“THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT!”“There was nothing I was not up for teaching…boundless energy and ambition!” THE PRODUCTIVE DECADE OF ONE’S THIRTIES I used to tell myself I was one of those relatively few people who loved their jobs. For me teaching was more vocation than job, and the boundary between what I did at work for pay and did at home for pleasure was very blurred, if it even existed at all. I spent my free summers as a teacher working on American history curriculum and developing what I hoped would be innovative, exciting, and challenging assignments for my students. I read books for pleasure…

“Both parents then showered crying baby Julia with kisses and loving words…” A Morning to Remember Forever Today baby Julia had her usual morning feeding at 9:00 a.m. She fed for some thirty minutes and then played and cooed for another hour or so, watching the world around her and reaching out for her toys. Eventually Julia grew tired, then overtired, and started to fuss and cry, as she found it hard to settle down, self-soothe, and to get the sleep her mind and body craved. (This is of the many, many skills Julia is working on at four months of age!) This is Julia’s routine, more or less, repeated…

“The president is in good health,” Bush spokesman Tony Snow said Monday, July 23, 2007. “There is no reason for alarm.” WHY? Last Saturday I read that President Bush underwent anesthesia for a routine colonoscopy, whereupon Vice President Cheney officially was in charge of the Executive Branch for a few hours. I was also informed that during the operation doctors found and removed five growths – known as “polyps” – from Bush’s colon. Doctors would later examine the polyps for signs of cancer, although it appeared that none was present. President Bush would be scheduled to have another routine colonoscopy in three years. This, believe it or not, was the…

Wife and daughter at the entrance to the Santa Barbara Zoo AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE Today I did something I haven’t done in some 25 years: I went to the zoo. I went with wife Maria and daughter Julia to the Santa Barbara Zoo, to be exact. And I had a great time, much to my surprise. Young adults – those in their twenties and early thirties – don’t have much occasion to go the zoo, and so it was with me. I search back through the mists of time and seem to remember my last such visit was to the San Diego Zoo in the early 1980s. I was 13…

10 THINGS TO DO BEFORE I DIE My step-sister Kimberely asked me to identify twenty things I wanted to do before I died. I decided to think up ten but could not get past eight. I did, however, come up with a lot that I had already done or did not wish to do. Here is the list: Read all the major Jane Austen novels, as well as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Little Women with my daughter when she is a pre-teen. I have always had difficulty with these tomes of feminine literature, but to plow through them with my daughter could be a shared joy. I look forward…

Steve Jobs wants you to buy his new iPhone! The new Apple iPhone went on sale this morning, and customers camped out to be the first in line to buy one. I do not understand this. Someone please help me to understand. Why is this such a big deal? I cannot see it. As I can discern it, the iPhone is a combination iPod, cell phone, with moderate email and Web browsing capacity. For about $1,000 and locking oneself into a year cell phone agreement, one can have all this in one portable device. I already have a cell phone, video iPod player, and Internet capable computer(s). My cell phone…

A new baby daughter on board! “4” IS THE MAGIC NUMBER! Today my wife and I celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary; and several weeks ago, I celebrated my fortieth birthday. But with a baby girl on board such events, especially my birthday, seem to take on much less importance. They say many women as they turn forty lament bitterly the supposed onslaught of middle age and loss of youth the events supposedly symbolizes. I barely had time to notice. How do I feel about turning 40? I don’t feel much. I don’t think this is a lack of self-awareness on my part but of so many other more important activities…

Actress Keira Knightley stars in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. STILL GOT IT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS There is much talk about the “hegemony” of the American film business, and how it is driving everyone else out of business – American “cultural imperialism,” and the like. The French, for example, actually have laws limiting the amount of American TV footage that can be played per week. As if without the clumsy power of the state, there would be no French programming left. How sad! A quota system! When the situation has gotten to that point, there can be little hope. But I watched “Pride and Prejudice” the…

THUGS WITH MASKS WHO TAKE ORDERS FROM NOBODY God be praised for Netflix! Over the past three years, the mail order DVD rental service has significantly enriched my life in a way no conventional bricks-and-mortar video store could. Please keep in mind I am not a movie junkie. In fact, the number of movies I have paid to see in the theaters has drastically declined over the past several years. To be exact, in the past 12 months I saw “300,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “The History Boys,” and “Casino Real” (the last two I saw on the same ticket: I paid for the first, and then snuck into see…

KURT VONNEGUT ON THE DEATH OF KURT VONNEGUT Writer Kurt Vonnegut died today. He was 94 years old. I read a number of his novels while in high school, being told he was a “classic.” I remember reading him with mild amusement, and in the twenty five years since I have rarely thought of his books again. I remember over the past decade reading a newspaper article or two where in an interview Vonnegut decried the entire 20th and coming 21st century world as having no good to it. “Go ahead and die already then if you have outlived your time and hate it!” was my response at the time.…

