A few observations about High School Principals

I’ve had an opportunity over the past few years to observe a high school principal in his native environment. Here are a few things I’ve noticed.

1. If people in the community recognize someone as a high school principal, they assume that the principal has the power to take charge of a situation, especially with regards to controlling the behavior of children. This is especially true at the grocery store. And the movie theater. And the swimming pool.

2. Principals know enough private things about some families to make everyone feel a little uncomfortable, but not as much as many people believe, and frequently not enough to figure out the best solution to any given problem for a student.

4. Many parents expect principals to know how to raise children. All children. In all circumstances. Regardless of their own parenting experience.

5. Many people believe that there are too many principals and other administrators in public schools and that those administrators are paid too much. Our ten-year-old car laughs at that assertion.

6. The principals in Texas occasionally convene in Austin (with their pockets full of referral slips) and engage in behaviors that any self-respecting teenager would find embarrassing and horrifying. Behaviors such as Having a Good Time, and Not Thinking About School, or Thinking About School Too Much. 

7. Sometimes principals have to clean up barf. Or tell people to shave or change clothes. Or try to catch students as they fall apart. Or give students a boost or a break or a hard time. Or send them to ISS. Or stand helplessly. Or get cursed at. Or clap. Or cry. Or throw up their hands. Or dye their hair red and blue and then shave it all off. Or listen. Again. Or hang up the keys and turn off the lights until the next school year begins.

What do you know about high school principals?

Presidential jewels, pants optional, another weird dream

Because you people seem to get a kick out of my subconscious, I thought I’d let you know that I had one of those nights where the dreams came fast, furious, and bizarre. Did you know, for instance, that the time between the first morning alarm and actually getting out of the bed is called my caucus time? At least that’s what someone in one of my dreams told me. No obvious connection to Asian geography or political gatherings. Mine lasts anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes. Your results may vary.

The most memorable dream of last night, however, involved a parade, a ring, and president George H. W. Bush. Stop now if you’re squeamish or under ten.

I’m kidding. This is totally a PG dream. You might have to explain what chaps are and why someone would be wearing them in a jewelry store. Type that explanation into the comments so I’ll know too.

Partner and I were wandering the streets along the route of a large raucous parade. Where? Dreamland, I guess. It was no place I’m familiar with. What kind of parade? No idea. Big one. With streamers. And screaming. And costumes. But not a drunk one at night. Bright, sunny, kid-friendly daylight. After watching a few floats go by, we wandered into a store to do a little jewelry shopping.

Now, those of you who know me, will con to the fact that I don’t “shop” for much, especially not jewelry. The last time I went jewelry shopping was nearly fourteen years ago for the fourteen minutes it took to pick out my wedding ring. Now that I think of it, in this dream, I might have been wearing my wedding dress. Go figure.

Anyway, we wandered into a jewelry store, and before I could say “Hail to the Chief,” a young version of President George H.W. Bush walked out from behind the jewelry counter to greet us. He wore a brown polyester leisure suit with a creamy paisley shirt. Imagine the smarmiest seventies leisure suit with the most extreme butterfly collar. Yes. That’s the one. But his pants were the best part. 

Rather than regular trousers, the president’s “pants” were more like chaps, belled widely at the bottom of the legs, but open across the inside of the thigh and crotch. The better to show off his dark-greyish-green, snakeskin-print briefs that matched his pointy-toed boots. 

Yep.

After that? Who would remember what came after that? Not on purpose anyway.

What's in YOUR closet?

Cookie’s in the closet with a baseball, apparently

My thermodynamics of creativity, a moment of clarity

Walking along the street today, I was thinking about my activities, the sum of all the things I do each day, each week. I was making lists in my head.

teacher appreciation gifts, blog posts, birthday present for six year old, sewing of window shades and springtime skirts, paying bills, calling family, making dinner, meeting friends, making t-shirts, what time to pick up the Sonars, meeting times, finishing the book I’m reading, planning, scheduling, writing, writing, writing, writing, and so many other bits and pieces, large and small…

I wondered, as I often do, why I do what I do. Not the essential things that involve the care of myself and my family, but the extra things. The things no one really expects or requires. Like volunteering in the classrooms and libraries at Sonar School. Like making gifts for friends rather than buying them or not gifting at all.

