Note: Again I started this post long, long time ago, and never bothered to actually put it out into the cybersphere. I am almost a month into school, so this is old news. Enjoy.

So, it’s back to school again, Maxwell. Even though I did relatively nothing this summer, I was not at all eager to get back to the ol’ grind. I guess maybe my school was not so happy to have me back either, as I didn’t receive my Welcome Back letter until three days before I was supposed to show up, but show up I did, on account of I’m all about having an income.

The week before the students come back to school, teachers have to go to in-service, or professional staff development. I remember when I first started teaching, lo those many years ago, when I thought that I would benefit from being professionally developed by a staff, which, as I am certain you realize, is much better than being infected by one. However, year after year, as pointless, tedious in-service gave way to ridiculous, intelligence-insulting staff development, I’ve sort of lost the mirthful expectation of enlightenment. Nowadays, I bring a book. I bring snacks. Next time I am going to bring Valium.

However, there were two big surprise to this year’s in-service.

First, no foldables; of course, there were still word walls and enormous flip charts and lots of presentations given through sound systems that malfunctioned, which was kind of a blessing. The genius of origami learning through foldables was replaced by educational games (this year featuring puzzle pieces, m&ms and balloons!) and the ever popular chartsngraphs. Chartsngraphs are nothing new, but this year they had a new look to them; instead of simple pie or bar charts, these had multiple axis lines (axes? axises? axisili?), quadrants, and trajectories. I was in charge of our tables’ chart, and I drew an octopus in three colors. It had teeth and breasts – big ones. Eight of them.

Except for a new teacher, everyone else in my group was on his or her Iphone, playing Words With Friends, or on Facebook. One dude was snoring lightly, and I truly think one of our coaches was sexting a clerk who works in the attendance office, so clearly, it was up to me to represent our table. When I put our chart on the wall with the others, I was very impressed with how elegantly the octopus was picking her nose with one of her tentacles while pickpocketing a sand dollar from the Speedo of a surfer. It’s not so easy to look nonchalant when committing a crime, and even more difficult for an artist to portray that using giant flip chart paper and only three colors.

One of the math teachers noticed my happy appraisal of my work, followed my eyes, and sighed. He got up, took the giant flip chart paper down, and in five seconds drew up a new one that had x’s and y’s and plotted points and not only quadrants but eightdrants full of words like synthesis and analysis. It was all in black marker. He stuck his up on the wall where mine had been and shook his head at me. I would have complained, but it was time for lunch.

I had a glass of wine at lunch. Maybe a glass and a half. Who’s counting?

When I got back, just the teensiest bit tardy (I didn’t feel tardy!), I was knackered. Lunch can be so draining. Fortunately, it was time for movies.

Film is always an integral part for staff development. We have flicks on Blood Borne Pathogens (always a thriller!), Your Responsibility in the Face of Child Endangerment (an hour-long documentary that teaches you -spoiler alert!- to call if you suspect abuse…as opposed to doing nothing, I guess…), and the gem in the crown, the Sexual Harassment video.

In the past, the movies at our school have been marked with unfortunate technical failures. These mechanical flaws have made the videos bearable at least, hilarious at best. We once watched a video on a 23-inch tv on the  middle of a stage 30 feet away from us in an auditorium where the lights went out and the sound didn’t work. The teachers sat quietly through the first 15 minutes, but the cover of darkness and lack of sound proved too much for them. Soon people were shouting quasi-sensical, inappropriate comments like. “That’s no germ – it’s a sperm!” or random releases of  hostility like, “Mr. Creighton is an asswipe!” Finally the principal allowed us to leave, but, as I mentioned, the lights were out and there are no windows in the auditorium, so for five minutes all anyone could hear was uncomfortable wooden seats being lifted and then people falling over each other as they attempted to make their ways down the aisles.

Those were the days.

This brings me to the second surprise of the day. I settled in for the double feature du jour; “High Blood Pressure- Silent Killer” and “Sexual Harassment – Stop It!” The room – we were in the girl’s gym – was close and warm, as the air conditioner, never fully functional in the best of times, was wheezing asthmatically in the thousand degree heat of the summer. Lunch was weighing down on me while the lights dimmed. I gently nodded out, floating into the comforting, deep sleep that one can only get in a high school during a movie after lunch.

And then I heard it, from the outer edges of my consciousness – the Sexual Harassment film was pulling me back into alertness because….

