Politics, Surfing, and Beer Slinging

On Woeful Underfunding

I'm back at work subbing today after a week without work, due to Eureka City Schools celebrating President's Day for an entire week. An entire week off for President's Day?...If it seems a bit overboard to you, then we're in agreement. It's funny how different the school environment is out this way. I would postulate that the attitude of the students is directly correlated to the amount of money spent on the schools here. For example, the physical buildings are falling apart and teachers out here get paid crap (I suppose the state of affairs is pretty similar in a majority of places). Just to throw a number out there...I get paid a meager $75 per day to substitute. It's funny because there are never enough subs to fill all of the absences (so I cover two classes a day, but get paid the same), yet the powers that be refuse to bite the bullet and raise the pay level.
I also started coaching the local high school swim team and who would have guessed, but the pool sucks. It's a relic from the 1950's which has been kept alive purely on the janitor's ingenuity. I have swum in more pools than I can remember and I shudder to think that someday I may have to hop into this pool to demonstrate proper butterfly technique or lay down the law in games of water polo. This pool is bad. The paint (lead paint with my luck) constantly flakes off into the pool and on especially humid days I keep my rain coat on in order to avoid the indoor precipitation. The water clarity usually hovers around that of skim milk. And I especially love it when I arrive at the pool to find a thin layer of bubbles on top of the pool...maybe it doubles as a bubble bath for the basketball team. I remember my early days of high school swimming. Our practice pool sucked, it was a nasty cesspool of hairballs and snot. And guess how we treated it...Like a nasty, nasty pool and it affected our work ethic. But what happened when we got to swim in a nice clean, well-lit pool...We hammered out hard practices and we felt like achieving great things. The same thing goes for schools...When kids are herded into windowless leaky trailers for English classes, how does that affect their work ethic? I'd venture a guess that it doesn't make a lecture about prepositions and dangling modifiers any easier...

With the previous rant in mind...Why/How do teachers put up with people constantly pissing and moaning about how our youth are falling behind the rest of the world? On the news it's always "American youth are now ranked somewhere in between Estonia and Honduras in math and science"...I mean, what do you think is going to happen when you don't spend money on education. I was reading last week about the way in which other countries treat their education systems. European countries like Sweden and Norway (consistently ranked in the top few countries education wise) spend serious cash on their schools. Once a teacher enters an education program, the government funds their education. I'm not really in favor of that happening. Strong government/public schools is the 10th plank of the Communist Manifesto...
The bottom line...The public needs to put up the cash to make schools work or shut up and let the free market take care of things...i.e. private schools.

On the Surf
My wife was gone last week taking a massage class in the Sierra Nevada's, so was l left on my own for about a week. I spent my time searching for solid waves, reading, and slinging beers. The surf around here has been big and burly for the past week. Often it wasn't the problem of finding the surf (there was way too much), but the issue was finding a wave that wouldn't result in me getting my ass kicked by good ol' mother nature. Last weekend we had a run of classic conditions. It was sunny, mild, offshore winds, and a long period 6-8ft swell. It was about as good as it gets around here. For three days straight I would wake up, go to the beach and surf the entire day...and I mean all day at the beach. After hours and hours splashing around in the brine I would go into the bar and sling beers to the wonderful variety of folk who frequent the dingy little establishment that is Jo's Little Red Lion. The state of mind that results from surfing until your arms are noodles and then working until 2am, all to do it over again the next day, is interesting to say the least...
I remember my the last wave I caught on Sunday rather vividly, I've resurfed that wave in my mind countless times this past week. It was the last wave of a big set that had rolled through and cleaned up the line-up. The line-up refers to the big group of surfers massed in the same general area, waiting for pretty much the same waves. In pictures and from a distance it looks like we're all good buddies out there, having a blast, and stoked to see each other...In reality though, it's 40 individuals all trying to catch those 8 waves that roll through every 4 or 5 minutes. On this particular set I got rather lucky, the 3rd and 4th wave that rolled through was way bigger than usual and caught most everyone off guard, except for me. I barely made it through those waves, but I was in perfect position for the last wave of the set and nobody was around the challenge me for the wave. Several hard strokes and I was in, after a huge bottom turn I was right in the pocket and hauling ass down the line. It's hard to describe the feeling of going really fast on a wave...There is all of this energy around you. Underneath your board you can feel the water slipping by, beside you is a wall of water, behind you is the barrel...Slow down just a bit, slide your back foot back just a bit, just enough to slow you down, tuck your head, crouch down a bit, and SILENCE...Look up, look over your shoulder, just take it all in, you're in the wave...I couldn't tell you whether I was in the barrel for 2 seconds or an hour, but judging from the fact that I made it to work on time I'd say the two second guess was closer to reality. But the fact remains that when you're surfing that's all you're doing...On the wave you aren't wondering about dinner, or taxes, or if Hilary is gonna beat Obama...all of that crap doesn't matter...all that matters is the wave, your board, and the energy that is pushing you forward...Oh and watch out for that big rock just under the water...

On Slinging Beers
Justine and I were talking about what we want to do this summer and we came to the conclusion that we needed more money, so I picked up a couple nights of bartending to supplement my meager income from teaching and coaching full time. It's funny how entertaining it is to bartend. People tend to pour out their life stories and problems to the guy behind the bar, especially after a couple pints...But it's not just people needing someone to listen to their problems, it's old guys who just need someone to hear them ramble about their past adventures. The bar is somewhat seedy and it seems to attract a lot of commercial fishermen, so that gives you some idea about some of the stories I hear...I'm gonna put some effort into this listening thing and get some good stories, this stuff needs written down. Everybody always says history is written from the perspective of the winner. Some of these guys have done some crazy stuff and the only place it's recorded is in the memory of some sunspotted, wrinkled old salt of a fisherman.