands for Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure, a set of required tests which anyone who wants to teach in the state must pass. All teachers must pass the Communications and Literacy exam and then a separate exam covering their area of expertise. In my case that meant I needed to pass the Secondary English exam.

The way it works is similar to the SAT exam or any other high stakes exam you may have taken. Each test costs roughly $100 in various fees and lasts four hours. I elected to take the Communications and Literacy exam in two four hour segments to improve my chances. I also chose to take what they call the "computer based exam" which means you show up at an office building downtown and take the test on a computer there. The paper based test is the same except you use a workbook and take the test in a high school with a bunch of other wanna-be teachers. I would recommend the computer model only because it allows for greater scheduling options and you don't have to worry about your sloppy handwriting being misunderstood.

I easily passed the C&L tests, as they are called, but I was much more worried about the English. The test prep book alone looked like the yellow pages for a midsize metropolis. It covers not only one's ability to write an essay, analyze and respond to text, punctuate and spell but also deep literary trivia a range of other areas related to working with students. This test can only be taken in a high school, in my case Quincy High on a Saturday in July. It's really quite a sight to see what five hundred nervous aspiring educators look like milling about in a cafeteria. Test takers are expected to be able to basically answer questions about every period in literature from Homer til the present and we're not talking broad questions either, we're talking about "Which of the following authors did not win a Nobel prize?" and "Which of the following best describes Hawthorne's view on man's mortal soul?" I ended up writing a two page essay about Jamaica Kincaid and her garden as a metaphor for man vs. nature and then another essay explaining how the Canterbury Tales is actually a quest story .

Normally when I finish a big exam I have a fairly good idea how I did, I either kicked ass or I bombed, but when I turned in my workbook with a minute to spare I just felt a pit in my stomach. For five weeks I brooded over my performance. I was trying to remember questions and looking up the answers, really screwed up on absurdist theater apparently, and so on. I started reading this big anthology from one of my courses to help me prepare for the inevitable retake, learning all there is to known about literature all over again! I was practically dancing yesterday when I found out I passed, not sure if it was triumph or relief that I would never have to endure the exam again, but damn, I was happy!

Good luck to anyone who hasn't taken their MTELs yet, don't waste another moment - register today! They suck and they can ruin your plans to student teach if you don't allow yourself time to retest in the event of failure. UMB offers a workshop which I took for $75, it only covers the C&L, you might not need it if you usually score well on reading comprehension and mechanics but it does offer peace of mind and practice.

A really good song for a sunny day

A Heart of Fiberglass - Living with Luiz Jimenez's Masterpieces

Hat tip to "Discovering UMB" for reminding me of this old journal entry. I too, am a fan of the eclectic outdoor artwork at UMB.

A rather famous sculpture faces the path at this point, one of those neo-classical heavy draping affairs. The title is fairly self explanatory, "Death Stays the Hand of the Sculptor",  so it goes. It makes me think of Luiz Jimenez, the fiberglass sculptor who gave UMB the "Ironworker" and the "Pastel Gator Clusterfuck"; he was killed when his piece de resistance: a giant evil blue horse with a giant evil blue penis, fell over and crushed him.* The sculpture was none the worse for wear and currently rears its doomsday hooves over the drop-off area at the Denver International Airport. "It is not my job to censor myself," Jimenez once said. "An artist's job is to constantly test the boundaries." So it goes.

*The reader may feel the mention of the giant evil blue penis is gratuitous - it is not. The reader might think the penis is in scale with the sculpture and its size goes without saying - it is not. The penis is exceptional in the generally tasteful genre of equestrian statuary. It probably goes without saying that an evil horse would have an evil penis but to omit evil from its description would allow for doubt and there should be no doubt here. The mention of color is purely to clear up any misconceptions that dog fanciers may have about the horse having a "pink thing" that appears when you come home after a long trip; it is in fact a pure cerulean mega-phallus. All of this penis talk may seem distasteful in the light of the sculptor's tragic demise - it is not. Remember who put it there in the first place. 

Bookshelf of Mistrust!

My conspiracy library, excluding the Kennedy stuff.

