RafeWorld

A few weeks ago I lost a former student. Even sadder, I lost this student to suicide. It was… and is… an incredible tragic event. I’ve watched over the past few years as suicides and student deaths have shaken the community I teach in, fortunate that they weren’t my students. This time it was and it was every bit as devastating an event as I expected it would be. I hope not to have to go through it again.

A year ago I ranted on my podcast about the unfortunate suicides that were making national headlines and how I pondered if things would be different if these kids knew that someone loved them. A year later, I’m wondering what I could have done to ensure one of my past students knew how much his former teachers and coaches still cared about him. Would it have made a difference? I’ll never know. I can’t change the past, but I can change the present… the future… and I’m doing so.

I wrote the following speech which I delivered to most of my students over the past week. I still have a few more classes to deliver it to, but I suspect they won’t see it before I get to deliver it to them as well. I worked hard to make it say what I wanted and needed to say and I’ll never know if the students know how much saying these words meant – it undermines five years of building a reputation as a “tough” and “mean” teacher, but I need them to know why I teach and what they mean to me more than I need to be seen as “mean”.

So… here’s what I told my students this week:

“How are you doing?”

I can’t count the number of times I have been asked that question over the past few weeks. I reply with some variation of the conventional answer, of course: “I’m fine.” After all, what I’m experiencing is the same as many others and most frequently the people asking are the ones who really need to talk. To those who have asked how I’m doing, I thank you. To those who haven’t out of consideration of privacy, I thank you as well. You would have only gotten the same answer, “I’m fine.” And I think everyone who has gotten that answer has known it’s not the truth.

No, the truth is that I’m not fine. Coming to terms with death is hard. Making sense out of something that has no logic behind it is hard. And considering the life of someone and contemplating all of the potential and brilliance that will never be seen again is hard. None of these things are fine, and the recent death of Troy Pelish brings all of these things forward. He was a brilliant young man with an unlimited future ahead of him, and his death most certainly does not make sense. While I hold myself proud to have known him, I am incredibly mournful of his passing. I am not, “fine”.

One of my teacher friends has a saying: “I can teach out of love or I can teach out of fear. I prefer fear because I can get a lot more done with it.” The first time I heard him say those words I became enamored with that phrase because it’s true: I can teach out of fear or I can teach out of love. As many of you know, I tend to favor fear. Unfortunately, in favoring fear, I have often forgotten to show love.

I love all of you. It’s an awkward phrase to hear, I’m sure. It’s equally awkward to say, but it’s the truth: I love all of you. This is an important lesson I’ve learned over the course of my time as a teacher: teaching is love. I got into teaching because I wanted to make a difference in the world, but what does that difference mean if I don’t love those who I teach? I may not always like the decisions you make, but that doesn’t make me love you less – it just makes us human. Love – real love – is accepting someone as they are – the good, the bad; the smart choices and the dumb ones.

I’ve also learned over the years that there’s even an irony to that love: those of you who think I’m just saying the words but they don’t apply to you, or think that I can’t possibly care about you because I’m so hard on you I obviously I dislike you are most likely the ones I care about the most. Ask yourself: why else would I care how you do? Love. Why else would I want to see you succeed and rebound from failure? Love. Why else would I take the time to make an investment in you not just as a student, but as a human being? Love. It’s one of the most important pieces of teaching, but I fear I’ve become so adept at my style of teaching that I’m not very good at showing it, so let me repeat one more time: I love all of you, just as I loved Troy. I need you to know that and I’m sorry if I’m not better at showing it at times. I also need you to know that, just as I miss Troy, I would miss any one of you if something happened to you, because I do care about you and because you are mine.

You see, teaching is a very possessive profession. As teachers, we have classrooms that are “ours” and we have books we prefer teaching that are “ours” and we have lessons that are uniquely “ours.” What you might not realize is that, as our students, you too are “ours.” We take possession of you, just as we help take responsibility for your successes and failures. When we hear about your achievements, like a proud parent we are quick to point out, “That one’s mine.” This student got accepted into an Ivy League university: “She’s mine.” This student just finished boot camp: “He’s mine.” Even, this student was arrested by the police. “They’re mine too.” In fact, when I got the phone call about Troy, I wasn’t asked if I had taught or coached him, but, if he was mine. And he was, just as all of you are.

That possession doesn’t end when you leave my classroom or leave William Byrd High School. You are my students, and you will always be my students. I care about you, and I will always care about you. I’m not alone in that: I don’t know a single teacher who isn’t exhilarated to find out how a former student is doing in life.  We enjoy seeing our students mature and grow and we are fascinated about where life takes you. Students often worry that we will be disappointed in where life has taken them, but I assure you we aren’t. Part of love is recognizing happiness, and even if life takes you in a completely different direction than you expected when we taught you, if you are happy, we will be happy for you.

