Today's substitute assignment was supposed to be a half day, but the regular teacher never showed up, so I got a full day's work (and pay) out of it. As with my first assignment, I laid down the law right away with the kids at the beginning of each class. I think that was a big reason I only had to run one student down the hall to the vice-principal. I also got a chance before school started to talk to the teacher I subbed for back in October. She was very impressed by how I did (especially since it had been my first class with civilian students) and was going to request me tomorrow, but unfortunately I had this prior engagement with the leg-cutters downtown...

...which wound up being scheduled for 1230 tomorrow. So I could have done the assignment anyway. Oh, well. Anyhow, yeah, P is going to pick me up at 1100 and cart me home after the cutting is done. I admit to being a little nervous about it. This is my first surgery since they took my appendix out in sixth grade, and since my bulk and (lack of) definition prevents a spinal tap (THANK YOU GOD) they're going to put me under. Not that I don't have confidence in the staff or anything, but accidents happen. I just hope one doesn't happen to me. Prayers would be appreciated from those of you so inclined. It's supposed to be day surgery, and let's hope it actually is.

Finished my first day of subbing, covering for a language arts teacher in one of the two middle schools. Since the Kia is hors de combat until Carlos can figure out what's wrong and fix it, I took the bus over there and back, which involved a fair amount of walking on top of all the walking I was doing in class. (The kids stay quiet and on task so much better when I loom over them.)* By and large it went well; most of this teacher's classes were Honors classes and those kids were generally well-behaved with a couple of exceptions that I left notes about. One kid in the last period got on my last nerve, wandering around messing with the others, and so I invited him out into the hallway where one of the regular teachers proceeded to realign his headspace with some impressive non-obscene language before taking the little troublemaker down the hall to the vice-principal. On my return the rest of the students were noticeably quieter.

Missed lunch at the school, wound up walking a couple blocks to Subway (needs must when the blood sugar drives) and then another couple blocks to the Braddock Road Metro, where I took a bus to the Alexandria Hospital. I was hoping to catch a Metrobus down into Foxchase, but instead of waiting 45 minutes I just walked it, since it was all downhill. My legs may forgive me, but not today. :(

Was going to make chili tonight but instead I think I'll just fry a pork chop or two, nuke some veggies, and crash.

*windelina, I don't have your bubbly personality, so I have to rely on presence. ;)

Man, I've been doing a lot of walking these last couple of days. Marched up the hill to the management office to pay the rent, came back to the apartment and collapsed for a while, and after dinner went out to the Alexandria City Republican Committee meeting by bus, which involved a couple of blocks' walk between bus routes.

Wow...it was almost a flashback to RPM* days in District 61. On the other hand, both of our Republican/Independent city council members were there, and everyone was really pumped on account of the big wins on Tuesday. Both the candidates for delegate were there as well and got standing ovations for their efforts; Sasha Gong in particular got enthusiastic cheers after delivering an impromptu two-minute speech in which she called out the Democrats for being a bunch of racists. Some things never change. I put my name on the committee's e-mail list and will probably wind up being the precinct captain for Foxchase, which like most precincts with apartment complexes has a lot of turnover. It'll get me out of the basement and also get me face time with people, which is two good things at once.

Aside from that, I finally got my ID number from the ACPS** and got set up on the assignment system. Nothing out there yet, but I'll be diligent about checking the website. It's flu season, after all.

*Republican Party of Minnesota
**Alexandria City Public Schools

Called in to Accountemps (all three NoVa offices) this morning and made sure they were showing me as active. ACPS never did get around to calling me today, so I'm going to follow up with them tomorrow and find out what's clogging the gears. I also headed over to the management office to hand in my lease renewal paperwork and complain about my living room window. It's been nice during the day lately, so I figure I might as well get it unjammed now...what the hell, it's been almost two years, I ought to be able to enjoy it before next spring. Confirmed that there is a DirecTV hookup in the building so I don't have to deploy my own antenna, which would be in radio defilade anyway since I have a north-facing basement apartment. I won't need that until next spring either, but it doesn't hurt to plan ahead.

Saw Game 5 of the World Series down at Shooter's tonight; it went much better than the preceding two games in Philadelphia since the Phillies staved off extermination 8-6, partially due to the awesome pitching of Cliff M.F. Lee and partially due to Chase Utley's two dingers, which moved him ahead of Reggie Jackson on the WS homers list. For once Charlie Manuel remembered that Brad Lidge is shitty, and called in Ryan Madsen to close the deal in the 9th. Madsen made things unnecessarily exciting by giving up hits to Posada and Gojira Matsui before getting Jeter to ground into a double play and striking out Teixeira, but he got the save, so it was all good.

