Twofer

Despite a big Mother’s Day bash, this particularly assertive class of ESL students insist on throwing another party to celebrate the culmination of the semester.  As our last night is on a Thursday, dollar pupusa night is Wednesday so pizza is on the menu.  As with the pupusa extravaganza, the students are aware of my dietary fussiness and I am brought a salad.  I’m regaled with a bunch of gifts, which knowing that most of the students engage in low paid physical labor, I inevitably feel guilty accepting. 

There is lots of hugging and picture taking and the room is decorated elaborately.  Two of the girls bring prizes for a raffle and I let students “shop” for cheap prizes to purchase with the colored paperclips that they amass for good attendance.  They pass their phones around to pose for pictures with me and polish off a big box of cookies that I baked.  I turn in my final paperwork, clean up my desk and load up the car, completing the 6^th trimester of ESL 1B that I’ve taught.  My schedule for summer school and for the Fall semester will be comprised of classes that I’ve never taught.  I’m excited about the challenge but having spent two years refining my 1B schtick I know that the future will be a bit wobbly.

The District is in “outcome” frenzy.  Despite the high percentage of undocumented students with a limited range of possibilities, our ESL program is only deigned successful if students continue on to a profession or college.  Towards that end, classes that combine ESL with vocational training are being offered and substantial resources are allotted to ensure the success of the program.

I am assigned to co-teach an intro to medical technology and enrolled in an intensive training program.  I am grouped with my co-teacher and instructors from all over the district who are teaching the same class.  Also present are groups of auto mechanics, electricians, cake decorators, pharmacy technicians, manicurists and computer experts.  We are tasked with creating a detailed lesson plan for the four-week course.

My co-teacher usually teaches medical billing but for the ESL population the curriculum is boiled down to a basic health class.  We are teaching the body systems and some rudimentary nutrition.  Students will learn how to check vitals and create a model of the digestive system out of Play-Doh.  25 regular medical billing students are enrolled for summer session and my school has dropped the ball on enrolling ESL students.  My co-teacher is very fretful about being charged with students of such disparate needs.

During the training week, we present, with our teaching partners, a sample co-taught lesson.  We are mandated to plan lessons with measurable objectives.  My partner and offer lessons on taking temperatures, measuring heart-rate and calling 9-1-1-.  Other instructors teach us to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider, strip electrical wires, and make eye contact on a job interview.  The automotive group does a lesson on brake installation.  The instructor, when queried about a measurable objective, proffers flatly, “I drive the car and it stops.” 

Many of the co-taught sample lessons pertain to hand washing.  There is a very strict set of hand washing protocol for many of the different professions.  The child care workers sing happy birthday while they wash.  The physical therapists wash up to the elbows, dry each hand with a separate paper towel and turn off the faucet with a third.  One group of teachers checks our hands for bacteria with a blue light.  While I eschew the triplicate paper towel thing, mine pass for clean.  Whew.

Because my colleague has a full class of regular students, I realize the despite my lack of qualification, I will be doing most of the teaching for the ESL population.  I am thankful, at least, not to have been assigned a construction or plumbing course.  I learn, from the moderators of the workshop, that ours is the only school that has concurrently enrolled vocational and ESL students.  There is lots of hand wringing and phone calling.  Towards the end of the weeklong training, we receive a text that the ESL portion of the Medical Technology class is cancelled, and they’ve thrown together for me a schedule of 3 ESL classes for the summer.  I am scheduled to teach the ESL portion of the Medical Technology class in the fall so the training isn’t a waste of time and I imagine that the teaching circumstance will be more optimal then.

While I’ve managed for nearly twenty years to keep off about 100 lbs. of “baby weight,” I’ve yoyo-ed within about a thirty- pound range.  I’ve done Weight Watchers a number of times.  I met some great girls there that I remain friends with, but, showing up for a meeting and stepping on the scale was always a humiliating reminder of my lack of fortitude and willpower.

With a couple of breaks for travels, I’ve done a rather loose version of the Keto diet since the first of the year.  I am close to being at the lower end of the thirty-pound range. Keto seems more effective for me than Weight Watchers.   I haven’t eaten anything that ever walked on four legs forever.  It’s never a big deal to say, “I just don’t eat that.”  Eliminating carbs hasn’t been that much more difficult.  The keto diet is high in fat and moderate in protein.  I don’t restrict portions but am always sated.  As for potatoes, pasta, bread, sugar and even most fruit, it hasn’t been that big a deal to say, “I just don’t eat that.”

