A Lousy Time to be Hurt

There was this one time...back when I was a wee lad...when I burned my right hand. It was during the summer. We went to visit Ohio for the first time, and I recall not being able swim well, finally settling for a plastic bag and tape to keep my bandages dry while bobbing in the pool.

Well this past week has been kind of like that. Not only in the sense that I can't swim, despite pools opening up, it is like the previous situation in that I am missing out on all the fun.

My basketball league team in undefeated, and it looks like we'll go on to 8-0 and the number one seed in the play offs. But I've missed the past two games, and it looks like I might miss the rest of the season.

My volleyball league just started...and it looks like I'll just back out and let someone else take my spot.

But wait! Allow me to continue my self-involved, whiney rant. Because, also due to my injury, I have missed the dodgeball tournament at school AND had to play a significantly diminished role in the 4-2-1 volleyball tournament. Fortunately, I played a little bit in the championship (and not too badly for a "one-armed bandit", if I do say so myself) and we held our own, before falling 21-18 and 23-21.

Anyway, here are some pictures, including me in my costume on "Performance Art Day" in art history (and you can see a video of our "performance"). Savor the rainbow.

Here's the dodgeball outfit. While I cheered on my team I held a sword with a punctured dodgeball on the end (sorry..no shots of that one).

The Fighting Unicorns. Nearly champs.

Performance Art Lizard Jay.

A Twit

This is as close as I will EVER come to "tweeting" (I detest Twitter).

What I should be doing: completing my final for art history
What I am doing: desperately trying to avoid any work related to this waning school year.

No Slouch at Self-Destruction

I never should have started this t-shirt design project. The supplies hadn't come in. I was uncertain on the exposure time using the emulsion and light source I had. And every step of the way brought more complications & frustrations.

For instance: the bulb I have is bright enough to expose the photo-sensitive material, but too hot for the process. I had burned several screens trying to get it right. On one particular occasion, the light was so near the screen for the duration of the exposure time that it actually broke the glass that was holding down the transparency. The other piece of glass I purchased for this purpose had fallen off a table and shattered on a previous day. Now mind you, I used all my fine arts funding to purchase supplies (of which most of the silk screening stuff is still only trickling in) so all these purchases were coming out of pocket. The frustration...and the tab...was mounting.

So you can imagine my delight and feeling of providence and favor when I found 2 glass aquariums begin thrown out on the roadside that led to Home Depot (where I was going to fork out even more of my hard-earned cash). I stopped, scooped them up, and purchased some caulk remover at the HD and planned how to disassemble the aquariums.

Now one side on each was cracked. That was perfect, because it provided me the opportunity to practice removing a side without worrying about breaking it. I was able to learn how the sides were held together, and succeeded in taking the broken pieces of. Following the directions on the caulk remover, I applied the liquid and let it stand overnight. This brings us up to yesterday.

At about 2 o'clock, I started exposing 2 new screens, and realized that I needed glass. This reminded me of the aquariums waiting in the corner of my classroom. I scraped and poked a bit more until I felt like the two pieces of glass were ready to be pried apart. I hadn't applied much pressure at all when the glass split in two. The next part happened so fast, I don't really remember all the details. I don't recall dropping the glass in my right hand. I don't recall seeing the glass hit my left wrist. I don't recall feeling any pain. But I can recall bending down and in my mind I can see vividly the instant spray...that's right, SPRAY...of thick, dark blood. I immediately clamped down on my wrist with my right hand. I took one look to assess the damage. The gash was gaping and squirting blood. After I had reapplied pressure and was fairly sure I wasn't dripping, I walked up to the nurse's office on the first floor.

Once there, I was ready to report my injury and have a friend take me to the hospital. But the nurses freaked out fearing that I had hit an artery and might bleed out. They called an ambulance and strongly recommended I take it. While we waited, we took another look (and here my animal amputations helped me, both in stomaching the sight and in observing the small tube squirting out my blood). All the administrators came in to take a look. My friend Bobby was on hand to take pictures with his iPhone. He commented later that he was laughing and joking with the rest of us until he went to my room and saw all the blood on the floor. He said there was so much that the kids who came for fifth period thought it was spilled paint.

I was pushed out on a stretcher, and one of the paramedics commented that he had never been to a call where peopled laughed and joked about the injury as we did. The ride to the hospital was uneventful: blood pressure remained steady, there was very little pain. At the hospital I waited for several hours, endured several attempts (which grew increasingly painful as they poked and manipulated) to get a look at the wound, took x-rays (to insure that no glass remained in the cut), and finally was taken care of. The PA who stitched me up had to try a couple different things to stop the bleeding (after he almost got squirted in the face), but with a fully inflated blood-pressure cuff AND a tournequit, he was able to tie off the arterial (not an artery), place a couple stitches inside and 4 stitches outide. I will refrain from posting the picture of the cut itself, but here are some other shots for you.

The stitches

The after-affects

The splint

So I'm off school today, trying to see a hand specialist to make sure I didn't REALLY mess something up. I'll miss the annual dodgeball tournament, which I'm sad about, but it seems like I will be alright in the end.

And please don't think the irony is lost on me: by trying to save a few bucks on glass I have incurred all this pain, loss of time and money. Yeah, I get it...hilarious. The moral, dear children, is never start a project you're not prepared for and always pay to do things right the first time.

Slouching Into Summer

I will defend the statements to follow by saying that I have covered 30,000 years of art history, prepared my students for their test tomorrow, worked diligently to help students improve on their art projects, seen the TAKS test come and go....

...and I'm done.

With two and a half weeks left until finals, I am just about as exhausted as the students. So, tonight, encouraged to be lazy by my lack of preparation needed for tomorrow AND by the onset of a sinus infection, I have been playing video games for the past 20 minutes. I never play video games. Ever. Not since college.

But those were good memories. I remember intentionally NOT studying for finals at BGSU in order to play Tekken 3. I also remember playing Mario Cart late into the night in the 16th floor lounge of Culby 16 at Moody. But I have an even better memory.

Pizza Hut. A treasured family outing. In the lobby stood 2 arcade games. Something dumb, like Galaga or Pac Man, and Mario Brothers. I'm not talking Nintendo Mario. I'm talking about the arcade version of the Atari classic. Turtles, lobsters, fireflies, blocks of ice (and if you can make it to this level, and beyond, I'm super impressed; I was shocked to be reminded how hard it is) all flow from the sewer pipes to thwart the legendary plumbers. We would play that thing like maniacs until our pizza came (and usually after).

That's what I was playing tonight. If you too have fond memories for this game, and if you have the current version of Java, check it out (once there, press 5 for credits, 1 to start, Ctrl to jump and the arrow keys to move left and right). You'll be transfixed for hours.

"It's the End of the World as We Know It"

The REM song was blasting in my classroom this morning.

Reaching that classroom was a very perilous thing today. Not only are we on the verge of shutting down for Swine Flu (H1N1), just as the entire Fort Worth Independent School district has (making national news as the largest district to do so; other area elementary schools have closed, and I just heard at the end of the day that Lewisville and others are now following suit). So far, Keller has no confirmed cases, and therefore there is no talk of actually shutting down, but it seems the hysteria is swirling around us, and I have a suspicion that we may get swept up in it.

Speaking of getting swept up in hysteria, some 1,800 kids (no...that's not a typo; nearly two thousand kids from our campus, amounting to nearly 2/3) left school today because of a threat of a shooting. As I said, it was somewhat perilous getting to class today, what with all the police on hand, and the metal detectors students had to pass through. The back story is that earlier this week, one student fatally shot another, which is in and of itself somewhat unusual and tragic for our suburban surroundings and our particular campus history/make up. Then, last night, posts and texts starting flying about a shooting in retaliation ("A friend for a friend" was the quoted message offered by one student. But remember, this is all here-say, and often the WORST place for straight, factual information is a hormonally-charged high school campus). Even though I pointed out that, according to what students themselves were saying, they were aware that the situation--if it were to come true--was being threatened as an "assassination" (going after 1 or several of the murderer's friends), not a Columbine-type event, so many kids were so freaked out, and were able to sufficiently freak out their parents, that in 3rd period (mid-day), I ended the class with only 6 students in my room (out of a class of 28). (Sorry...that was a ridiculously running-on and sub-pointed sentence. I hope you get the point. )

But in the end, it was just another day. All productively was effectively negated, but nothing happened. The implications for the future, however, could be vast and still remain to be seen.