I was behind this school bus the other day and saw that the driver was attempting to make a left turn where you can only turn right.
I knew not to expect carnage and death, but I was hoping to see the bus go the wrong way or attempt to drive over the street island. This one will not go viral.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Job #1: Artesia Racquet and Health Club Era (1980 - 1982 and 1984)
(A bit of a preamble before the start of this post: In this blog, I will be writing about all the paying jobs that I've held. In the titles, I will refer to these as eras and list the years during which I worked there in the subject titles. Many of these jobs will result in multiple posts, but once I start writing about a job, I will tell the complete story until it comes to an end.)
In the fall of 1980, I was moving up in the world. I was able to line up my first job. Since my Mom was in charge of Distributive Education, she got a line on a position that would soon have an opening. The people who ran one of the big oil companies in Artesia decided to open a health club across the street from their office that would have racquetball courts.
The only reason no one from DECA got the job there was because they didn't open the club until October. Everyone in DECA needed to have their jobs in place before the end of September. I went in and interviewed with the woman who was put in charge of it. Mom had told me all this stuff that I was supposed to say and not say and it was all very confusing, and as it turned out, unnecessary. A couple of weeks later, she called me to come down to the club so I could see where I was working.
When I went in, it was still being constructed. They hadn't put down the carpeting or the front desk yet and still had a lot to do on the main excercise floor. My job was going to be to check members in at the front desk and sweeping the racquetball courts. I would work the early morning hours from 6am to 8am. I would get paid the minimum wage, which at the time was $2.85 an hour and went up to $3.10 an hour in 1981. There would not be another national minimum wage increase until 1990.
The best part about this job is that it got me out of the house in the mornings, when Mom was in her worst moods. If ever there were times that major punishments got handed down, it was always before school. It seemed like Mom would sleep on a problem and wake up deciding to make Loyd and me miserable. By not being at the house, I never received any punishments those last two years that I lived at home. However, I'm pretty certain Loyd got more than his usual share of manic mornings with Mom because I wasn't around.
I was surprised when I got my first paycheck. I couldn't believe they were giving me money to basically sit around. Since I didn't really have much to do, I would frequently bring my homework in during the morning. This left me free to not have to do any studying at the house at night. This means I was getting paid to do my homework.
I left the job when I went to college in 1982. My job went to the boyfriend of my boss' daughter. Two years later, he graduated from high school and I came home from college to spend what would be my final summer at home. (I went to summer school in 1983 and 1985.) Even though my old boss was no longer there, I got my old job back. I should note that this would be the only time in my life that I ever returned to a job in which I left.
However, there was an unexpected change about the time I started back. This person came in as the new general manager. After he had taken over for one week, the first thing he did was lay me off because he was trying to make the club profitable. (Actually, the reason why the club wasn't profitable was because of delinquent accounts, not because they were paying me about $30 a week.)
The only other person who had been there since the beginning got the job of coming in early in the morning. She was originally hired to run the child care center when the club first opened. After awhile, it was only my father and a friend of his showing up in the morning, so the club just gave them the keys and they let themselves in and cut more hours that way.
However, losing that job led to me being able to take a job that would turn into a full-time position before I graduated from college, so I guess it was a good thing that I was let go, but that will be the subject of a post way, way in the future.
In the fall of 1980, I was moving up in the world. I was able to line up my first job. Since my Mom was in charge of Distributive Education, she got a line on a position that would soon have an opening. The people who ran one of the big oil companies in Artesia decided to open a health club across the street from their office that would have racquetball courts.
The only reason no one from DECA got the job there was because they didn't open the club until October. Everyone in DECA needed to have their jobs in place before the end of September. I went in and interviewed with the woman who was put in charge of it. Mom had told me all this stuff that I was supposed to say and not say and it was all very confusing, and as it turned out, unnecessary. A couple of weeks later, she called me to come down to the club so I could see where I was working.
When I went in, it was still being constructed. They hadn't put down the carpeting or the front desk yet and still had a lot to do on the main excercise floor. My job was going to be to check members in at the front desk and sweeping the racquetball courts. I would work the early morning hours from 6am to 8am. I would get paid the minimum wage, which at the time was $2.85 an hour and went up to $3.10 an hour in 1981. There would not be another national minimum wage increase until 1990.
