Posts Tagged ‘home’

The Syracuse City School District referred to grades 7 through 9 as junior high school. The feeble term “middle school” was reserved for those milquetoast suburban kids whose districts had sleek, modern buildings and full-fledged orchestras featuring fierce battles over who was going to get first chair. My desegregated and gritty junior high school was a scary, Hogwarts-looking building also featuring pitched battles over who was going to get first chair – at the lunch table. Heck, some 9^th graders were actually driving cars to school, but only because they were 17 and should’ve been in 11^th grade.

 

Eastwood Junior High School was more tightly structured than elementary school. In fact, Eastwood was more closely structured to a high school, but like a smaller version of a high school – more like a “junior” high school. Hmmm…I wonder if that’s how it got its name.

 

My 8^th grade school day ran from 8:15 to 2:06 and the lunch period was shoehorned into the day from 10:50-11:18. This left us ravenous and hormonal lunchers a mere 28 minutes to nosh and dash. But since school administrators had to squeeze 2 lunches into 6 educational periods, frittering away time was not on the menu.

 

In addition to truncated lunches, we were allotted only 3 miserly minutes between classes. Take more than 180 seconds to get to your next class and your tardiness would become part of your permanent record – egad, no, not the dreaded permanent record! The in-between-classes time was marked off for us in colorfully stark indicators. First the green light came on meaning that class was over and you had 2 minutes till the red light alerted you that you now had only one minute to be seated and ready to go in your next class.

 

This was not an easy task. Especially if you had to trek from gym class in the basement all the way to health class on the 2^nd floor on the opposite side of the building – all without benefit of GPS. Throw in a visit to your locker and a pee pitstop and you might not beat the countdown of the red light flicking off. When you arrived at health class, the door could be shut and you’d be a marooned studenaut floating freely out in the empty corridors of space – a truant teenager in no man’s land without the protection of a get-out-of-jail-free Hall Pass.

 

Maybe an understanding teacher would grant you entrance knowing how hard it is to organize your books, stop at your locker, get a drink or take a wiz and then double time it to your next class. And you can forget about pinching a loaf – there was no time for such necessary evacuations. Meeting this shipshape timetable was a big ask (a pain in the ask), but we complied and it generally worked out. From the school’s point of view, providing a scant 3 minutes between classes allowed little time for mischief like drawing a moustache on the Donnie Osmond picture taped to Kathy Kraushaar’s locker (“Crow” to her intimates).

 

In addition to these exacting time parameters, there was a cardinal rule that students were prohibited from dining off campus or from leaving the building during school hours. While that rule was binding on all the civilian students, it did not apply to me since I didn’t regard myself as a civilian. I saw myself more as a foreign exchange student visiting from Rigel-7. Furthermore, however well understood or well-meaning this rule might be, it was at odds with my own creed of circumventing ill-conceived regulations. And this regulation was illing me.

 

I was always scheming to make my time my own. So, by employing at least 6 of my limbic system brain cells, I decided to take the miserly 28 minutes administrators allotted for midday num-num and make a jail break for the cozy confines of my comfortable crib located a scant 2 blocks away.

 

By attempting such risky self-care and flouting the territorial strictures of scholastic mandarins, I’d replace a noisy lunch period in the godlessly chirpy cafeteria with a serene and restorative mini-spa day back at my personal ground zero. So when the green light flashed “Go Time” at 10:47, I bolted from Miss Patrick’s 4^th period algebra class and dashed home like a border collie with the zoomies. By 10:51 I had unlocked the kitchen door using the key hidden in the Batman box up in the green cabinet and entered my personal Shangri-la.

 

Once ensconced behind the walls of Fortress Hardiman, I’d thrill to the pleasure of bilocation whereby for all intents I was in 2 places at once. That is, I was at school (at least by dint of roster assignment and supposed residency), but simultaneously I was also at home (by dint of being at home). This magical ability to be two places at once, wasn’t an act of David Hardiman. Nope. This was more an act of David Copperfield’s. My God. What kind of mad funhouse did I live in? Damn I was good company.

