When I meet someone new who appears to differ from me in some obvious substantial way, I must first remember to look and see how they are enjoying their lives which be imagined freely by the spirit universally.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Monday, September 29, 2014
Hello!
I know I haven't been writing on this web site very much lately. I am still writing though. I am also still teaching and learning and living each day in a way that helps me find a balance which enables me to stay alive and when possible, thrive.
I love how the universe picks up on intentions from time to time and sometimes does the work for you. Take today, for example. I was thinking that I really needed some more hours each week to balance the budget, and then I got a call this afternoon asking me to take over a two-hour evening class from 6-8 pm for the next month. And it's in the Bronx! I haven't been back to the Bronx branch since I worked there from October to May of this year (not counting one day of substitutions a week or so later). The thing was, they needed me to start tonight. So I put on my tie (they don't make us wear ties in midtown. I haven't missed the ties) and took the familiar route to work.
The first person I saw upon climbing the stairs was the janitor, who immediately gave me a fist bump, which he does to pretty much all of the teachers, but I'm happy he recognized me and was happy to have me back. That appeared to be the sentiment of most people there, from the receptionists to, most importantly, my old angel of a supervisor.
Teaching the class was easy, albeit different from what I've been doing in midtown lately. First, the class was 90% Spanish speaking, with almost all of the students coming from either the Dominican Republic or Mexico. Spanish is still the predominant language in midtown, but most of the speakers are from South American countries, as opposed to Central American or Caribbean countries. There were also individuals from Honduras and Panama tonight, but Yemen and Hungary broke the Spanish monopoly. Strangely, this morning I met my first student from Hungary, and then later met another student from Hungary the same day, but in the Bronx.
I enjoyed meeting the students and remembering the old commute. One year ago I was packing to move across the country, and in three weeks I will reach my one year anniversary. I haven't worked anywhere for a year straight in my entire life. I'm not worried about padding my resume, as I consider myself a writer more than a teacher, but I feel good about seeing something through.
Speaking of seeing things through, I am still working on publishing stories in book form for you.
And, as always, I'm living stories. I'll share some more tomorrow.
In more ways than one, it's good to be back.
I love how the universe picks up on intentions from time to time and sometimes does the work for you. Take today, for example. I was thinking that I really needed some more hours each week to balance the budget, and then I got a call this afternoon asking me to take over a two-hour evening class from 6-8 pm for the next month. And it's in the Bronx! I haven't been back to the Bronx branch since I worked there from October to May of this year (not counting one day of substitutions a week or so later). The thing was, they needed me to start tonight. So I put on my tie (they don't make us wear ties in midtown. I haven't missed the ties) and took the familiar route to work.
The first person I saw upon climbing the stairs was the janitor, who immediately gave me a fist bump, which he does to pretty much all of the teachers, but I'm happy he recognized me and was happy to have me back. That appeared to be the sentiment of most people there, from the receptionists to, most importantly, my old angel of a supervisor.
Teaching the class was easy, albeit different from what I've been doing in midtown lately. First, the class was 90% Spanish speaking, with almost all of the students coming from either the Dominican Republic or Mexico. Spanish is still the predominant language in midtown, but most of the speakers are from South American countries, as opposed to Central American or Caribbean countries. There were also individuals from Honduras and Panama tonight, but Yemen and Hungary broke the Spanish monopoly. Strangely, this morning I met my first student from Hungary, and then later met another student from Hungary the same day, but in the Bronx.
I enjoyed meeting the students and remembering the old commute. One year ago I was packing to move across the country, and in three weeks I will reach my one year anniversary. I haven't worked anywhere for a year straight in my entire life. I'm not worried about padding my resume, as I consider myself a writer more than a teacher, but I feel good about seeing something through.
Speaking of seeing things through, I am still working on publishing stories in book form for you.
And, as always, I'm living stories. I'll share some more tomorrow.
