Fish Tank

A pivotal thing recently happened: I have a running fish tank in my classroom, for the first time ever. It's a rather small and simple tank, 10 gallons, but I have a really nice filter, really nice lights, and I've stuffed it full of plants. In terms of animals, so far I only have four cherry shrimp and three neon tetras (the sole survivors of an initial batch of ten, but these three have hung on for weeks now, so I think they're here to stay). This might not seem like a huge accomplishment, but allow me to provide a bit of context:

Three years ago I was teaching in a rundown middle school classroom in a rundown school building in a rundown section of Queens. My students were quiet twelve year old girls who weighed 120 pounds each and rowdy twelve year old boys who weighed 85 pounds each. They were mostly African American or were immigrants from Ghana or East India. All black, and intensely racist of each other. They treated me, white and unprepared, with vague amusement. I was a part of the structure after awhile, a door frame, a cracked chair. It was fall and my girlfriend was spending the weekend with me.

I was embarrassed to have her there. Embarrassed by my small apartment living above a Bengali family on a street with cars parked one inch away from each other. Embarrassed by the trash bags by the F train which ran inconsistently, rank with the smell of urine and discarded fast food containers. I envisioned her coming to New York, arriving at that holy city, that central point, visible from space, visible on even the simplest maps, and then making a sharp detour, another train, the city slowly fading, disappearing, before finally arriving in a broken pseudo-suburbia where I would meet her and give her a big hug. We were both wrapped in thick coats to ward off the cold fall, the leaves had abandoned the branches early that year. She was so genuinely happy to see me, and that only added to my sense of shame.

I had the great idea to start a fish tank. There were few empty 29 gallon tanks in the science lab upstairs. There was a spot in my classroom that would be perfect. Custodians worked in the school on the weekends, they would let me in. We traveled to Chinatown and found a small fish store owned by an extremely energetic young man who spoke English without an accent and had a much more attractive hair cut than me. His store was full of filters, animals, plants, gravel, chemicals, lights, and old Chinese men. He upsold me and I walked out with three huge plastic bags, two each filled with a large bag of gravel and the third filled with an expensive canister filter and some tiny plastic bottles filled with water treatment chemicals. 

The trip back to my school was exhausting. My school was located on the top of a not-so-small hill, any by the time we finally got inside, my arms felt like they were going to fall off at the shoulders, the handles of the plastic bags were stretched to thin strips of razor line cutting into my fingers. We had just dropped everything off inside of my classroom when I realized my first big mistake: there was no source of water. The nearest place was a water fountain at the end of the hallway, probably two hundred feet away. I had a 2 gallon bucket. 

It took about three hours to fill the tank with gravel, fill the tank with water, and setup the filter, not including a 45 minute delay when, during a materials scavenging expedition, I locked my keys inside of the third floor science lab. The custodians, who I truly believed lived in the walls were hard to find, and would scatter as they heard my footsteps approaching. Finally I tracked one down, a weather beaten 65 year old white man who had a ring dangling from his belt that held maybe a two hundred keys.

The tank was full of metallic smelling Queens public school water fountain water. The pump was running, quietly tucked away under the sturdy metal desk positioned in the corner of the room out of direct sunlight, exactly like I had read online. I added a few drops of the water conditioner, a foul smelling liquid that was chock full of beneficial bacteria to keep my fish healthy. The fish I hadn't bought yet, the fish I was waiting to buy, I told myself that I would buy fish after a few weeks, let the water sit there and become safe and healthy. I had a plan to organize my tank around plants, bright green plants, providing a natural habitat for the fish. I wanted to build an oasis in my chaotic classroom. I wanted to give the students something to look at besides the walls and their worksheets.

It never really panned out. The tank sat there in the corner of my room, full of room temperature water. The filter quietly pulsed away for the next four months, recycling the same water again and again, never having the chance to remove the fish poop it was designed to. Occasionally I would add water to the tank to fill it up.

