Can you find the adult?

I can't seem to sleep with my recently beat up jaw (wisdom tooth extraction, ain't it fun?) and I finally got around to watching the video of the infamous pool party in McKinney, Texas.  Here it is for those of you who haven't seen it.  If you're sensitive to violence, you might want to skip it.  I'm really not and I had a hard time watching it despite knowing the outcome. If you like blooper reels from Reno 911, the first minute or so is right up your alley.  Also, language.  From the cops. Ahem.

So, here are the events as I understand them:

• Teenager organizes a pool party and posts it on social media, and naturally everyone shows up.
• Pool party is in clear violation of the HOA rules that state that each member of the community is allowed a maximum of two guests with a key card.
• Kids are denied entry and get upset.  They start jumping the fence.  A couple of fights break out.  Parents complain about vulgar music in the presence of their young children.  
• Security guard is overwhelmed and calls the police.
• Meanwhile, an adult allegedly begins tossing out racial slurs, things get heated, and someone gets slapped.
• This took place in a very quiet community with an extremely low crime rate.  As most of the kids knew each other, they were almost all from the area.

OK, so these kids, at least the majority of them, were being stupid.  I'm sure I can find at least 500 articles from the last year in Texas about house parties getting out of hand, police being called, and teenagers getting arrested.  This has probably been happening since the dawn of time.  My parents grew up in the 50's and 60's and they have their fair share of stories. 

Let's all acknowledge right now that teenagers do stupid things, and they do them with greater frequency and intensity in large groups.  Let's all acknowledge that we did stupid things when we were teenagers, and we probably dug ourselves deeper by mouthing off to at least one authority figure.  This is what teenagers do.  I'm not going to bother to cite sources here, because I believe you all have Google, but we know that this is part of development in kids.  Teenagers do not yet have fully developed brains.  Many of them have poor impulse control.  

This doesn't mean that we let them get away with these things.  We should be teaching them how to appropriately deal with authority figures.  I've had kids mouth off at me.  I've broken up a large group of teenagers in the hall watching a fight (and found myself in the middle of two girls fighting once) and not once did I ever put my hands on a kid.  I have written referrals for kids who like to argue with teachers, or run from teachers when they're in trouble.  I've also never run after a kid, and they usually got caught anyway.  Funny how that works out.

The sane cop shown in the video, the one who accepts the flashlight that the kids pick up off the ground, has the right idea.  He rationally talks to the kids and says "Hey, guys, you can't run from the cops.  Have a seat please." And they do.  He is a calm, authoritative person in an otherwise chaotic environment, and people respond.  Meanwhile, crazy cop is running around screaming.  And kids are running from him.  Listen, guys, that's at least partially instinct.  If something big and loud is coming at you, your body says run.  And given his behavior throughout the video combined with recent events and their subsequent news coverage involving young men and police officers, if I were those kids, I probably would have run away, too. Let's also talk about they way he's addressing the kids. "Don't make me f*****' run around here with thirty pounds of ******* gear on, son!"  "Get your *** over here!"  "Get your *** home!"  Who, exactly, is the professional adult in this situation? 

Furthermore, as I understand it, the purpose of calling the police in the first place was to get the kids to leave.  I can understand the need to control the crowd, but come on.  If in fact the cops had arrived and the kids who were running had committed a crime, couldn't they have done some investigative work to track them down?  Don't our tax dollars pay for that?  Unless they were running away with kidnapped babies or something I fail to see the point in trying to corral that many kids.

As for the girl who was tackled to the ground: she got yanked around quite a bit.  I didn't see what the initial provocation was, if any, because it was too far away from the view of the camera, but it looks like he heard a kid mouthing off and confronted her.  Again, who is the adult here? And once she was sitting on the ground in tears, screaming about calling her mom, how hard would it have been to get her in handcuffs?  Maybe hard.  Sometimes when people are upset they resist being physically touched.  But certainly not so hard that this officer had to put his knees into her back.  On the concrete.  While she was wearing a bikini.  Haven't we already observed that this kind of restraint can cause serious injury?

A lot of people have argued that the cop was justified in pulling his weapon because there were two kids advancing on him and one of them looked like he was trying to pull a gun from the waistband of his pants. First of all, the officer was not alone on the scene (as evidenced by the two officers who immediately come to him after he draws his weapon, seemingly to get him to put it away).  Second of all, if those kids were looking for a fight it was clearly to protect the girl who the officer was yanking around.  Is it right?  That's a tough one to call.  On the one hand, he is a police officer.  On the other,  if she were your sister, or your girlfriend, or your cousin, what would you have done?  Were the officer's actions right to begin with, and whose responsibility is it to step in when we see a police officer harming a citizen?  Third, I'm no expert, but it didn't look to me like that kid was trying to pull a gun from his waistband.  It didn't look like there was a gun in there.  Have any of you watched teenage boys walk anywhere lately?  That kid was pulling up his pants not two seconds before the "reach behind the back" move.  He pulled up his pants from the back of his waistband.  Nearly all teenage boys do this because nearly all teenage boys wear their pants halfway to their knees, and they have a nervous twitch about it.  Go to the mall.  Count the number of times you see teenage boys touch or adjust the backs of their shirts or their waistbands.  I'm convinced that at this point it will be hardwired in the DNA of their offspring.  

