Birthday Fun

Yesterday was my birthday and it was quite a long birthday at that. It really wasn't too exciting actually, but it did make for a memorable day which can be categorized as a birthday. It started out with me working. So... actually for the first 4 hours of my birthday, I was working, because it was the last 4 hours of my 13 hour shift for the day at work. It was pretty long and i was pretty darn tired at the end of that day, but it wasn't really that bad i think.
Then I went to bed and slept for about 5 hours and then got up and went back to work again for the rest of the day. It was a nice Gameday in Norman and when a few of my customers found out it was my birthday, they were extra nice, and one table even sang to me. Then, since my boss hadn't given me a break on the previous day, I asked him if i could get a break today, and so he did. He gave me the first half of the game off. I was excited, but then, just as i was leaving, he asked me if I wanted to go to the game. I said yes, and so he gave me an extra ticket they had! Wow, I was really happy. So i went to the first half of the game. It was really great. It'd been about 4 years since my last game and the environment was so much fun. I was really lucky to have had such a great break I think.
In the end of the night, I was working behind the bar. It's funny you know how many people would come up to the bar and they'd be like hey man, it's my birthday, can i get something for free. I told them, no they couldn't. They'd proceed to badger me about it and they'd say, "But it's my birthday." Then I'd just tell them it was mine too and they'd be a bit more silent. And the last fun notable comment of the evening is when the future Heisman winner was sitting at my bar and i had to tell him that he couldn't sit there because he isn't 21. :) My birthday ended anti-climatically and I got home the day after my birthday and went to bed. Thus... another year down, another year yet to come. Let's hope it's a good one. Thanks to everyone for the messages and calls.

The Turnpike

In Oklahoma we have this highway that you have to pay money for every time you drive on it. It's the main connection from Tulsa to OKC. It's nice and really fast, but there is the problem of having to pay for it every time you go on it. The cost is approximately three dollars and fifty cents.

I went to Tulsa last weekend to hang out with my family a bit and it was a great time. I got to spend time with my nephews, talked on the phone to a friend and watched movies with my mom. But all that aside (that's not the cause for a story). I made it to Tulsa ok, but the problem was going back home.

Sunday morning I headed off and as soon as I got on the road, I realized that perhaps I didn't have the mandatory amount of money to drive on the highway home. As I was driving, I started to count my money (not a good idea to do when you're driving on the highway, but nevertheless...) and I finally counted out that I had three dollars and 44 cents. I needed only six more cents. So as I was still driving on the highway, I looked around my car. I reached in all sorts of places and yet, I couldn't find anything... :(

I finally came to the toll booth and I was thinking to myself... "So many people drive through this each day that they must have run across this problem before. They must accept credit card or something. I pull up and the guy asks me for my money. I ask if they accept card and he says no. I then proceed to tell him that I am lacking 6 cents. He hesitantly accepts my money and puts it in the register and lets me through. Before leaving I apologetically ask, "Is it ok?" he begrudgingly answers, "I GUESS so...". Really rude. I drove off. But i was a little upset because if he was upset about it or didn't want to accept it, I would have accepted responsibility for my actions. I had realized that it was my fault and that I would have to pay the consequences. But he just acted a bit rude and let me go on through, like he had to. But he DIDN'T have to. So if he wants to let me through, he should have acted a bit nicer to me. At least that's what I think...

International Schooling and American Independence

Dear Mr. Friedman, I teach fifth grade reading and social studies at the Annie Wright School, a private school in Tacoma, Washington. While many of the families I teach are ethically diverse and well educated, most are white, upper middle class American families. I recently rinished your new book "The World Is Flat." I wish i could have shared these thoughts with you before you write this. Parent conferences are one of the more interesting aspects of my job; I never realized that they were such a cultural study, though. Two parent conferences two years ago were my flat earth moment. One conference was with Deven and Swati Vora. (Guess where the Vora family immigrated from?) As we chatted about their daughter Sonia, they told me not only did our school not give enough homework but also that it wasn't challenging enough. Later that day in another conference, Irena Mikeladze, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, wanted to know why her son Timothy had no science book and such a flimsy science curriculum. How could we be a competitive school when we didn't have a science book? Representing two different national characters, the three parents made me think. Sadly, many... white, American, middle class parents told me that the fifth grade work was too hard on their kids. They couldn't possibly complete it and have time to "be a kid." Soccer, gymnastics, music lessons and dinner out squeezed their education time. Some parents would ask for my colleagues and me to lighten the load. These worrisome parents merely set low expectations for children by running interference; the scary parents... think everything is great and never demand more. If their kids do OK and have fun, then they must be getting a great education. Our schools tend to live back in an 11/9 mindset (referring to pre-internet era). I know as a school, my school compares itself with schools down the road or in the next town. If my students' parents believe that we are better than the local public, parochial and private schools, then they are content. As you wrote, and I realized in the two conferences, the real competition is not from the next town or the neighboring state any more. You're right - in many ways we are fooling ourselves. In an academic sense we lost our hunger (except for cheerleading and football and failing bond measures). We're complacent and headed for trouble. Sadly, national leadership is worried about not leave kids behind, and states like Kansas and Georgia seem more concerned with elimination Darwin and adding intelligent design. If one puts his ear to the flat Earth, one can hear the competition from overseass. My goal as an educator is to stop being the best local school, or reagional school, and start being the best on the planet.
-Malcolm Davidson, a high school teacher in Washington State

