thedonproject
“Do you smile when you’re not at school?”
Personal
Published 11-18-2008 on my old wordpress blog.

Yes. Yes, I do. Particularly on lovely evenings such as this.

Have you looked outside? The stars are out and it’s practically balmy.

Also, my non-stop search for adventure has landed me in awesome-town. A while back, a teacher offered some free tickets to a Rick Steves presentation on his recent travels to Iran. Well, that sounds like an adventure. I think my BFF likes Rick Steves, I’ll invite her. Turns out that the BFF friggin’ loves Rick Steves. He’s somewhat of a liberal icon around these parts with his fancy travel show and what not, and to see him live it’s pretty easy to see why. His belief appears to be that understanding defeats fear. Perfect. That’s why I got into being a teacher in the first place right? To start a revolution by ensuring that all kids understand the most abstract and difficult topics of all? At any rate, Rick Steves went to Iran, people! The place that right-wing conservative x-tians want us to believe is “THE ENEMY.” Fine, they might not be perfect, but then again, neither are we. And seeking to understand the reason for their actions help to assuage our fears enough so that we don’t bomb the crap out of them for no reason at all. Instead we could, oh I don’t know, take some time to discuss values.

It was a fascinating presentation and you should definitely check out the show when it airs the week before the inauguration speech on your local public television station. I’m super psyched that I got to check it out a bit in advance and listen to the man himself talk to us from about 10 feet away. My BFF even got to touch his hand and thank him for the nice presentation. I just thought of the question I should have asked during the “Q and A” part: “Are the Iranians aware of our current election and if so, what seems to be their position on it?” It’d be pretty sweet to hang out with Rick Steves for a bit and find out a thing or two.

In other awesome news, Blake Schwarzenbach (from some bands called Jets to Brazil, Jawbreaker) has started up a band with Daniela Sea (of The Gr’ups) and, holy crap, Aaron Cometbus. They are called Thorns of Life and here’s an article about their two debut HOUSE SHOWS written by Gabe Meline, whose house I stayed at in Santa Rosa (well, slept in a van outside of) 13 years ago when my high school band played two shows in California and visited some colleges and called it a tour. He was also in a rad band called Ground Round (“I’ve got 500 friends and 500 friends got me. That doesn’t make me any less lonley. Any less lonley!”). In cataloging all my records I found a bunch of cool blogs (Larry Livermore, Dr. Frank, Gabe Meline and even the 10 Things Zine) that I can read to relive the glory of my favorite bands from 1988 to 1995. Only if I had a dang record player!

What a great day today has been. Too bad I have to go to sleep so I can wake up and be to school on time for a parent to yell at me about how hard Calculus is, otherwise more greatness might have occurred in these last 45 minutes!

If you like this page, you can buy me a coffee.

Keywords: adventure, music, rick steves

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