I remember though with Weight Watchers, when I was measuring and counting points and pretty much enjoying what I ate, saying to myself, “I can do this forever.”  I’ve saved the better of my smallest sized clothes and, after five months of Keto, rotated them back into my closet.

My niece in Grass Valley has opened an amazing thrift store to benefit the Diabetes Foundation.  My friend, who has also lost a lot of weight, and I do a huge closet purge, fill her Prius with bags and boxes of clothes, and armed with a book on tape, hit the road.  I’ve saved a couple of the better too large garments.  I’ve been doing this dance for nearly sixty years.  Perhaps Keto is the magic bullet, but I’ve felt “cured” before, only to “relapse” so I’m hedging my bets and holding on to a few super sizes.

I think that it’s easier to be fat now than it was during my adolescence. There are movies and TV shows that depict fat girls with boyfriends.  I endured so much casual cruelty that even now I consciously repress memories that are too painful to conjure.  While fatness is my own hobbling trauma, I am a close witness to the emotional weightiness of adoption.  Himself is an adoptee.  My niece, in Grass Valley is my sister’s daughter but she was, as a toddler, adopted and raised by another family.  I won’t co-opt anyone’s story but essentially both niece and husband inherited the inevitable dysfunctionality of not just one, but two, families.  While I’m only on the periphery of the adoption trauma, having grown up with a pervasive sense of being unlovable and not belonging, my loved ones’ stories are perhaps particularly relatable.

While I know folks that document every moment of existence with their cellphone cameras, I’m lousy about taking pictures.  I realize that, regrettably, there isn’t a single photograph to document a December trip to Felton, a rare occasion when we had both kids with us.  It’s difficult for me to interrupt the flow of happiness to capture it by posing for a picture.  Spuds experimentally spent his last two years of college with only a primitive flip phone, in order to more fully engage in real life.  I doubt that the lad has ever read here, but he has adopted a form of prose not dissimilar to my own musings.  He chews stuff around, weaves it together and struggles to make sense.  His recent piece examines how our psyches have transitioned to future think. 

As time grows less friendly to me, I strive to remain present.  The current administration is a giant kick in the ass to living in the now because I am desperate for Trump, and everything he represents to be over.  In Spuds’ much shorter lifetime, technology advances such a sonic speed that the present is always a nanosecond from obsolescence. 

With Spud’s permission, I am ending here with some of his recent writing.  Jewish mother mode?  Guilty!  But he gets right to the heart of things I’ve struggled to express here for over a decade, so it’s worth copping to the rap.

Livin’ Life Like There’s No Tomorrow

Niall Murphy

Few things are cornier than a social media pun- but as we scroll, swipe and like our way through ever-replicating jumbles of data and information, I’m beginning to get the sense the present moment feels like it’s slipping away. It’s not that the social media generation suffer from corroded attention spans, as everyone on the internet loves to claim about everyone else on the internet, but rather that our attention is firmly fixed elsewhere, away from what's in front of us and instead on what will come. Futurology is of course not a novel point of fixation. In The Republic, Plato dreams of an ideal, future city no longer corrupted by poverty or despair. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne crafted visions of technocratic societies dispersed into global villages by trains and automobiles and The Jetsons animated a world of flying cars, robotic maids and video conferencing. But our more recent obsessions seem to reside less in a fantastical prophecy of what the future will look like than an impatience with the world in its current manifestation. Consequently, politics and culture trip over themselves in a hurried climb towards the future, no longer interested in painting a picture of the times we live in as they are in catering to a society caught up in speculation more than they are enthralled by spectacle.  

         A prime example of this collective conjecture is this year’s NBA Playoffs. After a gripping postseason that included three game sevens and two series clinching buzzer beaters, the Toronto Raptors leveled the Golden State Warriors’ contemptible and- often-thought- insurmountable dynasty. It comes as a surprise, then, that playoff viewership was dismal this year, down a significant 14% from last year. Many, including commissioner Adam Silver, have been quick to attribute this drop to the absence of the most recognizable player on the planet, Lebron James. This was the first playoffs since 2005 without Lebron and the first Finals devoid of him in almost a decade. And while a Lebron-deficient postseason may have turned many casual viewers away, basketball’s coverage on social media and sport’s news programs would suggest the sport’s global popularity is ever-increasing. But in these broadcasts and discussions, far more attention is given to speculation regarding offseason transactions, free agent destinations and hyped-up draft prospects than games themselves. What this decrease in playoff viewership reveals, then, is less a dispassion towards basketball without Lebron than an indifference to basketball, and sports in general, as live events.