In more ways than one, it's good to be back.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Thursday, September 18, 2014
I am happy today.
Why am I so happy?
Well, to start, you have a wonderful smile.
On top of that, I slept more than eight hours last night, which is a rarity.
Furthermore, I just finished reading a quick book about World War I, and I'm feeling pretty great about not having to walk through any trenches, dodge any bullets or shells, or put on a gas mask to save myself from mustard gas. More thoughts on this later.
Why am I so happy?
Well, to start, you have a wonderful smile.
On top of that, I slept more than eight hours last night, which is a rarity.
Furthermore, I just finished reading a quick book about World War I, and I'm feeling pretty great about not having to walk through any trenches, dodge any bullets or shells, or put on a gas mask to save myself from mustard gas. More thoughts on this later.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Today I taught the students what I could, and then took a few of them on a field trip to play mini-golf. I haven't played mini-golf in years, but they were going to pay me to take them there, so I signed up for it. Then it started raining as soon as we left the office, so the activities coordinator suggested we go to another place named "Fat Cat." Since I'm currently reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, I thought that was a good sign.
This place is in the village. You walk down these stairs and enter a room full of ping pong, billiards, and foosball tables. There is also a stage where performers play late at night. I realized immediately upon entering that I had been here before, once, six years ago. I was on a third date with a girl I had met the year before at a friend's party. She'd lived in Paris since, but remembered me and called me when she got back.
We had started the evening at a nearby restaurant that featured performers from Woodstock, NY. When we were there we ran into one of her co-workers who had just returned from teaching English in Japan. I'd told him that sounded amazing, and he told me to do it. So I did. But that's another story. Afterwards we moved to this place "Fat Cat" to see live jazz music. I was only 24 then, so the young crowd didn't bother me. It was an open free-for-all on that particular night, so anyone could play as long as they could keep up with everyone else. I recall that one of the performers was a guitarist who meandered on his own and played absurdly long uninteresting solos, much to the visible chagrin of everyone else on stage. There were no other guitarists though, so the leader couldn't boot him. My date was incredibly angered by this, and even said she wanted to "murder" the guitarist, which obviously put me off a little. She couldn't enjoy any of the other musicians because of him. Maybe if you're playing jazz with them you could understandably be upset, but we were just hanging out at a place for young people. I was already unsure about this girl after the last time I'd seen her (she'd been rude to the cab driver two weeks before). Like everyone she had her good side and her other side, but the other side involved being truly unkind to strangers, and that's not a turn on for me. I never saw the girl again, but I did make my way back to Fat Cat this evening, unintentionally, and they were playing some excellent John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and strange Cambodian music.
After a few games with strangers and students from Ecuador, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Brazil, I said good bye to the students and went to midtown east to meet some friends for happy hour, and had a great time.
On the way home I went through Times Square, carrying a copy of the Andrew Carnegie bio: The Richest Man in the World. There was a band playing music, as there often is. They were singing, honest to God, "Can't Buy Me Love."
I love the world.
This place is in the village. You walk down these stairs and enter a room full of ping pong, billiards, and foosball tables. There is also a stage where performers play late at night. I realized immediately upon entering that I had been here before, once, six years ago. I was on a third date with a girl I had met the year before at a friend's party. She'd lived in Paris since, but remembered me and called me when she got back.
We had started the evening at a nearby restaurant that featured performers from Woodstock, NY. When we were there we ran into one of her co-workers who had just returned from teaching English in Japan. I'd told him that sounded amazing, and he told me to do it. So I did. But that's another story. Afterwards we moved to this place "Fat Cat" to see live jazz music. I was only 24 then, so the young crowd didn't bother me. It was an open free-for-all on that particular night, so anyone could play as long as they could keep up with everyone else. I recall that one of the performers was a guitarist who meandered on his own and played absurdly long uninteresting solos, much to the visible chagrin of everyone else on stage. There were no other guitarists though, so the leader couldn't boot him. My date was incredibly angered by this, and even said she wanted to "murder" the guitarist, which obviously put me off a little. She couldn't enjoy any of the other musicians because of him. Maybe if you're playing jazz with them you could understandably be upset, but we were just hanging out at a place for young people. I was already unsure about this girl after the last time I'd seen her (she'd been rude to the cab driver two weeks before). Like everyone she had her good side and her other side, but the other side involved being truly unkind to strangers, and that's not a turn on for me. I never saw the girl again, but I did make my way back to Fat Cat this evening, unintentionally, and they were playing some excellent John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and strange Cambodian music.