Minor personal accomplishment - got my alt into Goonfleet and out of the Tribal Defense Forces, where he'd been grinding missions for loyalty points. Normally I would have podjumped to Goon space, but i decided to take my little missile boat and run for it. Surprisingly, I managed to run the 56-jump route through Gallente and Amarr space without getting blown up and/or podded. Also, there's some drama involving a friend of mine who's risen to a position of some responsibility in the Swarm and the new spy master/counterintelligence chief, who I used to think well of until he had a major attack of bitchiness at my friend's expense. Maybe next time he'll remember to fuel his own damn towers. :)

E.D. Hirsch's Curriculum for Democracy. Needless to say, Hirsch and his Core Knowledge curriculum never came up once in any of my education classes. Rousseauists, all of them. (Maggie's Farm)

Went over to Alexandria City Public Schools' main office this morning to turn in all my paperwork and get fingerprinted, which means that if everything goes smoothly (no reason why it shouldn't) I'll be an active member of the substitute pool starting Monday. Hopefully I'll have better luck with that than I've had with the various temp agencies.

Been on quite the reading jag lately, which considering how much time I'm spending with my feet up isn't too surprising. Today I finished S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers; yesterday I wrapped up his Helot War trilogy with Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta, both of which are co-written with Jerry Pournelle. I've also been browsing through Total Baseball, mostly looking at horrible teams like the A's, Browns and Phillies from the 1940s and 50s. Actually, since the Browns became the Orioles in 1953, there's not much to look at, but what's there is morbidly fascinating.

Speaking of baseball, I finished sixth in the fantasy league fsf_rapier started, which puts me two places behind him and one behind luned, though it really wasn't that close. luned's Rivendell Rangers led my Dukes by 10.5 points at the end of the season, mainly because my pitching blew chunks. I had the league's worst ERA and WHIP, to say nothing of Batting Avergae Against. The only pitching category I did well in was saves, where I was fourth. The offense was similarly bad: league worst AVG and OBP, mediocre HR and RBI - at least we led the league in steals, which is just ridiculous since that's not the kind of team I like. :(

Maybe next year I'll do better, after I pick up the Sporting News guide and figure out who all these damn players are. Also, I need to just leave my pitchers alone until June; I got rid of Scott Baker, Justin Verlander, and Cole Hamels, all of whom started badly and finished great. :(

My eyes are telling me I spent too much time staring at this screen today, so I think I'll post this and go to bed.

Avoiding an Italian future: why we need to do this. Luigi Zingales' article describes how Italy's pro-market politicians got eaten alive by the pro-business faction after their (eventually) successful defeat of the Marxists. This is something that's still thrashing itself out here, where the difference between Main Street and Wall Street is more obvious than it might have been in Italy. (Instapundit)

You know, for somebody that was going to unify us all in a post-partisan glow with his cleanliness and articulate speech, 0bama and his crew sure manage to piss a lot of people off. Even people that wanted to believe what he was saying. (The Corner)

Kids without parents have a tough time getting it together in school. Not exactly news, but some people just don't get why the single-mom thing is such a bad idea. I saw links to this earlier in the week but forgot to post them. (Instapundit)

Been wheezing and coughing up stuff today so decided not to go to Mass and share it. Ironic, I'm taking all these antibiotics, and some damn virus moves in to mess with me. Ffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

I sure hope I impressed ACPS* with my zeal for the job as opposed to my illiteracy when I showed up this morning for in-processing - one week and twenty minutes before I was supposed to be there. :headdesk: At least I had all my papers done and ready to roll.

*Alexandria City Public Schools

Took about an hour tonight to fill in all the forms I'll need to turn in to the Alexandria City schools tomorrow, including a voided check for the direct deposit. This will go in with me tomorrow to the fingerprinting along with the copies of my college transcripts and the letter from the VA saying I don't have tuberculosis. All this paperwork gets turned in tomorrow when I get fingerprinted a little before 0830. *sigh* Well, at least I'll get access to the sub scheduling systems (phone and computer) once they hear back from the Commonwealth that I'm not some kind of preverted child-abusing felonious wackjob. That shouldn't take long.

Aside from that, not a whole lot on the agenda for tomorrow. The usual job hunting and hanging out on the Internets, I suppose.

Finally, your moment of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Porn Zen for the day. The drag racing starts about 7:30 into the clip.

(Moe Lane)

Called the advice line yesterday to check on the Clindamycin dosage, which I erroneously thought was 9/day instead of the more reasonable 6/day (RX actually said three pills every 6 hours) and they said someone would call me back. This morning my primary care doc called and said yeah, they messed up the RX: it should have been 12 pills a day. OMFG. I think I'm just going to go on the BRAT diet for the duration.

