Day 1 (Day 3)

We arrived in Jo'burg after a jarring travel schedule that left us shuffling weakly through the streets near Melrose Arch, looking for dinner in the middle of the afternoon. It's Thursday night now, but we boarded our first flight in Sacramento at 5:15 pm on Tuesday. The plane, a twin-prop matchbox flying for only 40 minutes, easily stands as the most frightening aspect of our travels thus far.

From SFO, we hopped a red eye to JFK, arriving around 7:45 am (east coast time), enduring another layover and breakfast before boarding the nearly 15-hour flight to Johannesburg. The plane was full of soccer fans, but many of them boasted allegiances to other countries.

Mexican fans were most prominent, already in full regalia for tomorrow's match against their South African hosts. We heard noisemakers and chants in the airport, dodged poncho-clad hooligans in the streets, and saw one man in full Mexican peasantry, prompting Ben to wonder how the guy will ratchet up his spirit tomorrow.


The citizens of South Africa seem noticeably energized for the event (though our driver joked that the heavy traffic period is daily from 7 am to 7 pm due to road construction. It had a completion date that expired three months back, he noted, then jokingly speculating it wouldn't end until 2017). Others we see proudly wear their men's national team jerseys: flight attendants, restaurant servers, room service workers, and many casual fans. The image of the flag is plastered through freeway interchanges in colored stone, and flags themselves fly from autos whose drivers shape them to fit their rear-view mirrors, hoods, and wheels. The upscale shops at the mall in Melrose Arch all contained soccer clothing regardless of normal merchandise.

What's most striking about the fervent spirit remains who shows it (those of the middle and upper class) and who doesn't (those of an impoverished lower class who instead focus on the opportunity to make money in any number of ways). It goes beyond a simplistic division between social classes, however, as we learned when a well-dressed, well-mannered man helped to load our bags into the tour van at the airport. We believed him to be part of our tour caravan so we held our tip, completely willing to offer it once we arrived at our destination. When we did not pay him for his service, he simply walked off through the garage.

At Melrose Arch we found a nice restaurant called Europa, and all decided we could've easily been dining in San Francisco. The food, people, and atmosphere felt posh, urban, and Western. We three can proudly claim that our first meals in South Africa consisted of two salads and a club sandwich with French fries. At the end of such traveling, however, the comfort Europa and its surroundings provided helped ease our transition into life nearby (and made the end of a tiring day very leisurely). After, we strolled through shops until we found a three-story Woolworth's department store. The first level contained the closest (and likely coolest) miniature grocery store to our apartment, and allowed us to stock up on some basic snacks.

We're lodged at an extended stay-style apartment complex north of Jo'burg. There's a kitchenette, small living room, and two bedrooms. We can hear every phone ring, every conversation in the hall or at the front desk, and might just have the grossest fridge in the city, judging from the responses of the maids. Far be it from me to make any unfair judgments before my first night's sleep. I will therefore proclaim that we are happy to finally be in a room, and be awake at what appears to be an appropriate evening hour for sleep.

Like all the houses on this hill, we're surrounded by high walls and electric wire.

Because of these walls, it's difficult to say how beautiful the houses around us might actually be. They're more like fortified villas. Guards sit at gates around properties that line streets manned by stationed guards at fences. It makes for a safe walk, but we couldn't help but question the lengths at which these people have gone to protect their existence.

The best part of the trip so far? Tournament play begins in less than 24 hours! I have never been so eager to paint my face, wave a flag, and cry out in praise of the Yanks.

Until Further Notice: Blog Controlled by Uncle Sam's Army

For the next three weeks, Erasure Dust will be the base of operations for our trip to the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Published and updated from Johannesburg, the blog will chronicle the sights, sounds, and scenery of South Africa as it hosts the world's premier football tournament. Go USA!

An Open Admission

Registering for graduate courses has been a tricky intersection to navigate. A typical registration period consists a (thankfully shrinking) list of unit requirements, a cadre of professors with varying reputations, a smattering of obscure course titles and foci, and one or two choices that make sense in life beyond outside the university. It's a crap shoot, really, and what I end up studying often reflects the convenience of time slot more than my own interest. Until this last year, that is, when the cosmos harmoniously aligned and gave me Irish-American literature.

