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Beehive Coffeehouse: A memory collage

nooccar — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:19:51 +0000

Sometime in the early 1990s during high school I began hanging out at the Beehive Coffeehouse on East Carson Street in the Southside of Pittsburgh. Some of my earlier memories were when it was only one store front wide (now it’s three), and we’d play Galaga in the back room by the leather couch. The female manager had blonde and pink hair, and she’d sleep back there. This must’ve been about later 1990 or early 1991. I know this because I could drive then, and I had my blue Dodge Colt. I remember several months where I’d make sure I came down here once a day even if it was just to grab a coffee and play some video games. In the summer, the doors would be open and it’d be muggy as hell here.

After high school I went away to Penn State , but none of the State College coffee houses could do this place justice. I would return on weekends and summers, and always be here. I knew the people from the locals who hung out here to the baristas (some of whom are still here!). I remember in 1992 seeing Jason Szalla hang work he did at Baldwin High School from the ceiling in the Beehive. I remember the different people who’d flirt with each other, and some of the girls who flirted with me. One of whom, in the late 1990s, I still know. Alicia talked to me one night for hours. She was a Fordham student who loved iguanas and worked at VH1. We still know her, and she is still here.

I remember playing cards here through the mid-1990s. Spades was the game, and each night we’d have several tables going all at once. Elliot was a character, and we can to really enjoy his company. One guy we played with had to run off to not go to jail. I think his name was Fruit. An odd fellow. Another guy was just wild. Donna and I ruled the table by this time.

Occasionally famous people would walk in. I saw Patrick Stewart near the front one night, and another night I met Robert Downey Jr buying coffee. He suggested I read Wonderboys which they were filming nearby. I read it that night at a front table. The whole thing.

I remember grad school. The Beehive was the place to study. I’d walk across the 10th street bridge from Duquesne University, and it didn’t matter if it was -10 with the wind chill factor. I’d still do it. I would sit here and write, read, study. I remember bringing my first laptop down here for the first time.

By this time my mother was hanging out here too. Everyone called her Mum. Even the old people. She was everyone’s mother. The funny thing was when we, her biological children, called her “mum” no one knew we were really the children. Jaime got in with Scott and Z the owners, and he followed them from project to project. I buried myself in books when I had to study and cards when I had some time off.

In the summer of 1998, I was in the Beehive when Donna returned from school for the summer. We were just friends then and nothing was going on. I told her to meet me at the Beehive. I still remember sitting in a large red booth ten feet from where I sit when she came in the door. That was May. By July we were back together, and we spent much of that summer in the Beehive.

By fall I was student teaching at Mt Lebanon High School and Donna was back at Lockhaven for her senior year. One night we went out to Dee’s, and I got drunk. I decided to head to the Beehive to sit it off and get some coffee. One of my students walked in! Not the best idea (although I was of age).

By summer of 1999 Donna and I were engaged and moved to Arizona. Alicia came to the wedding; she framed shots of the Beehive for us. Black and whites of some things we will never forget.

Since then, the first few years we’d try to come in. Slowly, it was shifting. We knew less people. The building expanded to a second nonsmoking room (perfect since it was always smokey in here!). My Mum stopped coming and Meghan moved to Colorado.

Until today now I could not tell you the last time I was here. 2005? 2004? People grow and change, but this place. This place stays the same. It’s always for those memories. Today I sit here. Christmas 2008 wondering when I will be back here. Maybe next Christmas (have no trips planned to PA until then), or maybe it won’t be until Claire is older and I can tell her the stories. We will see.

Ear Tubes: Take 2?

nooccar — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:35:13 +0000

Ok world here’s a post. A doozy it’ll be. Wow. Today was bad. I was reading Claire a book in the doctor’s office about some little boy who had a terrible, horrible, really bad day, and compared to mine, his was a skip in the sun. Now I know people have worse days in their lives than today. No one died. No one got ran over. No car wrecks. But still pretty bad.