…it was AWESOME! It had a real 20 year old super hot high school girl with long frosted hair telling about how her chemistry teacher had made her feel uncomfortable. The girl who portrayed the girl who evidently got laid was a very earnest actress. She elevated the  what could have been a bit part into a tour de force of melodrama. She did a lot of that “laughing-to-hide-the-pain-look-at-my-brave -face-but-oh-how-I’m-crying-inside” stuff, rubbing her smooth brow (no matter how good of an actress she was, she’s still only twenty!), and smiling that particular sorrowful smile where the grin is lopsided and the corners turn down. She snivelled, she whined, she was rueful as hell. I would have found her too annoying to harass, but who am I to judge the fictional chemistry teacher?

Then there was a lady principal who stood in a back lit classroom door in a shapely red power suit while she blackmailed a male teacher who sat sweating behind his desk. She was hilarious. I took notes on what she said – she had some great double entendres-  so that I could share it with you, but I wrote them on the thick packet of very important information I got at staff development that I accidentally threw  away later that evening. Trust me when I say she was really funny. I laughed out loud. Some people turned to look at me, but I didn’t care. The only thing that could have made it was popcorn.

But that wasn’t even the best part. The best part was this very well-educated lunch lady was complaining that even though she was a professional, this douchebag teacher kept hitting on her. She went into a reverie type flashback and we saw her abuse. The teacher had a swagger and a sense of his own irresistibility that couldn’t be shaken despite the “school spirit” t-shirt, tie and leisure jacket he sported. He wore all white tennis shoes, like a creepy nurse.The dignified lunch lady tried to fend off his advances, but no avail. “Mr. Smith, I am a professional!” she protested.

“Aw, Prudie! Call my by real name – Pimp Daddy!”

That, my friends, is Sexual Harassment video gold. It doesn’t get any better than that.

The word ‘literally’ is literally overused.

Really, you hardly ever need to use it. See? I just said the same thing I just said without using ‘literally’, and it was just as effective and much less affected.

It’s ok to use it when your head literally explodes, because that is unexpected.If someone said, “My head just exploded,” you might say, “Damn! No shit? Literally just exploded?” Of course, if your head literally exploded, you probably wouldn’t need to underscore the actuality of the event, nor would you be the one to tell about it. Maybe that’s not the best example.

I heard that the fat president, Taft I think, or maybe that president that died from eating too many dried apricots and plums, (was it Zachary Taylor? Did I just look that up on Wikipedia or do I just happen to know stuff like that?) internally combusted. That would be a good one. “He literally combusted from prunes and shit!”

Or if you eat a bunch of super-hot peppers and literal flames shot out of your ass. One would expect something to shoot out of your ass, but not actual fire, so the literally is good there.

Most of the time when literally is used appropriately, some sort of explosion is necessary.

But not when you miss the train literally by 5 minutes. Do you think someone is going to question you so you have to make sure that they know that it was truly 5 minutes? “Come on now,” they ask concernedly. “Are you sure you didn’t miss that train by seven minutes?”

You don’t need to emphasize the veracity of the situation when you say “I literally fell down the steps!” Just “I fell down the steps!” is funny enough. Or, “My deadline is literally Thursday at 7.”  Who cares? Not me, that’s for sure. I have deadlines to miss of my own.

Plus, people lie when they use literally. “I was literally starving!” Really? Belly full of air, flies around your head, hallucinating-dancing-hotdogs-starving? I don’t think so. Or, “I literally didn’t have a single thought in my head!”

That one might be true. Some people are literal idiots. Eejits. Egrets. Some people are literally egrets.

Yup. I literally choose to end this post with that thought. That just happened. Suck it, egret.

You know that phrase, ‘live in the moment’? That’s hard to do, because in order to live it one has to realize that the moment is occurring, and to appreciate it, but then reject analysis of it and just be in it.  You have to simultaneously acknowledge and deny, or activate and withdraw consciousness, and that takes time. By the time you figure out what is happening and that this is the moment you are living in, the moment is gone.

Some would argue that the point of living in the moment is NOT being aware or conscious of what’s going on and how you are reacting to it, but I contend that just existing at a given time is not really living; in order to truly live, one must have some awareness of one’s role in that life, even if the understanding of the moment is skewed, subconscious, or recognized only in retrospect. In order to fully realize the implication’s of Hamlet’s famous question, one really has to figure out what it means to be before one can decide whether or not it’s better not to be.

