Almostgotit.com

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ~Thomas Edison

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~Samuel Beckett

One fails forward toward success. ~Charles F. Kettering

With our eldest finishing his second week at college, we are all quickly getting our first college failures out of the way. This is good news. It’s good to fail as quickly as you can, to learn as quickly as you can, too.

For instance: we thought we could manage without his having a cell phone. I hate cell phones on a visceral level, and they are bloody expensive, besides. And didn’t *I* manage college without having a cell phone?

But it turns out that our son does need a cell phone. Moreover, his parents need him to have a cell phone. Our 18-year-old has not yet activated the phone in his room, nor does he regularly check his email, nor does he write letters, either. Too busy, too overwhelmed, too inexperienced, too new? Whatever the reasons, we’ve been largely out of contact with him for these very important first few weeks of his college experience, and guess what? There have been some problems. Together, the three of us have failed to manage that much separation, all at once, this soon in the “growing up and leaving home” process.

Furthermore, all of his friends arrange their meals and other social activities together by cell phone. (Or on Facebook, but you can only go into so much detail with so much efficiency on Facebook. )

Turns out, too, that cell phones are herding devices, serving the same function as the call of migrating geese, who honk constantly back and forth in order to organize themselves in proper V-formation.

Who knew? We only learned all this, about cell phones, by failure.

I also learned (again) that my own successful experience (going to college without a cell phone) does not necessarily make me an expert about someone else’s experience. The problem is that I was successful in college without a cell phone. All of us were, back then, of course. But things are different now, and consequently my husband and I had something new to learn, right along with our son.

But we had to fail, first, in order to learn it.

Dave Rendell asks that question on Freak Factor this week:

What’s your problem? I’m serious. What do you wish you could change about yourself? What is the complaint that you hear the most from those closest to you, your friends, co-workers, and family members? Are you too loud or too quiet, too hyperactive or too sedentary, too organized or too messy? You get the idea.

So, what should you do? Most people think that they should find and fix their weaknesses. Unfortunately, this just leads to frustration and failure. Your weaknesses are actually the best clue to your strengths. Furthermore, building your strengths, not fixing your weaknesses, is your best strategy for success.

To watch a free preview of Rendell’s Freak Factor Seminar, click here.

The dentist’s office called yesterday to remind me of my Cleaning scheduled for this morning.

I felt like a cross between a venereal disease and a Toyota.

Being scheduled for a Cleaning is far more serious than being scheduled for a mere Tune-Up, because of the many moral issues that are also at stake.

It’s so good of my dentist to employ these altar-(phone)calls for filthy reprobates like me.

Otherwise I may have spent the entire day chewing sticky candy and ice cubes instead, and have you read the news lately? Poor dental hygiene is now associated with everything from heart disease to Altzheimer’s. Plus, if you don’t floss, you are pretty definitely going to Hell.

But today? Verily I have been Cleaned, washed in the blood of flouride. They fumigated the Hell right out of me too, thank God, with a microbial gum wash that tasted, appropriately, like insect repellent — about a 97-proof DEET with just a hint of mint at the finish.

There was the Requisite Sermon on Flossing, my appropriate semi-annual dosing of guilt, followed by the deep, soul-cleansing pain of gouging and scraping.

Finally, I met with a spiritual counselor to go over my Personalized Treatment Plan which over the next two months will cost me approximately $50,000.

Have I mentioned here lately, at all, that I need a job?

I used to be a normal person. Somewhere along the line, though, I met a man from Laramie, Wyoming, a place where people actually wear cowboy boots and hats even when they’re wearing a suit.  And their music? Country-western, of course. 

Lord, how that once made me wince. 

But true love and all that, blah blah. So I started listening to Lyle Lovett.  Emmylou Harris.  Mary Chapin Carpenter.  It wasn’t so bad, really. Did you know Mark Knopfler sometimes sings country?  Then I moved to Tennessee. Did you know Mark Knopfler sometimes sings country with Emmylou Harris?

Carrie Underwood is still a bit twee for me, however. But my daughter wanted to share one of her mucus music videos with me this evening — “Jesus take the wheel” — and since I’m currently trying to be a very attentive, caring parent (otherwise they leave the nest forever, you know)  I sat down to watch it.

