Random Thoughts

Doing Hard Things

The diplomas are safely on a shelf in my closet, and the desire to wreak irrational havoc upon them has thankfully passed.

I’ve learned that the most recent job I applied for which appeared to have been a perfect fit for me (teaching 5 periods of 7th grade English), was filled by someone already hired in the district, moved from another school because of “a shifting population.” Basically, I’ve been trying to get jobs that aren’t really available at all.

Well gee, at least now I know it’s not my age. Or the color of my slacks. Or the fact that I got my degree during the era of deconstructionism. Or anything of any relevance whatsoever–there’s just no job available for a newly credentialed English teacher. No matter how well educated she might be.

Meanwhile, more US companies face obliteration, guaranteeing fewer jobs for Americans in general.

How’s that “hope and change” working out for you?

Despite the fact that I’m unemployed, and therefore can’t really call myself a “teacher” now–I have no students, no classroom, nothing but this little blog and whomever I happen to converse with in the 3-D world–I am still educating myself.

One of the best books I’ve read in months:

Written by two teenage brothers, Alex and Brett Harris, it tackles head on the contemporary concept that teens are immature and incapable of handling serious responsibility. The boys point out that “teenager” is a 20th century construct. Throughout history up until the early 20th century, you were considered either a child or an adult; there was no decade of transition between the two. Now, they argue compellingly, we have a significant span of years where children are capable of mature behavior but treated like they’re not. Society sets low expectations for teens, resulting in laziness and self-centered (often self destructive as well) behavior.

In their words, it’s time for a “rebelution.”

When you look around today, in terms of godly character and practical competence, our culture does not expect much of us young people. We are not only expected to do very little that is wise or good, but we’re expected to do the opposite. Our media-saturated youth culture is constantly reinforcing lower and lower standards and expectations.

The word ‘rebelution’ is a combination of the words “rebellion” and “revolution.” So it carries a sense of an uprising against social norms. But in this case, it’s not a rebellion against God-established authority, but against the low expectations of our society. It’s a refusal to be defined by our ungodly, rebellious culture. Actually, we like to think of it as rebelling against rebellion.

The boys have a website too, The Rebelution.

If I ever get a classroom of my own, I’m having my students read that book. Even if I’m teaching in a public school. Especially if I’m teaching in a public school. I’ll probably get fired, unless I wait for three years to implement the book, then I’ll have tenure permanent employee status and they won’t be able to touch me. Ironic, as that’s one of the worst aspects of public school education, and directly responsible for the deplorable state of far too many schools.

Sometimes I really do feel like a chef trying to get work in a restaurant that’s been given a failing rating by the health department. And then I think about the kids whom I could help…

Spare me the Drama

Why does this blog get so much Russian spam? What is with that?

Imponderable questions…my life is full of them.

I’ve spent all summer hunting for a teaching job. Thus far, I’ve submitted about a dozen applications, and had three interviews. The first one, Job #1 was for a job I really, really wanted.

I have two English degrees, a teaching credential, and Eldest Son graduated from the private school in question, so I thought I would have a shot at the open teaching position.  I may have had a shot at it, but Job #1 hired someone else. Probably someone with more experience. Mr. Random Thoughts thinks that they probably hired someone younger, but he’s that way.

There’s nothing I can do about my age, or my level of experience. I yam what I yam.

Job #2 involved a more traditional interview given by a principal who looked like he was one step away from a heart attack, and not at all enjoying the hiring process. His questions were about my teaching style, my perspective on discipline, and how I would prepare students for STAR testing. I was the first of a string of interviews he had scheduled, and as soon as the alloted 1/2 hour was up he was done with me, onto the next, “We will call you, we may have you go through a second interview,” etc. etc. thank you goodbye.

On the way out I passed the next interviewee, a perspiring, stressed out young man. Impulsively I stuck out my hand and shook his, telling him “Good luck.” His hand was cold and clammy. Poor guy. He looked so desperate and so despondent even I, his competition, felt sorry for him. He probably needs the job even worse than I do.

