ivan

early openings are like hand-jobs from hottie strangers - eagerly to be hoped for, not to be counted upon

you can have my book when you pry it from my cold dead gay cock

5/9 - day 13 - way off my pace from last year weeks on end it seems union bidness dominating my thoughts - so sad, prime weather for poaching saturday at noon - the revenge rolls into a sun-soaked parking lot as i make parley w/ long-passed students n side climbing - love all dem new routes - we do one n' enjoy life - a foolish rap back down - jim gib-jabbering soon therafter - a quick run up the alpine route and we top-route the shit 'round stone soup the summer soon upon us - what fool sets this sorta shit aside?

anything worth knowing 'bout's been turned into pictures already

books are for faggoty educated types

i thought ole'dan had quite climbing ice?

hardly earth-shattering - 2 winters ago I fell on pitch 2 at the eyebrow traverse when a fixed nut (holy shit, somebody other than me climbed my route! ) popped - it's a low angle pitch and pretty much anywhere on it you get banged up if you fall, potentially quite badly - in that case I flensed off most of the tip of one of my fingers - no big deal, ole'boy Geoff finished it off for me - couldn't pick me nose for weeks though

5/3 - day 12 - off my pace for the year - too busy doing other cool things - a trip to tower rock - union agitation on an increasingly grand scale - a week in red rocks and city of rocks today was stone soup - went extremely smoothly - bryan did p2, which i still haven't led since hurting myself on it last year - i was sorta dreading p5, with all of its fixed funky knifeblades, but they all held, so i reckon it's all good? anybody know what's going w/ the evergreens in the gorge? am i crazy or does damn near every pine near beacon show serious blight right now? tons of brown on most of the trees for miles - looks likely to burn like mad this summer if it continues.

i'm from the south and...uh...yeah....that about sums it up for us - nice to see you're not all alone in the world

there's something to be said for traditions? 45 years ago today the same citizens of the same town were burning the joint down to protest nixon's invasion of cambodia - i'm willing to bet the same good people will have a hair up their ass 45 years hence

holy shit, you really can learn something from listening to the other side! never did make that mental connection [video:youtube]

i'm for anything that makes the walk in lighter

sage or not so much, i thought old bob was a product of somebody else's edu-mucation system? carry on... ...but wait: wasn't fdr a socialist? and if he's on the currency, can he really be such a cock-sucker?

love's a strong word - i'm not sure i actually love anything, at least not for more than 60-90 seconds equally corny - my work ethic was beat into me as a kid - wehther you like it or not, do the thing set before you as well as you can, preferably w/a smile and an ironic sense of humor - the immortal words of colonel saito "be happy in your work"

so can a massive brain injury, which i assume you remember our old boy suffering years ago - shit, i've always liked how much it chilled him out - a right nice n' reasonable fellow by comparision- some of dem bitches 'round here could stand similar improvements

Something tells me I wouldn't last very long in that environment. Thought about teaching at a community college--but they really don't make shit. meh, you might be surprised- the drop out rate is high, which is, you know, a sign maybe that it's worth paying well for, since so many can't seem to do it w/o suffering a massive freak-out the challenge for a teacher of government and history and current events (the area you'd be inclined to i imagine) of course is divorcing yourself as much as possible from your own point of view and finding validity and respect for others, skills not easily learning on the interwebs- putting up with mother-fuckers is mostly what defines the job ultimately, and it is corny, it IS a fun job, once you learn to filter out the bullshit - kids make me laugh and i see plenty of myself in them, especially the ones that annoy the piss out of me - like all of us, they're just trying to figure out how to survive w/o losing their shit, and often fail in the most spectacular of ways.... yeah though, teaching community college is like being a voluntary prison guard i suspect

shit, you should become a teacher

odd - your constant mistrust of government would indicate otherwise - why would a strident capitalist cum congressman shed this curmudgeonly behavior exactly? your claim of a "generous pension plan" flies in the face of plenty of public pensions that have gotten the chop over the past few years - i have to have confidence that the promises will be kept when it comes time as, as said, i can't save independently, but do you not think i'm setting myself up for a massive failure by assuming the people of your political persuasion won't carve into it w/ a chainsaw when they get the opportunity?

