How to Breathe: Part One, Inhalation; Step One, the Diaphragm (fig. A, inset I)

There’s about 147 pages of help on how to enter rooms in the Goy of Districts. I will condense it down for you: click on “rooms” and type in the names of the rooms. Jeesh. Of course, in one of my other lives (I’m not sure which one) I’ve written a lot of technical documentation, i.e., computing for non-computists, and I have learned that you can’t explain the simplest things too much, and while you’re at it, never put in any jokes because nobody has a sense of humor when they’re trying to get their computers to work. So I sympathize with them. I have watched a lot of educators ham-fistedly attack their computers over the years, and I understand the problem. It’s not an age thing as much as a brain thing; for whatever reason, some people can’t get a computer to do much more than keep papers from blowing away (if they remember to put the computer on top of the papers), and maybe teachers are higher (or lower) on the inherent computism scale than the general population. I don’t know. But if their eyes glaze over and their palms start to sweat when you tell them to copy a file, you know it’s time to ask them to move away from the computer before they do any further damage. (As a corollary to this, a lot of people my age who can’t compute, A, think that they can and B, think that all young people can, and therefore C, think that they are cool and forever young. But in fact, the computist brain is age neutral, and no one is forever young, especially people my age, which, for the record, is a lot in dog years but not much at all in Galapagos turtle years.)

So last night I did most of what I had to do in prep for Districts, which isn’t all that much given that I don’t have much entry data yet. But I did poke around the program. If nothing else it removes some of the problems like insuring that people are NFL members and the like, and tracking double-entry. I plugged in my neutral judge-everything judges while I was at it. I put in a schedule based on last year’s, which was relatively meaningless but useful enough. There isn’t much else to do now except wait for people to sign up. I did get the NFL Goober of the Year Award in the mail yesterday from Rippin’, by the way, which is given to the senior who best represents. Whatever that means. I’m just trying to stay young here. In turtle years.

This coming weekend is Lakeland, with O’C jumbling up all the data and me in second chair. We’ll hook his MacBook up to the MHL printer, to keep him hardware current. I love the new MHL printer. It makes ballots at top speed, copies, scans, and serves sushi if you remember to put tuna in the paper rack. We haven’t exactly given it too much to sweat over yet. Last week’s Bronx Scientology MHL was tiny, most of the competitors coming from just a couple of schools thanks to bad weather. Which meant a lot of juggling in tab, with teams hitting their own school and the like. I try to keep judging neutral in those situations (unless people are out of contention). Then we switched a bunch of judges between LD and Policy, which meant that pretty much no one in the place knew what they were doing, but it seemed to work okay, or at least it all came out balanced in the end. The entire event was set in the Scientology cafeteria because of other events like Districts already taking place in the classrooms. To atone for his sin of stuffing everyone in the basement, O’C went so far as to buy pizzas for everyone so that they could at least stuff their faces. When he patted himself on the back for this during his three-hour award ceremony speech, everyone looked at him as if he had a hole in his head because, apparently, none of the pizza had managed to make it to the basement, all of it being devoured en route by hungry NFL Districtians. Ain’t that always the way? NFL Districtians can smell pizza three miles away. Thank God they didn’t smell the tuna in the MHL printer. I was not in the mood to share.