Job #3 is a position teaching honors English, Debate, and Drama. The interview call came very unexpectedly (I had not submitted an application except to the district in general) from a school that suddenly has a teacher not returning, and needs to fill that hole immediately.

I don’t do Drama though. I don’t teach it either. Do you want me to learn on the job? Do I want to learn on the job? Do I really want this job?

Heck yes, so I did my best to wow them with all I have to offer, pulling out the “attended law school” card I normally bury deep in the pack–it intimidates people–to demonstrate that I could handle teaching Debate, and would be willing to tackle Drama.

Why did I ever think having an MA in English Lit was going to help me get a job teaching English? Obviously it’s not enough. I need to have minored in History Social Science, or Theatre. Or be 23 years old and far more attractive than I was when I was 23 years old. That is, if Mr. Random Thoughts is to be believed. He hires people. I haven’t been hired yet. So maybe he’s right.

I hate this part most of all though: Waiting for the phone call. The phone call that never seems to come, because they’re calling someone else.

This is the first time in my entire adult life that I haven’t been able to get a job simply by wanting it and presenting myself as fully capable of doing it. Oh, there was that one time an employer wanted to hire me away from a temp agency, but the negative reaction from her other employees (two of whom threatened to quit) made her back out of the deal. The temp agency told me I’d come across as “too capable.”

Somehow I don’t think that’s the problem now, but then what do I know?

All I know for certain is that I picked the worst time to enter the teaching profession in California.

I am certainly not the only one going through this sort of thing. Beyond the Pale has had an experience eerily similar to mine. And of all things, she wants to teach Drama! Maybe she could qualify for Job #3.

I’m trying to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing. This is me on the inside:

Okay, I am a woman not a man, and I will never see 35–or 45–again, and I am the mother doing the laundry, and the loans are about twice that much (thanks to the abortive attempt at law school), but otherwise it’s pretty accurate.

In fact, many of Kerry Soper’s cartoons describe my internal thought process about interviewing. On the outside, I’m smiling, answering questions ranging from “What Bible character do you think you most resemble” to “How would you teach writing using Bloom’s Taxonomy?” without breaking a sweat. On the inside, I’m wanting to say something like this:

Maybe I should teach Drama after all…so much of getting hired seems to involve acting.

Maybe I need to put my mind on other things. Things that are both simpler and weightier.

Like Crosscribe’s Ripples.

And I Was Just Thinking’s Challenging Words.

Anything to get my mind of the futile-thus-far job hunt.

No cash yet for clunkers

Apparently all is not rainbows and unicorns with the Cash for Clunkers program.

…the government has received applications for about 412,000 rebates totaling $1.7 billion. But so far, the feds have approved only a fraction of those, leaving dealers furious.

The Transportation Department won’t say exactly what the rejection rate is, but in an Automotive News survey, some dealers said up to 80 percent of their rebate applications had been rejected. Some dealers are waiting for payments totaling as much as $200,000, the survey found. About 13 percent of dealers said they’ve suspended clunker deals because of red tape and concern about getting paid by the government.

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

If the government can’t handle running a relatively simple buyback program, involving a very small percentage of the total US population, however will they manage health care covering every single US citizen?

The mind reels.

If you’ve got your health…

So, if I write about Youngest Son coming home from a week at camp only to come down with swine flu–which he then lovingly shared with both his parents–I’m inviting a string of spam about A(H1NI) and Tamiflu, aren’t I.

*sigh*

It really is no worse than any other type of flu. Of course I haven’t had any other type of flu in at least 15 years, so it hit me like a cement truck. But I do not have Obamacare, I have good old Blue Cross PPO. And that means that when I woke up sick, I went to the doctor of my choosing and got the drugs I needed at the pharmacy of my choosing and within 24 hours my fever was gone, and now, three days later, I am feeling considerably better.

Of course my health care is not free, but you, dear reader, are not paying for it out of your taxes either. MrRandomThoughts pays for it in part out of his salary, as a subscriber to the medical coverage provided by his employer.

