This is yet another post about my pathetic posting frequency as of late. I have been busy here in Raleigh for a while and I’m still trying to get all of my proverbial ducks in a row. The holiday season also brought a visit from the parents and the cats who are all doing well.

Raleigh is a really cool town. The people are really friendly and will approach you and strike up a conversation. Having grown up in Queens and lived in Florida, I am not used to this. It’s peculiar to me but it’s also one of the things that makes me feel comfortable here. When I moved to Pennsylvania it took me months to find decent people to hang out with. Aside from neighbors and friends of my family I never really found anyone to hang out with when I was in Florida. Being in a place where people reach out to you is a blessing.

This area of North Carolina is also really socially aware and is populated with many well-educated people. There is a great deal of political activism and people donate a great deal to charities. I haven’t seen this much political and social awareness since I left NYC. We all know how politically aware Floridians are by now, and the school systems there are some of the worst in the United States, therefore you can draw your own conclusions about awareness there. Pennsylvanians are more politically aware and there are some small pockets of activists throughout the state that do good things. There are even several communities in Pennsylvania that are fighting the invasion of Wal-Mart tooth and nail. I wish they would fight racism with such vigor. I’d have to say that the people in this area are more well-rounded than the denizens of my previous areas of residence with the exception of NYC.

Of course I have a lot more to say about Raleigh and its surrounding areas, but I need the time to put it all into coherent sentences.

I’ve been delinquent in wishing everyone a happy holiday so I figure now is as good a time as any to say Happy Holidays. Enjoy your New Year’s celebrations and remember to drink and act responsibly!

So I’m finally getting out of Orlando! I am moving to Raleigh, NC within the next two weeks. This could possibly be my last weekend in Florida, ever!

I kinda fell off of the radar for about a week because I was out of town making arrangements for my move. Once I’m settled I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

It’s time for me to get the hell out of Orlando. I knew that there was nothing here for me when I got here, but it took me about four years to come to grips with that. When I got here the job market was much worse but you could still afford a house. Now there are jobs (granted most of them are $12/hr or worse, even for degree holders) but on that kind of salary you can’t afford a house. Florida has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country right now:

In Florida, which had the highest rate of foreclosure in the previous two months — there was one property in foreclosure for every 719 households. Texas is close behind. Both states’ foreclosure rates were more than 2.5 times the national average.

A lot of people are quick to say that these growing foreclosure rates are the result of the real estate market starting to collapse. How about the fact that there is a severe lack of jobs in Florida that pay enough to sustain a mortgage payment? How about the fact that a two income family in Florida can barely afford an interest only ARM? If the average starter home in a questionable neighborhood goes for $250,000 (that is a conservative estimate), how are two people making a total of less than $50k annually going to comfortably finance a place to live? I’m no mathematician but these numbers don’t seem to work out well.

There is just not a lot of reason for me to stay here anymore. I can never be truly independent without pissing money away on overpriced rent for years before I save up enough for a modest down payment on a home. By the time I accumulate those funds, what will the average home price be? All of the real estate industry analysts are saying that the market cannot support itself at these heights, but have you seen any decreases in the prices of new homes? Of course not. The only notable difference is that people cannot sell their homes for the insane amounts of money they got this time last year. As you can see, on the home front, there is not a lot of reason to stay.

I could move to Tampa or to another city in Florida where there is a better IT market, but why? I’d still be hot and miserable and subjected to the same incredibly high home prices. Therefore common sense dictates that it’s time to move elsewhere.

All roads for IT people seem to lead to the Raleigh area of North Carolina. I haven’t read anything negative about it. From the population mix, to the average age, to the tech market and the cost of living — it seems that there is no where on the east coast that is more attractive. For a long while I toyed with the idea of moving to Seattle or to the San Francisco Bay Area, but the technology markets there are not what they used to be. Furthermore, I don’t know if I could deal with the big water being on the other side. I’ll stick with the evil I know.

It’s been a very long time since I have had the chance to blog. Life has been very hard but exciting lately. I started a new job with a phenomenal company about 6 weeks ago, and I’m already on my first business trip in McLean, VA. I’m working on a disaster releif team to help emergency and rescue services with their communication needs in the midst of Hurricane Frances. That’s a mouthful, eh? It has been rough in Florida this hurricane season, first Charley, now Frances, and possibly Ivan in a week and a half. It almost makes no sense to fly back down if we have to help out during Ivan too, so I do not know when I will be returning to Orlando, which is almost a blessing. I am nearing the end of my Masters too and am heavily considering starting my PhD soon afterwards. I just want people to call me “Doc” but that’s a completely different story.

Anyway, I’m at another crossroads in my life which I was trying to ignore and put off for several weeks. I have to face it now. As I work and live I meet new friends and invite new people into my life. The old friends who don’t seem to be accepting it will have to or be left behind because I was never the type to cater to the insecurities of others. I am not in the business of dropping people out of my life when it gets too difficult be their friend, but I cannot force people to accept change. I am rolling with the punches like everyone else and I expect the people I love to do the same. So for now, I refocus my life on myself and my goals and aspirations.

Apparently someone heard my desperate pleas, because Creed broke up! I am so excited. I doubt that there is anything that could make me happier at this very moment. I was excited when I heard that they might be breaking up but I dropped by their official site and there is the official message that they’ve decided to call it quits. Such beautiful words. Apparently (and this is according to Jason) the drummer and guitarist have already moved on to a new project while Scott Stapp has found himself a new band. Anyone else find it funny that the drummer and the guitarist stuck together and Stapp is off alone with the remnants of another group? I smell ego issues.

Jason is here in Orlando right now and I think he likes it. Aside from the humidity, and this horrible rain that he brought with him, I think he’ll like it here. So far we’ve had a lot of fun and I can’t wait for work to end so I can get back home to him. Hopefully he’ll find things to do to keep himself occupied while I’m at work. There’s a lot of cool things to do out on International Drive, only problem is the weather today is disgusting. I haven’t seen it rain like this in at least 5 or 6 months. No Go Karts for pookums.

My law class is almost over and there are few things that get me as happy as I am about this. I hate this class. I hate Law. I don’t really try too hard to pull high grades in this class, so I know I’m not going to get an A, but I’ll settle for a B or a B+ so long as it keeps my average over 3.0. The only thing left for me to do is to post my Weekly Summary and after that I’m done! YAY!

I haven’t updated my blog very much lately. Between work and Jason’s visit I’ve been tied in knots. Jason’s blog and my blog might be getting married soon. Don’t know what we’re going to do yet, but I’ll keep you posted. This will be the first time we officially blogged together and it’ll help us keep our content more fresh. I think we should just write in one blog, but he’s got something up his sleeve, so we’ll see what happens.

So I got up really early this morning. In fact I never really went to bed *smirk* so I turned on the Sunday morning news for kicks. They were doing a special on the state of education, namely reading skills, among Florida youth. Being interested in education, I started to watch this special and I was astounded by what is going on down here.

According to the research, over two thirds of tenth graders in the Florida public high school system have reading skills below average for their grade level. Yeah, you read right, TWO THIRDS. Governor Jeb recently got eleven million dollars in funding to revamp the way reading is taught to children in the school system down here. Revamp? You mean there is more than one way to teach children to read?

Apparently the Florida school system employs a “wholistic” approach to teaching fundamental reading skills. Essentially, they expose children to books and give them “meaningful assignments” that encourage them to read. What this boils down to is they put a kid with no fundamental reading skills in a room full of books and give them assignments on their reading. There is no step-by-step process to teach the kids basic phonics skills, model reading behavior, read aloud in groups, or any of the things I did as a child when I was learning to read. Of course I am one of the exceptions to the rule. I was reading books on my own before I started first grade (which was considered advanced even in a New York City private school), so I can’t really compare my experience to what these kids are getting, but simple logic tells me that it’s all bullshit. How can you expect a child to learn to read if you don’t teach them the sounds of the letters. How can they make the connection between written and spoken word without this kind of learning? How can they just pick up a book and spontaneously read it and comprehend it without any of the tools that are necessary to read?

This “new research” that Governor Jeb got the 11 million dollars of funding based on is essentially a laundry list of the skills and tools that were used by my parents and my school to help me learn to read. This research states that children have to be taught the alphabet, the phonetic representations associated with the letters in the alphabet, and basic grammatical structures to begin reading. If this is news to you, faithful reader of my blog, please feel free to contact me immediately and tell me how you learned to read. I was under the assumption that all of the things I mentioned above were necessary requisites for learning to read. The research goes on to also state that reading education should be specific, and the assignments and lessons should be explicit in their purpose.. as opposed to sitting a kid in a room full of books and waiting for them to learn to read via osmosis.

If I sound sarcastic and a little bit angry, you’re wrong. I’m really pissed off about this situation. No wonder why I haven’t met anyone my age down here in a bookstore. Two thirds of them can’t read on their age level, so I’d never run into them outside of the children’s section! Can you honestly believe that this kind of thing still exists in American education system? We are the richest country in the world and the greater population of certain states can’t read on their age level. No wonder why we’re a running joke internationally.

In my humble opinion, I think there should be a national education system with national exams for basic literacy, math skills, science/technology, and analytical skills. More than half of the countries on the planet have similar systems, and their kids are going to be the ones coming here and getting the jobs that our kids used to get. Technology companies are outsourcing their IT work in countries like India and China because the salaries are lower and the talent is much brighter. Let’s face it, national education systems and testing structures work (England, Canada..), why can’t we get together as a country and ignore state’s rights long enough to get our kids to read and write at age appropriate levels? What’s so scary about that? For the life of me I can’t figure it out…