The Second Grade

The show I watched every day was Lost in Space in re-runs. I watched a parade of re-runs. Family Affair, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, The Addams Family, The Munsters, The Partridge Family, That Girl, Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, Green Acres. I had very little connection to the time in which I was in. That was okay because I hardly talked to anyone so I very rarely needed to make conversation or understand what anyone was talking about. It turned out that much of my generation was watching these programs too, as many of our recent movies have proven. In fact, the whole retro feeling that pervaded the 90's was very much the mid 60's and early 70's and had the goofyness of some of these shows. Some of what I was doing in my quiet was percolating. Thinking. Getting close to my own aesthetic.

I was also making my first trips to the Museum of Modern Art and talking to my mother about Marc Chagall and where poverty figured into his paintings.

Maybe everyone needs a period of silence. Maybe I am going back again because I have to re-discover my aesthetic. My ability to use my own is being run over by an administration that feels my job is expendible, the school at which I worked was not worth sustaining, and that I now much make the argument to principals for why I am valuable. Again and again. That's always very hard to me as I can see why many people are useful. I see myself as one of many choices and not the best of the lot. I am working because I am the right person for the kind of school at which I have worked for the past eight years. And now it is closing.

Danger, Will Robinson!