Dear Friends,
I have to interrupt the army story (again) to get some things off my chest. This past week was a doozy in many ways. So get ready for some really random thoughts.
*****
I have to start off with the Suns. I don’t understand this team at all. Skip ahead to the next set of asterisks if you don’t like basketball because this is going to go down a hoop rabbit hole.
If we look back to earlier in the season when the Suns went on their 18-game winning streak, we saw a team that had serious poise. Even when they weren’t hitting shots and the other team would go on a run, they kept their cool and methodically used their defense to get back into games. They locked teams down and that just hasn’t happened in the playoffs except for a few quarters.
The game on Thursday showed zero poise. The Suns got absolutely schooled from about halfway through the second quarter on and there was no urgency at all. I fear they have started reading their press clippings from much earlier in the season when they were the odds-on favorite to win their first championship.
It makes you wish you could get inside the heads of the team and see what’s really going on. They have this aura about them that keeps the press out. They are very, very measured in what they say in the post-game conferences, for example, and for fans, it doesn’t give us a lot to go on. I feel like I don’t even know who this team is right now and that’s weird when you consider that someone like me, and there is a ton of us out there, have watched at least some of every game and followed this story closely.
Maybe that’s the worst part of this is that this season has felt like such a great story for most of it. They dealt with the adversity of injuries to key players, put together some amazing runs, and just played the right way. The supposed drama that was thought to be coming with the Robert Sarver nonsense never materialized and these guys could just flat out play.
More than anything, I just don’t know what the hell is going on with them. It’s very frustrating.
I’ve been unleashing my angst on Twitter and probably looking like a seriously fair-weather fan, but I must get it out. Earlier in the week, I loudly yelled, “Cocksucker!” at the TV and made Rhondi laugh. I have to believe that tomorrow will be another nailbiter. We shall see.
In the end, it doesn’t matter much to my life other than the tremendous joy I am sure a championship would bring. I literally danced in the street with the Diamondbacks won the world series. I was by myself, but I had to just go outside and hop around for a bit. I want to do that for the Suns, too. So bad!
Go Suns! Get it done and figure your shit out because if you win, the next team is going to be even harder to beat.
*****
My students are nuts.
We have 19 school days to go, and they are feeling it, big time. Right now, I’d say a gnat has a gargantuan attention span compared to 75% of my kids. The volume level in my classroom can go from nice and quiet with a few kids whispering to each other to several kids yelling in about 2.3 seconds. If I had laser eyes, half of them would have been melted or cut in half by now.
I had a discussion with one of my little cherubs yesterday about her candy consumption. She almost always has candy in the mornings. Early in the school year, I asked her mom to please stop sending her to school with a pink frosted donut each morning, sometimes two, because she cannot sit still. This child struggles with attention and impulse control on a morning when she has no sugar, so introducing the world’s most dangerous drug is just a bad idea.
She looked at me while I was explaining how sugar works in the body with huge brown eyes and a horrified expression on her face. I could see her realizing that I wasn’t just trying to scare her away from sugar but giving her insight into why she has trouble with self-control.
We’ve been talking about self-control a lot during our morning meetings and character education time. I’m pulling some stuff, of course, from my old Casa days to share with them and it helps, but it’s not enough. Right now, they are just so full of energy and dread and fear and excitement about the end of the year that it’s a full-time job managing them.
Luckily, we are almost done with testing so I can just put our time towards having some fun, learning some information that they will enjoy a lot, and coasting into the summer break. We are going to focus for the last few weeks on learning about the milky way and our place in it. I’m tying all the classes to this so we can explore reading, writing, math, science, social studies…all of it… in looking at, and thinking about, space. I think they will enjoy it a lot. We’re also going to do a little project where they create their own solar system. I can’t wait to see what the ones who have not been felled by my laser eyes can do.
*****
Lastly, I finished Ozark early in the week. What an interesting ending. This show was so intense and dealt with such dark and stressful subject matter that it would have been nearly impossible to please everyone with the way it ended. I thought about putting this in the review section, but it seemed a little strange and disingenuous to me to write a review for something I have enjoyed so much over the last five years. If you haven’t watched it, I would give it a shot. The acting and writing are pretty darn superb. Sure, I’m a Jason Bateman fan and have been since he was on Silver Spoons, but it’s not just about him.
See you tomorrow.
Last summer in Maine. I've got my buddy, Gerty, on my lap. I'm wearing my Suns shirt so I figured it was worth adding to the page today. This same Suns shirt failed to give the Suns the proper motivation to win on Thursday. Photo by Rhondi.
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