From Cisco: Texas kids protest not being able to walk graduation due to failing state tests.

A perfectly fair and reasonable complaint. Until you take a look at the picture:



Note to Texan adolescents: You're not exactly helping the team out here!

SKOOL--It's funny--the last day of school, and I can't concentrate on any work in
front of me. That's hardly unusual. What's unusual is *why* I can't concentrate.

The kids are feeding me energy. This is not a "good" kind of energy, i.e. something that makes you knock down the walls you've come across, climb the metaphorical mountain, fight the good fight. This is the kind of energy that causes me to see how many times I can spin around in my chair. The kind of energy that causes me to lead a class of 07 graduates in a rousing chorus of Kum By Ya. And especially the kind of energy that makes me bounce my rubber ball off opposite walls in one throw.

I should be paying the district today for the privilege of being a teacher on the last day of school. It's just like being a kid, as long as you forget that you were ever responsible for anyone's education.

I must have this. What's $150, anyway?

I hate Mr. Roma

I'm having another professional crisis. And I blame one Rick Roma of the history department.

It's perhaps an inopportune time for plaudits, as President Bush uses the ruler of No Child Left Behind to whap the collective knuckles of my school district, but for once, the president isn't the reason for my reticence to accept praise. This time, it's a colleague.

Rick Roma. He sucks.

He's single, late-thirties to early forties, constantly gushed over by students and faculty alike. We're of a similar build and height, we both wear glasses, and we have a lot of students in common. They leave his class able to cite differences between European and American law without even cracking open a book. They send him cards from college. And you know what he says in return? "I'm just doing my job."

The nerve of that bastard.

Anyway, the last night of layout had my seniors in tears. Normally they're in tears because of an extendd run of late nights, bad food and even worse company. This time, they were crying because they didn't want to go. And they told me so. "I don't want to graduate--this is so much fun." "You've changed my life. You really have." "Thank you so much for everything."

Well, I'm not one to accept compliments. I thanked them, sure, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "Roma probably gets more compliments for doing the lit mag. If I were Roma, I'd be getting seniors dedicating their first novels to me by now."

Then my state-award-winning editor gifts me with a wind gun. I don't know what the real name for this marvelous contraption is, but in layman's terms, it's basically a gun that compresses and shoots pressurized air with all the precision of a sawed off shotgun. I've used them before--if you're good, you can blow someone's hat off their head from fifty yards away. Me, I can ruffle a phone book while sitting at my desk.

Okay, so it's a touching gift, but Roma would have gotten a perpetual wind machine. And a solar-powered gyro-thingee to work it automatically, made by a student whom he taught physics in his spare time. The jerk. I hate his guts.

This is the self-deprecation that runs through my mind when students and faculty are trying to congratulate me. After everything was over and I was done negating the compliments, I schlepped off to the banquet.

I won't go into the banquet in detail. Suffice to say, certain students perform at a considerably high level, and they ask teachers to attend this honorary banquet with their parents to show their gratitute. They pick a teacher who "had significant influence on them." I was chosen by a kid in my afternoon literature class. Bright kid, pretty quiet but friendly, good sense of humor, good writer (a self-confessed "synonym junkie," he makes a sesquipedalian look like positively economical). I started to swell up a little when his parents told me his accounts of my class (no need to go into it all here, but rest assured, I come off as a god)...and then I saw Roma two tables over. Three or four students had invited him, that's how popular he is. The jerk. What a jerk.

No matter. I was being honored. I got my picture taken, got a nifty certificate, shook a lot of hands and did some home-fried politicking with the parents and faculty. On my way out, I stopped in front of a mirror to straighten myself out, and there was Roma, right beside me, combing that luxurious mane of hair and flaunting his utter lack of fear of a receding hairline.

"Have a good night," he said to me. "Congratulations."

Can you believe the condescending attitude? What a jerk. He can go to hell. Good thing for him I was on my way out anyway.

