The work starts with a lot of thinking then a lot of website searching and then a lot of talking and thinking and calling old associates that may still live in such and such a town or teach at such and such school. The whole family did a tour of a few schools in Southern California during the summer that coincided with a conference in San Diego. One last car trip with the family. A good experience for the younger sibling to see a few universities and perhaps get exposed to the concept of higher education.

I would not consider my wife and I helicopter parents. Very involved when our kids were younger but as they grew older we have stepped back a bit. No more PTA. Bake sales are often forgotten. Kids soccer is fun but the comradely and party verve of the parents seems to also keep the team playing every year. But when the college application process came around we got back involved. The school had resources but overall it seemed that the responsibility was on a 17 year old’s shoulders. We stepped in. I quit my job and took on freelance work to get my head around the whole thing. Drastic measures perhaps but I have done such things before. In the end I am glad I did.

Our son has been a really good student. He has taken AP classes and been involved with a lot of clubs. He has a part-time job, which he had to really work to get. In the last year he has had a nasty case of senioritis. He become a lot more social and has often stretched the limits of both parents – staying out pretty late (I will not divulge until what hour) and being a kid getting to know the world. So along with the uncertainty of college a lot of growing up has been going on. This is good.

It was recommended that he apply to nine schools. Why nine schools? I have no idea. We took the advice and made the list.

19 Tips for Helping Your Kid Apply to College
1. Open a communal gmail account that is his name at gmail.com and use this for all application correspondence. Make sure everyone in the family knows the password.
2. Have him create separate google documents for all the essays he is going to have to write. He should copy and paste the questions into each of these documents just to get the cogs turning. What a bummer to write essays on lots of different computers and ones that may not be backed up. Having things centralized helps versioning.
3. Use google calendar and put in all the dates (e.g when applications are due. When the school visit is. Auditions. Possible interviews)
4. Get really anal and get a three ring binder and print out the relevant info for each school in separated tabs. Copy and paste key info about the school into documents and print the suckers out.
5. Memorize your kid’s social security number.
6. Print out SAT scores and put them in the binder
7. Create a document with all the possible people who will write letters of recommendations. Make sure you have their current email address. Have your kid email them asking if it is cool if they can write letters on his behalf. Most applications have you submit these people’s names and emails as part of the application so it is good to be ready.
8. Make a spreadsheet of all the schools and key stuff. Print it out and stare at it with a large coffee until you can recite the dates like the star spangled banner. Have columns for website urls, website applications and application name and any other stuff that seems useful.
9. Calm your significant other down when they ask a nerve-racking question at 11 pm about some minute detail. Let them know that in the morning they can go to the google docs and look up the detail on their own.
10. If your kid is in the performing arts, get all the audition clothes way ahead of time.
11. Most applications have the ability to start them and complete them gradually. Start them early. If you cannot find the application on the website and you created an account and you just still see the usual ethnically diverse set of attractive college kids when you log in, call the place. The link may be plain text that is not underlined and in light grey. No kidding!
12. Get ready for the FAFSA in December. You have to do your taxes anyway and unless you have some magic bank account to pay for everything, financial aid will be in the picture.
13. If your kid has the capacity to write essays about how they want to find a cure for cancer, build biodegradable, solar housing in Somalia that is also edible or cure political corruption get them writing scholarship essays early. Most 17 year olds just want to be 17 year olds, do their thing and maybe have fun and play on facebook but yours may be different. Milk it for all it is worth.
14. When you fly for auditions or interviews book with Virgin America. The seats are bigger and the cool purple lights trick you into thinking you are on vacation.
15. When you’re visiting schools, get to know the other parents. Even though my son was competing for the same spot as some of the other kids, all the parents I ran into were people I would invite to my house for dinner. The sense of openness, good intentions and well wishing was extraordinary.
16. Try not to scream at your computer at how lousy the online application websites are. Stuff like this gets old very quickly and the oversight committee from three years ago thought that having every form submission create a new popup window with useless information was so cool.
17. When the form you just submitted seems like it is stuck. Walk away. Make a cup of tea and forget about it. In ten minutes, when you come back to your computer, you might get a really cool server error message with some useless information about timeouts and database offline jargon.
18. If your kid is in the performing arts, apply to five schools at most not nine. Trust me.
19. Hang in there. In six months you may be able to turn their bedroom into a really cool spare office.

(a) Title 17 Amendments- Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

`(a) Criminal Infringement-

`(1) IN GENERAL- Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed–

SEC. 201. STREAMING OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS IN VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL LAW.

(C) by the distribution or public performance of a work being prepared for commercial dissemination, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial dissemination.

It has been a long time. Actually a really long time. I hope you are doing well. Where you are, I have no idea. We knew each other back in “the day.” You took up surfing as you thought the paddling would help out the carpel-tunnel in the arms. Exercise. The remedy of last resort for the inflicted. Not sure if it worked but in the end you left town and your surf board ended up in my basement. It is an 8 foot Nev, well-built with very few miles. I have used it perhaps 3 or 4 times. Actually it was my friends who rode it when we were short a board on surf ventures.

The issue is this. I cannot find you anywhere. Not on Google. Not on Facebook. Not on LinkedIn. You have done it! You have maintained your sanity and privacy. In the future, when someone needs a privacy policy, I will just send them to you as you got it down. The only problem is, I will have no way to get a hold of you. Anyway, I really want to get rid of the Nev surf board. The surf season is upon us and I have eyes on a more high performance model. Maybe a 7 foot pin tail. Something that really carves. Let me tell you. That Nev is not made for carving.

So just email me before say Thanksgiving. Lets work out a deal.

Your friend,

Paul

2198 Folsom St
(between 17th St & 18th St)
San Francisco, CA 94110
Neighborhood: Mission
(415) 255-8372

Hours:
Mon-Fri 10 am – 8 pm
Sat 11 am – 4 pm

Laundry is usual pretty straight forward. Try as best I can, I separate the clothes by color. I then dump them in the washer and turn the dials around until it sounds right – not the groaning sound like it is on the washing machine five-minute-break cycle – but the “yes, I am getting to work and I have turned on the water” cycle. “See you in forty-five minutes. Don’t be late like last time. Your clothes will smell bad if you leave them in here too long and I do not want to do this all over again!”

So an hour later I pull the load out of the washing machine and head to the backyard where I wanted to hang out some of the big items. It is a beautiful sunny day. There is no clothesline so I improvise a few hangings – from this tree to this chair, over the fence in the sun, over a chair. It is all looking really good when I hear – shhhhhhhhhooooooooBBBBOOOOMMMM. I look back and the back door has blown closed by the wind. It is the only way back into the house. I think: no problem. Why would the back door be locked? So I check to see and it is locked. I am locked out. There is no quick way in.

They say that most accidents happen in your own house in the kitchen or the bathroom. Why not just stay on the couch, never bathe and order out? For me, most lockouts occur when you hang laundry out in your backyard. So here I was assessing the situation. I knock on the door and call “hello!” a few times to no avail. No one is in the house and the downstairs renters obviously must be out.

I had left the back windows on the second floor open to air out the place. They are wide open. I look around for a ladder but there are none. Unfortunately I cannot find the Batman rope with the magic metal prong thingies either. So there is no climbing my way out of this. I look over the fence to the other backyards for perhaps a ladder. No luck. Being in the middle of the block is of no help. Without an alley, there would be at least five fences climb over to get to the street and I am not excited about running into Rex – the unknown overexcited guard dog.

Perhaps there is a key hidden under a nearby rock or plant. I look through the likely places. Instead of a key I only discover panic-stricken rolly pollies, worms and ants scurrying madly to darker places.

The front door of the house is unlocked so there is a way in the house if only I could get out of this fenced-in backyard. I call my trusty brother-in-law on my cellphone. He lives ten blocks away. I get his voice mail. In a calm and nonchalant way, I leave a message asking him if he could please call me about an important pressing manner. I cannot think of a single person not at work or many miles away.

For a brief minute I think up a dark, existential play about some Chinese-American guy who gets locked out in his backyard in the Sunset District in this very house in San Francisco. No one responds. No one every goes out into their backyard. The Chinese-American guy ends up a pile of bones in a lawn chair. The lights fade. The curtain closes.

So just when I am starting to get a bit macabre, the backdoor to the neighbor’s house opens. VOOOVOOMMMBB. A young guy walks out. He is out for a smoke break. After a few minutes, not giving in that I am in a complete panic, I ask him if it would be possible for me to hop over the fence, walk through his garage so I can get back into my house. Dave is a nice guy. Sure no problem. My name is Dave. Thanks a ton.

Not the first time I have been bailed-out by some guy in his twenties, with lots of interesting jewelry pierced throughout various locations in his head. Smoke breaks. A new public safety imperative.