I am sailing the ship of state through a sea of estrogen. Or I feel at times like I am swimming in an ocean of estrogen, and I struggle to keep my head above the surface. Between work and home I am up to my ears in females – teenage girls, in particular.  And this sea I swim in is not always a placid and predictable one. There are sudden emotional storms which produce powerful waves of frustration and angst. I often find myself buffeted by these waves. They wash over me. Sometimes they take me completely by surprise. One moment all is calm. Then the opposite. In short, “estrogen…

I saw that Barbara Ehrenreich died three weeks ago. I was saddened. I enjoyed Ehrenreich as an author, although I disagreed with her on just about everything. I especially enjoyed her “Nickel and Dimed” piece of muckraking investigative journalism, and read the first chapter with my economics students each year. I saw that not long before her death, Barbara had published a book which had flown under the radar and I knew nothing of – a “spiritual autobiography,” or something akin. The book was called “Living with a Wild God.” I immediately bought and listened to the audiobook version, read by Barbara herself. It was wonderful to hear her talk…

I read of the death of the author Norah Vincent last week. It was unusual in that she actually died in early July of this year, but the news of her passing was released only a few weeks ago. I enjoyed Norah’s work earlier in this century. She was a lesbian tending towards the libertarian with unconventional and interesting views, and as such I read her work with interest and pleasure. I appreciated the slant of Norah’s mind. I remember reading her best known book about passing for a male, “Self-Made Man,” listening to the audiobook on my way driving north through Santa Barbara on the 101 Freeway to an…

I work for the government, so I know what I mean when I say that the government often makes rules so stupid they should be ignored. And the majority of the Covid regulations of the past two years have been stupid in the extreme. Here in California they closed all the parks and tennis courts, and they even tried to close the beach. “Stay home, stay safe!”  I rarely stay home and I’m always out exercising: thus it has been all my adult life. So from the beginning I ignored these “stay at home” rules. Here is a telling example: In the height of the lockdowns on Easter of 2020,…

All last week I was out of contact with the larger world. No Internet, no newspapers, nada. I was on a cruise in the Caribbean and was mostly in the middle of the ocean, and I loved it! I could just relax and enjoy my vacation. The outside world would still be there when I got back. But when I arrived back in Florida and docked last Saturday morning, I connected to the Internet again and caught up on the news via my iPhone. I was hit with the usual tragedy which the newspaper brings. I read first of all that my acquaintance Carmen Ramirez has been struck and killed…

So in a few short weeks I will go back to work in my 28th year of teaching. My classroom will be full of new students ready for a new semester. And it will be my 23rd at my current school. All of them in the same classroom, no less. The same 70′ by 50′ physical space. So I sit down this morning to think about where I am, what I am doing, and how I might want to make adjustments. If I don’t take this deep inventory soon, I will be too busy to do it.  So here it goes. I apologize in advance for the unavoidable length of…

The U-Shaped Happiness Curve, touted by researchers, claims that the data is clear, across cultures and even species. The numbers show that on average life satisfaction drops during midlife and begins its recovery around age 50, reaching its peak at the end of life. Younger people tend to be happy and the eldery tend to be happy, but persons in their 30s and increasingly into their 40s tend to be miserable. To be in the middle of your life is to struggle, as Dante told us some 900 years ago. I have found the U Shaped Happiness Curve to be real in my own life. Thankfully, I am past the…

I got a late start in the parenting game. I was 36 when I first got married (I was cautious), and I was 39 when my firstborn took her first breaths outside the womb. I was 42 when my second and last child was born. Yes, I am an old dad. I am sure there are many negatives to being an older dad: less available energy, increased grouchiness, and you will die earlier in your child’s life. But there are upsides: you are more mature and settled, additional patience is available, and you can appreciate better “the big picture.” Maybe you have earned some wisdom over the years (and maybe…

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the penultimate act in driving your doctrinaire radical feminist off the rails. Roe v. Wade is gone, and the feminists are irate. And as I have always hated feminists, I enjoyed the spectacle.  No, I’m not talking about hating the sort of “feminist” who express a general solidarity with the female gender in getting a fair shot in the race of life. That sort of feminist is ¾ of all the women I know, and I have no problem with them. They will claim that men will be happier when women are happier, and together the two sexes…

