Archive for November, 2009

I have been considering a question lately: is the road to success paved with working on what you love?

Some seem to believe that you should only do what you like – implying that  it is done to the exclusion of things you don’t like to do. In the abstract, this sounds about right – who would spend hoards of time doing something they hate? One argument is that anyone who has been forced to work out of some necessity will likely scoff, as necessity is the mother of the unpleasant.

However, if the work is to be tenable in the long run, it must be relatively pleasant, lest it become the bane of one’s existence – a situation that I could relate to, a situation that could hardly be defined as success in any way.

However, let us point out, success is NOT “doing your dream job.” There are not enough dream jobs in the world for that to work. For example, take writers. There are mountains of people who would love to write for a living, yet every major city generally only has one newspaper; every state only so many magazines. Only so many books can be printed as people will only demand so much. Thus, those who wish to write for a living are generally foiled. Some succeed; most don’t. Or take poets. Is it humanly possible to make a good living writing poetry? How about writing music? Even these pursuits must encompass some of the tedious, the belabored, the demeaning. And even those who find more ordinary jobs and manage to love them – can they really love every minute? If they don’t, are they a failure?

I wrote this post because I feel there is sometimes resentment against pre-med or Med, I suppose) students. We are seen as the opposite of those doing only what we love, instead we are sometimes seen as competitive raptors, chasing a high salary and relatively high social standing, those gods of men. We are narrow-minded, greedy even. We somehow choke down all the information we must know to proceed, all for a one-way path to financial success. However, there are other ways to financial success, ways that probably don’t require the entire decade spanning your 20′s to fulfill. It’s true, without having some toleration for the material and the work, one might be doomed. without aptitude for it, certainly. The chances of someone who loathes all things medical, biological, chemical, and statistical making it out of their residency at the usual age of about 30 are pretty slim. They might even be pitied, as their life, one of disliking their work, will not be success. On the other hand, one who loves those studies will likely still find they embark on unpleasant activities all the time.

Our decision to go down that path is multifaceted, bound up in interest for work itself, perhaps feeling a penchant for it based on experience. Yes, we know the other benefits, but that is not all we are after. For we pre-meds have a job in mind, one that we want, and one that we are pretty sure we’ll enjoy. We want to be doctors, and we do what we must to get there.

From a press release by the City:

A new 20-member task force will guide the planning and design effort for Fort Worth’s future modern streetcar system.

The Regional Transportation Council has allocated $1.6 million in federal funds, and the City of Fort Worth and the Fort Worth Transportation Authority (The T) have allocated $200,000 each for planning and design of a streetcar system to complement the regional rail system.

Modern Streetcar Task Force appointees are:

• Nina Petty, Task Force Chair, Greater Fort Worth Real Estate Council
• Bob Parmelee, Fort Worth Transportation Authority
• Roy Brooks, Tarrant County Commissioners Court
• Joy Webster, XTO Energy, representing the TIF Board
• Scott Rule, Tarrant County Hospital District, representing the TIF Board
• Fran McCarthy, Central City Redevelopment Committee
• Phillip Poole, Associated Businesses of the Cultural District
• Andy Taft, Downtown Fort Worth Inc.
• Johnny Campbell, Sundance Square
• Paul Paine, Fort Worth South Inc.
• Andre McEwing, Southeast Fort Worth Inc.
• J.D. Granger, Trinity River Vision Authority
• David DuBois, Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Adam Adolfo, Artes de la Rosa
• Janet Saltsgiver, neighborhood representative
• Rod Erakovich, Texas Wesleyan University
• Pam Minick, Historic Stockyards
• Jamie Terrell, local transit user
• Michael Morris, North Central Texas Council of Governments
• Carlos De La Torre, Oncor

The Task Force will guide the planning and design effort, recommend an initial streetcar route and submit a finance plan to City Council, The T board of directors, Tarrant County Commissioners Court and other stakeholders.

Background

In 2008, the Fort Worth City Council appointed a Modern Streetcar Study Committee to investigate the feasibility of a modern streetcar system. The committee’s fact-finding trip to Oregon and Washington determined that a streetcar system is desirable for Fort Worth.

The system would connect Downtown and Trinity Railway Express to adjacent mixed-use districts.

Preliminary cost estimate is $20 million per track mile and includes design, construction, utilities, vehicles and a maintenance facility. The total cost of the initial project, if built as recommended by the study committee, is estimated at $250 million. The initial route would rely primarily on multiple sources of local funding, including existing tax-increment financing districts and new or existing public improvement districts.

Fort Worth has joined with the North Central Texas Council of Governments and theCity of Dallas in a regional grant application that could provide limited federal funding for Fort Worth’s streetcar system.

