It's Still A Party When The Ice Is Empty

What do you do when your team is in the Stanley Cup playoffs but they aren't playing at home?  Simple.  You go to the home arena anyway and watch the game for free up on the big screen.  Yeah, that's right.  MSG for FREE.  We also got towels for FREE.  We sat in cushy seats way down by the ice for FREE.  Eddie's friend Big Puma sent us on this little FREE excursion to the viewing party, and party party it was, complete with John Amaranti singing the National Anthem in person.  Also in person?  The boom guy who slipped on the ice and fell over as he sang.  Ah, falling.  It's the funniest thing in the world.

Between periods, the entertainment team--one of whom is an Asian chick who I think was on a reality show at some point in time--kept us occupied with interviews of old players.  Unfortunately, I couldn't understand one thing that they said, but it was nice that they were there.  Also between periods was a mini-hockey game played by very tiny people, some would call them children, who could skate and score better than I ever could.  One of them was really good at face-planting, but he was still eons better than I could be.  The game was my kind of game--no stopping, constant scoring, lots of falling, everybody wins.

It was like a real game.  There was cheering.  There was booing.  There was some cursing.  There was a fight in the stands.  There were really, really long lines at the concession stands.  There was dancing and singing.  There were people making enough commotion to get themselves up on the big screen when there was no hockey action going on.  There was a guy in front of us walking around with an inflatable Stanley Cup (which we later found out was fifty bucks, which is pretty hefty for something that could double as a poolside toy). 

This guy was there.  It made me happy.  I'm not sure why.

More importantly, there were contests.  They had a few people come out to center ice to slide a puck into a small slot seemingly miles away.  One guy did it and won tickets to some game.  Another contest was based on randomly choosing seats to see who could win a family gift pack of tickets.  Every time they called a seat number, we were like, why isn't it ours.  Then after we'd moved over two sections to see the screen better, we heard the announcer announce not only the section we'd been sitting in, but the seat that one of Eddie's friends had been sitting in.  We all looked at each other.  Ummm, he would've won the tickets. 

It was like some odd hockey version of Final Destination.  Moral of the story: don't change your seat.

And on the way out, my wish to steal the balloons that were waving in arches along the seats became a reality for someone else.  Some dude found a way to cut the balloons off of the railing and take them with him.  There he was, big doofy man, with a big doofy bunch of balloons trailing behind him.  The security guy followed him for a while but then came back, mumbling, I'm not gonna fight with him about balloons.  Heh heh.  I wonder if he made it to the train.

The only aspect of the night that was disheartening was my dream of riding a zamboni still being a dream.  All these little kids get to ride it.  Why can't I?  We're all about the same size.  They're out there for quite some time.  It's actually a bit of work to ride the zamboni.  Those kids are forced to wave the whole time.  You can see that when they stop waving, the driver leans over and whispers something.  Then suddenly, the kids are back to waving more frantically than ever.  I think I'd excel at that, and the driver wouldn't even have to remind me to do it.

Heh heh.  We look great, huh?

Thirsty?: A Story of Traffic

We're not sure what started it.  We think it was a merging issue.  The Belt has construction and narrow lanes and not many drivers follow the speed limit nor do they heed warnings or abide by common courtesy.  All this makes for an entertaining if not thrilling ride from Long Island to Brooklyn, thrilling in the sense of "I'm going to die," of course.

Eddie and I are in his Cruz, jamming to some Hot 97, short-sleeved shirts on, sun setting, stopping and going with the stuttering flow of cars and trucks and motorcycles.  We're in a good groove of dropping off invoices together so we can spend time together on our very opposite schedules.  Car time is our time.  His car smells like bread.  It's better than motor oil.

From the right, we see a silver-white sporty coup careening through the lanes, from right lane to middle to left and then back to middle.  Then from the right, we see a large tractor-trailer truck thing also veering over into the right lane from the ramp and then into the middle and then back to the right.

