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!