Like I Have Time For This?

Last week, RegularDad and I were sitting in the living room, flicking through the channels, when we happened upon the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics. Oooooh, let’s watch, I said. Which is weird, because I never get into the Olympics. Seriously. The last time I remember ever actually watching them is when Mary Lou Retton won all those perfect 10’s, way back when.

But, for some reason, this year, I’m hooked. I can’t stop watching the damned Olympics. And, if I may paraphrase what it says up in the banner up there, I don’t have time for this. The laundry is piling up, I haven’t exercised since the games started, I’m eating way too much junk food way too late at night, I’m missing out on some sorely-needed sleep, and it’s starting to show.

Two weeks ago, I had no idea who Michael Phelps was. Now, I hang on the edge of my sofa for every race. Two nights ago I stayed up past midnight watching the swimming races. I collapsed into bed at 1:00 am, and when RegularDad’s alarm woke me up a few hours later, the first thing I heard was the garbage truck rolling up the street:

“Oh no!” I said to him. “I forgot to put out the trash.”
“It’s okay. That’s not the trash truck,” he said. “That’s the recycling truck.”
“No,” I said. “Recycling only comes on Monday.”
He looked at me funny and said, “It IS Monday…. How late were you up last night?”

The next night, I stayed up until 1:00 in the morning to see the final outcome of men’s gymnastics. I mean, I could not go to bed until I saw if they got the medal. Seriously.

Last night, we tuned in for the women’s gymnastic finals. We ate cheesy puffs and drank grape juice in honor of all the calories they were burning on the screen. We noted the obvious young-ness of the Chinese team a half hour BEFORE the TV announcers made reference to it. I mean, two of them looked to be maybe twelve years old. Thirteen, tops. And we also noticed how the American girls looked so… TOUGH. Like some sort of modern West Side Story gang of girls. And we also noted the overall BLONDE-NESS of the group. Oh sure, they had a token brunette and a token redhead, but other than that, they were WAY BLONDE. I know it must have been the pressure they were under, but they just looked… MEAN. I’m sure in real life, they’re very nice young ladies.

A little after 11:00, RegularDad had to go to bed. He has to get up early in the mornings and go to work. Me, I’ve got to get up early because the kids get up early (My Kingdom For Children Who Sleep Later Than 6:00 AM!!!!!) but it’s not like I’ve got to operate heavy machinery or anything. So, I stayed up to watch the end. The next morning, when RegularDad’s alarm went off, I woke up with a headache that promised to linger all day long.

“So, how’d it end?” RegularDad asked me.
“We got the silver,” I said. “We could have got the gold but one of the girls fell off the balance beam, and it all went down hill from there.”
“Oh. Which one fell?”
“The blonde one.”
“Um, yeah. Which blonde one?”
“You know… that mean-looking one.”

He almost asked “WHICH mean-looking one?” but then must have realized how quickly we were succumbing to a horrible, exhausted, olympic rendition of “Who’s On First?” and he went down to the kitchen to pour some coffee without another word.

He’s a wise man.

I got the kids through their schoolwork and suffered through today’s headache until about an hour ago when I broke down and took two Advil with a cup of caffeinated coffee. I’ll pay for the coffee later on tonight. But at least I’ll be wide awake when Michael Phelps wins another one.

Go team.

YAWN. YAY!

A friend of mine recommended this month’s cover story over at the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid“, by Nicholas Carr, and now that I’ve read it, I’d like to recommend it to you. It’s a somewhat long article, so if you’re stopping by my blog during a tiny little hiatus in your work day, I’d say wait until lunch or until tonight when you’ve got some time to really sit down and read it.

Because that’s what it’s about really…how we simply can’t sit down and read a long article or book anymore. How the Internet is changing our brain, how constant data streams of smaller bits of information, snatched in brief moments of fleeting free time might actually have a lasting and permanent impact on our brain’s mapping and chemistry and all that shit. How today’s modern reader may no longer be able to sit down and lose themselves in War and Peace.

And you know, I’m not surprised. At all.

I haven’t been online much the past few days. Sunday was RegularNephew’s first birthday, so we drove on up to RegularSis’s house and had ourselves a little party at a nearby Chili’s.

