New Year's Resolutions:

1. I will not have beer for dinner.

2. I will not have icecream for dinner.

3. I will not have beer and icecream for dinner.

4. I will not compensate for a lack of laundry-doing by buying more socks.

5. I will stop swearing so fucking much.

6. I will stop talking back to NPR.

7. I will stop mocking my students...so openly.

8. I will stop referring to adults as "grownups."

9. I will stop writing important pieces of information on stray scraps of paper which float by.

10. I will eliminate, or at least severely curtail, my "funny t-shirt" budget.

I don't normally post self-authored poetry (and those who do are boring pooheads, like as not). But it being Christmas, and all, I'm willing to share. This one amuses me.

Here is my heart on a platter;
oh god! I forgot to salt it!
how stupid of me;
No, please don't get up...
.
.
.
(it's only a flesh wound)

laptop - $800
semi-decent speakers - $70
own apartment - $625
itunes download - $0.99
ability to dance around with one's t-shirt on one's head to Erasure's "L'Amour" without fear of discovery by roommate - PRICELESS

I'm in the process of writing (for my high school seniors and juniors) a short Guide To Becoming a Civilized Human Being (alternatively, Self Help For Southern Californians). Basically, I'm trying to find disquieting alternatives to the inspid coming-of-age piles-o-poop normally read by that age group. Ideally, this will be a compedium of approachable works of philosophy, theology, poetry, and literature, as well as notes on how to read such works effectively. My goal is to select works which don't present too much of a language barrier, are more or less comprehensible on a strictly literal level, and which are likely to resonate with kids who are (albeit haphazardly) trying to fight the system, stick it to the man, and so forth. Here's a rough sketch of some of the initial prerequisites...

groundwork:

St. Augustine's Confessions
G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man
Antoine De Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince
Norman Juster's Phantom Tollbooth
C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, That Hideous Strength
Plato's Symposium, Apology
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

umm. Any other ideas?

Civilization has reached its peak: "Baby Got Back." In Latin.

Well, I know what my seventh grade Latin class will be working on next...

Qua high school teacher, I also have the enviable task of writing my protege's letters of recommendation for various institutes of higher education. This is a more than moderately amusing undertaking, inasmuch as I was myself, quite recently, a solicitor of such letters. Anyhoo. I wrote the following sentence, and promptly laughed until I drooled...

"******** has always been a joy to have in class; not only is he a personable young man, with a mature and respectful attitude towards his teachers, but he is also a creative thinker and problem solver."

Personable young man! Yes. Personable. Young. Man. Heehee. Heh.

I'm blue right now...this happens occasionally, and for no apparent reason. Should I have this looked at? or are spells of pointless depression just part of the human condition?

oh, all right, I'll quit whining already. Surely my ever-supportive, sensitive teenaged students will cheer me right up tomorrow (HA!!!).

Some of my high school students, apropos of nothing, volunteered to be my Designated Driver the next time I want to go out and get "totally wasted."

...

SEE, I am SO making an impact!

man it's so loud in here

I've started the whole Christmas decorating thing. My apartment now has "I like hanging up Christmas lights more or less at random at six inches above my eye level because I'm scared of standing on chairs" chic. Also, Mel brought over a small plastic Christmas tree, which, being sort of the runt of the litter, is in need of much love...

Mel visited over the weekend, and we, like, totally part-ay-d. Actually, we mostly wandered from pub to pub in San Diego, and were hit on by men who were not young, attractive, or at all sober (especially the one guy who really, really wanted us to explain why women couldn't grow beards).

And now I have to clean my car out, because I've been volunteered to drive the kiddies on a field trip tomorrow. Hurrah. I'm debating whether to make them a mix cd of cute kid friendly pop-punk, or just play Tom Waits at full volume the whole way down...