Students would ask what had happened to the tank. When was I going to get fish? Other teachers would say the same thing. I didn't really have an answer. I would just shrug my shoulders and give the same look that people give when asked, "Why is life so hard?". This is just the way it is folks. The fish tank is full of water and empty of fish.

Of course, in reality the tank wasn't really empty. I was playing host to a whole colony of bacteria and algae, playing out their own microscopic circle of life. Thousands of generations giving birth, dying, fighting, getting sick, falling in and out of positive relations with each other, migrating to new and exciting parts of the fish tank. For them, the tank was the entire known universe, and this notion provided me with some excellent material for daydreaming on many an afternoon when, after the last student had left for the day, I would sit at my desk and feel empty and broken.

Things are very different now. I'm still bone tired at the end of a school day, but this tiredness is not an aimless, pointless-seeming thing anymore. I feel purposeful, some days more than others, but still, the fact remains that I can more clearly see the benefits of my work. I have taken great pleasure in watching myself grow as an educator, and even if I do not feel that this job is what I seek to build my life around, even if I feel like I may get up and leave one year and never come back, I still find myself fascinated at the ways in which it has become easy, almost effortless, to manage a classroom full of students, to convince them of the value of being there, even if momentarily, and to expose them to things that they are not used to seeing or hearing, like a beautiful fish tank, full of fish.


Here's a picture of my fish tank taken by one of my illustrative students Casey:

Never Ending

Okay guys, time for a throwback post. When I reflect on the history of my blog, and really my writing in general, it's clear to me that it all started off very political and motivated. I was young and energized and I communicated my thoughts, ideas, and opinions with a forceful, sometimes offensive vigor. This was mostly conversations with my immediate family and, as I grew older, friends. I remember, as a young boy, being told many times that things would make more sense when I was older. I remember being told, always with a soft chuckle, "I used to be like you." I made a promise to myself that I would never say something like that to a child, something so thoughtlessly damaging, so quietly dehumanizing. So far I've kept that promise, but I try to remain aware and vigilant, for in my current role as a teacher I stand at the precipice of a chasm of influence, toeing stones into the void, and its very deep and the consequences will rattle through the years long after I've died.

The advent of online writing represented a sea change for me. It gave me a platform, bathed in the comforting glow of anonymity. I could say anything I wanted to, and there was the exciting, almost promiscuous promise of anonymous readership. Anyone could be reading what I wrote, at any time, from any place on earth.

Now, in reality, very few people read what I wrote, whether in the form of my earliest website or in the current incarnation of this blog. And truth be told, I'm okay with that. I've grown comfortable in this routine, the simulacrum of conversation, the empty walls echoing. The closest I've had to real interaction from this and other blogs have been the dappled-eyed awestruck chords of an occasional lover who, upon researching my name and online presence, has stumbled upon my writing and then proceeded to bring it up in conversation. Many times this has resulted in a conversation, perhaps the defining conversation of any romance I've ever had that has failed, the conversation of writing as occupation. It presents a seemingly irresistible allure to so many of the people that I have met. Almost all of my relationships, platonic and otherwise, without exception, and sometimes ever so briefly, at one point or another, have stumbled through the mire of that conversation, complete with the awkward period at the end where I struggle to explain why I write, why I have failed to follow that course in my career or my study. Why does it exist at the fringes of my life. Why not make it a central part. It is my journal, my diary, my sacred cathedral of personal reflection, pointless if full of people. Why write online at all? I guess it all comes back to that perverse sense of reverse voyeurism.

So, here's the throwback post, a post about issues of politics, of global economies, of human suffering and aspiration: Let's talk about childbirth.

This sacred ritual is enthroned in our society, the pregnant mother held up against the sunlight, child held in arms at stomach level, cast in bronze, left to glow in a leaf-dappled square somewhere out in the half-civilized wilderness of our collective national conscious. She is sacred because she enables a continuation, a generation to succeed. The baby is corrupt, we have seen it a thousand times. Humans become horrible as they grow older, but until they are born, they are shrouded in promise and secrecy. Literally pregnant with potential. In spite of my decidedly liberal leanings regarding women's health and other topics, my Catholic upbringing always rears it head, ever briefly, during these moments of introspection.