If you aren’t happy… that’s when I need you to remember what I’m saying the most: I love you and care about you. I have never turned my back on a student or friend in need, and I never will. If you need someone to talk to, someone to complain to, someone to vent to, or just someone to remind you that there are people in the universe who care about you… well, you know how to find me. I am here for you. Now. In the future. When you need it. After all, you are my students.

I’m not a heavily religious person, but I do believe in fate or destiny. I believe things happen for a reason and we are put where we are supposed to be. I believe that you are my students and I am your teacher for a reason. While I can not pretend to make sense of it, Troy’s death happened for a reason as well. I’m trying to find something positive to come out of this tragedy. It will be some time before I am actually “fine” again, but I keep coming back to Troy’s parent’s request: to greatly cherish those who we love. I do cherish all of you, but I think it’s important – important enough to give up some of my valuable classroom time – to make sure you understand that – to make sure you know that someone cares for you and cherishes you.

Thank you for being my students, and never forget that you are my students and that means something, at least to me.

And the reason for the picture at the top: a scene that has been repeating in my head for the past few weeks – another fictional teacher I hope I can carry the spirit of throughout my very real career:

I posted to facebook last week:

The important lesson I hope my students learned today, regardless of anything else: don’t disturb Mr. Telsch while he’s eating. Seriously. Important lesson.

While that may sound like sarcasm (one of my friends responded “OMG – You’ve become “that” teacher), it actually is an important lesson and one that keeps coming up this year, so I thought I’d pontificate on the subject of lunch and why it is the most important meal of the day… at least for me.

When I had my first job (a subject I wrote about here), I didn’t give my lunches much attention. I would work through lunch, sitting in the back, typically familiarizing myself with policies and procedures, making a schedule, or doing one of another various and sundry work related things. No big surprise: I quickly found myself burned out. Even though the manager of that store was absolute rubbish as a manager, the one thing she did teach me was the importance of taking a lunch break; getting out of the workplace and clearing your head for thirty minutes does wonders for recharging in the middle of a busy work day.

I’ve had the luxury of having jobs with very flexible lunch schedules. These sort of jobs offer the opportunity for longer lunches or leaving the workplace in order to eat. When I was in hospitality, I could sometimes be gone for an hour or more (not frequently) and left to eat out on a daily basis. I think part of the reason I get along so well with the person who served as my boss in that job was because we would bond over lunch. We’d get away from the craziness, enjoy a good meal, and chat about movies, music, theater, books, family, or whatever came to mind. Sure, work would creep in sometimes, but most of the time we just enjoyed the freedom of escaping for a while.

Teachers don’t have that luxury.

Seriously. As a teacher, I get 35 minutes to eat lunch. Subtract from that the amount of time it takes to clear out the classroom and satisfy the needs of any lurking students afterwards (or any students that had to stay after to discuss behavioral choices during lunch), monitoring the hall, etc, and you’re looking at half an hour tops for eating. But you can’t get away. There is not enough time to race out and grab fast food, particularly since the closest fast food is at least 10 minutes away. So there you are: half an hour, stuck on campus where students, administrators, and others can quickly track you down.

The need to recharge is getting more and more desperate. I love teaching, so don’t read this as a complaint. This is fact. When I started teaching five years ago, teachers had an uninterrupted planning period and a duty period. The duty would take half the class period, so essentially in two days you had a period and a half of time designed for the teacher to plan, grade, call parents, talk to administrators, guidance, etc. That never was enough time, but it was something. For teachers with responsibilities like department chair or SCA or class sponsor, that was considered your duty. Now, thanks to budget cuts, that time simply isn’t there. This year, my schedule afforded me one duty period (but being department chair doesn’t count as that duty) and a second duty period. No uninterrupted planning. Three duties: hall duty, study hall supervision, and department chair (I should add that one of the wonderful members of my department did – of their own volition – take the hall duty so I would at least have one uninterrupted period for planning).

Can you see the need to unwind in the middle of the day?

I don’t mean to complain. It’s simply a fact: teachers are being asked to do more and more with less and less time afforded to do it (people who complain that teachers have such an easy job since they only work 10 months and get off at 3pm have no idea what they’re talking about). And you know what, I’ll take it. Because I love teaching. I love my students. I love my job, even with the bureaucratic tasks we are given and the constant amount of C-Y-A going on. I know what I do makes a difference.

But give me my lunches. Let me unwind. Let me destress for thirty minutes. Let me joke around with co-workers for half-an-hour without having to fulfill any commitments or face any students or answer any questions. I’ll be happy to do more work after those thirty minutes are done, including having my classroom interrupted to deal with the things people wanted to bug me with during lunch.