 

I reveled in the temporal alchemy of taking worthless school district time, and converting it into valuable personal time to spend as I saw fit – and I spent it like a drunken neurotic. I was like a teenage sorcerer converting ordinary school district moments into Dave’s personally treasured time, and I measured these enriched units of time in Hardiminutes and Nanodaves. Maybe in zooming home from Miss Patrick’s class, I had warped the time space continuum and had become a critical mass. A critical mass of what, I’ll leave to the reader to decide.  

 

So what does a wizardly time-junkie do in 27 cherished Hardiminutes to intensify his temporal larceny? Well I might start by removing my chicken loaf sandwich from the refrigerator. The sandwich I strategically assembled the previous night in preparation for this off the reservation event. I’d allow the sandwich to breathe – that is, to come to room temperature in the manner of decanting a fine wine. But instead of softening bitter tannins or developing a pleasing bouquet, I’d be enhancing the processed tang of compressed chicken loaf and intensifying the flavorless savor of Hellman’s Mayonnaise. Turns out I was doing sous vide before that cooking technique had even crossed the pond.

 

By adroitly structuring my time I’d synergize the moment and telescope the event. More prosaically, I might then proceed to the familiar family oval (the toilet) and decant something of a personal nature right through the oval and into the waiting waters of the family throne – there’s your original streaming service right there. This would be followed by various ablutions: a hot washcloth luxuriantly applied to the face followed by a warm wipe of the neck and hands. And because I was aware the hot water heater was directly below the sink, I knew there’d be a very short wait for the hot water to stream from the faucet. Understanding my domicile’s intimate infrastructure made me feel I had the advantage over my enemies – even though I really didn’t have any enemies and even though no advantage was gained. Maybe this whole thing was just happening in my head. Well, that was good enough for me. By now my Wonder Bread “chicken” sandwich had been properly decanted. It had lost all its chill and was ready for onboarding.

 

So I tossed my amalgamated chicken parts sandwich onto a plate with some pretzels, poured a tall glass of milk into my favorite ARCO gas station mug (the one with the handle and the New York Giants logo etching) and, lap towel in hand, brought it all into the living room where I turn on the TV and watch the last 5 minutes of Tattletales (which by 10:56 was mostly credits and commercials). At 11 I was happy to start a Let’s Make a Deal. By now I’m deep into the experience, very far away and completely immersed in my own private Idaho. My junior high school might as well be in Boise right now.

 

I finish lunch and watch as Monty Hall asks a lady dressed as a pickle if she’d like to take the curtain superintended by slim Carol Merril or the small box presented by chunky Jay Stewart. The pickle lady opts for the box and is rewarded with a $300 gift certificate to Spiegel Catalogue. Monty reminds us of the company’s location, “Spiegel, Chicago 6-oh-6-oh-9.” She chose wisely because behind the curtain was a gag gift of a rickety Beverly Hillbillies-looking jalopy.

 

It’s now 11:07 and I’m very deep into the experience and far removed from algebra class. I wonder if I can even make it back to the civilians students awaiting me at some place called Eastwood Junior High School. Where was that again? This mini-spa day in my hometown oasis had projected me out of this world. I’d become a studenaut – tethered to this world only by the knowledge that I had to be back at school by 11:21 or I’d besmirch my permanent record.

 

Taking a quick catnap crosses my mind, but I decide against anything remotely feline for fear of waking up in a no-kill shelter. No, there was only one honorable thing to do: return to Spaceship Earth and get my ass back to school. So I activated my heat shields and began reentry. I didn’t want to be late for Miss Patrick’s class and have this youthful blunder give prospective employers pause for hiring me in the years to come – “Mr. Hardiman we’d really like to hire you, but it appears you returned 3 minutes late to an algebra class in 1974. How do you account for this?” I couldn’t risk that. Besides, stern Miss Patrick would be expecting me since her class bookended the lunch period.

 

At 11:10 I lay me down on the bed and pretend to meditate (which is the same as actually meditating). By 11:11 I had put in almost a complete 1 minute of intermittent meditation and I was either enlightened or unchanged – I couldn’t tell the difference. So I cleaned up the lunch dishes and hoped the phone wouldn’t ring with Principal Dolan or more likely, his nosey secretary Mrs. DeSantis wondering why I’m not at school. I grab a Chips Ahoy! cookie as I enter earth’s atmosphere and stealthily make my way back to school, unseen by administrative patrols. At 11:20 Miss Patrick’s door is thankfully still open and I settle in to my seat at 11:21 ready to go and fully restored from my larcenous escapade. Before cracking open my algebra book I think to myself, “Damn, I am good company and I’m glad to have made my acquaintance.”  

 

So yeah, maybe this stitch in time wasn’t exactly Ferris Bueller’s day off, but it was a gratifying, time bending and swashbuckling caper. And as Miss Patrick began discussing binomial expressions, I wondered if any of the civilian students could sense that my buckle had been recently swashed. As things stood, there’d be no post-prandial regret from this erstwhile extra-terrestrial, non-civilian pupil. As the teachers’ would say to each other about my behavior, “I think we better keep an eye on that pupil.” 

 

 

The Punny Bonus

 

Because I dined at home and didn’t have to pay for a cafeteria lunch, I fulfilled another goal of mine – to Buy No Meal if I could avoid it. Which, if you think about it, is just a fittingly algebraic way of solving a binomial expression – also known as a “Buy No Meal” expression.   

 

 

In Praise of Those I Didn’t Get Then, But Do Now

 

Fortyish-year old math teacher Miss Patrick was a very rational and exacting math teacher (maybe that’s why she gravitated to the very rational and exacting field of numbers). So steeped in algebra, she always seemed to have a binomial expression on her face. We kids weren’t quite sure what her sexual proclivities were, but the consensus was she probably spoke heterosexuality as a second language. Our revered Miss Patrick commanded respect. You just didn’t talk out of turn in her class like you did in every other class. You didn’t even want to. She was a next level caliber educator.

 

Yes she may have been a no nonsense teacher, but on St. Patrick’s Day she let down her close-cropped hair and transformed into a kind of Impish Irishwoman. On St. Patrick’s Day, instead of the usual orderly use of the black chalkboard with white chalk, Miss Patrick would turn her back to the students and begin writing a quadratic equation on the blackboard in green chalk. The usually silent class would begin to giggle. She’d then turn slowly around and deadpan to us students, “What’s the matter, haven’t you ever seen green chalk before,” to which we’d all bust out laughing like little leprechauns.  

People never have to leave home now. They can be home-birthed, home-schooled and work from home. They can have meals and groceries home-delivered.

If they get sick – homeopathy.

All their friends – homies.

All their hits – homers.

They can even visit the Great Outdoors by sitting on their ovens where they’re Home, Home on the Range.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

1. Mirror That Makes You Look 10 Years Younger – Not recommended for children under 10 who become frightened when they look into their past life.
2. Riding Vacuum from John Deere – Don’t let those 8000 sq. feet of carpeting in your mansion gather dust. Keep them spotlessly clean with a Riding Vacuum from John Deere. Why not get one for each floor. You’ll find that Riding Vacuums suck a lot more than you think. And they practically disappear into the interior design when covered with their included Riding Vacuum Cozy.
3. Peeing Sink – Once you try this new streaming device you’ll never go back to aiming
4. 

   This is your brain on cauliflower.