It is birth that has, for millions of years, represented the saving grace of our species, of really any species. It's genetic, the urge to reproduce. And while I've learned enough about evolutionary biology (and certainly spent enough in tuition and textbooks) to understand that only a certain percentage of a population will feel a desire to reproduce, high in some species, low in others, and always changing, it still represents a shared social goal. We are too altruistic of a species to be capable of instinctively casting a disparaging eye on this process.

But it is childbirth that is sinking us. Population increase will be the catalyst that forces our hand on this planet. It is unquestionable. The rolling tide of humanity, increasing every year, very slowly in the developed world, but astonishingly rapidly in the developing world, will eventually break over the seawall of this fine place and leave everything in ruins. Now, obviously, it is the poorest countries that are the locus of this problem. When you have eight or ten children, and 75% of them survive to adulthood....well you can paint the rest of that picture. And also, perhaps even more obvious, it is clear that only by empowering these poor people economically can we ever hope to reduce their birth rates. Much of this economic empowerment, maybe all of it, must come from a reduction and restructuring of the global wealth system, starting with us, the people who have everything. Most people who have witnessed crippling poverty first hand can never quite shake the feeling that our economic system is unsustainable in the long run. Something will have to change. But with a rapidly globalized economy, and the ever increasing effectiveness and, can I say this, near-miraculous nature of new technologies, I believe that the sacrifices will neither be as deep-reaching nor as widespread as some may say.

No, it is not the developing countries who are the focus of this post. Why would they be? Not only do I feel removed from them in a practical sense but also in a moral sense. I cannot cast judgement or aspersions on a society that I don't live. Neither can I beatify or pile up platitudes. I simply don't possess the appropriate volume of empathy required for that. Instead, I will focus on the world and society that I do live in. The United States of America, home of the free et cetera.

Here's my thesis: If you live in America, and if you graduated from high school and (lets winnow the excuses as much as we can) you attended college for at least two years, and demonstrated at least a rudimentary appreciation of basic concepts of social science and life science, and you proceed to have more than two biological children in your lifetime, you should be considered a criminal and locked up because you have failed to treat this planet with the respect that it deserves. That's it. Have more than two kids (knowing of the consequences), boom, locked up, key thrown away. I don't want to share my country with people like that. I just don't! And it's not intolerance, no more than someone who grimaces when observing someone throw trash out of the window of a moving car. It is wrong, objectively wrong, to have more than two children in this day. Not when the stakes are as high as they are. It is selfish and short sighted. It represents the slimiest of human characteristics and also represents a disturbing lack of awareness and altruism. And unlike verifying the origin of every purchase you make at the grocery store, this singular act of humanistic responsibility is rather easy to make. If you can't sit down with a clear head, after having two children, and say "Whelp, that's it. No more for me or for this planet" then you are a person of the most foolish and self-entitled category. And you're taking advantage of an institution that puts childbirth on a pedestal in order to continue to contribute to the process of environmental destruction through over population. And, also, if you even begin to articulate an argument that starts off, "If we don't have enough kids, America might lose to other countries..." then please clear a path because I've already stopped listening to you and I need to go home and take a shower and try to scrub my brain clean of the memory of our conversation.

I want to make it clear here, at the end of this long ramble, that I'm not talking specifically about women, although, upon re-reading this post, it certainly may seem that way, and so I apologize in advance. My guess is that, if you assumed that I was talking specifically about women, you probably stopped reading a while back, so I'll just say goodbye to you and then finish up this post. Men share a responsibility, absolutely they do. In many relationships (most relationships?) the man certainly holds more control over the reproductive process than the women. Only recently has attention been called to the issue of redefining sexual abuse to give a more accurate representation of the kinds of lopsided power struggles that occur behind countless closed bedroom doors in America. Women and men are both entangled in this mess, and I also acknowledge that the choice to have children or not have children is never as easy as it may seem from an outside perspective. But it is obviously worth thinking about. It will be the greatest struggle of this century, and I am certain that childbirth will be the issue that determines the trajectory of our species past that point.