  Father and daughter three weeks into their relationship.   “A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER” I look down at my daughter and search for signs of what will be. Right now to Julia the whole world is contained in a feeding or in trying to digest food or conciliate sleep. She is only 23 days old. People say Julia already resembles me, that she has my mouth, etc, but she just looks like a baby to me. Her traits and demeanor seem like those of any other baby, as far as I can see: eat, sleep, cry – repeat over and over again. But surely some marks of her character…

E-MAIL READY On March 1st, 2007, exactly one week before her projected birth date, Julia Emerson Geib acquired her first e-mail address. A big moment in her life, obviously! It took place at exactly Pacific Standard time. Five minutes later she received her first email. It was from her father. Just you watch how the daughter eventually develops tech skills to put her father to shame… WIRED AND READY TO GOT Minus Seven Days and Counting…

“Hillary Clinton is the right candidate. The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future.”Daphne Zimanquoted in LA Times of February 16, 2007 I read the above quote today by Daphna Ziman, the official fund raiser for Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles. I almost gasped out loud when reading it. Is this bald-faced political rhetoric? Does anybody really believe those would be the Hillary Clinton priorities/preoccupations as she sat in the crosshairs of international strife and worry as President of the United…

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.”Ludwig van Beethovenquoted in Marion M Scott, Beethoven (1934) I generally don’t listen to much Ludwig van Beethoven. He like a bracing, strong Scotch – much too strong and upsetting for daily use, although just the thing now and again. “Wow! I had forgotten how good that is!” One cannot deny Beethoven’s genius, but he leaves me unsettled. I feel disturbed. I don’t like that in large doses. I prefer Mozart — he can…

“A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.” André Maurois “What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” Nick Hornsby “High Fiedlity” —————— May God be praised for YouTube! I have recently discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that I…

“More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.”Rudyard Kipling —————— In talking last week with a childhood friend who now lives in North Carolina, a yawning depression overcame me as he described his typical workday — it sounded exactly like mine: “I work steadily right through lunch and maybe grab a snack somewhere and eat it off quickly at my desk. In the afternoon, I go to the vending machines and buy a Coke when I should be drinking water – and that is all I have until dinner when I get home at night.” The same thing happens with me. By the end of…

“An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”Thomas Jefferson THE “DIS-UNITED” STATES OF AMERICA I would like to think that bipartisanship can work in the United States. JFK once wrote, “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.” In the wake of the incredibly acrimonious election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson claimed, “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” These are high-minded expressions of reason that highlight…

“That was the difference in why September 11th would fail. That was why bin Laden would lose.” It all started on September 11th, 2001. The Twin Towers fell in New York. Then, on September 12, 2001, I looked out at my period 6 Honor’s English class. My students were 14-years old, and they were confused, scared, and angry about the terrorist attacks that had rocked the United States the day before. Nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no reference point. They asked me for my thoughts. I was their ninth grade Honor’s English teacher. I told them that for the first time since D-Day in June 1944,…

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live… When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of conscience. When we find our true vocation – thought and life are one.” Thomas Merton LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA: SUMMER OF 1998 The second half of my second decade in this world was filled with frustration, ugliness, striving, suffering – and death. That these afflictions were mostly of my own creation led directly…

“There’s too much music everywhere. It’s horrible stuff, the most noise conveying the least information. Kids today are violent because they have no inner life; they have no inner life because they have no thoughts; they have no thoughts because they know no words; they know no words because they never speak; and they never speak because the music’s too loud.” — Quentin Crisp SUMMER OF 1998: MY GOAL “Illi mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi.”* Seneca *Death lies heavily on the man who, too well known to others, dies a stranger to himself. My life as a writer and thinker never much coincided with my…

In reviewing pieces I had written many years ago, I read with much interest the exasperated musings of a beginning teacher and the grade chase. On the other side of that hill now as a veteran teacher, I am satisfied that I have made my peace with “the system” without having lost my soul to it. I read my words with a mixture of amusement and surprise – “How earnest and edgy I was!” Without further ado, coming to you from all the way from back in 1998– NON SCHOLA SED VITA DECIMOS* *We learn not for school but for life. Grades and grading are for me a pest invested…

PRESSURE I teach four high school Advanced Placement courses in two different disciplines, in addition to two other college prep English classes. Starting January I will also teach one undergrad college course on Monday nights, and in February I will teach a Masters’ Degree class on Wednesday evenings. (This is after my day job.) Around that time I will also be giving my final exams to my daytime classes and have to have them graded by the end of the next week. I have a whole slew of regular essays to grade, in addition to 57 research papers to read and assess which average about 25 pages each. I have…

This is a new blog offering on my domain. I am not sure to what use I will put it, but I have some ideas… If you happen to be around, go ahead and leave a comment! I will read it with much interest. Until Laters, Rich Geib