it's a wrap

No, not the fatty-fatty-boombalatty-Jared kind of wrap; the "I'm almost done student teaching" wrap! It's been the longest 15 weeks of my young life, but it's over and I can now begin the search for a more permanent hell.

Speaking of hell and the search for it, I found it last night. No, I didn't get a job. In fact, I'm probably the first person to have been practically fired during an interview. The debacle took place at a local high school that had contacted me and was interested in interviewing me, so I ran myself into the ground creating a portfolio and preparing for the inevitable interview questions... none of which were asked! Below is a hyperbolic transcription of the event (also truncated).

Principal Dick: Hugging Bear? What the hell kind of person lives in a street named that?

Me: Me.

Cool Teacher: Like from Starsky and Hutch!

Me: Yeah.

Principal Dick: Tell us a little about Dwain.

Me: (What the...? How much is a little? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? Trick question?) Well, I was born..... [1-2 minutes later, glazed looks and nervous shuffling brought my autobiographical monologue to a screeching halt] That's all, folks!

Gotee Dude: How does your experience and Spanish figure into your lesson planning?

Me: (What the...? Um, dude, how does your gotee affect your lesson planning? I grew up there, man, how do you think it affected me!) Well, I use my language skills to teach students the power of language, and I use my experience as an outsider to explore that theme. (Aw shit.)

Cool Teacher: What are some of your strengths and weaknesses?

Me: (I can't bench more than 10 lbs. I have kidney stones. I hate blowing my nose. I have a 23" meatcicle. I can tell you the difference between a maduro and a robusto cigar.) Well... [Lots of bs.]

Assistant Principal who was a Black Woman: How does art figure into your discipline plan?

Me: (What does that even mean? Uh... Uh... I don't know) Uh... Uhhhh... I don't know. It doesn't. Good question. (Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit!)

Principal Dick: Get the hell out. We'll call you back if every other teacher in the world dies.


I hate interviewing. They gave me a cup of water that I couldn't drink because my hand was shaking too much. AGH!

Hope all (pronounced "one person who reads this") are doing well and have more self-confidence than I do at this time.

cheers to beers!

triangulate

I don't know if anyone else has noticed--anyone being the lone visitor and myself--but my posts have been getting shorter and shorter as time goes on. This definitely isn't a swan song, so don't freak out yet. It's just a busy time of year with a lot of crap going on at the same time.

I'm like a toy poodle caught in a rushing stream that's carrying me toward a dam, and I'm paddling my little legs as quickly as I can, but I'm just a small poodle in a large body of water, and the current is just taking me where it will. Poor poodle...

monday night blues

I'm sitting here frantically b.s.ing my way through a philosophy of education and reflection, all the while researching suplementary resources to include in a multicultural resource toolkit (toolkit is the ultimate double entendre) and completing neither in a satisfactory way.

I hate teaching. I also hate Dead Poets' Society. Robin Williams as an intelligent human being? Suspension of disbelief can only go so far.

cheers to beers

another saturday night and i ain't got no energy

Saturdays are odd days. Friday night used to be my favorite night of the week; then it was Saturday nights; and now it's Saturday morning (which includes any time until 4 p.m.). There's just something about being able to lie in bed until whatever time you'd like (a luxury that some of my friends take for granted, lazy bastards) and knowing that you're not missing out on anything except crappy Satuday morning cartoons. My favorite Saturday morning cartoon ever had to be the Fighting Foodons, a show which Fox no longer airs in my region. Good storytelling abounded on the show, with the mighty villain King Gorge battling against a young hero with superfriends like Fried Ricer and Cinnamonkey. Brilliance!

So that should be Saturday mornings, but not today. This morning, I awoke to the overtures of the world's most annoying alarm clock, a nasty little surprise that make me jerk awake and hit my head on the corner of the nightstand. That was snafu #1. The second snafu came in the sinister form of the Praxis II, an exhaustive evaluation of my ability to BS my way through English content and pedagogy. I'm taking a break in the fine art's library while waiting for my 2:30 date with the last of the three ugly sisters that I'm doing today. Take the pun any way you want to.

The most frustrating of the questions which I have been asked so far is definitely the one in which I was require to defend the statement "Modern literature is primarily preoccupied with self-discovery" (paraphrased). Ok, not so bad, axiomatic and most defendable. However, since this is a standardized and bastardized evaluation, they had to make sure that I am well-versed in all literature American, so I was to choose 2 novels, from a list of about 10, to use in my defense of the statement. Ok, still not so bad. Oh wait, I've only taken 2 survey courses of American literature, and I didn't go to high school in the US. Merde. I was familiar with only one of the novels on the list (ironically, it was Joyce's Portrait, the only non-American) and knew little to nothing about the rest. Fortunately, I was able to b.s. my way through Ellison's Invisible Man as my second novel while I dedicated 3/4 of my response to Joyce. Crap, man, utter bollocks!

Time to get back to take the Principles of Learning and Teaching (or something like that). I'm drinking tonight, hands down and bottoms up!

what happened to primetime?

Is there anything sadder than eagerly awaiting 8 o'clock on a Thursday? It used to be "Friends," and now it's "Joey." The horse is dead! Stop trying to ride it! I now hate Thursday nights (though it would be truer to say that I hate them more than I did during "Friends'" heyday) and eagerly await the 11 o'clock news. There is one faint glimmer of hope for the night, however, and it manifests itself in the gravelly voice of Anthony LaPaglia and the chiseled chin and piercing eyes of Eric Close.