So, Roma, if you're reading this (and I know you are, you smug bastard), I'm warning you. Stop fucking with my triumphs. Eat your humble pie and stay away from my business. Or I'll corral the several knuckle-draggers that aren't failing my classes and tell them to go to work on that big ugly head of yours.

I'll see you at the scholarship banquet tomorrow. Stay out of my way.

JibJab's "What We Call the News". My views on cable news 24-hour stations not having enough news to fill 24 hours a day are on record. Good to see them annotated.

More exercises today. Plus, along with waiting at the pharmacy for the back pills, I'd guess I've spent more time working on my physique in the last three days than I have the last three years. It's beginning to show, too. All I have to do is straighten myself out and let the sound of the cracking of my vertabrae lull me to relaxation.

I like having pills, though. I doubt I'll use them, but now I can growl at my students: "I'm either going to kill you or myself. Where the hell are my pills?" and actually mean it. (I used to growl, "Where the hell is my flask," but stories started getting around, so enough of that.)

Karl Rove raps at the Correspondents' Dinner. The Times says this cockiness is in spite of the recent brou-ha-ha over Libby's conviction.

I say this is yet more evidence that white people shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a microphone when hip hop is playing, especially not while wearing tuxedoes and sporting glasses and a bald spot.

Step One to Back Problem Recovery: Admit you have a problem.

Step Two: Do something about the problem.

Step One, as it turns out, was a piece of cake. The doctor made me walk on my toes, lie on my back and do a couple of knee bends. He then recommended me for physical therapy.

It took me a few weeks to actually get in there because of late nights with the newspaper, grading essays, global warming, insurance runarounds...oh hell, mostly it was dread. Dread over what I knew would happen.

I got right in there around 6:45 and was sitting on the examination table shortly afterwards. The therapist did some stress tests, then asked me to stand.

That's it. Just stand, like I would normally stand.

Her eyes rolled like marbles. Apparently, my posture sucks: I've adopted the Al Bundy life-has-defeated-me slouch for so long, it's putting pressure on my upper back. I'm supposed to square my shoulders and tighten my abdomen to improve my posture while standing. She said this is the intended way the body is to stand. To me, it feels like I'm imitating George Reeve in Superman.

So now I'm supposed to do a series of exercises every day that aren't even exercises. Ab tightening, back-stretching and other routines designed to improve flexibility and loosen/strengthen my ligaments. They aren't particularly grueling, but they take about a half hour to do. Yes, I've been doing them and everything, and I've been hating every minute of it. It's not so much the effort. It's the fact that, were someone in shape to watch me, they'd fall over laughing.

If my brother were to scoff, that would be one thing. But when a mid-twenties physical therapist with a potbelly of her own watches my leg tremble while doing a leglift and has to put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, you know you've hit some kind of bottom. Bottom, here I be.

Confessions of an (un)aspiring novelist; Cholera in a time of (love?)

All week long, all I could think about was spring break, and now that I'm here, unlike other years where it's felt like charging headfirst into your favorite bar, surrounded by friends and dollar-a-pint prices, this time it's more like getting into a hot bath after a day working out in cold weather. Muscles relax. Blood pressure decreases. I wound up canceling my plans (yes, I'm the only person alive who has to call in sick for a party), watched TV for an hour (of all things, Scrubs episodes I already have on DVD), read for two hours and was asleep at nine a.m. Up this morning at 4:30, finished the book, made coffee and stared out the window impatiently, waiting for the newspaper. My old man, I do take after.