I’ll break the first rule of what a day is now by saying this, in part, began days ago or weeks ago, but I am getting ahead of myself here (or is it, behind myself?)… anyway, Donna’s had a cold-ear infection-sinus-thingy going on, and she got me sick. Yesterday I was terrible, and Claire and I took off from work early to go to the doctor’s. He said my sinus infection was still there and gave me Augmentin. Needless to say I was just on Cipro for a week, which did nothing for me. Nada. No deal. I thanked him, picked up my pills, popped one and went to bed.

By that evening Claire was hacking up a lung. Even few minutes she’d run into her bathroom to spit up in the toilet. I gave her her treatment before bed and her temp was 100. She’s been doing treatments since early June, and we’re all getting a little sick of it! I am going to buy stock in the doctor’s office!

I’d been to the doctor’s with her on and off since June, and the last time Nikki told us she’d have the girls call the allergist. After a week of not hearing back from the referral department, I began calling them. A week later someone from the office called me! Craaaazy. Yes, I was frustrated. Now it’s two weeks out and finally they got her an appointment for later this week.

So now come 745AM I want to call the pediatrician to get her in, but I know they’re not open that early. I figured I’d wait until 8AM. After 8AM I called and the message said they’d open at 9AM. I was like "who opens their offices at 9?!". I knew it was a mistake and remembering Nikki saying something about their VM message being wrong months ago. I kept calling and finally at 9:02AM it went through! They said that Nikki could see her at 9:40AM, so we rushed over there. Donna met us there because she feels like the kid’s been popping antibiotics like candy for 2 years. We were looking for something different. A diagnosis, rather than a treatment.

We got there and the doc came into the room. I figured since it’s been ongoing for so long, that they’d have her look at Claire. She told us some different info, but also a lot of the same. They had her do a treatment to open her up, which I knew would work, but does the kid gotta take treatments everyday forever? Then they sent us off to the ENT. They called over there immediately and got us in!!!

We hit lunch and then the ENT who told us Claire needed her tubes put back in. See Claire had tubes when she was 1, and now they wanted to redo them. There’s so many different schools of thoughts on tubes, that you never know for sure and now he wants them back in. We have a concern about hearing loss since she’s had ear infections for more than half of her life, now! He wants us to do an ABR test which will conclusively tell if her hearing is ok, and if not, how bad is it? We acquiesced to the test and left with an antibiotic (ask me anything! I am an antibiotic expert!).

On our way out, I snapped at my wife. So that left a bad taste in both of our mouths. I popped in a DVD (since Claire fell asleep in the car), and the damn speaker was making horrid noises. One speaker’s been messed up in the last few days, so I was just annoyed it was still doing it. I checked all the connections and even slipped the unit out of the tv cabinet to check the wires. Nothing. Nada. Still bad.

Began to consider dinner, but then remembered one of our stove burners doesn’t heat up anymore. We’re down to 2 1/2. Was thinking of doing laundry, but then I remembered our washing machine screams louder than a fire alarm when I try to put on the rinse cycle. Sounds like a ringtail cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and the thing won’t turn. Damn.

Finally gave up, plopped my butt down and did very little. Donna called later and wanted a second opinion. I figured she wasn’t talking about the washer, the tv, or the stove. Maybe it was on marrying me in the first place, but then I decided it was about Claire’s tubes.

My first inclination was NO WAY. NO HOW. Nikki rocks. We love her. The doc is great, too. The ENT is their friend. Nice guy! I wouldn’t want any of them to think we don’t value them. And if we wanted a second opinion, then we’d need to gather records. Damn.

Then I wondered. Worse case scenario, is whatever we (Donna and I) decide affects Claire FOREVER, and somewhere down the line our daughter (who worse case scenario wears hearing aids all her life) asks us why we didn’t get a second opinion on redoing tubes, and we gotta tell her, cause we liked the doc a lot? Well, that sure don’t fly with me.

So now I need another ENT appointment, I gotta take her to the allergist appt (which I was finally able to get), buy a new washer, figure out how to use my stove, and beat my head against my stereo.

In the mean time, I also gotta figure out who dropped the ball at MCC and didn’t order my books for my course, and finish building my courses that Shelley is also teaching, go to two meetings this week about my extra duties at work, and I need to figure out how to drop a duty, but don’t know which one, and lastly I need to learn to not write run-ons because I yell at my kids when they do.

Gaga for Google Publication

nooccar — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:46:53 +0000

Forgive the cross posting, but I am excited about the publication of my first real single author publication. Click here to read the post.

Claire drawing

nooccar — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:01:30 +0000

My mother was an artist when she was younger. For years I had a sculpture she made in high school, I remember paintings she use to do, and in the ’70s she use to airbrush Harley gas tanks (yes, for motorcycles. yes, my mother). Her artistry rubbed off on me, albeit my medium of choice is oils. I love the way I can mix the colors on the canvas and create whatever’s in mind. I am unsurprised that Claire’s got the same flair. Don’t get me wrong her Mama’s got some, too, but Claire’s beginning young. Yeah, I know, all kids play with crayons and such, but there’s something a bit different with how Claire does her art. Something more familiar like watching yourself from outside your body far far ago.

Last week we were in my classroom, and Claire drew across my entire board as high as she could reach. She then turned to me and asked how to spell her friend Eli’s name. I told her, and she proceeded to write "Claire" and then "Eli". I even love the little stick man in between the two. This amazes me. She’s three, folks. I don’t remember doing quite this well in ’77.

Giftedness

nooccar — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:01:00 +0000

We had Claire at SwimKidsUSA almost every day or every other day for the last week or so. She was struggling with her swim class, and we got her a new teacher. I don’t think it was her current teacher at all, but she just readily seemed to click with this other instructor. While we were there watching Claire run from swim to gym to the playgrounds, my mother-in-law mentioned that Claire never slows down. Never.

I just looked at her, thinking. Suddenly I began to agree. Yes, I understood that. Just that day I was asked to teach a course, and I wholeheartedly agreed. Donna was less than happy, and I was surprised. It was more money for our family, and I didn’t think it was much more work. I began to try to put myself in Claire’s perspective. My brain is always going. I’ve got list after list of things I want to do, projects I am working on, articles I plan to write, courses I plan to develop. I have 35 books on a shelf I plan to read sooner than later. I have projects all over this place, and that’s even before I get to my home improvement ideas. It’s as if I cannot turn my mind off. I can’t say no, and I can’t slow down. I just keep going.

I wonder if Claire’s the same as me. This whole concept struck something from my mind from year’s ago. When I studied gifted education, I studied people who were just like this (and no I’m not some parent shouting from the roof tops that my kid’s gifted!) but I see signs I see in myself. My mother-in-law sees signs in Claire that she saw in Danny, my brother-in-law, when he was young. I think about people like Danny and others. Gifted kids who didn’t get the support they needed or the resources they unknowingly desired, and how do we serve them? How do we help them? How do we keep Claire loving everything without destroying that creativity, that drive that ambition? I still can’t answer for me, so what do I do for her?

Popa and Dadda

nooccar — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:08:25 +0000

Last week while I was in California, Claire kept asking where Daddy was. Mama kept telling her I was away working, and Claire was confused because she’s use to going to school with me since her day care is on my campus. As soon as I got in the car at the airport she wanted two things. 1) To have permission to go get ice cream and, 2) To give me a hug. (Yes, in that order). Off we went to Baskin Robbin’s, and Claire was so excited to see me that she didn’t stop chattering away. After the excitement slowed, I explained I had to go back to work in two days. I wasn’t about to tell her I had a five day AP Institute in Seattle after being home for two days. So I told her I had to go to work, and she started telling me over and over all weekend "Dadda, don’t go to work! Stay with me." Damn. How do you say No?

…

Of course, he Popa lands in Arizona in two hours, and I bet that by bedtime today (11pm or later because she’ll be so excited to see him since it’s been 6 months) Claire will forget she has a Dadda until maybe I get home, or atleast, after Popa and Babci spoil her silly and leave her with Donna and me in early July to try to straighten her out before school begins again three weeks later.

