otoh

You know how you get part of a song stuck in your head? And how much worse it is when you can’t remember all of it so that fragment just keeps rattling around and around and around….? I don’t even remember what stuck this back in my consciousness recently, but there was a song that we sang as kids that I haven’t been able to either remember or get away from.

The version we sang started with “Girls are made of greasy, grimey gopher guts,” and that was all I could remember. (Can you tell this was early enough in my childhood that boys and girls did not, as a rule, play together very much? If we didn’t have cootie shots, we might all have died!)

Thank god for Google! I searched for “lyric greasy grimey gopher guts” and BAM! I found way more than I ever thought possible. Apparently every neighborhood had its own version of this song. Or maybe just because this was passed on through oral tradition, and you know how six-year-olds screw up the details to EVERY story they tell…. (I suspect that grandpa helped perpetuate the tune in more than a few cases too.)

Anyway, I learned that most versions start with “great green gobs of” rather than “girls/boys are made of”. There was a less clear consensus on whether one needs a spoon or a straw. Yum! Here, for your edification are some of the versions I found:

Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat, little birdies dirty feet,
Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
And I forgot my spoon!

Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat, itsy bitsy birdie feet,
French fried eye-balls rolling down a muddy street,
And I forgot my spoon.
(pause)
But I got my straw!

Great green gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat, saturated birdie feet,
All wrapped up in all-purpose porpoise pus.
And me without a spoon!

Gee whiz! (but I’ve got a straw)

Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat, chopped up dirty birdie feet.
A one pound jar of all purpose porpoise pus
And me without a spoon!

Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Scab sandwich, spit on top, monkey vomit, camel snot,
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Swimming in pink lemonade

Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Eagle eye and cookie goo, made a sandwich just for you.
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
And I forgot my spoon.

Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

~Edward Lorenz

My last post was tinged with a bit of regret. My decision to move so far away from the familiar led me to other decisions that were not very healthy for me. The recovery was (is) long and difficult, but that may be the subject for another post another day. And I left someone behind that I have always wondered about. I don’t really think my life would be better if I had not moved here, but it would certainly be different.

I always get a little sentimental this time of year. With all the final exams behind us now, I have sent another group of classes out into the world. I will see some of those students next year. Some I’m sure I will never see again. For the vast majority of them, I will never know how much of an influence I may be in their lives. That is the nature of teaching though. I can be a very cynical person, but my chosen profession requires an underlying optimism that things can get better and that I might contribute in some small way to help that happen.

I had some teachers that made huge differences in my life. For the most part, I only fully realized how influential they were many years later after I became a teacher myself. By then, I had lost track of them and never had the chance to thank them. I certainly hope that they believe their efforts were not in vain.

I’ll continue to teach as long as I still have more to learn and as long as I think I am making some small contribution to making our world a little better. I don’t expect my students to thank me, though some do. I hold onto a small, silent dream that I have nudged them in a positive direction. And those tiny nudges, even if they are never recognized, stir a whirlwind of change somewhere down the road. I am a butterfly and I am flapping my wings. Watch out world!

It’s often easy, if frightening, to see how big decisions can change our lives. Moving to a new home, changing jobs, beginning or ending a relationship — all those loom large in front of us at times and may cause a lot of stress as we anticipate them. They are milestones by which we plot the course of our lives. When I was 25 I moved 900 miles away from everything and everyone I had known my entire life. Making a life for myself in this new place was devastatingly difficult and clearly effects me even now.

It occurs to me though that the millions of smaller and seemingly inconsequential choices may have a larger cumulative effect. There is a movie from a few years ago that I think illustrates very well the consequences of seemingly small changes. The film is Sliding Doors and stars Gwyneth Paltrow. In it, Paltrow plays two versions of her character, Helen. Early in the film we see Helen catching a train to go home — and not catching that train by just a few seconds, and we pass back and forth between two paths where her life diverges at that point.

