Some mid-week thoughts:

There was a royal Albanian Sabella family which was overthrown and driven out of the country, eventually settling in southern Italy. My father’s parents were from a small Calabrian fishing village named Porta Canon which was primarily an Albanian-speaking region. Does this mean my family is descended from Albanian royalty? Perhaps, but the fact that they were actually overthrown makes them a more desirable ancestry!

Today was the annual American Math Competition, which is the centerpiece of the competitive math year. Students who do well on this contest qualify for the prestigious American Invitational Math Exam, which helps their college applications. We almost did not participate in this year’s contest because the purchase order was never sent by some unknown person in the central office–and I think it’s better I do not know who was responsible–so I had to phone Nebraska frantically Monday, pay for the contest and overnight shipping with my own credit card at a cost of $302, and then be told by the vice-principal that the district will not reimburse any credit card purchases. *sigh*

If you shop at the Parsippany Shop-Rite, be sure to check out the plaque of this year’s Shop-Rite Stars and you’ll see some of the Math Lab regulars smiling down at you!

Currently Listening: Steve Forbert is an underrated singer-songwriter whose music is on the border of folk and rock. Streets of This Town is one of his finest works.

Currently Reading: Gardner Dozois’ Galactic Empires is a collection of 6 novellas set in the far-future, which range between interesting and outstanding. Good stuff.

Today is our second snow day of the season. Of course, Mark still had to drive into work where he and his boss were the only employees who actually showed up. Everybody else claimed they were working at home, which he cannot really do yet. Hopefully next winter he will be able to stay home on such bad driving days.

Andy needs to go into work today since he was sick Monday and Tuesday because he lost his voice (not a good condition for a front desk person), then Wednesday and Thursday were his days off. Maybe business will be so slow at the hotel because of the storm they will tell him to stay home.

I do not have much schoolwork to do this unexpected three-day weekend, so I hope to get a lot of writing and reading done, although we’ll see how that actually works out.

Two different former students told me the past few days that they actually read my blog. *sniff* While it’s nice to have a readership, it is even nicer that they contacted me. If this blog encourages people to stay in touch with me, then it is well worthwhile. Of course, this does not absolve me from the task of keeping in touch with them too. I need to work harder at corresponding with both sets of friends, my former students and my VoP readership. I spend so much of my limited free time working on my magazine and blogs that my correspondence suffers, and that is bad since correspondence is 50% of my social life, the other 50%
being seeing people at school. If I don’t nurture the correspondence, what will happen when I retire in a few years?

Some random thoughts reverberating through my brain:

I think life would be boring without having at least one passionate interest. I am fortunate enough to have two: reading and writing.

If you read the newspaper, what portion do you enjoy the most? Guess which portion I prefer? The answer is at the end of this blog.

Either John McCain versus Hillary Clinton or John McCain versus Barack Obama gives voters a much better choice than Bush versus Kerry.

About a decade ago Rutgers University declared it wished to be considered one of the premier institutions of higher learning in the country. In the past few years it has cut millions of dollars from educational programs while greatly increasing its sports expenditures. So how is this supposed to make it a better university?

Some of the people who entertain me include Richard Thompson, Chris de Burgh, Jack McDevitt, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Fortunately none of them are celebrities undergoing rehab.

Hanna hanna bo bana banana fana fo fanna, fe fi fo fanna. (Does anybody remember “The Name Game?”)

I would much rather write a blog updating my thoughts and observations than join MySpace or Facebook and socialize. Sorry, that’s just not my thing.

The comics, of course!!!

This is a three-day weekend, the remnants of what used to be a week-long Winter Break. Because of construction in most of the district’s schools this year, we started late in September and are finishing fairly early in June, so our vacations during the year are minimal. While my classes are mostly stress-free this year, the workload is not diminished so my available time to catch up on things is even less than usual.

So these three days I will be grading 3 tests, updating the Math Team standings (which have been disastrous this year with virtually our entire team returning intact after a statewide top ten finish last year *sigh*) and preparing the rosters for next year’s RMW classes, as well as doing household chores such as vacuuming, shopping, cooking meals and hopefully going to the YMCA twice. My time available for writing and reading will be minimal. Oh, well...