I do have a checklist, of sorts, for the next eight days. Projects and papers to grade, lesson plans to prepare, etc. But there are a few books to read as well. In a fit of ill-advised ambition, I offered my sophomores extra credit to read and review James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me over break, then realized I'd have to read it myself. No matter. I'm a fan of revisionist history. Every time Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter sounds off about "liberals who want America to fail," I have to wince and shrug embarrasingly. No, I want to tell them, it's not about wanting your country to fail. It's about wanting the people who "run" your country to fail. When a president goes to war because God told him to, when an administration congratulates itself on a "reasonable proposal" by offering members up for testimony without oath, and when think-tanks doing precious little thinking give shitty advice on Capitol Hill, I find myself waiting for the fifth act, when hubris is punished and, if the righteous don't prevail, at least they get to say, "I told you so." I've been able to say such words to several people lately, but have gotten no joy out of it. Maybe when and if Patrick Fitzgerald goes after President Bush, I'll be able to crow a little.

But I digress. Before I can tackle Loewen and how my history textbooks got it all wrong, I had to finish Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I stumbled across the book in a Salon.com article reviewing books about how to read, and I picked it up more or less on a whim. I've read two Smiley novels, and neither made much of an impression on me. However, I've come to realize this had less to do with her writing style than it did with my attention span--I read both of them in grad school, on off-hours not spent studying or grading undergraduate themes, and just seeing her name and recognizing her cadence brings back some of those memories. Smiley's meditation on the novel and the novelist is a tad circular since she constantly brings up the same novels as examples, and she is fond of pointing out that (maybe) novelists are good at their craft because of their inability to engage successfully within their own social circle. But I could listen to her go on about the particulars of novels for twice as long as she does in the book. I like how she points out that most, if not all novels are destined for some level of failure, whether through the passage of history or the disparity of today's multimedia audience, and I respect how she willingly offers herself up for sacrifice by walking us through the composition and editing of her novel Good Faith (which I have not read).

What's probably the most alluring part of the book, though, is the last two-thirds, where she offers encouragement to would-be novelists by reminding them to write to please themselves rather than get rich and famous, and where she offers her own two cents on one hundred novels she read over a two- or three-year period. I've only glanced at a few of her reviews, and I plan on only skimming the rest, but I have to admit, I'm a sucker for reading about reading. Nick Hornby does it in The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt; Jonathan Franzen bemoans both his own and the public's lapses in novel-reading in How to Be Alone, and while I have yet to finish it, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is no less intriguing for its social commentary about why we read and why we read what we read than it is for its insights into the psychology and even sexuality of reading (did you know your eyes are skipping all over this page even as you follow the words? or is that because you found some porn somewhere and are getting distracted? come on, share the wealth, asshole).

Gulity confession: I used to want to be a novelist. Sometimes, in spare moments, I still do. I've started maybe a dozen novels in my lifetime. Some fought for existence heroically, uttering strangled last words melodramatically on a death bed. Some came into existence, chuckled contemptuously at the lot that had been cast at them, and died without a murmur. The example that sticks in my head most vividly: in the summer of 1998, while working for a mosquito management company, I spent days trudging through forest preserves and suburban back yards spraying larvae and thinking up third-rate horror stories. One tried to become a book about a vampire who tries to give up blood drinking by switching to substitutes, only to have his possessive witch of a mother trick him into backsliding with a girl he's trying to start an affair with. I was smoking fairly heavily at the time and unsure of the teaching credentials that I was shopping around the state, and figured, way way in the back of my mind, that this could be a means to avoid the drudgery of work, of an alarm clock and a briefcase filled with essays on Why My Parents Don't Understand Me. What's always precluded me from pursuing a career in writing has been twofold: I find myself questioning why I want to do it in the first place, and I wrestle with the guilt that comes with struggling valiantly over something so middling while working in a profession that, by necessity, demands creativity, innovation and dedication. Elmore Leonard wrote some of his first work by hiding it in a desk drawer while at his office job. Geoffrey Chaucer was a civil servant his entire life; The Canterbury Tales were more of a hobby. Were I to do likewise, my students would be watching a lot more movies, and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Every time I sat down to write something halfway decent, Jack Roeser would leap up in my head, chuckling over how well-paid I was and how many kids would never learn to write coherently because of a middle-of-the-road drama about an alcoholic ex-priest visiting his home town.

