My Trip

This is more bloggy than usual.  Thought I should report on my use of my summer vacation thus far:

  I live alone, so I struggle with how to fill my time when, as a teacher, I get whole weeks and months off at a time as I do each year, so that I might regain my ability to not eat children alive.  I have often visited my friends Michael and Bethany as a way to get away.  They tend to live far away, so this always involves driving for 7 or 8 hours, and frequently I have had to deal with hassles at the Canada/America border due to sharing the identical first and last name and birth date (including year) as a local felon.  U.S. customs officials use handcuffs made by the fine Smith and Wesson company of America.

  I wrapped up the school year, and got the kids failed who most needed to (in order for the hard work of the other kids to not be totally without cause, and for passing my course to mean anything at all.)  It is very hard work to get kids failed.  It is viewed as a failure of the system, and of me in particular.  But it was always and only down to kids missing more than half of the classes and doing less than a third of the work.

  So I got that done, was convinced that what I really needed to buy was a camera, and scored online deals by getting a new camera and lens from Hong Kong.  I saved perhaps a hundred dollars on each of those, including shipping (which was free).  I have the camera body, and will enjoy it a lot more once the lens arrives and I can actually take pictures with it.  It arrived just when I got back from My Trip.  I always used to take pictures everywhere I went, Back in the Day.  I used film cameras, mostly, and mainly an SLR (with removable, interchangeable lenses, if you don't understand what Single Lens Reflex cameras are).  I always wanted to "replace" the film one with a digital SLR, but they're pricey.  Took the plunge this summer.  Now I actually need to go places and do things that are worth photographing.  But anyway...My Trip:

  I took my (purchased this year) 2010 Dodge Charger (black, with leather seats and spoiler) on what I thought of as its maiden voyage with me, and drove, air conditioned and iPod soundtracked, by the guidance of a GPS, my car represented onscreen as the General Lee, to my aunt and uncle's house in New Jersey.

  I have gone there a couple of times, leaving my mostly worn-out, about-to-break-down vehicles at their house in an affluent neighbourhood, and taking the short train ride to Penn Station in New York City.  This is to save me the impossible job of trying to park my car in Brooklyn.  Every single time I've attempted that before, I've somehow gotten both a dent and a parking ticket.  Hard to find cars in NYC without any dents.  This time, though, I took my time getting to Jersey, hung out there, slept overnight in the bedroom I used to sleep in when we'd visit when I was a kid, and then took the train the next day.

  It was sweltering hot the whole trip, with air conditioned car, train and subway, and "deal with it" everywhere else.  There is a certain greasy/gritty atmosphere in New York.  It's like nothing is ever clean.

  Hung with Michael and Bethany, installed an NES and a SNES (Nintendo and SuperNintendo) emulator on their son's computer, leaving a USB hand controller as well, so he can grow up knowing the wonders of the Nintendo stuff from the 80s and 90s.  Link, Mario, Megaman, Metroid and all the rest.  I probably waxed overzealous in sharing child-management tips and the like.  I had to decompress from the year I just worked.  Some of that involves resolving to remember what worked and resolving to make sure stuff that didn't doesn't happen the same way next year.

  When it's that hot, I find I don't want to eat much.  Ice cream is good, though.  And beer.  As is usually the way, we didn't exactly sight-see, so much as go walking all over the city.  Walking across the Manhattan Bridge with Michael around midnight provided a nice city-scape view.  We talked about the structure of TV shows.  I explained about Fringe, which he is unlikely to ever watch, and he talked to me about Game of Thrones which people have been trying to get me to watch for a while.  At one point, he broke off the discussion to chase a rat across a few yards of the bridge.  It had been trying to keep just ahead of us, hugging the shadows, and in a fit of typical playfulness, Michael decided to run after it.

