I read recently an article in Men’s Health titled “These Are the Unwritten Rules That All Guys Follow” that I would like to speak to — yes, I read magazines like “Men’s Health,” “Men’s Journal,” and “Maxim” on my Apple Newsfeed. They provide a welcome counterbalance to the humorless screeds (usually complaining about politics) which blanket the more “serious” publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Washington Post. Balance. The article listed was based on a Reddit thread that has some 5,700 responses. It summarizes a few of the main “unspoken rules” that men supposedly follow: Do not crowd next to each other when using the urinal in a…
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The Homeless in Ventura: Frustration, Confusion, Ambivalence, Avoidance
I go round and round in a circle. I don’t quite know what to think about the homeless in Ventura where I live. There are new numbers of homeless people in the neighborhoods I travel in, and I have complicated and ambivalent feelings towards them. On the one hand, they are a burden to the community and a blight on the landscape. Here is this homeless person sleeping under a camouflage blanket in the mulch off to the left of the strip mall, or pushing an abandoned grocery cart heaped tall with their belongings down the street. It sends a signal of tawdriness and a neighborhood in decline. The public…
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“Thank You, Chris”
I did not have a good feeling about this tennis match. We were playing a men’s 4.5 USTA doubles league match against Ojai and they were always a solid squad. The competition would consist of three lines of doubles teams, and whoever won at least two out of the three is the winner. They had “stacked” their lineup, putting their weakest team on line one and their strongest on line three. Predictably, they won on line three and got crushed on line one. I knew I had been “out-captained” when they stacked their lineup. That did not feel good. The score was tied 1-1 and it was coming down to…
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Time, Time, Time
In three weeks it will be 23 years since my mother died. My mom was 55-years old when she passed away from lung cancer, and I will be 55 myself in three and a half years. I was at a work training last Friday where I spoke with an English teacher from another high school. She had had the option to be part of the inaugural freshman class at the high school where I worked back in 2000. This lady was already 35-years old now and not a beginning teacher anymore, and it is strange to think that while she was starting high school I was already well into my…
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Autumn and the Fall Semester; Renewal and Opportunity: School and Sports
“Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” Tching-Thang It is the third week of the new fall semester. The shock of the school year beginning has passed, and we are now more in the swing of things: we have found our stride, more or less. And when I say “we,” I mean both parents and children: Maria and Richard, elementary and high school teachers, and Julia and Elizabeth, seventh and fourth graders, respectively. Summer has time aplenty where not much is going on, which is fine. Time doing not much of anything is still time doing something, in my opinion. My mother would occasionally…
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Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump for President?
I was cruising around my Apple News Plus feed the other day when I came across the following article “Polls, Fake News, and Trends” by Erick Erickson. Fifteen months away from the presidential election of 2020, Erickson writes the following: American voters are exhausted. They are tired of the drama. They are tired of the tweets. They are tired of the fighting. They are tired of the media sensationalizing everything. They want some semblance of normalcy. Americans, at this point, would love a president they do not have to think about, see or hear for weeks on end. President Donald Trump is stressing people out with his erratic nature, his…
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Joe Rogan and the Zeitgeist
Last night I was browsing the news when I came across the following article title and lede: “WHY IS JOE ROGAN SO POPULAR?” He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention. by Devin Gordon. I had never heard of Joe Rogan — or maybe I had head of him second-hand somewhere? Others talking about him? But if Rogan “understands men in America better than most do,” maybe I should know more about him? The clickbait intrigued me. I was game; I bit. I clicked on the link and read. The fifth paragraph into Gordon’s long article I read the…
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Meditation: Goal for the Year
Tomorrow is the first day of school. It is a fresh start — something we all deserve now and again. The past is past, the future is unknown, but the present is eternal. Stay present in the moment and the future will go better. With that in mind I am going to try meditating this year. Swimming and other activities are a form of meditation for me, but I want to try it more straight up. Make it a more specific, intentional practice. Tomorrow starts the seventh year of taking my daughters to school before my school day begins, and the turnaround where I drop my daughter off is a…
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End of Summer Vacation
In a few days I start my twenty-sixth year of teaching. For all those years I have been stuck in the academic model of living: summer and winter/spring break off where I have more time free than I want, and then other times (like final exams, letters of recommendation deadlines) where I am so overwhelmed I am barely hanging in there. It is irregular and seasonal. Yes, it is the feast or famine lifestyle for me. I have had ten weeks off from work, and as usual I am itching to get back. Not so much because I cannot wait to see my new classes and greet the students, but…
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Unmoored, Underfed, and Unhappy
I spent a good chunk of this summer training for my tennis team’s USTA sectional playoffs last weekend at the Costa Mesa Tennis Center. I put in the “hard yards” both on and off the court to prepare for a weekend of intense tennis against players likely better than myself. I ended up winning neither of my two matches, as expected. I made my opponents work for their victories, though, and I was not unhappy with my performance: I left sectionals with my athletic ego only semi-ravaged. But I was physically exhausted at the end of some five hours of hard tennis under a hot Southern California summer sun. Around…
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Finding Your “Tribe”