There was no big, agonizing decision to make the difference. Some reviewers even referred to the staging of the divergence as clumsy. But her two selves are very different and, for the most part I think, equally plausible. I know that my life would be very different if I had stayed in Kentucky instead of moving to Florida. I would be very different. Some days, like today, I wonder how different I would be if I had left work five seconds earlier or later. I’ve read a theory that there are infinite multiple universes so that everything that possibly can happen DOES happen… somewhere. That’s no consolation for having to live in THIS universe though.

There have been a few very negative opinion columns in the local paper recently. I’ve started a more detailed response that I’ll post somewhere if I ever finish it, but since this is final exam week I thought I’d do a mini-rant here. Feel free to comment, but please don’t call us names like the local columnists did. (You all do know that I teach in a public high school, right?)

One of the issues is the amount of time that we spend in direct instruction. The state Board of Education requires a minimum number of minutes of instruction in a school year to get credit for a class. In my county we meet that requirement, but there are some neighboring counties that schedule a few minutes more than the minimum.

Our duty day is 7.5 hours. In the high schools we are usually scheduled to teach five periods with one period for planning and 25 minutes for lunch. The remaining time includes passing time between classes (during which we are required to supervise students in the hallways) and time before and after school (during which we frequently have parent conferences, faculty meetings, department meetings, training sessions, planning, grading, etc.).

So these geniuses (genii?) figure that if I teach five classes of about 50 minutes each, then I’m only “working” 250 minutes (or a little over 4 hours) per day. And if I object to a proposal that I teach another 50 minutes per day I must be a slacker or a “petulant brat.” They sometimes grudgingly admit that most good teachers really work far more than the 7.5 hours per day and five days per week that we get paid for. An informal survey of my colleagues indicates an average of about 9 hours per day is pretty common. (I’m usually on campus from around 6:15 am until about 3:30 or 4:00 pm — and I still do some work at home.) But since there are some bad teachers (and, yes, there are) in the system that are not as dedicated, it’s okay to treat all of us like slackers and call us names.

So if I have to teach another 50 minutes, that doesn’t mean I give up a coffee break (we don’t get coffee breaks) or that I spend less time with my feet up on the desk. It means that I either do even MORE work for free or I do less in planning, evaluation, preparation, parent conferences, meetings, and training.The columnists want me to act like a professional and work as many hours as it takes to get the job done while they treat me like an hourly worker in determining how much of that time I deserve to get paid for.

They hide their arguments in the need to improve test scores. I don’t disagree with the need to get all of our students reading on grade level, writing coherently, and performing mathematical computations correctly. But, trust me, the solution to that problem is far more complex than adding a few minutes to each class period.

Get me a bottle of amnesia
Give me a shot of I forget
A tall cool glass of don’t remember
With a chaser of no regret

Put those flashbacks on the rocks
Watch those memories drown
Put unconscious in a long neck bottle
And I will gulp it down

I don’t want to drink about it
But I can’t stand to think about it

Reflections in a glass of bourbon
Have a warm kinda glow
I sip, you slip out of my mind
‘Cause I don’t wanna know

Recollections fade at last
Like photos in the sun
The last few drops of comprehension
And all my thinking’s done

I don’t want to drink about it
But I can’t stand to think about it

I could stop this any time
Or I could never start
My brain will always learn again
What I know by heart

Let’s start with two premises: 1) I am not normal, and 2) I am a Dirty Old Man. These are not, as one might assume, mutually exclusive.

I am obsessing over Kim Possible, a cartoon teenage super-hero type character on Disney Channel. Now, let me quell any fears that this obsession spills over into real life since I work around teenage people all day long. They are children and my only interest in them is in helping to stamp out ignorance. (Schools are, by design, intended to battle ignorance, not stupidity. But that’s a topic for another day….)

Now, I think I know where the root of this obsession began. I have three older sisters. So I grew up around women that were stronger, smarter, and could do more than I could. (No wonder I have unreasonable expectations in a mate, but I digress again….) And I read way more Nancy Drew mysteries than Hardy Boys mysteries because the books were already around the house. I’m grateful that the hand-me-downs were pretty much limited to books or I would be a LOT more screwed up than I am.

