@twitter, #idontunderstandu

I’ve made it a goal of mine to write twenty blog posts every month. I used to do this with ease, but then I got a life.

Making numerical goals is something that gives me satisfaction. Am I alone? No joke, when I earn an achievement on my 360, I occasionally squeal in delight. It’s like finding a jellybean in your glove compartment.

So along with my blog goal, tweeting more frequently is also tied in with that.

I like twitter, but there’s always this foreboding sense of unease I have with it. I know the basic mechanics, but beyond that, I’m hopeless. To me, using twitter is like driving in a foreign country: just do what you know how to do and don’t go on the sidewalk even if you see others doing exactly that.

So I just keep plugging away. Its doubtful that all the @ symbols and hash tags (i think of hashBROWNS every time i hear that word. Yum.) will ever be anything more than jibberish to me, but at least I’m still trying.
Still, there’s a certain amount of dread, however minuscule it is, that comes with the rapid pace of the tweet verse.

It all makes me feel so old, and that’s something I never thought I’d be.

Me:twitter::my grandma:email.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Grounding exercises

At work, we do this thing called grounding. Basically, it’s simple. When someone starts to get angry, frustrated, agitated, anxious, hyper or something else that is not what you want them to be, you can’t simply say, don’t do that.

Teenagers don’t do don’t do that.
It’s gibberish to them.

What you have to do is distract them. For instance, recently a kid decided to take a walk through the bushes the other day. He was mad, furious about something that happened in a game of soccer. Naturally, he’s so furious that he begins talking about picking lavender.

You’ve picked lavender?
Where’d you learn that?
Do you do it often?
What other plants do you know?

And so on and so on. I just kept asking questions. And in fifteen minutes, the kid had cooled down, deciding to come back down the hill instead of throwing a bee hive at me.

That’s essentially what grounding is. Distracting people long enough for their brain to catch up with their energy.

Tonight’s grounding exercise was simple. Kids were hyper, running around the circle drive like hooligans. I told them to balance on the edge of the circle in the middle. If they touched concrete, they died. Because it was lava. Two minutes of crazed hyperness became ten minutes of timed runs around the circle. The winning time? 9.3 seconds.

And….grounded.
This is why I get paid the big bucks.

The Dread of Arbor Drive

The winner of the google search for bicycle crashes. Note: Do NOT a search for gruesome bicycle accidents.

The prevailing response when I first tell people I am from Kentucky is a question:

Why don’t you have an accent?

Oh, I don’t know. It took a few years to lose it. I think that by the first time I watched television in my life in the year 1996, just a year after we got electricity, I had lurnt the wrong way to speak on account of the moonshine brewed from that rattlesnake venom my ma made me drink every mornin’.

Or, alternatively, I grew up in the suburbs of Northern Kentucky, which is right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. Oh? You didn’t know Ohio bordered Kentucky? Guess who look ignorant now.

Onward.

I grew up in a sprawling suburb called Knollwood. Unlike most suburbs I see now, Knollwood was a charming little enclave where kids still sold lemonade on the corner, the town mayor handed out bags of pop tarts every Halloween, and people knew other people.

In fact, by the time I was nine, I knew the name and address of every single kid my age in the whole suburb. Minus the girls, because at age nine they didn’t exist. This was a wonderful time, as I just recently learned how to ride a bike. Fittingly, I spent nearly every waking minute not spent on homework or my burgeoning fascination with this thing called Nintendo riding my bike.

Every other kid was the same way. The best part about living in Knollwood was that nearly every street branching off the main artery went down a hill. It was like our own private blacktopped ski resort. Every street was classified based on degree of difficulty. A few down the way where just bunny slopes. Tiny little nubs with a cul de sac and that’s that. My street, Malabu, was a decent square. A straight shot down for about 300 feet and then a nice, long even run out before reaching the end.

