1-800- Luca Brazi
This entry was posted on 2/2/2011 10:07 AM and is filed under blather.
Jay is currently working on two different campuses, wearing three distinct hats.
He's teaching full time at one campus and acting as the union's faculty grievance rep, while designing a men's basketball program at another campus from the ground up.
Home is no refuge; even when he's here, he spends hours on the phone, switching back and forth from planning, recruiting and logistics to putting out fires ranging from avoiding renting space in gyms that are high school regulation instead of college (turns out there's a difference) to negotiating with the administration over whether or not they can discipline faculty over yadda yadda yadda.
It never stops.
EVER.
As you can imagine, this leads to the need for some serious down time.
So sometimes before cooking me dinner, he likes to go ice fishing.
But thanks to modern technology, even being out on the frozen surface of a lake in the middle of a Minnesota winter is no place to hide from work.
His cell never stops ringing.
EVER.
He could turn it off but that would be irresponsible. If it were me, I'd turn it off, but I'm a misanthropic hermit and it's no accident that I'm self employed.
My heart was wrung yesterday afternoon when Josie got home from school. She has a naturally sunny disposition and is usually the most upbeat of kids. She's the kind of person who can always find the silver lining. I could tell she was upset as soon as she came in the back door. I called down the stairs and asked her what was wrong. She came and told me what a horrible day she'd had; she didn't understand what they were doing in trig, she didn't think she had written a very good essay in APUSH and worst of all, her phone had disappeared out of her back pack somewhere between third and sixth hour.
Josie is already on her third cell phone. She's not allowed to use her phone in the kitchen because she dropped her last one in a bowl of steaming hot chicken noodle soup.
If there's liquid around, her phones dive for it.
So I knew that all the sadness about her school day was a smoke screen; she was dreading having to tell her dad that she'd lost another phone.
She didn't have to tell him immediately. He had grabbed the late afternoon opportunity to go fishing. He called me on the way home for dinner to tell me he hadn't had a bite. Not only that, but another fire had broken out on campus shortly after he'd drilled a hole in the ice. Phone began to buzz like an alarm. He took the call as he set up his fishing hole. As soon as he finished that call, he shut the phone, placed it in a fold of his insulated shirt and dropped his line.
The phone buzzed again.
Before he had time to react, it vibrated off his lap, he saw it hit the ice and slide right into his newly drilled fishing hole.
His fish finder went nuts as the phone disappeared, along with all his contacts and messages into the icy depths of a nameless lake, to forever sleep with the fishes.
Personally? I think his phone committed suicide.
Anyway, instead of a relaxing hour of watching the sunset and fishing, he'd spent the last hour at the mall, replacing his phone.
I told Josie, whose sad little face immediately lit up like a sunrise as she cried "YES! It's a good day!"
See? Silver lining.
