Reading

http://www.accessola.org/ola_prod/Documents/OLA/issues/Reading-for-Joy.pdf

According to EQAO, Ontario students are scoring better on reading tests but “like reading less.” I understand how the kids feel. When I was assigned two chapters of a book, I finished what was necessary to answer the questions and didn’t venture any further than that. Sometimes I spent more time looking up credible book summaries online than I did reading the actual book, because I hated the books they chose. I don’t think I was old enough to appreciate the books and articles they were getting me to read. How do you instil a love of reading in children when you give them boring dry shit to read?

As a kid I had three things that I was massively obsessed with: space, dinosaurs, and ancient Egyptians. Every time I went to the library, I would borrow books on these subjects, especially those Eyewitness books that are absolutely amazing. They’re honestly the best things you can get a kid to read if they’re interested in a subject. I read about cool space stuff all the time, like comets, and meteors, and asteroids. Things that would obliterate everything in its way. I read about what would happen if we tried landing on these planets, how Jupiter would just crush us like a can, or an even cooler thought was how Saturn would be able to float in water because it was less dense. Can you imagine how excited I got when I learned that our next unit was going to be on space? You know what we ended up learning about? The phases of the moon! I am a 10 year old boy that dreams of life outside of our solar system, and I’m stuck learning about how the Earth casts shadows on the moon.

I don’t remember liking the dinosaur unit in school either. They focused a lot on the fossils and palaeontology aspect of it, which just saps the fun out of the subject. It’s interesting to me now, but was this curriculum designed with children in mind? Do they think they’re going to enjoy this stuff or are they just doing this so they can test the kids? I’m not surprised that kids don’t like reading. They’ve distilled the fun out of it and turned it into some straight information processing activity. Here, read this chapter and pick out some details for me in this fill in the blanks sheet. I can’t think of a worse way to read a book.

My Knee

I am currently playing in a Fall Softball league. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I’m starting to really hate it. I have a 9:30am game on Sunday, and it’s pretty damn cold out when we play. The ball we use is a soft-ish rubber ball that is a complete bitch to hit. Unless you hit the ball squarely in the middle, its going to distort and spin out, which really makes for a shitty playing experience for me. I’m not the best fielder, but I can at least say that I’m a decent hitter so it’s the one thing I look forward to in all my games. Except, I can’t really hit now either! Some horseshit going on.

Anyway…I guess all this makes what happened to me on Sunday a little funnier. We were getting slaughtered by the first team we were facing. We were down by about 10 runs in the last inning (if we were down 20 – 10, I’d be ok, because at least we were hitting, but we were down 11 – 1) and finally managed to string together a couple of hits and runs. So there I was on first base, after hitting an RBI single, and I thought if I could at least get to second base then we would have a legitimate rally going on. The next batter comes up and in my mind I’m thinking I’m going to run so fucking fast that these guys won’t have a chance to throw me out. She hits the ball and I got a wickedly fast jump on my way to second, only, the ball was hit right at the second basemen. I was DOA. There was no way I was going to be safe at all, so, without really thinking I slid foot first into second base. I was out. The batter was out too. We got doubled up. The play wasn’t even close, I was out before I even thought about sliding, but for some dumb reason I slid anyway.

As soon as I got up I immediately felt the pain. I probably scraped my knee, no big deal. It’s what happens when you slide. When I got to the bench, I noticed a big hole in my sweat pants. Through the hole, my knee looked ok, but I rolled up my pants leg anyway to see what’s up. It turns out that I was just looking at the top part of the scrape, because my whole knee was messed up. That wasn’t even the bad bit. When I got home I had to clean it because I got this when I essentially drove my knee into the dirty ground. Despite the fact that the anti-septic cream said “no burning” that shit fucking burned! When you watch Major League Baseball players slide, you’ll see them lean back a bit, so they can absorb the impact with more of their body. When you do it right, you don’t really feel it at all. Now, when I went for this slide I was running as fast as I could, so my head was down. When I went for the slide, I didn’t lean back at all, and more or less just dropped to the ground. It’s why my knee looked like someone just flayed me, and would explain why, a few hours later, I was completely crippled.