This week Francis over at Food and Fort Worth posted on a review in U.S. and World Report‘s  “eight commercial chain restaurants that get it right “. I thought of adding to the considerable string of comments about the various eateries, but I actually didn’t have too much to say, since we almost never eat at big chain restaurants — the reason is I believe that in general their food is insipid, overpriced, and unhealthy. I’ve never completely gotten over a story from The Learning Channel about the top ten ingredients in chain restaurant food, which discusses the amount of fat, salt and not sugar but high fructose corn syrup used in their products.

At the same time, we watched in the last month as our beloved City Market, in Bluebonnet Village, was assumed into the Albertson’s chain and the gourmet food items and local workers we had come to love disappeared. I’m afraid to say it but  yes, there is a connection.

Big Food, as in restaurant chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Albertson’s, has become too big. It has gone beyond providing a large-volumn alternative to local stores into the realm of driving local stores out.  This has the extended effect of driving local workers and local suppliers out. Our beloved OB Macaroni was in a bin at the “new” Albertsons last week, being sold off for pennies. Why should they continue to stock the products of a local supplier when then can send back to Battleground, Washington or where ever they go to to bring huge lots of whatever the rest of America is eating to Texas?

Where will we get O.B Pasta now? A local institution for about 100  years, O.B. Pasta is just as good as premium chain store brands, is cheaper, and is local. College Girl and I feel despair as we see their business and the business of other local food suppliers endangered by the over growth of the chains.

Is there anything that can be done? I’m not sure. As anyone who reads this blog is probably aware, I’m kept entirely occupied with trying to learn to be a second grade public school teacher to contribute to the support of my own children, and help the ones in my class too. But I have to say the truth: when I heard City Market was going down, an idea began to form. This idea was to find out about whether we could form a local food co-op. These types of stores have flourished in other communities and provide an opportunity for cooperation between local buyers and vendors.  Fort Worth does not have one that I know of.

Does anyone else out there feel a desire to bond together to purchase food wholesale from local suppliers?

Is it possible? Of course. I have started reasearch about this on the Cooperative Grocers Information Network site. Is anyone else interested in cooperative food purchase as a way of keeping it local? Pete? Kevin? Anyone?

Sunday is an interesting day. Sometimes it’s pretty bad. Sometimes it’s good. Today was pretty good. I went to mass, which is something these days I get a great deal of joy doing, especially at my home church.

My home church and mass are quite interesting – ot’s a unique place.

First off, we are celebrating our Hundredth Anniversary. The church was built in 1909 , with dark bricks with a belltower; mostly rectangular with rows of multi-story stained glass windows, which depict the glorious and joyful mysteries of the Rosary. Inside, the ceiling is decorated, and old wooden pews and a traditional marble communion rail give it character.

However, it’s the people there that give it the most character. The church is down near the hospital district, and the population is almost entirely Hispanic. Fewer than half of the masses are in Spanish, however. Every Sunday one of the prayer groups serves breakfast, gorditas and tacos to die for, after mass, in the basement of the old school building.  The ushers, none of whom I know but all of whom I have a special appreciation for, are mostly  in the Knights of Columbus;  many wear jackets that say “Knights on Bikes.”

Yes, I’m serious! They have their leather jackets and boots and keys hanging at the belt-line, as they carry the offering baskets and stand at the ends of the pews to direct communion traffic, and stand at the back of the church, like sentinels. They are a small but significant presence. They stand tall and proud, and for me, all the ushers and leaders in the church represent a certain stability as they are there, week after week, fulfilling their duty. There is also a complement of others serving on the altar: the Deacon, our current Seminarian, and a few others who are always there, dressed in white or beige, directing the altar servers and aiding in the mass.

There are a lot of children and babies in the congregation every week. It’s gotten better, but the noise used to be a problem – it’s a large church and the rustlings and movements and whispered conversations of so many can get quite loud. Father Bristow, the pastor and sole priest, chastised us repeatedly a while back and now it’s better.

And there lies one of the most important aspects of the parish, Father. He’s unique in that he is married ( in fact today he mentioned his grandson goes to TCU, and was on TV yesterday when ESPN Gameday came to there – yes, mention of football came before the homily, as he began with the Horned Frogs hand sign). A converted Anglican, Father Bristow grew up in a little town in Texas, which I know because almost every homily begins “when I was young growing up…” He is now the pastor of a church of thousands, and sometimes I wonder how he has the time to take care of all the administrative and care tasks integral to his position.

His homilies and general attitude blend, for me at least, taking religion seriously while considering the reality of people’s lives. He doesn’t tell us to never listen to the radio and put bags over our heads, but he doesn’t ignore that there are real issues and real problems in the world, obstacles for religious and moral people.