And then, from this tiny car low to the ground, from the driver's side across through the passenger's side window, we see a Poland Spring bottle fly out and up.  Not only does the bottle hit the truck, it hits the driver of the truck square on the forearm that is resting on the ledge of the open window.  It's not one of those small

20 oz bottles.  It's that large-drink-your-day's-worth-of-water-from-one-bottle sized bottle.  It hit him hard enough to bounce off and arc back over the middle lane and back towards the left lane, the bottle eventually resting for a second before being crushed by oncoming tires.

It's a physics miracle.

The truck driver?  Not happy about this turn of events.  The car driver had been yelling something as he threw the bottle--one-handed, I might add.  The truck driver had been yelling back.  He stopped mid-yell as the bottle hit him and he punched at it to get it away. 

The truck driver begins yelling more.  The car driver hears none of it because he's now weaving in and out of traffic, trying to get wherever he needs to get without being slowed down by silly things like laws and the threat of danger.

Not to be treated in such a manner, the truck driver decides that his truck is not a truck but is also a tiny sporty coup.  In this delusion, he continues waving his arm out his open window and yelling whatever it is he's been yelling as he ignores the lines in the road and acts as if the Belt Parkway is now one very wide lane meant for him only.  He starts weaving in and out of cars, chasing down the guy in the sports coup.

The truck--by another miracle--holds its own and almost catches up to the car. 

Eddie and I in our Cruz have turned our attention away from our late-day groove towards a play by play of our live and up-close version of Cannonball Run: The Water Bottle Debacle. We lose sight of the car and the truck around a curve, but then I see the truck ahead of us, getting off at our exit. 

Eddie speeds up to the exit to follow the truck, but the light at the end of the street is green and the truck is long gone.  We don't know the fate of the car, but I'm guessing it either made it to the Verrazano before the truck could catch it or it got off at our exit before the truck and the truck is still hunting him down, perhaps to thank him for the water. Maybe that's what he'd been yelling and why he'd been chasing: manners.

No Horse No Boxer

I hate horses.  This should be no surprise.  I know I've said this before.  Every time I start reading a story or a poem and a horse enters, I stop reading.  Every time I see a picture of a horse, I cluck my tongue and roll my eyes.  I really don't know where my aversion came from.  I do know that it's a pretty strong aversion.

Except for when those horses are set up at the gate and ready to run in a circle and possible win me money.

And so, as the Kentucky Derby fell on Cinco de Mayo, I found myself mixing Crystal Lite Mojito with Bacardi Rum from the freezer, OTB bet in hand. 

I don't choose horses based on the odds.  I refuse to even look at the odds.  I choose horses based on their names.  I chose El Padrino, thinking that it's a Spanish name and Mexicans speak Spanish, so it fit the day.  That's the definition of logic.

Eddie chooses horses based on odds as well as how the name would sound being yelled by the announcer as it came down the home stretch.

Everyone else randomly chose horses based on their own systems.  Everyone else pertains SMM and AF, J and C, and S and R, who we scrounged up at the last minute when Eddie found out he could get a driver for the night.  We threw together some crackers and cheese and called it a get-together.

We watched the race on delay because no one could show up until after 7 and Eddie had to make a trip to Brooklyn and back, so I was on media blackout, not wanting to find out who won before we watched.

We fast-fowarded through the hours of coverage.  We watched the race.  I lost.  Miserably.  My horse, I think, is still rounding the bend to the final stretch. His name didn't even come up once during the commentary.  I had flashbacks to last year's Preakness when my horse had a fever and then didn't want to even get into the gate.  The only difference?  That horse won.

Cutting my losses, we turned to boxing.  Mayweather was fighing Cotto.  The only thing I know about boxing is that the object is to beat the living crap out of someone else.  I understand why you have to be fit to do so, but I don't understand why the point of a sport needs to be to pummel someone.  Why can't they punch the punching bag and judge by the impact?  Or maybe they can each have a crack at the strong man game--just take the booth from the local carnival, put it in the ring, and try to make the bell go ding.  Just a thought.

So we watched the fight and it was filled with swollen faces and Justin Bieber.  That kids is everywhere.  I didn't bet on the boxing match, though.  I'd rather take my chances on the horses.  Maybe I'll eventually learn to like them.

And The Grand Prize Is....Nothing

Stupid stupid TD Bank is so, so stupid. 

That sentence is years of higher education in creative writing put to excellent use. However, no other word describes TD Bank as precisely as "stupid."  Here's why:

Eddie and I were standing in line for the longest time as usual.  They had two tellers and a long, long line and no one seemed to be moving.  We'd already visited the coin machine and had our ticket.  We weren't able to guess the amount of change within 1.99 so we didn't win a prize. 

When we finally got up to the teller, Eddie said we're making a cash deposit.  He had bills and he had dollar coins.  She told us we need to use the machine for the dollar coins, too.  I took the coins over to the machine.  I had time to put them through because the bank has no machine counter, and that means the teller has to manually count all the dollar bills.  There was even enough time for the machine to break down--as it always does--and to be fixed.

Because we'd separated the dollar coins from everything else, we knew exactly how much money was in the bag.  So when Penny the Animated Blonde Girl at the Penny Arcade Machine asked if I'd like to take a guess as to how much money we had in coins, I entered the EXACT AMOUNT, which is well within 1.99  because it is EXACT.

Penny congratulated me as my ticket printed because I'd guessed the right amount.  She told me that I would get a prize when I got to the teller.

I handed over the receipt to Eddie.  I'm a winner! I said quite loudly so pretty much everyone in the bank hear me.  He handed the receipt to the teller who had finally finished counting and seemed unimpressed with my winner-status.

She handed us a receipt of deposit. 

That?  Was apparently our prize because we got nothing else.  No lollipop that she could have simply plucked out of the lollipop holders that stand at either end of the teller counter and are covered in dust because no one in their right mind and even in their not so right mind would eat them.  No change purse.  Not even an extra penny.  The next time I go to the Penny Arcade, I might punch animated Penny in her animated face.  Or I'll punch this guy:

All About The Bread Business

Bread is returnable.

That is one of the many facts I never even thought of thinking about yet have learned over the past few months. Eddie and I took the Now Or Never Approach to attain one of his goals in owning a bread route, something he had done before when he was like 19 or 20. He'd told me stories about how he and his friend would pile up bread in the van and in one of their cars, drive around and deliver it like maniacs, buy some butter, have a snack, and then go out to the club.

My how things have changed in the bread business since then. Now, the bakery has more than three types of bread.

There are over 4000 types of bread. Guestimating based on what I've learned so far.

The bakery he bought the route from has an online system of inputting orders. Every day, some orders change. Every day, some orders stay the same. Every day, invoicing must happen prior to inputting orders. Every day, calls need to be made to some places, sometimes to simply remind them that they need to call back to place their order. All this needs to happen in a window of about two hours. There are over 45 stores involved. It's all very confusing.

Bread is yummy. Okay, that's more of an opinion, but I've never been a big bread-eater, and now, I'm telling Eddie to stop bringing home certain breads because I will devour them all in one sitting. On the list: croissants, pretzel croissants, cranberry pecan heros, wheat bread heros, and sweet rolls. Also: bagels of any kind.

There's always extra bread. Fact. We don't know where it comes from. We don't know how it happens. It just is. Maybe something magic happens in the box when no one is looking and the yeast just reproduces.

Eddie is a good samaritan. We've been giving the extra bread to my dad who volunteers at the church's pantry. The sisters there are very happy about the shelves being stocked with bread. We also distribute bread to the neighbors and to the people who work around the corner at the school my mom retired from last year. Everyone is very happy about the bread. On some Mondays, I bring bread to work. Sometimes people eat it. Sometimes they don't. It's a crap shoot.

Probably the most harrowing times thus far have involved vehicles. One night, I went into Brooklyn with Eddie to drop off invoices for a driver who drives the route for him once a week (when he collects, he drives the route all night and then goes straight to collecting during the day, so he's awake for over 24 hours straight, so finding someone to drive the next night is kind of helpful--also, when he collects money, he also collects the bread that the store is returning. Because bread? Is returnable). He was organizing the back of the truck. I climbed into the back and swept. He said, Hey this is our truck honey! Yeay. We own a massive truck filled with crumbs. Also? Kind of exciting.

Until the truck decided it did not want to cooperate. A truck with a flat tire at 2 AM is not a good situation. Even in New York, where everything is always open, he could not find someone to help with the flat for about an hour.

A few days later while collecting, his car got towed. He needs to collect from a restaurant where there's virtually no parking. He hopped out for a minute and the guy already had it up on the tow truck by the time Eddie came out. The woman at the restaurant followed Eddie out, screaming at the tow truck guy about how he was mean and needed to put Eddie's car down.

The next day, Eddie got a parking ticket while he was unloading bread at the super market.

And then, the truck stopped working. Transition kaput. Over and done. Thankfully, it happened right after he finished his deliveries for the day. He's now using a brand new truck, bakery-owned, that does not chug chug chug along but actually runs well and doesn't gulp gas. The first night the truck was used, it was by the other driver; during that run, all the racks the bakery had put into the new truck from the old collapsed. The driver told Eddie it was a good thing Eddie wasn't driving because, as a new comer, he probably would have panicked. Agreed. Eddie got his friend to install new racks and the truck is stylin and functional.

New trucks are better than old trucks.

The best part about the business is the stories. Eddie has encountered many new people, most of which are not the kind he would seek out. The stories are wonderful. In the first week of the route, he got a hug from a drunk homeless man who then tried to steal bread off of the truck. Since then, he's encountered a hooker who asks for bagels and then complains if the bagels aren't cinnamon raisin, many drunk people who shout out Yo Breadman!, a woman who screamed out "We should all be like Michael Fuckin' Jackson!" as she roamed the neighborhood, a guy running with a pipe, a guy running after the guy running with the pipe, and several people who ask, hey do you have any bread?

People like free bread.

We're getting into the groove of things. I've helped him figure out how to use Excel with my very limited knowledge of it. What used to take hours to complete now takes a little under one. We both know the bagel order by heart. He can tell the difference between two types of bread by their weight when they look exactly alike--and a lot of bread looks exactly alike. It's a niche business. It's an art.

Moth Dance Challenge

Going over the same dances week after week can sometimes be boring. The challenges need to come from other source. The hand-dance challenge S and I invented was exciting, but that can't sustain the level of excitement all the time. Thankfully, a semi-warm night and some open windows in the dance room offered a different challenge. Enter the moths.

Moths are icky. They float. They flitter. They meander around the air, all drunken-like. So during a dance that doesn't necessarily have any particular hand movements, some of the dancers, including S and me, were flailing our arms around. Moth attack! Moth attack!

Jean? Was oblivious to any of this.

Also oblivious? The woman across the room whom S still thinks has never attended a class before even though she's attended almost all of them.

Everyone else was on a steady path of moth avoiding. At one point, during a dance that involved kicking, S had a moth flying around her feet and then swiftly dive down to the floor and play dead. I was laughing hysterically. S was thinking I was laughing at her until the music ended and I was able to point out the pretend dead moth. How did I know it was pretending? She stepped near it and it wiggled and wriggled its way back up into the air and swept itself away.

To keep the fun going, Jean put on the Rod Stewart song so we could dance Chronomatic. Is that the name of the dance? In my mind, yes. In the real world, no. I stated this name to S and she was like, it's called Auto Moves. Like that makes any more sense. She asked where I'd come up with Chronomatic and I really didn't know. As we danced, I pointed out, hey! It totally fits into the hook!

"Bring over some of your old motown records" becomes "bring over some of that old chronomatic!!!" Ahh, Rod Stewart is fun.

Rally Gal

Teaching can be rewarding. It can be painful and tedious. It can be frustrating. For the most part, though, it's rewarding. Plus, I'm pretty good at it. I really would love to go to work, teach, grade, and go home (where I would then grade some more). However, that's not reality. The reality is that there's a whole other side to working at a community college--the bureaucratic side. I just want to do my job, but to do my job successfully, I sometimes have to get involved in things I never really thought about before--public forums, union strategies, pledges, campaigns, and petitions. It's all very daunting and it takes away part of the fun of teaching. Teaching is fun? Yes, yes it is (even when I'm grading the 50th essay of the day that is also the 50th essay that uses there instead of their even though we specifically went over the difference and how to figure out which one to use every single class for the past week--yes, even then).

Because I strongly believe that I can't let others fight a battle for me, I found myself at a rally on campus. It was a rally for students, formed by faculty who want to stop some of the poor decision-making that is not conducive to education and who want to make some more positive changes so that we can teach successfully (you know, like not killing sections of classes during scheduling so that students won't get closed out of classes they need to graduate and so that the max number of students in a class doesn't exceed the number of seats in a classroom--you know, mysterious and outrageous ideas known as "logic").

The organizers of the rally are strong union members. The attendees of the rally whom I recognized were mostly from my department; my department is a huge entity of about 100 full time and 100 adjunct instructors, so we have a huge voice. Many members of my department are also hard-core protestors, some from the generation where activism was a lifestyle more than any other available path of life, real Che Guevara types who I could see starting the day with a solid chant about freedom to wake up and then an hour of petition signing and letters to the government before going to bed. They are the real deal.

So when I found myself standing on the quad (which I did not even know was a quad until I wandered along with a few other people who also did not know we had a quad and bumped into the organizers who proclaimed, yes this is the quad, and I thought, wow I thought it was a football field), I realized I was so out of my league in the protest department. It was chilly. We moved into the sun. It was still chilly. Yet faculty still arrived and stayed, which is kind of a statement in and of itself. Standing in the cold shows resolve in some sort of way, defiance against forces over which we have no control.

That, really, was the only empowerment I felt. The organizers handed out signs. The signs were about my size, so I declined, thinking that if the wind picked up any more, I'd be sailing away with said sign. My vision of me floating on a wind gust was interupted by a call of, Why don't we start with some chants to warm up?

Uh-oh. I didn't realized there'd be chanting. It was then that I had another realization: I really had no clue as to what to expect. So chanting. There you go. Of course, there would be chanting. I looked around at our circle of maybe 100 strong (I read later on that it was about 100, but to me, it could have been 40 or 300; I can never estimate numbers like crowd attendees, age, height, or weight). This group seemed to small for a chant. I am highly uncomfortable with chanting in small crowds. Since this was my first rally, I wasn't going to suggest we forego the chanting. I went with it.

At that time, two black Chevy camaros were pulling up along the street beside us. They were unmarked public safety cars. Seriously? Seriously. There was also one of their electric carts, clearly marked, on the sidewalk next to them, I suppose to impede any kind of protesting beyond our planned path. Huh, this was really happening.

Then the chanting began. 2! 4! 6! 8! We need support to educate!

Okay, I can follow that. It rhymes. I'm a poet (though I do not like rhyming poetry very much).

3! 5! 24! 876! Whoa! Odd number chanting? This? Was something I could not do. I simply could not count by twos in odd numbers. It wasn't happening. Some other people were doing it, but also, I think, I hope, I wasn't the only one struggling. Why didn't we start with 1? Why start with 3? I think it had something to do with the rhyming, but why couldn't we just stick with the 2-4-6-8 and leave it at that? The entire two years of cheering I did as a kid was finally going to come in handy!

But then they changed the chant. Whose college is this? The community's college! The question-response chant can be tricky if you don't know what the response is. This new chant brought me back to my participation in Take Back The Night one semester in college when a bunch of us walked the path along campus and into town, stopping in places where women had been raped and assaulted. The leaders would call out questions and we would all answer a firm NO! no matter what they asked, which worked until the one question that did not make any sense and some people shouted a No! when the answer was supposed to be a Yes! while others didn't shout anything and it all kind of lost its purpose, so we called someone back at the dorms to come pick us up so we could get hot chocolate.