This matters because, at one point during my formative years, I decided--although I likely reported being told at the time--that I descended from Irish lineage. I naively imagined a bloodline imbued by immigrants and emigres. I saw my grandmother's red hair and knew of her Chicago roots and somehow concluded that the old sod was in there somewhere, too.

Now that I think about, I can recall one instance that may have planted the seed of my beliefs. I remember sitting outside the principal's office, staring through tears in a bustling elementary school office, awaiting my punishment. The sole black kid at the school and I had been trading barbs over cadence calls on the football field. His eyes, dry and steeled by the skepticism that others use to regard his differences, stared forward stoically.

The principal did not like the use of the n-word. "You have fair complexion," he said. "Someone might see those freckles and think you're Irish. How would you like it if they called you a Mick, considered your family a bunch of drunks?"

I wouldn't like it, I said. I wanted my punishment. I did not want to cry in front of Jamar anymore.

My mind never drifted from that direction. When my grandmother died, I sought symbols of Celtic remembrance, eventually deciding on a spiral triscele as a permanent reminder of her love and guidance. I matched the triscele two years later. Those around me joined the bandwagon of my myth: a belt buckle from dad; a book mark and candle-holder from an old college girlfriend; a small scroll banner purchased by a friend on his travels; a bracelet. Seeing the symbol gave people a sense of obligation. They bought me trinkets and knickknacks, and the triscele and I became one and the same. I buried any doubts I had about my origins in boxes as I made room for all the relics people kept giving me.

Irish-American literature offered some validation, an academically suitable method of comparison. I could hold my history up to the literary mirror and critique the similarities and differences of the reflection. I quickly realized my naivete, however, as some of my colleagues told of their reasons for taking the course. Some were on pilgrimages, seeking to understand the origins of their mysterious ancestry. Others had seen the green hills, the shantytowns or the Northeast, and needed an educational context for their mind's eye. A few enrolled to avoid good old Catholic guilt. It goes without saying that no one enrolled because it fit into their schedule.

I soon found some fundamental elements missing from my decidedly Irish background. The most glaring seems to be an absence of religion. Catholicism remains the focal point for all things Irish, the marker to which most characteristics--both legitimate and overblown--inevitably link. My grandmother didn't create a clan, didn't put anyone through Catholic school, and didn't implant any fatalist senses in her children or their offspring. She bore no heavy grief, no obligation to educate me on the falsities of wearing green on St. Paddy's Day. The more I considered the content, the more I smelled a rat.

Though I'd known (or learned to know) better, I had clung to an invented identity. As I see it now, it stems in part from the luxuries afforded to a white kid from a small town: I never had to acknowledge that I was a white kid. I had been granted the label of "normal." Only after I grew bored with the complacency and invisibility of normalcy did I undergo a crisis of identity. Only then did I seek refuge in the stereotypical signifiers conveniently available for me to cobble together a heritage.

Like a first draft of a bad term paper, I found myself faced with the (in this case somewhat embarrassing) task of revising my work. So I retraced my steps. I located the only genealogy book I knew of (ironically the one shown to me by my beloved, ink-inspiring grandmother some twenty years prior). And though it only accounts for one-fourth of my familial underpinnings, its contents helped answer my version of the Irish question.

Sadly, my mother's mother did not descend from Irish emigrants. My people did not flee famine or tyranny, did not receive new names at Ellis Island, and did not fortify the strands of the burgeoning urban-American fabric. Members of my family tilled eastern soils in the 17th century, then taught school in the Midwest until, well, now. Turns out I'm more American than America itself. We come from very humble origins that boast pre-Revolution roots. Family lore has it that some of us even helped dumped tea into Boston Harbor.

And so I'm forced to again acknowledge that the truth remains elusive, complicated, and layered. The privileges of not having to deal with racial and ethnic identity (or my social standing, gender, age, ability, or sexual preference) left me with a desire to "fit in" to the ethnic landscape around me. "America is a land of immigrants," the post-racial zealotous overture would have me believe, but I've found it neither rings true nor makes tracing the history of those immigrants any easier.

I'm reminded that the truth is only what one believes it to be. And in just ten years' time, I've managed to invent a history, sell it to those around me, print it on the landscape of my body, and now admit I was wrong. But these actions, these choices, that mindset, they are still who I am. And that makes them true.

(At this point, part of me wants to revisit the issue of my own whiteness and how it gives me the liberty to vacillate between otherwise rigid social, cultural, and ethnic confines without enduring alienation or exile or shame. But if I did, you might think I was making up the truth again.)

Writer's Block

When I'm asked how my experience in graduate school is going, most people are only ready for the reply that pertains to the traffic, the time, and the level of work that I must do in addition to teaching full-time. Some want to know how my wife handles it (admirably, thank you), and some are curious about its affects on my ability to see family and enjoy down time. Rarely, though, does one ask how my learning reinvigorates the critical pedagogy I acquired in undergrad, or how my master's work enhances some of the rhetorical techniques and composition strategies I came to take for granted in my earlier education.

I don't mind that no one asks about the nuts and bolts of composition studies and writing instruction, but as of late, these components have managed to compel my interest in the subject and undermine my day-to-day practice as a secondary English teacher.

It's a particularly vexing precipice upon which to stand. The view into the world of research and study is one of color, light, and possibility. The view into the high school classroom is one of rigid policy, lackluster performance, and unfit practice. (And I'm just talking about my own classroom.)

What started as a quest to enhance my ability to teach secondary English (writing, specifically) has evolved into a weekly reminder that public education is flawed. This is certainly no surprise in a job that demands participation as a regular agent of stagnant practice, fixed processes, and systemic problems. The fact that I've committed to do so unwaveringly, however, certainly is.

One's Proximity to his Father

The radio says it will snow tonight
depending on the elevation. "If we are
closer to God," my father answers,
as I watch the wiper blades erase raindrops flecked
with ice from the windshield. My father
points and says, "That's a
good sign," and I believe this night
the ground will hide its soggy brown body
in silent snow.

I look beyond the rushing rain and sleet
and hope to find the slow tumble of flakes
falling through the beams of headlights.

In twenty years I will live
far from God, and my son
will have nothing to hope for between
the slash of wiper blades as they clear away
warm, empty raindrops like memories.

One Big Decade

**Disclaimer: I am of the mindset that the decade ends on 9, because 30 is not one of the 20s, just like 10 is not the last single-digit number.

My generation finds itself in a fortunate position. As the 2009 comes to a close, most of us can look back fondly at a dramatic decade that brought with it some of life's most altering moments, decisions, and changes. For those of us who graduated high school in '00 or 01' and set out for higher learning beyond, the aughts represent the apex of our youth, the moment when vigor and passion and searching converged--and (for some of us) diverged--with commitment, responsibility, and time.

With all these things in mind, I'm offering up a photo essay that seeks to encapsulate one perspective of my experiences in a dynamic decade.



Year: 2000
Image(s): Lindsay and I at Sierra Ski Ranch (now Sierra at Tahoe); Chris and I after our final high school football game.
Explanation: The images illustrate how I managed to successfully straddle social groups during the last two years of high school. I played football, continued a dedicated campaign on the slopes, acted on stage, and worked as a sound technician behind the scenes.
Significance Then: I didn't realize it at the time, but I see in my day-to-day interactions as a classroom teacher how difficult it is to run with separate crowds. I somehow managed to slide between social groups with ease, feeling substantially invested in each. I think by that time of our educational careers, most of my classmates were seamlessly switching between various social groups. It is as if the shells of these groups were permeable, leaving us with the false understanding that they remained in tact as we moved between them.
Significance Now: The fact that I was able to dabble in different sectors during my time in high school certainly made me believe I could do it in college. Not that I believe everyone has to find a limited niche and be content in it, but it was clearly a freeing realization at the time.



Year: 2001
Image(s): Jamie and I at our high school graduation ceremony; me lying on empty bottles in Omega Essentials, an invented "frasority" at CSUMB.
Explanation: Jamie is saluting because Jamie is inspired by moments. I am embracing him because he inspired me. The bottles were a project undertaken by a number of college freshmen and sophomores in Res Hall 206 at CSUMB.
Significance Then: Jamie and I rekindled a friendship that sat dormant for 11 years. He was an assistant in my beginning drama class, and he made me believe that I could act, create, and believe in the possibility of all things. He's the reason I grew secure in a number of my interests. The bottles, on the other hand, served as a false wall built between the existing dorm-room wall and a bunk bed. It represented a lot of drinking, yes, but more the bonds that grew from the tumultuously wonderful period during our first year at MB. The bonds created there, for the most part, still exist.
Significance Now: Seeing both of these images makes me remember the difference between what I want and what I have. When I left Placerville, my relationship with Jamie grew in new and productive ways, but there were times when I expected more from him. As it happens with friends that feed your senses, I felt a need for his presence in more frequent quantities. I remember wanting something reliable. I look at the picture and think about all those times I wanted him to reach out, how frustrating it made things for me, and how the frustration was my own needy creation. Along those same lines, I didn't appreciate certain relationships forged in the frasority days of 206. Now that I don't have them, I play the What if game. What if I made an effort to contact so-and-so? What if I actually tried to hang out with those guys? Ultimately, both were valuable when they were valuable, and at least afford me the ability to pontificate on the impressions they left on me.


Year: 2002
Image(s): Mat (One T) and I taking a study break on Reservation Road. I'm pretty sure Joe took the photo. I remember Matt (Two Ts) sitting on my left playing another drum. Jenni and Melissa came out, and a handful of others.
Explanation: Mat and I jumped to Res Hall 208 the following school year, and to me this image represents the new things that came along with that move. We spent more and more time at beaches for the sunset. We ventured out and explored the coastline and mined the content of our studies for some philosophical fodder, and generally avoided barber shops.
Significance Then: Taking a break from school was particularly easy to justify, but going off campus without some larger plan in mind was difficult because of the isolation on campus (base). This excursion occurred at a point when I had been practicing the guitar long enough to feel comfortable strumming it in front of people--granted, I played the same 8 barre chords to different Jack Johnson songs, but still. I remember this evening being particularly beautiful. The bay was rough in the crisp wind, and for the first time I kept playing through the pain in my fingers.
Significance Now: This is my quintessential I'm in college photo. I'm with my roommate and best friend, I came to the beach because I thought nature could bring me closer to a girl, I'm not studying, my hair is long, and I'm playing the kind ubiquitous folky music that saturated the college and coastal experience.


Year: 2003
Image(s): Captured by Joe, I'm filming behind the scenes footage on a movie called The Mission, a piece created by TAT students and professor Hiro Kinoshi.
Explanation: I spent the better part of two weeks with Joe and friends as part of the production crew. The shoot took place the summer before Joe's senior year, and this marks a busy time for our apartment. Joe worked on three films, while Mat and I did some stand-in work and generally observed all phases of production.
Significance Then: This particular experience drove me to unofficially change my major (for a weekend). Joe told me, after a bit of wine, "Kyle, I think you could be a really good director." It didn't stick because, in the end, I didn't feel "film" was a good enough reason to spend four years in college, and I didn't want to go to Hollywood. But I like what the TAT program did for us as roommates and friends, and I like how it shaped our creative endeavors together at CSUMB. Essentially, I have a body of work that effectively documents my time at CSUMB.
Significance Now: It's really, really, really cool to have all of these artifacts from college that have nothing to do with teaching or literature. Knowing that Joe has gone on to live in Los Angeles surrounded by a network of talented individuals from CSUMB almost makes me feel like I know important people in The Biz. Almost. Amazingly, none of my school work suffered from these new extra-curricular activities.


Year: 2004
Image(s): This image was taken after Mat and Jaclynn's wedding reception.
Explanation: Mat's beginning was in many ways our end. This image makes me think of the joy I felt during the days surrounding the occasion.
Significance Then: For everyone, including Joe, Mat, and me, the general belief was that Mat would keep the girls wanting him while Joe married his long-time girlfriend Season. Before we knew it, Joe and Season split up, he graduated, and Mat got married. At the beginning of my senior year, I served as the best man in my roommate's wedding. It was a huge moment for me. The couple would soon have a baby, Mat had moved home, and all I'd built my college identity around changed. I moved in with Brittany, started working at a bar off campus, and tried to smooth over the bumps in my personal life while finishing school. At the time the picture was taken, I remember admitting I'd never been happier, and feeling joy in realizing that it was happiness for someone other than myself.
Significance Now: The last sentence really sticks, even now. Watching Mat become something new changed how I viewed my own plight. I remember resolving to let certain things go and start enjoying the moment. Subsequently, I ended up watching a lot of The Daily Show with my roommates in the fog.


Year: 2005
Image(s): Jamie called this a photo shoot for our band Spilt Tea. We grabbed old guitars and wandered down along his property while his mother snapped photos of us.
Explanation: The prospect of moving home after graduation, coupled with Jamie's return from Vancouver, spawned a creative explosion. We had high hopes that we'd be writing songs long into the night, recording and perhaps even performing. We thought time had given us a moment to make up for all that we'd squandered as children.
Significance Then: I like what this image--this whole photo shoot, really--embodies about how we believed in each other. We were hell-bent on exploring things, whether ideas or philosophies or literatures or landscapes. Not long after these shots were taken, we embarked on a week-long road trip through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. I really felt like I was on the brink of re-creating myself on completely new terms.
Significance Now: Part of me does see myself on the brink of something, but I see someone very content in being unfocused. I think Jamie once called us "The Questioneers," like we were out on a mission to just ask. I certainly embraced it, and it's affected how I view my impulses and thoughts now. This picture also represents the time I had to re-learn what I conceded in my thoughts about my friend Jamie in 2001 (above).


Year: 2006
Image(s): Noel took this photo of me at a turnout in Big Sur.
Explanation: From 2006 to 2007, there's elusive theme in the photos I took and requested taken. Many are like the one here; I'm staring off into some unknown scene scape. I think the goal was to both illustrate my positioning in a particular moment and place, and also reinforce movement and progress beyond. The other photos that show up a lot this year are pictures of my shadow.
Significance Then: It was clearly easier for me to avoid a confrontation with captured reality. To me, the shadow is just a semblance, and while it suggests that I'm somewhere, my condition, other than upright, remains uncertain. Similarly, I wanted to convey visually what I felt in 2005; I lacked focus, but I was willing to explore. I had no desire to look back a fresh mistakes (both a good and bad thing, one might argue, in terms of how I learn).
Significance Now: I think it's important that I turned my back on certain things, especially at such an awkward phase in my twenties. I like this picture now more than ever because, at the time it was taken, I was no longer a student in Monterey. Being a visitor in my old home reinforced that my view was clearly in other directions (though I recall now that the trip itself was a lesson in value). I was figuring out how to be a college graduate without a job, how to be a son newly returned home, how to be (or at least aspire to be) an adult, and how to rewrite guidelines for forming new human connections amid a new surge of uncertainty and impulsiveness.



Year: 2007
Image(s): Asleep on an ice chest in the middle of the northern-Nevada high desert; reading with a cup of coffee in Mendocino.
Explanation: These images nicely illustrate the year for me. At worst, I was an exhausted, moody, overworked first-year teacher trying to appease my employer's demands, my family's desires, and still charm my new girlfriend into believing I could pull off every impossible task. At best, I filled my moments with leisurely indulgences.
Significance Then: I spent some time butting heads with people around me over the effects of stress and the definition of health. Some of the conversations loved ones started with me during this period of time began with, "I'm only telling you this because you need to hear it... ." Despite straining the delicate balances between work, family, and play, I spent 2007 trying to convince everyone that I knew what I was doing. I recognized the effects around me, but I wasn't about to admit that I needed to reconsider what I was trying to accomplish.
Significance Now: Easily the craziest year in terms of new beginnings. I settled in my downtown apartment, actively engaged in a meaningful relationship with the woman I eventually married, finished my first stint as a full-time teacher, taught what I swear was my only summer school session, left Elk Grove Unified for Woodland Joint, opened a line of credit, and bought a car.


Year: 2008
Image(s): Stephanie took this picture at a fruit market on Hawaii's big island.
Explanation: This year had a lot to do with distance. I moved out of the apartment and in with Stephanie in May, and traveled to visit my mother and stepfather living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Stephanie and I were able to spend a week on Hawaii and Kauai, and I rejoined my father, stepmother and brother on the Jeep Jamboree in August. I enjoyed my second year at Pioneer--my first without the "newbie" status, and began working on my master's in composition at Sacramento State. I ran my first half-marathon, then proposed to Stephanie before The Run to Feed the Hungry in November.
Significance Then: At the time I considered myself lucky to be traveling to such wonderful places with such easy company. The trip, our second major adventure together, was filled with hiking and snorkeling and cooking and eating, and permitted the kind of mutual immersion that life with a job cannot provide.
Significance Now: That trip stands out because we weren't married, but we had strong beliefs that we would be. As a result, I think we treated the experience like something more than just a trip.


Year: 2009
Image(s): Brittany took this photo of me bowling in my tuxedo.
Explanation: After the wedding ceremony, we left it up to our friends to decide how to keep the party rolling (no pun intended). Land Park Lanes won out, and although the time was shared with close friends and members of the wedding party, this image best represents what the decade has done to me.
Significance Then: This one's certainly easier to ruminate on because it's relatively fresh in my mind. I liked the way Ben and Carrie orchestrated not only the bowling lanes and the rides to the alley, but how they effortlessly involved a perfect blend of people and fun. After bowling, we went to Harry's Cafe and made the kind of memories that could never, ever be planned in advance.
Significance Now: Time, for me, is two things. For one, it is a continuum that feeds itself and forces those bound to it to acknowledge the connections across the continuum that work to render one's perception of reality. Time is also malleable, though, and the wedding, like so many other valuable memories, stands as a peak in the time line, a period in which progress and movement become, simply, "the now," and remain there, frozen and beautiful.

The Year According to Facebook.

It these modern times, the most appropriate way to look back at the past year might be via status updates. Then again, maybe not. Warning: Most of these are about the cat, sports, and work.

January 3 at 11:53pm: K.S. Petty is a food coma. [after his birthday dinner at the Kitchen]
January 4 at 9:22pm: K.S. Petty acknowledges it's a banner year.
January 11 at 3:51pm: K.S. Petty is quelling his brother's reactions as the Chargers choke.
January 14 at 10:01pm: K.S. Petty is always being meowed at.
January 20 at 10:43pm: K.S. Petty is all about America again. [inauguration day]
January 22 at 5:07pm: K.S. Petty is enjoying his third and fourth eye. [got glasses]
February 8 at 6:23pm: K.S. Petty is, like, planning a wedding and stuff.
February 18 at 6:12pm: K.S. Petty is hoisting his John Salmons jersey to the rafters. [Salmons and Miller traded for Nocioni and Drew Gooden]
March 8 at 1:21pm: K.S. Petty is avoiding articles on composition theory. [grad school]
March 15 at 12:43pm: K.S. Petty 13.1 miles and twice as many groans. [finished 3rd in my age group and averaged a 6:38 mile]
April 17 at 12:31pm: K.S. Petty can't believe MSNBC publicly referred to April 15th "Tea Party" protests as "Tea Bagging." [a good year for politics]
April 25 at 9:11pm: K.S. Petty is going to World Cup 2010 in South Africa. [a good year for sports]
April 27 at 5:35pm: K.S. Petty admits it's a good thing he introduced the Swineherd in the Odyssey just in time for this flu epidemic. [the year of H1N1]
May 2 at 7:44am: K.S. Petty dedicates Saturday to tuxedos, grades, and the fall of Rondo. [weddings, work, and the NBA finals]
May 11 at 6:20pm: K.S. Petty will put this portfolio to bed. [grad school semester ends]
May 17 at 9:26pm: K.S. Petty doesn't need to read the paper anymore because Facebook users deliver all of his news.
May 19 at 8:51pm: Sweet! Fourth pick in a two-person draft! [Tyreke Evans has since made a fool out of me]
June 6 at 3:23pm: K.S. Petty saw The Hangover and saw more than he bargained for [this comment was about penises, but it's still a hilarious film]
June 11 at 9:21pm: What?! Kobe Bryant threw an elbow in the post season? Never seen that before. [this one upset some people]
June 20 at 9:15pm: K.S. Petty is cold and the Giants can't close the deal. [Father's day at PacBell Park that included an extra innings game-winner on a wild pitch]
June 24 at 11:24am: K.S. Petty is yelling, "Bocanegra!" and the other customers don't care. [Confederations Cup. The three updates that followed? "ALTIDORE!!!" and "DEMPSEY!!!", then USA!! USA!! USA!!"]
June 25 at 6:42pm: Michael Jackson died a loooooooooong time ago. [stolen from my brother in-law]
July 6 at 10:34am: Today I made it official. There will be booze at the wedding. [purchased all the alcohol for the wedding]
July 10 at 4:09pm: K.S. Petty is scotch, dominoes, and a collection of inside jokes with repeated callbacks. [bachelor party in Bodega Bay]