Green sunshine on me

nooccar — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:59:34 +0000

I’m sitting here at my diningroom table, looking out through slotted blinds into my backyard. Yes, it’s still dirt and I can see my grill and Emma’s old red slide that Claire inherited, but I can also see the trees in the distance, the window framed by pear curtains, and in the center of it all beyond my mess is three bamboo plants Donna bought at MCC. She said she liked them there, and frankly they are the first plant-like thing neither of us killed in …. well…. ever. They make me feel like I have a real office where I can sit and work all day, where things are green and lush, and definitely not deserty.

Occasionally the landscapers walk by. Today they are leveling all the area left piled up by the fence guy, and they are also installing the dog run. Yeah! They are going being very careful with the dog run, and I think it looks great. They’ve been here since 7AM, but they’ve been working like dogs all day.

Here’s a shot of my work area as it stands right now. It mutates as Spring Break ’08 slowly slips away.

Frontline: Growing Up Online – A Response

nooccar — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:28:15 +0000

"Growing Up Online", a program aired on Public Broadcast Systems
detailed the world in which we all now live. A world where our NetGen
has always had computers and has always been online. Is the Internet a
positive or negative place for this generation? How do we as adults
control this area, or do we? I missed this report on the television (my
personal, comfortable format for video) and had to watch it online. I
needed to remind myself that this generation watches more and more on
small screens of the monitors or even smaller of the iPods. This is
their life, and no matter how tech savvy I am, I am still only a
visitor here.

The
program pointed out that several kids have complete identities online,
and their parents know nothing about them. They live out of reach of
their parents, but why do they? And should the parents worry? Who
controls these lives? I would say no one really does, but they regulate
themselves. In the 21st century we’re moving to "Teenager 2.0" and they
are controlling the technology around them, instead of it controlling
them. We used computers as tools to teach, and then we humans began to
learn from computers and now we have begun to give up that control by
allowing the computers themselves to learn from us. Several of the
students interviewed for this article felt that the Internet is
"currency" and today’s teens fear being out of the loop. I understand
this feeling and agree that I cannot live without information at my
fingertips, but over my last 16+ years online I’ve fought to teach
myself to use that technology wisely.

The report focused on
Chatham high school in New Jersey where teachers realize that they need
to be more interactive with their students. The students today will not
learn anything from a monotone voice tethered to a piece of chalk. Some
teachers do podcast their classes like I would like to do. Teachers
know they need to be entertainers, and I know I do this daily in my own
classes, but I am searching for the HOW. I know a SmartBoard, in some
ways, would tether me to the front of the room, and I am one to move
throughout the room continually during my lesson. I think adding an
AirLiner would give me more freedom to better use technology to engage
my students. I know what’s like to be over exposed to immediate
responses and quickness when searching for information, and our current
students have grown up multitasking online, and we need to figure out
ways to better teach them to discern between that information. For
example, I have always fought against Wikipedia, because I know how to
abuse it, but I came back from Christmas break recently and refused to
negate the importance of this site. My colleague even cited Wikipedia
in a paper and a test prep book for the AP Language and Composition
course I teach cites a cartoon from Wikipedia. Educators need to cut
through the "cloud of media" to capture the attention of the NetGen,
and I say we use that cloud to instruct them in our traditional content
and concepts. Don’t we (older generations, Gen X & Y, educators)
want future citizens who can find, borrow, reshape and synthesize
information in new, interesting, and original ways?

Many of our
NetGen are searching for places that they can call their OWN. Online
they can be whomever they want, and the profiles they create on Web 2.0
sites like Facebook are who they feel they really are or who they wish
they were. One young woman interviewed on this report was a 14-year-old
freshman in NJ who said she has over 2,194 friends on Facebook, but "I
am only best friends with like 50 people." Either she is being
hyperbolic, or the NetGeners have redefined concepts like "best friend"
for their own use.

A group of students from Morristown High
School pointed out that online relationships with teens differ from
real life (RL) relationships, in that there’s more freedom but fewer
restrictions. NetGeners are more comfortable being way more public than
in the past. As soon as 5 years ago I feared my online persona being
publicized as a public role model in RL, but now I feel a lot less
worried as more and more of my colleagues are all over the Internet
themselves (some feel they have to be, to better educate our students
and they are right) but it’s more commonplace to find your teacher on
Facebook or MySpace, to IM them at night or on the weekends, or to text
them on your way to Starbuck’s before school to get their order. At a
conference on Understanding Technology to Better Understand Our
Students today, my parting shot to the presenter was "Do you think we
will get to a point where we will just crawl into our computers?" His
remark was "No, I think they will crawl into us." A colleague of mine
has so many places she goes online, and so many accounts online, that
when she finds something new that may work for her classes, she just
types in her ID and password. She uses the same for them all and
doesn’t even try to keep a running list. The very public lives of these
kids and the immediacy of adolescence is fearful because employers and
universities search people out online, and as move further into this
millennium, we cannot divorce ourselves from our online selves.
NetGeners won’t begin to realize this on the large scale until a large
portion of them comes of age. Even last year when we went through a
hiring wave, my interview team Googled the applicants. We found very
little of the older candidates, and a little more of the
twenty-somethings. In 5 years, the online personas and RL identities
will have blurred so much more, that these searches can be detrimental
for some.

The Online Identities these people have created stem
from the idea that Sara an anorexic girl from the east coast who
frequents thinspiration.com has simply asserted as being more
comfortable being open about who she is if she’s more open online. Anne
Collier, author of MySpace Unraveled, agrees that this NetGen is more
comfortable as a public generation. As Jessica Hunter grew up, she felt
that her true self was in contrasting and conflicting opposite from her
outward appearance. She eventually developed the online persona of
"Autumn Edows" a sexualized, Goth model. Her parents never knew that
their 14-year-old daughter was strutting around as an 18 year old
online identity. More and more people took notice and this gave her a
sense of self worth that she did find in her RL communities and family.
She was online literally all day and loved every minute of it.
Eventually someone in her small town alerted her parents who
immediately made her delete everything without really trying to
understand why it was important to her. It wasn’t until much later that
her parents realized that Autumn Edows is who their daughter truly is,
and Mr. Hunter said, "I am glad the Internet is there". It’s given his
daughter a place to be herself, and she has successfully blurred her RL
and VL identities, but, in part, she succeeded because people believed
in her and understood her needs.

A NetGen report would not be
complete without perpetuating some fear through a discussion of sexual
predators, but I found one thing interesting. The only true Online
Predator study done so far was by the Dept of Justice, and it found
that only 1 in 7 children online have been sexually solicited, and
according to the report, some of the findings were from situations
where a 17-year-old girl was addressed with "Hey, baby" by an 18 or 19
year old boy. Gen Xers & Yers do not realize that these children
and students have always been online and have been educated in a way
that we will never understand They know not to reject unsolicited
advances or to give out information to people they do not know, and our
generations have to realize that these children grew up with keyboards
under their fingertips and the Internet surrounding them. Parents and
teachers tend to forget that the Internet IS their life, it is their
world. We’re visiting, but they have always been there. This native
generation is savvy in the way of predators, and predators lurk where
kids are. Be it a park afterschool in RL or in the virtual world of
cyberspace. That’s not going to end. Kids engage in risky behavior off
line as well as online, and many of the reports of this behavior online
were those NetGeners seeking out that kind of information &
interaction. We need to look at this generation less as victims and
more as participants, and then learn how to engage and educate them in
their own worlds. Most of the damage being done, they are doing to
themselves.

Evan Skinner, PTO president and mother, first came
on screen praying before dinner with her family during this segment as
if being online was a secular action that sent the surfer directly to
hell. With her crosses and white-bread attitude, she asks her son Cam
for his passwords in case anything ever happens to him. He answers with
a resounding NO. Her daughter Ashley tells FrontLine that she’d "rather
not use my family computer at all than give up my password. I can use
my friend’s computer." When I grew up, my house was the one with all
the kids because my mother knew if we were in the basement we were
safe. Taking away the NetGens connectivity only makes them smarter in
how to get around this. We need to ask ourselves why we try to block
them, and how to educate and better use the technology that to fight
against an awesome educational too that is not ever going to go away.

The
negative aspect of the predatory portion of this report regurgitates
what we always hear in our schools about how blogs, webmail tools,
online video sites like YouTube, and social sites like MySpace need to
be blocked all the time everywhere. But why? Give us good reasons or
drop the filters. People worry what our kids will see, but Gen X &
Y need to realize they see it anyway and it’s not just online, it’s in
our hallways and on our sidewalks daily.

The online predator
section segued into the final part of cyber bullying, which was the
most histrionic of the bunch. Don’t get me wrong, children are bullied
every day online and in our schools. I was bullied, too. But Ryan
Halligan’s and more recently Megan Meyer’s experiences with being
bullied led to their suicides. Ryan had been bullied in school before
it moved online, and eventually he killed himself after a rumor he was
gay and a prank by a pretty young girl pushed him over the edge. These
are two stories of cyberspace woe, and they are not the only ones, but
there are stories of successes too. As mentioned early, Autumn Edow’s
parents finally came to understand their daughter, Evan Skinner’s son
and daughter finally graduated (yes, escaped from their mother), and
Sara, the anorexic of our tale, finally saw a therapist (should’ve been
a Second Life therapist!). Little Ryan’s dad will never find peace and
Megan’s neighbor who pretended to be a young boy who hated her may
never go to jail.

But what do we learn from all of this? Danah
Boyd from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society
reiterated that the Internet is NOT going away, and we (Gen X & Y)
have to learn how to use it and live with it. Even though the Internet
isn’t the cause of hurt, it can amplify pain felt in the real world,
according to this report. The owner of WiredSafety.org argued what I’ve
been saying all along: We need to teach online education. Teach NetGen
to use the Web 2.0 tools that they’ve developed in a way that couples
both of our generations’ ideas of pedagogy in a critical 21st century
situation.

Monday night

nooccar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:20:53 +0000

Dear reader, I am sure the solitaire reader of this blog would be curious to know the outcome of today’s surgery and even though I am horribly busy tonight, I don’t want to leave you out cold. My mother’s surgery was brief and successful. When they cut open her back they only found a cyst, and it was in a place where they could remove it quickly and easily. They did so, sewed her up, and a few hours later she was walking around. I equate that with a C-section. They make those women walk, too. When I got the news early this morning, I sobbed. My sister sobbed, too. I guess we were expecting worse, or at least less reassurance from the doctor. I’ve talked to my mother from her hospital bed several times tonight, and it was like I was talking to her on her cell as she bargain shopped at the Good Will or played with her kitty on the couch. She will go home tomorrow morning, and she will be back at work in 2-3 weeks. Meghan is relieved because she gets to spend more leisure time in Pittsburgh with her family and friends, than kowtowing to Mum’s every need.

Back the grindstone

nooccar — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:45:53 +0000

Don’t know what to tell you. Here we sit in OUR OWN LIVING ROOM! Claire got so many presents from her family that we had 9 bags coming back from Pittsburgh today. Donna’s father just rolled his eyes and made his comments and moved on. This morning we had to take Danny’s 4Runner and Dad’s Jeep to the airport since we had so much stuff. One bag I had weighed 53.5 pounds and the other was 48 pounds. Danny & I stood there and took out piece by piece, weighing it by hand. Eventually both bags were 50.0 pounds and Danny had a handful of clothes and I had a few DVDs. We were proud of ourselves for figuring it all out, and then Donna showed up to check her and Claire in.

Once we made it on the plane (and yes, the new SOUTHWEST seating orders suck!) Claire fell asleep for 90 minutesl I got three magazines read cover to cover and Donna read her Reader’s DIgests. I can’t believe I took about 8 magazines home to read, and I read three ON the ride home!

Now we’re sitting here at home, unpacking, watching reality TV that we recorded while we were gone, and watching Claire be very attentive to the baby dolls that were sitting here for the last three weeks. She’s got a new babydoll stroller from Mimi & Pap Pap, and she’s been driving them all over the house in the stroller. Back to the grindstone…