Besides all that-when someone pulls out a gun in a situation like this, against unarmed teenagers, people very understandably panic.  The situation just kept escalating.  I think that this officer should seek some counseling and find a different career.  Maybe he's not a terrible person, but he probably isn't suited for police work.  There are some situations in which I find myself reviewing the facts of the case as they are presented and making the conclusion that the police acted correctly, but this isn't one of them.  Well-that one officer wasn't doing his job correctly.  The others were, and thank goodness they stepped in when he pulled out a gun. 

So my big question is this: what can we as citizens do in the moment to stop these things?  I did see one man approach the girl who was tackled to the ground, presumably to ask if she was ok.  There were two boys who attempted to physically defend her and that went horribly.  There were people filming, including a fifteen year old boy who filmed the whole thing (good thinking, kid).  But what if the video had ended with kids dying?  Certainly it would be of use in a trial, but it wouldn't have saved anyone.  Would anyone have responded in time if citizens had called the police...on the police?  What if the other officers hadn't been there immediately after the gun was drawn?  I don't know the answer, but I hope someone does.  What if these had been your kids?  Your students?  Your cousins?

I'll just be over here, drooling on myself

Yesterday, I lost my brakes coming down transmountain. I made it home and am borrowing my dad's truck (thank goodness). 

Today, I went to the dentist for a cleaning. I learned that my dentist, who just replaced my former dentist (she retired) is from Houston and wants to go rattlesnake hunting. 

Also, despite my careful attention to my teeth I needed four fillings, and my dentist decided that my one wisdom tooth that has come in should probably go. I was glad to see it go but not pleased to be numbed up to my eyeballs (literally) on both sides of my face. I am glad I couldn't feel the extraction, because I could certainly hear the crunching as the dentist pushed the tooth out and it freaked me the hell out. 

I drooled on myself for a few hours while my face regained feeling. And now the socket keeps bleeding, so I have a tea bag string hanging out of my mouth. Apparently, the tannins cause the blood vessels to constrict. 

On the bright side: I am not covered in cats.

Freedom!

I am finally, officially on summer vacation. After a trip to Austin for Texas State Solo and Ensemble and a week of summer camp, I'm done!  I got off easy at summer camp this year and just ran the games. The kids had a good time. 

We bought ourselves a nice patio set and a fire pit and have quickly become the people who spend more time outside than inside. Our very large hollyhock plant is covered with flowers and with seed pods.

If anyone wants seeds, let me know. I've heard the pods are edible. I'll have to check. We rigged up a nice solution to our leaky swamp cooler. Now, it waters the grass and doesn't get the roof wet. Bless pvc pipes. 

We are dog sitting while my dad is on vacation. PJ is glad to have a buddy although they did fight over a treat earlier. 

Dear Six Flags

Dear Six Flags,

There was a time when I would beg my parents to go to Six Flags Over Texas.  Any part of Texas, really.  Arlington or San Antonio, it didn't matter to me.  I LOVE roller coasters.  I love theme parks in general.  I'm older now and I still love roller coasters and theme parks, and in my heart I still love Six Flags, but I'm also a high school teacher.  And once a year, we take all of the band, choir, and orchestra students who have earned the right to play at Texas State Solo and Ensemble in Austin to Six Flags Fiesta Texas.  And they love it.  They love it so much.  It makes me happy to see them have a good time.

But, dear Six Flags, it's always at the end of May and it's always too humid for this El Pasoan. Furthermore, it comes after a grueling weekend of long bus rides (did I mention we live in El Paso?), fast food, gas station food, hotel breakfast, and running around after kids all over the UT Austin campus, often while carrying or dragging heavy things and stepping over exhausted teenagers stretched out on every available surface, whining about how incredibly awful their three hour car ride home is.  So, unfortunately, by the time I get to Six Flags, I just can't bear to get on a roller coaster.  I fear that it would anger my aging body and really, a ten hour bus ride home after that just doesn't sound all that appealing.  Not at all. I had spinal surgery last year and, because I know you post signs warning about such things, I won't be going on the roller coasters at all.