The best part about this job is that it got me out of the house in the mornings, when Mom was in her worst moods. If ever there were times that major punishments got handed down, it was always before school. It seemed like Mom would sleep on a problem and wake up deciding to make Loyd and me miserable. By not being at the house, I never received any punishments those last two years that I lived at home. However, I'm pretty certain Loyd got more than his usual share of manic mornings with Mom because I wasn't around.
I was surprised when I got my first paycheck. I couldn't believe they were giving me money to basically sit around. Since I didn't really have much to do, I would frequently bring my homework in during the morning. This left me free to not have to do any studying at the house at night. This means I was getting paid to do my homework.
I left the job when I went to college in 1982. My job went to the boyfriend of my boss' daughter. Two years later, he graduated from high school and I came home from college to spend what would be my final summer at home. (I went to summer school in 1983 and 1985.) Even though my old boss was no longer there, I got my old job back. I should note that this would be the only time in my life that I ever returned to a job in which I left.
However, there was an unexpected change about the time I started back. This person came in as the new general manager. After he had taken over for one week, the first thing he did was lay me off because he was trying to make the club profitable. (Actually, the reason why the club wasn't profitable was because of delinquent accounts, not because they were paying me about $30 a week.)
The only other person who had been there since the beginning got the job of coming in early in the morning. She was originally hired to run the child care center when the club first opened. After awhile, it was only my father and a friend of his showing up in the morning, so the club just gave them the keys and they let themselves in and cut more hours that way.
However, losing that job led to me being able to take a job that would turn into a full-time position before I graduated from college, so I guess it was a good thing that I was let go, but that will be the subject of a post way, way in the future.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Stalled memories.
A lot of things happened in the bathroom when I was younger.
The lesson here is to get a house with three bathrooms.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Student Council Rules!
So, here it was. The one thing I had been waiting to be able to do for years: I was going to serve on the Student Council! As I mentioned in an earlier post, prior to high school, in order to serve on the Student Council, you had to be elected by your homeroom. In high school, they just held general elections. I mentioned that I was not elected for my sophomore year and was not asked to become a member even though they were supposed to call on me when they were losing members left and right.
Apparently, the Student Council lost a lot of its appeal in high school. This was probably due to the faculty advisor being considerably on the dull side. When I ran for the next year's Council my sophomore year, there weren't enough candidates to fill all the slots. They still had to have an election so that they could pull a write-in candidate to fill out the seats. They had to do this for both the sophomore and junior classes. (I would have been a truly complete loser if I hadn't gotten elected that year.)
One of the best things about Student Council is that we got out of one class every Monday. They would rotate among the periods. If the meeting didn't take the full hour, we still got to stay out of class. My Drama teacher got mad every time I had to miss class. I guess she wasn't a fan of the Student Council because our Homecoming floats never got judged.
I served on several committees, including the Homecoming committee. One of the things I got to do was help choose some possible Homecoming themes. During the committee discussion, I submitted "Bulldog Mania" (even though this was more than 15 years after Beatlemania). The entire Student Council got to vote on the submitted themes. My suggestion came in second place, behind "Bulldog Country" (by a VERY wide margin). The idea was that we would get this popular area country covers band to play at the Homecoming dance. It turned out they were already booked that weekend, so the decision was made to book the band for next year's Homecoming and make "Bulldog Country" the theme that year. Almost by default, "Bulldog Mania" became the theme for the current Homecoming. I wonder how many on the Council would have supported that if they had remembered that was my idea. I could see hundreds of local residents protesting the Homecoming parade because I was the one who came up with the theme. However, I was still proud of that accomplishment.
One thing unbeknownst to me at the time was that there was an initiation of the new council members. Incumbent members would go out to the houses of the newbies early in the morning and kidnap them for a special breakfast. The idea was to wake them up and make them go to breakfast while they were still in their pajamas. However, at my house, since we all had to go to school (because my parents were teachers), we got up at 6am. I was brushing my teeth when two girls came to get me. I was already all dressed, except for putting on my shoes. They decided to let me put on my shoes and they went to pick someone else up. When we got to the house of the faculty advisor, there were some other members still in pajamas. I was lucky because they took pictures.
Unfortunately, all that joy and power lasted only that one year. Somehow, word got around that the Student Council was something worth getting involved in. I guess it had to do with the new faculty advisor, who had a really fun personality. The year before, they had to recruit people who didn't even have their names on the ballot to fill the ten seats. But this year, there were 30 (yes, THIRTY!) of my classmates who wanted to be on the Council. We didn't even get to give speeches like we did in ninth grade. The candidates just sat on the gym floor and stood when our names were called. Of course, I didn't win. It went back to being a popularity contest.
