The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

So this story's all about some hicksville fair and there's this woman who's there with her family and it's all small town crap like when I go to stay with my cousin at his farm and his family makes me go to the 4H fair and like I'm supposed to be all happy 'cause on account of I get a candy apple and to ride on some lameass ferris wheel. Plus all the decent looking chicks are like already engaged on account of they get married the day they graduate from high school.

Anyway, this fair has some sort of big lottery and I'm thinking it's for some pie or something but this chick in the story she's all not wanting to win, which I think is kind of generous of her and all, but then her family gets picked and she wants her kids to win and stuff and I'm thinking nice mom but then... Wh0a!

This lottery kind of sucks--and I don't mean like that draw we had in grade 7 to ride in the cop car with officer "needs some deodorant" sucked, but it really sucks. I guess it would be kinda wrong to tell you how it all ends because then you won't even bother reading the story.

But whoa--I've been stoned at a fair before and all, but this... I mean, it was a rock concert, dude, but there ain't no headliner.

I wonder if that's too big a hint. Oh well, you ain't gonna read it anyway, or you wouldn't be botherin' with this.

Thoughts that flit into my head for a moment

First of all, in addition to the crap Kate went through in that recent post on the way home from the concert that never was she was driving her dad's new car on the interstate and a tire blew out on her--could've been very bad news indeed. Oh, and I forgot to mention the uncertainty about where she will live if her dad's job moves since his workplace was destroyed?

Send her hugs.

I've updated my photobuckets a bit, and am in process of updating them more. If you already have the addresses and password, feel free to stop by and if you don't, and want to see them, just email me and I'll send you the info.

Heavy and/or tough things happening in a variety of friends' lives right now, but I can't go into details entirely here--here's hoping this doesn't become Fall 2004, part 2.

I was a bit relieved not to be asked specifics about some of my examples by the parents of my English students on last Thursday night's open house. For instance, I was explaining the difference between "count nouns" and "non-count nouns" and how you can say there are "fewer" students in the class but in order to say there are "less" students you'd have to put them in a big blender and liquify them first...

Yeah, I got a few looks. Yes, I'm strange.

We had Vicki Gabereau as our guest speaker this afternoon. (I'm not sure if that's the right spelling of her name.) It's an odd phenomenon this "speakers' bureau" approach to professional development activities. Other groups she's spoken to recently include both a neurosurgeon's convention and a nurse's conference. She's somewhat of a minor celebrity as a journalist/talk show host for many years, and I must admit, she's an entertaining and engaging speaker. Truthfully, though--nothing we did today really was more valuable than simply getting some marking and planning done would have been.

Yesterday, we took my inlaws up to this year's "dream home" being raffled off as part of the big annual cancer society lottery. Quite a crowd going through, and as always, it looks nice but there's so much impracticality about it. Here are a few pics:

Waiting for the anvil to drop next

So here's Kate's situation at the moment:

Hurricane rips roof off building where she lives--when able to move back to her town with suitable services restored, she'll have to move into a different place.

Her senior year of high school is completely messed up and vacations will be reduced to make up for the lost month of September.

Becomes very... fond of new friend staying together at her mom's--friend is supposed to go to Coldplay concert with her tonight--last minute bailout.

Was supposed to fly to the concert--No New Orleans to fly out of, so it's the long drive to Alabama .

At least she has the concert to help her escape things for a few hours. Oh wait--now she's in Alabama for the concert tonight and she finds that Chris Martin is sick and THE CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Those of you who read and comment on her blog occasionally--Jatue, B.G.--go visit and drop a note of encouragement. I feel so sorry for her for all thic crap right now.

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Writer

Oh—you’re the kid who won that story contest a while back. Yeah, I guess I could tell you about being a writer if you want a good hobby for when… what? You want to make a living at it? Okay, then that’s different…

You’ll head off to college after high school and do the general first year or two in the Arts faculty, and then when you get a chance you’ll apply to the writing coop or English honors program. Either way, you'll have to show some college writing teachers what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be surprised if they’re not gushing over anything you do. You see, most writing instructors are simply frustrated writers—if they had their preference, they’d be writing too, but they can’t make a living at it so they toil in academia where they have come to the conclusion that no one actually will succeed in the profession that has been so fickle to them.