I will spend my time at Six Flags in the air conditioned food court, probably with a book and a bottle of ibuprofen, watching Looney Tunes.  I might hop on the train once or go through that Scooby Doo haunted house ride.  It's pretty tame.  And let me tell you: after two days of fast food, gas station food, hotel breakfast, and UT Austin student fundraiser barbecue sandwiches, there is virtually no limit on what I would pay for a salad bar.  Your website indicates that your pizzeria offers salads, but, a salad bar is pretty different.  I'm going to take a guess and say that the pizzeria salads are pre-assembled and are primarily lettuce.

Let's start at $25.  I would seriously, at this point in the trip, pay $25 for a single trip to the salad bar.  A.  Single.  Trip.  Throw in extra trips and make it a really, really good salad bar (a la Jason's Deli) and I'll up it to $35.  I'm not even kidding. Because even if I don't spend the day in the heat at the park, I spent the day before this in the heat at UT Austin, and the thought of just about anything else makes me a little queasy.

Thanks, Six Flags.  I'll always love you deep down.

Stuff...and Thaaaangs

This isn't likely to be a coherent post.  That's ok, right?  You guys don't have great expectations from me at this point.  It's been like two weeks since I posted my last post.  And right now, thanks to some spasms in the muscles in my neck, I am under the influence of muscle relaxers and I will not claim responsibility for anything that follows.  Here's some stuff and thangs from the last couple of weeks.

1. We said goodbye to old White Cat.  It was time.  He was losing control of his legs and was getting to be a pretty cranky old man.  Our vet was wonderful.  They even sent us a card.  We buried him underneath the tree out back and he spent his final days outside in the herb garden at every opportunity and had tuna for every meal.

2. We had UIL contest this past week.  I don't know if anyone here watches "Glee", but look, that is so not what it's about.  Sure, we spend time preparing the music, but going to contest is pretty much paperwork.  Double check the performance requirements for your school.  Select literature. Fill out a purchase order for any music you don't already have.  Submit.  Wait for it to come back from business.  Mail to vendor.  Complete online entry for each group.  Request failure report from office clerk.  Receive failure report. Ctrl+F for the name of every student in your program.  Write everybody down who's failing.  Determine who gets an AP/IB/Dual Credit waiver.  Check eligibility action days to see if the ineligible kids can regain eligibility at the next progress report.  Fill out a form 1, in alpha order, and print. Put every single eligible kid on it, for Pete's sake, whether they're going or not.  For each group.  Track down an admin to sign it.  (I think admins should all be implanted with tracking devices.  Sometimes they're hard to find.)  Complete a list of students who are attending, complete with ID numbers, on the appropriate attendance form.  Deliver to attendance. Complete a stage diagram.  Assemble and number three sets of judge's scores (so, this is 9 pieces of music per group). Scores didn't come in?  Get on your email and see who you can borrow it from.  If nobody has them, you can make copies, put them in a binder, and include a receipt, a purchase order, or a letter from the publisher. If you used an eprint, better include that receipt as well. Collect permission slips from each student.  Double check them.  Put the medical forms and student travel acknowledgement forms they signed in the beginning of the year in a binder just in case someone falls off of the stage. Have kids who are planning to go home with their parents?  They get to sign a release of liability for alternate transportation.  Congratulations.  You are now ready to go to contest.

3. Speaking of UIL: for my non-Texan friends, and non-musician friends,  here's a breakdown.  Get all of your kids on the bus and travel to the contest site. Enjoy lovely views of the border fence on your way. Be greeted at the contest site by a monitor who will verify your school and take your judge's scores, form 1, and stage diagram.  Get instructions on where the kids will wait. 20 minutes before your scheduled warm-up, go to the unpacking area.  Your kids may not play in here or you will get disqualified.  (I should mention: any violation of UIL rules, DQ.  Improper planetary alignment, DQ.  They don't mess around.)  Collect every cell phone and carry it with you from now until you are done. Warm up for your designated time.  When the monitor calls time, you must stop playing.  Kids go to the stage in a single file line, while two backstage monitors with clickers count them.  If the number of kids is greater than the number on your form 1, everyone must line up and roll must be taken.  Anyone not on the form 1 will not perform.  If you have more kids on the form 1 than are on stage, that's ok. But if you take an ineligible kid, you can expect to go before the almighty UIL gods and risk your job or sanctions to your school that last for years.  Everything on stage is already set up thanks to your super accurate stage diagram.  Perform within the allotted time.  Yes, they keep a stopwatch on your setup and tear-down and everything.  Come off of the stage and get handed a cold bottle of water immediately.  You need this because it is blazing hot on stage. Kids are counted again going into the sight reading room.  Your numbers must match.  Sight read (this means that you have 8-10 minutes to teach the kids a piece that you and they have never seen before, and they can't actually play until it's time to perform it.)  The rules for this could be a book roughly the size of the US Tax Code, and they're worse for band.  Luckily, the director gets a three minute score study period, which is nice. Leave sight reading, pack up, and wait for buses.  Give cell phones back.  Go backstage to get your scores.  Either get disapproving lectures or a hug from the UIL region secretary.  Sometimes both.  Smile when you remember that regardless of your score, there's a candy bar in your results envelope.

