Birds are Hard Core

My Winter Break has begun. It doesn't really feel like it, but I haven't had to listen to obnoxious teenagers rapping along to some funky, fly artist without knowing it, and that's a bonus.

The project of the day, and throughout the week, is to complete the housing arrangements for Young Master Prindle's arrival. About two months ago, I spent a morning of frustration in his room, piecing together the far too many parts of his crib. I realized then that if fathers had to construct baby furniture as a precursor to having a child, there would be millions of fatherless children in the world today. The pieces are confusing enough (the crib has some pieces that I'm convinced were not correctly aligned when they were cut), but the instructions are intolerable. If they were my students' process essays, I'd fail them all.

Today's endeavors took me to the room with a glider chair and changing table to assemble. For the most part, both were easier than that crib. However, while the chair was wonderfully simple, the table frustrated me to know end. I'll admit to some errors as the operator's fault, but other that, the person jotting down instructions should be socked in the mouth. If your going to take the time to tell me that parts D need to have the slats facing in, then you should also tell me the the holes in parts D should be toward a certain direction. I put over half the thing together before realizing I had to go back and fix some things. I later had to go back at the end because the diagrams are always so convoluted with too many images and lines and dashes.

Birds don't have to deal with this when they do their nesting. If they had to create their nests in a similar fassion, matching stick C with twig F while parts A and Q intertwine themselves to create an indention where twigs B,D,H,I,N,W,L,S,X, and P cross, birds would give up living in the trees. Instead they have the God-given brilliance to figure out how to make something stable enough and safe enough to have kids in that doesn't make them want to squawk and tweet profanity for hours on end.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

But really, there's not a reason to stop making me angry. I take this break from my Adventist Education series to contemplate how utterly not wrathful I can be. I have a class in which students are horrible, disrespectful, little whelps that I can't imagine being successful in life if they act outside of my class like they act inside of my class. And it grew today. I now have 27 kids in the class that should be capped at 20. Last year, the same classes were never larger than 15. It doesn't bother me so much, but it is overwhelming often.

As for me being angry, it frustrates me more to not know how to take that anger out. I'm a sulker, a brooder. I take life as it is, laugh off what is annoying, and write off the infuriating as something that can not be helped and only complete ignoramuses will ever actually be so ridiculous. Nevertheless, I am trapped with these ignoramuses for one class period a day. I keep expecting to pop, explode, scream...anything. But nothing happens. I don't know where the line is or what I should do when that line is crossed.

Sigh.

The Kindness of Strangers

Hurray! Free time!

I have meetings at the district office, so I don't have to go in until later. So, as mentioned last week, the story of my being locked out of my house.

It was cold. The first snowfall, actually. Amy had left early to go exercise before work. I was trying to hustle along as the week had been leaving piles of work for me to sort through. I was doing well, getting out of the house a good ten or fifteen minutes earlier than usual. As I closed the door, I remember thinking that I had better close it tightly because it sometimes doesn't want to latch. I yanked quite hard. Satisfied with my secure home, I began down the steps toward the garage, feeling my pockets as I went. As I patted each leg, the jingle and jangle that I have become accustomed to was not to be heard.

"Oh, no."

I leapt back to the door to see if I had, maybe, not secured it as well as I had hoped--no luck. It was not yet 7:00, and nearly every house was still dark. As I looked up and down the street, wondering who to wake up, I saw a man come out of his house and begin scraping his windshield.

"Hurray, hurrah!"

I shuffled over there, but he had made it back inside his house before I got there. I had seen him many times before, but never talked to or introduced myself to him. So I stood, knock, knock, knockin' on Tahim's door. He opened and said, "Good morning."

"Hi," I said. "We've not met. I'm Cale, and I locked myself out of my house."

He invited me in and gave me his cell phone so I could call my wife. She didn't answer. She was probably just ending her routine or maybe showering off. Either way, her voice mail was not a welcome message.

"Is she going to call back?" Tahim asked.

"She will after a bit, but it's cool. She'll call my..." I remembered that my phone was in my house with keys. "Dang it."

"Just keep mine, then."

I had never thought of cell phones in this way. You can let somebody have it for a while and it will be useful wherever they go. But I instantly thought of people abusing the privilege. The thought had either never occurred to Tahim, or it didn't bother him. He then told me that he needed to take his daughter to school, and that I should make myself comfortable. So I sat in his house for a good twenty minutes with nobody else there--it's a weird thing to do if you've never been given the chance.

At this point, when I was telling my students, some of them asked if I snooped around or mentioned how easily I could have stolen something...ugh. Brilliant idea. I could take his stuff and sit outside my house where I wouldn't be able to stash the stuff.

Anyhow, he came back and we got to talking about religion and how people ruin religion's name by taking it in the wrong direction and turning it into something it's not supposed to be. We spent a good half hour talking before my wife made it home.

Despite taking 40 minutes to drive to school and missing my first class, my day was great because I knew that humanity was alive across the street.

He's totally getting special Christmas cookies this year.

Once was Lost...

Life in general has been excellent lately. I've revamped some of my classes and made them a lot more interesting (though a lot harder to prepare for), and I had a really fun (and tiring) weekend. I'll talk about the school stuff another time.

Saturday night was an adventure and a half. Some friends were house-sitting and wanted to have everybody over to hang out and enjoy life well outside the city limits. It was awesome and worth all the wanderings and frustrations that it took to get there.

First, I learned something: even if it is rude and annoying to be a backseat driver, it's not always a bad thing. I didn't drive to the house, and my wife didn't either. Instead, our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Smith drove. We started out and expected a half-hour drive, so we went for quite a while before realizing that the directions were not matching up with our surroundings. If my wife had been driving, I would have probably been a real pain in the tail and hollered
from the back seat, and if I had been behind the wheel, she'd have done the same. But we didn't want to be rude. So when we found that we were on the wrong highway, on the wrong side of town, heading in the wrong direction entirely, nothing was said. Honest mistakes...they happen. As my wife and I talked later, we found that we had inklings that may have led us in the right direction before this point, but we didn't want to be annoying backseat drivers.

Later, I started feeling a bit squeamish. I think it was the heater that did it, but it may have been Arby's--who knows, really? It was in this unfortunate condition, and 20-30 minutes later that we realized that, again, our surroundings and directions were not lining up. We called the hosts of our eventual get-together and were informed that though we were on the correct highway, we were heading in the wrong direction.

To wrap this up, an hour later we rolled up to the house, two and a half hours late, almost out of gas, and with a very apologetic driver. We had a great time over all with some Wall-E and some Killer Bunnies. And the night is already filed as a ridiculous romp through the Nebraskan wilderness that was a good time for all.

A F*@%ed Up World

I had talks with three different students yesterday that made my heart shrivel. One was convinced that he will not graduate from high school. He's in 10th grade right now and said his mom is making him drop out in his junior year to get his GED. Another said he'd been kicked out of his house because his parents were angry at him. He claims to have spent some nights in the park. Another has a whole new batch of issues.


What's wrong with people? Everyday I work with teenagers who fight an up-hill battle with life. They're kids, for crying out loud. They should get more of a chance than this. With all the state-of-the-art jerk faces around, it's no wonder. But how is it that people can be so self-centered to not realize what's going on or want to help.

I can't imagine how God must feel to see how humans have lost their humanity.