performance in the real-world of education is pretty simple, and not something that my or any other teachign union i'm aware of gets in the way of - showing up to work on time and sober, keeping your hands off the product, responding promptly and in an informed fashion to requests from parents/principals/colleagues/etc, treating kids fairly and equally, etc. - these are no-brainers - but again, test scores don't get at those basics.

wonderful. the capitalist system is great in a number of arenas, especially ones where pushing out widgets is key. paying workers based on how many they can get out the door an hour is perfectly logical in many employment areas. human beings aren't really widgets though, and defining performance in the educational world is frought with difficulty - any given class of 30 kids i teach will have a very ride range of needs, many of which are hard to fashion a metric to - some kids need a brilliant professor type to push them to the pinnacle of Socratic introspection and maybe that can be measured in a meaningful way (ironically, i'm not sure the almighty socrates would agree though) - far more need guidance counselors, social workers, remedial tutors, reading coaches, psychologists, surrogate parents, patient listeners, etc. how do you create a simple, fair, easily explained test to measure that? how, in an environoment as ate-up by politics as any other profession, do you keep politics from creeping into the measurement technique? do you really assume that, if a patient dies, it's his doctors fault? should cops be retained only on the basis of how many tickets they write? is it the fire-fighters fault when he shows up to a building already burning? can every important job really boil down to something that's on a balance sheet? teachers and schools do need oversight and we should use metrics as part of that -graduation rates, students long-term outcomes in terms of college graduation and employment, ap/sat scores, community satisfaction, etc., these are all important things, but no single factor is prime, nor does any particularly get at the value of a single employee in the system. pretending otherwise is facile and foolish, the product of wishing the world was a much, much simpler place than it is.

many of the conservative members of this board are fans of self-government and enlightenment principles - i'm a foolish optimist, but i do think they can be won over to unionism on that basis unions, i'd suggest, are just another organ of human self-government - like any organ of government, its important they should be checked and balanced as, being composed of humans, there's a tendency to run a muck if allowed to (smith's great quote on this subject i'll let jayb put in if ever he sees this) - i don't pretend the world would be perfect if the teachers turned robespierres - unions should be self-policing, democratic, as corruption-free as any human institution can be - they should have to be able to convince other governmental bodies to comply with them, not be able to ignore them all together and do as they wish is it surprising that the same section of our country that so doggedly supported human slavery should, in the 21st century, be equally determined to deny working people the right to organize and oppose their masters?

ask my many climber partners how often i've done this - except pat - holy shit, i couldn't begin to fit the bag of shit i have to deal w/ on a typical basis into that space coffin of his agreed w/ many of the above statements - yeah, you don't expect to get rich teaching - hanging on to the middle class life you likely inherited is good enough - you understand that the stability of the job, once you've proved yourself, and the warm-fuzzies, and the vacation time (which by euro standards is common to pretty much everybody, but in work-obsessed america is somehow indecent) has to be a big part of the compensation - you understand you'll need to work until you're gray and old and probably physically (and financially) incapable of doing much beyond watching "wheel of fortune" re-runs for a couple of years before dying in some shitty old-person home that said, you still expect to be able to save for your kids college, pay off your college loans, afford health-care, have a small house with a bit of a yard, drive a car that's not going to kill your kids, feed your kids something other than baloney, save enough for a simple retirement and generally live the white-picket fence american dream i guess that's the product of a radical mind though?

no cost of living increase in 6 years = my income this year is 15% less than it was 6 years ago - no increases in health care coverage further eroded that the reality is, for a family of 4 w/ both of us working, we're lucky if we can save 100$ a month for retirement or emergencies - it wouldn't take much of a disaster for things to get real grim real fast.

"big things have small beginnings" is the relevant line from "lawrence of arabia" i believe

Yeah, all the disgruntled stoners will suddenly get off the couch and march in the streets LOL 4000 pissed off (mainly) libturds managed to encircle the state capitol on Saturday...perhaps they just had an extra big bowl of Wheaties that morning?