I don’t much like hanging out at home. It has been like that since I have been an adult. The world is just too interesting to stay at home for long: there are places to go, the world to view, things to learn. And so this summer I have been in many a restaurant, coffee shop, bistro, etc. — just sitting there for hours, reading or writing, but mostly just thinking. My wife and daughters accidentjailally came across me in a Carl’s Jr. just sitting there at a booth looking out the window into space, lost in my own thoughts. She thought it was plain weird, straining to understand. But…
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The Critics and Their Discontents
As a young composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff had his first major piece (his First Symphony in D Minor) performed in 1897. It did not go well. Music critic César Antonovich Cui savaged it in a Russian newspaper: If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless…
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“La Mamma Morta”
I had occasion today to watch the famous scene in the movie Philadelphia where Tom Hanks listens to Maria Callas sing the “La Mamma Morta” aria from Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier. The character Hanks plays — “Andrew Beckett” — is dying of AIDS, pulling his IV pole around the room, as he encounters Callas singing music of death, hope, transcendence, and the energy which links us all together — love. The power of being alive. The power of art to capture the essence of our humanity. Obviously, Beckett is thinking of himself. He is affixed on his mortality and the tragic brevity of life, and he is preparing to…
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My 52nd Birthday
So I turn 52 years old this week. And my father turns 80. Our birthdays are only two days apart, so for many years our tradition has been to celebrate our birthdays jointly. We drive to be together on the long Memorial Day weekend in late May and have a birthday party where our whole family can fête us both. It is always a happy time, particularly because it comes at the end of the school year. Summer — and summer vacation — are near. The weather is beautiful. This year is a bit different. My father turns 80 and that is a real benchmark. When he turned 70 and…
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Abortion: Culture War Flashpoint
Portrait of an Activist Banging Head Against the Wall: Those dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade have enacted a whole series of legislative acts at the state level to try and make life difficult for women seeking to get an abortion. Mandatory waiting periods before an abortion, having to read scripts to the patient, or forcing the mother to see a sonogram or hear the heartbeat of her fetus. Or conservative states pass laws whereby doctors performing abortions have to have admitting privileges at a local hospital — even passing a law saying that abortion facilities must have hallways wide enough to allow hospital beds to move in them. The…
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Time to Make a Small but Important Adjustment
So today is my last match of this junior team tennis season. Actually we are to play two matches at two different locations, to finish the season before the deadline — and I am exhausted. All the text messages arranging practices and setting up matches with the other coaches from the other clubs, and then arranging to have courts reserved at my club on weekends busy with other adult league matches. It is a lot. I have to admit there has been a part of it that has been enjoyable. I have had some adorable fourth grade boys on my team. They look at me with wide eyes and call…
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Is It Time to “Panic”?
“The boundaries of privacy are in dispute and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs.” New York Times The New York Times last month launched a whole series of pieces on the danger of privacy going the way of the Dodo — with articles like “It Is Time to Panic About Privacy.” by Farhad Manjoo. Long hours of laborious writing and and prominent space on the NY Times website was devoted to privacy in the digital era. It was a big deal. The two focuses of this series of articles were thus: the violation of privacy by big…
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Polycythemia and Hematology Oncology
So I changed my health insurance last year so that this year I could have “PPO” rather than “HMO” health insurance. It has been worth it, even having to spend some money. As a result, I saw a quality physical therapist in January who took the time to train me about a longstanding issue I have with my Achilles tendon — and it was hours spent closely touching and educating me, not minutes. My previous physical therapists were more of the “spray and pray” method of health care. Twenty minutes of their time once and then never again. And my new “PPO” doctor did not just email me the results…
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“I Should Have Done it Earlier, But I Was Cautious.”
I am cautious when it comes to social ventures. I am slow to join, and I am slow to quit. Maybe too much so on both ends. Sometime around 2004 my high school students semi-dragged me onto the Myspace social media platform and then onto Facebook. I did not see the point, but I went along after they pressured me. My students seemed to think it hilarious. And for a time Facebook was fun. I was able to see my students in a different, non-school light; I was able to see them more fully as human beings, not only as students. I also over time was able to connect with…
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In Praise of UC Irvine’s Humanities Core Class
I did not receive an inferior college education in the years I spent in the University of California system. I read the important books on a subject and heard experts in the field deliver lectures. There were usually breakout discussion sections led by graduate students. Then we wrote essays and research papers on the material. Lots of them. Lots of reading and writing. What I tell my high school students: if you can read complex texts on complicated topics and weigh and consider different arguments, and if you can explain your thinking in clear standard academic prose — you will be fine. If you struggle to understand what you have…
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A Letter to Present and Future Journalists
“Fake news is cheap to produce. Genuine journalism is expensive.” Toomas Hendrik “In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.” Oscar Wilde March 12, 2019 Dear Journalists of the Present and the Future, Before I talk about the role of your chosen vocation — “journalism” — in America today, a bit of autobiography, please. I read the Los Angeles Times in print everyday for some twenty five years. I had the newspaper delivered to my residence and I read page and after page of print, the black ink smudging my fingers. It was a huge part of my civic formation and shaped how my…
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“For the World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand.”