4.  As you can see, I've been busy.  But we've done a lot of planting in the back yard despite the busy schedule and we have some neat things up.  I'm not doing too well with transferring of photos lately, so you'll have to take my word for it.

5.  PJ decided it was fun to play with a fledgling sparrow that was in the backyard and we had to take it to wildlife rehab.  You have to get there before 8:00, because that's bird bed time, apparently.  They're very nice people.  The little bird will be ok.  PJ continues to PJ.  Right now he's on my lap (all 90 pounds of him) because he's scared of the thunder.

6.  On Saturday night we bought cheese from a kid in a gas station parking lot.  Look, it's asadero and that stuff is delicious.  It's worth the risk.  Later we ended up in what is possibly the sketchiest dive in the sketchiest part of town, right next to Chico's Tacos, which is the sketchiest food in the world.  It was a good night.

7.  I'm really enjoying this podcast right now, and all of you sci-fi and conspiracy nuts should get in on it.  It's free.  Welcome to Nightvale.

8.  Saturday was Free Comic Book Day.  If you didn't go, you missed out.  We came home with 52 free comic books.  I'll take this opportunity now to tell you how I got into reading comic books as an adult.  When you're teaching, unfortunately you don't often have time to read for pleasure.  Comic books are nice because they come in installments that are short and easy to digest.  They also have wonderful artwork, and are a little less limited in some aspects of storytelling than novels are.  They're a wonderful medium.  I highly recommend visiting your local comic book store and giving them a try.  We have a box and subscribe to several titles between us, but find one you like and follow it for awhile.

Comics I'm reading:

• Rocket Girl.  
• Pariah
• The Twilight Zone
• The X-Files and its companion series, Millenium
• The Walking Dead
• Chew

If you aren't big into giving out candy for Halloween, or if you just want to encourage kids to read, check out Halloween Comicfest for information about ordering mini comic bundles for Halloween.  We did this last year and they were quite popular.  We went through something like 150 mini comics.  

Goodbye For Now, Facebook

I recently decided to deactivate my Facebook account, and it was suggested that I return to blogging (I was never good at it, FYI) in order to keep up with friends and family while limiting my exposure to what bothers me on my newsfeed.  In the interest of furthering discussion on the impact of social media on our daily lives, I'll go ahead and get personal and tell you why I'm leaving. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

We would love nothing more than to have a family...except maybe to win the lottery.  Then we could pay to adopt a herd of kids and take them around the world with us in a fancy RV.  That'd be pretty cool.  But, after almost to a year, we aren't any closer. Nobody likes to talk about this, but maybe more people should. After all, we don't want Idiocracy to happen.  Someone has to breed us out of it.

After nearly a year, every pregnancy and birth announcement on Facebook feels like a punch in the gut.  And I get the need to post those happy updates, really.  I felt the same way about engagement and wedding posts once upon a time, and when my time came, I posted anyway.  But they can still be difficult reminders of what's not happening for you, and not in the same way that posts about promotions and awards are.  After all, those things are about hard work.  There is some measure of control.  Getting married and having babies is about luck.  Know how I found a husband?  I got lucky.  Know how babies get made?  Ask Google or your parents.  I'm keeping it PG-13 here. But seriously, even if you do everything right, you still don't have control. For me, this is yet another reminder of the fact that my body doesn't really do anything well.  It's a dumb body.  We have issues. So basically, I can't handle the daily pregnancy and birth announcements.  Not right now.  And I'm not exaggerating when I say daily, people.  And it's not like I can just unfollow people-these announcements are always kind of a surprise, you know?  I don't have cameras in peoples' houses.

To be clear, people who are posting these things: I have no expectation that you will censor your posts based on how they might make other people feel.  That's ridiculous.  But, I also can't 100% control my emotional reaction to your posts.  And, as I'd rather be happy for you than resent you, I'm controlling what I can and limiting my exposure to what's bothering me.  Seems fair enough. 

As for us, it's completely weird that I posted about trying to have kids.  But, like I said, maybe people need to talk about it more. And by "talk about it", I don't mean give us your fertility advice.  We haven't been told we're hopelessly infertile or anything; as a matter of fact, we haven't been told anything except "well, sometimes it takes a year, come back when it's been a year."   But that still doesn't mean I can handle any more pinterest-inspired pregnancy photo shoots on my newsfeed. Nothing personal, guys.  Post away.  And I will enjoy my Facebook-free life for awhile.