After a few games with strangers and students from Ecuador, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Brazil, I said good bye to the students and went to midtown east to meet some friends for happy hour, and had a great time.
On the way home I went through Times Square, carrying a copy of the Andrew Carnegie bio: The Richest Man in the World. There was a band playing music, as there often is. They were singing, honest to God, "Can't Buy Me Love."
I love the world.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
6'5"
The first memory I have of playing basketball is being in elementary school and
playing a game called "around the world." You had to make a basket from
various spots surrounding the hoop, and if you made it from each place,
then you had successfully gone around the world.
Then I found you can literally do that, without the basketball. You can bounce around the ball as opposed to bouncing the ball. In many ways, it is much more fun, and important.
Even so, I've been bouncing the ball again lately. I began a week ago and returned again tonight. I am having a great deal of fun. I can always dribble and penetrate extremely quickly, and complete fancy passes, play vigorous defense and get my hands on plenty of rebounds. Then again, shooting is a whole different matter. You need to practice shooting.
When I was younger I was much better at hanging around the arc and nailing three pointers from the outside, where I was safer from the taller and stronger players who would inevitably block me, or at least my view. I was very short growing up, and it took me a very long time to grow to a normal height, something I did slowly but surely through high school and early college. My height had always bothered me, and even gotten me picked on throughout junior high school, especially in a sport like basketball. That never stopped me from guarding whoever I had to, even if they had a foot on me. I couldn't always stop them, but players later admitted to me that they hated playing against me because they knew I was going to guard them with everything I had and that even if they scored, it was going to be very difficult. Then I got taller. By senior year I could grab the rim when I jumped (I can't do that anymore!), and when I would return to play pick-up games during college I was as good as any of the other alumni, aged 18 to 45. You couldn't stop me from hitting 3's, no matter how tall the person guarding me.
That was all after the serious competition had ended. I was never a basketball star in official play, with the exception of a lucky award for a small tournament where I had played well. Despite that, I still love to play, because it's a way to PLAY. Writing can be fun, but you don't get to run and jump with other people.
The best "season" I ever had was playing pick-up ball with fellow alumni at Cambridge Central School on Thursday nights from January through March of 2011. I had just traveled around the world and the United States for 9 out of the previous 12 months, and I was waiting to go to Japan. I wasn't the most talented player or the best shooter, but I made sure my teams scored lots of points and that I played as hard as I could with as much creativity as possible. Once I caught the ball and just threw it behind me without looking and it went in the basket, and another player--who I think was overall a much more consistent shooter--asked me what planet I was from. I'll always remember that one.
This evening, after the game was finished, I walked to the PATH train from NJ to 33rd street. There I saw all of these TV's showing the news of the day. One of them showed sports news. Athletes make incredibly enormous amounts of money. One basketball player just signed with a sports company for $300 million. And that's not even for playing basketball. That's just for saying he likes their stuff, even though he almost said the same thing for a completely different company who offered him almost as much money.
As for me, I'm back in my small room in Harlem, writing, or practicing my shot, so to speak. I'll never get paid $300 million by a company to say that I like writing on their laptops or with their pencils (Sanford, L.P., I'm looking at you...), but that's not why I do it, and that's not why the athletes do it either, although I'm sure they're not complaining about the added perks. However, I would like to make enough money to spend more time writing, traveling and influencing the world in positive ways. The only way to make that happen is with practice, patience, publishing and help from the lucky ones.