Dear Andrew, Good morning. I write to you today as the United States Supreme Court releases its New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen decision. I read your article from a few weeks ago in the Atlantic Monthly about guns in American life and would say a thing or two about it. I write to you because you know your way around firearms. You were an Army Ranger officer, trained in the use of firearms, and have led men in combat. You are unlike the typical progressive Democrat who struggles to distinguish firearms from fireworks. So there is a shared understanding which I hope to build on…

When you fail to do something you were supposed to do, it can nag at you. But the longer you put it off, the harder it can be to get around to doing.  I have not been to the dentist for over a year, and I almost always make my every-six-month visit. But last year I put off making an appointment with my dentist, put it off again, then a bit more – and before I knew it was 17 months. I knew I had to get in there, but the longer I waited the harder it became to make that call. Putting it off further had become a habit.…

I returned home last night from my weekly men’s tennis night to find my younger daughter exhausted and overwrought. Her eyes were ringed red with fatigue, and she sat down at the kitchen table and burst out crying. It took me by surprise. I wondered if something bad had happened to my daughter that day, but then I quickly surmised this was an overtired 12-year old “tween” very possibly with hormones running amok. I grabbed her hands and told her I loved her. I got her older sister and mother to tell her things they admired about her. After a few minutes of unconditional love and support, I wondered how…

So I turned 55-years old yesterday, and my father turns 83 tomorrow; we had our joint birthdays this weekend overlooking the ocean at my father’s house in Laguna Beach. We tend to do this each year during the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Beyond our birthdays, this annual celebratory weekend heralds the beginning of summer. I always look forward to it. I was happy to turn 55-years old. It means I am one year closer to retirement: so getting older is a good, not a bad, thing. But it is true as my father tells it: like a roll of toilet paper unfurling, the closer you get to the end the…

I sometimes think I am. I am a public school teacher, and so I am in a job where I have little control over my working conditions. The traits entrepreneurs need – decisiveness, risk taking, incisive intelligence, competitiveness – don’t necessarily pay off for teachers. It goes the other way, too. The traits teachers need – selfless caring, rock-solid steadfastness, patience in the face of low performance, resilience to withstand poor working conditions – don’t serve entrepreneurs well. So I wonder if I have become over the decades incredibly tolerant of putting up with stuff I shouldn’t have to put up with. Last night I watched a video of Ukrainian…

False Prophets of Hope and Ineffectual Shortcuts to Happiness “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” Milan Kundera So I made the mistake last night of reading the 180 page manifesto written by the 18-year old man-child who murdered 11 people and wounded 3 others in Buffalo, New York two days ago. He supposedly explained why he did it, and I was curious. I knew it would probably be a mistake, and it pretty much was. “How much are you really going to learn from this kid barely out of high school ranting about…

Almost three years ago I spent much of my summer training my body and preparing my mind for the United States Tennis Association sectionals for Southern California in Costa Mesa, California. I dedicated myself to get ready for the big weekend starting on August 3, 2019. And then it arrived. I played two hard matches and lost both. The first one I might have been able to win but didn’t. The second match I just got blown off the court by clearly superior opponents. It was a long day of hard and discouraging tennis. I had trained all summer to be ready and it was not enough. I don’t think…

What does it mean to be a parent? Often I think to serve well as a parent means ideally to be mature, possess self-control, and have good judgment. This might seem self-evident, my dear reader. But it is also vague. What does self-control and good judgment look like in practice? Well, let me be specific: It means to hold your tongue when you are angry with your children, and still speak calmly and refuse to lose your temper. You are bigger than that. You are the adult in the household. You bite your cheek until it bleeds, and you refuse to lash out. Or at least you hope you do.…

On the first day of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that I hoped Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “rots in hell” and urged the Ukrainians to send lots of Russian boys “home in body bags.” The Ukrainian armed forces have done that and more in the past 56 days – killing some 7,000 to 14,000 Russian soldiers, and dealing Putin a serious black-eye both militarily and diplomatically. Six days ago the Ukrainians sank the heavy guided-missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship for the Russian Back Sea Fleet. It was the most dramatic naval loss anywhere in the world in over 40 years. I say to the Ukrainians: Good job…

(This is the second of a 2 Part Essay. Read Part 1 here.) I have never made much money, taking into account my level of education. Public school teachers are not paid all that much money in the United States. That is one of the many negatives to working as a teacher. I can hear many critics claiming that I make way more money than they do, or more money those who are unequivocally poor. True enough. But for having a Master’s Degree and more, it ain’t much. Almost all my friends and family make more money than I do. There are many other negatives to being a public school…