Meanwhile, I woke up with what I thought was a cold, but it seems to have passed. Still feel kind of bleh, but I need to go out and get stuff printed out today since I need to turn in a ton of forms/transcripts/stuff when I go in to get fingerprinted by the Alexandria City schools tomorrow.

Ironically enough, the day I turned the heat on, we're expecting a high in the 70s. Indian summer?

So I got up super early (for me) and went over to the city school HQ for my substitute orientation. Got another pound or two of forms to fill out and found that all the stuff I'd jumped through my ass to collect for the orientation (TB test, recommendation letters, transcripts, etc.) would not in fact be needed until next week when I come in for fingerprinting. At that point they'll also hook me up with the SAM software/phone system and get me on the payroll. Anyway, the morning session was pretty good; the presenter has been teaching in the system (full-time and sub) since 1961 when they integrated TC Williams (see Remember the Titans) by folding the other two city high schools into it. Ironic that the high school named for the superintendent who spearheaded the city's massive resistance to racial integration has a 69% minority student body this year, LOL. Morning session also had a useful refresher on classroom discipline and management. Afternoon session was less useful; there was a brief video on biohazard containment and handling with respect to AIDS, Hepatitis C and other blood-borne pathogens that would not have been out of place in the infamous forklift safety video. This was followed by a presentation on special education students which had way too many "exercises" and damn little practical advice. I don't think they could have driven their point that special education students are SPECIAL and must be handled with DIFFERENTIATED instruction home any harder if they'd used sixteen-pound sledges.

Eh. Aside form that, it's in the forties, rainy, miserable, and blah. Debating whether to turn on the heat or just make a two-pound meatloaf with the ingredients I have on hand. Maybe pasta. First, though, I'm going to throw some stuff out while there's room in the dumpsters.

P wants to do a road trip, so this is going to be quick & dirty.

Most important: Alexandria accepted my application for substitute teaching. Fairfax County, on the other hand, deprecated my lack of classroom teaching experience and said they'd take me only as a substitute instructional assistant. Which counts as classroom experience, so it's a step toward the eventual goal of landing a FT teaching job.

Still no call from Don Beyer. For all I know they sold the Sportage for scrap and are hoping I don't find the fatal flaw in the Legacy they loaned me.

Smittypalooza was great fun, and the host has a recap here. Lots of good conversation in addition to meeting the legendary Paco, R. Stacy and Smitty their own selves, and some lovely ladies who had flown in from Arizona, Idaho and Michigan for the 9/12 rally*. All in attendance agreed that this would have to become a recurring event, so we might well see this happening on a monthly basis, or maybe only every six weeks. Much depends on whether Smitty was able to cover his tab with our contributions. :)

I said a couple weeks ago that I'd review Inglourious Basterds and Reservoir Dogs, which I saw while in Ocean City.
( Spoilers )

Finally, Allahpundit's account of 9/11. Original Twitter feed here. I read this when I got home early this morning, and it put me in a somber mood, remembering how the day went. (Ace)






*Also present was Matthew Vadum, who writes for the American Spectator.

Tremendously relieved to find that my substitute interview with Alexandria is Friday and not tomorrow. This means I have an extra day to heal up from the self-inflicted burns and maybe even get an uninterrupted night's sleep, which I sure didn't get last night.

No call from Don Beyer means no Sportage until tomorrow. At least.

One of the things that really annoys me about my current jobless state is that I'm not in a position to do anything for the growing group of friends who are having problems more serious than mine. I'm not used to this, and it bothers the hell out of me that all I can do is express sympathy and send encouragement through the internets.

Next week is going to be busy in a good way. I have a doctor's appointment on Thursday morning, a meet-up with some conservative FB friends from out of town that evening, and PRSFS Friday night. Also, if I get there early enough, I'll be seeing a pre-screening of Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone at the Japanese Embassy. So if nothing else, I'll be getting out of the basement more. :)

Despite all the handwaving and flaming in the media, I don't see the economy getting any better any time soon. Unlike my brother, who actually learned a civilian skill or three in the Army, all I have is a quarter-century of questionable office experience with a side order of non-profit business founding. Which will get you a cup of coffee at Dunkin' if you have a buck to go with it. So I'm thinking of going back to college. Originally I was looking at Norwich University, which I applied to in my high school days because it had a reputation for being a big producer of armor officers, and at the time I was much enamored of tanks. Norwich is pretty expensive, though, and I'm old school enough to prefer live classes to internet seminars. So I'll probably wind up going to George Mason and finishing the program I started at St. Mary's while temping and subbing here and there. We'll see what happens, I guess.