In spite of their lack of support, you begin to develop your own unique style—well, not exactly unique—face it, there are so many writers out there all you can hope is that you’re not so very obvious when you mimic Hemingway or imitate Sylvia Plath. While you are struggling to please your professors, you also begin sending off short works to various magazines, and begin working on what you come to describe as your “major opus”—a work so dear to your heart that you begin celebrating its birthday and think of it as family.

In your senior year in college you take up with another young writer—you’ve been pretentiously ambiguous about your sexuality for a couple of years but you decide to settle on this dark young poet who writes his most edgy works while recovering from his all too common three-day drunken benders. You keep his printer in ink, make him breakfast and ensure the world doesn’t bother him when he’s writing. You try not to look hurt when he refuses to show you his work, and you manage not to cry when he mocks the few things you show him. One night he even goads you into burning your "baby". You plan to leave him countless times but every time he’s on his tenth martini and slurs that you’re his “muse”, you succumb to your codependent tendencies and unpack your bags.

Money is tight when the two of you move in together after graduating with worthless bachelors’ degrees so you take a job as a phone harasser for a loans collection agency while he continues to drink and occasionally write. After you receive an eviction notice because he spent your rent money on a beer bong and a party while you were out of town one weekend you decide you’ve had enough. You sneak out while he’s asleep and rent a small apartment across town. You decide to forget your writing dream and enroll in a graduate business program. It’s deadly dull, but at least you feel there’s some money at the end of this obstacle course.

Meanwhile, only a few weeks after you leave your ex is suddenly discovered as a “bright new literary star”, which simply means that he had the good fortune to step into traffic and be hit by Oprah’s chauffeur. Fearing a lawsuit, Oprah befriends him and puts his poetry anthology “Blood in my Urine” on her monthly book club recommended list. Soon your old boyfriend is being feted by pretentious semiliterates throughout the English-speaking world, while you write insincere papers for soulless business professors. It shocks you when your suddenly successful ex calls you and invites you for dinner. He had hired a private investigator to unravel the mystery of your sudden disappearance, and once he has found you, he immediately proposes.

Your heart overrules your doubts and you say yes. Within a few days you’ve once again moved in together and you’re suddenly sharing the fruits of his newfound wealth. He boasts of his six-month long sobriety to you, but within another month the two of you are screaming at each other daily and you realize sadly that it was the drunk you fell in love with, and his sober self is a tiresome bore. You resolve to leave one night when he’s in the middle of a rant about your many shortcomings when suddenly he stops, clutches his chest and then falls to the floor, dead.

The outpouring of grief by his admiring public is intense but shortlived. As you are cleaning out his den a few weeks later, you discover some unpublished poems and take them to his publisher. Soon you’re collecting royalties for the posthumous anthology and you realize that there’s still some money left in his reputation. You quietly begin writing bogus poetry you attribute to him—long hours of listening to his cynical diatribes have made you uniquely qualified to counterfeit his work.

It’s only when you get even greedier and recycle some of your old work from college that an old teaching assistant from your former university blows the whistle on you and your lucrative income vanishes instantly. Because you were unprepared for it, you had no chance to save, and before long you’re desperate for cash. Unfortunately the writing bug has returned to you full force and you cannot bring yourself to return to the mundane demands of any other career. Still, your work is hardly of a caliber to attract attention in the right circles, and before long you are forced to turn to writing pornography—a 150 page predictable piece of trash pays a few hundred dollars, and your prose is a slight cut above the tripe most of your fellow pornographers produce.

If you’re lucky, one day you’ll get a chance to write a screenplay for one of your novels. I doubt it will be difficult.

grrrrr...