   Refrigerator that dispenses crushed ice, cubed steak and chipped beef

5. Techno Doggy Door – A microchip-activated pet door that allows your chipped pet indoor/outdoor privileges. Works with husbands too, providing they’re also chipped. Even works with beef, as long as it’s chipped beef.
6. Programmable Paint from Microsoft – Paint your room one time, then set it and forget it. Alter the color as you see fit, when you see fit. Note: Paint must be chipped, even though most people don’t like chipped paint.
7. Detached Manger – No room in the house for the new baby? Not a problem with this biblically themed nursery. Raise your child like he’s the Second Coming or at least like the angel he is. Insulated manger comes with frankincense, myrrh and a straw floor. Great for out-of-town visitors come to pay their respects. One look at its simple straw-themed design and you’ll say, “Hay!”
8. A 2^nd Floor Above-Ground Swimming Pool – Classy and white trashy. Guaranteed not to collapse…unless it does. Then enjoy your new Staircase Waterfall at no extra cost. Comes with ethically-sourced, gluten-free water noodles.
9. Aah-oo-Gah Doorbell Chime – This supersonic doorbell breaks the sound barrier and guarantees you get to your Amazon package at the door before a robber scoops it up. It’s sonic boom is said to cure people suffering from Shy Bladder.
10. Crawlspace Catacombs – This one might be illegal. We’ll discuss it in person.
11. Mirrored Toilet Seat – Popular in England where they tend to be a little cheekier. Some find its reflection confusing because they don’t know whether they’re coming or going.
12. Random Desperate Bird Fluttering Inside the House, Way Up in the Vaulted Ceiling – Guaranteed to make you feel like you’re living in a Home Depot or an Airline Terminal. If the bird escapes, all guarantees are out the window.
13. Walk-in Closet with 30 Foot Drop into a Foam Pit – Located in the guest room, this adrenalizing freefall gives the in-laws a gentle pause for thought about ever visiting you again.
14. 48-Car Underground Garage – Or, for the more frugal, a 36-car above ground parking structure. Underground garage incompatible with the Crawlspace Catacomb.
15. Nuclear Powered Doorbell Light – The last doorbell light you’ll ever buy. And probably the only one too. Always leaves a light burning in the doorbell – at 950° inside a transparent titanium containment vessel. Take great comfort in the manufacturer’s guarantee that it will stay illuminated eons after the sun explodes and vaporizes Solar System. Pairs well with Aah-oo-Gah horn option.
16. Bidet/Hydration Station Bubbler – Proves that you can drink where you clean.
17. Husband-proof Appliances – Designed especially for husband-proofing the house by ensuring that:
    1. The dirty clothes are not put in the dryer before they’re washed
    2. Laundry does not come out of the wash all one color
    3. Soap is put in the dishwasher before it’s turned on
    4. Dishes are put in the dishwasher before it’s turned on
    5. Food is put in the microwave before it’s turned on
    6. The electric toothbrush doesn’t shock you back to 2^nd grade
    7. The remote is never lost because it’s attached to a can’t-be-misplaced kayak
    8. The freezer and the refrigerator are not both set to the same temperature
18. Every Door in the House Operates Like a Garage Door – Make entering any room an event with this brawny option. Comes with a universal remote. Pet-safe…if their chipped.
19. Hilarious Woman’s Shoe  Closet with Room for Only 4 Pair of Shoes– Prove that you have an unbounded sense of humor by showing visitors this ridiculously undersized storage closet specially built for your wife’s 4 pairs of shoes.
20. Drone Ceiling Fan – Fly it to the room where it’s most needed
21. Reverse Microwave that Makes Things Cooler – It’s finally here. By overcoming the primordial forces of nature the Reverse Microwave draws about 450 gigawatts of electricity per use. Therefore your Electrical Panel must be hooked-up directly to the Hoover Dam. A better option may be to just put whatever it is you want cooled in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.
22. Thinly Sliced Deep-Fried Potatoes – Note: In order to do this correctly, potatoes must be chipped.
23. Chocolate Cookie and Card Playing Gaming Table – Note: The cookies and the table must both be chipped
24. Favorite Son on the TV show My Three Sons – Gotta be Chip.
25. Favorite 70’s TV Show – You guessed it: ChiPs

David?

Yes.

What do these last few entries about chips have to do with home improvement ideas?

Well, let’s face it folks. I’m off the rails here and I’m loving it. It’s fun to go nuts when you’re not driving a car, performing surgery or sitting in a church pew. I encourage y’all to do the same once in a while. In that way you’d be a chip off the old block.