July 17 at 8:17pm: K.S. Petty is tying up loose ends that will eventually become a knot.
July 17 at 10:46am: Programs? Check. Booze? Check. Table cards? Check. Wedding ceremony rehearsal notes? Check. Find out your principal just quit via email? Check. [this one ended up working out for the better, but the timing was terrible]
July 18 at 5:50am: Let's roll. [wedding day]
July 18 at 10:45pm: Ceremony, reception, bowling, Harry's Cafe, fin.
August 4 at 4:49pm: El ultimo dia en espana. Pobre sito!
August 8 at 2:20pm: K.S. Petty went all the way to Barcelona only to come home and see Barca play Chivas after Quakes vs Crew.
August 15 at 7:24pm: K.S. Petty thinks Michael Vick needs to play football since his attempt at another economic venture landed him in jail.
August 17 at 10:26pm: Is it hot in here, or did i just watch the season premiere of Mad Men? [if you don't watch it, you aren't fully human]
August 24 at 8:50pm: Dear Facebook, I'll never tell you everything, even though some people do. Regards, Kyle
August 30 at 6:43am: K.S. Petty is afraid the cat will give herself a concussion if she keeps headbutting my kneecaps.
September 10 at 9:43pm: We should all be glad this Caster Semenya case arose in an arena that so forcefully depends on distinctions between what is "male" and what is "female."
September 19 at 2:05pm: Book is finished, papers are graded, yard work is done, new mason jennings cd has arrived, and I'm getting ready to pop bottles and celebrate. [Stephanie's birthday party]
September 23 at 8:25pm: K.S. Petty realized that nearly all the stories in the state-adopted anthology he uses to teach ninth graders are either about selfishness, war, or murder, and always involve wine, whiskey, or cigarettes.
September 29 at 8:45pm: K.S. Petty is teaching manners today, along with how-to-eat-indoors-without-attracting-ants. These are two areas the state does not consider important, but one in which my students need educating.
October 1 at 9:38pm: K.S. Petty loves checking up on his friends and acquaintances via facebook; hates reading updates about farms, drink passing, and mafia wars.
October 11 at 7:26pm: K.S. Petty wonders what SNL will do when Fred Armistad isn't around to play the light-skinned black guys, the Arabs and Muslims, the Italians, the Latinos, and an array of nerdy white guys. Who will they turn to to single-handedly blur the racial stereotypes!?
October 15 at 4:19pm: Dear Major League Baseball: Your current playoffs can't save the mistakes of the last decade. I am avoiding your playoff fever like swine flu.
October 20 at 6:42pm: Thank you, hide feature.
October 23 at 4:20pm: K.S. Petty wishes a credential program could teach classroom recovery strategies for spiders on overheads, students breaking wind, and construction equipment vibrating the floor.
November 4 at 9:08pm: Home alone is bourbon.
November 11 at 7:12am: K.S. Petty saw the "Happy Memorial Day" post in the obit. section of the Bee and wondered about the downfalls of missing school on Veteran's Day.
November 23 at 7:03am: K.S. Petty woke up to the cat on a Monday and not an alarm. Three cheers for vacation!
November 25 at 9:25pm: K.S. Petty is thankful for The Wire on DVD.
December 1 at 3:15pm: K.S. Petty is always singing Bone Thugs n Harmony on the first of da month.
December 12 at 4:30pm: K.S. Petty will not pronounce the hard "ch" when he says "Chanukah" tonight.
December 20 at 12:00pm: K.S. Petty blames the dairy industry for the persistent adaptation of the "Got ____________?" slogans that refuse to die.
December 22 at 8:00am: K.S. Petty stayed up late to watch the second airing of the Kings' stunner in Chicago because it's so damn fun to be relevant. [Kings erase 35-point deficit, the largest comeback in franchise history]
December 22 at 2:52pm: The ticket stub says "Avatar," but I swear I just watched a remake of the 1992 animated film Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest.
December 26 at 8:58am: K.S. Petty is enjoying his traditional plight in times of worklessness: blogging.
December 26 at 4:35pm: K.S. Petty bets he an get the zip code for Owl City from the Postal Service.