But the true black diamond of the neighborhood was Arbor Drive. An intimidating piece of work, Arbor drive started off benignly flat for the first hundred feet or so. This was just the calm before storm. When you reached the hill, the concrete just tumbled away, almost twice as steep as my own street. To make matters far worse, there was a slight bend in the road, like a kink in a pipe, about halfway through the plummet. Seams in the road were filled with large squirts of blacktop, creating a quilt of bumps that amplified the difficulty even further.

This street claimed many accidents. My brother, deciding it was fashionable to ride a big wheel wearing only biker shorts and no undies, scrapped his backside raw when he fell off the back of his big wheel and skidded down the street on his bottom. Arbor Drive claimed his biker shorts. It showed no mercy.

Naturally, one of my best friends lived down Arbor Drive, so I was an expert on the ways of this treacherous slope. So was my friend Josh. Perhaps we were too confident in our abilities. Arbor Drive would soon teach us the error of our ways.

It happened on a bright day. No rain. No wind. Perfect bike riding weather. We had already been up and down the neighborhood several times when it came time to slalom down Arbor Drive. Like always, we stoop up on our pedals as we approached the hill. Why? Because that was the badass way to do things.

We dropped down into the hill and approached the bend. I veered past a large bump, with Josh just in front of me. Then, the most extraordinary thing happened. Josh’s bike decided to fly! His front wheel hit a bump, and in the blink of an eye he was upside down, hurtling through the air on his red Huffy. No exaggeration, he did a full front flip.

And then landed on his wrist, skidding to a stop underneath a car.

I might be wrong, but I think this is the first time I familiarized myself with the many intricacies of the word fuck. Panicked, I went to check on the carcass of my friend. He didn’t move at first, and I sincerely thought he had died. Then he started crying. I started crying, and I ran to get his grandma.

Josh didn’t die. I think he broke his arm. But after that day, Arbor Drive was the stuff of legend. Rumors circulated around. Gossip spread.

Did you hear about Josh?

He flipped his bike on Arbor Drive.

I heard it was a back flip.

I heard it was a corkscrew.

I heard there was blood everywhere.

I heard he went twenty feet in the air.

Mike, you were there. What happened?

Arbor Drive happened, that’s what. And I’ll never forget it.

My huggest embarrassment ever

I promise this is relevant.

 

The year of first grade was the year I began attaching trash to my clothes as a fashion statement, testing the limits of how far I could urinate, and seeing color in black and white. Two of these things have to do with me learning to read. The other is just me being gross. At this point, I will leave it entirely up to your imagination what impact pee streams could have on phonics, because I’m certainly not telling you which is which.

All I remember about learning to read is that it came incredibly easy to me, which probably explains why I don’t really remember learning how to read. I just did it. I became so good in such a short span that I refused to let my mother read me any more bedtime stories. Instead, I’d snatch the book out of her hand and say, Mom…I got this.

Over two decades later and my mom is still halfway between hurt and proud on this one, although I think her retelling of this story over and over again comes more from the latter than the former.

For each letter of the alphabet, our eternally patient teacher, Mrs. Annemarine, spent days drilling us on every aspect of that particular letter. We’re talking alphabet songs, phonics, pronunciation, reading,  endless notepads filled with those big lines where we could practice writing out each letter over and over and over again, more songs, activities, worksheets…You name it, we learned it. And then we learned it again.

By the time spring rolled around, we were long past letters and into words and sentences. The time came for the school spelling bee. We practiced for weeks in our classroom, forming a seemingly endless conveyor belt of kids stepping up to the front and rattling off words like bird, ant, and junk.

There was an unspoken rivalry of course. Just down the hall, there was an another set of first graders practicing their words too. That other classroom, we had no way of knowing how smart they were. We only saw them at recess, and even then, a sense of distance, competition and mystery pervaded them. If grade school was a deserted tropical island, they were The Others. Rumor had it that sometimes they drank strawberry milk for lunch instead of chocolate milk. That they sometimes got to use the parachute in P.E.. That they killed puppies.