Lunch. It’s the most important meal of the day. If for no other reason than it’s what keeps us sane.

I suspect I will be writing here more often again soon. I’ll have a bit more time and I have some mental things I need to get worked out. Writing is one of those things that helps me work them out, and putting it out there for the world to see helps me know that I’m writing for someone… even if nobody actually does read it. The idea of a journal never worked for me specifically because I knew nobody would read it… the writer’s endless desire to be seen.

It’s been a rough week in our household. We were looking forward to Tuesday: a doctor’s visit where we would get our first glimpse of a pregnancy we had kept largely secret. We miscarried twice before our little boy was born, and that instilled in us a fear of sharing the exciting news of expectation until we had more confidence about the pregnancy staying. The appointment came, but it wound up not being as happy an occasion as we would like. The pregnancy was found, but there was no heartbeat. In the past, we had known about the miscarriage before going to the doctor’s office, so this was a very new experience.

Miscarriages are strange things. The child that would be has not arrived, and yet it creates an atmosphere of a funeral. There is no body to be put into the ground, and only a few people are affected, but there is still a pervasive sense of loss. One of my favorite authors, John Scalzi, described it as such in his entry, The Child on the Train:

If I could describe to you what a miscarry feels like from an emotional point of view, I would ask you to imagine a dream in which you are standing on a train station platform. While you are waiting, you look through the dirty windows of the train car in front of you and see a small child looking back at you. The child’s face is indistinct because of condition of the windows, but what you can see looks achingly familiar. For a moment, the child is separated from you by only that single, dirty pane of glass. Then the train starts to move, and the child starts to move with it.

And you realize that the reason you’re on the platform at all is because you’re waiting for your own child to arrive, a child you have yet to meet. And you realize that you could have claimed that child as your own. And you know that whatever child eventually comes to you, you will love that child like the sun loves the sky, like the water loves the river, and the branch loves the tree. The child will be the greater whole in which you dwell.

But it will never be that child, the one you could only glimpse, the one who went away from you. All you can do is remember, and hope with everything in your heart that the child who went away from you finds another who will love it as the sun loves the sky, the water loves the river, and the branch loves the tree. You pray and you hope and you never forget. That’s what you do. That’s what I do.

When these things happened previously, my wonderful wife and I leaned on each other, but that was pretty much all I had. My family is great – some of them are supportive, others often choose to give space when events like this ocur, but there’s always been a feeling of isolation in what we were experiencing. This time there has been an overwhelming level of support. Kristi has great friends and her family to lean on. I have the best co-workers a guy could ever wish for. Maybe it’s because we’re all teachers… even the administrators I rely most on are teachers at heart… but the level of understanding, support, compassion, and empathy has been beyond words. To paraphrase Aragorn (of Lord of the Rings – so this entry gets some geek cred), I would follow them into the very fires of Mordor.

So… I am unfortunate in that my family suffered a loss that we will never be able to recover. We will mend, but we will not forget. At the same time, I am fortunate that I have some of the best friends, colleagues, co-workers, and administrators a person could wish for.

Six years ago, Kristi was feeling sick to her stomach right about now. Regardless, she triumphed on, walked down the aisle (looking amazing, of course), and agreed to be my wife.

Make the jokes you want to about her feeling ill (and little Z didn’t come for quite a few years afterward, so it wasn’t that). I know I do.

Our wedding wasn’t the start of our adventure together. That had come five years earlier as our relationship began under what we’ll refer to as the least optimal conditions. But the wedding was exactly what it needed to be: an affirmation of our love, surrounded by friends and family. There were tears, there was laughter, and most importantly of all, there was (and still is) love.

Our life has changed dramatically from that day. I’ve finished school and changed careers. She’s ended one career, at least temporarily, and we’ve brought a son into the world. And through it all, there have been tears, there has been laughter, and most importantly, there has been love.

I love you, my beloved. Still your huckleberry.

Bullying has taken to the front page of the news recently. Suddenly it has become a national focus, as if the problem just suddenly appeared on the scene. Well, it didn’t. Unfortunately, as is often the case, it cost the lives of several people to make it an important focus. Since we can’t get the lives back, now we’ll try to fix the problem… a problem that is far from new and should have been a focus for a long time.

I’m not exactly a stranger to bullying. I don’t think any of us who went to public school were. I found myself slammed into lockers more than once, was tossed in the middle of a bush one time, bore multiple injuries from bullies sitting behind me on the school buss and thwacking me on the head with their class rings turned in, and was even punched square in the gut without any warning – the kind of injury that killed Harry Houdini.