I don't have any money to show for my strange basketball career, but I still have something very valuable to show for it: a compliment. The greatest compliment I ever received from the game was during pick-up in 2011, when I was flying with confidence from feeling at home just about everywhere on the magic spin ball. One of the players, who had known me since I was 4'8", asked me how tall I was. I said I was 5'11", which is about average for Americans. He said, "You play like you're 6'5"."
Whatever you do, play like you're 6'5".
Unless you're 6'7". Then you should step it up a notch.
Then I found you can literally do that, without the basketball. You can bounce around the ball as opposed to bouncing the ball. In many ways, it is much more fun, and important.
Even so, I've been bouncing the ball again lately. I began a week ago and returned again tonight. I am having a great deal of fun. I can always dribble and penetrate extremely quickly, and complete fancy passes, play vigorous defense and get my hands on plenty of rebounds. Then again, shooting is a whole different matter. You need to practice shooting.
When I was younger I was much better at hanging around the arc and nailing three pointers from the outside, where I was safer from the taller and stronger players who would inevitably block me, or at least my view. I was very short growing up, and it took me a very long time to grow to a normal height, something I did slowly but surely through high school and early college. My height had always bothered me, and even gotten me picked on throughout junior high school, especially in a sport like basketball. That never stopped me from guarding whoever I had to, even if they had a foot on me. I couldn't always stop them, but players later admitted to me that they hated playing against me because they knew I was going to guard them with everything I had and that even if they scored, it was going to be very difficult. Then I got taller. By senior year I could grab the rim when I jumped (I can't do that anymore!), and when I would return to play pick-up games during college I was as good as any of the other alumni, aged 18 to 45. You couldn't stop me from hitting 3's, no matter how tall the person guarding me.
That was all after the serious competition had ended. I was never a basketball star in official play, with the exception of a lucky award for a small tournament where I had played well. Despite that, I still love to play, because it's a way to PLAY. Writing can be fun, but you don't get to run and jump with other people.
The best "season" I ever had was playing pick-up ball with fellow alumni at Cambridge Central School on Thursday nights from January through March of 2011. I had just traveled around the world and the United States for 9 out of the previous 12 months, and I was waiting to go to Japan. I wasn't the most talented player or the best shooter, but I made sure my teams scored lots of points and that I played as hard as I could with as much creativity as possible. Once I caught the ball and just threw it behind me without looking and it went in the basket, and another player--who I think was overall a much more consistent shooter--asked me what planet I was from. I'll always remember that one.
This evening, after the game was finished, I walked to the PATH train from NJ to 33rd street. There I saw all of these TV's showing the news of the day. One of them showed sports news. Athletes make incredibly enormous amounts of money. One basketball player just signed with a sports company for $300 million. And that's not even for playing basketball. That's just for saying he likes their stuff, even though he almost said the same thing for a completely different company who offered him almost as much money.
As for me, I'm back in my small room in Harlem, writing, or practicing my shot, so to speak. I'll never get paid $300 million by a company to say that I like writing on their laptops or with their pencils (Sanford, L.P., I'm looking at you...), but that's not why I do it, and that's not why the athletes do it either, although I'm sure they're not complaining about the added perks. However, I would like to make enough money to spend more time writing, traveling and influencing the world in positive ways. The only way to make that happen is with practice, patience, publishing and help from the lucky ones.
I don't have any money to show for my strange basketball career, but I still have something very valuable to show for it: a compliment. The greatest compliment I ever received from the game was during pick-up in 2011, when I was flying with confidence from feeling at home just about everywhere on the magic spin ball. One of the players, who had known me since I was 4'8", asked me how tall I was. I said I was 5'11", which is about average for Americans. He said, "You play like you're 6'5"."
Whatever you do, play like you're 6'5".
Unless you're 6'7". Then you should step it up a notch.
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