Okay, it’s really sort of sweet, isn’t it?

Well, turns out my sweet little daughter is almost as wicked as I am.  She’d really only played the Carrie Underwood video for me so I’d be better able to appreciate the following, which (I must say) is TRULY a work of lyrical Southern genius.

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Bonus treat for those who really don’t want to start the work week quite yet:
Country Western Song Lyric Generator

(Image: TheAtlantic.com)

A few years ago, my son was being harrassed by another middle school student.  We knew that bullies can become even more dangerous if parents intervene, but this had become too serious to ignore, so my husband and I marched together to the principal’s office and laid it all on the line.  

Fortunately, the principal took us seriously and the bullying was immediately stopped.  Had it not been resolved, however, my husband and I would have continued to take action ourselves, up to and including moving our son to another school. 

A couple days ago, on the day of the shooting, our daughter received a minor bit of bullying herself, which the teacher apparently did nothing about.   I admit I was a little more afraid this time.  What if none of us can act against misbehavior or abuse anymore because we’re afraid we’ll be shot if we do?

Every Knox County parent received a recorded phone message from the system superintendant yesterday.  The gist was that this latest shooting was not, in fact, random — the two kids knew each other and were having some (yet unrevealed) difficulties.  Be at peace, therefore: there are no gangs, no conspiracies, and the rest of your children are safe.

Well, yes and no.

The superintendant’s words reassured me that those of us blessed with the right family resources still have a great deal of control over our own children’s safety; it does not necessarily mean, however, that this or any school had any further ability to prevent this shooting than if it *had been* a random event.   While we may be able to point to a number of risk factors, reasons, and motives in the aftermath, we can’t proactively lock up or expel every child who exhibits them, nor can we even separate ourselves or our children from every potential “thug.”

Simply:  we can’t always “see it coming.”

We need to be prudent about safety, of course, but we must also be reasonable.  I doubt that the schools can or should do very much more than they already do.  The fact is that the great majority of children are not murderers, including the great majority of children who live in the same sort of environment as Central High’s shooter.

Probably, we each need to do our best to carry on, and do the best we can, as always.  Nor is it generally very useful to make decisions or conduct our lives in an atmosphere of fear. 

If there is any single key to safe and effective educations for our children,  it probably is the parent, and guess what?  I found the article I mentioned in yesterday’s post (Who needs to be a walking bibliography like my husband, anyway, when God gave us the Internet?)    I don’t agree with every word, but felt the author had some brilliantly-new insights I’d not seen anywhere else before. 

Tales out of School: How a pushy, Type A mother stopped reading Jonathan Kozol and learned to love the public schools  (Sandra Tsing Loh, The Atlantic, March 2008)

Child places flowers at Central High after the shooting (Image: KnoxNews..com).

I wish I could find the beautiful article I read sometime in the past year, written by the parent of a child who attended an urban public school in California.  Alas, my husband is the walking human bibliography in the family, not I.

My own school experience was in a wealthy, and lily-white part of Washington State.  Few of us there were the children of jailbirds and prostitutes, so mostly we self-destructed using expensive drugs, expensive cars, and the occasional existential suicide. 

Nor did our parents necessarily love us any more than inner-city parents love their children: ours were often too busy making money and divorcing each other to notice or care when we co-opted their giant houses for our own youthful drug and sex fests.

Life, and love, are both such messy and dangerous things. It breaks my heart to listen in (yes, still watching children talk on Facebook) as my children and their friends try to process, yet again,  the fatal gun shots that were fired in places that should have been their safest havens.  Some of my children’s friends were in the church sanctuary a few weeks ago when Jim David Adkisson began shooting people, and yesterday morning some other young friends were about to start classes at Central High School when another gun started shooting. 

“Were you scared?”  They ask each other.  “Yeah, it was intense,” answers one.  “I’m fine,” writes another child.  “I decided to go to sonic this morning, and I got to school 10 min after the shooting and got turned away from school. It just kinda freaked me out that I missed it by 10 min.”

But it also breaks my heart as other parents begin blaming yesterday’s shooting on the fact that Knoxville’s Central High is an urban school.   The alleged shooter’s  elder adopted sister is wanted for murder, and victim also came from a poor family with a speckled history, so perhaps “we should have seen it coming.”