When Pamela Sue Martin played the sleuth in a short-lived TV series and did a pictorial in Playboy at around the same time, the character took on a whole new dimension. (The producers and authors were not amused as I recall, but I was still young then.) So Nancy Drew and my older sisters were the models on which my concepts of women were based in my formative years. Strong, smart, successful — hey, I think I have the basis for a personal want ad here….

And now there’s Kim Possible, Cheerleader by Day/Crimestopper by Night. Now, to be honest, even if I were a teenage cartoon character too, I would be way too intimidated by Kim to even talk to her. But that’s rather the point of fantasy, isn’t it? We imagine what we know we can’t have in real life. And maybe part of the attraction is knowing that Kim’s voice is provided by Christy Carlson Romano. She’s not a teenager, but I am old enough to be her… let’s say her uncle, okay? That doesn’t exactly get me out of D.O.M. territory though, does it?

Have you met my wife?

Neither have I. Well, at least I hope not.

There’s only one woman in my past that I have thought might have been the right one. But we met at a really wrong time for me to make such a commitment. What a cruel twist of fate that would be — to meet the one and only right person at the wrong time. Is the universe that unfair? So, I’ve continued under the assumption that it was never meant to be, that we aren’t the ones for each other.

Two old middle aged men
Were sittin’ up in the corner bar
They were lying about what
Wonderful lovers they are

Bending each other’s ear
They were bending their elbows too
Holding their arms apart
Just the way fishermen do, singing

You should have seen the one that got away
You should have seen the one that got away

Two old middle aged girls
Were sittin’ in the beauty salon
Just waiting for their nails to dry
They were trading the recipes

And all of the ways to save
One hundred and one night stands
With a brand new permanent wave,
singing

You should have seen the one that got away
You should have seen the one that got away

I think there are some people who should not be married. And often I think I’m one of them. I don’t have a great track record with intimate relationships. I know a lot of people that ARE married, but I don’t think they should be. I don’t get to make that choice for anyone but myself, though. And I may not be qualified: I have four siblings. Between them two are divorced (one of them twice) and two are married to alcoholics. I really don’t believe I would fare much better, especially considering some of the poor choices I have made.

I realize that marriage becomes a more and more remote possibility the older I get. I decided a long time ago that I prefer to be alone than to be with the wrong person. And I haven’t met the right person. Have I? Remaining single because I haven’t met the right person is a lot easier to deal with than the possibility that I met her somewhere along the way and failed to realize it. How much of a role does fate play in this?

Hindsight makes the heart grow fonder
And that’s what it cost
When you run around saying I love you
With your fingers crossed

And it’s too late to go back now
And that’s just about as good as it gets
For rock’n'roll Romeos and their jukebox Juliets

And you can see them out on the street
Tryin’ to figure out what it all means
When they try to make their lives complete
In the safety of their dreams

By putting their arms around the one that got away
And you should have seen the one that got away
oh you should have seen the one that got away
And you should have seen the one that got away

Of course, all this depends on buying into the notion that there is only one right person for each of us. To the pragmatist in me the odds against that seem astronomical. But I’m a product of my raising as they say and I would find this a much more dreary world if such romance does not exist. For someone.

The One That Got Away by Steve Goodman

The most direct route between my home and the place I worked 10 years ago took me past a “gentleman’s club.” They had a big sign out front that flashed daily specials to entice gentlemen inside. One afternoon I was stopped at the intersection waiting for the light to change and looked over at that sign. At that instant it said: “ALL YOU CAN EAT $4.99″

WHAT?!? It was a long light and soon I saw that it was a two-part message: “LUNCH BUFFET” “ALL YOU CAN EAT $4.99″ Of course, that makes sense. Funny that is not the first thing that popped into my mind. Color me blushing with a sheepish grin….

Chauncey the dog lives on a horse farm in Kentucky. One day he overhears two retired race horses.

