Getting comfortable
Sure, you have to work, but you can work anywhere
The old mantra in teaching was, Don’t smile till Christmas, with the idea that you have to establish order before you can have fun. That philosophy has since been dispatched as oddly cruel (we all smile plenty, right from the start) but the idea of establishing order before loosening up is sound. For me that meant giving it a couple of weeks before introducing pillows, blankets, comfy chairs, the complete expanse of our classroom landscape. We worked at tables early on, now that we’re comfortable, I want kids physically comfortable, too. It buys good will when I ask them to work.
Our school now encourages movement, but I started moving kids as a student teacher. We usually start at tables for Writing into the Day and a student share, then sit at/around/on the rug for the lesson, finally dispersing throughout the classroom for work time. Kids sprawl onto high window shelves, nestled in cubbies, across various rugs. As I’ve said before, I love my Physical Space, and so do the kids. Kids in my class find a lot of the same places they do every year, but they always expand. Under the sink is now the domain of the air purifier, so kids are sitting on the bottom shelf of my dry erase easel. When you say they can work anywhere, sixth graders see a challenge.
This year the comfy chairs require teacher permission, a policy inspired by last year’s endless rocking-chair-inspired wrestling matches. Permission is always granted unless you’ve already had it this week and someone else wants it. I want to spread the wealth, but I find myself giving it to the original requestor because there are enough other comfy places and nobody else asks. They’re a chill crew and my classroom is well stocked.
I’ve yet to have to warn against weaponizing pillows, maybe because they’re overgrown fifth graders still shaking off the rust of elementary school where sharing is caring. We’ll save those conflicts for spring when they’re undergrown seventh graders teeming with hormones. Middle school is all transitions — sixth graders and eighth graders feel way more than two years apart. Everyone’s on a different growth schedule and little of it adheres to the school calendar. But no matter the age, being comfortable inspires better work. Or at least it feels good, and that’s okay too.
The Week in Dog Poo
Sometimes the dogs start walking immediately after a poo. Winnie never wants to wait for picking up Ginger’s, but she also bolts away from her own output. Aside from being less than legal, it’s bad form. I always pull them back and uselessly admonish: If you don’t wanna spend the time, don’t do the crime. It reminds me of six graders leaving tables full of materials unless prompted repeatedly to clean up. Something about Winnie’s vacant expression gave me sixth grade vibes, neither of them understanding it’s a mess that needs to be addressed, you can’t just walk away from the markers/poo on the table/sidewalk. Picking up after the dogs is my job, I’m encouraging the sixth graders to be better than my dogs.
I kind of failed to discuss the actual week in dog poo, huh? Well, the wife reports that Winnie was peeing when she also started pooing. I’ve been denied such triumphs, but I’m glad she got that win.
The Urban Blah
Back in 2009-11 I collaborated with the brilliant Lovisa to make a webcomic that failed to become syndicated across the globe. I am pro-recycling.
I have since refined breakfast nachos by adding scrambled eggs. I’ve even had breakfast nachos for dinner, which I guess might also be called nachos with eggs. Regardless, I continue to use this construction. Have you ever had breakfast sushi? The night after an overlarge takeout order, I recommend it.
Jam of the Week
Gum Country is my latest favorite two-person band, joining the Black Keys, Bass Drum of Death, Japandroids, maybe the White Stripes. They’re a side project of the poppy Courtneys (also good!) and Somewhere was my favorite album of 2020. I haven’t found another album with so many hits. I can’t move on. It’s hard to pick just one, but I’d go with the album closer, “Waterfall,” the second half of which is an epic jam that layers guitars on guitars until it shimmers into a crescendo. Deep in quarantine, I’d close my eyes and imagine myself at a show, Courtney Garvin and her guitar washing over us, I could almost see the other side of the pandemic, major feels. No signs of life from the band since we came out of our Covid-holes, but fingers remain crossed for a new album and Boston tour date. Until then, those last 2:30 will suffice.
My Back Pages
My first job out of college was data entry as Listings Coordinator for The Boston Phoenix, but that got me in the door to pitch articles. I thought I wanted to be a music writer but soon discovered I knew alot about music compared to my friends, not real music people. So I pitched what I knew and ended up writing an ode to Beavis and Butt-head commemorating their final episode. It made the cover of the Styles section, “Butting Out,” Nov 26, 1997:
It sucks because Beavis and Butt-head have brought subversive humor to a bold new low. It sucks because they're poetically pathetic. A pair of idiot metalheads wasn't exactly a new formula, but Beavis and Butt-head are aggressively stupid in a way their predecessors were not. Bill and Ted found excellent ways out of bogus situations; Wayne and Garth slyly riffed on pop culture mainstays. Beavis and Butt-head just broke stuff and talked about poop.