Of course, not all of these experiences came about from bullying. One of the more memorable times I was slammed into a locker came about from telling a girl that her boyfriend was just going to wind up hurting her. They got into a fight, she told him, “I guess Rafe was right,” and I wound up going headlong into a locker. I guess I deserved it. I also learned not to tell girls the truth about their guys, since it was just going to wind up hurting me in the long run. The time I was bushed? I was an 8th grader who mouthed off to a 12th grader. He drug me out to the bush and was about to let me go when I sensed his grip loosening and tried to knee him in the not-so-comfortable place. He later told me he had intended to let me go, so I guess I deserved that one.

That’s not to say my mouth always got me in trouble. The class ring head-smacks were never deserved. The person behind them graduated before I did, and eventually came back to the high school to apologize to me – a sincere and unnecessary apology. My mother guessed he was joining a 12-step program of some sort, since part of that is seeking forgiveness. The punch in the gut was absolutely random from a student I had never met before. Never found out why he punched me. Who knows, maybe I ran my mouth there too.

That my school had a bunch of bullies was no surprise, however. Heck, we had “redneck hall”: a segment of the hallway where the rednecks gathered together, leaned against the walls in between classes, and heaved pennies as people walked down the hall. We didn’t have our lunch money stolen; instead I had a friend who paid for his lunch by walking down and picking up the flung change.

But these were bullies of a different sort than today. These bullies just picked on the unfamiliar and the weak. I once got rid of a problematic bully who picked my fedora off my head and threw it down the hall by turning around, grabbing his ballcap, and doing the same. The look of shock on his face that came with someone turning the tables on him was priceless. I enjoyed it even after being slammed into the lockers after the look of shock passed.

Okay, I’m making jokes, but that was part of how I dealt with bullies when I was in school. The truth is the bullies of my day were random. They picked on anyone who wasn’t part of their clique and anyone who was weaker than they were. Not a redneck? You were going to get pennies thrown at you. Not a jock? Be prepared for bitter humiliation in gym class. It was never about who you were as a person. It was more about who you did or didn’t know. The second you stood up to them, they stopped, because they had no grounds to keep going – and because they could always find someone else who didn’t stand up to them to pick on next. It was never really personal. In fact, it was almost Darwinian in nature.

With the bullies of my day, there was almost always a way around their behavior as well. Don’t want pennies thrown at you? Pick another hall to walk down (the truth is that “redneck hall” was one of the most worthless pieces of real estate in the building). Anger someone by mouthing off to them or telling their girlfriend he’ll mistreat her? Just miss a day of school or two and things would calm down. Since it wasn’t personal, most of the time (random punches in the gut notwithstanding) it was easily avoidable as well.

Today’s bullies are a bigger threat. More and more, it’s becoming personal, with kids picked on for being black, white, red, orange, brown, and rainbow. Part of the bullying becomes about who these children are personally, which is something they can’t easily get away from, and has the added effect of making those kids doubt themselves as individuals. Even worse is that thanks to the same devices that allow adults to check day-trading, harvest virtual crops on farm town, and stay in non-stop contact with friends, families, and bookies, no picked-on student is safe. The bulling doesn’t start and stop with the school’s bells, but it becomes a pervasive part of the student’s life, to the point that far too many students are finding the only solution is to end that life to escape it.

I still don’t consider myself to be that old, and I think the world has been through many changes for the better, but today, I consider the bullying of my day to be far better than the horrible situations students have to go through today.

(Part II to come)

When I worked at the hotel, we would occasionally have guests who confused “customer service” with “servant.” There were quite a few who make for good stories, but one really took the cake. His name was Pat. Pat broke so many rules of good taste and decency dealing with the people at our facility, down to pretending to be someone at his meeting planner’s school when his meeting planner wasn’t taking calls (she was in a meeting with other customers – God forbid she help other people, so he pretended to be with the school in order to panic her enough to come out of the meeting and take his call).

It got to the point that many of us wanted to march into our General Manager’s office and demand he get involved or tell Pat’s organization they wouldn’t be permitted to meet at our facility based on his conduct. Of course, that didn’t happen, and in the name of the almighty dollar, Pat’s group came to the facility.

Dealing with Pat was one of the few times I played my seniority card and had standard technicians deal with the guest, monitoring what was going on from our office – out of sight of Pat’s bonehead ways. I wasn’t the only one who took this approach. My boss acted in a similar manner. Essentially it was one of the rarities where the low man on the totem pole got stuck with the bad job. Most of the time both myself and my boss were willing to step up and do everything, but we both knew Pat might push us beyond the limitations of sanity. It didn’t matter. Nothing we did was good enough for Pat, and we knew just about everyone he came into contact with was going to be reported to our General Manager in some fashion. We also knew better than to trust our General Manager would support his staff (surprisingly, he did, but that’s another matter).