This same pattern would follow me into college when I was running for Student Senate. If I had no opposition, I would win and get to serve. If someone else ran, even though I was an incumbent, I would lose. I guess you could say that I figured out before I was 21 that I would never be able to run for public office.
Junior Year, 4th Period: American Literature/English Composition
This will be the last of my class breakdowns for my junior year. As I explained in my sophomore year, fifth and sixth periods were the same for all three years of high school: Chorus and Drama, although the latter was referred to as "Masquers" to indicate an activity credit as opposed to a solid credit.
My sophomore year, my Physical Education requirement was split between two separate classes, PE in the fall semester and Tennis in the spring. This was true for my English class my junior year. For the fall, I had American Literature. In the spring, it was English Composition. As it turned out, these would be the last English classes I was required to take in high school. (I'd always complained that one of the problems with the public education system was that everyone was required to take lessons for their own native language for 12 straight years. Here, I only had to do it in 11 years, although I had two English credit classes my sophomore year, because Drama was considered an English class. Come to think of it, in the ninth grade, I took English I and Public Speaking, which also made for two English credits. That meant that I took my native language for the equivalent of 13 years.)
American Literature was a relatively easy class. We just read the short stories and novels that were assigned to us and answer a few questions. However, it got challenging when we got to the tall tales portion of the class. The teacher (who was the same faculty member named to be in charge of the Student Council that year) had these audio recordings of the stories being read. However, we didn't have the books for those, so we just listened. After the first story, the teacher gave us a quiz on the material. We weren't expecting that. Most of us had zoned out while the recording was being played and did very poorly. The next few days after that, we made sure to take notes during the stories. The only story I didn't have to take notes for was the one about Joe Magarac because the version I had read years before was word for word the one on the recording. I was very familiar with that story, except that I learned that I had been mispronouncing the name for years.
English Composition was the strangest class I had in high school. This was due to a couple of factors: For one, it was in one of the few classrooms at the school that had a carpeted floor. This made everything sound very quiet. The normal roar of students in the other classes was relatively silenced in that room. It was so quiet, I fell asleep a few times (due to outside influences, which I'll go into detail in a future post). The other strange thing is that I didn't feel like I had to work very hard in the class to get my A's. Basically, we had to do an outline first. Then, we would write the compositions. When I write, I never have to use outlines, so this was very restrictive to me. Virtually every composition I wrote was exactly what I wrote in the outline and rarely contained more material than that.
There was only one composition that I got a C on. The topic was "The Composition I've Always Wanted to Write." I decided to plagarize Steve Martin from the last chapter of his book "Cruel Shoes." The chapter was titled "The Last Thing on My Mind." In it, Martin ends by saying something like, "I guess the last thing on my mind is the last thing on my mind." After a bunch of rambling about compositions that I thought about writing, I ended with, "I guess the composition I've always wanted to write is the composition I've always wanted to write." That C was not enough to lower my grade. It practically didn't count.
A few years after high school, I looked back at the classes I took. At the time, I barely remembered this class to the point that the entire semester was very fuzzy during that period directly after lunch, almost like it didn't happen, but I remembered everything else that year so well.
There is a strange thing about my English Composition teacher that is worth revealing. After my Grandfather Bend died in 1954 (10 years before I was born), to the best of my knowledge, Grandma Bend never dated anyone. However, around 1979, she was dating a particular gentleman whom I had never met. I never knew this was going on. He died late that year. He was my English Composition teacher's father. I remember Mom, Loyd and myself going to eat with the teacher and her two daughters. (This was a year before I was in her class.) The older daughter was a year ahead of me in school and would go on to be the Student Council President my junior year. The younger daughter was a year ahead of Loyd. I don't remember the conversation during the lunch and wasn't aware that we were meeting for any specific reason.
Afterward, Loyd told me that Grandma Bend had been dating the grandfather of those girls and they were likely going to get married before he died. That would have made all of us somehow related. That would have made things really awkward because I developed a crush on the younger girl two years later when she was a sophomore. It was a crush that didn't really go anywhere. Years later, I saw the teacher and her daughters at my parents' 25th wedding anniversary. I saw the teacher and the younger daughter again seven years later when they attended my Mom's wedding with Dend.
I never told the teacher how I felt about that class.