Having taught English and lived in a society that is gravely different from that of the American, I feel I am able to see both sides of this. Americans see more importance in extracurricular activities and sports, while other cultures place more importance on education. And this is something that I really do feel strongly about. I think that we haven't been pushing our kids enough in the school system here in America. I feel like it's just not being expected to get these kids prepared for what life is really going to test them on. I hope I'm wrong, but because the American education system is so different internally (from school district to school district, from state to state), I don't feel that things are ever going to be regulated the way they should be.

About our country, I feel that it's just too big. To be honest, I think our country would be much better off if it were 50 actual independent states and not unified. I think that when the country gets so big, that it's hard to keep an eye on everything. Things get thrown by the wayside, they get forgotten about and things are more difficult to manage. I think if the states were independent, we'd be able to really knock out many more of the problems that are facing our society today more precisely. We'd be able to concentrate on things with a smaller scale and with more rigidity. Gosh, wouldn't that just be so great. The President wouldn't be so so far away, the people would feel much more involved, and I think that funding would be more feasible.

Those are just a couple of quotes I've run by recently. Enjoy. I'll try and be more up to date.

Quotes and Comments

I've been reading this book recently for a Graduate class called "The World is Flat". It talks about how technology has connected every part of the world to each other. ANyways, I'd like to first note some really great quotes and then talk about them in turn... maybe...


"Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University (June 12, 2005)

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life...
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt ery strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the might asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class patents; savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so i slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cents deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every SUnday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus ever poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans typefaces, and about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them... Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, harma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I just love this quote! It's so strong to me right now personally. It's something that I firmly believe, and especially right now, in this transition semester for me, it's something important for me to cling to. I mean, I'm just working and teaching and studying and frankly it just really sucks and it would be really easy to get frustrated and hopeless about lots of things, but this quote really bangs home the things I've been thinking quite recently. Unfortunately, the waiting thing is the hardest for me. I want to see results now. But patience is something that I feel like I need to learn some more, even though I'm a shade under 24 and still haven't a clue what's next

Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat.

-James McGregor, a journalist-turned0businessman based in China, and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, writing in the Washing Post, July 31, 2005

Ugh... I just really don't like this quote... Why? Well.. because it's just sad. I didn't say it was true, I didn't say I agree with it or disagree. I just don't like it. I think that we need to do a better job of finding what are the most important things in our society... but it seems clear to me that we already have. And it becomes more evident what these things are from an outsiders point of view. The strange thing is that unfortunately, we aren't outsiders here in America. These are actually us! And the problem that we have in America is that we don't care at all about these things. We know and see the same things that the outsiders see, but it really doesn't hit us that these things are really as prevalent as they really are. How could we let our society come to this? How could we let our civilization become known for this? Do we even care? It's disgusting how we can let other people talk about us like this and not care at all. Thus, once again I'll say... U just really don't like this quote.

Wow... sorry all

It seems as though September 2008 was the first month in over three years which did not merit a post. It's sad, but true. As things in America are fairly busy and uneventful, I haven't been that motivated in writing what things have been going on.

THough something did happen to me the other day. I woke up ready to drive to school the other day and was duly surprised to come to the conclusion that my car engine wouldn't turn over. The engine just couldn't get going and i got scared. Luckily, my roommate was able to take me to school where I was first of all... late, but my nervousness didn't end there. I still had the big problem of getting the 3 miles home after school finished at 4, fixing my car and then getting to the bar for work which is 1.5 miles away all in an hour. Luckily, I was able to get a ride with my teacher, but only after Jeopardy was over at 430 and I got home, and had to keep my fingers crossed that my other roommate would be home... which he was... I was batting 1000 so far, and I had a hunch of what the problem was for my car, so I had to get my roommate to take me to the nearest gas station (I figured it was just out of gas... or so I hoped) to get some gas. I made it back fast and put the gas in my car and it started!! Wow... i was lucky... I quickly darted off the work and made it there just 3 minutes late! WOW... talk about a stressful day... but it all worked out in the end and I was happy.