the garrison show

so far, this blog has sucked.

there are, to be sure, many reasons for this. i accept the blame for most of them. the war in iraq, though? definitely not my fault (sorry, folks, the jokes don’t get any better than that). in any case, today marks the beginning of a new direction. i am going to post funny things. meaning, i’m going to ignore intellectual stirrings and instead focus on the “lowest common denominator”, which as we all know, is jokes about farts.

but really, i’m going to try to write one post a day to make someone laugh. it may not be you, but hopefully someone, somewhere, will be laughing. and someone (probably related to me), somewhere (probably within arm’s reach), will be reading my blog.

get ready.

did i say “every day?” i meant “whenever convenient.”

it turns out i’m not as creative as i wanted to be. so i will have to wait for inspiration to strike, like a doddering old man trying to down that last shot of whiskey before the muscular, midnight black-skinned bartender with a shaved head and mysterious, dark eyes kicks him out like bartender kicking out a drunk.

…where did that come from?

it strikes me upon re-reading my simile that the two things i was trying to compare, my wait for inspiration and a drunk trying to take a shot, arereally nothing alike. despite a slightly lowered self-esteem, i will let the simile stand as written as a testament to bad writing.

i was a late-comer to bicycles (and girls, but that’s a different post). i sort of had a bicycle in elementary school, but really only learned to ride it going downhill. so as long as i was (1) going somewhere that was closer to sea level than where i was and (2) not needing to come back, a bicycle made perfect sense.

fast-foward to 2002; i’m 24 and i just bought my first bike (from a dude in DC, no less). i actually had a friend videotaping my first ride, thinking the general public might want to watch me look like an imbecile on two wheels [there's a better joke here but I just can't find it]. to say it was anticlimactic is anticlimactic. which is a solipsism, itself. which reminds me of a tautology i heard once… anyways, it was a non-event, like Colbert’s White House speech (or so the media would have you believe).

anyways (again), fast-forward to last weekend. or would that be rewinding? in either case, i’m bicycling along the Mount Vernon trail with my good pal, Zigler, relishing the sunshine and rainstorm of pollen that engufled us. we rode out from his spot in Clarendon along the Custis, then headed south by the Key Bridge, bound for Old Town. we rode uphill and down, past rivers and monuments, through parks and parking lots. i’d been putting up a pace that Zigler, riding on his girl’s bicycle, was having a hard time keeping up wtih. consequently, he’s unavailable as a witness to what happened next.

i came upon a slow-traveling woman going up a small incline, right before a sharp left turn. i waited to pass until we’d made the turn (so as to avoid the ever-feared head-on collision), then passed her. of course, this was on the decline of the little hill we were on, and i ended up going a little faster than i’d planned. i didn’t cut the turn as hard as i needed, so i ended up on the grass, off the trail a bit. ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem but there was a hard fence-line on the left at this point. so i’m sort of wigging out, trying to get back on the trail, not run into the fence, make sure no one’s coming in the opposite direction, not hit this lady again when i get back on, and make sure i don’t look like a tool (always a primary consideration).

evidently, i wasn’t up to the multitasking and managed to accomplish only 3 of those objectives. i didn’t hit the fence, i didn’t have a head-on, and i didn’t hit our friend. unfortunately, i got back on the pavement knee-first. the trail was raised maybe two inches above the ground, so what i needed to do was jump it back on pavement. or stop. i didn’t do either; i tried to just roll back on. the bike couldn’t make it, i was already leaning, and i took a nice spill. got my knee, shoulder and wrist pretty good. no serious injuries or damages. thankfully, the woman i tried to pass did not spot and investigate the situation. if she had, i would have investigated her face with my foot. not really, but you get my point.

this post is getting long and i’m losing patience cause it’s not funny anymore (relatively speaking, of course). if i were more clever, we’d both be more interested in what i was going to write next. but we can only be what we are. maybe, someday, i’ll get funnier. i can only hope.

one day, i’ll meet a girl and i’ll introduce myself, and she’ll say “oh, i read your blog!!”

i’ll say, “really??”

and she’ll say, “[fill in the blank here]“

to put it briefly, i’ve had 28 years to do something cool and i’m just getting around to figuring out what that might be.

i’ve definitely got a new tuesday night tradition: quizzo in capitol hill.

you’ve got about 60 people in a bar room playing a trivia game in teams so you know that you’ve got some similar values. for example, you can make a star trek joke (not that i would do something like that) and count on someone laughing. this is not generally true anywhere else, of course.

so we get there (late, cause i suck at life and finding my way around the capitol) and the game is already underway. we saddle up to a table with a couple of empty spots and immediately start trying to look like we know what we’re doing. we must not have been too good at it because about 40 seconds later, the dude sitting next me asks, “so this is your first time?” we answered in the affirmative and became adopted by their team.

i was stoked by how friendly and welcoming the crowd was; when you get smart people together, smart things happen. met a few exchange students, a couple interns, and saw some cute capitol hill tail. i’ll be back. who’s with me?

in case you were worried that we had solved the problem of education, fear no more. reformers often call for improved “teacher quality,” and while they balk at defining ‘quality’ (they typically don’t mention bust size), they are not shy of stressing its importance. they usually end up saying professional organizations need to define and enforce quality control. gee, thanks.

you see, overacheivers need outlets: doctors have the AMA, lawyers have the ABA; we teachers have the NBPTS. arguably, the AMA makes better doctors and the ABA makes better lawyers. however, a study just came out this week that shows the NBPTS does NOT make better teachers.

it’s really easy to make a bad teacher. imagine someone who hates kids, is relatively incompetent and completely self-absorbed. i could be the poster-child of bad teacherdom. what this study tells me is that it’s really hard to put that bad teacher through some sort of process and improve their teaching ability. the NBPTS is the most rigorous and involved process there is, so if that doesn’t do it (and evidently it don’t), then nothing can. i wonder if we’re in trouble here…

the study (which was featured in Ed Week which I can’t link to because you have to be a member…) is not without its criticims, to be fair. all the teachers and students involved were in north carolina. perhaps it’s not the most repsentative sample you could imagine, but no matter. it’s hip to be square.

i’ll try to be funnier in my next post. thanks for hanging in there…