After day one of dealing with Pat on property, I stopped at a music store on the way home and picked up a CD: Denis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer. The album has Leary’s infamous song, “I’m an Asshole” as the opening track. I figured, if I was going to get fired (or quit out of frustration), the last thing I’d do would be to patch a CD player into the meeting room’s sound (you could do that from the safety of our office), announce via microphone that this one was dedicated to Pat, and put the track on repeat before walking out of the building. Sounds like a pretty cool way to quit a job, eh?

Obviously I didn’t do it. I survived Pat and many other jerks, eventually getting promoted and moving up the corporate ladder a little bit. But that encounter was an eye-opening event that showed me just how little I was worth to some of our customers, as well as to the company I worked for. Companies are driven by money, and I was fooling myself if my job meant anything more than serving as a person who earned a considerable amount of money for that location. It’s probably the first step I took toward complete job dissatisfaction, and part of the reason I eventually left to become an educator.

Why do I bring this story up? Because, to this day, I still think it would have been a cool way to quit a job. Falling with style, if you will. Voicing my dissidence to an entire audience, and letting Pat’s people know exactly what we thought of him…

… and now I have complete control over my school’s football field video display system.

Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?

Those who pay attention to other facets of my life are familiar with a dissatisfaction I’ve had as of late – a dissatisfaction that grew to a head a few weeks ago on Episode 139 of my podcast. Having taken two weeks off in a row, with no time to watch movies or write reviews of the movies I had seen, I voiced the possibility of shutting things down. My logic was that I hadn’t really had time to maintain the site, and without the site there’s no point in continuing the show. The site is responsible for what little ad revenue and the gracious donations we receive. Much like when we were at Cinema Blend, the show itself makes no money. It’s just a fun thing we do to talk about movies.

In my dissatisfaction, I asked for people to sound off – were we done doing the show, continuing only to #250 (a nice clean number for a break) or should we carry on. The response was almost unanimous: our fans like the show and wished to see us continue, even if that meant cutting back on what we did or getting rid of the site. (Again, getting rid of the site isn’t an option – it’s the only real way to bring in new listeners and support the show.) The response filled me with a bit of a charge though, and so the show and my life as a film critic got a reprieve (interestingly enough, the one response we got that suggested we hang it up if we weren’t interested anymore came after we recorded the following episode, where we announced we were sticking around and which I felt was a much better show).

Since we made that decision, the site has received little update, as I expected. One review, one “write your own review,” an editorial, and two of Margaret’s Trailer Park articles, and that’s about it. In a period of three weeks, that’s not a lot. I’ve been questioning how to resolve that. Now, leave it to someone I don’t know to give me the kick in the pants I need.

On his blog, John Scalzi writes today about writing. The post is a response to questions he gets about where his motivation and energy come for writing, sent by people who, like me, have a job and a family and have trouble finding time and energy to write. I knew from the get-go this was a post that was either going to motivate me or make me want to jump off a bridge (or, more realistically, grab a stiff drink).

Scalzi writes:

So: Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is “yes, but,” then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say “no.” And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what “yes, but” means.

So, yeah, he has a point. Nothing says I have to be a writer, despite the fact that I’ve defined myself as one for almost a decade now. I’m a writer because I want to be, even if I don’t say I have time to do it like I want. His counter to that is that, if you can find time to pen 250 words a day – which isn’t a large task (I’m at over 500 words at this point in this post) – you can write a novel within a year. It’s a good point, and perhaps the aforementioned swift kick I needed.

The closing of Scalzi’s article is a killing blow to any excuse I’ve ever made:

But if you want to be a writer, than be a writer, for god’s sake. It’s not that hard, and it doesn’t require that much effort on a day to day basis. Find the time or make the time. Sit down, shut up and put your words together. Work at it and keep working at it. And if you need inspiration, think of yourself on your deathbed saying “well, at least I watched a lot of TV.” If saying such a thing as your life ebbs away fills you with existential horror, well, then. I think you know what to do.

When I left my previous career, it was bent on having a family and doing something that meant something – that made a difference. It was done with the motivation that nobody ever dies wishing they spent more time at the office or sold one more microphone. At least what I do now makes a difference and gives me time for family. Until now, what I felt like it hadn’t given me a lot of time for was writing. But I do watch TV. I do play video games. And, as evidenced by this post, I can write almost a thousand words within fifteen minutes. Somewhere in there is the message. It just took Scalzi to put the pieces together.

As I tell my students: I’m not justifying… I’m just making excuses. Clearly, it’s time those excuses stop or I face the facts that they are nothing more than just excuses.

