a blanket and a habitat…
“see, i’ve been putting up with this for thirty years!”…my mother on one of my dad’s irrational arguments about some miniscule detail regarding the house…they argue like this every few hours or so…it’s both slightly annoying and a little relieving…they seem to enjoy it in their own bizarre world…i guess spending thirty years with anyone exclusively is bound to make you a little insane…
i’m at a panera bread right now…i enjoyed a fairly delicious asiago cheese bagel with sun dried tomato cream cheese and my parents have taken a brief leave of me to tend to their visitors…this is most welcome as i require a reasonable amount of alone time in my daily digest in order to maintain my own sanity…this is often difficult to come by when i’m visiting my parents…but i’ve managed to do a decent job of it so far…
on the first day of my trip, i took a nice five mile run around my parents neighborhood…luckily for me, their neighborhood happens to sit in an enormous nature preserve…it was nice to run alongside a landscape of endless dark green woods, chirping birds and a smattering of animals i’ve never before seen…there’s no real nature in new york city and north andover, ma (by contrast) seems like the most relaxing place in the world…
yesterday, i spent some time sorting through old boxes of books that were left in what my mother labels as “arun’s room”…i dug up some books that i lent my mom that i plan on bringing back to brooklyn with me and found my old high school yearbook…it’s interesting to revisit who you were when you were young…i’ve been reading (and re-reading) ee cummings’ 73 poems along side a revisit of the shame of the nation by jonathon kozol…the latter is a really well researched diatribe about the way in which we’ve sold out our nation’s poorest children…it’s heartbreaking to read and i’d say it’s recommended reading for just about anybody…unfortunately, i often feel like his works are read mostly by educators…there’s nothing particularly wrong about this, because there are certainly some excellent suggestions that even educators can garner from his work…still, it’s a lot like preaching to the choir…i’d like the rest of the country to try and engage themselves in this problem a little more…i think it’d provide for a much better place to live for all of us…there are some great passages in there that i’d like to post, but i left the book at my parent’s house so it’ll have to wait…
i’m reviewing a resume right now for a math teaching position at my school…resume’s are mostly a whole lot of bullshit…i can’t really discern how i’m supposed to determine if anyone’s qualified for anything through a resume…i mean, excluding a few that are just riddled with grammatical errors and the like, everyone looks good on paper…this one happens to be a teach for america resume…so trying to decipher if this person is actually interested in education or whether this is just a place to rest in between undergrad and law school (or something of that ilk) is always the first step…an administrative duty that reminds me why i’d never really want to be a principal…
ooxx aa