A Pillow of Milk

To make mushroom potatoes: first grab some good sized red bliss, look for ones that are more ball shaped than egg shaped. Hold the potato in your right hand and spear it with a metal tube about as a big around as nickel - such as a whisk handle missing the end cap. The tube should go in a little less than an inch. Next, take a dull paring knife and trace around the portion of the potato impaled on the tube. Pull the potato free from the tube carefully, revealing the lovely cream and crimson mushroom potato. Hold the potato in a non-reactive container filled with cold water. Save the cut away portions for staff meal; call them doughnut fries. To cook mushroom potatoes, preheat an oven to 375F, and place several empty sheetpans on the racks. Gently toss the potatoes in a bowl with chopped rosemary, garlic, olive oil, salt and white pepper to taste. Remove the preheated sheetpans from the oven and pour the oiled potatoes onto them. Return the sheetpans to the oven and cook for half an hour or until the potatoes are lightly browned. Serve two to three potatoes per plate.

The mushroom potatoes go with our chicken dishes, red meat dishes get tourne potatoes braised in veal stock. The filet and arctic char plate gets Dauphinoise potatoes and all seafood dishes get saffron lobster risotto, except lobster itself which always gets boiled potatoes and corn. I've cutting mushroom potatoes for what feels like hours. My fingers are wrinkly around the whisk and starch is caking my wrist. Behind me Tommy is marking off the Statler breasts, trying to keep the chicken fat flare ups under control so as not to impart a bad flavor. Fernando, our fearless leader, is over the steam kettle. He is reducing an unlikely combination of trimmings, stems and stock with generous pours from the box of Marsala Marsala. In the kettle next to him, neatly peeled baby carrots (stem on) are boiling in water laced with orange juice, soon I will fish them out and they will join the forest green haricot vert in a deep tub of ice water.

When I've finished my potatoes I leave the hot side of the kitchen to check up on Anthony, our intern from Job Corps. Anthony's NBA sized frame is bent at a right angle over a long table of gleaming white plates, each one sporting a tuft of mesclun. He carefully places a split teardrop tomato at each of the cardinal points. I tell him it looks good and he doesn't respond, once again white wires have mysteriously sprouted from his earlobes. This requires us to repeat our dialogue about why it's okay to listen to the radio but not okay to listen to an iPod and why even when you're working alone and everybody speaks Spanish anyways you still have to be able to hear - in case of a fire or something. Fernando appears in the doorway and reinforces my authority in a strange combination of English, Portuguese and Italian, he was raised in Lisbon and trained in Austria but if you ask him he is Italian, so it goes.

We did the same thing yesterday and afterwards I drank more than I should have but less than I needed. I've come up with a brute force hangover cure, not so much a cure really, more like a jumper cable. I go the pot sink and take off my chefs hat. I adjust the taps to cold and use the sprayer to rinse out my hair. I wrap my head in a dish towel and run off to the walk-in cooler where we store beverages and dairy products. I build myself a throne of milk crates and suck down a container of vanilla yogurt. I open a fresh gallon of orange juice and chug for dear life. Synapses in my brain come back like a slowly inflating air mattress, the sugary juice lubricates my joints. In one of the long crates that go into the milk dispenser (also known as the cow) there is a plump bag of perfect whiteness. I position the milk bladder behind my wet head and float away on a bucolic pond of 2%.

Wildwood

My "Out and About" piece got me thinking about some old family photographs I scanned a few years ago. We've always been a beach family. In the twenties my great-great grandmother owned several hotels in a town called Wildwood on New Jersey's Cape May. These photos come from the scrapbook of her daughter Maud, she's the curly haired girl featured in most of them, Granny is wearing her hair in bun. According to family gossip Maud was a devil-may-care flapper girl. Her skimpy swimsuits scandalized the family, as did the rumors that she flirted with sailors and girls alike. Maud lived a very colorful life and these photos are a but a portion of the pile we inherited.

Stopping for Death

Is it wrong to dwell only on murders that happen nearby? This weekend some form of the slaughter stopped down the street from me. I had to work an overnight at the hotel and then I missed my bus, so there I was traipsing down Washington in Roslindale on a rainy Sunday morning. I was focused on the woman in scrubs ahead of me, thinking how soaked she would be if she really was going to walk all the way to the VA. Then I saw the cruiser across the road and the cop in his slicker. I figured it was roadwork or maybe a gas leak. He didn't say anything to me or the nurse. Two ambulances were let past, no lights and in no hurry. Then there were more cops, black suited K-9 handlers and plainclothes guys in Red Sox shirts. Police vehicles of every type and big shot detective types with ties and cameras. There were so many of them it felt like a movie set, I kept waiting for them to tell me to leave but they paid me no mind. At first it was hard to tell what they were doing, the nearby Archdale projects generate a lot of crime. Then I caught her eye and she followed me with hers, a young, female black cop standing on a second floor porch with her arms folded. Behind her was the apartment where two people had been murdered.