We had to beat them. Someone from our classroom had to emerge victorious. The big showdown came in the school cafeteria. Lining up by alphabetical order, half the field was already out by the time I spelled my first word: ham.

H-A-M.

That is correct.

I kept rattling off words, round after round. No hesitation. No problem. By the time the phonetic dust had settled, I stood alone. The Champion of Highland Heights Elementary! To my little first grade heart, I may as well have been Champion of the World.

It was now time for the big leagues: A trip to nearby Florence Mall to compete against other spelling bee champions from around the area. Please hold off any snide remarks about my home state and spelling here, because surely you’ll find it ironic that a spelling bee was held in a mall underneath a giant red and white water tower that reads: Florence Y’all.

There’s a story behind this. There damn well better be, because it looks redonkulous and to make matters far, far worse, this water tower is right off of Interstate 75, one of the busiest arteries of interstate commerce in the entire country. People enter into the state of Kentucky, and after a few miles, this is what they see. Classy.

Anyway, the story goes that they originally wrote Florence Mall on the side of the water tower, but because they couldn’t advertise on public works, they had to change it. A quick chop of two lines, and the aforementioned advertisement for a mall was now changed into a welcome sign for Hickville, USA, just in case anyone ever confused Florence, Kentucky with the one over in Europe.

I’m derailing here. Okay, spelling bee. At this stage in my young life, I had never encountered a scenario more terrifying than the mall spelling bee. Held in the center plaza, the floor and balconies were filled with onlookers, all waiting in anxious excitement to see kids spell back words said to them.

But come on, get real. Parents wanted to see their kids, yes, but everyone else? They were just there to get a pair of blue jeans from Sears. Seeing all but one little kid fail miserably was a bonus.

I sure wouldn’t disappoint them.

First round, I was shaking so hard I chattered out the letters. The announcer said dishes, and I spelled out… Ddd-Iii-Ssss-Hhhh-Eee—Ssss.

Sufficient to earn a trip back to the line for round 2. This time the wait was shorter. I shuffled patiently up the podium. The jitters were shaken off like dust. Confidence swelled in me. I was a spelling bee champion! I could spell anything!

Michael, your word is huge. Huge.

Um, say what?

If the blank in my mind were a painting, it would be a canyon deeper, wider and HUGER then the Grand Canyon.

Huge!?! HUGE!!! Huge? Was this a real word? Surely it can’t be, because I was spelling bee champion and knew every word in existence! This huge wasn’t a word!

Michael, the word is huge.

Uh….H….U…..G…..AND THAT’S IT.

No, I’m sorry. That is incorrect. The correct spelling is…

Spare me.

I walked off the stage in utter defeat and humiliation. My cheeks burned so red people were warming their hands in front of them as I passed by. Huge? Really? That’s the word that knocks you down?

Come here, my mom said. Let me give you a h…

I went running the other way, not stopping until I reached Kay Bee toys.

The epic battle of my kindergarten chin vs. concrete

Kids need to test limits. It’s only natural that since we’ve only had a handful of years to figure out how things work, we don’t know how most things work. By five, most everyone understands that if you trip when you walk, you fall. That if you jump, you don’t just float off into space. You come back down. Gravity is understood. Well, maybe not in the Newtonian, force of attraction, sense of the word. For a five year old, the language of gravity is spelled out in owies and boo boos. We begin to understand the way the world works in direct proportion to how much pain it causes us.

So, by five, I understood that what goes up, must come down. Lots of scrapped knees and elbows taught me that. What I didn’t quite understand was that I was not from the planet Krypton. Or that my skeleton wasn’t pumped with adamantium. Or that I couldn’t shoot spiderwebs out of my wrist bones. I didn’t even know these things existed, but I didn’t know they didn’t either.

Actively mobile, I might have decided to test my limits by climbing a tree and jumping off the tallest branches, ready to see if my shoulders sprouted feathers. Another alternative, I might have flung myself on a swing. Or jumped off a merry go round whirling around at full tilt.