Also, he is intent on restoring St. Mary’s to its former grandeur. We are in the process of cleaning all of the stained glass, installing a hundred-year old pulpit, and, hopefully soon, peeling back the paint on the vestibule to uncover what mystery lays behind. In fact, the proceeds of a recent carnival were all for the continuing restoration.

Part of me wonders at this – is it prodigal? how can this money be spent on paint and windows when there are other causes, other philanthropies? Then I see the church, and know how important it is to have pride in your faith and your place of worship. To respect it, and to respect the past. One window has been redone, and now the light shines through, faint shadows of the trees can be seen waving behind St. Matthew. It brings me great joy, and it brings me here. It is important work. If we don’t take care of our building, our history, the importance of it, of coming here,  could slip away, sand through fingers. My Faith, the Catholic Faith, is one with a long history; without that history, there is little left. I am glad I can be a part of its continuity.

I am sitting in the library (not a rare occurrence), and am getting antsy and wanting to go home (similarly not rare). But I really want to write a good post, and I just wrote a whole one that was all rambling and weird, so I tossed it and am going to write a different, even more weird and rambling that the last. Hahaha.

Things have been fairly lame lately – I have had this low-level cold and headache for like a week, people at home are all generally a)overtired and b)overworked, leading to c)overwhelm on a mass scale. It’s weird how when you’re really getting things done, things seem to be such a convoluted mess. Industry industry. But basically the worst is the monotony that everyone falls into (okay, I’m assuming everyone does) in the middle of the term. You look back and see weeks and weeks of the same, and look forward and see…more….and your reserves of energy, motivation, and whatever is the opposite of apathy are dwindling. However, some things have saved me.

1. The radio – every day for about fifteen minutes when I am driving I switch between Jack FM, Mix (which plays mostly newer soft pop) and KTCU, which I listen to when the other stations are on ad breaks or playing something obnoxious (it plays mostly soft music, which always works, and has hardly any ad breaks)

2. My siblings. Last night, I came home to find that V, my high-school aged brother, had come home sick early. He lay wrapped in a sheet on his bed, groaning. I got him some medicine to relieve his symptoms, and told him if he wanted to talk he could come in my room, as I was trying to clean it up. I left to take care of something, and came back to find, yup, he’d moved. The next thing I knew they were all in my room (A, the youngest, would fall asleep on the bed). We sat around chatting about I-don’t-know-what. Music probably. Anyways, it was just really nice.

3. My dog, who has been a lot friendlier since she started getting frequent walks.

4. Discovering I could do some schoolwork while listening to music, as long as it wasn’t memorization work and the music was fairly innocuous (preferably without words).

5. Going to meetings to become a Hospital Minister. Once finished, I’ll go as a representative of St. Mary’s and visit Catholic patients at Harris Methodist, downtown.

6. Really good music playlists. I have a few that I just love. They make me so happy. I think this is something that works for everyone.

7. Saying prayers every night, even if it’s a struggle to stay on target and not drift off into daydreams

8. And, most of all, things like this: I have O-Chem lab every Wednesday. This week, as usual, it had been fairly tedious, and I was there after 5, when it’s supposed to end, again. However, as I was waiting for my final product to distill – it was taking all day I swear – I looked around at the motley group of perhaps a half-dozen people who were similarly still hanging around. And I saw friends. Every one of them was one. I literally thought that – “friends! look! they’re all friends!” (Yup, you just got a first-person glance into T’s brain right there. I’m so complex, I know) That afternoon, one of them had taught me, to great embarrassment, to nod my head and lift my hands in just the right way, as I needed to be more “hood” and, further, I would do it every time I saw him. I don’t know why, it was just a really great moment. I wanted to have people over for a dinner since my birthday is coming up (actually, I’ve been wanting to for a while and figured that’d be a good excuse) but I never got down to organizing it. Maybe next week. That’s something to break the monotony!

Well, that’s all I have. It wasn’t riotously funny, or just riotous, but maybe next time. Cheers!

If you’re wondering what happened to College Girl, and whether she forgot her readers, or just got distracted, or both, or perhaps, on any given day this fall, made the mistake of taking the last bagel on Saturday morning and was never seen again, let me give you an anecdote to explain my state of mind that will make the whole thing make sense (alright, it’s only a partial excuse. Laziness and something along the line of “I haven’t been there in so long it’ll just be weird” account for much of my absence. Also, writing regularly seems to be one of those things that is self-perpetuating, and by that I mean to infer that when you don’t write it is self-exploiting, as all the ideas that come from nowhere when the knowledge you need to write is hanging about in the mists somehow don’t show up when you pretty much don’t care, because….)

Well, because of things like this.