Then along comes Smiley with words of encouragement, arguing that a finished first draft of a bad novel is in itself a success, that only through looking at the trees at first can one eventually see a forest. "Just write," she seems to be telling me. "The worst that can happen is you won't finish it, and that's already happened, what, a dozen times?"

Well, don't sit by the phone, Reading Public. "Write a novel" is on my list of Things to Do Before I Die, and I'll most likely get to it before long, but I'm still in the process of deconditioning my must-publish attitude towards the whole thing. I'm also having way too much fun reading novels, not to mention histories, biographies, essay collections and, yes, even the occasional student essay.

Among the pile: Maugham's The Painted Veil. I picked up a copy at Target on an impulse (and before anyone gives me any static about that, let me just point out that there hasn't been an independent bookseller in my neck of the woods in years, and that I regularly frequent the Chicago bookstores, not to mention independent sellers on line) and read it over the space of a week. I like Maugham. I don't know why, but I do. Of Human Bondage is a book I'd love to teach, although I have no idea how I'd go about doing it. Maugham has symbols, foreshadowing, style and substance, but it's all just so there. Things just happen. I think it was Jane Smiley herself who wrote the foreword to the Bantam edition, in which she points out that the progression seems more an afterthought, as if it's an excuse to watch the protagonist struggle with his passions, his lack of money and his ostracism. My cup of tea. The interior conflict has always been something that, when executed well, I can eat for breakfast.

The Painted Veil is different, though. Kitty Fane is caught in an affair with a big-talking diplomat, and in a fit of passive agressive punishment, her husband Walter, a doctor, takes her with him to treat cholera victims in an epidemic sweeping through rural Japan. Kitty is superficial, but changes when exposed to true suffering, true love, and the example of the Catholic church as it treats cholera patients, and she learns to see her husband through her new eyes. The ending could have been melodramatic, but Maugham does a better job wrapping up Kitty's journey of self-awareness than he does Philip's in Of Human Bondgage--she's lost too much and made too many mistakes to have a happy ending, but she can at least step in a new direction, and it's from there that I derived the most enjoyment.

Unfortunately, the one factoid that kept running through my head while reading was Maugham's homosexuality. Critics, I believe, keep returning to that as an explanation for his treatment of women: they're either complete and utter bitches, like Mildred Rogers, or confused yet immoral roundheels, like Kitty (and is it any accident that she's named after a slang term for either a prostitute or a vagina? I doubt it). So I was preconditioned to be skeptical of her portrayal, and I think I bought into it. Leafing through the pages once again, I still can't see deep pathos on her part, just a matter-of-fact account of her second thoughts and self-ruminations, almost as if she's going through the motions of having a soul.

But then, pathos in fiction has never been my strong suit. Like Eleanor of Acquitaine, I am not moved to tears, but I should at least be able to recognize when I should be so moved. It's something to work on, I guess. How else could I write my own deathbed scene, many years from now? "As the life left his eyes and his head slumped on the pillow, she felt as if she were floating over him, untethered, free yet precariously so, like a balloon drifting into the atmosphere, at risk of popping because of the inverted atmosphere." Sure, that will do the job just fine. God, I could have gotten a paper graded in the time it took to write that. Damn you, Roeser, you win this round.

NYC-49th and 6th-TROPIC zone bar is a lounge-type place with pounding yet manageable disco music, plenty of space, and waitresses in string bikinis. Journey's End turned out to be an outstanding play chronicling the pathos of the Great War. But it didn't have any waitresses with string bikinis. So I think it's only fair to turn my attention back to the excellent service I'm receiving.

I like this blackberry. This could be a problem.

NYC-88th and 1st Ave--Blogging from Matt's Blackberry. He tells me it's a work-related device, which means it's not to be used frivolously. So hopefully, this is costing his shit company money, and I'm getting the bastard in trouble.