But, eh, those things make too much sense. Instead, I decided…no wait. Decided is the completely wrong word to use to describe my decision to go completely insane for a span of about three seconds. Those three seconds came when I was sent to the cafeteria to pick up a tray full of chocolate milk. Certainly, the teachers sent me to get the milk because I had demonstrated I was capable of making the requisite right hand turn down the hall, marching thirty feet to the cafeteria and picking up a tray of tiny chocolate milk cartons. They thought I did things that made sense.

Maybe I was out to prove them wrong.

The initial trip to the cafeteria came without incident. I picked up the tray of chocolate milk from the lunch lady. She might have pinched my cheek. I turned and headed back, carefully balancing the tray of milk cartons with straws poking out the tops. The decisive moment came on the return trip when I noticed the concrete stairs leading back up to the classroom. Hmm, five year old me thought. I know this is concrete. What I don’t know is…am I stronger than concrete? I put the tray of milk down gently on the ground, took two tiny shuffles forward and then face planted myself into the stairs.

To this day, I still have no idea what I was thinking. I wasn’t feeling sad. Not angry. Not anything other than a mild curiosity to know my chin could break concrete.          ‘

It couldn’t.

Limits were reached and my chin was busted, scarred with a tiny little sliver for the rest of my life.

And then I lied. I told my teachers, and then my dad when he arrived to take me to get stitches, that I slipped and fell. On the imaginary puddle of water that was out to get me. I knew I wasn’t Superman before I even knew about Superman, but after my first purposeful encounter with the duel dynamos of gravity and concrete, I also knew I was very much human.

Six Flags Magic Mountain

Michelle and I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain on Saturday.

Saturday was an extremely crowded day at the park. So crowded we had to park in the very last section of the park, which pretty much means you better be carrying a liter of water with you to the front gates because you could just keel over and die walking that far on a hot day.

No worries. We have season passes, and the beautiful thing about having a season pass and going on a day like Saturday is that there’s no rush. You can enjoy the ambience. While Magic Mountain is decidedly less aesthetically charming than any other park in SoCal (overflowing trash cans, muddy water on the bathroom floor. Honestly, they might as well name the main entrance area Skid Row and just leave it as is. You know, for theming.), it still holds some good qualities for just strolling around.

Now, the thing is, a trip to Magic Mountain means certain concessions need to be made. One, it is overrun with teenagers and adrenaline junkies. You’ll hear more things to referred to as “That shit” than at a colonoscopy center. It’s mildly annoying most times, but on crowded days, when you have to wait with these degenerates in line, it can get more than annoying. Two, you can’t expect Disneyland. It doesn’t have the same charm. The same magic. Some of that can be attributed to the crowd, but it’s also just the park itself.

The reason these concessions need to be made, and why Six Flags is worth the trip, is that it houses a dozen and a half hellawesome roller coasters that make the minor annoyances all the more minor.

Superman breaks down almost every time I’m in the station, but that seven second rush up to 400 feet and back down is just that, a rush. And you get an awesome view of the whole park now that it runs backwards.

We didn’t ride Tatsu because the line was close to three hours. I’ll never ride something, no matter how awesome it is, with a wait that long. But Tatsu is awesome. That pretzel loop, where you divebomb your head to the ground and then loop back around, is the single best element of any ride I’ve ever been on.

Apocalypse is a great woodie, even better in the dark. The only real detractor is that it doesn’t stop to breath once the lift hill is done. There’s no place to just slow down for a second to process just what the hell happened.

That’s just three of what?, seventeen roller coasters at the park. And that’s not even including X2 and Green Lantern, both of which are unlike any other ride in North America.

I’ll get back to this, because I’m going back to the park. Next week. On a Sunday. That shit will be less crowded on a Sunday.

Submitting again

It’s hard to start a process all over again. Kind of like pushing a snowball back UP the mountain.