Tuesday, August 31, 2010

losing

The ear infection i have makes me crave music. Losing my hearing scares me. I save sounds.  I save long hair music on the leaves of my dining table plant. That wobbly chair saves that Incredible String Band song I can't find on YouTube.
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I'm teaching second grade again. I didn't like first grade. I lost my patience for shoe laces and the random Spiderman pajama stories.

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My parents bought me a little used radio when I was 11 years old. I used to sleep with the radio on hoping  Gimme Shelter would come on. One day I woke up in the middle of the night and this song was playing:

 

I wanted to save that song.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

To iphone, or not to iphone: that is the question

Next Thursday and Friday I will attend a workshop on how to use the ipod touch in my classroom and on my last week of vacation I will attend another two-day  training where I will learn how to use the Promethean board. Yes, I have to say good-bye to the white board and the document camera. Most schools are already using the Promethean boards, but since we are a poor school district we are a bit behind in technology. Here's a video of a Promethean board just in case you don't know what I'm talking about.


At home I've been debating with myself if I should get an iphone. My current cel phone has abuelita written all over it. I think I'm the only person in the universe who doesn't send text messages. Well, there is my husband, but he doesn't even have a cel phone. We are not technophobes, on the contrary, we embrace technology, remember, we met on the internet. My family tells me it is very difficult to communicate with me since my cel phone does not accept text messages. They tell me I'm missing all the family juicy gossip.  By the way, we also have a home telephone which we never answer when it rings. Our philosophy is that we will CALL YOU when we NEED to talk to you. The same goes with my cel phone. I know, sometimes we can be arrogant assholes and incredibly selfish with our time.

I really don't know if an iphone and I will get along. I do like the idea of writing/texting people instead of talking to them.  I'm a lousy talker. "Um" and "like" run amok in my speech and for the life of me I hardly speak in complete sentences. If you ever meet me, I guarantee disappointment.   Yet one factor that bugs me about smart phones is  that so many people walk and check their  phones simultaneously. People, multitasking is so United States and it's really gross! And whatever happened to sitting alone and thinking? If Rodan were alive today his Thinker would be checking his phone. Forget having a conversation with a person under 25, that individual  will check his/her cel phone several times.

It even bothers me that I spend time thinking about iphones. I should be thinking more about BP, Arizona's SB1070, and Wikileaks these days, dammit. These days I feel really stupid and contagious as that ol' Nirvana song goes. This is what I look like when I think of getting an iphone: