I know I was a smart kid. Not the smartest, certainly, but I do remember that I scored points on national, separate-the-useless-from-the-dangerous tests, before the ravages of adolescence got to me, and then my lifestyle finished the job.
I knew some smart people and talked to them without making an ass of myself; also with an eye toward getting out of a discussion before the half-remembered developmental history, the brazenly subjunctive sentence structure, and the imprecise vocabulary would have revealed me, in one false comment or imprecise wisecrack, as a fraud.
But I was—a pretender who played well but occasionally stayed just a tad to long, or who waded out a bit too far, or worst of all, laughed at precisely the wrong time, by scant seconds.
So, I’ve been stupid, and I know it. And I’ve been dense, on occasion, really dense on others.
Since a week or so, I have been telling people that (Cablevision’s) Optimum Online optonline.net is cutting me off, that I can’t be reached at optonline.net any more. I can be reached, at edward.lowe1@marist.edu.
People have answered me at the Optimum address, which is not Optimum, but optonline.net, but I was supposed to know that.
So I, again, tell them that Cablevision’s Optimum Online optonline.net is cutting me off. Don’t e-mail me at the optonline.net address. They fire back, “What happened with you and Optimum?” posing this question in an e-mail to the Optimum address, optonline.net.
I’m panicking, because I don’t know when Cablevision’s Optimum Online optonline.net will pull the plug, and I’m saying I won’t have an optonline.net address any more, probably in minutes, maybe in seconds. I won’t get these messages unless you send them to the address, edward.lowe1@marist.edu.
I talked to a bunch of Optimum Online people at Cablevison before I realized what they where saying. They were very patient, before passing me along to the next voice who asked the same questions with the same patience. I did this five whole times before I got it. By that time, I was shameless. I said, “…but I had a stroke. I don’t know what you’re saying…” I was trying to buy a weekend to notify everyone I’ve e-mailed e-mails to for years (I know, I know).
Here’s what happened.
Back in 199?, when we were newer to this, I acquired an e-mail address from Newsday, then an e-mail address from Yahoo, because the e-mail address from Newsday didn’t always work so well.
Then, I think much later, an Optimum truck hit my neighborhood. I got an optonline.net e-mail address from Optimum, because I had Cablevision, which owned Optimum; I figured I was always going to have Cablevision, therefore Optimum, and as it worked out, I used the Cablevision Optimum optonline e-mail most often.
I began to believe it was my address, no one else’s.
A couple of years ago, Marist College, my Alma Mater, sent an unusual mailing, telling all graduates that they could have free e-mail for life. I paid little attention to it, because I already had e-mail addresses to spare. But I thought it was nice of them to do that. And, when I went to work for two other newspapers, I used optonline.net for one and Marist for the other, just for goofs.
Two years ago, I had a stroke. I was asleep for three months, half awake for another, and mostly awake for another, during the end of which time I found that I was not going to stay wherever I was for the rest of my life. I was going to go to Susan’s, to sleep in the living room. Asked about this, I cried, because I thought I was going to stay where I was.
My son, Jed, lived in my house for about 6 months, paying the Cablevision bill, because he wanted a lot more out of the TV than I did. After that, he moved to Florida, and the house was empty. My Cablevision was turned off.
Susan took over my bills, while I learned English.
Among the bills was my mother’s Cablevision bill, which came to my address, and was forwarded to Susan’s house. She paid it, because I had paid it.
About 9 months ago, I tried the computer for the third time, and learned to type, weirdly, at first, but learned. I also suddenly remembered my e-mail address, an optonline.net address, which still existed, but not because it was my address, as I stupidly thought.
In October, Doe died. My Mom. With her house being empty, and my not making any money, it seemed wasteful to be paying Cablevision (-Optimum-Online-optonline.net). So, Susan, with my approval, cancelled Doe’s Cablevision (-Optimum-Online-optonline.net). Now, I had no connection with Cablevision.
We got a refund on Doe’s Cablevision on a recent Wednesday. On Thursday, I couldn’t get into my optonline.net e-mail box. I didn’t put two-and-two together until I called the Cablevision number and kept having to say the same thing to employee after employee. I thought they were crazy, but it turns out, why should they give me an Optimum Online optonline.net mailbox for free when they can charge me $29.00 for it.
“What does the homeowner who owns your house pay?”
“She has Verizon, I think. Why?”
“Well, do you want the Cablevision service?” each one said.
“For $29.00 a month?”
“Yes.”
“Why would I want that?”
That’s when they passed me to another employee. I wasn’t getting it.
I thought of Marist. I had used Marist as an e-mail box for the readers of Neighbor Newspapers. Why not use them for all my e-mail?
“I see.” I said. “I can pay you $29.00 a month for my e-mail box, which is all I use, or, I can use the e-mailbox at Marist, and not pay anything.”
No comment.
“Let’s see, pay Cablevision $29.00 a month for Optimum Online optonline.net, or pay Marist nothing.”
No comment.
One of us hung up.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Thursday, December 08, 2005
A Lowe Blow
I prefer writing stories over writing essays, but, when I haven’t got a good story, I fall back on humor, first-person anecdotal material, or wild rantings.
I ranted recently about sneezing, coughing, spitting and blowing my nose. I’d visited a doctor for an annual checkup and encountered in his waiting room a trillion bacteriological invaders waiting for me and whatever vulnerabilities I might have brought along. Six days later, just as happened a year ago, the last time I visited the same doctor, a killer headcold ran me down and laid me Lowe.
Absent energy, reportorial inspiration, and/or a catch basin for my prodigiously leaking head, I wrote the following and elicited the following following snotty retort.
By the way, you can go to longislandpress.com and click on, “columnists,” and then on the name, “Ed Lowe,” and get links to each and every Ed Lowe column they have published since January 6, 2005. I don’t know how long that will last. They may clean the slate for 2006 and start over. Here is the column that appears as of Dec. 8, 2005.
ON A ROLL
By Ed Lowe
Dec. 08, 2005
Toilet tissue became one of my ruminations of choice during a recent siege of cold symptoms. (As a younger man, I fulminated rather than ruminated about head colds. Youth prefers angry protest to peaceful meditation, but meditation, we eventually learn, requires less effort.)
The symptoms began this time with excessive throat clearing on Thanksgiving Eve—no sore throat, the usual opening gambit—just "ahem, ahem, ahem."
During the holiday meal, I felt two Peterbilt tractor-trailers pull to an idling stop just behind my eyeballs, each leaking battery acid into my eye cavities. By the time dessert had arrived, the battery acid had burned my eyelids, which responded by self-lubricating, to soothe the sting.
Membranes inside my nostrils began to leak, as the Peterbilts inched forward, pressing their giant grills against my eyeballs in a threatened effort to push them out beyond their sockets.
I held only a linen napkin for a weapon, which I dabbed, unobtrusively, I thought, at my mustache, initially to prevent telltale glistening. I did not want to reveal to the other guests that giant trucks were idling inside my head.
Desperation drove me to the bathroom, to therein expel the accumulating liquids, and, more importantly, seize some extra toilet paper, so that when I returned to the table, I would have an alternative to linen.
I did not want to use a linen dinner napkin to absorb contagions. Why should some innocent person clearing the table have to handle my napkin and unwittingly infect him or herself with my approaching miseries?
This was not a rhetorical question I had invented either because of original thinking or procedural training. Some years ago, I learned accidentally that persons raised in the culture of Japan were appalled to discover that their otherwise pretentious European conquerors carried in their pockets linen handkerchiefs, into which they periodically expelled body wastes from their heads and lungs.
After usage, the Europeans refolded the linen cloths and returned them to the pockets, effectively storing their own body wastes and carrying them about for the remainder of the business day.
The Japanese couldn't believe the incivility of such behavior, I was told. Polite Japanese custom required that the afflicted sufferer sneeze or cough into a disposable catchall—say, paper—and then immediately deposit into a waste receptacle the contaminated paper and its vile contents.
It never had occurred to me that body wastes manufactured in and expelled from orifices above the shoulders might inspire the same revulsion as those produced and expelled from below. The idea made such sense on contact that I thereafter never again carried a handkerchief or employed one. I also embraced an entirely different attitude about the prodigious spittle of professional athletes.
I resolved to rely on paper products, solely, instead of handkerchiefs. At first, I bought facial tissues, probably because almost everybody else I knew did. I also had permitted the advertising world to convince me that I should pay extra for pastel boxes of soft, absorbent paper to apply to my face than for rolls of soft, absorbent paper to...well, use elsewhere.
So, for a while, I endured the annoying selection process (long, rectangular box or short, square box? Pastel green floral pattern, or pastel blue fleur-de-lis?) and the infuriating indignities of boxed tissue paper usage. The first piece of facial tissue resists leaving the box and must either be torn or dragged out with a dozen of its neighbors. The last piece, especially when grasped in the fear and desperation that precedes a colossal sneeze, often rises accompanied by the box itself, and thus provides no respite but only a panicked—and usually tardy—search for an alternate box of tissues.
However, I also had allowed the plumbing industry to convince me that facial tissue did not break down sufficiently when flushed, as toilet tissue did, which meant I should not dispose of facial tissues the way I customarily rid my house of toilet tissues. Instead, my wastepaper baskets ranneth over—little snow cones of puffed, white, infectious paper.
I noticed (brilliantly), as well, that because toilet tissue arrived on a roll, I could see the whole roll in a glance and determine whether it contained enough paper to contain what I might offer it. I could keep a roll next to my bedside, a roll next to my computer terminal, a roll on the kitchen counter, a roll in the living room.
The car presented a problem. Unrolling off-roller toilet tissue is a two-handed project. Also, sudden stops and turns make a roll on the passenger seat roll, until it hides on the passenger side floor, out of reach to a properly seat-belted motorist on the verge of a volcanic sneeze. For the car, I keep a large rectangular box of tissues.
Otherwise, when in my lair, I am ever free to blow my nose, sneeze, hack, cough and spit into as much soft paper as my expulsions require, and then guiltlessly flush them down the toilet.
I sense a half-amused, half-resigned disdain for this practice from a certain personage in my life, but when I am afflicted, I don't always care what she thinks.
-end-
Here is an e-mail exchange in reaction to that column, and several other e-mails from today.
From: Jennifer Thomas
To:href=<"mailto:edlowe@theneighbornewspapers.com">
Subject: A Personal Preference
I was approached by one of your sales people to take out an advertisement for the store I managed in Huntington Village when you first launched this paper. Having not had the opportunity to read it until today– especially your article “A Personal Preference”- I am quite relieved that we did not embarrass ourselves by doing so, advertise that is. I have a great idea what we can do with this new piece of junk mail… we can send them to you and you can save yourself a perfectly good roll of toilet tissue! Who in their right mind, do you think, really cares what you use to “blow your nose, hack, cough and spit into”????? My congratulations on another quality piece of editorial junk!
From: edlowe1@optonline.net
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 1:44 PM
To: Jennifer Thomas
Subject: waste
You might consider refraining from equating advertising efficacy with editorial taste. Calvin Klein ads, often tasteless, sell tremendous amounts of relatively nothing. Humor is in the eye/ear/nose of the beholder. Heaven forfend you should ever read (and I'm guessing you haven't, and wouldn't) Chaucer, Swift, Lovelace, let alone Twain's heroic epic on flatulence. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the e-mail accompanying your own:
December 7, 2005 12:54:41 PM EST
To: edlowe@theneighbornewspapers.com
Subject: Whatever works
I read with delight your column on altenative choices when faced with sniffly, sneezy compulsions. However, Ed, I was way ahead of you. Many (MANY) years ago I was the Kindergarten/First Grade/Second Grade teacher in a little country school that has long since passed into consolidation. Come winter season and the kids, all 25 of them, at various times and altogether, drooled, sniffled and sneezed at each other -- and me. For reasons of hygiene, the alternative being too gross to mention, I kept the regulation rectangular box of tissues on my desk for all who needed a tissue. Apparently, this was a special treat for box after box was emptied almost faster than I, or my wallet, could keep up with replacements.The solution: I kept a roll of bathroom tissue in an open bottom drawer of my desk. Those who needed it, used it. I don't know whether it was embarrassment that caused the restraint or not, but that roll of tissue lasted much longer than the equivalent in boxed hankies. Barbara Gunther
Jennifer’s response:
I'll stick to the New York Times... thanks!
To: Jennifer
Understood.In fact, perfectly understood. e.
From: Marooch77@aol.com
Thursday, December 8, 2005 9:50 am
TDear Ed,
Toilet paper is the preferred nose-wipe in my house. Since we always use it, it's always there. Boxes of tissues get stepped on, lost, stuffed under the couch, behind the couch and truthfully, toilet tissue is SOFTER.
We also euphemize it. We call it Irish Linen, among other names which are not too presentable. I hope the Irish don't take it personally..... Since I can claim 50% Irish heritage, I guess it's ok....
Maybe a barrage of mail from your readers will convince your friend that TP is the way to go! There's always a possibility that when she has time on her hands, she could sit and separate sheets of the stuff from their roll and make it look a little more presentable...
Have a good weekend, and thanks for the laugh. I hope you're feeling better...
Marooch
From: syd askoff saskoff@optonline.net
ED, GOOD ARTICLE TODAY. YOU MAY START A TREND.
FACT IS I HAVE BEEN USING PAPER IN THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME.
MAKES SENSE.
I ranted recently about sneezing, coughing, spitting and blowing my nose. I’d visited a doctor for an annual checkup and encountered in his waiting room a trillion bacteriological invaders waiting for me and whatever vulnerabilities I might have brought along. Six days later, just as happened a year ago, the last time I visited the same doctor, a killer headcold ran me down and laid me Lowe.
Absent energy, reportorial inspiration, and/or a catch basin for my prodigiously leaking head, I wrote the following and elicited the following following snotty retort.
By the way, you can go to longislandpress.com and click on, “columnists,” and then on the name, “Ed Lowe,” and get links to each and every Ed Lowe column they have published since January 6, 2005. I don’t know how long that will last. They may clean the slate for 2006 and start over. Here is the column that appears as of Dec. 8, 2005.
ON A ROLL
By Ed Lowe
Dec. 08, 2005
Toilet tissue became one of my ruminations of choice during a recent siege of cold symptoms. (As a younger man, I fulminated rather than ruminated about head colds. Youth prefers angry protest to peaceful meditation, but meditation, we eventually learn, requires less effort.)
The symptoms began this time with excessive throat clearing on Thanksgiving Eve—no sore throat, the usual opening gambit—just "ahem, ahem, ahem."
During the holiday meal, I felt two Peterbilt tractor-trailers pull to an idling stop just behind my eyeballs, each leaking battery acid into my eye cavities. By the time dessert had arrived, the battery acid had burned my eyelids, which responded by self-lubricating, to soothe the sting.
Membranes inside my nostrils began to leak, as the Peterbilts inched forward, pressing their giant grills against my eyeballs in a threatened effort to push them out beyond their sockets.
I held only a linen napkin for a weapon, which I dabbed, unobtrusively, I thought, at my mustache, initially to prevent telltale glistening. I did not want to reveal to the other guests that giant trucks were idling inside my head.
Desperation drove me to the bathroom, to therein expel the accumulating liquids, and, more importantly, seize some extra toilet paper, so that when I returned to the table, I would have an alternative to linen.
I did not want to use a linen dinner napkin to absorb contagions. Why should some innocent person clearing the table have to handle my napkin and unwittingly infect him or herself with my approaching miseries?
This was not a rhetorical question I had invented either because of original thinking or procedural training. Some years ago, I learned accidentally that persons raised in the culture of Japan were appalled to discover that their otherwise pretentious European conquerors carried in their pockets linen handkerchiefs, into which they periodically expelled body wastes from their heads and lungs.
After usage, the Europeans refolded the linen cloths and returned them to the pockets, effectively storing their own body wastes and carrying them about for the remainder of the business day.
The Japanese couldn't believe the incivility of such behavior, I was told. Polite Japanese custom required that the afflicted sufferer sneeze or cough into a disposable catchall—say, paper—and then immediately deposit into a waste receptacle the contaminated paper and its vile contents.
It never had occurred to me that body wastes manufactured in and expelled from orifices above the shoulders might inspire the same revulsion as those produced and expelled from below. The idea made such sense on contact that I thereafter never again carried a handkerchief or employed one. I also embraced an entirely different attitude about the prodigious spittle of professional athletes.
I resolved to rely on paper products, solely, instead of handkerchiefs. At first, I bought facial tissues, probably because almost everybody else I knew did. I also had permitted the advertising world to convince me that I should pay extra for pastel boxes of soft, absorbent paper to apply to my face than for rolls of soft, absorbent paper to...well, use elsewhere.
So, for a while, I endured the annoying selection process (long, rectangular box or short, square box? Pastel green floral pattern, or pastel blue fleur-de-lis?) and the infuriating indignities of boxed tissue paper usage. The first piece of facial tissue resists leaving the box and must either be torn or dragged out with a dozen of its neighbors. The last piece, especially when grasped in the fear and desperation that precedes a colossal sneeze, often rises accompanied by the box itself, and thus provides no respite but only a panicked—and usually tardy—search for an alternate box of tissues.
However, I also had allowed the plumbing industry to convince me that facial tissue did not break down sufficiently when flushed, as toilet tissue did, which meant I should not dispose of facial tissues the way I customarily rid my house of toilet tissues. Instead, my wastepaper baskets ranneth over—little snow cones of puffed, white, infectious paper.
I noticed (brilliantly), as well, that because toilet tissue arrived on a roll, I could see the whole roll in a glance and determine whether it contained enough paper to contain what I might offer it. I could keep a roll next to my bedside, a roll next to my computer terminal, a roll on the kitchen counter, a roll in the living room.
The car presented a problem. Unrolling off-roller toilet tissue is a two-handed project. Also, sudden stops and turns make a roll on the passenger seat roll, until it hides on the passenger side floor, out of reach to a properly seat-belted motorist on the verge of a volcanic sneeze. For the car, I keep a large rectangular box of tissues.
Otherwise, when in my lair, I am ever free to blow my nose, sneeze, hack, cough and spit into as much soft paper as my expulsions require, and then guiltlessly flush them down the toilet.
I sense a half-amused, half-resigned disdain for this practice from a certain personage in my life, but when I am afflicted, I don't always care what she thinks.
-end-
Here is an e-mail exchange in reaction to that column, and several other e-mails from today.
From: Jennifer Thomas
To:
Subject: A Personal Preference
I was approached by one of your sales people to take out an advertisement for the store I managed in Huntington Village when you first launched this paper. Having not had the opportunity to read it until today– especially your article “A Personal Preference”- I am quite relieved that we did not embarrass ourselves by doing so, advertise that is. I have a great idea what we can do with this new piece of junk mail… we can send them to you and you can save yourself a perfectly good roll of toilet tissue! Who in their right mind, do you think, really cares what you use to “blow your nose, hack, cough and spit into”????? My congratulations on another quality piece of editorial junk!
From: edlowe1@optonline.net
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 1:44 PM
To: Jennifer Thomas
Subject: waste
You might consider refraining from equating advertising efficacy with editorial taste. Calvin Klein ads, often tasteless, sell tremendous amounts of relatively nothing. Humor is in the eye/ear/nose of the beholder. Heaven forfend you should ever read (and I'm guessing you haven't, and wouldn't) Chaucer, Swift, Lovelace, let alone Twain's heroic epic on flatulence. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the e-mail accompanying your own:
December 7, 2005 12:54:41 PM EST
To: edlowe@theneighbornewspapers.com
Subject: Whatever works
I read with delight your column on altenative choices when faced with sniffly, sneezy compulsions. However, Ed, I was way ahead of you. Many (MANY) years ago I was the Kindergarten/First Grade/Second Grade teacher in a little country school that has long since passed into consolidation. Come winter season and the kids, all 25 of them, at various times and altogether, drooled, sniffled and sneezed at each other -- and me. For reasons of hygiene, the alternative being too gross to mention, I kept the regulation rectangular box of tissues on my desk for all who needed a tissue. Apparently, this was a special treat for box after box was emptied almost faster than I, or my wallet, could keep up with replacements.The solution: I kept a roll of bathroom tissue in an open bottom drawer of my desk. Those who needed it, used it. I don't know whether it was embarrassment that caused the restraint or not, but that roll of tissue lasted much longer than the equivalent in boxed hankies. Barbara Gunther
Jennifer’s response:
I'll stick to the New York Times... thanks!
To: Jennifer
Understood.In fact, perfectly understood. e.
From: Marooch77@aol.com
Thursday, December 8, 2005 9:50 am
TDear Ed,
Toilet paper is the preferred nose-wipe in my house. Since we always use it, it's always there. Boxes of tissues get stepped on, lost, stuffed under the couch, behind the couch and truthfully, toilet tissue is SOFTER.
We also euphemize it. We call it Irish Linen, among other names which are not too presentable. I hope the Irish don't take it personally..... Since I can claim 50% Irish heritage, I guess it's ok....
Maybe a barrage of mail from your readers will convince your friend that TP is the way to go! There's always a possibility that when she has time on her hands, she could sit and separate sheets of the stuff from their roll and make it look a little more presentable...
Have a good weekend, and thanks for the laugh. I hope you're feeling better...
Marooch
From: syd askoff saskoff@optonline.net
ED, GOOD ARTICLE TODAY. YOU MAY START A TREND.
FACT IS I HAVE BEEN USING PAPER IN THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME.
MAKES SENSE.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Everything Counts
The night before my first-ever speaking engagement (to an audience of Suffolk County, N.Y. librarians), I was a guest at a dinner party hosted by a business writer. During the preliminary liturgies, he introduced me to Robin Calitri, a young neighbor of his and a teacher in Rockville Centre, N.Y., now the retired principal of the high school there. The name rang a chord, and I asked Robin if he were related to a Jim or James Calitri, a professor of education at Hofstra University.
Jim Calitri was his father.
While working as a provisionally certified, junior high school English teacher in 1967 and ’68, I had taken graduate courses in education at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y., then called Hofstra College. Jim Calitri was one of my more engaging professors, even exciting, as hard as that might be to imagine for anyone who has ever taken a course in education.
The family connection launched Robin and me into a conversation about teaching. I told my stories. Before long, the entire dinner party was guffawing in unison at tales of various disasters I suffered—and perpetrated—as a student teacher in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and later, as an English teacher in Lindenhurst Junior High School. The stories were true, outlandish, and sufficiently entertaining that when the laughter finally subsided, I decided I would recount them the next night for the one-hundred-fifty librarians and their dates.
I did, and the librarians gave me my first, standing ovation. They invited me back the following year, insisting that I tell the same stories, again. I did that, and they invited me back for a third year, this time requesting that I tell a different tale. By that time, thanks to their enthusiasm, I had received invitations to address other associations of librarians, and then associations of English teachers, literature department chairs, reading councils, professional educator organizations, teacher unions and local, literary clubs.
Subsequent years brought more invitations. Additional performances gave me greater confidence and resulted in a constant polishing of the act, or presentation. Now, I have seventy-three school district Superintendent’s Conference Day keynote addresses under my belt. Some years, I have addressed as many as fifty different organizations of every size and stripe. I’ve performed for a roster of esoteric audiences as diverse as the National Association of Marine Bankers, the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors of America, plus dozens of local and regional associations of accountants, chief financial officers, lawyers, dentists, chambers of commerce and national sales teams.
In the long run, telling my own story has illustrated to me how important was every minute of my life; every gesture, every decision; every thought, reaction, daydream, longing, wound, triumph, sarcasm, kindness, memory, joke, glance, gift, gain loss; every outburst and every hesitation, every adherence to plan and every departure from it.
In more recent years, I have added to the stories a subtle conclusion, in attempting to explain some of my more impetuous actions and gestures (all of which had consequences, good and bad).
I think we consist of two selves, simultaneously: the conscious self and the subconscious self. The conscious self is a jerk; the subconscious self, a genius.
The daily, simultaneous operation of all of the involuntary physiological systems represents an intellectual miracle that the conscious self never could replicate. The subconscious does it even under anesthesia. I couldn’t possibly stand in front of an audience and speak, if, simultaneously, I had to concentrate on my alternating systolic and diastolic pressure, while maintaining the regularity and rate of my heartbeat and consciously remembering to inhale and then to exhale at appropriate points during and between sentences, fighting invading bacteria all the while with my immunological stystem.
My subconscious self likely knows better than its boneheaded counterpart exactly where I want to be and what I want to have and do. My subconscious self probably makes ten thousand decisions day toward those ends, from getting out of bed, to shaving, to slapping up the directional signal for the benefit of the motorist behind me, to responding respectfully (or flippantly) to the police officer who pulled me over for failing to do so.
It has been making decisions for years, on how to respond non-verbally to romantic glances, threatening gazes, fleeting dangers and involuntary sensory responses to attractive distractions.
That would suggest that if I wanted to know where my smarter self wanted to be, my genius self, I would have only to look down at my feet. My genius self had made a million decisions over more than half a century to put me in this place at this time. If I wanted to know what wealth my genius self considered appropriate for me to have achieved, saved and successfully invested, I would have only to look in my pockets and review my savings account. My genius self had accepted and rejected thousands of offers, opportunities and risks, while my conscious self tagged along behind, dopey and slothful and, ultimately, pretty reasonably happy with the consequences, and unhappy enough to keep me moving on.
So, do you want to know where your smarter self wants to be and what your brilliant subconscious wants to be doing?
You’re there, and you're doing it.
Because I always was more interested in the entertainment component of the stories I told (and, naturally, the thrill of the laughter and applause), some years passed before I accepted that the performance might also have real value. Another, consistent theme ran through the stories. I learned it, first, from a response that came straight from my subconscious and, years later, from an encounter with a former seventh grade student I had taught thirty years before.
I had received another invitation from a school district to serve as the keynote speaker for their superintendent’s conference day. The administrator who invited me seemed delighted when I said I had the date free. She said she had heard from other districts how audiences of teachers, administrators, custodians and support staff had howled with laughter at my stories. I thanked her profusely and agreed to do the keynote.
“Now,” she said abruptly, “what is the title of your presentation?”
Her relaxed, complimentary, conversational tone had spun around one-hundred-eighty degrees to her anal-rententive, administrative attitude.
I had no title. We had talked about this. I had said, as usual, with my recovering Irish Catholic (and probably false) humility, that I would speak to the faculty and staff as long as the administration knew that I had no information to offer. I was neither a motivator nor an educational consultant. I was more of an entertainer. I just told stories.
“I must have a title,” she said. “I have to print up a brochure and a program, and I have to have a title. What is the title of your presentation?”
I wanted to argue the point. I wanted to say, “But this wasn’t the deal. I don’t want to be packaged as somebody from whom these people should expect something of value. I just want to be funny. Don’t try to make my stuff sound important. It’s not important.”
Instead, I gave her a title.
“Everything counts,” I suddenly heard myself declaring. It came straight from my subconscious, which, I now believe, did not want to get involved in an argument about my bogus humility.
"What?” the administrator said, a little surprised, now, at my abruptness.
“‘Everything Counts.’ That’s the title of my presentation.”
She wrote it down.
“I like that,” she said, reverting to her more affable tone.
“So do I,” I said, surprised at the fit.
Everything does count.
...Stay tuned
Jim Calitri was his father.
While working as a provisionally certified, junior high school English teacher in 1967 and ’68, I had taken graduate courses in education at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y., then called Hofstra College. Jim Calitri was one of my more engaging professors, even exciting, as hard as that might be to imagine for anyone who has ever taken a course in education.
The family connection launched Robin and me into a conversation about teaching. I told my stories. Before long, the entire dinner party was guffawing in unison at tales of various disasters I suffered—and perpetrated—as a student teacher in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and later, as an English teacher in Lindenhurst Junior High School. The stories were true, outlandish, and sufficiently entertaining that when the laughter finally subsided, I decided I would recount them the next night for the one-hundred-fifty librarians and their dates.
I did, and the librarians gave me my first, standing ovation. They invited me back the following year, insisting that I tell the same stories, again. I did that, and they invited me back for a third year, this time requesting that I tell a different tale. By that time, thanks to their enthusiasm, I had received invitations to address other associations of librarians, and then associations of English teachers, literature department chairs, reading councils, professional educator organizations, teacher unions and local, literary clubs.
Subsequent years brought more invitations. Additional performances gave me greater confidence and resulted in a constant polishing of the act, or presentation. Now, I have seventy-three school district Superintendent’s Conference Day keynote addresses under my belt. Some years, I have addressed as many as fifty different organizations of every size and stripe. I’ve performed for a roster of esoteric audiences as diverse as the National Association of Marine Bankers, the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors of America, plus dozens of local and regional associations of accountants, chief financial officers, lawyers, dentists, chambers of commerce and national sales teams.
In the long run, telling my own story has illustrated to me how important was every minute of my life; every gesture, every decision; every thought, reaction, daydream, longing, wound, triumph, sarcasm, kindness, memory, joke, glance, gift, gain loss; every outburst and every hesitation, every adherence to plan and every departure from it.
In more recent years, I have added to the stories a subtle conclusion, in attempting to explain some of my more impetuous actions and gestures (all of which had consequences, good and bad).
I think we consist of two selves, simultaneously: the conscious self and the subconscious self. The conscious self is a jerk; the subconscious self, a genius.
The daily, simultaneous operation of all of the involuntary physiological systems represents an intellectual miracle that the conscious self never could replicate. The subconscious does it even under anesthesia. I couldn’t possibly stand in front of an audience and speak, if, simultaneously, I had to concentrate on my alternating systolic and diastolic pressure, while maintaining the regularity and rate of my heartbeat and consciously remembering to inhale and then to exhale at appropriate points during and between sentences, fighting invading bacteria all the while with my immunological stystem.
My subconscious self likely knows better than its boneheaded counterpart exactly where I want to be and what I want to have and do. My subconscious self probably makes ten thousand decisions day toward those ends, from getting out of bed, to shaving, to slapping up the directional signal for the benefit of the motorist behind me, to responding respectfully (or flippantly) to the police officer who pulled me over for failing to do so.
It has been making decisions for years, on how to respond non-verbally to romantic glances, threatening gazes, fleeting dangers and involuntary sensory responses to attractive distractions.
That would suggest that if I wanted to know where my smarter self wanted to be, my genius self, I would have only to look down at my feet. My genius self had made a million decisions over more than half a century to put me in this place at this time. If I wanted to know what wealth my genius self considered appropriate for me to have achieved, saved and successfully invested, I would have only to look in my pockets and review my savings account. My genius self had accepted and rejected thousands of offers, opportunities and risks, while my conscious self tagged along behind, dopey and slothful and, ultimately, pretty reasonably happy with the consequences, and unhappy enough to keep me moving on.
So, do you want to know where your smarter self wants to be and what your brilliant subconscious wants to be doing?
You’re there, and you're doing it.
Because I always was more interested in the entertainment component of the stories I told (and, naturally, the thrill of the laughter and applause), some years passed before I accepted that the performance might also have real value. Another, consistent theme ran through the stories. I learned it, first, from a response that came straight from my subconscious and, years later, from an encounter with a former seventh grade student I had taught thirty years before.
I had received another invitation from a school district to serve as the keynote speaker for their superintendent’s conference day. The administrator who invited me seemed delighted when I said I had the date free. She said she had heard from other districts how audiences of teachers, administrators, custodians and support staff had howled with laughter at my stories. I thanked her profusely and agreed to do the keynote.
“Now,” she said abruptly, “what is the title of your presentation?”
Her relaxed, complimentary, conversational tone had spun around one-hundred-eighty degrees to her anal-rententive, administrative attitude.
I had no title. We had talked about this. I had said, as usual, with my recovering Irish Catholic (and probably false) humility, that I would speak to the faculty and staff as long as the administration knew that I had no information to offer. I was neither a motivator nor an educational consultant. I was more of an entertainer. I just told stories.
“I must have a title,” she said. “I have to print up a brochure and a program, and I have to have a title. What is the title of your presentation?”
I wanted to argue the point. I wanted to say, “But this wasn’t the deal. I don’t want to be packaged as somebody from whom these people should expect something of value. I just want to be funny. Don’t try to make my stuff sound important. It’s not important.”
Instead, I gave her a title.
“Everything counts,” I suddenly heard myself declaring. It came straight from my subconscious, which, I now believe, did not want to get involved in an argument about my bogus humility.
"What?” the administrator said, a little surprised, now, at my abruptness.
“‘Everything Counts.’ That’s the title of my presentation.”
She wrote it down.
“I like that,” she said, reverting to her more affable tone.
“So do I,” I said, surprised at the fit.
Everything does count.
...Stay tuned
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
So, who is this Ed Lowe (There are others, you know)?
BIOGRAPHY: ED LOWE
Once a Lindenhurst, N.Y., Junior High school English teacher, Long Island’s raconteur/columnist Ed Lowe joined The Suffolk Sun as a daily newspaper reporter in August of 1969. Two and a half months later, the Sun set.