“You know,” says Bypass (one of the horses), “I’ve won my share of races, but I’ve never beaten you.”

“True enough,” relpies Blowby (the other horse). “I’ve won and lost many races over the years, but I’ve always come in ahead of you whenever we were in the same race.”

“So I was thinking,” Bypass continues, “since we’re getting old and don’t have so many days left, could we race around the pasture here so I can win against you just once?”

“You want me to let you win?”

“Well, yes. I hate to ask, but think of it as a final request from an old friend.”

Blowby reluctantly agrees.

Chauncey spreads the word around the farm about the impending race. All the other animals gather at one corner of the pasture. Bypass and Blowby line up. And they are off! Bypass and Blowby are neck and neck all the way down the first fence. Bypass takes the inside around the first corner and pulls half a length ahead. After the second turn Bypass is a full length ahead, but Blowby catches up in the backstretch. Both horses are huffing and puffing at the final turn and it’s a dead heat. Nose to nose and eye to eye they thunder toward the finish line. At the last second, Blowby puts in a burst of speed and crosses just ahead of Bypass.

Bypass is heartbroken. Chauncey says, “That wasn’t very nice. You said you were going to let Bypass win!”

And Blowby says, “Hey look, a talking dog!”

I grew up in Kentucky and there are some things I really miss about it now that I live in Florida: the hills of Eastern Kentucky, the changes of the seasons, (incredibly green springtimes, lightning bugs on summer evenings, fire-colored leaves in the fall), southern living, most of my family is still there, and the Kentucky Derby. I should note that, while Florida is geographically further south than Kentucky, most of Florida is not very southern. And sometimes it’s better for me to be several hundred miles away from my family. But that’s another story….

Today is Derby Day. My family is not “horse people.” I never really learned to ride, although I have been trail riding a few times. We never owned horses and certainly never sit on millionaire Row. But, most people in Kentucky don’t own horses (or get to millionaire Row). That doesn’t make us any less proud of the Derby. Besides, any old excuse will do for a party. In and around Louisville there are race-related activities for a week leading up to Derby Day.

Born in the valley
And raised in the trees
Of Western Kentucky
On wobbly knees
With mama beside you
To help you along
You’ll soon be a growing up strong.

All the long, lazy mornings
In pastures of green
The sun on your withers
The wind in your mane
Could never prepare you
For what lies ahead
The run for the roses so red –

And it’s run for the roses
As fast as you can
Your fate is delivered
Your moment’s at hand
It’s the chance of a lifetime
In a lifetime of chance
And it’s high time you joined
In the dance
It’s high time you joined
In the dance –

One of my coworkers opined that horse racing is a boring sport. (He started with, “No offense intended…” of course.) Personally, I find baseball a lot more boring, but I understand why he might feel like that. A day at the races (or at home watching them on TV, which is a lot more comfortable and usually provides a better view of the actual races) means about two minutes of racing every hour or so. It’s more like a picnic with periodic injections of adrenalin.

At the track, they want to make sure everyone has time to place bets, they recondition the track after every race, they often have to reposition the starting gate as the races are not all the same length, and there’s the pomp and circumstance of parading the entries out for every race. Hey, people stand in line for two hours to take a three-minute ride on Space Mountain down here at Disney World. I’d rather be sitting in the shade sipping a cool beverage.

From sire to sire
It’s born in the blood
The fire of a mare
And the strength of a stud
It’s breeding and it’s training
And it’s something unknown
That drives you and carries
You home.

And it’s run for the roses
As fast as you can
Your fate is delivered
Your moment’s at hand
It’s the chance of a lifetime
In a lifetime of chance
And it’s high time you joined
In the dance
It’s high time you joined
In the dance –

I won’t be able to watch the race live this year. I’m leaving in a few minutes to watch a play. (I’ll write about that in the next day or so.) But I’ll look for the replay on the news tonight. And I’ll spend a little time day-dreaming about my old Kentucky home.

Run for the Roses by Dan Fogelberg