I could tell you how my house is on a street where those kind of things don't happen or even imply that the victims were probably involved in some nefarious business but enough people are doing that already on the Herald comments section. Instead I just feel numb and angry about it. I have no understanding why it happened or how anyone could have stopped it.

http://www.universalhub.com/crime/more-violence-roslindale-three-shot-two-dead.html

Hosting an Exchange Student

My wife has this friend; she's a single mother with a big house and not a lot of income. This woman has been hosting exchange students for years, her house is sort of like a youth hostel at times. She has been pushing my wife to consider hosting a student and finally we agreed to give it a try. About a month ago I had a brief meeting with people from the agency that places students. They asked me questions about what our family likes to do, what hours we keep and how often we cook. Then they walked around taking photos of our house, I'm horrified to think that a picture of my bathroom is out there in cyberspace, but they wanted one. Shortly after that, they contacted us about a group of Japanese students needing an 18-day stay. The short duration stay appealed to us so we signed on to host one student. We're required to provide our student with an assortment of breakfast foods, a hot dinner, our guest room and a set of keys; in exchange we get something like $300 a week.

I was kind of relieved to find out we would be hosting a male student, because we only have one bathroom  here. Our student is a 20 year college kid named Saiya; he's friendly, soft spoken and thankfully, very independent. He's participating in a language immersion program at UMass Boston of all places. He's pretty busy with classes, field trips and social outings. I'm a little dismayed to see that they basically do everything as a big pack of Japanese kids speaking Japanese to each other, but they are having fun. He keeps bringing home girls from the program, which is fine. His method is to take them from UMB to the H&M at Downtown Crossing, Japanese girls apparently love that store. I've been trying to hip him to other shopping opportunities like Newbury St. or even the Copley Mall.

He has joined us for a couple of outings, once we went out for pizza and beer (they served him) and once we took him to a friend's backyard cookout. Culturally things have been fine, except for one minor incident where a friend of mine kept bowing to him with mock sincerity (thanks Richie!). I drove him out to UMass last week, along the way I kept apologizing for my city, explaining that not all of looks like Dorchester and not everyone is a crazy aggressive driver. He didn't seem to mind, I wonder if American TV shows and movies have prepared him for this? He always cleans his plate at dinner so I guess that's going alright as well. We have about one week left with him and based on things so far I think we'll do it again. We can always use the money and it's given our predictable home life a sitcom style plot twist.  

That's my lil' misanthrope!

Everything you think you know about parenting is wrong...

Biking the Harborwalk from Umass to Castle Island

We are hosting a Japanese exchange student who is participating in a program at UMB. After I dropped him off at the Campus Center, I decided to finally check out the Harborwalk. I saw JFK's sailboat and lots of lovely little gazebos and historical markers. It is all paved except the area by the D lot. I stopped for a cooling dip at Carson’s Beach, which thankfully has clean restrooms and an outdoor shower. After I got out of the water a lifeguard told me that yesterday the beach was closed due to high bacteria levels, nice... Castle Island is neither an island or a castle (a boring old fort on a spit of land) but it's pretty and has a nice breeze. I stopped for a hamburger and a pink lemonade at the famous Sullivan’s snack bar before biking back to the Wheatley lot. It turned out the water was okay today so I will live to post/ride again!

Has anyone read my post? How to tell!

I think one of the biggest concerns of a blogger, if Julie and Julia taught me anything, is page views. What's the point in posting if nobody is viewing, what are you some sort of latter day Emily Dickinson? No, you want traffic! So go to that fat orange B on the upper left corner, click it to get a dashboard, then click "stats". See it? At least half a dozen folks have probably stopped by, or millions, you just don't know until you check it.

The Wine Dark Sea - Online Latin Tales of Woe

Looking back on it I really should have taken Spanish, I could have actually used that and surely it must be easier than Latin. I guess I took Latin because it seemed like something a pretentious English major would know, grounding in the Classics. The first semester was frightening, I had been out of college for years and the course was a lot tougher than what I expected. Still I slogged through, mostly with mnemonics and lucky guesses. I managed a B+ but I was still only halfway through my language requirements. I couldn't imagine sitting through another M-W-F semester of Latin Power Points and quizzes, when I saw there was an online offering I jumped at it!