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, once had an interesting proposal.  She suggested that the United States require that all welfare recipients be sterilized as a condition of receiving any further benefits, which would keep such people from proliferating and ruining the world for the rest of us. 

What do you think?

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Related post:A note on Knoxville’s church shooting, and why I have to bring it up now

Child taken into custody following Knoxville school shooting (Image: WBIR.com).

At Knoxville’s Central High school today, a student gunned down and killed another  just before classes began. 

This shooting was a sad, sad thing in our city, still suffering from another senseless church shooting and murder just a few short weeks ago. 

Already, the speculating has begun.  Some folks are trying, as they always do, to make the tragedy into an argument supporting their own cause (e.g., “Public Schools are Bad.”) Others are simply trying to find meaning in meaningless acts of hatred and violence.  In both shootings, however, the perpetrators were deeply troubled individuals whose actions can not be made into “see, I told you so!” examples of anything much,  except what broken people can sometimes do.  

Most unemployed people do not go on shooting sprees, after all.  Even unemployed people who read Conservative Books.  Nor do most public school children go on shooting sprees.

I was very impressed by Central High today.  School administrators there were doing their job when they locked down the school to keep everyone safe.  They were also doing their job when they turned back the throngs of parents who immediately began gathering at the school: emergency personnel needed time and space to focus on the scene until it was secured, and information about individual children could not be released until authorities could be sure that it would not further endanger or mislead anyone. 

Maybe we shouldn’t allow our children to play so many violent video games.  Certainly we shouldn’t have so many guns lying around where people with very little impulse control can so easily get ahold of them.  But relying solely on any of these answers is too dangerous, seducing us too easily into the belief that we can ever control every risk factor or make our children perfectly safe. 

We can’t.

In fact, I am much more disturbed by what happened earlier this week,  at another high school in Knoxville.   A boy suffered a brain injury at Karns High school  after falling from the back of a pickup truck he was riding in a school parking lot, while moving school equipment, and while under the supervision of a shop teacher.  Student Eric Law then waited in a semi-conscious state at the school until his mother arrived to take him to the hospital  — 911 was never called – and died later that morning.

Central High faced a random incident today but had a plan; Karns should have seen that one coming and did very little to stop it.  Who will protect our children from criminally-stupid shop teachers and grossly-negligent school nurses and office personnel?  

There may be individually abusive priests and predatory neighbors, but I’m still sending my own children to church the neighborhood park.  I’m still appreciative of public schools too, but no – I will not be sending any child of mine to Karns.

Q. What do bloggers want more than anything else?

 A. NO, no, and no: none of the above, silly people. 

If you will all join me back here in the real world, please:

Bloggers want more readers (and more comments,) of course.

One of the best ways to increase reader participation (=comments) is to give readers something juicy in return. 

DISQUS (pronounced “discuss”) is a blog plug-in that encourages readers to leave comments by awarding them with much more exposure of their own.  Readers who comment on DISQUS-enabled blogs can track and archive their own comments all in one place, where they can also edit or even republish them.  Moreover, a reader’s DISQUS profile “follows” him or her from blog to blog, allowing other readers to click through to see his or her other DISQUS blog comments, as well as to his or her own blog or blogs.

CommentLuv is another comment plug-in that has attracted a lot of bloggy attention.  This utility automatically visits each commentor’s feed and embeds a link to the commentor’s latest blog post whenever s/he comments.  This, in turn, attracts readers to a commentor’s own blog while also building upon the latter’s own Technorati blog “authority” and Google-ability.

I’ve not yet had time to adopt either of these plug-ins, but would love to hear from any readers who have.  Have they made a difference on your blog?

Possibly-helpful links:

• A list of 100 blogs using CommentLuv (go get yourself some LinkyLuv right now!)
• Interesting discussion on DISQUS: who should own the rights to your comments: you or the blog where you’ve left them?  ( Copyright protocols and blogging continue to evolve!)

From Douglas Wilson, On Paper Wings:

Need more proof that committees get nothing done right? The Museum of Modern Art sent this letter to Andy Warhol in 1956 rejecting his gift of one of his early drawings. I am guessing they have regretted this decision for at least 40 years…

(Click for a larger version: andy-warhol-rejection-letter.jpg)