Hello?

    Although there are forty-nine other perfectly good states out there, I think West Virginia is a good place to start a search for extra-terrestrial life. In fact, I can't think of any other reason why a group of scientists would choose to hold a conference there.
    The conference--on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or SETI--was held at the Green Bank Radio Astronomy Observatory. It's true that there are better observatories in California and Hawaii, but it's possible  the SETI conference was held in West Virginia to avoid any distractions. Like fun. I've been to West Virginia and this seems to me entirely plausible. I don't know whether it's possible to drive or fly to West Virginia; I walked across the border from Virginia, on a detour from the Appalachian Trail. I have a story about that trip that involves a still, a forty-four caliber pistol, and a guy named Rusty, but I can't think of any good reason to tell it here.
    I read about the conference in an interesting book by James Trefil called 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either. I bought the book because it was cheap. While I seldom buy an interesting book if it isn't cheap, I often buy cheap books in the hope that they are interesting. The title is misleading (there were at least fifty-four things I already knew, and I'm only an English major), but the book was fifty per cent off, so I figure Trefil and I are square. Trefil announces his intention to devote only three pages--not two, not four--to each "thing," so to say that his treatment of each topic is superficial is not inaccurate, nor, I would suggest, even insulting. The 101 things, by the way, are all questions, so I assume it's the answers we don't know. One chapter, for instance, asks "Is Anybody Out There?," which neatly brings us back to West Virginia.

    In the end, the conference came up with little except (1) the possibility that there may once have been a primitive form of life in Wheeling, West Virginia, which the scientists chose to call "Senator Joseph McCarthy"; (2) the observation that even as they talked there were life forms right outside the building, many wearing feed caps; and (3) a promising formula for their purposes called the Drake Equation (after Sir Francis Drake, the explorer and cupcake salesman whose ship discovered West Virginia in 1574 when it was still part of Africa):N=RxPxExLxIxT. Promising, that is, until one of the attendees pointed out, "Hey, that equation doesn't have any numbers in it!"
    So the search goes on. The SETI people are still looking for what they call a "continuously habitable zone"--either outside the solar system or inside the Beltway.

A Comment From the World of Education (or somewhere nearby):

A Comment From the World of Education (or somewhere nearby):

Have you noticed how, in Education, every noun has an adjective attached to it? I was alerted to this phenomenon one day in a faculty meeting when I was distracted from my daydreaming by the phrase “Enduring Understanding,” which intruded on my consciousness from somewhere in the front of the room. Faculty meetings are hard on daydreamers but a boon to language enthusiasts. Since I am both, it’s probably not surprising that I have mixed feelings about them. When I’m able to pay attention, I sometimes hear the most curious things: “Enduring Understanding,” “Essential Question,” “Scientific Research Based Instruction.” These phrases always come in capital letters, which you can actually hear.

            Why is this, do you think? Ernest Hemingway was a firm believer in nouns. He said that if you named a thing carefully, there was no need to pile on adjectives. Here is one of my favorite lines from his A Farewell to Arms: “I lay flat on the bank and heard the river and the rain.” And here is the famous opening line of that novel: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” When Carl Sandburg was in his seventies, he said, “I am more suspicious of adjectives, now, than at any other time in my life.” And here is one of my favorite verses from one of my favorite poets, William Butler Yeats:

                        Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

It’s not that adjectives are evil. I like Dickens, too. But what is this inability to leave things alone?  I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the Educationists. They make up names for things. “Focused Correction.” “Research Assisted Instructional D…d…d…d…

–Whew! That was close. I’m back from the edge. Still, I’m glad that I’ve had time to think about these things. And I’m glad I finally got to this journal so these thoughts would have somewhere to go. It’s not easy being an English teacher. You don’t get to write or read or think very much. It’s just that there’s more stuff  every year. There really is.  Administrators believe in the trickle-down theory, so this stuff just keeps sifting down on us, often with capital letters. It can be really suffocating. But that’s education, I guess. It’s just that it gets really dark in here sometimes.

Do other teachers feel the way I do? It’s not an Essential Question or anything. I’m just asking. I need a forum to write about these things. My journal isn’t going to tell me whether I’m an anomaly or whether I’m just like everyone else. Although I have a feeling that I’m not just like everyone else. It’s a feeling I call alienation.

I suppose I could put up a blog, but it would be nice if I got paid for my writing, too. There must be a market for anomalies. Everyone loves an anomaly. I need a little corner of a newspaper or a magazine that I could call my own—a platform from which I could provoke people (in a good way) once a week or so with anomalous observations. What would I call this column?

                        “Don’t Try This at Home”

                        (or) “I’m Just Saying”

                        (or) “Whatever”

                        (or) “A Little Something to Think About”

                        (or) “Left of Center”

                        (or)…well, something will come up. (Say, that’s not a bad title, either.)

The thing is, I’ve never thought quite the same way other people do. This has been both good and bad, as you can imagine. I see things that other people don’t. I miss things that other people see. Now, I just want a place where I can capitalize on my, um, different point of view.

I was just sitting here thinking who wouldn’t want to hear what I have to say, and you know what? I couldn’t come up with a single name. Well, maybe Ricky Regan. I beat up Ricky Regan on the playground in fourth grade. I got out of it, though, because the teacher took one look at me and said, “I seriously doubt it.” So I beat her up. No, but I did smirk at Ricky Regan in such a way that I’m sure he hates me to this day. Although he could be dead. I really should start going to some class reunions just to see who’s still alive. Cheryl Boulanger, for instance. I had such a crush on her. She probably looks like Rosa DeLauro by now.

The thing is, I don’t look back much. I’m not what you’d call nostalgic. For what? A dirty little mill town, factory smoke and brick tenement houses? A nineteenth century school building with eighteenth century teachers? Ignorant, racist “classmates” being primed for the mills?

No, I look ahead, mostly: tomorrow, the weekend, vacation, my daughter graduates, my son moves out. Maybe the Rapture comes. I just hope I get to keep my medical insurance.