Of course, as someone without children, who I am to make these claims? "You'll understand when you're older." That's something else that they used to say to me.




Here's a photograph I took near my campsite in the Keibab National Forest.

Older Chests

Hello blog! I totally forgot to update in July, a truly remarkable failure on my part, especially since I had been so diligent over the last two years. Well, I'm updating now!

The summer of 2015 has been a busy and productive summer. I started off by attending an AP Chemistry workshop right after the last day of the school year. I met a bunch of other chemistry teachers from across the country. We spent our days practicing experiments and calculations and after two weeks I walked away with a certificate of completion and eight free textbooks.

After that, I left for a motorcycle trip to California. This was my first cross-country motorcycle trip and I was very pleased with how it went. There were a few minor hiccups, as there always are, but I cannot complain in the slightest. I took a bunch of pictures, some of which will show up here periodically, over the next decade or so.

I'm committed to taking on more trips like this in the future. But here are two things that I will be changing:

• I would like to find a motorcycle that is more fuel efficient. Riding a sport bike for 7,000 miles is uncomfortable and expensive and I can only tolerate one of those at a time.

• My film camera takes up too much room in my pack, so unless I can find a motorcycle with greater storage, it won't be making the cut on the next trip.

On the way back to CT, I camped and hiked in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Famous national parks, the ones I could clearly see in my earliest memories of deserts and back seats. I also found several new spots, roads and state parks, that were winding and lonely and made me feel very small. 

After fifteen days I came home, but I sometimes worry that I cut my trip too short. What did I miss? When will I be back?

Here's a picture I took just outside of Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

Cold Outside

Recently the weather has turned much warmer. The air heats up and gets thicker, the humidity building. The sky turns from blue to gray and the clouds rolls in, diffuse, spread and gather just beyond the horizon. Suddenly you wake up and the sky is just bursting with the promise of rain. Nothing moves outside, not even the birds. The grass lies thick, browning slightly (a foreshadowing of summer), until late evening when the drops fall heavily, dark splotches on sidewalks, windshields, and clothing. The rain is cool and it falls heavier now. As the sun sinks, the heat that was holding everything together takes a vacation. Everything falls apart and the sky bleeds. These early summer rainstorms are critical. They bring water to the ground where it is immediately taken back up by plants, still shooting and growing, still recovering from winter. They also bring relief. When you wake up, the air is thin, you can see through it for miles, or at least until a distant hill or stand of trees gets in the way. More than anything else, you can feel the difference in the temperature. The morning after is always cold. 

I rode my motorcycle to work this morning, regretting it about halfway through. I wasn't uncomfortable, but I had grown used to the warm weather, the sweat, the tight fitting heat of my helmet, my jacket, my gloves. Riding my motorcycle often takes on a womb like experience, dry heating bouncing crazily from the muffler off my right leg. I can feel the heat from the pavement through my boots. I can feel it in the tank pressed against my thighs. These cold mornings take me by surprise. For a moment, I forget who I am. There is some thrill in it. Cold weather riding comes with its own special type of adrenaline rush. 20 mph feels faster, and I need to open my visor at stop lights to ward off the condensation. 

I feel like an outsider. On days that begin with these types of mornings, I feel like all of the things that I thought I knew have shifted slightly. Like a burglar broke into my home and moved everything a couple inches. The world continues to turn, and I feel left alone, trying to understand the movements.

