The End Of Awards Assemblies??

There’s a story making its way around the interwebs about a principal of a middle school in Massachusetts, who allegedly cancelled an honor’s assembly because it caused too much embarrassment to underachieving students. Since the story originated with Fox News, the intelligent consumer of news must perform the necessary due diligence to make sure the facts weren’t selectively cherry-picked and only half the story told. Upon doing so I discovered that the real story isn’t quite as damning as made out to be by Fox. What actually happened was that the principal rescheduled a private “honors-only” assembly to a later assembly where the entire school would be present. Still, we do find a letter that he wrote to the parents explaining his decision that I would like to discuss. Principal David Fabrizio of Irswich Middle School opined:

“ The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average.”

There are so many things wrong with this sort of thinking it is difficult to know where to begin, but the obvious place would be…if Principal Fabrizio believes this, then why not keep the Honors Night Assembly private? By opening up the Honors assembly to the entire school won’t he be deliberately exposing under achieving students to devastation?

When I first read his quote I thought back to my days in Middle and High School. I remembered my horrible study habits, my nonchalance, my determined refusal to bring books to class, my spotty record turning in homework. I also remember all the fun I had skipping my last class of the day to go swimming off the horseshoe bridge about a mile from school,(a record of 27 absences for the year, which I believe is still the school record). My long suffering guidance counselor, God rest her soul, would daily harangue me for my indifferent scholarship, accusing me of wasting God-given talent, with little or no regard for how these criticisms might affect my self esteem. Finally, by the middle of my junior year, I was able to right the ship, although too late to salvage a respectable GPA. I share all this to say, that I was never once “devastated” when I sat through the awards assemblies where I would see my contemporaries receiving one plaudit after another. What I was, was bored, and annoyed, but far from “devastated”.

What are middle school students made of nowadays that an awards assembly would be an occasion for such humiliation? I must say that I was very disappointed the day I realized that I didn’t have enough athletic skill to become the starting short stop for the New York Yankees, quite pissed, in fact. It was just the latest in a long line of painful; sobering bouts of self discovery that each of us must endure. No, I wasn’t the best looking guy in school. No, my 1966 VW Beetle wasn’t the hottest ride in the senior lot. No, I wouldn’t be getting that free ride to Harvard after all. But along the way I discovered skills and gifts that I possessed in abundance that many of my class mates did not. My ability, for example, to charm my way out of detention, to convince the assistant principals to look the other way when one of my practical jokes went awry, contributed mightily to my self-confidence.

We are a culture who values self esteem in our children above practically anything else. This fixation on feeling good about ourselves is what produces confused Principals like David Fabrizio. It was my Parents’ conviction that my self-esteem would grow once I learned to do something well, not before I learned to do something well. Why would my parents want me to feel good about being an under-achieving, wise-cracking  charmer? “You want to feel better about yourself? Stop acting like an idiot,” they would say. “And while you’re at it, sit still and pay attention during the awards assemblies. You might learn something!”

Once I entered the real world I learned rather quickly that my guidance counselor was right. In business, they don’t hand out participation trophies; you have to actually accomplish something. If I had actually applied myself back in school, it would have benefitted me in ways large and small. Lesson learned. If the David Fabrizios of the world have their way, we will be sending young people out into the world totally ill-equipped to deal with its inherent unfairness. Coddling kids and giving them a false sense of their own value is educational malpractice and only produces a generation of self-deluded narcissists.

A Job Opening

In my line of work, I am something of an anomaly, since I have always been able to run a successful practice without any full time help. There are many reasons for this, primary among them being the fact that I’m cheap. That salient fact aside, I have always been able to manage my business just fine with part time secretarial and administrative employees. Now, I’m aware of all the arguments about how much more productive I would be, how much more money I could make, how much faster my business would grow if only I would hire this person and that person to help my business to that ever illusive “next level”. But the fact is I have never had a burning desire to get to the next level. What’s wrong with the level I’m on? After 30 years in the business, I do quite well. With each passing year, I’m able to work a little less than the year before. My income is just fine, most of the time. Besides, with more employees come more complications, more responsibility, and more complexity. As I get older, I want less of all three.

Anyhow, I say all this because I have recently lost my assistant, so am once again in the market for a unique individual to fill the position. I’m looking for a bright, energetic woman with computer and secretarial skills, who doesn’t want to work a ton of hours, and wants those hours to be flexible. Perhaps a mom whose kids are now in school and wants to make some extra money but still be there when they get off the bus in the afternoons. I need someone who can work between 10 and 15 hours a week. Having a good telephone voice would help, experience in the investment or insurance fields would be a huge benefit, but is not a must. I am flexible as to which days of the week would be involved, they can even vary from week to week if need be. The benefits of the job would be flexibility, pretty decent pay ( between $10 and $12 an hour depending on skill level to start ), and most of all, the chance to work for an awesome boss. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that my office is sometimes a place of rampant practical joking and adolescent high jinks are quite common, so a sense of humor and a thick skin are sometimes required.

