school

Teaching Irony through Sarcasm

  I have the luxury of working weekends and being able to pick up our son from school most weekdays. I watch with joy as he bounces down the steps from his school happy to tell me all about the things he did during the day. Rarely does he come out upset. Never has he come out needing comfort. Until this week. I was waiting with the other parents as we stood around making fun our kids behind their backs… as we do. The doors opened and he came flying out full of wails and tears. He looked inconsolable. The other parents parted making a red carpet like path for him to have easy access to my welcoming arms. He collapsed to the sidewalk at my knees gasping for air between his breathless screams of agony. “Oh my son. What happened man?! What’s going on?!” I cried back to him. “I didn’t have time to finish my stress ball!!! My stress ball! I didn’t have time when the bell rang!!!” He cried out at what to me appeared to an […]

I got some lip from a ROBOT

I called to check on room availabilities at a few hotels in Towson for my parents’ visit next month. Google, of course, gave me a few pushpins just a few miles up the road, so I started calling. What’s amazing is that with each call to the front desks, I was redirected to a call center somewhere else to field my questions on room rates and availabilities. I’m a mile away asking a question to a lady who could be my neighbor, and soon I’m talking to someone on another part of the world who pronounces Baltimore wrong. On one call, I was connected to Lilly, who spoke remarkably crisply and quite lovely. She asked the standard questions, and when it was my turn to respond, my questions were standard as well. “I’m wondering if you have any rooms for the weekend of October 4th?” “That weekend. Let me check. I am checking. Yes, we have a standard suite available with one king bed and an attached living room for a rate of $116 a night, with cancellation up until

My childhood “Boy named Sue” moment

In grade school, we wore navy blue pants and white dress shirts. The boys had triangular collars, while the girls wore the rounded ones that little Catholic school girls wear. There was an unfortunate era when my sister and I wore the same size shirt even though we were two years apart. And, of course, there was that day. One of those days that sticks with you forever and came back to me the other day when I was trying on used sweaters at an outdoor market in Amsterdam. “This is a girl’s sweater,” I said to Susan. “Oh no, it’s not. It looks good on you,” she answered. “Irrelevant how it looks, the buttons are on the wrong side.” Back to grade school. The unlucky day must have been around 5th grade, and it was made clear to me by my teacher that I was wearing a girl’s shirt. She asked, of course, in front of the class, “Are you wearing your sister’s clothes?” The class turned and erupted in laughter. “Stork-dork’s wearing a girl’s shirt!” So my question

I’m thankful for warm lemonaide and chicken.

A four-day trip the week of Thanksgiving took me to Columbus, Ohio. Since I was to spend the holiday alone in the hotel, S. decided to drive up from visiting her grandparents in Pittsburgh. She had our cousin Troy with her, so we figured we’d play in Ohio for the night and let him see what a glamorous life in a hotel is like. A friend in Columbus was going to take us out for dinner until the “what do you plan to do for dinner” conversation started up in the cockpit with my first officer. He also had some friends in Columbus and said he planned on meeting up with them for dinner. My co-pilot was from Uganda, and the friends he mentioned were also from Eastern Africa. They planned on eating at a Somali restaurant he knew about that served goat. I could think of no better way to celebrate the holiday than with my vegetarian wife, some goat, and a bunch of Africans. I asked if we could join them and if we needed to wear anything

Who’s the boss?

I would have missed more school as a kid if Tony Danza had a talk show rather than a blue van full of Milano’s. I’ve learned so much from daytime TV today. The day began with the Orange County Chopper guys taking me on a tour of Ireland, Scotland, and France! Even though I was comfortably nestled in my Nashville DoubleTree bed with my free cookie, I could almost smell the exhaust from the vintage Triumph motorcycles they were loaned! During commercials, I flipped between some crappy MTV show about rich kids and their sweet 16th birthday party and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. There is no basement at the Alamo. But the real treat came from Mr. Danza. You can’t really appreciate how crappy his show is simply from seeing Conan make fun of him at 1 am. I thought his show was pretty bad then, but those were just outtakes! Today, we made chocolate eggs by draining the egg out of the shell through a small hole (VERY CAREFULLY). To make this work, you have to make faces, dance around,

And it only cost a quarter

Jesuit high school. All-boys. Shirt and tie. A Beanie for freshmen, Catholic guilt baked into the curriculum. Everyone else had cars or rides or parents with flexible schedules. I had the city bus. The H.A.R.T. Line. Hillsborough Area Regional Transit. Big red heart logo, which, after a few sunburned summers, faded to a kind of medical-waste brown. The buses didn’t allow smoking anymore, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t smell the ghost of menthols past—or whatever mysterious stew had been simmering in the vinyl seats since 1983. Looking back, I’m convinced the whole thing was a character-building exercise from my parents. Some warped suburban rite of passage: “Let the boy take the bus. It’ll either toughen him up or teach him to get better grades.” That, or they just really loved the phrase “twenty-five cents a ride.” Enter: Diggs. Richard Diggs. Bus #7. We called him Dick Diggs because it felt right. He was a barrel-chested, don’t-make-me-turn-this-bus-around kind of guy. I met him on day one. Fresh shirt. Stiff tie. Armed with a quarter and a lot of misplaced confidence.

My theme park – My babysitter

I grew up in the theme park Busch Gardens and its water park sister, Adventure Island. They were my babysitters. They were my Grandma’s house. They were home. They were where I went when school was out for the summer, where I went when I was too sick for school or where I went when the parents didn’t want me around for the day. They were where my sister and I did our homework and worked on after-school projects. We weren’t latchkey kids. We were turn-style key kids. “Pick you up at the gate at 5” was as synonymous as “Don’t give your grandma a hard time.” Growing up, my parents both worked in management there. He was the VP of Marketing. She did the same for the Special Events department. Both titles had their own distinctive perks for two spoiled theme park kids. Marketing, through the eyes of a child, was more about trade than advertising. We had plenty of coupons and free food cards to eat wherever the current ad campaign was partnered. One month it may be

LOST AND FOUND POETRY AT 37000 FEET

I took a walk to the back of the plane in flight today to pee. This is something I try not to do too often, and it’s called the “Walk of Shame” for good reason. First of all, it requires getting up. After sitting for so long strapped to an airplane seat, that’s pretty tough to do, not because of muscle atrophy or sleeping blood vessels, but because you get so damned lazy and lethargic. To make the trip, though, you have to get a crewmember up front to fill your seat while you’re gone. The doors are bulletproof now, and they figure it’s best not to have one guy locked up front by himself with the other in the back. They always want two bodies up front at all times—so if one passes out dead, the other can still open the door. The awkwardness of leaving the cockpit and walking by all the folks, with them wondering who in the hell is flying the plane, is the big reason why I don’t care too much for taking the “Walk

WHERE ARCADE GAMES GO TO DIE

With not much on my plate yesterday I made the short trek out to Crabtown to see what it was all about. I figured if it was listed on the internet on a website devoted to classic arcade game rooms and was ranked high on the most games list… I should check it out. Especially if Mapquest said it was just 9 miles away. I clicked on “map the scenic route” because it was going to take us to the heart of Glen Burnie, MD and all routes in Glen Burnie are scenic routes. As my buddy Ben said on our drive out, “If you’re ever feeling down about yourself, go to the Wal-Mart in Glen Burnie.”Growing up in a game room in Tampa I have missed the days of sweaty palms full of quarters and the sounds of dozens of games all blaring the sounds from the high scores screen. I look for classic games when i travel and have seen a few here and there but the idea of an old game room full intrigued me. The posts

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