Lil' Hipsters

I'm sitting at CC's so that I can make myself re-vamp my short story unit. I realized I was getting bored just thinking about it and that it won't be that big of a deal to pick four or five new stories and get rid of the old ones. Plus, Bridgette suggested that I run 33 copies and just read the things in class and give grammar homework. Brilliant, that Bridgette. So now I'm excited by the prospects of Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Poe, Joyce Carol Oates, and Richard Wright. I think I've found the secret to planning: pick shit you like. As long as it's relevant to the students, of course, because without that rule I'd be teaching David Sedaris 101.

But that's neither here nor there, because the whole reason I'm sidetracked on this blog is because the world's dumbest conversation is going on next to me and I have no one to snicker with at the moment. I'm just minding my own business over here with my British tea and my cranberry muffin and these kids are blaring their iTunes over this laptop and yelling musical opinions over it. There's a nose-ringed goofy white girl in a sun dress and a floppy blond haired boy. First of all, the girl is picking out "tunes" and singing along while telling the boy how good each one is. Then! She plays "I don't wanna take advice from fools" by the Gin Blossoms (remember being bored by that song?) and she actually says, all sophisticated-like: "The '80s and '90s was a great time for music."

Then, a few minutes later, I catch her recalling the lines to "I Saw the Sign" by, of course, Ace of Base, and she asked him if he knew that one. He didn't. "I was like, in kindergarten when that came out," she said.

Yesssss!

I see that the boy has a bag from Barnes and Noble. It immediately brings me back to all those times with Ang in tenth grade when we realized we weren't going to be going to senior parties and started doing what we probably perceived as "our own thing": hitting up corporate coffee shops and bookstores. Being all intellectual-like. Feeling like we had a cool and entertaining alternative to Student Council and football games, but feeling bored and lonely all the same. Ang drove us there in her mom's big wheezy Dodge Intrepid (dubbed "The Spaceship"). The seat was one of those where you could squeeze a third person in the front if you were cool enough to have that many friends. It felt like sliding around on a couch. It didn't have a CD player, but Ang had one of those cool cassette adapters and a "Discman" and we blared some Ben Folds Five Whatever and Ever Amen and Dave Matthews live with Tim Reynolds. Ang was really into Robert Fulgham books (All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten). I don't remember at all what I was into, book-wise. I liked the journal section and Frappacinos. The Early Hipster phase.

Nosering Girl's playing the Requiem for a Dream theme song and singing along to the strings line. And I just noticed that her hair has a green streak.

Twenty four is looking pretty cool right now.

Who are these people?

Hi, Carolyn!

Any thoughts on the "matching hypothesis" -- which says that couples who are of equal or similar attractiveness are more likely to last?

I mean, there are mismatched couples who work, right?

Mismatched

Not one in recorded history.

Yes, unequally attractive people do find love. Coincidentally, they succeed at a rate inversely proportional to their belief in the "matching hypothesis." It's called the "forehead-to-wall hypothesis."

A little Hax for old time's sake

I can't write anything right now, so here's some good stuff.

Carolyn:

Do you believe that what goes around comes around?

I've seen it too much lately where the bad guy wins. The jerk in my office got the promotion. A guy who cheated on me and all the other girls he dated managed to get a nice girl to marry him. My friend was fired unfairly because of a suck-up to the boss who spread lies. I could go on. I'm starting to wonder what living by the Golden Rule is getting me.

Karma Town

I believe what "comes around" for being a jerk -- assuming the jerk doesn't eventually grow into a better person -- is dying alone. Even if you're a jerk with people in your life, your relationships with others are strained, conflicted or outright bad, and so you still die alone even though you have family surrounding your bed. I see a spouse and children who can't admit they hate you except maybe in therapy, and only then if they have the nerve to confront and grow from their problems.

Of course, if you have no conscience, then you don't care. Surely someone cheats for the promotion and gets the girl, and then laughs all the way to the bank while abusing the wife -- who, the classic victim, stays by him till he dies -- and leaves the world feeling like he won the lottery.

But then the question has to be, do you want that life?

I also don't believe "what goes around comes around" just so the good can watch the bad get theirs. Entertaining though it may be.

You feel like the good guy finishing last; I get it, and sympathize. However, the justice in being good is perfect only if you treat goodness as its own reward.

If religious reasons for this didn't stick, here's a pragmatic one: Make it about a promotion or getting the nice girl, and it becomes a quid-pro-quo, clean-your-room-and-you-can-have-dessert system -- which is swell, but logistically impossible. You can see when a room is clean; you can't always know whether an employee is predatory or a mate is cheating, and of course icy roads can't distinguish nice drivers from mean. So at least some spoils are going to be doled out unfairly. And that's before you even begin to tackle the question: Dessert -- good or bad?

So, this is really about how to handle unfairness. If whining made people feel better, the demands for beer, cigarettes, gambling, shopping and corn chips would dry

up in 24 hours. If everyone took

the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em approach, society would be gone in a long afternoon of looting.

I suppose you can let everyone else be good while you grab what you want on the sly -- but either it'll torment you or you're as bad as those who disgust you.

If instead you keep treating others as well as you can and make your best guess about the way others are treating you and, when you screw up one of these, try to do better next time, and repeat repeat repeat, then your gratification occasionally may get flecked with envy, frustration and loss. Nevertheless, it will be immediate, constant and in endless supply -- and totally in your control.

Outstanding

I am so completely satisfied with Harry Potter seven. I managed to finish the thing before anyone spoiled it for me, and even though I've read a bunch of really good editorials predicting the events of the novel, I was still on the edge of my...couch and completely surprised by a lot of parts. I've been saying for months: "Oh, I just don't see how J.K. Rowling is going to tie up all those threads that have been building up" and thinking she couldn't possibly manage that and retain a smooth narrative that felt like it made sense with the rest of the story, but she totally pulled it off. She Exceeded Expectations by far, so I give her an "O."

I think I'll write some analytical stuff about details in book seven once the newness dies down so there won't be spoilers. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go scour the internet for any recent J.K.R. interviews or editorials on book seven.

I need a butterbeer

I need to gush about the new Harry Potter movie for a second, so if you haven't seen it and you actually care about it, I'm probably going to ruin it for you if you keep reading.

As a big fan of the books, I'm aware of the Big Fan Tendency, or the BFT, to complain about every little detail in the book that the movie either left out or didn't interpret in the way you interpreted it when you had the intimate experience of reading and interpreting the characters in your own mind. I'm also aware that books and movies are different media and that this particular book is over 800 pages, thereby making it a necessity to chop out scenes for the film version.

But why cut THE most important scene? It's not a matter of saving time at that point: it would have taken maybe ten more minutes to do it justice. I could have forgiven a lot of things about the movie if the post-climax conversation between Harry and Dumbledore (one of the most important scenes in the entire series) would have been more than four seconds long. This is crucial character development time, people: as the movie audience, we need to know that Harry has reached the breaking point of emotion after Sirius's death and his discovery of the prophecy that either he or Voldemort will have to kill the other. We need Harry to mirror the reader and ask questions to Dumbledore about what all this means. Plus, Harry's supposed to lose it and break items in Dumbledore's office while Dumbledore kindly lets him without raging back. It's supposed to feel complex and painful to watch Harry reeling against the person who supports him the most.

And above all, we need Dumbledore to be the Zen Master having a human moment.

But we can't, because Michael Gambon can't (or won't) play Dumbledore as the Zen Master. He's Dumbledore as a bumbling, angry, confused-looking old man, albeit with a few scenes of awesome magic power. He doesn't even wear the "half-moon spectacles." The thing that bothers me the absolute most about this movie and the other recent ones is that Dumbledore is supposed to have mysterious wisdom in a very human way, which is why I keep referring to him as the Zen Master. He goes through things like criminal trials (where most humans succumb to stress and anger and fear) with grace, kindness, and slight amusement. At Harry's expulsion hearing, he was said to pull out a chair and listen to the Minister of Magic as if they were having tea. In the movie, he paced and raised his voice!

The Dumbledore in the books appears to enjoy life and to sense great meaning in small moments with a transcendent humor (example: when Harry asks him the intimate question in the first book about what would appear when Dumbledore looked in the mirror that reveals what a person wants most in life, he said it would be him holding a pair of warm socks). He's the type of guy that characters look to for ultimate wisdom, and all his answers are small and unexpected. If someone were to ask him the meaning of life, he'd probably say drinking a large brandy with a friend.