My sophomore year, my Physical Education requirement was split between two separate classes, PE in the fall semester and Tennis in the spring. This was true for my English class my junior year. For the fall, I had American Literature. In the spring, it was English Composition. As it turned out, these would be the last English classes I was required to take in high school. (I'd always complained that one of the problems with the public education system was that everyone was required to take lessons for their own native language for 12 straight years. Here, I only had to do it in 11 years, although I had two English credit classes my sophomore year, because Drama was considered an English class. Come to think of it, in the ninth grade, I took English I and Public Speaking, which also made for two English credits. That meant that I took my native language for the equivalent of 13 years.)
American Literature was a relatively easy class. We just read the short stories and novels that were assigned to us and answer a few questions. However, it got challenging when we got to the tall tales portion of the class. The teacher (who was the same faculty member named to be in charge of the Student Council that year) had these audio recordings of the stories being read. However, we didn't have the books for those, so we just listened. After the first story, the teacher gave us a quiz on the material. We weren't expecting that. Most of us had zoned out while the recording was being played and did very poorly. The next few days after that, we made sure to take notes during the stories. The only story I didn't have to take notes for was the one about Joe Magarac because the version I had read years before was word for word the one on the recording. I was very familiar with that story, except that I learned that I had been mispronouncing the name for years.
English Composition was the strangest class I had in high school. This was due to a couple of factors: For one, it was in one of the few classrooms at the school that had a carpeted floor. This made everything sound very quiet. The normal roar of students in the other classes was relatively silenced in that room. It was so quiet, I fell asleep a few times (due to outside influences, which I'll go into detail in a future post). The other strange thing is that I didn't feel like I had to work very hard in the class to get my A's. Basically, we had to do an outline first. Then, we would write the compositions. When I write, I never have to use outlines, so this was very restrictive to me. Virtually every composition I wrote was exactly what I wrote in the outline and rarely contained more material than that.
There was only one composition that I got a C on. The topic was "The Composition I've Always Wanted to Write." I decided to plagarize Steve Martin from the last chapter of his book "Cruel Shoes." The chapter was titled "The Last Thing on My Mind." In it, Martin ends by saying something like, "I guess the last thing on my mind is the last thing on my mind." After a bunch of rambling about compositions that I thought about writing, I ended with, "I guess the composition I've always wanted to write is the composition I've always wanted to write." That C was not enough to lower my grade. It practically didn't count.
A few years after high school, I looked back at the classes I took. At the time, I barely remembered this class to the point that the entire semester was very fuzzy during that period directly after lunch, almost like it didn't happen, but I remembered everything else that year so well.
There is a strange thing about my English Composition teacher that is worth revealing. After my Grandfather Bend died in 1954 (10 years before I was born), to the best of my knowledge, Grandma Bend never dated anyone. However, around 1979, she was dating a particular gentleman whom I had never met. I never knew this was going on. He died late that year. He was my English Composition teacher's father. I remember Mom, Loyd and myself going to eat with the teacher and her two daughters. (This was a year before I was in her class.) The older daughter was a year ahead of me in school and would go on to be the Student Council President my junior year. The younger daughter was a year ahead of Loyd. I don't remember the conversation during the lunch and wasn't aware that we were meeting for any specific reason.
Afterward, Loyd told me that Grandma Bend had been dating the grandfather of those girls and they were likely going to get married before he died. That would have made all of us somehow related. That would have made things really awkward because I developed a crush on the younger girl two years later when she was a sophomore. It was a crush that didn't really go anywhere. Years later, I saw the teacher and her daughters at my parents' 25th wedding anniversary. I saw the teacher and the younger daughter again seven years later when they attended my Mom's wedding with Dend.
I never told the teacher how I felt about that class.
A little English won't hurt anyone
This is the part of the blog I've been neglecting for the past several months. I hope to get more video commentaries done.
Basically, I decided to get back into this now because someone I don't know just subscribed to my channel. With any luck, I can do regular blogging on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday with video commentaries appearing on Tuesday and Friday.
Basically, I decided to get back into this now because someone I don't know just subscribed to my channel. With any luck, I can do regular blogging on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday with video commentaries appearing on Tuesday and Friday.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Junior Year, 3rd Period: American History
I was not required to take any kind of Social Studies course during my sophomore year of high school, so I didn't. Honestly, since we were only able to take just six classes a day, it sort of limited our choices since we were allowed to take a certain number of activity classes in order to graduate.