Today, as I was starting a lab writeup – my tenth this semester – I started typing the date. And instead of “12 November”, “12 September” came out. I looked at it, and thought – “no wait, it’s not September…or October. November! There we go.” Then I started – wait — it’s November? When in the bloody blank did it get to be then? I’m turning 20 in four days? FOUR DAYS? WHAT?! (Insert some silent profanity here) Because I swear it was a week until my birthday yesterday, heck, it was years since I was supposed to turn 20 just a little while ago…

Apparently, a gigantic wormhole – you know, the one with all the socks and good pencils in it – jumped me sometime this fall, and deposited me down in the basement of a library about to embark on the oh so exciting and ever thrilling process of writing a lab. Then, I looked in my binder, and saw the last nine writeups, and this explanation had to be discounted. Perhaps – perhaps! - an alien took my place and did it for me…but no, there’s my crummy handwriting, as illegible as ever. ‘Truth is, I faintly remember all those weeks and months…there was the day I made pumpkin pie, that one time I went to a football game, and a few other moments where, for a brief second, like a reverse eclipse, I actually had a life. What was a doing the rest of the time? Well, can I tell you…thirty chemistry lectures, 27 of which I had listened to again. About four hundred pages of Philosophy to be copied. And the rest was frantic racing about between the printers in the library, my planner, and the Albertson’s where I go when I forget my lunch. Some other stuff was thrown in there, too.

Well, at least I got that off my chest, and I’m back, right? I guess, barring having any kind of real-life exposure of any great magnitude, I can always wax poetic about it here, right?

Not that I’m complaining. At the end of the semester, for all this, I’ll have five little letters, one for each class! written in capitals, too! That’ll be it. The sum total. The reason for my existence about ninety percent of the time. Yippyyayyo!

I’ve now completed three and a half weeks at my new school. Since I am now in a self-contained 2nd grade, I have to prepare instruction in all the subjects — and there are six, readng, spelling, writing, science, math and social studies — every day. We have team planning so I don’t have to write up the lesson plans, but I do have to interpret the other teacher’s plans for my students. And then do all the grading.

This is a demanding list of duties, but luckily I have a comrade in arms in my classroom all day every day — a Promethian board. This board is a touch sensitive computer screen about 6 x 4 feet in size — and is my blackboard. Every evening, I write out page after page of “flipcharts” which are the individual screens you can show on the computer.  There’s  one for procedure when students first come in, one introducing the message and words of the day, one reiterating our rules and another about who will go into what independent work center. There will probably be a chart or two I’ve cooked up for science or social studies. The longest one-day flipchart I’ve made so far was 17 pages.  Each night I go home, with the laptop that goes with the board (which because of it’s size stays at the school) and write up the next day’s directions and diagrams.

Some teachers don’t take the laptop home. The idea is that if the laptop won’t go back into the “docking station” or place where you attach it into the Promethian board, you’d be in trouble. So, what am I going to do if that happens?

Not sure. My general attitude right now is if I can’t access my flipcharts I am so dead. I do have an overhead and the math and writing and reading are still done on paper at the indivudual students’ desks. But in modern education theory, planning is everything, and if planning is everything the Promethian is huge. It makes planning communicable to students in a way never before possible. I didn’t have one at my earlier school, but I can’t imagine doing without it now.

Without the board, I’d feel like a bird with clipped wings.  Because at least for today, my instructional method is all Promethian, all the time.

From a Fort Worth City press release of Nov. 6, 2009

A proposal to amend the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance to prohibit discrimination based on transgender, gender identity or gender expression will be considered by the City Council during its regular meeting on Tuesday. The existing ordinance prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation based on sex, race, national origin, age, disability, religion, color and sexual orientation.

“Fort Worth has always taken the lead when it comes to recognizing the inherent value of each of its residents,” said Estrus Tucker, chairman of the city’s Human Relations Commission. “Over the past four decades, the HRC has worked to make the city more inclusive through various amendments to the ordinance. What better way to ensure that Fort Worth remains an open and inclusive community than to guarantee that no one will be discriminated against than to prohibit discrimination based on transgender, gender identity or gender expression? It’s the right thing to do.”

Fort Worth was one of the first cities in the state to adopt an anti-discrimination ordinance. The original ordinance, approved in 1967, also resulted in the creation of the Human Relations Commission – the first such municipal body in the state. Throughout its 42-year history, the commission has recommended amendments to the ordinance to prohibit discrimination against people who live and work in Fort Worth.

The proposal to extend the protection in the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance has been endorsed by the City Manager’s Diversity Task Force. It was one of 20 task force recommendations presented to the City Council during its last meeting and is the only recommendation that the City Council will consider at its Nov. 10 meeting. Only two other task force recommendations require further review and study before implementation: equal access to employee benefits and coverage for gender identification disorder treatments.