And Michael Gambon just doesn't portray this at all. There's no twinkle in his eye (except defiance, which is one look he does well) that suggests his inner peace and zeal for life, and he doesn't even smile once. In the books, he has this Buddhist half-smile just about anytime he appears, and the big mystery about him is that he maintains such composure when everything seems to be going wrong in the world, and readers suspect he must know something we (and the other characters) don't know. He's also the most kind character, talking to the kids with the same respect and attention that he would give to an adult, and he's trusting of characters like Snape who others alienate. Dumbledore is my favorite character in the series, and one of my favorite characters in anything I've ever read, and it is a little painful to see him so misinterpreted (or deliberately played unlike the book Dumbledore).

I also feel bad for the people who are keeping up with movies without having read the books, because they are seeing a dinky version of something really complex and wonderful. And they're missing out on the book Dumbledore.

My third big complaint is Harry's cheesy lines at the end, which suggest Harry is this all-knowing stoic character and not an emotional fifteen year old guy (which the book portrays very well at the end). I can't believe he actually said something like "I know what friendship is and you don't, and I feel sorry for you" while Voldemort was trying to possess his body. Besides the fact that the line is lame and simplified, Harry doesn't have the capacity to "feel sorry" and be superior to Voldemort just yet. He's pretty freaking terrified.

The last line of the movie made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. It's something like, "You know what the difference between us and Voldemort is? Our side has something worth fighting for." Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's nowhere in the book. Harry marching away from Hogwarts with his friends...ugh. Maybe if he said "the difference is that we have something worth fighting for" while he was sitting around being quiet and thoughtful with Ron and Hermione. A big maybe.

To recap, main disappoitments were Gambon's performance, the director's choice to leave out Harry's grief over Sirius and the Harry/Dumbledore analytical conversation, and the two cheesiest lines Harry's ever said.

Things I liked: the portrayal of Umbridge, the climax scene, any scene with Gary Oldman, and Filch teetering on ladders and eating sandwiches in front of the Room of Requirement.

There. I think I've gotten it all out. Now I'm just left with a sense of worry for the movie interpretation for book six because it's being done by the same director. Book six is extremely emotional and character-driven, and I didn't see a bunch of subtle emotional complexities in movie five when there should have been. Book six is my favorite and it'll be really hard to see an emotionally stunted version with cheesy lines and un-earned drama. Spare us if you can, please, David Yates.

I wonder what happened to that awesome Mexican director who did the third movie?

This guy probably says what I'm trying to say better than me. Plus, he brings good news:

“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” is easily the weakest installment of the “Potter” series to date, but it is by no means a death knell for the series as a whole. Yates is remaining on board to direct the next movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” and while he didn’t fare too well here, his continued involvement should stabilize things considerably. Even better, Steve Kloves, who did an impressive job adapting the first four “Potter” books for the screen, is back to see the series home. If this is as bad as the “Potter” series gets, it’s a pretty good low-water mark. The problem is that anyone who's familiar with the source material – which is, well, half the world – knows that there was a much better movie to be made.

~David Medsker

davidm@bullz-eye.com

Wasting time and paper

Planning can be overwhelming and infuriating. I re-organized my short story unit today and I was thinking to myself, I'm really bored with the prospect of teaching some of these stories. But then the other way to look at it is that they're good for the skills that the kids need. "Desiree's Baby" is the only one I really like (out of the five I did last year).

I'm going through the literature book and thinking about how most of the stories are old and white. I'm trying to look for something more up-to-date and preferably by a black author--especially since some last year's kids said they wished we would have studied more black authors. "Before the End of Summer" by Grant Moss was so long and boring. Maybe "Blues Ain't No Mockingbird" by Toni Cade Bambara will be better.

Then I picked up some of my college anthologies to find something I remembered liking that would be appropriate and interesting for ninth grade. I remember liking "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates which is a suspense thing about a fifteen year old girl who gets tricked by a pedophile or a kidnapper or someone. We could talk about "blaming the victim" and other contemporary, relevant issues. But then I saw that it was really long and thought about how I'll have to make 160 copies of it and collate it by myself.

This is my process. Brainstorm, start to settle on something, get excited about it, realize that there's a huge blockade, look around for something else, get overwhelmed, and quit. Then get mad at myself for being such a weenie. And I inevitably start thinking about Holmes and Dr. Guillory, and how it would be cool if I could do thematic units and have a sense of goals for the unit, but instead my only tie is "short stories" and the whole thing feels fragmented and the discussions feel separate.