If you’re reading this and think that I am writing about you, please call me or contact me in some way. I will not give out my number or address for obvious reasons. Besides, the person I am looking for will be resourceful enough to find me.

    

Writing A Book

For the past two months I’ve been writing a book that has turned into an obsession. It’s more than just a story, but to call it a novel sounds pretentious. But at 16 chapters with no end in sight, I suppose it qualifies. Every time I try to summarize what it’s “about”, it ends up sounding ridiculous. Let me try again…

It’s about a man who has a prodigious ability for winning games of chance, a gambling savant, who meets and falls in love with a woman who is his total opposite in every way that matters and who happens to be clairvoyant. Eventually they end up hating each other and getting a divorce, about as ugly a divorce as can be imagined since it involves, infidelity, bankruptcy, and a suicide attempt. After the protagonist’s parents pass away, he moves back into their home whereupon he starts getting nightly visits from his ex-wife in his dreams. Unknown to him, his ex-wife is seeing him in her dreams every night as well. After a while it is difficult to differentiate between reality and dreams, as the two of them try to deal with issues of forgiveness, the possibility of redemption, and the spectre of loss.

See what I mean?

But here’s the cool thing, writing a story is a little like being God. You create these characters, endow them with personality, then turn them loose to interact with each other. Sometimes you are pleased with them and the decisions they make, other times you want to smack the hell out of them. I imagine that God feels the same way looking down upon us. The big difference obviously is that I can write my characters out of trouble. In the real world, what’s done is done. Still, it has been great fun creating an entire universe of people whose fate is in my hands. I spend half my time researching details. What exactly was the color of the steel in that great big arch bridge on I-95 leading into Maine? Google Earth to the rescue, green! Then I write a couple thousand words a night, and when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing.

Two things I’ve come to understand over these past two months. First, I fully understand why so many novelists are crazy. Writing changes you, transforms you into someone else, a not entirely pleasant experience. Secondly, it is great fun. Creating something, no matter how amateurish, is an exhilarating experience. Although my story is not auto-biographical by any stretch, it does contain much of who I am. I can only write what I know, so my experiences inform my characters. I have no idea how it will all end. I feel as though I’m about half way done.

I’ll keep you posted.

Wonder What It's Like In Key West Today?

It is March the 18^th. I wake up this morning at 6:10 to the sound of ice pellets ticking against the windows. I stumble out into the hallway; walk over to the big Palladian window that overlooks my front yard. My heart sinks. My chin drops to my chest. There’s an inch and a half film of slush covering the world, and now a mixture of sleet and freezing rain is adding to the misery. There is not one single sign of life, no dogs, cats, birds or even squirrels to be seen. Where do they go at times like these? I trudge into my office and check out the weather radar map. It shows a band of green and pink running directly through Short Pump, with an ominous blue band to the north and west. It is 33 degrees. This is not the day that the Lord has made; this day comes directly from the pit of hell courtesy of Lucifer himself.

I slump back in my chair. I grab my cell phone and open the weather gadget that shows the 7 day forecast of some of my favorite places. I flip over to Key West. Just as I suspected, the forecast for the entire week shows bright sunshine and 79 degrees, all seven days, into infinity. I remember when I was younger I used to brag about being from Virginia. Specifically, I would champion the fact that in Virginia one gets to enjoy all four seasons, and about how the changing of the seasons brought with it charm and variety. Lies, all lies.

I have a birthday coming up. I will turn 55. Seasons have become overrated. The only season that appeals to me on mornings like this is the monotonous 79 and sunny of places like Key West and San Diego. I’ve been warned about global warning for over 15 years now and, well, it can’t get here soon enough for me.

What Is The "Good Life"?

Yesterday was our day to take dinner out to my Dad. It was the day before St. Patrick’s Day, so Pam decided to plan an Irish dinner. By 3 o’clock the kitchen was alive with activity. There would be her famous meat loaf, with a raw sliced sliver of carrot, coin-shaped hidden inside one serving. Whoever got the orange “coin” would be blessed with good luck throughout the year. There would be mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade Irish Soda bread with raisins. For dessert she had made bright green Pistachio pie. In honor of the day, she renamed all of these dishes to suit the occasion. Meat loaf became “Blarney Stones,” dessert became “Shamrock Pie”. Then she went out and bought special green shamrock paper plates to serve the pie on, along with matching four leaf clover napkins. For Ezra she bought Irish themed stickers featuring Snoopy and Woodstock dressed up like Leprechauns. She even wrote his name at the top of a piece of green construction paper so he would have a place to stick them. The dinner was a rousing success. Everyone cleaned their plates. There were six “Blarney Stones” in the dish and only 5 of us, so in keeping with the famous Dunnevant luck; the lucky coin will appear in dad’s leftovers today.