There are moments in youth when you make choices that alter the trajectory of your life. You might not recognize it at the time, but years later you can appreciate where a turning point took place. In this essay I will explain how my life changed so much for the better when I decided to teach myself Spanish. With a first few steps I undertook a journey which would be long, difficult, rewarding, adventuresome, and wonderful. It would change my life. I studied French in high school and college. I enjoyed learning the language and culture, but I did not find much use for it.  I spoke some French when…

I wrote recently about adversity in competitive sports. But I was really using sport as a metaphor to talk about dealing with adversity in life generally. In this essay I would like to add to last week’s post to flesh out a fuller picture of how I see it. For the vast majority of us winning or losing in competitive sports is not all that important. But learning to train and compete well is incredibly important, in my opinion — especially for the young. To learn how to win with grace and lose with dignity -— that is important. To not sit on your ass all day waiting for life…

So I wrote late last fall about the impending darkness of winter, and my ability to get my workouts completed in the dark and the cold. Now we are on the other side: it is April and spring, and the sun is out for longer. Driving by the tennis courts last night and they were packed at seven pm. It was not like this in late December, to put it mildly. Creatures large and small – human and otherwise – were in semi-hibernation. Not any more. I am excited. The hardest part of this academic school year (my 28th) is behind me. Spring Break is next week. The Ojai Tennis…

In a corner of my garage I do tennis-specific workouts, and I have done these for years. I have on the walls some photographs of myself after after having won tournaments, or other such important competitive moments. More importantly, I have some quotes posted there that I have particularly important and which I constantly want to be reminded of – quotes to live by. And there is one of them in particular that I think about all the time. Here is the quote in my own handwriting tacked onto the wall, by the great champion Arthur Ashe – Ashe was only about four times more literate and thoughtful than your…

I recently was informed in writing that some members of the local community are pouring over my personal webpage to find objectionable opinions. They are calling into question my fitness to serve in my current job. This is not the first time this has happened: Watch what you write, one sympathetic soul warned me. “Be careful.” But that was almost three years ago. Well, the crows are back to hang on and haunt my website. The language police have arrived. I and my words are being scrutinized. The numbers of such have never been large, but they are there. They are watching. I knew something was up. The stats on…

It is what I would have wanted to see: a large army built on dictatorial fiat with conscripted soldiers attacking a neighbor unnecessarily, getting their asses handed to them by a smaller but motivated army of volunteers in a democracy fighting for and on their home turf. At the beginning of the war the conventional wisdom was that Vladimir Putin’s modernized army would roll over the Ukrainians after a brief but inspired fight. This is what so many of the talking-heads on TV predicted. But the reality seems to be something different: the Ukrainians are fighting the Russians to a standstill, and maybe even winning. Any student of history should…

I woke up last night around 2:30 am and I was AWAKE. I lay there for a few minutes and realized I would not be falling asleep again anytime soon. This happens now and again. I have no idea why.  Occasional trouble sleeping is a problem which arrived to me in my fifties. I try to get a vigorous workout almost everyday, else I have little appetite and restless sleep. Usually the workout works. I sleep well. But not last night. Who knows why? I suspect it is a function of age. As William Shakespeare compared youth and age with respect to sleep: Care keeps his watch in every old…

Yesterday I read an excellent article by George Packer where he says, among other things, the following: “We’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans. If remote learning taught parents anything, it was that staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers. One day, and I hope soon, the masters of social media will stand before Congress with their hands raised in the manner of the Big Tobacco bosses, and try to deny what they’ve long known about the damage their products can inflict on human minds, especially young minds. After these hearings lead to belated regulation of web…

I see new parents and I shake my head. I see them pushing a baby-stroller, or chasing down a scrambling toddler, and I think to myself the following thought: “There but for the grace of God go I…” Being a parent to babies, toddlers, and little kids is so exhausting. It sucks you dry. I am so relieved it is behind me. Yet it was a precious time in my own life. I am sure my friends were sick of hearing how beautiful and wonderful my babies were, and how cute these baby clothes looked or about how restful were the afternoon naps we shared. At the time I could…

I talked to a childhood friend the other day by telephone. I was surprised when he explained to me that his 21-year old son was near disconsolate over the recent fighting in Ukraine. His son was tearful much of the time and had trouble sleeping, my friend told me. The kid spent hours glued to his iPhone on YouTube and TikTok looking at reports of the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine — My son is really sensitive! He would watch that video of a Russian armored personnel carrier running over that old guy in his car and could hardly speak. He would just fall apart. The emotions around this are…