he's like some sort of non... giving up... school... guy*

i'm watching an episode of "monk" for the first time. monk is at a school board meeting because someone is trying to kill a candidate or something.

they have it all wrong because (1) every person at the meeting on tv is better looking than like 95 percent of the people at real school board meetings, and (2) monk is the only crazy person at the meeting and there should be at least six crazy people.

man, any of you people who are/were reporters know... school board meetings are fucking torture. whenever i'm having a bad day at work, i always think "well, at least i'm not listening to impassioned arguments about whether the board should reduce the number of "spanish I" course offerings from 23 to 20 at 10 p.m. on a wednesday."

somehow, school board meetings always had the least favorable ratio of "boring bullshit" to "time it takes to resolve an average agenda item." plus there was an increased chance of having to overhear stories about people's stupid kids because everyone there is a parent.

i sometimes would get so bored and frustrated that i would start contemplating doing something crazy, like throwing my chair through a window or punching the guy next to me just to break the suffocating tedium of the proceedings.

i think part of it was the people themselves. on the political ladder, the school board members were often a couple rungs below the members of their accompanying municipal governments... but they were just as bad in terms of hugely inflated egos and generally being full of shit. i think it was a lot of them thinking they were these stalwart champions stepping up to defend the children. oh, won't someone please think of the children?!

plus, you feel a juxtapositional sense of disgust when recalling how many of these people are, in far too many cases, choosing to not act in the best interests of the children, i.e. going to expensive conventions and staying in expensive hotels and ordering $70 per-person meals on the district's dime. or doing things that were way worse, like embezzling fucking money.

the only board member i ever liked was this big fat dude. he wasn't cool or anything, he just reminded me of an african-american version of newman from seinfeld.

and the parents... jesus. i hate (and love) to reference the simpsons so much in this post, but that episode where milhouse's dad, kirk, is like "i think the school should start sending out the school's lunch menus in advance. i don't like the idea of milhouse having two spaghetti meals in one day!" -- that's honestly not that much of an exaggeration.

a lot of it is just parents being defensive of their kids, for better or for worse. but i found school districts attract even more civic crusaders who are really passionate about something, like to the point of coming across as being obsessed. again, because they're all "oh, won't someone please think of the children?!"

these people are so fixated on blocking a 0.7% district tax levy increase for new band uniforms during the next election that they start alienating people, even if their point was valid.

gahhh... all these school board meeting memories. i don't care if the chicago public school district starts sacrificing students to some kind of persian snake god, i'm never going to make any contact with a school board member ever again.

*alternate title: simpsons references a-go-go