As I watched Pam flitting about the kitchen preparing this meal, it occurred to me that a life well lived is not heralded by screaming headlines in the newspaper, rather it comes in the form of a thousand daily graces. It doesn’t come from wearing the right clothes, living in the right house or driving the right car, it comes from sharing your life with people who take care of the details with tenderness, people for whom the little things in life aren’t little at all. The “good life” is the sum total of these tender moments. My wife’s talent for transforming the routine into something extraordinary has made for me and our family a remarkable life. Even after nearly 30 years together, her loving kindness still astonishes me.

Want some marital advice? Marry the right woman.

I Have A Problem

 Dear Compassionate Reader,

 

I have a password problem. I love technology as much as the next guy. Seems like every week I discover some new urber-cool app that I just HAVE to have.(Not really, I am 54 after all). However, what with my business needs, personal finance demands as well as the occasional entertainment app, I am constantly being asked for a username and password to gain entry into the glorious world of the World Wide Web. So, what’s the problem, you ask? The problem is that I can’t keep up with them.

All of the cyber security folks out there are constantly encouraging me to come up with original, difficult to hack passwords. Apparently, the internet is populated with nefarious geeks bent on world domination, whose goal in life is to gain entry into my Spotify account and wreak havoc. Ok, I get it. But the more in decipherable my password is, the less likely I will ever remember it without adding it to my dog-eared password and username cheat sheet. Yes, that’s right sports fans; I have a single sheet of paper with all of my usernames and passwords written out. Now, I’m painfully aware that it would be better if I had them in some encrypted file somewhere on my computer, but I’m not savvy enough for that. So, I carry around my trusted cheat sheet. It’s like my digital keychain. It has passwords for 19 different websites and apps. If ever I were to lose this thing, my life would be over.

In addition to that potential nightmare, there’s the related problem of all the places I go where I have established a username and password, failed to write them down, so I can’t gain access.( Hello, Twitter, GoodReads and Soundcloud). I’m aware that admitting my failures in this regard will open me up to howls of laughter from my young tech-savvy friends, but so be it. I need help. I would ask my wife for help since she is the All-Knowing, Strikingly Gorgeous, Internet Goddess in my house, but I’m thinking it would less humiliating to be schooled by a twenty-something know it all than Pam. Just sayin’.

So, hit me up with the sarcastic jabs, and then offer some guidance for your old friend.

 

Clueless In Cyberspace,

Doug

NOOOO!! Is That Meeting Today?? NOOOO!!!

I was awake before the alarm went off this morning. Today is one of the two or three days of the year that I dread the most, the day I meet with my accountant and give him my 6 inch stack of paper so he can prepare my tax return.

The very idea that I should have to save these scraps of paper in my tax shoe box all year, then pay my guy $750 bucks to construct my 50 page return galls me like nothing else in this world. Less you think I’m some 1% billionaire, think again. I am only a reasonably successful small business owner. However, because of the complexities of the tax scheme under which we labor, I began employing accountants over 25 years ago to fight my battles for me. When I sign off on the thick volume of forms, schedules, and summaries that he produces, something inside me becomes enraged. Why should I be forced to do this? How can filing taxes have become such an arcane exercise so hopelessly beyond the capabilities of mere mortals?

The worst part is I don’t even know how to help my kids file their own taxes. When you’ve had it done for you for longer than either of your children has been alive, you become worthless to them, unable to answer even the most basic of questions.

So, my meeting will go something like this:

Accountant: Ok, Doug, I see you’ve got all your receipts. Good. What kind of year did you have in 2012?

Me: Terrible.

Accountant: Sorry to hear that. So, you made less money?

Me: No, a little more, which means I’ll probably lose the ability to deduct something and end up having to pay more.

Accountant: Ha! Doug, you are so funny!

Me:…………………crickets

Accountant: Doug, I see here that you only sent the IRS $2500 in December, not the $4000 that we had agreed on, any particular reason?

Me: A very good reason…I didn’t have enough money in my account to cover a $4000 check, so I gave them what I had.

Accountant: I see…. Well, my preliminary calculations indicate that you will probably owe a bit more this year, but it might not be too bad.

Me:………………………crickets

Accountant: I’ll have this return back to you in a couple of weeks.

 “Not too bad” turns out to be an outrageous lie. I owe an insane amount of money to the Feds and the State. I scrape together the money and pay what I owe, since the last person on earth you want to have as a creditor is the Internal Revenue Service. I survive to fight another day.

This nation once had the stones to put a man on the moon, whip the Germans twice in 30 years, and invent Jazz, but can’t figure out how to tax its citizens in a way that doesn’t involve a 67,000 page tax code.

Hopeless.