Maybe it's worth it to collate the Joyce Carol Oates story. But maybe there's something good in the lit book that I haven't gotten to yet. Then I wouldn't have to waste a bunch of paper and time.

Our house--doot doot---in the middle of our street

Leif has found a way to record our moving in process because he is Leif. Check out pictures of the house and click on the arrows to see before and after pictures of the paint job.

House in progress

Possum Babies

I dreamed I had a baby. I didn't pass a baby, I just had it. It was just around. I had two, actually.

One was a boy. I lived in these dorm things and Nanny lived across the way at another dorm and she'd pretty much taken care of him. I think I breastfed once in the dream. The girl was younger--both were naked pink little piggies and I had no feeling toward them in the dream. I had left the girl in the trunk of the car for a day (I guess on the way home from the hospital?). I started to worry about it because I hadn't breast fed her, so at the end of the day Nanny and I went to get her out of the trunk. She was pink, naked, and curled up. I think at this point in the dream the babies started being possums or kittens or something, or that's how I was perceiving them. I was feeling bad because we hadn't named them. I think I told Leif I liked the name Bjorn. He came up with some other name too. I just kept thinking I didn't want to take care of them. I didn't want them to die, but I didn't want to take care of them, and I was ashamed of this.

This morning was one of those mornings where I tossed and turned and fell back into a million dreams. I had another dream that Ang was confiding in me that she had a baby. I was shocked. She said in high school this guy Derek had come by in his car and that's how it had happened. I tried to remember her getting bigger, and I remembered that she wore a lot of baggy T-shirts. She said she knew the family that had the baby now, and don't tell anyone. In the dream, I thought to myself: everyone has babies. It's unavoidable. I also enjoyed that I was the one she chose to tell the secret to.

I'm sure this all has something to do with my general feeling of being unprepared (probably for school). I pretty much believe that dreams reflect an emotion you've been feeling.

One of those really long conversations at Highland

I guess no one told me that when I went to meet with my ex, it'd be as if 3.5 years had not passed and we'd talk to each other with the same level of understanding that we always had. I was half expecting to sit around awkwardly for a while, maybe receive a few snide remarks, brush it off, and turn around and go home without feeling anything or being stirred up in any way, which is about the opposite of what actually transpired.

We were able to talk openly without being defensive, even about painful subjects like the time of our breakup and me starting to date Leif soon after. We both had enough distance from our 18-20 year old selves to talk about it. I'm not sure if it was a great idea to let loose, but it was such a relief just to be talking that we let ourselves be indulgent with comments and questions. We were able, at some points, to make light of painful things:
Me: "I pretty much kept everything you ever gave me or wrote to me."
Him: "Yeah, I burned all of your stuff."
Me: "How about that poster collage thing of a bunch of pictures of us?"
Him: "I destroyed that. Violently."
(brief silence)
Me: "Violently, huh?"
(smile)

We talked about books, movies, shows, music. We shared a similar stylistic point of view, which I had forgotten all about. He said there were a lot of times when he thought "hey, she would like this" and I said I have had that same thought about a lot of things. We decided we'd at least be facebook friends so we could send each other things whenever we felt like it.

At the end of it all, I walked with him to his car because he said he had one thing that he couldn't bring himself to throw away that he wanted to give me and he wouldn't tell me what it was. It was a painting I did at his house one day when we had decided we needed to do something besides watch TV and lay on the couch. And I said that was what I remembered about it, and he said "Man, what was wrong with us?" I said, drunk with the indulgence of being able to say something about our relationship, "I don't know, I guess we thought we would keep laying on the couch until something happened to us."

When he drove me to my car, his car, though new, smelled just like the old one.

We had hugged when we walked up to each other, and we hugged when we parted, and I think we were both really able to exhale.

But I was really stirred up from it, on top of being exhausted and hungry. I guess it was because it was so bittersweet, like breaking up all over again, irritating a bite that had already stopped itching, being reminded of the friendship and the connection we once had that (still) only exists between us. I knew I'd need to cry alone and really heavily, which I did after dropping my brother off later that night on the car ride back to my house.

There have been very few times in my life when I couldn't identify or explain an emotion, but I still don't really know what I was feeling after last night and why I was feeling it.