When I was growing up, I never had my own bedroom. I always had to share my room with at least one brother. I remember the bedroom we had on Wood Street. We had two sets of bunkbeds for the four of us. I always liked sleeping on the top bunk just to be away from everyone, even if it was only temporarily. Sometimes it was the only privacy I had.

When my parents started to really argue right before getting divorced, my mother moved her bedroom to the attic and gave me her bedroom all to myself. I felt bad because then my father didn’t have a bedroom, but he wanted me to have the bedroom for myself. He told me that he didn’t need a bedroom. My father worked the midnight shift, and he would sleep on the sofa while we were at school. He was upset that his marriage was breaking up.

Well, this new bedroom of mine was the first time I ever had my own bedroom, and I just loved the privacy! The doors even had a working lock because my mother had put it there to keep my brothers and me out. So, I used to lock my bedroom whenever I went to school. That was my very own private kingdom. I would always find things right where I left them! My brother Danny couldn’t borrow my hockey shin guards without my permission. Dicky couldn’t sell my stuff when I wasn’t home. Tato was the only one I could trust because we did many things together ever since he started helping me with my paper route. We were business associates. I also had a chameleon in my room that liked to hang on the red drapes and blend in.

When I went away to Divine Heart Seminary my freshman year, I lost my private bedroom. My father had moved out of our house on Wood Street due to their separation and pending divorce.

When I returned from Divine Heart a year and a half later, my new bedroom was in the attic, which was unfinished, unheated, unfurnished, and had no running water. The bedroom that my mother had for herself in the attic was very livable, but it was off limits to me. That was my mother’s emergency bedroom. Just in case. Just in case of what, I never did learn.

My father would only return to the house to take us out for a visitation. So, I was relegated to the rear of the drafty attic. My mother had found a stowaway bed in the alley, and she came to get me so I could help her put it in the attic. At first, I didn’t know why she called me. When we were in the alley, she said that we were putting the bed in the back of her VW Squareback. I had seen a dog urinating on it early in the day and I told my mother so. She told me to just help her take it home because that was going to be my bed in the attic.

Well, ever the optimist, I was happy to have my very own room again. I stuffed newspaper into the cracks between the roof and the wall to stop the wind from coming in during the winter. My mother and I installed a gas space heater to make the attic bearable during the winter, but it was still cold anyway. Luckily, I had been in the Explorers Club where I learned how to camp during winter weather. I used to sleep in my mummy sleeping bag with two wool blankets. I was quite comfortable even on the coldest nights.

I used my guitar amplifier to create surround sound in the attic by hooking up every speaker I ever found to my radio and 8-track player. I set up a little table with a manual typewriter and I used to type away for hours. And the final touch was my favorite. I bought a black light and some flourescent posters of M.C. Escher drawings that were so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. I always kept the black light on as a night light. Otherwise, I would crash into the roof beams and bang my head so hard that I would have large lumps. (That’s why I’m so hard-headed to this day.) And just when I had my bedroomm exactly as I wanted it, my parents’s divorce was final and my mother bought a new house in Marquette Park and we had to move.

When I think of all the bedrooms that I have ever had, my favorite one had to be the one at the house on Marquette Road. I went from one extreme to the other. From a cold drafty bedroom in the attic to a bedroom in the basement next to the boiler.

I actually started sleeping in my birthday suit for the first time in my life because the bedroom was so hot. This bedroom wasn’t actually just mine and mine alone, but rather a room I shared with Danny, Tato, and Dicky. But as they went off to Divine Heart Seminary one by one, the room became mine alone while they were away at school. But before they left, we painted the room completely black. We also painted the windows black, so the bedroom was completely dark. However, I brought the black light from my previous bedroom and put it up, along with the flourescent M.C. Escher posters that I had. My brothers bought more flourescent posters that practically lit up the whole room.

That room was perfect for sleeping! In fact, I couldn’t tell when the sun rose because the room was so dark. The only thing I really hated about the room was the concrete floor that wasn’t level. It looked deceivingly level, but if you put a ball on the floor it would immediately start rolling. The dressers were practically useless in that vortex of a bedroom because of the uneven floors. The drawers wouldn’t open or close properly because the dresser would become misshapen because of the floor. When the basement became very humid, the drawers would just freeze in whatever position they were in.

But as I said, the room was perfect for sleeping because it was so dark. The black light was perpetually on. It was the perfect mood lighting. All the posters were very comforting. I even got used to waking up in the middle of the night and looking at the one of the Satan-like creature with pterodactyl-like wings flying off with a baby in its talons into the flourescent orange sky. One of my brothers bought that poster.

My mother no longer used her portable AM/FM/8-Track player, so I used it for mood music while I slept. I especially loved the 8-Track player. Sure the sound quality didn’t compare to other stereos, but it had the distinct advantage of being able to play good music over and over and over again.

The most annoying part was when the looped tape would reach the beginning/end marked by a slilver strip that would change tracks. It would make a sound similar to the clack-clack-clack of a roller coaster as it ascends the first hill. Only it was duller and it sounded like wood thumping on wood.

I remember listening to these 8-Tracks repeatedly through high school: Led Zeppelin III, Black Sabbath Paranoid, Yes Fragile, Deep Purple Machine Head, and Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy. And when they wore out and broke from being over played, I would buy a new copy of to replace the faulty 8-Track. Amazingly, the 8-Track player never broke!

When I taught Spanish at Richard J. Daley College on the south side, the department sure made me earn my money. They got more than their money’s worth from me if you ask me. The ideal size for a Spanish class should be somewhere around fifteen students, but less would be even better. At Daley College, my small class had twenty-five students and my large class had forty-five. I was constantly correcting homework, quizzes, and exams. When I have such a large enrollment, I usually don’t notice individual students unless they are performing extremely well or extremely poorly.

One day, Lois came into my office during office hours. I was surprised since students do not normally visit me during office hours. I would like to attribute this to the fact that I’m a great Spanish teacher, but the sad reality is that students who really need my help are either too busy or too lazy to visit me for help. I knew of Lois that semester because she had failed every quiz thus far. At least she came to me for help early in the semester. She was an African-American single mother. As I soon found out, she was also on welfare, but the state required her to take classes or lose her welfare benefits. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be in college.

She said she was really trying, but I didn’t believe her. She said Spanish was too hard for her.  She had not completed even one homework assignment. She gave me a lot reasons for her poor performance, but I told her that those were just excuses. She told me that she had no time to do her homework. “What’s the next item on your agenda?” I asked her. Well, she had to pick up her children from school in two hours. I told her to sit down and start doing her homework. If she had any problems, I would answer her questions.

Slowly but surely, she finished her first homework assignment. Sure, I had to help her, but she caught on rather quickly. She didn’t think she was smart enough to do the homework. She came to my office a few more times to do her homework and soon she was doing all the homework without my help. She started passing the quizzes and eventually earned a B- for final grade of the course. I was quite proud of her. She was only defeating herself until I showed her that she had the capacity to do college work. I’m sure she eventually graduated from college because she was so determined after that semester.

Today is a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in my air-conditioned house trying to think of a topic for today’s blog entry. I can’t. I think I have run out of ideas.

The only reason I thought of this title was because last night I saw Risky Business with my sons, and I recalled the other Chicago movie that I sometimes watch with my sons: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Lately, my sons have been asking me about famous paintings. I hope that it’s because I have been a positive influence on them. Anyway, in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris and his friends go to the Chicago Art Institute and look at the painting by Georges Seurat titled “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” And in the painting, everyone is all dressed up and at the park.

However, there isn’t much activity. Everyone seems to have gone to the park to see and be seen. Well, that’s what it looks like in my head right now. I have all these ideas in my head, all dressed up, but they’re not doing anything. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything to write. I’m just sitting here waiting for something to trickle out of my head and flow to my fingertips so that I can type it up. But no such luck!

I really love personal computers. Of course, that’s because I really loved typewriters. I mean those old mechanical ones whose keys would get all tangled up if you typed too fast. Not that I could type that fast, but I loved to jam them up on purpose so I could figure out which letters to pull down first in order not to bend the arms.

Then, I bought an electric typewriter with self-correcting tape. Now that I think about it, that was truly my first word processor! I used that typewriter to publish some of my first articles and I wanted them to look perfect before I submitted them. The correction tape made editing so much easier so long as I caught the mistakes before I went hit the carriage return to go to the next line because the typewriter’s memory was only good for the line on which I was typing.

When the first PCs first came out at about $10K, I couldn’t afford to buy one. I used to visit my friend Jim and use his. However, typing any kind of text was still actually easier with an electric typewriter. And typewriters produced better documents than those early dot-matrix printers. The PC word processors required you to learn the operating system and all these arcane word processing commands.

When WordPerfect eventually came out with their 5.0 version, I finally bought an IBM computer. This was back when IBM mass-produced IBM-compatible computers. They were the number one computer manufacturer back then. My IBM computer used IBM-DOS. This was before Bill Gates had the power to rule the computer world. His evil empire may be slowly eroding, but the competition is constantly watching him covetously.

I remember always upgrading my computer because obsolescence was the main component of every PC. I loved opening that beige box and taking everything apart and putting it back together every time I upgraded my PC rather than buying a new one. As a teenager, I used to build electronics kits and I became quite an expert solderer.

When I joined the Marines, I could solder up to NASA Class 1 specs, the highest rating. I learned electronics in the Marines, but when it became a job for me, I lost all interest in electronics.

I remember all this now because my laptop crashed. I could have fixed it myself if I had had all the right diagnostic equipment. However, I had already paid for the extended warranty so I Fed Ex-ed it to get repaired. All they did was replace the motherboard, something I could have done, but not as cheaply as they.

I have an old computer that I kept upgrading until not one of the original components remained. It reminded me of the knife that Socrates (or it was Aristotle or Plato) described. If you replace one half of the handle, then later replace the other side of the handle, and then finally replace the blade, is it still the same knife? Well, to me, my upgraded computer is still my original computer, at least in spirit, if computers can have spirits not projected onto them by their owners.

Chris is another memorable Spanish student of mine, but not for the reasons you might think. “Chris” is merely a sexually ambiguous pseudonym that I’m using in order to hide his identity. Oops! I revealed his gender. Okay, he is a he. This blog entry would be so hard to write since we don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun for people in English. Anyway, he was in my Spanish class for one whole semester, but I only saw him exactly six times during the entire semester that consisted of 58 total days. I never saw him before, nor since, that semester. In the beginning of the semester, he e-mailed me that he was having personal problems and that’s why he was missing so many classes. In fact, he never even showed up to class once. This was the third week of the semester, and I still had no idea what he looked like. Then, he e-mailed me telling me that he suffered from anxiety, and he was taking prescription medications. He attached an image of the letter from his psychiatrist asking me to excuse his patient’s absences, which I did. When the first exam came around, I e-mailed Chris reminding him to come to class in order to take the exam. I normally don’t do this for students, but I was concerned for him since he was in counseling. He responded by asking me not to ask him anything about his absences when he finally showed up to class on exam day for the very first time of the semester. He didn’t want to create a scene in front of the class because all the attention would cause him emotional stress. He came to his first class late and I handed him the exam, but he avoided eye contact with me, and he was forced to sit in the front row because all the other seats were taken. I could tell that he was extremely uncomfortable. He was tall and thin and extremely pale. His hair was dyed black even though it was naturally black and when he bent his down his hair would fall over his eyes. His lip was pierced, and he had tattoos on his arms. Oh, yes, he was dressed completely in black. Well, he finished the exam before the other students and left without a word. I only saw him five more times: on exam days. He would e-mail his compositions and tell me about his ongoing therapy and how he didn’t feel comfortable sitting in classrooms with other students. His exam grades suffered because he was missing all of my wonderful Spanish lessons. Then, one day, he e-mailed me thanking me for being so tolerant with him. Every e-mail that I read from him always implied that he would soon start attending class regularly. But one e-mail absolutely floored me! He told me that he wanted to be a teacher! But I wondered, “How?” He didn’t feel comfortable sitting in the classroom as a student, so I couldn’t imagine him as a teacher when all eyes would be on him. And that reminds me: we never made eye contact the entire semester. Well, he finished the semester with a D, but he would have gotten a much better grade had he actually shown up with a little more consistency. I wonder if he ever became a teacher.