Today in class I finished showing the 1980 movie “The Elephant Man” to my students. We are reading “Catcher in the Rye” and focusing on how alienated, troubled persons do or don’t get the help they need by finding those that can help them, and then making allies of them and getting the help they need. They communicate, they connect, and they get their needs taken care of. Or they don’t. John Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” helps those who would help him. In contrast, Holden Caulfield in “Catcher” fails to communicate clearly to others what he needs, and so nobody gives it to him. It is a case of miscommunication…
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The Lost Little Boy
It happened in 1974 or 1975, and I would have been 7 or 8 years of age. I was in suburban Milwaukee — in Waukesha County somewhere near the city of Elm Grove, Wisconsin to be exact. The exact details of when and where are blurry, but the events of that day remain clear in my memory. My mother was driving me to a tennis match I was supposed to play at some club I had never been to before. My coach and teammates were supposedly waiting for me there. I wish I knew what the name of this club was. On a day with picture perfect weather I remember…
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Prematurely An “Old Man”?
I spent the Christmas holidays visiting family in the Bay Area. In doing so I had the opportunity to speak at length with two young men, one 30 and the other 35 years of age. They spoke to me about “their dreams for the future,” as they sought to reconcile their hopes for making money while contributing to the world. They both had good jobs and were successful in the workforce up to a point, but neither want to remain where they were forever. Both wanted to improve their position and find the “perfect fit” for their ideal futures. They had hopes and dreams. They were ambitious. They would make…
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“Losers” and Loneliness in America, Part II
In my last essay, I talked about the “fraying” of American society, and how loosening social mores resulted in a tiny number of lonely, disturbed young men choosing to perform acts which were taboo in earlier eras of American history. I was talking about high publicity mass shootings. But as tragic, senseless, and dramatic such spectacular acts of public violence are, they are also rare, thankfully. The chances of encountering a random sociopath with a gun at school, at a concert, or some other public venue, are minuscule. It is akin to getting hit by lightning or infected by flesh eating bacteria. (Small comfort the statistics might be, however, if…
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Rise of the Lonely Losers, Part I
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the only mass murderers who will be named in this essay, with the exception of Mohammad Atta. I read about the recent shooting in Pittsburgh, and I had the same sick feeling in my gut I had when I previously read about the Las Vegas shooting, the Manchester Ariana Grande shooting, the Paris “Charlie Hebdo” shootings, or the one at the Paris Bataclan theater, or the Pulse nightclub in Orlando or the Inland Regional Center in San Bernadino — or at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, or the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. They blur together, these horrible mass shootings. Almost all of these I can remember the first…
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Father-Daughter: Open Lines of Communication in Adolescence and Beyond
Every weekday morning it is the same. I race out the door no later than 7:30 am to take my daughters to school. I drop Julia off for her bus at 7:39, and then deposit Elizabeth no later than 7:43 at her school. I am in my own classroom standing tall and ready for students by 7:50. The bell rings at 7:55 and at 8:00 sharp class begins. My schedule is tight. Minutes count. I teach all day long, with some 45 minutes free for bathroom breaks and lunch. The compressed nature of my teacher’s workday means I am done in time to pick up Elizabeth from her school —…
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Half-Way Done: I Will Not Allow President Trump to Make Me Crazy
“I will not allow Trump to make me crazy.” It is almost two years since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. I am still so deeply embarrassed and ashamed of this fact. I am against Trump in most aspects of his presidency, and I am a confirmed centrist — far from a far left orthodox liberal who instinctively is against any Republican policy. I am open to good ideas wherever they might originate; I am not ideologically wedded to the right or the left. I like nuance. I see most arguments have two sides to them. The gray areas are the most interesting places for discussion. But…
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My Love/Hate Relationship With AYSO
Oh, how I have a love/hate relationship with AYSO soccer! So, gentle reader, you may well ask what does “AYSO” stand for? Officially, it stands for American Youth Soccer Organization, and it has been around forever. I played it back in 1976. But I and other parents refer to it as “All Your Saturdays Occupied.” So let’s start with why I love AYSO soccer. Firstly and lastly, there is the exercise. I see my daughters come running off the soccer pitch panting and covered with sweat, with cheeks red as tomatoes, and I see health. Our bodies are meant to be used, and exercise in young people is often a…
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“She is herself a dowry.”
ON RAISING DAUGHTERS Two summers ago when she was preparing to start fourth grade, I read Romeo and Juliet with my oldest daughter, Julia. It took a long time to read each line and to examine closely the Elizabethan era prose/verse, and to discuss characterization and what Shakespeare was trying to do at that point in the play. After we had spoken the lines out loud and chewed over their meaning for some forty minutes, we would watch professional actors bring the action to life. We watched all of the Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version and also Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version. Julia loved it! Each night she begged to read and…