And then yesterday, RegularDad had the day off so we spent the day cleaning out the laundry room and making yet more progress on the giant home project we like to call UNPACKING, which is really just us opening up box after box after box of utter CRAP, looking blankly at the contents, scratching our heads quizzically, and then transferring the contents of the box directly into the trash bin and hiding when the trash truck comes because these guys must think we’re nuts by now, or if not nuts, at least a family of people recovering from that weird pack rat syndrome.

And then today, it was back to a regular schedule, but the truth is, my regular schedule doesn’t exactly allow for a lot of free surfin’ time, especially when my day includes writing time. And days that include writing time are days in which I feel better about my life choices and my parenting skills, and I yell less, so we try to make those days happen a lot.

It wasn’t until almost 9:00 tonight that I was finally able to sit down and open my blog and see what I wanted to say. And the thing is: that’s okay. A few days away from the Internet was downright refreshing.

Because I’m one of those weird people who exists on the outer fringe of all this. Who still likes to read long, complicated books, who still wants to get the paper ON PAPER and flip lazily through the pages while sipping coffee and eating bagels and listening to the kids fight over the comics.

I want to use the Internet for all the good it has to offer, but not be consumed by it. I want to close my browser and go get myself a copy of something by Dickens or Tolstoy and go sit outside with a glass of iced tea with it, and curse when the condensation drips onto the pages and wipe away the water with my finger and just keep reading.

And I’m sitting here wondering if that’s just a naive little pipe dream. 

Here’s a memorable quote from the article:

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

Reprogramming. That’s a word to keep you up later than usual tonight. You will be have been assimilated.

And even in spite of my wants and wishes, in spite of my best efforts, I also am changed because of the Internet. I had just settled down to read this long-ish article (off my laptop — no printed copy here) and as I hit paragraph 3 in which Carr addresses how difficult it’s become to immerse oneself in a long article or a book, I found my attention had wandered from the text to things like possible blog titles for the entry I planned to write on this topic, to wondering if anyone else had already blogged on this yet, and then a quick glance at the scroll bar at the right, to check it’s length and position on the screen so as to gauge just how long this article would be and how far I’d come in it, and on and on and on. I kept having to force my brain back to the words in front of me, force myself to concentrate on the meaning behind the words, which was of course, how hard it is to make today’s brains concentrate on anything longer than news blips on Yahoo’s homepage or the latest YouTube video.

And then I think about how schools are using the Internet now, and how computers have become essential tools in the classroom, and how no one is reading books anymore, and I just want to run screaming down the street because there’s just no way to make any of it stop, but instead of doing that, I find myself once again renegotiating my stopping point, and mentally redrawing my line in the sand, lips pressed flat and determind, knowing that pretty soon something else will come up and I’ll be doing this again. And again. And again.

And then, I pick up our copy of Gilgamesh, or perhaps The Iliad, and read it to my children again. I barricade them and myself behind a great wall of printed words, because that’s all I can think of, and when they ask to go online to visit their Webkinz, I smile and say, “Maybe later.”

Ouch.

Today we went to an “Old Fashioned Field Day” hosted by one of our homeschool clubs. The girls ran foot races, sack races, sponge races, egg tosses, not to mention the infamous water balloon toss which turned into a gigantic water balloon fight and fiasco. But in a nice way, ya know?

It was HOT, of course. We’re in the throes of our first heat wave of the season here, and it’s Barely Tolerable. The girls opted out of the final Tug of War match just because they were Too. Damn. Hot. Luckily, there was a reasonably priced community pool right across the street from the park where we had our Field Day. So, after lunch, a bunch of us went over there and spent a nice afternoon swimming together. The girls all picked mermaid names from various Barbie movies and spent a good hour playing a very elaborate game based somehow on at least two different Barbie movies. It was cute. Then we just sort of swam around. For a long time.

And even in spite of the sunscreen, we’re all a little lobster-colored now. But it was still a great day.

And I’m sitting here now thinking about how “mainstream” homeschooling is becoming. All those arguments about socialization are rapidly becoming meaningless as hundreds of thousands of people opt to homeschool and then go online and find other people who have opted for the same, and then (GASP!!!) actually form groups so that they can all be… like… social… together. Nicely.

There’s even a homeschool prom in these here parts, believe it or not.