I don’t write a lot about my years at the hotel. Maybe it’s having a mindset for so long about not burning bridges, or maybe it’s that my mind has blanked some of my memories from my time working there to protect me from insanity. I enjoyed a lot of the people I worked with, but the job itself was crazy, especially as I carried my responsibilities with such a personal level of attentiveness that I couldn’t let myself “take it easy.” My work ethic and my expectations exceeded my own common sense – a problem that I can’t ever seem to let go of.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 80-90 hour weeks at the hotel. That’s not an exaggeration, unfortunately. There were times where I literally only got three or four hours of sleep between the time I got home from work and the time I had to go back in. Thankfully, it wasn’t the norm, but working six days a week or twelve hour shifts were pretty common. It wasn’t unusual for me to be greeted by people as I entered the building with the query: “Don’t you ever go home?”

For the longest time, the joke was that I didn’t. It was a hotel, after all. It wasn’t hard to believe that I had a room somewhere I could sequester myself for a few hours of sleep in between shifts. The “barn” (our audio-visual office) was private enough with few enough holding keys at the time that it was completely believable that we could have a cot set up in there. Frankly, there was a time or two (or a dozen), when I was in “hurry up and wait” mode, awaiting a room with little a/v requirements to finish so I could reset it for early the next morning, where I did grab a quick nap in the office, uncomfortably positioned in the office chairs.

As I entered management, I would find myself covering last minute pop-ups where things weren’t scheduled or the event didn’t justify the cost of bringing in a staff person. I was, after all, a slave of salary. As this became more and more frequent thanks to poor meeting planners, the exchange became something out of Clerks:

“Don’t you ever go home?”

“I’m not even supposed to be here today!”

It’s unfortunate not enough people recognize Kevin Smith’s debut film, since it’s so easily quotable. Still, at least the response was true, if not as clever as most people understood.

Fast forward to present time. I’m arriving at school around 7:30. I usually stay afterwards to prepare my materials and check in with other members of the department. At the beginning of the year, I determined I would stay until 4pm each day in an effort to get more done at the school and less that has to be done at home. Even that’s been unrealistic, as it’s uncommon for me to leave before 4:30. With very little prep time during the day, and an almost constant need to meet with principals, guidance counselors, other teachers, etc, I almost always have things to do once students leave.

On top of that, I was “volunteered” to run a new digital scoreboard our school has installed as part of the ongoing construction. This week was one of two games I said from the get-go I couldn’t participate in, but due to a comedy of errors (or, at least something I’m trying to call a “comedy”), I wound up having to go at the game.

So… get to the school at 7:30am. Leave around 5pm in order to come home and grab a quick bite to eat before getting back to the school before 6:30. As I walked up to the gates to enter the football stadium, what am I greeted with? One of the other teachers, who asks, “Do you ever go home?”

And before I could even think about it, the response came out: “I’m not even supposed to be here today.”

It’s funny because it’s true, but in that brief instant, this school year became something reminiscent of my time at the hotel – an experience that I don’t write much about, either because I don’t want to burn bridges, or because my mind has blanked things out to protect me from insanity. There is one key difference: this time I carry an unparalleled love for what I do, even if it does slowly drive me mad over the next year.

As good, old Norman Bates once said: We all go a little mad sometimes. It worked out well for him, right?

It’s that time of year again: San Diego Comic Con – the geek pilgrimage to San Diego for a convention that long ago stopped being a comic book show and instead has taken all of the interests of Hollywood and jam packed them into one building. Even shows that have limited genre appeal have started making an appearance. Shows like Castle can get away with it because they star Nathan Filion, of Firefly and “Doctor Horrible” fame. Other shows like Psych and Glee just have large followings, so if you take a large part of the populous, even those who like to dress up like Stormtroopers and Batman, and you’re likely to have enough people who are fans of those shows.

I’m not at Comic Con this year, and I can’t say I’m terribly sad about it. Nor did I get to go last year. The first, last, and only venture I’ve made to the annual event was in 2008, when I attended as a member of the press, if you can really call what I was doing as a blogger and podcaster “press.”

Attending as part of the press means that I didn’t have the typical Comic Con experience. For normal people, they go, they get their badges, they wander around the exhibit hall buying all kinds of cool swag, and they plot out what events they really want to see, often requiring they forego other events to make it into the ones they really want to see. Going as press meant I was there as part of a team – three writers and a photographer – so many of the panels and events we would go to were plotted out in advance.