So, I'm hitting USAJOBS pretty much on a daily basis, the other job search sites less often. Because frankly, the listings aren't updating that quickly, which isn't too surprising considering the unemployment rates in Maryland and Virginia are 7.3% and 7.2% as of June, and since the economy continued to suck in July I don't expect those numbers will have changed for the better. (DC is at 10.9%, if anyone cares.) As I've said before, the temp agencies have been telling me to call in one a month to let them know I'm available. Quite a change from 2007 and 2008 (during the "worst economy since the Great Depression, LOL) when I was required to call in daily, and there was plenty of work to keep me busy and current on my payments.

I've also submitted applications to Alexandria and Fairfax County schools to fill some full-time and substitute positions. It's been over two years since I sent in applications to those systems, and things have changed. Hopefully enough to at least get me a look and a provisional license. I'm also mailing out a packet of papers to the DoD so i can get on their list as well. We'll see how well I do this time around.

Reading this post by Dr. Helen stirred up a number of things I probably shouldn't be trying to deal with before coffee, but here we go anyway.

Christina Hoff Sommers and others have noted the changes in American schools and culture that -intentionally or otherwise- tend to feminize boys or at least deny them outlets for innate active/aggressive behavior. I think this confuses young men and women and correlates with the increased popularity of BDSM (pace Paglia, who notes that this has always enjoyed an upswing in times of confused gender roles) as well as the popularity of "gangsta" role models as an extension of pimp culture. In Europe, where the military is not as available to young men as a channel for aggression, one sees soccer hooliganism*, which in its extreme forms takes on a political aspect far out of the mainstream of European socialism. See, for example, Real Madrid's Ultras Sur for an example that conflates historical Falangism with neo-Nazi skinhead tropes; Celtic's Green Brigade and Hapoel Tel-Aviv's Ultras Hapoel for examples of Communist/anarchist imagery.

This ties in to posts I've made before arguing that the present American educational "system" -more correctly, the patchwork quilt of local school districts across these United States- with its default to college prep is bad for the country, since it presents young men not inclined to joining the clerisy with no clear options except for the military, which many young men are neither physically or temperamentally suited for. The result is hooliganism and other antisocial behavior. The question is, how do we pry the schools loose from the death grip of the teachers, administrators, and lawyers who have gotten us into this mess? Home-schooling isn't for everyone, and the Falangist part of my politics argues that there should be a minimum amount of socialization and cultural education going on in the schools - just not the socialist, equalitarian, esteem-based castrating crap we have now.

*For an interesting take on "the English disease", see John King's review of Hooligan Wars in The New Statesman.

...Hell freezing over, and Yr. Humble Narrator agreeing with Garrison Keillor.
IT'S ALL A SIGN OF THE END TIMES!

Seriously, though - Keillor takes his fellow Donks to task for carrying the NEA's water on NCLB and Reading First just because "it's Bush's idea!". Which, actually, they aren't, as he points out. Probably the best thing he's written in quite a while, and not just because I agree with him. (Joanne Jacobs)

Speaking of people I don't agree with, my Pandora country music "station" played James McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here" for me last night. I don't agree with the politics and sentiments behind the song, but it's very well done and I think I'm going to go ahead and get Childish Things sometime soon.

Got sent home after half an hour from Strayer since their IT department hadn't gotten me a login for their legacy mainframe system, but got paid for the full six hours anyway. Booya. The downside is that the job is only four days a week and lasts through the end of October. Well, what the hell; it gives me time to look for better jobs. In the meantime, I'm waiting for the one apartment place I seriously want to get back to me now that I've faxed my application in. It's possible having my last couple of landlords pissed off at me could put the kibosh on this, but there's nothing I can do about that.

Meanwhile, I see that most of the adjunct teaching positions in the community colleges require a Master's degree or 18 graduate credits in the subject area. Hrm. Maybe I'll be going back to school after all. Maybe the IRS will give me that job I always wanted with the secret police. :D

An observation that really belongs in the "things to think about" post: I don't notice how hot it is out here most of the time unless I'm stuck in traffic for a while. Most of the time I'm zipping around on the highways and byways, and only notice the heat when I come in out of it...at which point I can feel it radiating off me. Yow.

E.D. Hirsch makes it, and Cobb amplifies it. RTWT.

( I have my own thoughts on this. )

Brenda had some very useful suggestions regarding my pursuit of a teaching career. She urged patience with PG and willingness on my part to consider a long-term substitute teaching assignment, or possibly take a job teaching in one of the local community colleges. These are all good suggestions, and I'm going to look into following up on them.

Checked out two of the local Rockville eateries today. The Lebanese Taverna was disappointing with regard to the shawarma, which was far too juicy, but P said the traditional mezza was good. For dinner we all went out to Cheeburger Cheeburger, whose burgers are indeed as good as Five Guys, and which does indeed serve Pepsi Pepsi. Their fries are actually better, since they aren't nearly as greasy although they're fried in peanut oil just like Five Guys. Extra points for the onion rings, which are excellent.