I am absolutely timing this blog with the middle of the month, knowing all you people got paid in the past 72 hours. Please let this serve as a reminder that I still need to raise roughly $2500 to run in the Boston Marathon. And you can help me by going here: Ross's Marathon Fundraising Page.
Other great reasons to donate to a good cause now:
-According to multiple websites that seem more confident in their tax knowledge than I am, a person is eligible to donate up to ½ of their Gross Income in a given year. But I’m not greedy; I’m not asking you to donate 50%. I’d be happy with 10% (Another benefit to donating to the cause: if you donate & have questions about the tax ramifications, I have access to a top notch accountant. I can offer unlimited hours of his time for consulting at no cost).
-Many of you reading this likely thought you’d be buying the new Patriots Super Bowl DVD or championship gear three weeks from now…seems like you’ve got a bit of free cash now (the majority of you probably would have been spending an extra $100+ at bars the next couple Sundays too).
-Donations have a direct correlation to amount & effort I put into this blog. If the donations aren’t rolling in, I’ve gotta hit the streets knocking on doors of strangers, inevitably taking up all my time.
-Because you’d do everything in your power to keep this blog going if you knew what I had planned over the next three months (I debated the previous sentence for 30 minutes, trying to figure out how wrong it was to blatantly lie to all of you). There’s potential for a legendary posting coming up in three weeks after I run the Kaiser Half Marathon with Colleen & Neil. If I get as competitive with Neil as I think I’m going to, you’ll likely read a post about how two brothers set a record on slowest half marathon in history just because they spent the whole race fighting each other. I’m planning to slow him down by doing things like running ahead of him to a water station, grabbing a cup & filling it with tequila (that I’ll have in my pocket), and handing it to him when he goes for some water.
I’m wondering if maybe my 1st blog post had too many jokes and you are all looking for a very serious post about why raising this money is important to me and to the Playworks Organization. Fine.
If you remember, Playworks raises money to provide children with qualified coaches & structured activities during recess as well as in classrooms (some stats to consider: It costs $162 a year for 1 student to participate in Playworks so my minimum target of $3,250 will provide 20 low-income students the opportunity to receive in and out-of-school activities through Playworks. Playworks raises $27,000 per school that they operate in. Collectively, our team will raise a minimum of $48,750, alone allowing Playworks to serve 2 low-income schools).
I would never pretend that I had it rough growing up in terms of the school I went to—it was a private, Catholic school that my parents likely paid good money for—but I will tell you even St. Joe’s had its own shortcomings when it came to recess/structured play for the students. Located in the “heart” of Cleghorn—just a beautiful, exquisite section of Fitchburg (which is itself a beautiful section of Massachusetts) (please re-read that last sentence with thick, heavy sarcasm)—St. Joe’s gave its students access to a large parking lot for daily recess. And because of its awesome surroundings, you could often find unique “treasures” for students to play with scattered across this recess area—such as rusty nails, broken glass, a syringe or two, and I think I even saw my first condom at recess in the 4th grade (thought it was a balloon, and no, I did not try to blow it up). One time when the parking lot was being repaved, the school shoved us into a smaller parking lot—the teacher’s parking lot—for recess. All that transpired that day was me stepping on a nail, nail going through my shoe, into my foot, and turning my sock from completely white to completely red in 7 seconds.
In the main recess lot, there was a basketball hoop, and each time our teachers added a rim to the backboard—so we could actually play basketball—the neighborhood kids were nice enough to rip it down that same night to show us that we needed a better way to attach the rim to the backboard.
Sure, maybe we didn’t have anything more than a lame parking lot to play in, but at least the teachers (specifically the PE teacher) were creative with the activities they had us do for recess. For a couple years, every Monday our recess/gym class would consist of walking in a circle around the parking lot for 30 minutes. I think the creative part was allowing us to log how many laps we did & compare to other kids. Just amazing structure for kids.
This wasteland of a recess session is also where I saw 2 dogs have sex for the first time (I don’t remember it being consensual sex either). And, Aaron, do you remember the time you & your friends decided to form a puddle out of spit & try to shape it into a map of the U.S.? Sweet geography lesson there.
And don’t even get me started about our “indoor basketball court,” where the ceiling was exactly 12 feet high & the out of bounds markers were simply the walls…think about those dimensions for a second.
I think my point is clear. Even at a decent school with sufficient funds, the recess environment still wasn’t ideal for kids.
Help me raise money so that in the future kids get to choose when they first see two dogs having sex, not have it forced on them during recess.
Please donate to this cause. Again that website is: Ross's Marathon Fundraising Page.