My editor really pushed me to figure out, Why does it matter? The New York Times did a slightly better job recently, but I gave it what I considered an honest try.
Beavis and Butt-head succeeds because even though people don't like to admit it, fart jokes and people hurting themselves are funny. Beavis and Butt-head turned stupidity into a crusade, forcing us to acknowledge how little it really takes to make us laugh.
This was my bold thesis? Farts are funny? And yet, that last sentence was good enough to be memorialized on Wikipedia, and I promise I didn’t add it. That I am now name-checked on the Wikipedia page for Beavis and Butt-head is a dubious claim to fame, but I like knowing I can out-Beavis any rival fan. I go on to chronicle their crude beginnings and evolution.
Every season a little more intelligence would creep into the dialogue, and their personalities would become a little more distinct. Butt-head was the ringleader, the devious visionary, while Beavis — the sidekick and follower — grew into more of a loose cannon. "The Great Cornholio," the watershed episode where Beavis, on a sugar high, develops a berserk alternate personality, pushed abstract stupidity to a hilarious new level. From then on, cleverness began to play a larger role in the show.
Paul Hollywood would probably describe this writing as “claggy,” but there must have been so little pseudo-high-minded analysis of Beavis and Butt-head that again, they were referenced on the Wikipedia pages for Beavis and for Butt-head. Again, unless I’m Tyler Durden, I didn’t do this myself. I feel like years ago I found this description entered as evidence in a trial where the kid cited having seen Beavis go, “Fire! Fire!” But am I really that Forrest Gump?
Then the part that makes me shudder.
Beavis and Butt-head see a video with Frank Sinatra in it and mistake him for Andy Rooney, only they get his name wrong and call him "that Mickey Rooney dude." This segues into a cruel parody of the 60 Minutes guru's observational humor. "Why is it called taking a dump?" Beavis whines. "You're not taking it anywhere. They should call it leaving a dump." And you wonder: if Andy Rooney did a segment on potty talk, wouldn't that be his commentary?
In 1997 there was no Youtube, you had to go with your memory, and mine is notoriously unreliable. The fact-checker elsewhere asked, “What’s Sir Mix-a-Lot?” He’s a musician. “Like Sting?” So she obviously was blindly trusting my Beavis and Butt-head quotes. The fool! My belated fact-checks:
That Frank Sinatra story is completely invented, or if it happens it doesn’t lead to the Andy Rooney bit
The Andy Rooney bit comes during the (excellent) video for “Funk Dat”
The actual line is, “How come they call it taking a dump and not leaving a dump? I mean after all, you’re not really taking it anywhere.”
Nobody wept for the end of my journalistic career.
Beavis and Butt-head may be soulmates, but there isn't a drop of loyalty between them. Their lexicon consists mostly of insults -- wuss, fart-knocker, ass-munch, bung-hole, dill-weed, turd-burglar -- and they are constantly hurling threats and blows.
I remember being excited that my job paid me to write words like this, and I’m still tickled. The article overall is not great, 1300 words that should have been 400 tops. I close on my 21 year-old mountaintop, planting a flag for entitled Gen X slacker moronity.
As much as we'd like to praise the fine entertainment value of Masterpiece Theatre, deep down we'd probably rather watch Beavis roam the school demanding TP for his bunghole. We'd rather watch Butt-head try to kill a fly with a hammer and smash his toilet to pieces in the process. We'd rather watch the two of them get wasted on nonalcoholic beer.
Homer Simpson once says, Name one thing mankind has ever produced that’s better than this. LISA, wearily: The Renaissance? HOMER: This is better. I feel like I was channeling deep Homer there. I’m lucky my hot girlfriend at the Phoenix didn’t dump me over it. In fact, she she was laughing nearly as hard as I was this weekend at the new Paramount-Plus reboot. (Yep, now wife.) I just discovered this summer’s Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-head, and just like 25 years ago, I laughed until I couldn’t breathe. Plenty of reboots fall short, this might be even better than the original.