I was upset when we awoke at 5:15 with no call from school about a delayed opening, fearing we needed to drive through slush and ice to get there on time. However, the district website had the message Delayed opening for all schools, and the phone call followed a bit later. Fortunately, I also checked my email because one of my students needed some help studying for a Calculus test, so I enjoyed myself (really) helping her via IM for awhile. Soon after we finished, the district website said Schools closed. *hooray*

Since I did not anticipate having a free day, I do not have a lot of school chores to do, other than write a Statistics test and do some grading of a writing assignment. I spent much of the morning editing some writing, and this afternoon I plan to read awhile and maybe watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I need more free days like this!

I have discussed politics in this blog frequently, but I have never tackled the other most controversial topic, religion. I believe my view of “God” differs from that of most people. Some people I respect a lot believe in a personal God who watches over us individually. Other people I respect do not believe in God at all. I think the latter view is foolish, since it is hard for me to accept that the universe does not have any overriding guiding force at all, that the creation of such a vast universe (and parallel universes as well if Everett’s "many worlds" theory and brane theory are to be believed) was entirely due to chance.

However, I suspect that “God” is so far removed from our level of existence that it (he? she? They both seem ludicrous designations for a cosmic entity) barely knows humans exist, if indeed it does at all. Creating the universe does not mean sitting at a cosmic computer controlling every little thing that happens in it. An infinite God must have the ability to set the forces of nature in operation, then let those forces carry out its plan without further intervention. So I doubt God is watching over each of us individually.

Still, it is difficult for me to believe that the direction of my life is totally by accident. When I was young, all I wanted to do was become a science fiction writer. To some extent that dream has never faded. The reason I became a teacher was because I believed it would give me time to write, which was so wrong because I have virtually no time to write fiction for 10 months of the year, while if I had a non-teaching job I would probably have time on weekends which overall total more time than summer vacation does. Instead the happiest times of my life, at least as happy as when I am reading and writing, are when I am in the Math Lab with my students. Not only am I surrounded by wonderful students every day, but I have had a string of special students who spend a lot of time chatting with me and who really fill me with joy.

Ironically, until this year I still believed I was basically a failure because I did not succeed as a science fiction writer, but this year has convinced me that I am much happier in the Math Lab than I would ever have been writing full-time. So, was the course of my life due entirely to chance? Perhaps it was, or maybe not. I’ll probably never know for sure, unless there is indeed an afterlife wherein everything will be answered.

Winners and Losers...

Congratulations to the New York Giants who played a fabulous game Sunday night and deserved to be the Super-Bowl champions. After I watched Tom Petty’s halftime performance, I stayed for the entire second half–while reading a magazine, of course–and was glad I did.

John McCain is beginning to look unbeatable in the Republican primary, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will likely be fighting it out awhile longer. Perhaps this will be the first primary in decades which will not be settled until the convention itself. That might be disastrous for the Democrats, but very interesting for the viewers.

We were doing an example in Statistics today regarding a test which measures the ability of men and women to “appraise other people.” I have always considered myself fairly adept at appraising other people beneath the “walls” they use to face the world, but it is possible I have met my match this year in somebody whom I might have totally misunderstood.

During the day yesterday there was a freezing rain which made many roads slick. It took 90 minutes for us to get home from school because Route 10 was closed due to downed power lines, so everybody had to merge onto Route 46 (which we took because of fear that Route 80 might be dangerous with so many trucks and speeding drivers on an icy road). Meanwhile, A.H. was driving four hours to New Hampshire for a weekend of snowboarding. I hope she had no trouble getting there!

This is Super-Bowl weekend, and nothing else seems to matter in the public consciousness. I don’t normally watched the four-hour extravaganza since I have little interest in actually watching sports (except as an excuse to read magazines or grade papers), although this year the game is a bit more interesting since the Giants are playing and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers are the halftime show.

After an entire month I have not bought a single science fiction book yet this year, although I do have two books on order, Gardner Dozois’ Galactic Empires from SFBC and C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith from Amazon.com. I read two books in January, so as along as my reading pace stays ahead of my buying pace, I should be able to cut down the 124 books I have waiting to be read.

The presidential primary season is moving into “Super-Tuesday” when both races should simplify considerably. Right now there are only two serious candidates remaining in each party, John McCain and Mitt Romney for the Republicans, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. While there is a serious anti-Bush backlash in this country which should favor the Democratic candidate in November, the fact that the two Democratic leading candidates are a black and a woman might mean we will have another Republican president next year. That is the problem with the primary system in which devout party members nominate the presidential candidates, while the majority of voters do not belong to either party.