In just thirty short minutes, I head out the door, walk for approximately 94 seconds and attend my local neighborhood meeting.

My hope, dare I say it, my dream is that something slightly more productive than neighbors ranting about the feral cats that seem to be overtaking the neighborhood (hey, at least they’re only cats, and not Starbucks stores).

On the positive side, the neighborhood does seem to have its act together insofar as we’ve successfully gotten overnight parking restrictions to be enacted on our street (keeping non-residents from parking vehicles long term in our precious parking places). Not only this, but representatives from both the LAPD and the LA City Council often grace us with their presence at their meetings. When little communities start to make noise, the folks in power start to listen.

My hope is that noise is something a bit more than “MEOW!!!!”

This picture makes me want to get up off my butt and go explore L.A. I get to do that a little bit this weekend, as today and tomorrow take me on:

Three

Separate

Trips

to Griffith Park, an amazing oasis of pines, trails, and views in the city.

Even six years of living in this town still brings its fair share of “firsts” as last evening I attended my first opera, Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first part in the massive four-part Ring Cycle that my little town is undertaking with both great ambition and reckless economic abandon.

While the music sits firmly in the mid- to late-19th century Romantic tradition (a musical adjective that all too often sends many of my friends running to the hills), the costumes of last night could only be described as nothing short of dreamlike Tim Burton-esque-with-a-hint-of-Star-Wars. In other words, as one of my frequently opera-going colleagues put it, “eurotrash”.

In all honesty, the opera was amazing, even if it bordered on sensory overload. Complex romantic chord progressions, layers of character and thematic leitmotifs, redonkulous costumes, and supertitles that were only visible on an adjacent wall of the auditorium made the 160 minute performance quite an endeavor to follow. But I guess that’s what opera is basically like.

My only complaint is that I discovered that in opera, since the actors and singers must take the entire stage, the orchestra is thusly relegated to a pit, which significantly limits the scope and power of their volume. The pre-recorded clips played at the conductor’s pre-performance talk were themselves louder than the musical strains coming from the opera itself, a reality which I found a bit disappointing.

Oh well. One down, three to go, and although I won’t get a chance to see any of the rest of this here in LA this year, it might just be worth it to check out the next part, The Fellowship of the Ring Die Walküre, when the San Francisco Opera takes this on for themselves next summer. Apparently, it will have a California Gold Rush theme. Interesting.

Google Maps has just been getting better and better. First they put bike routes on their maps. Then they included public transportation. Now they’ve gone ahead and allowed for a 3D view with their "Earth” plugin. While certain areas (namely, my own neighborhood) appear stale and flat, heading just a few miles east, one encounters the vastness of the beautiful downtown skyline, complete with mountains and hills in the background. If only they could somehow manage lighting based on the time of day, and snow caps based on the time of year!

Today will be an L.A. first for me. Despite living a mere two miles from the Staples Center, this evening will mark the first NHL game I have ever attended west of the Mississippi.

The Kings, who I feel not a little ambivalent toward, will be facing off against the N.Y. Islanders, a visiting team that will have at least one fan in the crowd, a fellow New Yorker colleague of mine who is convinced that I’m insane because I root for all the wrong New York teams (Mets, Giants, Rangers) versus his supposedly superior Yankees, Jets, and Islanders.

It’s about time for a hockey game. After all, after seeing my fair share of fights at school, it’ll be relaxing to see some adults duke it out for once.

  This is the parking lot at The Grove. One of the downsides of statistics is that they put into full focus the reality of situations that can only be described as abysmal.

Yet, the TFA naïveté within me says there is hope in the midst of even the most dire situation.

At Cochran, the statistics say the situation is dire. Kids enter each grade far below grade level, and somehow expected to turn around instantaneously and make marked improvement towards the top (after all, it’s a race now). Many kids do, in fact, make improvements, albeit not miraculous, and some kids simply do not. One often wonders what one can reasonably hope for.

In my parking situation, I pushed forward onto Level 3 (notice “FULL”), and began the trek around the sardine-packed level. Yet somehow, out of the blue, the convergence of my “coming”, paired with someone else’s “leaving” did, in fact, open up a parking space, and roughly 45 seconds after snapping the above photograph (don’t worry….at least I wasn’t talking or texting while driving), I was walking out of my vehicle on the way out of the structure. In the midst of impossibility, the possible became reality.

In the midst of impossibility at Cochran, I think of C****, a former student who stopped by last week to get help filling out her FAFSA application; I think of A****, an 8th grader who last year seemed to make a weekly trip to the Dean’s office, now is the leading participant and moving faster than anyone else in her Algebra class; I think of K*******, who already a stellar student, has really upped her game to take on more leadership and meta-meta-service to other students at our school.

Hope in the midst of impossibility? Sure. Is it predictable? Never.

Go drive around some full parking lots and see for yourself.