I had never taken an online course before and for some reason I imagined it would be this sort of video chat thing where I would watch a teacher online and chime in with the headset I was told to buy. What it turned out to be was a blackboard set up with notes, homework assignments and quizzes. You might think such a course would be easy, after all you could cheat right? Well, aside from the honor system the Professor played a few head games on us, boasting how every semester he caught students cheating and brought them before the Undergrad Dean for I don’t know, excommunication or something awful. A classmate claimed that the Professor had a database of words and rules he had taught us and anything outside of his canon would be considered cheating. To take quizzes we were required to use this special "computer lock down" software that prevented us from opening up anything besides the testing window.

All of this really started to stress me out. The first week I scored a 100 on the quiz, would he accuse me of cheating? Should I dumb it down? The worst part was that quizzes weren't quizzes at all, at least not in the sense that a quiz is something you do for the first half hour of class and it's less than twenty questions long. Latin II quizzes were what I would call final exam length and there was one every week except when we had actual midterms and finals which were truly massive. We were given two hours to complete our quizzes and I never finished with more than a few minutes to spare. Sitting in front of my computer with a kitchen timer ticking, it was sheer terror. Still I was getting good at the game, keeping my test average in the upper eighties and nailing the homework. His homework policy was strictly punitive, you earned nothing for doing your homework instead you lost points for not doing it or doing it poorly.

The day of the final exam I was a wreck mentally. I had studied like mad, reviewing every sentence we had ever worked with, trying to psych out his patterns. I ritualistically cleaned my computer desk and cleared the area of distractions. I had my coffee thermos, kleenex, pencils, scratch paper and two bags of sour patch kids (I would eat one for every question I answered, I know I'm weird). I did some stretches, calculated when to take a bathroom break, turned off my phone and began my three-hour odyssey. I elected to tackle the difficult sentence translations first, figuring I could sprint through the multiple choice section if I had to. I stumbled on few missing nouns right out of the gate and struggled to meet my time goals. Halfway through I knocked over the thermos creating a big coffee puddle that I couldn't stop to mop up. Everything was falling into place but I needed to get some extra credit questions done. The Professor had offered a very generous deal; if our final exam was a higher score than our midterm he would make that our exam average. I knew my best hope lay in picking up some extra credit to counter the disappointing score I had made on the midterm.

I had only ten minutes to translate three sentences, not nearly enough time but like a punch drunk fighter I kept plugging. I lined up my verbs to mine them for person and tense and then slotted the nouns in, then something suddenly engaged in my brain, awakening a part of my database that heretofore had been asleep. The sentences were directly lifted from the Aeneid, literature over Latin! I translated them almost entirely on the memory of the story and dammit it worked! I won the Trojan War! With 30 seconds on the clock I hit submit and after a nail biting weekend I found out I had made a B+ in the course. I must admit the Latin I learned is fading away but I will never forget my online course and the epic battle of Troy.  

Nantaskets end

The far western end of the beach in Hull. The shore is a little stony and the waves are tame. Perfect for wading and rock climbing. Seven dollars to park

Limited to Endodontics - A Dental Story

You've probably never heard of "endodontics" before, which is a good thing since you typically learn what they do right before they do it to you. When I was eight I went flying over the handlebars of my bike and left my front teeth on the street. Since then I've had two root canals to repair the lingering damage and recently I underwent a third procedure which involves a specialist or endodontist actually drilling into my jaw and gum to cap the root itself. I tried to put the experience into a short story, here goes -

“How are we this morning Mr. Scott?”
“A little nervous really.”
“Oh, you’ll do fine, you won’t feel a thing.”
“Less painful than a root canal right?”
“Right, less painful than a root canal.”

Dr.Clark removes the cotton swab from my gums, its sour ointment paves the way for the Novocaine needle which will allow her arsenal of autoclaved implements unwincing access to the bone line. The needle is fine and fast, overlapping ripples of numbness make my tongue a stranger in its home. Here we will pause, X-rays will be taken with an awkward bite guide and a comforting lead blanket, questions will be asked regarding what I can no longer sense about the fore of my palate.

“It all feels like a walnut shell now.”
“Good, if you feel anything just raise your arm.”
“Mmm-nhh, would it be okay if I listen to my headphones?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve got Shakespeare’s Othello, its for a class”
“Oh.”

