:: p-dog ::

Danny called me at 4:30 this morning to consult about what he should write on his banner for this modest event. (He is living in Brooklyn now, working at the Strand and presumably writing plays.) Short on big paper, he pressed one of his curtains into service and probably went with either "Be the Change" or "Ouch, my eyes."

Evidently I got the honor of the early phone call since our street-marching careers began together, in Austin, protesting Bush's inauguration and chanting, "Hippies and vagrants! Hippies and vagrants!" Good times.

:: Leslie H - 4:05 PM - ::

The weekend in reverse:

Had a fabulous time last night at Leyla & Emily's potluck and was feeling very grown-up until the sing-alongs started. Then it was just good old-fashioned fun. Here's a taste of the musical talent that swept us all into staggering and tuneless verses of "Brown-Eyed Girl," "Like a Prayer," and the Proclaimers' perennial classic, "I'm Gonna Be (500 miles)." Nicole also put up some good pictures of the event as well. We were nerdy photographer sisters.

I overcame my usual Saturday work inertia to the extent of outlining lessons for the whole of next week and setting up my gradebook. Yesterday's work is making today feel much more manageable, with only the faint specter of school tomorrow to poison the last of the weekend.

Bryan and I were both looking forward to our first Friday evening of the year--a sacred time for us, usually graced by cooking good food and intense lounging. But we were both so tired that we ended up ordering pizza; our judgment was so impaired that we popped in Mulholland Drive as our de-stressing movie of the week. I enjoy the movie much more in retrospect than I did while watching it--at the time it was an interminable series of illogical and disturbing moments, plus slow views around corners that usually revealed something awful. Damn you, David Lynch!
After years of internal struggle, I've decided I prefer movies that entertain rather than profoundly disturb, regardless of the implications on my culture/taste. My too-willing sense of disbelief also hurts: at several points I had to think very hard about students' parents I had to call and papers to grade, just to bring me back to reality and assure myself that I am unlikely to run across three-week-old corpses in my day-to-day doings.

:: Leslie H - 10:54 AM - ::

Reflections on Day Three

Lordy, kids don't waste any time being little punks, do they? Already it's a battle to keep them quiet, on task, not interrupting. I kept two for detention and am calling 5 parents tonight. At least the behavior is a little more underground than last year. Making popping noises during a test is admittedly much better than throwing staple barbs at each other.

So much to do this weekend. I'm beginning to believe that we're actually back in school. After the first few days, I still felt so close to summer vacation that it was hard to believe that these days weren't just a bizarre interlude.

:: Leslie H - 3:08 PM - ::

Reflections on Day Two

Made them take an impossibly boring diagnostic test for a silent hour--to fairly good effect.
Answered "no" to "can I go to the bathroom?" 9 times.
Kept eight for detention (four from yesterday).
Problem class identified (5th/6th).
Have learned the names of most of the trouble-makers.

:: Leslie H - 3:02 PM - ::

Reflections on Day One

1) Damn, my back hurts. I must rebuild my stamina for standing up and talking all day.
2) Rotating schedules are needlessly confusing. Is it really worth it to mix up 4th/5th/6th everyday just for the sake of variety?
3) Lying to students is fun. (Is that wrong?) I have one class of 7th graders, for 1 period of language arts. I told them that they were with an 8th grade teacher to do extra-challenging work because their old teachers had recommended them.
4) I need to learn names fast.
5) I love visiting with former students. I talked to a few of my ex-8th graders yesterday about their first day of high school, and a number of my 7th graders from last year stopped by today to say hello.
6) I don't have to go to APEX! I don't have to teach the juvie class!

I only have one girl who (let's be honest) I didn't want to see again back in my class, and only for one period. My 7th grade terrors have moved on. I do have some known behavior problems, but they never knew the wimpy Ms. Hall, so I can still scare them into shape. I kept seven kids in for detention after school.

Schedules are a mess; my instinct for how long things will take is gone; my feet hurt. But all-in-all, it was a decent-to-good day. I think I can even manage to come back tomorrow.

I chewed my cuticles off, for the first time in quite a while. Sure sign of stress.

:: Leslie H - 3:28 PM - ::

Finally put up the Texas pics, well-pruned. Here's Bryan on a tractor.

:: Leslie H - 11:08 PM - ::

The week has been an orgy of preparation, and definitely some slacking/novel-reading. I went into Fischer on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, in order to:

• unpack and set up the room (check),
• re-acclimate myself to being at school (sort-of check),
• plan for the first two weeks (riiiight...).

I had this long dream last night about trying to repair my broken bike in time to make it to my first class. With McGuyver-like skills, I was using a zip-tie for the chain and twist-ties for the brake wires. I don't think I made it. I was also watching Cameron play the saxophone and meeting a midget girl, irate because she thought I was making fun of her folk-dancing. (Never would I make fun of a midget's folk-dancing.)

Anyway, it was actually the first time in a while that I've had an "unprepared for school" dream, which I take to mean I should get cracking on the planning.

So to work I go!