It felt like there was a ball at the top of my thigh. That’s how my friend described it when he tore his groin, and I’m more or less positive that I didn’t suffer the same fate. Although it still hurts like hell. So what’s the moral of the story? Don’t slide for a league you essentially don’t give a shit about anymore.

I Hate Thinking Up Titles

November 1st marks the start of National Novel Writing Month! Nanowrimo encourages you to write 50 000 words in the month of November. The purpose is to get you started on a project that you may have been working on in the hopes that you’ll be able to get it out of your system, and maybe polish it later. It’s pretty cool, except, I don’t really have something I’ve been working on. Zombie stories don’t count. Would you kill Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny? What if they were zombies? It changes everything doesn’t it? The minute you start turning people into zombies, it makes it “ok” for you to kill them, which makes zombie stories an awesome way for you to vent out and maim/kill all those people you might hate in real life.

I guess as a compromise, since I don’t intend on writing for NaNoWriMo, I’ll actually start posting more on my blog. I’m actually going to do it this time around. Sorry if it gets really mundane, but I’m much better at talking about my day, and reviewing movies I’ve watched than I am at making stories out of the blue. Kudos to the people who do this for a living, you guys are all heroes.

Why I Write

Note: I saw this on the front page of NaNoWriMo yesterday, and thought it was an interesting question. I can’t relate to some (actually, most) of these responses, but it’s interesting to see why people write.

Unlike a good chunk of the people on that site, there’s no real higher purpose to my writing. It’s probably because I’m not at the level that they are at, or maybe I’m just doing it all wrong. I don’t write about the human condition. I also tend to avoid terms like that because it sounds more like a doctor’s diagnosis than a way to describe your experiences. I’m not sure whether I write to explore, but I do wonder aloud at what goes on in people’s minds. It should be noted that I’ve never successfully figured out what it was they were thinking and often dismiss them as being stupid. Judging by the content of my posts on here, it seems that I write a lot when I’m angry or frustrated. It helps when I’m feeling that way because barriers that some writers face are pretty much ignored when you’re too angry to be self-conscious. Maybe it’s a cathartic thing for me? Then again I’d write much more if that was the case. Sometimes I just like the way the keyboard sounds on my netbook. That quiet clicking is pretty cool. I’ve never written a story before (I have for school, but that doesn’t count) so I’ve definitely never felt that satisfaction of bringing something to life. I can’t remember ever doing well for a narrative assignment in school. Partly because I paid more attention to the word count than I did the development of the plot or character. I really didn’t care for it when I was younger.

I think it’s just something as simple as I enjoy writing. It’s fun trying to extract whatever’s in my brain and putting it onto paper. Can you imagine what it must be like for a Hollywood script writer? You think of a story, you write it out, sell the script, and then once someone starts producing the movie, you can walk on the set and shake the hand of one of your characters. That must blow your mind!

Impressions

I take half-assed notes that are supposed to be the basis of my next blog post. They’re usually something I scribble at work and then spend the next half hour thinking about. I never really write it all down because I’m paranoid about people reading my shit (which is why I post it online after), but it’s different. At work I’m #2036, I’m an unshakeable customer service rep, and in my blogs I’m a maniac who types out his rage-filled posts with his fists. To be fair, since I’ve gotten rid of the “Seeing Red” tagline, I’ve tried to avoid complaining too much, but at work you can probably catch me drawing circles vigorously into the paper like that crazy kid from The Ring.

You gotta stay composed but it’s getting harder and harder to do that now. I probably need more rest. During our softball playoff games, I flied out to centre field, off a hit that I was trying to drive into the gap. It’s just a game, but I lost it, I went back and I punched the fence post with both my hands. A left, then a right. It was incredibly stupid and my right knuckle started to swell quite bad. At night it started to bruise, but I knew nothing was broken because I could still move my hand fingers properly. I couldn’t close my hands that hard, but that was probably due to the swelling. A teammate from last year played with us as well. I remember having dinner with her and she said that she heard that I was “one of the hot heads” to look out for because I was apparently really competitive. She told me this because I apparently didn’t come across that way at all during the season, but man, did she ever get a good dose of Redford that day. Not exactly the impression I want to leave people, but whatever.