All of the cool stuff happens in Hall H – a massive, airplane hanger sized room with multiple projection screens so people sitting in the back can see what’s going on up on the microscopic stage. From an entertainment reporter’s standpoint, that’s where the good info comes from, so one person from our team was dedicated to that room. They got in a line at 7:30 in the morning, almost three hours before the room would open up, and eventually plopped down at a seat in the hall. They had to carry food in with them, although as we got better at things we figured out how to relieve them for lunch breaks (helped by the staggering of less interesting presentations in with the popular ones). Not that it matters: Hall H was not for me. With the exception of seeing Kevin Smith and his Zack and Miri Make a Porno presentation (which was at night, after most of the rest of the convention had wound down), I didn’t really see much of Hall H.

Another room, the name of which I forget, also holds a considerable amount of people, and has the second popular stuff – material that won’t have the draw of Hall H sized crowds, but are still pretty big. Luckily, this was also staggered with decent presentations in some of the other rooms, so one person could cover this room and some of the smaller rooms pretty easily, provided they planned when they left and could return to the room. It also was easier for them to grab food. Again, it didn’t really matter to me, because again, this wasn’t me.

Instead, as the one person with broadcast experience, I was saddled with interviews. Celebrities would go do their panel, where they would show new footage of whatever project they were hawking to the masses. Then they would move to a back hallway of the convention center where members of the press had scheduled time for interviews. These interviews took one of two forms:

a. Roundtable discussions, where you sat at a table with four or five other press members and the celebs would rotate from table to table every ten minutes, answering questions from all of the press people at the table. As you might guess, one person would wind up dominating the table time, with others not getting to ask many questions.

b. Red Carpet extravaganzas, where the celebs would make their way down a red carpeted area, moving from interviewer to interviewer. Handlers would move the celebs on every couple of questions, but typically the time allocation was incredibly uneven, and the celeb would have to go elsewhere before they finished the  carpeted gauntlet. Guess who has been within four feet of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Gerard Butler, and Chris “Ludicrous” Bridges (among others)? This guy!

In short, interview duty was miserable. Roundtable interviews worked pretty well. I had enough journalistic integrity to let other people ask questions, but enough of a presence to push my way into getting a chance to ask questions. The problem is, you wind up with a recording of everyone’s questions, and the ethical thing to do is not to run other people’s parts of the interview, which makes it tough to use the audio recording for anything more than transcription, which is more miserable than interview duty.

Red Carpet interviews were a joke, even more miserable than roundtables. My video camera is prosumer – high end consumer gear, but consumer gear nonetheless. I had borrowed a better camera from a friend, but I still looked like a joke among the professional rigs there (seriously, if you’re Gerard Butler, who are you going to make time for – the TV Guide crew with a steadycam rig, or the guy with a fist-sized camcorder?). Even worse, I had no cameraperson. Our photographer didn’t know how to operate video cameras, so she was useless when it came to these types of interviews. This means I was required to run the camera, which means sitting behind the camera, but also had to conduct the interview, which meant holding a microphone out to the celeb. What I really needed was a boom mic attached to my head and a smiley face picture I could stick on the end of the camera so the celeb could look at something and I could work magic from behind the camera.

Despite being on interview duty, which was miserable, and feeling like I was babysitting our photographer a lot of the time (we wound up running a lot of my digital pictures, as well as captures from my video fooage), I still had some good experiences at Comic Con. Among them:

• Meeting the cast of The Big Bang Theory, which was just out of its freshman year. The guys were all pretty awesome, and a conversation between the three leads sounded like something straight out of the show, including comments from Kaley Cuoco that were as clueless about geek culture as her character.
• Meeting Dakota Fanning, who I had maligned numerous times in opinion/editorial pieces. She turned out to be a sweet  young lady who came across as very sincere and nowhere near as precocious as I had (mistakenly) credited her for.
• Seeing one of my writing heroes, J. Michael Straczynski, who spoke for an hour and then signed autographs. It was the closest I came to an average person’s experience of the Con, and it was glorious. I never did get an autograph, in part because I left my copy of his screenwriting book at home, and in part because I decided I’d rather keep him as a hero than meet him in person and possible have that hero aspect ruined.
• Interviewing Robert Englund. It was one of only two one-on-one interviews I got the entire time I was there. I was told I would only get five minutes with him, but he gave me ten, although he only answered one question in that ten minutes. He was pretty friendly and awesome, and it was one of the only interviews I was proud of from the Con.
• Seeing an advance screening of Tropic Thunder. Although I didn’t say hi to any of them, I sat in front of the Ain’t-It-Cool folks, who I’ve appreciated for a long time, and Jay Baruchel (who co-stars in the movie) was in attendance. A special video introduction from Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Ben Stiller alone made this screening worthwhile.
• The Fraggle Rock presentation, which celebrated the anniversary of the show with a live performance by Karen Prell (Red Fraggle) and a screening of an episode. When the opening credits rolled, the audience clapped along with the music without any prompting – a perfect display of fandom. Afterwards, I was one of only three members of the press who showed up to interview Prell and Dave Goelz (Boober Fraggle, but also The Great Gonzo), and the duo gave almost an hour and a half to the three of us. Sure, occasionally the conversation veered farther into territory the Jim Henson Co. rep felt the need to keep us from discussing, but it was awesome to be in the presence of some of the big Muppet pioneers, especially for such a big fan of Jim Henson as I am.