Yesterday was President’s Day. In honor of the day, I thought briefly to myself “Gee, I’m glad our President is hard at work today”, and then proceeded to enjoy a fantastic day that included, among other things, a trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or better known by locals as LACMA.

Now, when you walk into an art museum as utterly huge as LACMA, you are tempted to simply walk around, at a leisurely pace, taking in the paintings on the walls. Most folks, I observed, spent approximately 5 – 10 seconds at each particular piece before moving to the next one.

Yet,  when you do this (and believe me, I’ve done it), you find yourself very quickly suffering from visual ADD, as the museum suddenly become a checklist of token images to cross off, rather than a collection of pieces of expression, communication, and at times, beauty. I realized yesterday that to go through the museum at anything faster than a glacial pace would be analogous to purchasing a brand new CD, and only listening to the first 10 seconds of each track.

My experiment went something like this. Instead of walking from piece to piece, I decided to only take in one piece per room, a decision which allowed me to then stand in front of a piece for between 5 – 10 minutes.

The results? After getting over the initial “30 second hump” in which your mind says “Why are you still here….you’ve seen it all”, I started to notice more detail as it appeared in colors, shapes, themes, motifs, and after 5 – 10 minutes, even emotions.  Holy Bouncing Bananas Batman! This was amazing! For the rest of the afternoon, I really looked at perhaps 5 – 10 pieces in total, but those pieces were truly worth the trip there.

Do have patience, patience, patience, because when you do, absolutely amazing things can appear!

Explore your city! Last evening, my friend Carl and I drove down to Compton to try this BBQ shack that we’d both heard about in a local paper.

While I would not normally drive 30 minutes for BBQ, I must say that this BBQ was simply sublime. Bludso’s is, in fact, perhaps the best barbecue I’ve tasted here in LA (even in the face of stiff competition from such notables as Tasty-Q, and Phillip’s).

Simply oozing with tenderness and Texas hot sauce, the ribs we enjoyed were exactly what one needs at the end of a long week!

In the dining area (imagine a 15’ x 5’ hallway with barstools), Carl (who is also a teacher, albeit at a different LA middle school) and I were talking about our respective kids and how they were doing. After about 5 minutes of conversation an African American woman, perhaps in her mid to late 30s, who had been sitting nearby leaned over and asked us if we worked for Compton Unified. No, we replied, we both worked for LA Unified, their larger, northern neighbor.

Then, perhaps wondering what in the world would bring to white boys down to the heart of Compton/LA, she abrasively asked us, “So, do you teach for America”?

It’s likely that only my TFA readers will completely understand and relate to the sarcasm inherent in that question. It turns out that this lady has been an elementary school teacher in Compton for the last 12 years and has likely seen her fair share of starry-eyed, slightly arrogant, savior-type, young “teachers” pass through the hallways of her Compton school, only to abruptly leave after a pair of short and dramatic years.

We assured her that yes, some TFA teachers do, in fact, stay at their schools or in education for the long-haul (we were both living proof), yet that did nothing to alleviate the frustration on her end of members of the cult organization that Carl and I have previously belonged to.

As she waited for her order to arrive, we eventually were able to have a pleasant conversation, about what elementary grades she likes teaching (3rd grade), what kids are like at that age (you can actually teach them content), and how good the barbeque was. Her order finally arrived, and she left, wishing us a great year, yet somehow seemingly, still doubtful of our intentions.

As Carl and I refocused our efforts on the mac & cheese now staring us in the face, we both reflected on the complexities of building trust in a school, and even in a city.

Do go out and explore new places of your city! Totally worth it!

It’s hard to believe that this is my 300th post on The Hunsblog. I’ve now been blogging here for about 2.5 years, and if anything, it provides me an outlet to vent frustrations, post jokes that no one is obligated to laugh at, or to simply showcase whatever random music I happen to be listening to at the time.

In 300 posts, I have realized that this blog, much like its author, is primarily introspective in nature, with frequent postings about how I’m reacting to events, occurrences, and other input.

I do realize that part of the reason of this is due to the highly diverse nature of my readers, resulting in the reality that should I stick to a single, main theme (i.e. education, or music, or Los Angeles, etc…), I quickly lose half my audience.

As a reader myself, of a multitude of other blogs, I find that my favorite posts are the ones that actually give me something useful to do or to try, whether that is a bit of tech, a teaching strategy, a spiritual reflection/observation, or even an applied principle, that I can then use in the real world.

My hope is that as I continue to write and post on the Hunsblog, this will become less and less introverted, and far more extroverted as I seek to reciprocate all of the wonderful, fuzzy, goodness of the world wide web that is just waiting to be discovered!

This is not a pet.

One of the interesting things that I am discovering about my new neighborhood is that it seems to be stray cat central. Not that they’re really causing any trouble, I just know one of these days I’m going to accidently run over one with my car.

At least I won’t be able to complain about a rodent problem anytime soon.