Midlife Meditation

Besides being irascible, dogged, and right most of the time, what do these two gentlemen have in common? You may not like the answer. Yesterday I announced I will pragmatically vote not for Bernie Sanders but, instead, for Hillary Clinton, a politician who, for all her flaws, is, I believe, best suited to move the United States in a positive direction as President. Within hours, I had a half dozen comments to the piece--which is half a dozen more than I usually get for an essay. It seems there are many who read this blog who are proudly, defiantly feeling the Bern, and felt the need to take me to task for my business-as-usual choice. Never mind that the Sanders agenda is packed with items that cannot be legislated without the complete cooperation of a Congress dominated by Republicans who can't even agree on how to advance their own agenda, let alone the proudly socialist programs a President Sanders would put before them. Even in the unlikely event of a complete turnover o...

Great wish list. Too bad Santa isn't running for President. Before I launch the rant, here are my qualifications: 1) I first realized I was a socialist in 1980, when a conservative friend asked me some leading questions to which the answer, for me, was obviously yes (I can't remember what they were, but I expect they had to do with federal regulations, labor unions, and the social safety net). "Congratulations," he said, his voice heavy with irony, "you're a socialist." "Huh," I replied, "if believing that government should protect the interests of ordinary people against corporate interests, then I'm all in!" Or something like that. 2) I'm no Hillary Clinton fan.  There are many reasons, but the clincher was her evasiveness around the obviously political evolution of her views on marriage equality in a 2014 interview with Terry Gross. The rhetorical knots she tied herself in were eerily reminiscent of her husband...

Even at 16, I knew this was hokum. Yesterday morning at 10:15 (give or take a few minutes), I turned back into a 16-year-old. We arrived at the theater a half hour early, assuming there would be a line (there was not). The night before, we had purchased our tickets online, at an added cost of $1.50/ticket, assuming the show would be sold out (it was not). The theater was nearly full, though, and even arriving early enough to sit through all the sponsored content (ugh), we had to sit uncomfortably close to the screen to have three seats together. The ads ran, followed by a long string of previews, and then it happened: the sparkling Lucasfilm logo appeared. I gasped. Amy giggled at my excitement. A moment later, the brass chord that can mean only one thing rang through the theater, the prologue text began its crawl across the screen, and 38 years disappeared from my age. For two hours, I had fanboy thrill upon thrill as the sights and sounds I'd been craving since 198...

Scary thing about this graphic: how many variations one finds when Googling "hearts guns." This is not my first time at the shoot-em-up rodeo. Many of the first essays I wrote in this space were about gun violence. They triggered fierce reactions from some gun enthusiasts I was acquainted with. For a short time, I humored those people by attempting to engage them in some back-and-forth conversation. A very short time. It quickly became clear that, as with any other matter of religion, politics, or addiction, the people who feel most threatened by those holding different views have got no thinking space left for listening to those views. I was talking and writing past them, rather than to or with them. So I quit answering their comments. Life's too short to spend it carefully crafting arguments the intended recipient will conveniently ignore as he or she throws out a fresh batch of distortions, false equivalences, and appeals to authority. Comment strings also miss ...

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." --Wayne LaPierre, Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. And what if the bad guy with a gun is wearing body armor? Mass shootings have become so frequent in the United States that the aftermaths are utterly predictable. Speculative news reporting, Democratic hand-wringing, empty Republican platitudes, and rapid-response gun lobby spin flood the media. By the time accurate reporting is possible, the nation has moved on--all to frequently to the next shooting. Numb, shell-shocked, unable to process the sheer magnitude of the national gun pathology, our minds seize on distractions, flail about for something, anything that will keep us from imagining our friends, our families, our children on the receiving end of the next barrage. The most recent of these shootings appears to have had a connection to ISIS, the most recent i...

Nothing says "evil" like a fluffy white cat. Yesterday, I saw SPECTRE , the latest installment in the half-century old series of films about superspy James Bond. Overall, it was an enjoyable film, with some great action set-pieces, an encounter with the first age-appropriate Bond woman (she's no girl), and, as usual, a Byzantine plot that it's best not to think too much about. As in all three previous films starring Daniel Craig, this chapter was something of a reboot, introducing us to the latest incarnation of supervillain Blofeld. As with all supervillains, Blofeld is obsessed with a particular type of crime. In this case, it's one of the more boring evil obsessions: control of the internet. Ho hum. I've lost count of the number of suspense and action movies, including the last Bond film, Skyfall, that have rolled out this particular plot point. One gets the impression that the film industry has it in for the internet, and considering how many t...