My mind drifted to writing, to the story kernel that came to me yesterday. It started from a phrase and a feeling and an observation of someone else, and mushroomed into something I didn’t quite expect. The three-thousand words I wrote yesterday are shaky and cluttered with possibility and inspire me to anxiety and self-doubt about whether I have any authority to write about those things.

I don’t mean to be cryptic about the story. What it was about matters very little to the point I’m stumbling toward here. What matters is that the feeling of the story was mined from a situation I witnessed myself. Like other writers, I mine my days for ideas like this. I see them everywhere. A fleeting emotion, an odd juxtaposition, an interesting character. I don’t write down all of them. Not all of them could become a whole story. But I try more and more often to hold on to some of them and at least think through them a bit, sift through the ideas, and yesterday, I wrote through that one idea.

In a way, I feel odd about this mining, this taking from the world around me. I feel selfish for stealing these observations and hoarding them into my creative pocket without acknowledgement or payment. As I walked this morning, thinking about the time and action I give, and the words and ideas that I take, I wondered about the need for balance there.

If I want to see those ideas, have an opportunity to put them in my pocket, I have to be out there looking. While I’m out there looking, I can be putting myself, my energy, my time, my ideas back out there for the people around me to take. It’s a thermodynamics of creativity. The energy in the closed system must remain constant. What goes in must come out and vice versa. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. 

I want to and need to make things and give time as my way of maintaining the chemistry of ideas in my life. My activities keep my chemical reaction going forward, keep the words flowing in and out.

Contemplating geographic specificity in writing: do we need the detail?

Setting is an important facet of our understanding of a story. Setting can add layers of meaning to the interpretation of a story. It can offer a more abstract background for the unfolding of events. Setting can pass by, almost unnoticed, or can pop out on every page. Handled clumsily, setting can be a distraction. 

I’m reading Decoded by Jay-Z right now, and the setting of his youth—the Marcy Housing Project—is essential for an understanding of the story Jay-Z is trying to tell about himself and his generation. Before this book I knew nothing about Marcy. Jay teaches the important geography. He teaches me how to understand Marcy, and does it so well that Marcy becomes its own character in Jay’s story. This is a case of a writer taking an unfamiliar setting and unpacking it, DECODing it, making it known, even if it’s light years away from my personal experience. 

That’s not the sort of geography that I’m contemplating. I’m talking about the other sort of geography that Jay engages here. He’s also a dropper of names in the broader milieu of New York City. He mentions the names of streets, neighborhoods, boroughs with the ease of someone who knows those corners and crannies. Stieg Larsson does this as well, taking great pains to name streets and towns as his narrative unfolds in the Lisbeth Salander novels. I mentioned this detailed geography in my comments on the Larsson trilogy (see “Locational Specificity” late in the post). I wondered if I was missing some significance in these allusions. And although Jay-Z’s New York City names have more familiarity to me in terms of language and popular culture, I couldn’t help feeling that I might be missing some connotation. 

How much effort I put into figuring out that significance might depend on how invested I am in the story. But if I’m really gripped by the tale, I’m less likely to care about the geography, and more likely to speed past those road signs in search of the next plot development. This is as true with Jay-Z’s memoir as it was with Salander’s trilogy. 

I confess that part of the problem is my own ignorance of the geographies in question. I may recognize the New York City places, but I’d be at a loss if you wanted me to point them out on a map. And the Swedish geography (even if you excuse that some of the places are fictional)? I got nothing. 

I’ve decided there is only one city I know well enough to use geography to generate added significance: Albuquerque. But would anyone outside of Albuquerque get anything from those names? Is it worth the time of the writer to build that level of specificity? 

My knee-jerk response was no. I thought, Build into the story a sense of the significance of the places that really count, as Jay has done with Marcy, but don’t bother name-dropping other geography. But. But. Then I thought of the handful of times I have read stories in settings I know personally. I remembered the thrill of recognition, the richness that my familiarity added to my experience of the story. Even if only a fraction of the audience gets that thrill or makes that connection or recognizes the possibility of an additional connotation, then those mentions ARE worthwhile.

Jay-Z talks about hiding Easter eggs in his songs. Tiny gems of added meaning that are packed into his rhymes for those listeners willing to think and find them.

Even if *I* don’t get the significance of the specific geography of a well-crafted story, someone else will. I hope someone else will get that thrill of recognition and the treasure of puzzling out additional meaning.