So the travel company--I won't name them since they're huge and then I'd end up getting traffic I didn't want right now--who's doing our New York trip today tells me when I PHONE THEM that there's a problem since there's no other group to pair us with when we plan to go. Yes, we're not a huge group, but I was never told that would be a problem--there are 14 of us travelling all together. Anyway, the choices that her company seems to be giving us are

a) go during the spring, say March. NO THAT WON'T WORK WE HAVE KIDS ON BAND TRIPS AND THAT'S WHEN OUR SHOW IS.

b) cancel the trip outright and they'll refund our money. LOVELY--MY FIRST BIG TRIP AND IT FLOPS; WON'T THAT MAKE EVERYONE WHO'S LOOKING FORWARD TO IT HAPPY.

c) do it as a "private" tour, which means we add an amount per person to do that--she suggested $150 per person. RIGHT--HEY FOLKS, JUST THOUGHT I'D TELL YOU WE NEED MORE MONEY FROM ALL OF YOU WITHOUT WARNING--YOU'RE OKAY WITH THAT, RIGHT?

Sorry--I hate capitalization yelling, but this is crap. I told her to work really hard on that number for the private trip and get back to me. I'm not happy. If I wasn't already paying the 99 bucks per for everyone's comprehensive travel insurance package and doing the subsidies for all my program kids, it might be easily done. As it is, when I catch my breath and think about it, I know I can probably pull it off.

It just cuts into money that should be there for other things.

It's also too late to switch tour companies, as has already been suggested to me, and arranging a tour ourself at this late date isn't possible for the price per person we'd have to work with.

The company isn't some little mickey mouse one--it's the same one that did Kate's school trip to Germany a few months ago. I wonder how long it would've taken for them to spring this on me if I hadn't phoned today?

*sigh*

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Tourist Trap Operator

Hi kid--Your family has that dollar store in the strip mall, right? Did you know your toothpaste tastes like soap? So what do you want to... Oh, hmm--well, I can see the connection I guess, since tourists are good at paying for absolute crap merchandise if you market it right. It will go something like this:

You'll move to some small town, preferably located near a beach, mountains or hot springs--or any other kind of natural phenomenon that can be marketed. Remember, that stink from the hot springs is "therapeutic" rather than toxic.

You'll buy or build a small retail outlet near the center of town. You won't rent because you don't want someone evicting you and stealing your idea if you become a success. Besides, with the ingenuity you and the other members of the local chamber of commerce will bring to the task of creating a tourism destination you figure the property will be a good investment.

It won't be easy at first--the locals are an odd bunch, probably due to the small gene pool created by years of inbreeding--but eventually you figure out the only way into their trust and you marry a local girl. Fortunately her six toes are from a recessive gene and your two girls seem comfortingly normal.

The hot springs aren't enough to make the town boom, you figure out, so you bring a brainstorm to the city council and convince them the town needs a mythological creature to pull in the crowds and market souvenir merchandise. You propose "Mort the Giant Rat", which seems original to anyone who doesn't know your kids' propensity for watching "The Princess Bride" five nights a week. The council agrees--although some wonder about the repulsiveness of the creature until you share a portfolio of Mort charicatures you had done by a local artist--he's almost cuddly in the poses with a variety of local merchanise and produce.

Still, the goal is to create interest, so while the marketing version of Mort is friendly, you simultaneously develop a ficticious folklore about giant rats who inhabited the murky past of your small community. Soon cryptozoologists are among the hundreds who flock to wander the back trails in search of the legendary "rodentia gigantisimus" as you and your colleagues dub it. The growth of the town continues, and although some items, like the local eatery's "ratburgers" don't sell well, most find the tourist trade increasingly lucrative.

Of course, there is still the offseason. The winter months are grey and depressing, and your girls join the local children who wander the empty streets seeking distraction. Since the local police maintain their manpower year-round, all they have to do in the offseason is hunt for drugs and confiscate alcohol from teens. In despair local youth turn to glue and gasoline for their highs, and soon you're among the many parents who ship their kids off to boarding school to save them from tragedy.