It ain’t broke here, Miz Pelosi, please don’t go fixin’ it. At the very least, don’t go telling me the government running health care is going to solve anything. That’s just another lie amidst all the lies being told about this scheme…

…the president claimed the plan will not lead to rationing. But the bill, on page 30, section 123, would create a “Health Benefits Advisory Committee” that would make determinations about what kinds of treatments, items and services can be covered within certain benefit classes, and what kind of cost sharing will occur.

Oh swell. That will solve everything.

It is so darned hard sometimes not to judge the book by the cover.

Some more related thoughts…I’ve not been a big John Mackey fan (his Wild Oats messageboard stunt put me off) but I am a major Whole Foods shopper. Now I’m doubly glad they have my patronage. (H/T Gayle Miller).

In his [Wall Street Journal] op-ed, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” published Tuesday, [Whole Foods CEO] John Mackey criticized President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Mackey provided eight “reforms” he argued the U.S. can do to improve health care without increasing the deficit. He suggested that tax forms be revised to “make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance.”

Mackey also called for a move toward “less government control and more individual empowerment” instead of “a massive new health care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits.

This published reaction, on the other hand, is the epitome of everything I find so very moronic about liberalism:

Christine Taylor, a 34-year-old New Jersey shopper, vowed never to step foot in another Whole Foods again.

“I will no longer be shopping at Whole Foods,” Taylor told ABCNews.com. “I think a CEO should take care that if he speaks about politics, that his beliefs reflect at least the majority of his clients.”

Excuse me for a moment while I pound my forehead against the keyboard at the sight of such asininity.

Never mind how ridiculous it is to be spiteful about logically expressed concerns and valid suggested alternatives to a serious issue. Mr. Mackey’s beliefs are HIS beliefs. They do not have to reflect the majority of ANYONE else’s beliefs, much less what someone presumes are the “majority of his clients.”

I’m very conservative. I would bet Ms. Taylor real hard earned money that I spend more of it at my local Whole Foods than she does at hers. Seriously. Whole Foods and the local Farmer’s Market are just about the only places I shop (save for buying cat food and paper products at a major supermarket chain). And I’ve been shopping at my local Whole Foods for over 29 years, since it was a Mrs. Gooch’s, back when Ms. Taylor was too young to know what “organic” even meant.

I know what my city’s Whole Foods’ clientele is comprised of: Mostly upper middle class, fairly well educated people who are not about to give up access to Strauss milk and wild King salmon just because they may have voted for The One back in ’08. Chances are, like an increasing percentage of the country, they’re not digging this health care plan either.

Ms. Taylor should go ahead and boycott though.  Meanwhile, I won’t have to deal with people like her grabbing the fresh asparagus before I can get to it.

Mackey’s argument is a sound one, worth reading. And I do appreciate his opening quote from Margaret Thatcher…

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Indeed.

Credit Union woes

If I got paid for writing this blog, I’d be living out of my car by now.

3-D life right now makes going on line both too time consuming and honestly somewhat unattractive to me. It’s summer. My kids are home from college. There are a multitude of things to fill my days, from taking day trips with my 12 year old to spending hours picking fruit then making jams to taking a summer school college course in order to fulfill a teaching credential requirement.

Busy isn’t the word for it.

All excuses, and excuses are a very poor way to keep readership, I know. Look at it this way: I could bore readers with details of my ordinary days, or I could refrain from blogging until I have something worth reading.

Which would imply that I have something worth reading now.

*sigh*

Set that bar high for yourself, RandomThoughts.

Today’s snail mail held a survey from my local bank. It’s a credit union, and only inertia and force of habit keeps me banking there. They have one office in my town, it’s not convenient to my home, and I could present a long list of costly things they’ve done to me. I think I’ve reached the breaking point with them today, and it’s not even over a money issue.

I received a survey asking me why I haven’t used the loan for which I’ve been approved. Wait a minute. When I opened the account six years ago, I wasn’t approved for overdraft protection. Apparently while Bank of America VISA could see fit to extend to me a five figure line of credit simply because I fly on Alaska Airlines periodically, my credit union couldn’t give me a $500 line of checking overdraft protection. Go figure. Given that fact, I haven’t applied for anything else from them, no credit card, no auto loan, nothing. But here’s this survey, addressed to me, asking me all kids of questions about why I didn’t use the loan they purportedly gave me, how better they could serve me, what they did wrong.