At this point Dr.Clark dons a surgical mask, a pair of technical glasses with magnifying protrusions and finally a halogen head lamp, her red hair and blue scrubs all but vanish in the corona. Loda, the long necked assistant places a pair of black-out shades over my eyes. The chair drops with hydraulic oil effortlessness.

“First we will ease the gum back so we can gain access to the base of the root.”
“Uhh-aughhh.”
“It’s not that bad, if it helps I can tell you where we are at as we go along in the procedure.”
“Pleedesed dohnut. I juwz wan ta zohn out.”
“I’m going to ask you to bite down on this”

A cotton log goes between my teeth, my eyes knit shut as latex fingertips linger at points where I still receive sensation. I interlock my fingers and press one thumb against the other in corresponding intensity to the pain I feel. All is fine, all is Othello.

Instruments go in and out with pewter tones, some of them find things to burn, some dig, some scrape. Something with a motor saws at the root, I feel nothing, I only hear the slight change in pitch as it works through denser substances inside my gum. Cassio cannot hold his liquor.

“How ya doing?”
“mmmalllright.”

Dr.Clark calls for “elevators” of various sizes, suggesting something is being scaffolded, the area in question is not much bigger than a lentil but it requires a lot of attending. I distinctly hear the request for bone, what I later learn are tiny amounts deproteinized bovine bone matter, this substance is then packed into the void surrounding the newly shorn root. Toro Bravo. The packing creates a new awareness, Dr.Clark and perhaps Loda are holding my jaw steady and forcing material up into my jaw. The pushing throbs pain into my face, punishing areas well beyond the reach of the Novocaine. I say nothing, an hour into the procedure I am stoic and trying desperately to follow the handkerchief.

The packing finishes, this apparently being the climax of the procedure, I wonder if it was worth saving the tooth. The numbness now has holes in it, I feel the air conditioning drying my gums. Finally the welcome words of cotton and suture, a thread snakes over my cheek, diving and tugging. I imagine the seam of a baseball.

“Not so bad was it?”
“I feel like a hooked fish, like you were under my nostril almost going through”
“We weren’t far”
“Yikes”
“Nice and healthy besides the area we cleaned, not bad really.”

“Wonderful.” 

Got an Android phone?

As you'll see over the coming weeks I really like to take pictures and post them, and most of the time I'm using my smartphone. There are several methods for getting pictures from your phone onto your blog but the best way I've found is with the official app -

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.blogger

I'm sure it has an iPhone sibling as well. I guess you could also write your posts with it, if you really like using that tiny keyboard. 

Sand Beach, Acadia

Acadia docks

I love the panorama mode on my droid, alas it's hard to get it to display larger than a stick of gum! Back to picasa.

The lobster roll

Testing 1 2 3

The Butterfly Man

I think it's a rule that if you're an English major at UMB you must take at least one of Professor Nelson's classes, if only to unlearn what the other Profs have taught you. I ended up taking two courses with Duncan so on the first day of the second class I was ready with my phone. Note the summer hat.

And now our revels come to an end...

Like Prospero I must soon leave my magical island. My Acadian adventure ends tomorrow when I strike camp and return to Boston. I will be grateful for the warm shower, the mattress and most of all the reliable internet connection. I ate a lobster roll tonight, yeah and you know I don't even like lobster. I just felt I had to because it was a picnic table, on a dock, in summer, in Maine. It's sentimental tourists like me that keep these lobster pounds afloat. When you go to place your order you realize the entire staff of good looking all American teens are actually Eastern European college kids, we're all visitors in one way or another. I went to a beach here, the sea was so icy even I, a guy who swims on the South Shore in June, could barely take it. My wife suggested I get a bathing suit shirt, a rash guard she called it, what an awful name. She pointed to some guy who looked like Carlos Mencia in an Old Navy swim set, said it looked good on him. I wanted to bury my head in the sand. There are a lot Americans who swim with a shirt on, too many I think, I don't want to be one of them. Not this summer anyways....

Back in Boston by Saturday, lovely vacation pictures to follow.

Here come the words

This is my third class based blog so I should be a pro at this! This is just a test post, make sure this thing loads up all right. I started using Google+ (need an invite?) and for some reason that makes it harder to get to my blogs. I have an Android phone which should in theory make it easier to post pictures and such here, wait and see.

Hope you're enjoying the fine weather!