Settling Back In

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It's finally August, the temperatures are still almost unbearable, the reality of the coming school year is setting in, and the Barry Bonds traveling circus show has now come and gone from Los Angeles. In other exciting news, we're getting a new roommate for the coming year. Two of my previous roommates are moving out this year and today one of their replacements, Matt, moved in! He's not really new in the sense that I've now known him for almost three years as a member of TFA. I'll greatly miss Brett and Derek, but it's nice to have someone I know very well move in as a replacement! Upon moving in, Matt was as excited as I am about our newly renovated garage practice room! Anyway, school begins Monday and tomorrow is essentially my final day of freedom before I start the 10-month roller-coaster ride that is working for a district with a student population equal to the population of the city of San Francisco.

San Francisco (Day 8): Goin' back to California

So I finally made it to the last stop on my road trip vacation, the great city of San Francisco. The drive here was long, extremely tiresome, but not without it's rewards. I saw a minivan from Washington with a New York Mets license plate frame, a UHAUL van with a giant advertisement for Oneonta, NY (my hometown), the Newsboys' truck full of their gear (they were one of my favorite bands when I was a teenager), and an amazing sunset over Northern California.
Today so far has been fairly exhausting as well, not helped by the fact that I had to get up at 6am to move my car to avoid getting a parking ticket. After finding a great secret parking spot (invaluable information provided by a very helpful hostel staff), I took a bus down to the Haight-Ashbury district, then headed over to Golden-Gate Park, followed by another bus ride over to Coit Tower for an amazing view (of everything except the fog-covered Golden Gate Bridge, of course). This evening I think I'm going to head over to Oakland to check out the Oakland Coliseum and the A's. Detroit is in town and I don't really care who wins, but it'll be cool to check out the stadium.
By the way, as the hostel staff told me briefly about S.F., they mentioned the population was 750,000, a number that seemed all too familiar to me, although I couldn't quite place it. Well, during one of my bus rides today, as my mind wandered to thoughts of next week, it finally hit me. The number of students in the Los Angeles school district is equal to the population of San Francisco!!! Yikes... That should put a perspective on how monstrous LAUSD has become!

A Top Ten List (of sorts)

As some of you know, I'm in the middle of a project that consists of transforming my dirty, dusty, and useless garage into a useful music practice room! I'm about 70% finished now and in honor of a hard day's work, I decided to post a list of THE ONLY TEN THINGS THAT COULD POSSIBLY WORSE THAN INSTALLING CARPET VERTICALLY:


10. Root canals
9. The LAUSD bureaucracy
8. The LAUSD payroll system
7. Getting pulled over by an Oregon State trooper who thought it was hilarious that a California driver performed a "California Stop".
6. Getting sweaty simply by walking outside
5. Being held in limbo by the LA County Superior Court wondering if I'll actually have to serve Jury Duty.
4. Having my lofty goals of eating healthier shattered. (Hey, at least installing carpeting is giving me tons of exercise though!)
3. Band members who get married and move 3 time zones away.
2. A month (yes, an entire month) of professional development before any student shows up in September.
1. And finally, the number one thing worse than installing vertical carpeting.....[drumroll....]: Knowing that someday when I move out, all of it's got to come down :(

Propoganda can be funny too...

This evening, I had the opportunity to hang with some friends and go see Michael Moore's new film, Sicko (which incidentally, can hardly be called a "documentary"). Extremely inflammatory, thoroughly biased, and frequently hilarious, Moore makes a two-hour campaign for universal free health care in the United States. It was refreshing to see Moore in actually proposing a theoretically viable solution to an issue, rather than solely bashing the proponents of the status quo. Visiting several other countries that (at least on film) have excellent social healthcare programs such as Canada, England, France, and one other surprise, it seemed to me on initial viewing at least plausible that such a system could work in the U.S. And then I remember, "Oh wait a minute...I actually get to experience on a day to day basis a grand US free social program in action: the Los Angeles Unified School District" (which albeit is a state program rather than a federal program). I like the idea of a universal free healthcare system in the US, but if it's organized and run with the same level of negligence, incompetence, and incapacitation as other free universal systems (like large, urban school districts), I'd just as soon pass.
What Moore was able to diagnose (albeit all to briefly) was an underlying current of individual autonomy that pervades the US as opposed to these other countries in which a general sense of community is held as the norm. Ideally, if a sense of "we"-ness can overcome the sense of "me"-ness that is so prevalent here in this country, perhaps we'd actually be able to have functional and effective systems in place through which we could actually care for and look out for each other, rather than meagerly exist for mere self-survival.
Overall, Sicko is an entertaining film although it doesn't necessarily persuade me to do anything in particular (which this kind of persuasive film should try to do). My guess is that people's reaction to this film will be as polarized as their reaction to Moore himself, which leads me to the lame conclusion of recommending this film only to those who like Moore's previous films.
Anyway, it's late now, and I must retire so that tomorrow I can finally finish the garage!!!