46 degrees. Off to Battery Park. Then Broadway, then the bars. As the Black Keys sing, You just got to be.

Stuff I've been reading

I'm supposed to be working. But instead, I have just three words to contribute:

Jane Eyre rocks.

I love the girl. I don't know why. I don't know how this novel managed to get under my skin for the last five years or so, but I've been moving around from place to place with a swiped copy I picked up when I was teaching an ACT prep class in grad school. Meleena had mentioned it casually in conversation a few times, and since I couldn't take the idea of her knowing the book and me not, I tried reading it. Over and over again.

For all its mystery and allure, Charlotte Bronte had to have written the most boring opening to a novel in the history of Good English Novels. Exhibit A:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

Here, my brow usually furrowed and my attention started to wander. I would remember that I had a copy of a Richard Stark novel waiting to be read. I would wonder if The Merchant of Venice didn't bear rereading. I would remember Elle McPherson had a role in Zifferli's film version of the novel, and maybe I could get away with just reading that. No no, I would think, shaking it off. This is good literature. This is what your students hear all the time--it won't kill you to put yourself in their shoes. Read, damn you. Read!

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

Bleeeech.

That was as far as I got until 2003. At that point, I made it about a third through. I only finished the damned thing, start to completion, about a week ago. How can you not like it? Insanity, abused children, forbidden romance, exile, sacrifice, redemption? All lost because I couldn't get past that walk. I'm loathe to discuss it at length--is it possible that an itinerant web-surfer will latch onto this post, become immediately inspired and search out a copy for him/herself?

No way. Because I had to go and put that boring first page up. Try this on for size:

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer -- you are like a slave-driver -- you are like the Roman emperors!"

...[George, her abusive cousin] ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don't very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me "Rat! Rat!" and bellowed out aloud.

Now that'swhat I'm talking about. Kick the fat kid's butt, Jane!

If that doesn't do it, I don't know what will.

Enough is enough. I went to the doctor. I asked him about my back.

I felt like a kid going through the whole ordeal. Yes, it was an ordeal. I had to call my personnel office, find out how to use my insurance (since I've never used it before), find a doctor in the area covered by my plan, Mapquest the location, drive out there, fill out forms, wait in a waiting room littered with kiddie toys and Teen People Magazine (did you know Justin Timberlake was a Mouseketeer? You did? Wanker) and then sit around in a room for another ten minutes only to have my pulse and BP taken, and walk on my tiptoes for the good doctor, when he finally deigned to show up.

He's sending me to get x-rayed. Then I start physical therapy. Yippee. The last time I went through it was when my brother mercilessly crushed my leg with a schoolbus. That time, it was arduous, but doable. I was fifteen. I was an athlete. I could do anything.

Now I'm 31. I have a back problem. And I have papers to grade.

The long road to recovery is bound to have a few bumps in it. But I didn't know there wouldn't be a rest stop for the next hundred miles.

(That's a crappy analogy. I need a better one.)

Dumb Internet links for a Saturday morning when I should be working:

Fair Education Foundation: http://www.fixedearth.com. According to today's Times, Representative Chisum of Texas argued that evolution is a Rabbinical text-inspired theory, and therefore should not be taught in school. He must have missed the news about Einstein and relativity.

Challenge Blasphemy: http://www.challengeblasphemy.com. Youtube has had a series of videos challenging God's existence, in essence preaching to a largely stupor-addled and torpid crowd. In response, a police officer in Virginia responds in kind, in essence preaching to a largely self-righteous and placid in the face of logic crowd. Boooring.

Ratpure Alert: http://www.rapturealert.com. The police officer mentioned above is "sounding the alert that Jesus Christ is coming soon." Reminds me of a bumper sticker my neighbor had: "If the Rapture is coming, somebody grab my steering wheel!" (No rapture, but he did have to move when he couldn't pay his rent.)