Newsday, the reigning Long Island daily newspaper, hired Ed as a reporter. He became a featured Newsday columnist in 1976, writing stories and essays three times a week, until December of 2004, when he accepted two offers, one for an early retirement incentive from Newsday, by then a property of the Tribune Co., of Chicago, suffering badly from a costly circulation scandal; and the other to write once a week for the weekly Long Island Press, as well as The Neighbor Newspapers, for about the same pay.
Ed Lowe appeared for 14 seasons as a regular panelist on "Father Tom and Friends," a weekly cablevision show produced by Msgr. Tom Hartman, former director of Telecare, and, more notably, of , "God Squad" fame. The "Friends" show was cancelled after Msgr. Hartman’s fifth year suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and, coincidentally, after Ed Lowe wrote for the third or fourth time that William Murphy, the Bishop of Long Island's Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, formerly a prelate working under since-disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, of the Archdiocese of Boston, should have been prosecuted for his participation in the conspiratorial cover-up of the Boston clergy’s sustained tolerance of felony crimes committed against children by clerics.
From 1999 to 2002, Ed also hosted a daily radio talk show, "Lowecally Speaking with Ed Lowe" on what then was WLUX 540AM, since renamed WLIE. In each of its three years on the air, Ed’s program won a FOLIO award from the Long Island Coalition for Fair Broadcasting.
A humorist-raconteur after the fashion of Mark Twain and Bill Cosby, Ed has performed at Long Island comedy clubs and has served as a Master of Ceremonies or delivered the keynote address for hundreds of charity gatherings and galas, National Honor Society inductions, high school and college commencements and conventions of professional societies, industrial associations and trade and union organizations. He has keynoted superintendent staff conference days for 73 school districts, three BOCES supervisory districts, six statewide conventions of educators and education administrators and several national conventions of business and trade organizations.
Co-author with New York psychotherapist Stanley Siegel of "The Patient Who Cured His Therapist" and, "Uncharted Lives," both published by Dutton/Plume, Ed Lowe has edited two published collections of his own work: "Ed Lowe’s Long Island," and "Not As I Do -- A Father’s Report."
A Marist College (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) alumnus, father of four and grandfather of four, Ed Lowe lives with his property taxes in Amityville, N.Y., on the South Shore of his beloved Long Island, close to Great South Bay, his mistress.
Once a Lindenhurst, N.Y., Junior High school English teacher, Long Island’s raconteur/columnist Ed Lowe joined The Suffolk Sun as a daily newspaper reporter in August of 1969. Two and a half months later, the Sun set.
Newsday, the reigning Long Island daily newspaper, hired Ed as a reporter. He became a featured Newsday columnist in 1976, writing stories and essays three times a week, until December of 2004, when he accepted two offers, one for an early retirement incentive from Newsday, by then a property of the Tribune Co., of Chicago, suffering badly from a costly circulation scandal; and the other to write once a week for the weekly Long Island Press, as well as The Neighbor Newspapers, for about the same pay.
Ed Lowe appeared for 14 seasons as a regular panelist on "Father Tom and Friends," a weekly cablevision show produced by Msgr. Tom Hartman, former director of Telecare, and, more notably, of , "God Squad" fame. The "Friends" show was cancelled after Msgr. Hartman’s fifth year suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and, coincidentally, after Ed Lowe wrote for the third or fourth time that William Murphy, the Bishop of Long Island's Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, formerly a prelate working under since-disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, of the Archdiocese of Boston, should have been prosecuted for his participation in the conspiratorial cover-up of the Boston clergy’s sustained tolerance of felony crimes committed against children by clerics.
From 1999 to 2002, Ed also hosted a daily radio talk show, "Lowecally Speaking with Ed Lowe" on what then was WLUX 540AM, since renamed WLIE. In each of its three years on the air, Ed’s program won a FOLIO award from the Long Island Coalition for Fair Broadcasting.
A humorist-raconteur after the fashion of Mark Twain and Bill Cosby, Ed has performed at Long Island comedy clubs and has served as a Master of Ceremonies or delivered the keynote address for hundreds of charity gatherings and galas, National Honor Society inductions, high school and college commencements and conventions of professional societies, industrial associations and trade and union organizations. He has keynoted superintendent staff conference days for 73 school districts, three BOCES supervisory districts, six statewide conventions of educators and education administrators and several national conventions of business and trade organizations.
Co-author with New York psychotherapist Stanley Siegel of "The Patient Who Cured His Therapist" and, "Uncharted Lives," both published by Dutton/Plume, Ed Lowe has edited two published collections of his own work: "Ed Lowe’s Long Island," and "Not As I Do -- A Father’s Report."
A Marist College (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) alumnus, father of four and grandfather of four, Ed Lowe lives with his property taxes in Amityville, N.Y., on the South Shore of his beloved Long Island, close to Great South Bay, his mistress.
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