Social Studies was probably my second least favorite subject, after science. I didn't have a real problem with learning history. It was learning about each individual country that got on my nerves. That was why I skipped World History, which was offered my sophomore year.
So I was glad to have American History for my junior year. At the beginning of the year, the teacher said that the new textbooks were set up differently. Because there was so much trouble getting to the more recent events in American History, the book was designed to give a sort of Cliff's Notes version of the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That would allow us to spend more time on things like World War I, World War II and Vietnam. (Yes, it seems like all we did in History was talk about wars. Peacetime was just too boring.)
The funny thing is that even with us rushing through the first 100 years of American History in the first 9 weeks of the school year, we still could not get past World War II. I think that format gave the teacher the idea that he could teach the rest of the material in a more relaxed manner. He probably got too relaxed.
One of the things the teacher did during the year was tell us this tale of when he was in the Navy. He took a full hour to tell this story. Dont' worry, it's not scary, like the story my sixth grade music teacher told.
It went like this: He was serving on board the SS Patch. (I can't believe I remember the name of that ship after all this time.) Before he was in the Navy, that particular ship had been sunk twice, raised and salvaged. There were more than 300 people serving on the ship. One night, the dinner was beanie weinies. Everybody enjoyed the dinner. Before everyone went to bed, there was an announcement that the ship was about to head into a really rough storm and advised everyone to strap themselves in their bunks.
They weren't kidding about that announcement. The ocean tossed the ship back and forth. A lot of the crewmembers started feeling nauseous. At one point, the nose of the ship stuck straight up in the air, like the Titanic before it sunk. After a few wave crashes, he could hear somebody throwing up. Then another, then another. Then he started vomiting. He believed he had a good idea. He thought that if he went into the shower, he would feel a lot better. However, there were a lot of other sailors who had that same "good idea." Everyone was in the shower. Unfortunately, they were still all in the process of vomiting. The entire shower floor was covered in several inches of regurgitated beanie weanies. They clogged the drains. The teacher said that if he used his foot to clear the drain, it would make this sucking noise and get clogged again with beanie weanies.
Fortunately, the ship did not sink. But ever since then, the teacher could never eat beanie weanies again.
This was what I learned in American History my junior year.
Social Studies was probably my second least favorite subject, after science. I didn't have a real problem with learning history. It was learning about each individual country that got on my nerves. That was why I skipped World History, which was offered my sophomore year.
So I was glad to have American History for my junior year. At the beginning of the year, the teacher said that the new textbooks were set up differently. Because there was so much trouble getting to the more recent events in American History, the book was designed to give a sort of Cliff's Notes version of the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That would allow us to spend more time on things like World War I, World War II and Vietnam. (Yes, it seems like all we did in History was talk about wars. Peacetime was just too boring.)
The funny thing is that even with us rushing through the first 100 years of American History in the first 9 weeks of the school year, we still could not get past World War II. I think that format gave the teacher the idea that he could teach the rest of the material in a more relaxed manner. He probably got too relaxed.
One of the things the teacher did during the year was tell us this tale of when he was in the Navy. He took a full hour to tell this story. Dont' worry, it's not scary, like the story my sixth grade music teacher told.
It went like this: He was serving on board the SS Patch. (I can't believe I remember the name of that ship after all this time.) Before he was in the Navy, that particular ship had been sunk twice, raised and salvaged. There were more than 300 people serving on the ship. One night, the dinner was beanie weinies. Everybody enjoyed the dinner. Before everyone went to bed, there was an announcement that the ship was about to head into a really rough storm and advised everyone to strap themselves in their bunks.
They weren't kidding about that announcement. The ocean tossed the ship back and forth. A lot of the crewmembers started feeling nauseous. At one point, the nose of the ship stuck straight up in the air, like the Titanic before it sunk. After a few wave crashes, he could hear somebody throwing up. Then another, then another. Then he started vomiting. He believed he had a good idea. He thought that if he went into the shower, he would feel a lot better. However, there were a lot of other sailors who had that same "good idea." Everyone was in the shower. Unfortunately, they were still all in the process of vomiting. The entire shower floor was covered in several inches of regurgitated beanie weanies. They clogged the drains. The teacher said that if he used his foot to clear the drain, it would make this sucking noise and get clogged again with beanie weanies.
Fortunately, the ship did not sink. But ever since then, the teacher could never eat beanie weanies again.
This was what I learned in American History my junior year.
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