The chant of Whose college is this? worked until more people showed up. They apparently thought the right answer was Our college! instead of The community's college! So when the question arose, everyone answered differently. I didn't answer at all. I was still uncomfortable with the chanting in small groups situation.

My colleague standing next to me, a Protestor, said that she'd told them to start with the chants everyone knows. I gave her a blank face. She was like, You know--Tell me what democracy looks like! Blank face. This is what democracy looks like! I was like, Yeah, I don't know that chant, B. Then she said another one that went something like Together! United! We will not something something! Blank faced, I said, Yeah, I don't know that one either. They were, however, easier to remember than these custom-made chants.

When the speech-makers came, they got us started in listening and responding to cries of change with either cheers or boos. Then the PR leader told us to read the orange side of the signs everyone was holding. Ah, reading. This I could do. We read what was on the sign very loudly. Then we read what was on the blue sign of the sign. Scripts I can follow. I've never been one for wanting to memorize; that's why I never went into acting (yes, THAT'S the reason).

Once the speeches were over, we were told to follow our picketing leader. I don't know if anyone knew who that was, but we all managed to get into a line and walk towards the semi-circle where the administration offices were. That's when the unmarked cars that were clearly public safety sprung into action, one car zooming around so that each end of the semi-circle had a car stationed at it. I don't know what this was accomplishing. One of the leaders had a bullhorn and was shouting chants into it. The other leader did not have a bullhorn and was leading a different chant.

Then we walked. In a big circle, we walked, sometimes chanting different things, and sometimes chanting similar things, and sometimes not chanting anything but chatting and laughing and conversing while carrying signs or not carrying signs lest the wind take us away from the circle. One student walked through our circle and said, I don't want to get involved and you all should get raises. Heh heh. You know, that's what a lot of students usually tell me when they get into salaries. I never ever ever bring up how much I get paid, but every once in a while, students will bring it up either in class or during office hours or even in the hallway, and they'll say that teachers should get paid more. I don't know what they think I get paid or if they even think about it, but they say it anyway unprovoked and that's kind of a nice thing to think about when I'm on essay 49, on the verge of the frustration-shakes from making the same correction at least 30 times: put them on a pedestal, not petal stool.

One woman came out on the steps of her building, crossed her arms, and shook her head at us. That made me feel silly and then angry. If people protest, they obviously have a good reason. Why else walk around in a circle, holding signs that could get caught on the wind, freezing, chanting? They want to get a message across for a very important reason. Instead of standing in judgement, maybe listen to what they have to say and then try to find a solution. Take that, judgy lady.

On maybe the 20th lap and after suggesting to no one in particular that perhaps a silent rally would speak volumes since I was still feeling awkward about the size of the group combined with the chanting, my officemate and I ducked out of the circle and headed back to the office. We felt that we'd done our part. Some people were arriving late, so it's not like the protest was dwindling. I felt that we had been heard enough and since only a handful of students had passed by, we weren't generating any further buzz.

Too soon! I miss everything! Towards the end of the rally, the picketing leaders lead everyone up the path the electric public safety cart had blocked. I guess it moved or they went around it. They marched to the plaza where more of a crowd would see them, where students became inquistive and active. I found this out in an email the next day. I wondered why we hadn't simply just marched on the plaza to begin with: 1. we all know where the plaza is, which leads me to 2. we all know we actually HAVE a plaza as opposed to having a quad which I don't think many people knew. Since it is a football field.

So what's the take-away? Well, a bunch of muddled stuff. I felt like I did something. Even if I wasn't keen on chanting and felt a little silly, I was still a body and a body means a crowd and a crowd means a presence and a presence means a voice, and a voice is important. Power to the people! Hey, that's a chant, right? Maybe I learned a little more than I thought.