  As usual, we tended to stay up most of the night doing stuff like that, then sleeping until noon.  Bethany had got her younger son cello lessons, and had rented him a little cello and a normal sized one for herself.  Despite not having taken more than one lesson herself, her coaching him in playing some basic songs and her learning what note each string was, and getting her bowing technique together meant she could jam with Michael and I playing Michael's guitar.  At first we had Michael play songs we knew, and he was singing the melody, and she was playing the melody by ear on the cello.  When I had her just play the root note of the guitar chords played for the singing, it provided some awfully nice accompaniment without being so difficult.  They'd asked me to bring recording stuff, so I brought my laptop, breakout box, headphones and a microphone.  I plonked the microphone onto the coffee table between Bethany and I, and we did a passable version of Neil Young's Music Arcade.  I think cello adds so much to acoustic music.

  I also got to Forbidden Planet NYC, the huge comic store, which enabled me to pick up the latest hardcover binding of Alan Moore's career-making run on Swamp Thing.  Normally I get them from amazon.  Also got to the New York Costume Shop for a V for Vendetta mask to replace the ones the kids stole this year (along with my grade 9 yearbook, my Walking Dead season one DVD set and various other things).  Apparently the stolen mask has been sighted on Facebook, used in a drunken pub crawl.  I also picked up a V wig to go along with it, to put on a styrofoam head in my classroom.  And, on impulse, a black top hat from Gothic Renaissance, which is beside the costume shop.  I've always wanted one of those.

  I went to The Strand (a giant used book store up the street from Gothic Renaissance and New York Costume Shop "Sixteen Miles of Books!") and bought a fistful of used graphic novels, including one with comic parodies of classical stories.  Like Mac Worth (Mary Worth and Macbeth) and Blonde Eve (Blondie, with Dagwood as Adam, Blondie as Eve, and Dagwood's boss as God).

  On the evening that Bethany arranged babysitting so she could come out with us, it rained a lot.  We got quite wet, and picked up sushi and things from a place called Gourmet Garage, and went to a club called The Fat Cat, where we sat in the corner and ate it all.  It looks like they took all the basements of the stores on that block and made it into one huge space, with pool tables, foosball and ping pong everywhere, and a small bar.  At one end, there was a band.  This evening, it was a gospel group.  Four old black guys with grey moustaches and blue golf shirts, singing their guts out, like Sam Cooke and James Brown rolled into one, four part harmony accompanied by drums, bass, guitar and piano, but with the voices doing all the musical work.  The place was infested with hipsters, each timidly bearing some feeble badge of desperate, carefully uncool individualism, yet looking completely uniform and homogeneous as a group.
  What I really struggle with, in terms of my own mental and emotional well-being, is being able to talk about ideas with people for whom talking about ideas (instead of gossiping about people real, or the ones on Jersey Shore) is neither novel, confusing or upsetting.  I got to talk for days with Michael and Bethany, who are very smart, and equally got both ends of the spectrum, talking at length to my "going to my Plymouth Brethren church really works for me and I'd recommend it to everyone because everyone needs to go to church" uncle, and his divorced, lost-his-job-this-week, fairly recently atheist son.  They're very smart too.  And they don't just observe the ideas and label what ism they sound like.  They get into it for real.  It was all good.

  Made it back without incident, got all of my stuff bestowed upon my sweaty, humid little apartment, did final tweaks to a mix of a song on J's band's album which they want ready for Saturday's show, graphic designed better inserts for the DVD case inserts the store downstairs uses for their rentals (they'd used scissors and a photocopier for their current ones), did some work on a silly song of mine which needs more collaboration with other musicians, got my camera body at the post office, and picked up a memory card for it, and tried unsuccessfully to schedule a visit with my niece and nephew who moved out of my parents' place last week, and into an apartment in the city.
   I've been filling the time between computer fiddling and waiting for my camera's lens to come in with watching the entire Lord of the Rings Extended Version DVDs back to back with the director/writers commentary on, and watching episodes of Justified.  Justified is such a good redeeming of that tired old "macho, always gets his man through thinking and shooting, modern cowboy cop" idea.  It could so be Walker: Texas Ranger and it so isn't.
  It's raining now.  That's doing beautiful things to the temperature.  Here is the new "rented DVD and games" insert I designed for ARG Mayhem, the video rental/toys and collectables store downstairs.  Google image stealing to make a little collage, rather like the collage of snippets of photocopies from comic book covers and toy packaging that makes up their current packaging.  (They are self-admitted technotards.)