Yep. It’s true. A bunch of homeschoolers a little north of here got together and decided to do a smallish prom this year. And, so they did. And the unsocialized homeschooled teenagers that attended this prom were so nice to each other, and so well-behaved, and so SOCIALIZED TO BEHAVE LIKE GOOD, DECENT, UP AND COMING CITIZENS OF THEIR COMMUNITIES, that the hotel staff working that night were FLOORED. They couldn’t stop gushing about how wonderful those children were. And then the local paper got wind of this, and they sent over a reporter, and now the Homeschool Prom is receiving accolades from the local journalists.

No one, from the wait-staff at the hotel to the reporters, had ever seen anything like it. Or so they said.

And why am I the only one around here that thinks that’s sad? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m cheering like mad for those homeschoolin’ teens who know how to behave at a prom, and yes it makes us LOOK FABULOUS, and I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how thrilled I am that I now have this little hidden gem of a bullet stored away in my arsenal for when my mother-in-law asks: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PRRRROMMMMMM?????

But I’m also a little sad for all those other kids who went to their proms with agendas nonspecific to dancing and enjoying themselves. Because, so often, there is a completely different agenda on prom night, isn’t there?

Oh, well. No sense losing sleep over it, I guess. The world will be what the world will be.

But at least homeschooling is grabbing on a little more. And a little more. And each day, just a little more. Because if enough people start homeschooling, then eventually, things could start to self-correct, a little more here and there, slowly over time. We’d begin to see a bit of shift away from the endless crops of unhealthy, unhappy, unprepared young adults, to generations of people who were actually ready to take on this world and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. And eventually, maybe, that could make a difference globally.

I know, I know… it’s a stretch. But how else do we grow stronger without stretching a little first?

Think about it.

We homeschoolers like to talk a lot of trash about the public school system, and what’s wrong with it, and how the kids aren’t faring so well there anymore. And it’s good to talk about it. Good to get these things out into the open. Secrets tend to fester. Then they kill you. Slowly and with great pain and gangrene.

But I’d like to take a few moments here to recognize that in the faulty system we call public education, rife with meaningless doublespeak and ridiculous testing measures and (in my own humble opinion) WAY TOO MANY PHARMACEUTICALS, not to mention some seriously maladjusted and dangerous teachers, there is still a large, quiet contingent of Excellent Teachers who do their job well in spite of every insane obstacle that crosses their path.

It would be wrong of me to pretend that they don’t exist. Because they do. And they deserve a hell of a lot more respect than I do. After all, I teach in some of the most optimal conditions ever, having only two students, and an “administration” that does whatever I want. No one is dictating to me what to teach, and when and how, and I don’t have to concern myself with worries about bodily harm or what that irate parent wants from me THIS time.

For every harmful teacher we read about in the news, there are surely at least a dozen of good teachers, and probably one completely anonymous equivalent of Marva Collins or John Taylor Gatto as well.

So, having said all that, I’d like you to view this:

and remember those teachers you had that pushed you just a little further. Who saw through your fears, and your bullshit, and made you better than you were the day before. And raise a toast to them and send a little thanks out into the universe, and maybe a little prayer that there would be MORE of them in the days to come.

Because the schools could use some more of the good teachers.

And many thanks to Katherine over at Our Report Card, who posted this video a few days ago and really reminded me of things I needed to be reminded of.

She’s cool like that.

Ahh…May.

You know why I love May, don’t you? It’s not the new flowers, the warmth, the return of the birds, the days spent playing hooky at the park. It’s not that first outdoor barbeque in your new house, where you sit with your little family eating food that RegularDad cooked on the grill and just enjoying the spring air. It’s not the slow, steady end of the various activities the kids are into, promising more lazy days ahead when I won’t be as much of an on-call chauffeur. I mean, all that stuff is great and all, don’t get me wrong. But none of that is why I love May.

I love May because that’s the month I take my vacation. As in: MY vacation. Me. All by myself. Except for my poetry-writing girlfriends. And who knows? Maybe that nice young man from in-town will show up and give us all massages again. (Note to self: Pack extra cash just in case.)

Tomorrow we fly back to Colorado. RegularDad and the kids will stay with Grandma while I head down to the Sangre de Cristos to spend a few days just Taking Care Of Me. There’s no Internet where I’m going. And cell phones don’t work all that great. And sometimes the coyotes come in close when darkness falls and sing us a little something. But the food is fabulous, and the company is even better: women who write poetry by day and talk deep into the night.

That’s where I’ll be for a while.

See you in a week.