The Half Hour News Hour: http://youtube.com/watch?v=YjIfaMwIFxU. Described as a "Daily Show for Conservatives," which means they've already lost the battle. They have to borrow from the enemy. Reviews have universally panned the show, and Variety points out, rightfully, that the left-leaning media bashes whoever's in the White House, left or right.

Dudeism: http://www.dudeism.com. Via Tso (who else?). Tso, get back to work.

Being called to the principal's office is an odd experience for a grown man. It's even more odd for me.

He's got a nice office, my pal, the principal. Much nicer than mine (if I had one). Deep plush chairs, floor to ceiling bookshelves--it's nice to see what the referendum managed to pay for. He'd sent me an e-mail that morning, and I'd purposely shown up late so he'd be ready, but he got held up in a meeting, so I killed time rolling a pen down the side of his desk and seeing how close I could get it to the edge before swiping it off. When he finally came in, I was caught in the act of retrieving it from under his desk. If it's odd to be called into the principal's office at the age of 31, it's probably even odder to walk into the office and see one of your teachers rooting around where your smelly size-12s spend a few hours of the day.

When we got settled, I got the scoop: A group of parents showed up at the board meeting ready to register a "concern" about the "lack of writing taking place in [my] classroom." The principal and the curriculum director steered [them] away, and settled the group down. I got all hot under the collar, the principal let me settle down, then assured me they were behind me a hundred percent.

Trouble is, it wasn't a group of parents. It was one parent.

A parent I get along with just fine.

A parent concerned about the lack of supplementary grading assistance and the decreased writing assignments overall. Concerns we aired once upon a time.

I think I got played.

At long last...my new car.

More debt. More checks to write.

But isn't it sweet? And even though I look damn good already, I look even better driving it. Now can somebody loan me some gas money?

Daniel Craig shows some clips of Secretary Rumsfeld having some fun at the podium. Not to be missed.

Here's a list of people who owe me $20 (nicknames are used in places):

Dewey: "There's no way the Democrats are going to take any power in this election. The American people are just a bunch of sheep."

Tso: "There's no way Blagojevich is going to get reelected. His corruption has caught up with him."

Tso: "Iraq will not be a deciding factor in this election. America still supports the war."

Rinney: "You're not going to stay sober and watch CNN all election night. That's not possible."

Karl Rove: "[The Republican polls are going to stay in power.] You've got your [electoral math], I've got the math." (said to an NPR reporter, but I bet him through absentee ballot)

George Bush: "The Democrats want to cut and run." (after taking the house, Pelosi denied any such plans, and now that she's all but certain to become House Speaker, people actually started listening to Democrats.)

Look, people, how many times do I have to say it? You think elections don't change anything? What just happened: the President ate his own words, Rummy resigned, and the Democrats aren't talking tax-tax-tax, run-run-run. They're talking higher minimum wage. They're talking redirecting oil funds. They're talking pay-as-you-go.

And did anyone see Tom DeLay's comment: "The Democrats didn't win. The Republicans lost"? Strange thing for "The Hammer" to say, a man for whom there are nothing but absolutes. When convicted, he'll be saying, "They didn't find me guilty--they failed to find me innocent." And he'll be passing on the soap while saying it, too.

I'm drunk, but this time on elation. And gin.

We had a half day today because of conferences. Normally, I head to Best Buy to waste my hard-earned money on a crappy DVD--last year it was the Special Edition of The Fly; the year before that, Evil Dead II. But I found out I'm not, after all, registered to vote, and while I support wholeheartedly American complacency and the voting gap that lies stinking like an abscessed wound over my generation, I nevertheless felt a transitory yet persistent urge to throw my lot in with the rest of the disenchanted, sick-of-swiping-politicians voters and cast my ballot for the "anybody but the rest of them" party. As much as humanly possible, anyway. So I stopped-and-went along 90 to the Blue Line and hopped a train to the Daley Center (in its resplendent Halloween glory; see image and note below), where I did Late Registration Voting.