Here's a photograph I recently took of my brother blowing out the candles on his birthday cake:

Haunted House

After Crow Fair, I read "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. This is the second book I have read this year by Christie, and I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed. This one was more narrative than Murder on the Orient Express, and I'm not afraid to admit that the ending took me by surprise. I felt like a little kid as I was reading this book, and it was nice to be reminded that an effective story demands nothing more from the reader than total transportation. To cause your reader to forget where they are, even for a short while, is as noble a literary goal as any other. This book didn't cause me to question my faith or to reconsider my childhood. It didn't force me to reconcile my ambitions with my fears or challenge me with fundamental questions about the meaning of life. It just posed a riddle which was hard to solve, built up the tension, and then revealed everything in  a dramatic climax. Reading it was therapeutic and satisfying. "A good beach book" seems like such a dismissive or patronizing characterization. I'll settle for saying that it was an immersive book, well written with excellent pacing and dialogue. I'm excited to read another book by Christie very soon!

Crow Fair

April has been a hectic and enlightening month. The days are getting longer and the air is warming. Flowers are beginning to bloom outside, gently, as if they still remember the winter, which stayed longer than usual. It's nice to see the familiar patterns, but I can't shake the feeling that the long and tragic season of winter was just one of several disturbances yet to come. Global warming, etc.

Anyway, I finished a book recently called Crow Fair. I got this book as a present. It is named after a Native American ceremony which I know nothing about. The book didn't have anything to do with Native Americans either, except in perhaps a tangential sense. This book was set in Montana, which is built, I suppose, on the bones of Native Americans. What a sensational notion! Every state in America is built on the bones of Native Americans, but for some reason or another it was the people of the northern plains who have stuck around in our public memory. Maybe it was because they fought for the longest, maybe it's because those were the places where white America was stretched the thinnest, only a fragile veneer tearing in the wind that blows across the water color steppes and gray mountains. It is the center point of our continent and it is large and flat and mostly devoid of the modernity of the coastal civilizations. I have only lived on the coasts. I know nothing about the middle. After reading this book, I feel like I know a little bit more, but its just a feeling.

Thomas McGuane has a style which is unlike any author I've read, although I can see the influences of many writers reflected in his work. Perhaps that is the mark of a post-post-modernist; a 21st century writer is fated to recycle old things into new things. To pick up the broken trail left by Brautigan, Kerouac, and Vonnegut and try to make it lead somewhere. I know that somewhere out there an expert in feminist literature just died as a result of me writing that sentence. I'm sorry. I would read more 21st century women writers if I knew about them. I'll make it a sub-goal for this year, I promise.

Thomas McGuane writes in a way that seems easy and effortless, and that's what I like about it. The stories were very nice to read, but they hit you hard in the last moments and also immediately afterwards. A couple of the stories really stood out above the rest, but overall it was a really solid collection. No wasted words. That would be my three word review, but its not completely accurate. "No wasted words" sounds like Hemingway. It's not minimalism in a tortured sense, just simple and truthful. One adjective per noun type of writing. I loved it. I was inspired by it. Most importantly, I enjoyed reading it. The fact that I received it as a gift, and it had such a profound impact on me makes it even better. I have a bad habit of saving my appreciation for the purchases I make for myself, believing, on some deeper level, that no one could understand me well enough to hit the mark with a gift or surprise. It's nice to be proven wrong.

Head Space

Recently I read the book "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. My initial impression of it was positive. The immediate experience of reading it and reflecting upon it was similar to...well now that I am thinking about it, I cannot easily pin point a book that I have read in the last couple of years that is similar. Perhaps Faulkner, but only in the cadence and the style, the mood is completely different, and I have also found that one Faulkner book is completely unlike another, a pattern which I am incapable of establishing with Woolf (having only read one of her novels).

I suppose a better question then would be, would I read another story by Woolf? The answer is probably yes, but only after I take a break from the heady and atmospheric, the philosophical and imaginary. To the Lighthouse was a fine book, but a little too intangible for my tastes. Or at least, too intangible for me to endure in extended dosages. For my next read, I am aiming for something more rooted in traditional narrative plot advancement. I want characters that couple their thoughts with actions. I want dramatic twists and turns that have ramifications outside of a character's head. I want fist fights and long kisses and maybe some explosions. I want to read a good old fashioned story. I'm tired of the kinky stuff. Give me missionary.