By the following season you've added a new attraction--a local craftsman, related like most to your wife, builds you a giant rat trap which you locate at the front of your property, even though you dipped into the town treasury to pay for it. Some other merchants are angry at first, but you assuage them by having giant yellow rat prints painted on the town boardwalk and have the tracks enter those businesses who contribute to your campaign to become mayor. When you win you get to sit in a convertible at the front of the "rat race", the annual parade which kicks off the weeklong "Plague Festival". It's going so well you buy up property outside town you can't really afford and begin building a resort which will stretch your budget to the breaking point.

Unfortunately, at about that time an unlucky tourist will trigger the rat trap in front of your store--you hadn't realized your dimwitted cousin-in-law would make it a functioning device--and the result is one man dead, a couple both paralyzed for life, and a busload of children in need of months of trauma counselling. The town becomes even more crowded with tabloid news crews for a few days, and then the downturn begins. Locals blame you for the destruction of the tourist trade, and soon only a few ghouls come to look at the site of the tragedy, and even the hot springs can't escape the malaise that hangs over the town.

You declare bankruptcy after first alienating your wife and all of her relatives by trying to sue her cousin for his deadly mousetrap construction. He has no assets and leaves town and you are financially destroyed by the first few lawsuits to get to court.

Your daughters are forced to return home and when your wife leaves you they join her. Her relatives give her a portion of the moonshine revenue to start a new life as a maid in a large Las Vegas hotel and casino. She and your daughters stop writing you after six months, and you hear nothing for two years from them as you drink most of the little money you are able to glean from the occasional visitor. You become more and more isolated from the villagers who hate you and have to pay a local ne'er do well to buy groceries for you so you needn't mix with people who'd rather spit on you than serve you.

After a lively night of heavy drinking, the patrons of a local pub head to your home with torches, while you read a letter you received from your ex-wife earlier in the day--apparently your daughters are ironically both serving the needs of tourists in ways that are only legal in Nevada. You don't notice the crowd outside until the molotov cocktails come crashing through your windows.

The next year the locals concoct a story about how you were in league with the devil and you and your home spontaneously combusted. They have their most profitable summer in a decade, and they become nostalgic enough about your good years that within a few months practically no one urinates on your grave any more.

A Link Blog

This morning I drove my niece into town to stay with my wife's sister and her family tonight. Tomorrow afternoon I pick her up and take her to the airport and she heads to go live with her family for a few months before heading off to India after Christmas where she'll be volunteering in an orphanage for a year. I got to work and had to put away all my theatre seats before first block--fortunately Marcela stopped by and have me a hand. and had a nice Drama 9 class, and then in my spare had a much needed chat with R, who once again has the sacred keys to the theatre/booth and we went on our first Starbucks run of the new school year.

I enjoyed talking yesterday on the phone to Kate for the first time. She needs not be so touchy about cracker jokes though. Today I received the paperwork to make Bay one of my T.A.'s for this semester. At lunch, Milly was putting masking tape on people's backs and writing messages on them. She put one on my back that said something like "this beard needs shaving". The funny part was that after lunch I forgot about the tape and I went to my afternoon grade 9 English class with it still stuck on my back, where I am sure my students saw it every time I turned to write on the whiteboard and thought "what a loser".

When I got home I had a chance to chat with my friend sshhh, who works here. Then my daughter got home from her appointment to have her cast removed, and we discovered, as my wife had suspected a month ago when she got the cast on, that the bones hadn't quite been aligned and so the healing is going slowly and she has now got a "splint" half cast, which really disappointed her--crying time--so I promised her a trip to her favorite restaurant, and we even let her order one of the "expensive kid's drinks" instead of just the regular pop.

My wife wasn't suprised since the cast was put on in Powell River, where my wife, who is a nurse, has always been less than impressed by the quality of the health care she's heard about from my parents or seen firsthand on the occasions we've needed to use it up there. So now it looks like two more weeks of cast for the kid who had hoped to come home and jump in the pool that I rushed home from work to prepare.

