Five More Wisdom Biscuits
1. I know garbage
“You should put the garbage bins back where they were before you remodelled,” I tell the managers of the Grant High School construction project when they host a neighborhood forum.
“Funny thing, that,” the lady in charge says, “It’s a bit counterintuitive.”
She explains something city planners learned about beaches.
“If there is a garbage can, people will use it. And, then, when it gets filled, they will pile their refuse next to it—and the result is that the trash scatters everywhere. However, if you remove the trash can altogether, people take their trash with them.”
So much for what seemed obvious.
✧✧✧
2. Bread crumbs
Once, after a particularly foul mood lifted, I think to myself, “I should remember what I did to cause the mood to lift.”
“I know,” I excitedly think, “I’ll write out prescriptive directions—as a little, bread-crumb trail for me to follow back out the next time.”
However, the next time I’m in a particularly foul mood, I look at the bread crumbs before me and angrily bark, “Who the hell left this mess here?!”
✧✧✧
3. The writing on the walls
Things you need to know about the Ancient Near East:
- Most structures were made out of mud or plastered with it
- Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian were written in Cuneiform, which looks to our eyes like rows of bird tracks.
As the mud walls dried, they cracked—looking to ancient eyes like the writing of the day.
Accordingly experts were called in to “read the writing on the wall.”
(For the biblically minded: In Daniel 5, the future lion’s-den dweller interprets the writing on King Belshazzar’s wall.)
✧✧✧
4. More good than harm
I am 10+ years older than Adam, the Head of the English department at the small charter school at which we both work.
However, he has many more years experience teaching high school than I.
I’m at the copy machine, lamenting.
I do a lot of lamenting during my first years as an educator—public school classrooms are no joke.
“Brian,” Adam says, “There are days you need to just know that you are doing more good than harm.”
Amen.
✧✧✧
5. Two things about drugs
Drugs: One.
At the end of May, I have a tooth pulled and get a prescription for Oxycodone, a strong, highly-addictive pain manager.
While falling into the cloudy comfort, leaving the pain behind, I think—If you told someone they could either:
Do a thing and feel no pain
or
Do not do the thing and feel pain
The reasonable, logical thing to do seems to be “Option Oxycodone”
Drugs: Two.
It has been four weeks since the procedure.
I’m off pain-killers.
However, the antibiotic I took for two weeks to deal with the sinus infection from my dental issue caused thrush, a yeast infection in my mouth.
My tongue has felt like it’s on fire—pain level 2—for over a week.
I am finding it hard to be what I remember as my previous level of kind to others (and me).
I have newfound sympathy for anyone suffering from chronic pain.
