The only song I was disappointed that Arch Enemy didn’t play. Holy shit, they were good. Often, I think of my relationship with music. There is this blank area where I seemed to want to appear to like something that I simply did not, or that I didn’t want to appear that I liked what I actually did. Now that I am divorced from all that, I can do things like go to the metal show and get floored by a bunch of Swedish long hairs (and German lady). Shows like this make me realize why I’m alive.

As a math teacher, I see a wide range of people, with a wide variety of mathematical and linguistic skills. At the community college, I see the whole gamut of people with their educational handicaps, their strengths and weaknesses. At the end of a term, I am used to all their peculiar quirks and have had 3 months to work on the rough spots and I like to think that they have somewhat learned to work with the problems and I often see improvement. This truly glorious fact, the great reward of teaching is what makes the beginning of the next term such a shock. I find people that can’t multiply, have no idea how to add and subtract fractions, don’t know how to do long division, can’t write English outside of the absolutely stupid “text-speak” that pollutes our linguistic world today and find myself frustrated and tense. Most of the time, I feel that I’m extremely bad at math, even though I have 1.5 master’s degrees in the subject and teach it. My situation, however, is not dire. There’s are. I do my best to make it better and I like to think that I make a difference in someone’s life, even though the shock of reality bites me in the ass more often than I like.

Ramble on…

For my second post, I will complain. Now that America has decided that the racial slurs that have dominated our speech for generations are to be avoided, racism has reared it’s ugly head in the form of Billy Milano style “Speak English or Die”. I was at the gas station the other day (owned by a cool middle eastern dude, who barely speaks English but is nice as you can get. He gave me free coffee when I didn’t have enough change), one of the (American) employees insensitively wore a T-shirt proclaiming “ENGLISH: Learn it or LEAVE”. I was fucking floored. I would likely be called unamerican for calling her on her blatantly racist demonstration of her stupidity but it got me to realize that people are at their core racist and stupid and will always find new ways to marginalize those they feel threatened by. Since when a guy not being able to speak English is threatening, I don’t know. I feel more threatened by the armies of morons who proudly where their pea-brains on their shoulders and pat each other on the back for their dedication to the Amerikan Ueber-race. I wonder how man of their great-grandparents did not speak and never learned English.