Later, after supper, I talked to Katie on msn for the first time. While we were talking I noticed I had received an email from the recently invisible Camila, who briefly informed me of the main reason for her invisibility. Ahh, gossip from the eastern time zone...

Sorry if I didn't include some of you--this kind of post is more work than usual...

Participant list...

for the Delurking Day in support of Hurricane Katrina victims is at Ella's blog.

Go. Read. Comment. Cost us money. Donate yourself.

j.


I should give something for people to read, I just decided, so for those of you wandering to this blog just to say hi today, you can have a look at these old posts:

A poem by the "Emo Child" (though Alex rightly points out she sounds more goth than emo)

Ilsa the Costco Girl

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as an Art Critic

The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains "Romeo and Juliet"

Let's give them something to talk about

Sorry--cheesy title for a serious entry.

I figure if I'm doing the delurking day thing tomorrow (see below) then I'd best get some topics out there for commenting. BTW, I get an alert like many of you for each comment added anywhere on my blog, so you can go comment on something from last January and I'll still count it.

First, I'm barely able to tear myself away from the coverage of the disaster on the various news outlets--it's hard to even comprehend the level of this. Rampant snipers, corpses floating by, people dying in their homes with no one to rescue them, hospitals moving everyone to the upper floors to protect them from looters and chaos, and finally the military showing up several days late.

Oh, and on one station a commentator pointing out that 40% or more of the national guard members who'd be around for this sort of thing are instead in Iraq, and then asking what would happen if now there was a major terrorist incident or an earthquake in southern california. He followed that with bringing up the renewed push for a return of the draft...

Had a few good chats with Kate since she got back online. She's still at her mom's in B.R. and they've got another family of N.O. refugees staying there at the moment. School back in Mandeville is apparently scheduled to restart in early October. Lots of uncertainty--her dad's place of employment was located right near where the levee broke so it doesn't exist as a building anymore. They're also looking at having to move homes now, due to hurricane damage as well.

Here in my household we've begun once more discussing the need for better emergency supplies on hand--I wonder how many of you have such? K. can correct me but I seem to recall years ago when I boarded in the basement suite of an LDS family that they were supposed to keep two months supply of goods on hand--whether that was a local practice or a church teaching I don't know.

Back almost a decade ago when we had the freakish snowstorm that paralyzed this city--bodies were left in houses where people died for several days because no help could get through, etc.--we realized how much having a good relationship with neighbors can help. Our little cul-de-sac of 11 houses all pulled together to clear the street and look after the elderly residents--trudging on foot to the one grocery store we knew was open.

We also discovered that when the electricity and cable were on, television was useless--locally they just ran regular programming and didn't seem to acknowledge the problem. Meanwhile, one local radio station essentially ran the town for a week. It was that station who alerted people that an elderly person's roof needed shovelling off or it was in danger of collapse--a bunch of roofs did in fact collapse--or that a dialysis patient desperately needed a snowmobile ride to the hospital.

That's another tragic part of the crisis in the hurricane's aftermath--the poor who have survived but who need dialysis or insulin and can't get it in the chaos that exists right now.

Question for Ella--if a disaster on a large scale happened where you work and live, would you be the one sitting there with a shotgun protecting the inventory, or would you walk away and leave the door unlocked as you go?

Then there's the debate about our role as teachers if the big earthquake comes here while school is in session--how many of us must stay and how long? What about our own families and finding our kids?

Lots to think about right now.

If you wish to donate, there are lots of pages and locations but I'll just pass along a link page on the CNN site:
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/katrina/help.center/

I start counting at midnight tonight.

Delurking day to support hurricane victims

For everyone who comments on Saturday I'll be donating a dollar to the Red Cross to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (No, Kate, I won't just turn it into a starbucks card for you.) Seriously, though--it's a great cause and if you want to participate or know more, go read about the idea on Ella's blog.

Do it.

(Oh, and for you bright sparks who think you can make 700 comments that day--it's sadly one per customer.)

J.