YMCA, Kumbaya & Yoda

Let’s hope my VP of HC (that’s Vice President of Humor Control, and yes, I have one) gives this post a thumbs up. She’s been a bit cranky lately and not easily amused, but I just can’t allow another day to go by without my YMCA speech.

Something set me off.

OK, perhaps four somethings. I won’t bore you with the details because, quite frankly, what fires me up ignites as easily as tossing a lit match match into a puddle of gasoline. Kaboom!

I am not sure how we got to this point, but apparently everyone (don’t ya just love generalizations?) thinks we live at the Y and that we should all hold hands, sit in a circle and sing–no, not Y-M-C-A but– “Kumbaya.” It’s part of the whole Can’t-We-All-Just-Get-Along mindset that permeates our culture.

Without fail at some point during every year, I feel compelled to haul out my YMCA speech. It usually comes during some deadline after someone mistakenly says, “I know I didn’t turn in all my stuff, but at least I tried.” Or, someone says, “I have some of it done, just not all of it.” Or, I look at a yearbook page and half the stuff’s missing.

Instead of granting absolution, I usually whip out the pregnancy analogy before the YMCA speech. It goes something like this… “Deadlines are a lot like being pregnant. You can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either are or aren’t. You either have your story or you don’t. Your page is either finished or it isn’t. So what is it? Done or not done?”

…So-o-o-o-o go ahead and make my day. No wait, wrong allusion. (How’d ol’ Clint weasel his way in here?)

Of course, at this point I’ve worked myself into a bit of a frenzy, so I launch full-tilt into my Maybe-You-Hadn’t-Noticed-But-This-Isn’t-The-YMCA speech. It’s my favorite and this one goes something like this…

“This is not the YMCA. We are not in the business of building your self-esteem or making sure everyone feels good about themselves. Prisons are full of people with high self-esteem. We are a PUBLICATION. Our goal is to put out the best publication we can. We compete. We can’t do that if we only TRY. We have to DO. We have to PUBLISH. When you don’t do your story, are we supposed to run, ‘At least she TRIED to write her story’? Forget the trying part; it’s the doing part that matters. Jeez Louise….”

Echoes of Shenandoah, my mother’s favorite movie, reverberate somewhere in the back of my brain. There’s a part where James Stewart says, “If you don’t try, you don’t do, and if you don’t do, then what’s the sense of living?”

I guess he was the prequel to our little Star Wars buddy, Yoda, who admonishes, “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

I bet Yoda never sat around singing “Kumbaya.”

I guess all I need now is a lightsaber.

Deadlines, Dumbledore & Hail

I know you’re dying to know how last week’s double whammy deadline went. (Remember, some deranged person who skipped out of town the previous week, decided to have newspaper and yearbook deadline the same week?)

Well, newspaper made it out, but the jury’s still out on yearbook because I still have to sort through those pages right after I sort through 140 project pieces from a photography portrait assignment that some crackhead teacher (Oh, wait, that would be me… Now, before the rumors fly, let me just say I am not nor have I ever been a crackhead… Jeez, I’m starting to sound like Richard Nixon)… Rather, it’s simply my favorite hyperbole–no, not the Nixon thing, but the crackhead thing…

Ok, enough of my whining, let’s get back to the subject at hand… Deadlines always bring up a wealth of material for the Blogosphere. Some, sad to say, simply is not printable. For instance, the kids were all a bit discombobulated after J.K. Rowling outed Dumbledore. But I couldn’t discuss the matter with them at that moment because I had another urgent matter to attend to–dance practice for the Rock Star Pep Rally (and yes, that’s an entirely different story). So after admonishing them to remain focused, I left.

I’m sure it took all of, oh, about 10 seconds before the staff unanimously decided the Dumbledore revelation was more pressing then getting the newspaper to press. From what I've been able to piece together, the following occurred during my brief absence…

•Some sort of dancing was involved. On top of the table.

•Pizza Andy and British accents were involved. Repeat After Me: When British accents are involved, No Good Can Come Of This.

•In a burst of sudden creativity, the staff decided J.K. Rowling should re-release the Harry Potter series, but from Dumbledore’s perspective. Naturally, this meant that instead of writing headlines for their newspaper articles, the staff had to rename all the Harry Potter books. (After all, why should they work on their newspaper pages?) Of course, political correctness flew right out the door. The tamest one, I believe, was Harry Potter and the Closet of Secrets.

When I returned, I duly chastised the children and settled down to proof what little work had been done.

And there it was… “hail bails.”

So I said, “Hmmm, I’ve always been a city girl, but even I know that ‘hail bails’ should be h-a-y b-a-l-e-s… Unless, of course, we are bonding out frozen pellets from the hoosegow.”

Don’t even get me started on the time (years ago and at another school) when self-of-steam reared its ugly head.

Yes, that’s right.

Self-of-steam.

Or, softmore.

And, with that in mind, I thought it best for everyone involved for us to call it a night before Pizza Andy started talking British again and bad things happened.