I hate to blog and run midthought, but I must.

Day of Silence protested

I can't believe this. Is conservative America hellbent on becoming a sociocracy which alienates all those who are not White Affluent Straight Protestants? How can they honestly be organizing a day to celebrate hate-speech, isolation, and bullying? What the hell is wrong with these people!

Reawakened

I love the internet. Recently, during a forced lull in my schedule, I googled the names of some old friends from Bolivia, a shot in the dark that relied on one of them having made something of himself. Of course, to define success based on whether or not one's name is prestigious enough to appear when googled is inane, but it also seems to be the way of the world. Anyway, after googling with no hope, I browsed my way to a site for alumni of the high school which I attended, and there just happened to be an email address for a comrade's sister and a university name for another friend. To make a boring story short, I contacted both and am now in a dialogue with what are really nothing more than spectral memories from a different life. What do I talk about with them? Do I bother trying to fill them in on 10 years of life? Do I care about their 10 years of life? Do you plan to meet? If we do meet, is beer more appropriate than wine?

I'd have to go with beer. Beer can celebrate anything: wedding, anniversary (amount of beer drunk is directly proportionate to the number of years being celebrated), birthday (including child's first), bar mitzvah, Tuesday night, Tuesday morning, a sunny day, a test completed, a test coming up, and any other number of causes for celebration. Wine, on the other hand, must be as carefully paired to a celebration as it must be paired with cuisine. For example, to celebrate reuniting with a friend after 10 years is definitely cause for a bottle (or box, if you must) of wine. However, if for half of those 10 years you were still a teenager, is it really that big of a deal? Yes and no, so to save money and be socially cautious, go with beer. Maybe a good beer, just to be nice, but definitely not a Belgian. If you do go for wine, make sure you each have a cheap bottle; that way, if 10 years prove to have been too much time to cover, the wine will help keep the conversation flowing. When the wine flows, so does the talk. I'm sure that there are a thousand drunken sots who have come up with the same, pithy little saying and all thought they were being horrible witty. I'm not drunk, so what's my excuse?

I'm going to call Karl soon. Him, I do want to talk to. We were brothers in so many ways. Oscar and Felix (who we quoted incessantly), including the moose calls at all hours of the night. For certain people, 10 years is enough to dim any flicker of friendship that might have survived past 2 years. With Karl, though, I think I'm going to break out a bottle of expensive wine and top it off with a six-pack of Young's Double Chocolate Stout.

tuesday's gone

Forgive the Southern rock reference, but in keeping with the theme of beginning and ending, I found it too fitting to miss. I confess that despite my long residence in KY, I cannot bring myself to enjoy Lynyrd Skynyrd (in fact, I had to google an approximation of their name to figure out how to spell it), no matter how many times I hear them on the radio. How can a song that is as blatantly racist and Jim Crowish as "Sweet Home Alabama" is be so popular? I realize that the South will rise again--have fun with that, y'all--and all that crap, but can't you at least be somewhat circumspect about your KKK membership? The grand poobah of Southern rock may very well also be the grand dragon of the local Men With Hoods club. Rant complete.

A dear friend of mine has called into question my dedication to blogging (rightly so) and has raised an interesting question of the purpose and audience of blogging. When I began this blog, I intended it to be nothing more than an exercise in writing, something to help sharpen my vocabulary and style. Now, after only 2 posts, I've begun to look forward to posting for the cathartic and rant value of it all. Ok, I have to confess: I just wanted to use the word cathartic. Hmm, that's the second time I've confessed something in this post... Forgive me, father, for I must sin (Peter Steele reference #2). I can't say that this blog will live a long and full life, but hey, that's the nature of the beast and the blog.

Ok, I'm surrounded by students who want to talk about a talking Jesus doll. Sure, why not.

yet another beginning...

Monday morning and another beginning. The first day back from spring break and I'm tense. I've really missed the students--some more than others, of course, but they've all been missed--and it's an odd thing to realize they've now become part of my life. How quickly will I forget their names? This has been a heckofan (a nonce word) experience which I doubt will leave me any time soon, and I know that some of the students will forever represent to me the myriad of personalities and students I will teach in my life. What a responsibility they have; they're the first and last to be the first (Peter Steele, that's for you). I'm having trouble coming up with the philosophical name for what they are, but I'll come up with it sometime. I hope.

Back to class and dreams of a bottle of wine.

beginnings...

How does one go about beginning? I'm sitting, listening to DI's chillout stream, mood perfectly set--except for the computer lab geek who keeps staring at me--and my mind won't focus on beginning. Perhaps I shouldn't bother trying to have a cogent beginning, trusting my fingers to make the start.

Lambent has been a favorite word of mine for many years, and though I haven't a clue as to where I came upon it, I've claimed it as my own. Everything I do seems to flicker, never staying put for more than a moment before moving into the past, the "other." Perhaps this will be the same: I spend days pondering the right name, right address, right format, right background, only to dabble and forget. If blogging is an art--dubious--then perhaps I'm a dilettante, a fraud. Time will tell (god bless cliches).

My resume is inexcusably exaggerated. I'm off to hack at it, though the way this day is going, it will be more of a perfunctory slap than a true disembowelment. Odd image...


I leave you with your ever changing moods. And an image to go with.