I am currently not under a curse and have been living in mostly dull times for the past two weeks. The highlights so far seem to have been seeing a former student in my hometown's liquor store, the exchange with the transexual / cross-dresser / drag queen on New Year's Eve and the huge order I placed tonight with Amazon for a stack of books, including Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats and a DVD of the Royal National Theatre performing The Merchant of Venice.
One the books I am currently lusting after, but did not order, is a three volume graphic novel called Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, primarily because of the authors' reinvention of the characters Wendy, Dorothy, and Alice. The book is insanely expensive and has been criticized as “pornographic”.
From the spring of 1999 to May of 2003 I worked at my former high school as a substitue teacher and librarian. I taught primarily middle school students, with occasional guest appearances in AP English to lecture about narrative styles using Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' and teach Frankenstein. I ended up loving my middle school students, especially one group of bright, funny, fun kids.
Two days before Christmas J and I stopped in at the liquor store to grab a bottle of Bailey's. As I wandered through the store I was stopped by one of those former students, now in college and almost unrecognizable. And she was happy to see me.
This past sunday, the FIL continued in his quest to get me to submit to the family borg. First by implying that I was lazy for not getting back to him soon enough on a recommendation of a digital camera. I was especially irritated because he failed to inform me that he needed the information quickly. I shall be vindicated as the camera he purchased from eBay is an off label brand from an unknown company. If it breaks, which it will, he is completely out of luck.
While driving around Western PA this weekend, I managed to catch most of the interview with the organizers of the Helsinki Complaints Choir on Weekend Edition. While the concept of a complaint choir is not new, I found the interview highly entertaining.
The concept of a complaints choir was unfamiliar to me, but fortunately I found this.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you whose fluency in Finnish is somewhat lacking :o) here's a performance of the Complaints Choir of Birmingham (found via this Metafilter link from last November).