So, yeah, that’s what I think.

Being active in my day to day life isn’t all that easy, on account of lots of times I tune out and go on auto pilot, or let one of my alternate personalities come out (I have two main alters, Doo Doo Brown and The Baby. Have I told you about them? Is that weird? Well, anyway, this post isn’t about them, so maybe I’ll write about them another time.) It’s hard to be present in what you are doing and with whom you are dealing. It’s like driving to work. You get in the car, you turn on the radio, you think about the day ahead, and then you are there, but the actual drive, and perhaps more importantly, the driving; that’s all just a faded blur. Especially if you are drunk.

I think the not paying attention is because often we are preoccupied and think that whatever is in our heads is more important than what is in front of our faces, and our inner lives are interesting, while reality is boring. This is probably true for most people, but often I find myself thinking about cheese, or colors, or what ‘lorn’ means (forlorn, lovelorn), or if dogs have appendixes, or if sharks sweat, or why, if I am so cute in person, do I look like a cross between a rabbit, a shark, and a doberman in photos. For people like me, there is a chance that if I paid attention to what is going on in the world around me, or, better still, if I actually took part in it, I might learn something.

Hence Thursday’s goal.

Opportunities for engagement presented themselves almost immeadiately.

When Atticus woke me up at the crack of dawn for our morning walk, I tried to see things as he did. When he stopped to sniff, I sniffed, too. There is honeysuckle growing by my neighbors trash can. Mmmm! Smells good! And also, stinks like reeking trash in the hot sun! Delightful juxtaposition of olfactory truths, non?

When Atticus went into the high grass to pee, I went into the high grass too, but not to pee, because I didn’t have to go just then. Guess what? I addition to honeysuckle in the ally, we also have poison something growing! It rakes your flesh and immediately angry red welts spring up on your arms and legs. Also, something scary lives in the tall grass, and it makes a fast rustling sound when it moves! Another adventure for another day!

Atticus takes time to smell the roses

I took the time to chat with fellow dog walkers, something I normally cross the street or duck into an alley to avoid.

“Hey! How ya doin’ today? Not too hot yet, right?” Atticus met Odette, Eddie, Speckles and Madison. I talked to my neighbors and heard stories I thought were interesting (mostly) and sometimes poignant, all in the span of five minutes. One man had just had twins (named Austin and Dallas – really!), and said that walking the dog was his only chance to escape them during the day. I asked what his wife did for escape, and he said she got the afternoon and evening walks. The dog (Madison – I sense a theme in this dude’s naming strategy!)  looked very tired.

One man told about how he found Eddie and felt so sorry for the flea ridden, mangy puppy that showed up starving in his backyard one day that he not only decided to keep him, but he slept outside on the porch with him for a week until Eddie’s skin condition cleared up enough for him to come into the house. Eddie is three now, and walks without a leash, right by the man’s side. He is very friendly with people and dogs, and Eddie and his owner, who is probably in his late 60’s, walk two miles every day. He (the man, not Eddie) invited me to a dog party on his front lawn to celebrate the 4th of July.

Jenny carries Speckles. He was her kids’ dog, and now the kids are gone and so are the grandkids and the husband. Jenny went to England on vacation, but came back early because the vet called and said Speckles didn’t have too much more time.

When I crossed the busy street, I waved at the cars that passed by instead of just watching their wheels roll by. Lo and behold, there’s people in them there cars! Mostly they were baffled by me, but some waved and honked, and one guy double back and asked me – three times!- if I needed a ride!

I chatted up the mailman and gave some of my tomatoes and cucumbers to my neighbor down the street. I went to Starbucks and had an iced coffee (Atticus had iced water) and finished the last pages of my Shteyngart book, which was fantastic! I got completely absorbed in the story and cried a little at the end, and then told a stranger all about it, while Atticus snored at my feet in the shade of the table.

Later, I invited people over to dinner and danced while I cooked. I tasted everything and experimented with flavors. I picked flowers from the garden to put on the table and in the bathroom. We talked and laughed and ate and then sat around the table for a long time and talked and ate and laughed some more. At the end of the evening, people who had come into my house strangers hugged goodbye on the porch.

I liked being engaged so much I want to marry it!

Here are some people in some moments: