graduation and discussions about milk shakes

I woke up thinking about snow. Different kinds of snow, how some was driven and how some floated. Took a shower and put on a coat.

Outside it is really hot today, but I figured it was graduation day and I should wear something with patches. The trains took forever and I sweat. Man did I sweat. Waited for a train, then another and another. Finally at Forty-second I just got out and took a cab.

"Turn on the air conditioner all the way," I said to the driver and he did. We had some laughs and I got out at Riverside Church up in Morningside, right by the Hudson. Everything was quiet, I was a little late. The kids were already getting ready to march.

A lot of applause, a lot of pictures. People saying things they were supposed to and the kids talking about Iraq - I was proud of them for that.

Getting home took forever but luckily I had some of my kids around for most of the journey. We discussed milk shakes and french toast - I made fun of them and vice versa. I'm going to take a nap now, but I wanted to make a little note, about how nice it feels to have a little time again.

quick notes...

Until yesterday, this was a hellish week and another one, there seem to have been a lot lately, that I'm glad is over.

However, Houston was pretty brilliant, besides Houston which itself is the most boring town, kind of sprawled over area codes of wasted land so that California land-use looks almost reasonable in comparison, even the suburban sprawl that is the northern and western suburbs of Chicago look almost sane in contrast - though not really. Houston just rolls on and on into nothingness. But Texas itself is beautiful and an hour outside of Houston once to Galveston, things get prettier along the coast.

But I have to say, Minute Maid Park is an excellent place to watch some baseball after getting over the fact it's the Astros you're watching, and Arnab's wedding was out of this world beautiful.

And that was the whole point, right?

At school, the kids had their U.S. Regents Test, and it went marginally better than I was hoping, though I still had the worst passing rate I've ever had with a group of kids - it was at 70%, I was expecting more like 60 and usually get somewhere in the mid 80s, so I've mixed feelings about that - but the test itself is a pretty stupid idea created by people who believe these kind of things tell us something about individual students when really it only gives us an image of various schools in the most broad and unhelpful manner. In the end, all it does is punish individual students however and should really be scrapped.

In New York, education is completely politicized and ineffective, as well, education is seen only in discussions about schools, all the myriad problems that have a much larger effect on schooling are shunted off as being part of a larger, non-political series of issues that are in fact heavily political and simply spotlight how uncomfortable most Americans are about discussions of the impact of race and income on achievement, and this allows the huge corporately owened political system to get away with huge crimes against the health of the state as Jonathan Kozol and some of the other smarter people have pointed out time and time again.

Anyway, there were all kinds of adventures with City College that had to be dealt with as well and I'm sure there'll be more.

Otherwise, the Mermaid Parade is in a couple hours and Lewis is coming in for a brief visit, so I best be off.

Oh the Mermaid Parade!

Long week ends...

Papers are done...today I wrote in yearbooks and had nothing to run and do after school - like endlessly read and write.

It was brilliant.

Hung out with Rudy and Ashlie - saw Oceans 13 which was ok, you know, Ebert put it best - the genius of yesterday decomposes into the routine of the present, or something like that - and it was true - but I didn't want to think.

New York was HUMID - damp even. But not too hot, so it was just uncomfortable. Students finish up next week - I don't want my seniors to graduate yet - I've gotten so used to them over the last two or three years.

Picked up the new Wilco album finally - curious to see how it is. Also picked up a Charles Brown collection - I used to like him when I was in college and Steve Kushing would play him on Blues Before Sunrise - which is the only radio show I ever went out of my way to hear.

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic George W. Bush...

She can raise money. She can say the right thing to stoke the base...but when it comes down to it, the woman thinks of three things before she thinks about anything else:

1. How will this help me?
2. How will this help me?
3. How will this help me?

And her handlers think:

1. How will this help Hillary?
2. How will this help Hillary?
3. How will this help Hillary?

Bush got himself into a tragedy of his own design, not self-aware enough to be tragic himself, he made tragedy - because he can't answer the three questions with any kind of cohesive logic and so he allowed others to create the logic for him who then used that "logic" to pursue their own ends. But make no mistake, every move was choreographed and presented in a way to make George W. Bush feel that his interests were being served. Hillary at the very least, can create her own ends, but I am not excited by what ends she will pursue. Nothing will change on K Street, and those are the people who most need a one way ticket back to the festering hole they crawled out from - whether it be Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Messiah College.

She can look as confident as she wants and she can play politics. Great. So what? We've seen the end results of that Rovian game in spades. And it's not pretty, and it kills people. When the chips are down, she has failed everytime to accomplish anything of substance and I don't want her to lead my country. She's in bed with everybody I don't want to sleep with and her resorting to little nuggets of posturing and doubling back are the kind of flip-flopping I'm agaist. There is no mea culpa in her discussion of Iraq, there is no stepping up and flat out saying I did something out of politics rather than principle and that was wrong. While that wouldn't lead me to vote for her, it might make me consider her in the larger election when I have to choose between her, the crypto-fascist insane person the Republicans run and whoever the Libertarian is. She doesn't see her vote or that idea of politics before principle as wrong.

Sometimes it might not be so bad - you build a bridge where they don't need a bridge say...but you get something out of it - maybe your own bridge - maybe a promise to vote on your health care package - who knows, ok it's waste, but waste is not always evil...but when it's about the lives of literally millions, it is more than wrong. More than evil even.

It's unforgiveable.

And she has done nothing to suggest that it is an isolated incident, while nothing about her suggests that she represents meaningful change. She's Bush-lite with a law degree rather than a should-be-outlawed M.B.A.

She comes from the center rather than the right. And while those two things about her sadly represent real and measurable improvement, it represents much less than what we can find or what we need from out of these presidential candidates.

I hate the Republicans, but I refuse to support anybody who is as poor a candidate as she is. And the idea that she's won a debate simply by looking like something is stupid. And the media is moronicaly continuing with the fiction that appearance should be rated with more weight than substance.

Is this the media we deserve?

And if it is...what have we done to deserve it?

Ask around in Baghdad, I suppose...