Myspace is for kids

I went to the website of Sam Shaber today, hoping to see if she's going to be in the area in September so I might be able to book her for a house concert. (I'd link to the site, but my Holdenslair.com website is down right now, and has been for months, and I have no idea why because I thought I paid for two years on it, nor do I know how to fix it or where to inquire... ugh)

Anyhow, in her latest update - and, by the way, I asked her if she wanted to play on Friday, September 23, so maybe she'll be the big opener I'm looking for - she says she has a myspace.com profile. I'd fiddled with it before, but didn't like it as much as friendster, and, heck, I don't even really use friendster any more.

Anyhow, you could download a free Sam Shaber song if you went to her space, so I decided to make a profile for myself, or at least finish a profile from a while ago that my 16-year old cousin asked me to make. After I did that, I looked around the site, then did a search for the high school where I teach. Shit. Big mistake. I now know way more about some of my former students than I'd like to.

Actually, it wasn't so bad. I couldn't look away, so I kept reading these profiles and blogs of kids. Most of them are funny and innocent, like the boy I had two years ago for two classes at once who writes these paragraph-long runon sentences about going to the movies at the mall and getting in snowball fights. Then I found a profiles of a trifecta of really smart kids that had each other as buddies, and I saw all this amusing stuff about me. Actually, it was only three comments. None were bad. One kid said he had to do really well on his finals because he had to prove to me that he could do well on an in-class essay. That made me feel good, as he's a pretty brilliant kid but always ran out of time all year on timed writing. Then he had left a comment for another girl who went on this camping trip, with whom I had to do a ropes course with, just the two of us. He had said, "Gosh, that must have been so weird... and awkward??" I think it was much, much more awkward for me than her. It was this weird thing where we were on a tightrope 25 feet in the air, and we had to both lean backwards while holding on to each other in order to go from one end of the rope to the other. Now, this girl weighed 90 pounds, tops, and I'm more than double that, and she's a gymnastics whiz, and I often trip over my own feet on the ground. And she's laughing at me the whole time because I'm scared shitless. And I'm afraid I'm going to pull her down the whole time. So, yeah, much more awkward for me.

The last comment was from a kid who said A Lesson Before Dying was his favorite book and he thought he was going to hate it. That reminded me that I have to re-read it soon so it's fresh in my mind; we start the year with it (summer vacation is over in a month and three days).

I ended up not being able to turn away, and even thought about posting a comment to really freak them out. But I didn't. Let them have their fun without worrying about a teacher reading over their shoulder. My friend who teaches at another high school in the city has had to report blog activity to guidance because he was worried about a kid who had given him the blog address. None of that here, for me. There were a bit more f-bombs than I would have cared for, but it was all pretty innocent.

And, frankly, I never want to stumble upon it again.

In other news, it was so hot today during my four mile run this afternoon and my weights workout tonight that my nipples are chafed. Ouch! I'd forgotten about that side effect of running a lot.