:: Leslie H - 8:33 AM - ::

Time is passing, passing, passing, in this great unmarked progression towards the beginning of school. The re-beginning. Year Two. Year Final. Bizarrely, I'm sitting in Spiderhouse (a favorite hippy-trendy Austin coffeehouse with cheap drink and wireless internet, for you California readers). Bryan and I are in Texas, mostly visiting my family and celebrating Cameron's successful early-graduation from college, but we've darted down to Austin for half a day, so Bryan can visit friends and have his eye exam, and so I can be sad because there are so few people left to see in this now-desolate place. Because I don't even have enough society to fill seven hours, I'm here, posting a long-overdue update and (potentially, later) planning for Days 1,2,3 of school. Two weeks from this moment, I will be teaching 4th period how to shut up and listen, or whatever I end up doing on the second day of school.

Recent discovery: The stress and grief I feel about playing games, particulary board and card games, can be directly traced to my mother. (It feels pretty classic to blame such a thing on my mother, but there it is. She gets a lot more credit for good parts of me than blame for mental screwiness, on the whole.) It opens up that whole fascinating can of worms about nature/nurture/coincidence. I mean, is it really plausible that some wayward gene is dictating my inability to enjoy games? Seems not. Or did it somehow seep into me during my upbringing, to get all competative and angsty when playing? More likely, though I have no real memories of games with my family. Perhaps freak coincidence? Thoughts?

Man, people keep smiling at me. Either Austin is friendlier even than I remembered, or I'm wearing my shirt inside out again.

So here's what I've been up to. Old-college-friend Clare and new-boyfriend Steven visited for a few days as a pit stop as they biodieseled across the country to go backpacking with Steven's family. I'm sure Clare will write an update about that experience, if she ever posts again (she sucks at blog even more than I do this summer). They got in just as Bryan was leaving for Michigan, which he has responsibly chronicled because he's a better person than al of us. We went wine-tasting, window-shopping, made some dinner, got a little drunk on said wine, learned about Steven's future ambitions as green-trucking-mogul, bar-hopped in SF, and squeegeed (sp?) the windows, hood, trunk, and roof of my filthy car at a gas station. Then I watched the entirity of Sex in the City season 3, went to a few TFA induction events, and flew to Texas. That was last week.

In Texas, we've been bonding with Murphy and family. No big events thus far. Mailing invitations to Cam's engagent announcement party (honestly, how many parties are involved in the production of a wedding? This is a genuine question. Someone comment.), getting my eyes examined (20/15, no glasses), and general puttering. After Austin, we're heading to the ranch for graduation celebration, also tilling Mom's garden and riding jetskis. Mom's all excited about her new-to-her horse, a 20-year-old equine named Montana Tim.

We're having mixed feelings about the weather here. Texas is caught in a cool front, the weather barely breaking 90. Required to appreciate this mid-August miracle, we had sort of hoped for the sort of wilting Texas heat that makes us so grateful for Bay-Area weather. Regardless, we're not melting, and haven't pitted-out a single shirt.

We return to CA on Sunday. I don't want to think about the end of this trip. Back to School has never sounded so dire.

:: Leslie H - 11:36 AM - ::

Starting work (i.e. reading teacher books) has really put me in a good mood. I feel more in control of the time, the year, and I haven't had a bad teacher dream in, well, days. It's always been important to me to be able to point to something productive I did with my day, and I feel that much more justified playing SimCity for three hours (Bryan and I are rebuilding the Communist Bloc) if that morning I slogged through a book on cooperative learning.

Other (boring-to-most) news. Bryan and I decided we were sick of everything we were making for dinner, so have been trying to expand our cooking vocabulary. Epicurious.com (I know, what a name) indexes thousands of recipes from various cooking magazines, including Bon Appetit and Gourmet, plus comments and ratings by people who tried the recipes. We made the most incredible lasagna possible, involving wild mushrooms, sausage (who knew?), and red bell pepper sauce. It took three hours to prepare, but it also feeds you for a week. Last night, going for something a little lighter, we had penne with shrimp, asparagus, and sundried tomatoes. Suffice to say, we're big fans of this website, in our nerdy cooking Odyssey way.

We've had enough people over and enough glasses of wine drunk at our new house to consider it officially christened (except Johanna, where are you?). And Clare is presumably arriving sometime within the next 48 hours, though I've not heard from her about when. Hopefully she is not dead somewhere on I-10.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11, finally, and liked it a lot more than I expected to. I had seen Michael Moore speak before and been modestly impressed/amused by him, and I thought Bowling for Columbine made some excellent points, but I was left with a bad taste in my mouth by some parts of that film (his badgering of Charleton Heston, other trademark Moore hijinks). Then, unfortunately, my first impressions of Fahrenheit were filtered through various cable and network news sources, which were of course deriding it as attack-dog-partisan-filthy-nonsense. Despite my knowledge that cable news is the least trustworthy source of information since, I don't know, Stalin, that impression seeped in. So seeing it was almost a letdown. Where was my rabid propaganda-spewing hatefest? Aside from a few cheap shots and the predictable characatures of Bush administration members, it seemed remarkably (given its reputation) honest and, well, obvious. It's primary focus--our headlong rush and subsequent bellyflop in Iraq--was something that the bulk of the country could probably watch, by moved by, and quite possibly agree with. Some of his footage was pretty amazing, and he seemed more content than in past projects to be unobtrusive and let a variety of real people talk. Here's a nytimes review I enjoyed.

So, yes, I would recommend that most of the country watch this film, if only to get a decent different perspective on things. But of course most never will, the movie having been characterized as hateful liberal drivel.

I'd be curious to know if any of you, readers, have seen it, and what you thought.

:: Leslie H - 8:48 AM - ::