It's a humbling process. I should probably point out that I was still attired in my suit-and-tie from conferences, and since the Maiden concert was over and done with, I'd gotten a haircut mere minutes before the meet-and-greet yesterday. So I was looking relatively dapper. As my colleagues like to point out, I clean up good. As I like to point out...well, seriously, ladies, who wants a taste?

But I could have been wearing Armani delux and still received the same treatment.

My first mistake was bringing a book. White guys wearing Ipods, dressed in ratty clothing with hair hanging down their face over a copy of Critique of Practical Reason don't draw a second glance on the Red Line. (Trust me--I know, except substitute Kant for Hustler.) But wearing a rumpled shirt under your suit and carrying a copy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason, brands you a Hillary-ite. (I'm not saying I'm not one, just that I was labeled.) Seriously, several people passed me tracts. One guy told me he hated New York. Another said he would pray for me. And this was all from reading a fucking book. Or, better still, reading a book about the most powerful woman in the twelfth century. Had I carried a copy of Dr. Phil, I probably would have been safer.

My second mistake was assuming I'd remember the address. I found the building no sweat--only a complete and utter illiterate would have trouble disembarking and walking through the wrong door. I remembered that much from a Chicago parking ticket many moons ago. But I couldn't remember what suite in the Cook County building it was, and the "Information Desks" were anything but informative. The good news: I now know where to apply for divorce. Hey, you never know.

My last mistake was missing the deadline in the first place. Like an utter cretin (but not an illiterate one, I hasten to add), I assumed I'd registered when I moved, when, more likely, I reminded myself to register, forgot the reminder, and assumed I'd done it. Doing late registration seems to be like registering for unemployment--you get a lot of judgmental, "how the hell did you end up here looks from the people behind the desk, you fill out a lot of paperwork, you wait in uncomfortable plastic chairs that somehow mold to not fit your butt, and you listen to other people (losers, unlike you, who screwed up somehow, which is why they're there, even if it's not why you yourself are) screech about long lines, paperwork and uncomfortable chairs.

One interesting wrinkle: I had to vote that day. Late registration precludes you from the Nov. 7 experience. Good thing I did my homework and knew how badly both governor candidates sucked the royal root.

An even more interesting wrinkle: no-votes are possible. You can leave ballot boxes blank. It's the only form of two-party protest I can think of.

And you even get your I voted today sticker to put on Nov. 7.

You can rock at a Maiden concert on a school night.

Yes, indeedy, the Maidens rocked the house at the Allstate Arena Wednesday night. I whined. I puled. I howled. First about the late hour; then about the new album they were playing start to finish.

Let me tell you something: they rock.

I'm still digesting A Matter of Life and Death, but there are songs that scream "old school" to me. "These Colours Don't Run," or "The Greater Good of God." I've only listened to the songs in the car--I need to get them on my MP3, or in my living room. But I don't even know all the lyrics yet, and the only reason I know there's an anti-war theme is because of the bigass tank on the cover. My car is ok for acoustics, but the Allstate leaves much to be desired.

So there I stood, 31 years old, wearing a secondhand Hawaiian shirt and my dog-chewed concert jacket, cheering like a loon along with the appropriate lyrics from "Iron Maiden" and "Hallowed Be Thy Name." I'd never gotten to wail along to "Fear of the Dark" (it being post-1985 work of theirs), but I did not miss my chance Wednesday. They put me to shame: Dickinson has got to be past 50, yet he can still run and bellow high notes nonstop without even breaking a sweat. They had energy. They had depth. They knew how to put on a show.

When I left, my ears were ringing. My head was splitting. I needed a shower. I needed a drink. I needed to pull out all my Iron Maiden tapes and play them back to back until one a.m.

So why was it, then, that in the car, after fiddling with the radio for a while, I found myself singing lustily along to George Michaels' "Faith"?

Not exactly the capper for my first metal concert in over a decade. I swear, I have ADD for music taste.