When the Con was over, we all sat down and had a few drinks, which was a nice relaxing experience, but even then I felt sad that I didn’t really get to experience Comic Con. I got to experience a hallway of the Con most people don’t, but it was filled with members of the press that I couldn’t hold a candle to, and other members that showed why the blogging community doesn’t get the respect and professional courtesy other outlets do.

I really think that trip was the beginning of the end for my time as an entertainment reporter, but that’s a story for another time. For now, I just enjoy reading some of the big scoops from Comic Con and knowing that I’m on the other side of the country, in a nice, quiet house with my family – an experience that doesn’t require sitting in a line for hours or maintaining a feud with rival journalists.

That Robert Englund Interview:

So where were we… oh yes, the writing contest.

Today seems like an especially apropos day to pick this story back up, as a merciless and ridiculous editor managed to trash my interest in writing more. Fortunately, this was after I had done the bulk of the day’s writing, so the bills got paid anyway, as the saying goes… assuming that’s actually a saying.

So, I first heard about this contest towards the end of the school year. I enjoyed Wil Wheaton as an actor in my youth, when the two of us looked very much alike. John Scalzi, the other brain behind the contest, is a writer I’ve only recently discovered, but I really enjoy (I highly recommend his book Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Ten Years of Whatever, a collection of highlights from ten years of his blog, which is titled “Whatever”). Put the two brains together, and apparently you get John Scalzi as an orc, against Wil Wheaton, who is mounted upon a unicorn pegasus kitten. Silly, eh? And, to top things off, they wanted fanfic about the picture.

Now, understand, fanfic is one of those venues I have chosen not to go down. I consider myself a proficient writer. I have my weaknesses, mostly from not doing enough of a variety of writing, but I’ve read some fanfic and I know I’m more capable than a lot of the stuff I read. There’s some weird stuff that goes on in fanfic. Weird, unspeakable stuff. There’s a reason why one of the rules of the contest required entries not included explicit sex. Think about that for a second. Now think about all of the different fandoms out there – Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. Imagine what kind of explicit sex could be portrayed in those fandoms. Now, understand, whatever you just came up with is tame by comparison to some of the things some people have created. I’m not saying all fanfic is erotic or explicit, but a lot of it is – enough to give fanfic a bad name.

I also choose not to write fanfic because I enjoy watching or reading about those characters in the creator’s original manner. I couldn’t dream of what Tolkien really wanted to happen to Samwise Gamgee next; all I could come up with is what I would do with the character next. Well, who is that of interest to? Just me. So why write it? If I’m going to put that kind of time and energy into something, let it be my own original creations, who I have full control over without feeling like I’m deviating from a set path or destroying someone else’s intentions.

Back to the contest. Despite the silly premise, and despite the label of fanfic, I chose to enter the contest for a couple of reasons. The first, and least, was what I talked about before – feeling like I’m slogging through an existence, grinding out a living, but not really using my talent as a writer. The second, and more important reason, is that this contest is for a cause. The winning entry from the contest will go into a chapbook, alongside stories by Wheaton, Scalzi, and several other professional authors. While that’s all well and good, and it would be awesome to see something I created alongside that, that’s not why I entered. The proceeds from the chapbook, which I’m sure I will buy, regardless of what entry wins, go to the Lupus Alliance of America. Lupus isn’t just a good punchline on House M.D. It’s a serious illness and one that has tragically touched my life (that’s an entry for another time). So, anything I can do to benefit the cause… especially if it’s writing a silly story, well…

Like many things I write, ideas for the story percolated in my mind for a while. The original post announcing the contest came during the end of the school year, a time when I had no freedom to write, and many other things occupying my brain. It’s no surprise to me that one of these other things wound up taking the focus of the silly story: the novel Lord of the Flies. The concept for the story that finally came to me offered up a way to structure the story so that it wasn’t quite fanfic, and yet, it is fanfic. The story of Wheaton and Scalzi and the unicorn pegasus kitten is fanfic within the story, but it’s not my fanfic. It serves another purpose, and ultimately, that became a facet of the story I was really happy about.

My next entry: the story itself. Which is still one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever written.