The World is Getting Smaller

In a new attempt to both avoid becoming my father and also keep my brain young I have recently learned some new things and joined the 2010 online community.  The first dabble was the blog, but I've now traded in my archaic phone with a shiny, new BlackBerry and gone a little technologically crazy.  Within one day, I've now joined Tumblr, FourSquare, and added all kinds of fashion and political blogs to the blogs I follow.  Upon checking into a local coffee shop this morning, I was immediately reconnected with an LA rowing friend of mine - the world got smaller!  Will I have time to keep up with all of these things?  That remains to be seen...

Today was a welcome peek into what I used to believe being a normal, real-live adult would be like.  All day, as I loved on my city, I wanted to stop every other person on the street, desperately inquiring, "And what do you do?  Can I do that so that I, too, can wander the city, or brood importantly in this lovely coffee shop?"  Roommate and I went out last night, ate, danced, were insulted (more on that later) and came home after midnight.  This morning I had leisurely coffee, a bagel, read part of a real book, hung out with some lovely students, and read up on friends, fashion, and politics.  This isn't to say that there aren't bits of all of those things peppered into my teaching days, but the fact I continue to combat is simple:  I have a job where I teach students every day, beginning at 7:15 AM and ending at 5:30PM.  Don't get me wrong - I do love my job, and am reminded in little, every day things that I teach for a reason.  I cannot stop the connection  my brain immediately makes when reading about a delicious pumpkin cinnamon roll recipe that without the ability to sound out multi-syllabic, closed syllable words like pumpkin, my students may not ever have the cultural or literal capital to enjoy some of life's little luxuries.  So yup, I love the job and know why.  But then it's 4:40AM and my alarm clock is going off, and I yearn for a 9-5 gig.  Working from a small coffee shop seems so attractive.  How to squeeze it all in?  Is technology a piece of the time-stretching I seek?

And now back to the insults last night - Roommate, Neighbor and I, as stated, enjoyed a dinner that ideally would have taken hours upon hours to be able to savor every truffle-filled bite at Sojourn in the Upper East Side, and then headed to FB Lounge for some Latin jazz.  I learned so many things (like a motherf*@#ing adult) about my terrible dancing skills, how little I understand any form of jazz, and why the trombone is a really great instrument.  But then an older (not old, just older) man came up to the mic to do a series of spoken word pieces.  Usually I find spoken word forced and pretentious at best.  I loved it in the Mos Def DefJam Poetry days, and some artists are still able to manipulate language and make connections that instill some awe, but now the tenor and syntax and long... drawn... out... pauses to illustrate my....... brilliance is a bit too much.  This particular series, however, brought too much to a whole new level.  Why, oh why did this man decide that a room filled mostly with women needed to hear a piece informing us that as women we trap, manipulate, and stifle the men in our lives through our very presence in theirs?  Why, oh why was it necessary to then read an entire piece entitled "Spic" in a Latin-inspired establishment?  Why, oh why did the jazz drummer then need to follow up said verbal excrement with a short lecture about the importance of the poet himself, as though like jazz, I was a bit too uncultured to really "get it?"  Why, oh why, oh why did Neighbor's Friend (white, male, and wearing the kind of glasses that state "I take myself so seriously that I assume that you don't realize that I am just trying to look ironic") sitting to my immediate right THEN feel the need to let the rest of our table, clearly upset by both the letter and nature of said pieces, inform us that he "really wants to hear what we thought, just not right now?" 

What better way to end that kind of an evening?  By eating most of a pint of Roommate's Ben and Jerry's ice cream, of course.