Well, you sent me this survey, fools. And it typifies how clueless you are about my accounts with you and my banking needs.

Just in case I had an out of body experience, and someone else using my body while I was out of it applied for a loan, I called the credit union. Nope, no loan. No idea why I got the survey either. And no, I still can’t get overdraft protection.

I’m so done with them. I’m not keen on going elsewhere though. Given the state of banking in our country, the underside of my mattress is looking like a better place for my funds.

That cartoon would be funnier if it didn’t remind me of various friends and family members.

Comets, Climate Change and Congress

My inner science geek (usually deeply buried) has surfaced:

“The evidence is pretty strong that the Earth was hit by a comet in 1908.”

Ever since something generated a huge explosion over Siberia in 1908, flattening an area as big as a large city, scientists have been trying to figure out what caused it.

Among the enduring mysteries: Following the explosion, the night skies shone brightly for several nights across Europe all the way to London, 3,000 miles away…

The explosion on June 30, 1908, flattened some 500,000 acres (2,000 square kilometers) of Siberian forest. Estimates are the Tunguska Event was as strong as at least 10 megatons of TNT and perhaps a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.Just last year, many experts were figuring it was an asteroid.

But Kelley’s team thinks a comet fits better, since comets are loaded with water ice (asteroids are mostly rock and metals). The comet would have started to break up at about the same altitude as the release of the exhaust plume from the space shuttle following launch, they calculate. In both cases, water vapor was injected into the atmosphere.

But how did the water vapor travel so far?

“There is a mean transport of this material for tens of thousands of kilometers in a very short time, and there is no model that predicts that,” Kelley said. “It’s totally new and unexpected physics.”

Cool.

The Tunguska Event and its cause create serious ramifications for the global climate change theory. Never say it; the concept that *gasp* nature itself could be behind climate change is unthinkable. Can’t get any tax money from evaporated comets, can we.

I may throw up on you…

Sometimes I think we’re living in an alternate universe. Or maybe it’s like the new Star Trek movie…someone accidentally sucked the US into a black hole, and now we’re living out a reality where everything that had meaning, everything of substance, has been tweaked and twisted, and things just are wacked.

Like maybe Ronald Reagan was never President.

And Lee Iacocca never resurrected Chrysler. In the new reality Iacocca doesn’t even get to keep his company car.

And the French President and US President, having determined that Britain is irrelevant, are sucking up to one another so hard it makes my Miele vacuum look like a tired old broom.

And the US Government has decided that significant donors to the GOP can no longer own American car dealerships. Doug Ross offers an eye-opening breakdown of what dealerships are being targeted for closure.

If that’s not enough, some brilliant DC policymakers are considering implementing a nationwide VAT (value added tax). Just what we need with rising unemployment, sinking home values and the tax burden we already carry.

A VAT is a tax on the transfer of goods and services that ultimately is borne by the consumer. Highly visible, it would increase the cost of just about everything, from a carton of eggs to a visit with a lawyer. It is also hugely regressive, falling heavily on the poor. But VAT advocates say those negatives could be offset by using the proceeds to pay for health care for every American — a tangible benefit that would be highly valuable to low-income families.

…Orszag has hired a prominent VAT advocate to advise him on health care: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and author of the 2008 book “Health Care, Guaranteed.” Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, chairman of a task force Obama assigned to study the tax system, has expressed at least tentative support for a VAT.

My head might just implode. All that’s left is to find out that the past 29 years never happened.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Energy Secretary wants us to paint our roofs white.

Speaking at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, Professor Chu said that this approach could have a vast impact.

By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off the roads for 11 years, he said.

Dude. Seriously. Feel free to come paint every single one of my roof’s bazillion concrete tiles white. And be sure to replace any you break in the process.

How the crap they’d begin to pay to repave the roads in my state–a state which is so deep in the red it’s hemorrhaging–I have no idea. Probably via some sort of Global Warming/Road Resurfacing tax.

Good luck with that.