Some music teachers teach classes larger than this closing ceremony at the AOSA National Conference. I've been whiny. I'm not going to apologize for it: this is my blog, a diary about my personal struggles and accomplishments. As a reflection of my life, it naturally is filled with both highs and lows. Since 2009, music education has handed me a lot of lows: layoff, unemployment, underemployment, competing with teachers who are younger (and, with less experience and education, less expensive) for the few positions available, and once I finally found that elusive full-time elementary job in a high-poverty district, having to contend with teaching in the gymnasiums of two schools, with ineptly applied "restorative justice" behavior management, and, this year, again losing my classroom, as well as having my instructional time cut by a third. Teaching music in the Portland area has not been a walk in the park. Administrators don't have time for such com...

Between 1755 and 1764, more than 80% of the Acadians living in the Maritime Provinces were expelled by Great Britain. As persecutions go, it's penny ante. Some of my ancestors were Acadians, French colonists in Canada's Maritime Provinces. They took Acadia, their name for the region, from Greek mythology: Arcadia (the "r" was dropped by the French), meaning "refuge," was an abundant land, a Utopia where all could live in peace, free from want. And in fact, the Acadians coexisted with the native Mi'kmaq tribal peoples, intermarrying with them and allying with them against frequent British invasions. Over the course of Acadia's 150 year history, the power of the British Empire came to dominate. For the last fifty years of its existence, Acadia and its Mi'kmaq allies engaged in a series of small-scale wars with the Empire, culminating in the expulsion of 11,500 of the 14,100 Acadians still living in the region. Most were resettled in ...

Estevao Marques performs with Sandra Salcedo and Jackie Rago at the AOSA National Conference in San Diego. One does not go to a professional development conference for a philosophy lesson. And yet, that's the most important thing I brought back from San Diego. This was my third American Orff Schulwerk Association conference. After each of my previous conferences, I came home with a boatload of ideas which I eagerly transformed into lesson plans, some of them so productive that I got entire units. I went to San Diego hoping for more of the same, and I did, indeed, get some ideas that I'll be incorporating into my lesson plans. For once, though, the content was not the big takeaway. Maybe it's that I have had, for the first time in my career, enough time with the students I'm teaching, and enough experience with the methods I use, that finding new ideas for lessons is not a problem. Like most Orff teachers, I create my own curriculum, teaching concepts th...

O would some power the giftie gie us  to see ourselves as others see us. --Robert Burns Well look at that, Andrew. You're keeping company with Robert Burns. Andrew is a Comedy Sportz veteran, a brilliant improviser who has performed in more shows than I can imagine. He's also a world traveler, both for business and pleasure. Right now, he's in Barcelona, attending an international improv festival. That's what led him to make this observation on Facebook earlier today: You know how our shorthand for French people is smoking, and our shorthand for Italian people is hand gestures and kissing on the cheek? Well here in Europe, improv shorthand for American people is grabbing guns and shooting. That landed him squarely in the company of Robert Burns, and the quote at the top of this blog. Improv shorthand is an occasionally uncomfortable thing for me as I do my work behind the keyboard. I hear that we're doing something French, and I fi...

Every music teacher has a story like this: Last Friday, the lesson had wings. The second grade class I was teaching it to were completely in tune with me. We were riffing off each other, sharing a vibe that was magical. When I told the children we were out of time, they sighed: how could it be over? It felt like we just started! I left that classroom feeling great, knowing I had a winner here. This was especially important to me because I'd be teaching the same lesson to a different class Monday morning with my principal observing as part of my annual evaluation. I walked into that class on Monday, confident, assured, ready to tackle this group. The principal was a few minutes late, but that didn't faze me: this was a great lesson, I knew, fast-moving, action-packed, with plenty of opportunities for students to interact with the material in creative ways. But the kids weren't having it. Something was off: the children just weren't feeling it. The high flyers ...