During the playoffs, ESPN shows like SportsCenter and First Take were fixated on players like Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. And while both are future hall of famers, competing  for title-contending teams, attention was far less focused on their play than it was on their impending free agency. With their contracts expiring, rumors abound, and commentators dream up trade scenarios and superstar pairings for the two all stars. Septic franchises like the Knicks and Lakers weren’t even in the playoffs, yet received incessant airtime as speculative free agent landing spots and for front office melodrama. Zion Williamson, albeit a behemoth anomaly of a college prospect, has yet to put on an NBA jersey and was arguably discussed more than any player in the postseason. Speculation and excitement for the next big thing in sports is nothing new. But it would be hard to imagine coverage of the 1996 playoffs, for example, being far less focused on Jordan and the 72-10 Bulls’ quest for a fourth championship than on Shaq’s potential departure to Los Angeles or hype surrounding high school phenom Kobe Bryant.

Just as in sports, the 24/7 news cycle has saturated political broadcasts with endless streams of speculative reporting. It seems coverage of next year’s presidential election began almost the moment after the 2016 results were announced. And while I too eagerly await the dispossession of our current president, I worry that constantly hypothesizing his removal distracts from his administration's present attempts to implement policy detrimental to the most vulnerable Americans. As “I’m With Her” die-hards salivated over the possibility of impeachment, the media spun the Mueller investigation into a Cold War espionage thriller- one whose plot is built around a poorly written explanation of Facebook and targeted advertising. And when the special counsel’s report finally came out and discredited liberal’s pee-pee tape fantasies, they refused to believe they’d have to wait a year and a half for the bad man to go away.

Meanwhile, three years of conspiratorial reporting have muffled coverage of the president’s transgender military ban, intervention in Venezuela, denial of overtime pay to 12.5 million workers and acceleration of the development of the Keystone XL pipeline. Ironically, by proving him right, reporters that pined for the president’s impeachment by way of the Mueller Report ultimately built the foundation of his re-election campaign. What’s worse, coverage of Russiagate made liberals look panicked, annoying and, most importantly, wrong. Who knows how a greater focus on Trump’s degradation of America’s working class- through policies enacted in real time- may have conversley influenced undecided voters in the 2020 election.

If we look at popular forms of media, we find the same distracted infatuation with the forthcoming. The last installment in the Marvel Avengers franchise was released last month, but I stopped following after the first, bored with what felt like perpetual setups for further films. In fact, in thinking back to most of the superhero films I’ve seen in the past few years, I remember very little about the distinct plotlines or characters. Instead I recall cameos from supplemental characters, as well as remaining in the theater for post credit bonus scenes, all serving to foreshadow the next installment.  Eventually, audiences lose interest for whatever follows, and studios reboot franchises to attempt to re-invigorate the same cycle of anticipation. The franchise format is nothing new, but what made series like Christopher Nolan’s Batman and the Harry Potter adaptations so engrossing was that each film was self contained; every installment brought its own cast of heroes, villains, conflicts and resolutions. There was a commitment to a story that unfolded over three acts, not a cookie-cutter narrative precipitating some prolonged culmination, drawn out over interminable sequels.

Similarly, Game of Thrones was a show built around a single posterior event: the ascension to the Iron Throne. In the show’s last few seasons, episodes became little more than set-ups for this conclusion. Characters were killed off, often many in a single episode, and secondary plotlines were hastily derailed to make room for what was to come. It seemed as if the show’s writers cared less for creating absorbing narratives than they did elongating fan’s sense of anticipation for some epic apogee. And when the show finally rushed towards its conclusion, it failed on its promise, unable to scrape together the concise, satisfying finale previous episodes had so desperately foreshadowed.

In its last few seasons, the show relied far too heavily on the allusion of “next week’s episode.” Perhaps that’s a model that works for  decades-spanning, endless television soap operas- not so much for show’s that plan on arriving at a definitive, belabored endpoint. While the last episode was particularly poorly written, I get the sense that no matter the final result, fans would have been disappointed with the show’s inability to tie up the multitude of loose ends it had undone. And in many ways, society and culture feel as if they are constantly drawing us into tuning in next week, to follow-ups so highly anticipated they cloud the contemporary and risk disappointment when they arrive. The only solution, then, is to look to the future, and the cycle begins anew. Perhaps, then, a means of reconciling our agitated dissatisfaction with our present political and social condition is to take a moment to sit with this condition- to live with whatever is as opposed to riveting our eyes on whatever will be.