Tag: behavior

  • The Soundtrack of Memory

    I play trumpet for a mariachi, and I sing too.  And for those who are familiar with it, mariachi music is perhaps one of the most emotionally driven musical genres there is. I’d say arguably, but I am biased. Whatareyagunnado? Recently, we’ve played quite a few funerals, along with a whole lot of birthdays and…

  • Yeah! I got Nothing

    There is a certain kind of person who can speak for an impressively long time without ever actually saying anything. I may be one of them. Not because there is nothing going on in my head. Quite the opposite. There are a million things going through my mind all the time. Nonstop. Thoughts about this…

  • Like Group Norms with Better Lighting

    There’s that famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Brian tells the crowd they are all individuals and shouldn’t follow anyone. The crowd immediately responds, in unison, that they are all individuals. Then one guy quietly disagrees… and the crowd tells him to shut up. “You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got…

  • The Freshman Species: An Entirely Unscientific and Unauthorized Field Study

    Every year, they arrive.  Freshmen.  You can identify them immediately, even before they tell you what grade they’re in. They travel in groups—nay, in small herds—move through hallways with the urgency of someone late for a flight, and carry enough accessories to suggest they may be embarking on a three-week expedition rather than going to…

  • Just How God Made Me… I Wonder If He Has Regrets

    Have you ever wondered why people are the way they are? Why some people can sit quietly for hours, perfectly content with their own thoughts, while others seem physically incapable of leaving a question unanswered? Why some people are naturally cautious and measured, while others see a perfectly reasonable situation and immediately think, “I wonder…

  • Who Am I…?

    Who am I? That should be a simple question. It isn’t. I’ve spent a lifetime becoming someone, although I’m not entirely sure there was ever a plan. I have accumulated identities the way a workbench accumulates tools, scraps of wood, loose screws, half-finished projects, and things I am absolutely certain I will need someday. I’ve…

  • A Tasty Expression…

    It has been said that good food—rich, sumptuous, sassy, deliciously decadent food—is an expression of love. And I believe it. There is something almost intimate about feeding someone. The choosing, the preparing, the tasting, the anticipation. A pinch of this. A little more of that. The quiet knowledge of what makes someone close their eyes…

  • A Little More “We”

    I was at a high school football game recently, doing what people have done at high school football games for generations: watching the game, visiting with people I hadn’t seen in a while, eating something I probably didn’t need to eat, and generally enjoying the familiar chaos that comes with Friday night under the lights.…

  • The Thing About Progress…

    The other day, I was sitting with my dad and my uncle, and somehow we got to talking about cars. You know how those conversations go. One story leads to another, somebody remembers a car they used to have, somebody else remembers a road trip, and before you know it, we’re talking about the radios…

  • A Little Water, a Lot of Sun – What the Desert Grows

    If you didn’t grow up in or around California’s Imperial Valley, the hay stacks can seem a little strange. You drive out into the middle of the desert, where the landscape is supposed to be sand, creosote and tumbleweeds, and suddenly there they are—great golden walls of hay stacked beside the fields like somebody has…

  • What Remains

    There is something strange about the way we think about cemeteries. We call them places of death. We imagine them beneath gray skies, wrapped in fog, their crooked stones standing like silent sentinels in the dark. Movies fill them with shadows and whispers, with footsteps that seem to come from nowhere. We teach ourselves to…

  • Day One. Again. For the 27th Time.

    Tomorrow will be my 27th first day of school. Twenty-seven. At some point, you stop counting years and start counting first days survived. I am not a classroom teacher. I am an administrator. More specifically, I am the Dean of Students. Which is an interesting title. It sounds academic. Distinguished. Perhaps even scholarly. In reality,…

  • The Monkeys Got to the Caffeine Again

    There are certain things about yourself that you can spend years misunderstanding. You know something is different. You can feel it. You see the evidence scattered around your life like breadcrumbs, but you don’t always understand what they are pointing toward. For me, ADHD has been one of those things. I’ve known for a long…

  • Just Scrape the Cheese Off 

    There are certain foods I cannot eat. Cheese is one of them. This sounds simple enough.Four words. A perfectly manageable dietary limitation. I cannot eat cheese. Surely civilization can handle this. After all, we have landed people on the moon, developed tiny computers that can recognize our faces, and invented a machine that will vacuum…

  • The Persistence of Character

    There are some people you encounter after years apart and think, Oh, how nice. I wonder how they’ve been. And then there are people you encounter and immediately realize that, despite the passage of time, the universe has apparently made no meaningful attempt to alter the trajectory of their existence. Recently, during district-wide professional development,…