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hoserthehoserian
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Name: Living La Vida Brokaw
Country: United States
State: Missouri
Metro: Springfield
Birthday: 7/31/1981
Interests: Lounging, sitting, being at my ease. Staring at cleavage. Getting sweaty in my butt crack. Rocking out. Saying "No, thank you" to drugs. Not really rocking out. Not brushing my teeth in the morning. Thinking big, wistful thoughts. Peeing standing up. Saying the wrong thing. Trying to shoot bandits in banner ads.
Expertise: Master of Magic, reading, making jokes about your mom (sexual jokes).
Occupation: Consulting
Industry: Construction
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/4/2004
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| But it sort of is, so I guess I'd better make this good. I'm in Seoul, four or five days alone since Brigitte went back to Missouri last weekend. If I weren't alone I wouldn't be making this post, and I wouldn't have done several things I did in the last few days. Here's a list:
Up till 4 to finish Planescape: Torment
Up till whenever to watch an hour-long video of somebody else playing Planescape: Torment
Asleep on the couch at 8pm with ROTK paused an hour in
Three crossword puzzles yesterday
Pizza in my office tonight
Let me tell you about this pizza. It's the third time I've had it. It's normal pizza with marinara and cheese and some fatty bacon, but it's also got gobs of bright pumpkin filling on top (and maybe sweet potato), corn, shaved almonds, chestnuts (!), and onion. I prefer not to have the onion. I also prefer not to eat as much as I did tonight. I was in my office working on the first stages of feeling like a badass. I was making a spreadsheet for each of my classes, but I never got to feel like a badass because I became distracted by the pizza (coworker's idea), a caffeine rush, and the recurring guilt of a lazy teacher. Did I have enough assessments this semester? Likely not. Should I have kept better notes and planned my units more carefully? Pshht. Did I teach them anything?
We didn't practice the forms, we didn't learn any kind of context, we didn't learn anything. One of my classes is a lower-level thing almost completely full of Korean traditional music majors. They're sweet and talented, and at the beginning of class they're super chatty. I have to shut them up, which is a little unusual for this school. By the end of the period, though, I have them eating out of my hand. I can feel myself performing, and I know I'm doing a good job. I've got four colors of chalk up on the board, I'm sweeping my hands around, my eyebrows are going fucking nuts, and my voice is all over the room. Majestic pauses. Pregnant pauses.
I call on people, I train them to remember "topic sentence" and "transitions." I know they think they're having a good time learning. They like me. What's really happening, though, is, if not a crime, then at least something regrettable. My students are getting the same lessons they've had since eighth grade, only now from the mouth of a bearded Westerner. (today a student finally suggested I shave, btw -- it only took nine and a half weeks!) They're used to learning like this, but if it did them any good, they wouldn't need me--
DO they need me?
I was going to complain about how I don't give them extensive practice, how they learn terms instead of skills, but.... Do they really need me to be an effective teacher? Is it better to be a "good" teacher, quotes included?
I'm about done with this post. I just have to figure out how to end with "They need me."
ps I've got "Slow Education" on repeat. Didn't notice for a while. Also didn't notice how apropos that shit was until "while"!
pps It took me forever to figure out how to post this. I'm actually typing this out (in notepad) before succeeding, so these few sentences are a rare embodiment of hope. If you believe in quantum mechanics, if you believe in alternate worlds, then these banal words should hold a special significance -- they're an ironic roadsign, obvious to the living, nothing to the dead.
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| I'm not dead!
Just sleepy.
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| Tom willed it better with a telling vehemence. He had no understudies or lieutenants left. All he could do was outlive his detractors. Broken panties, busted engines, tear tracks, deer hair, sore throats, white lights, red hands.
I can't shave my moustache until Brian's project is done. Briian! :(
(i kind of like it, tho)
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| There was just a bird in my kitchen. I don't know how -- the door was locked. I was occupied in the bathroom and heard sounds consistent with an intrusion: the rustling of small cardboard boxes being jostled by small things, tapping against windows, etc. So I peeked my head out and saw a little bird in the window:
(dramatic reenactment; pretend the dragon is a little bird)
"No!" I said, hoping to scare it out the window. I thought the screen had fallen off and the bird was on the threshhold of freedom. But it was a cruel illusion: the screen was there and the bird was trapped. So I sat back down and thought, I hope that bird doesn't shit everywhere. Ironic, eh? I finished up and grabbed a jacket (no shirt) and my slippers. Walked out the front door and around to the back. I opened the door and saw the bird run, for maybe the twentieth time, into a windowpane. It fell back to a perch on my Ritz crackers on top of the fridge. Then it retreated to a cabinet door. I thought about grabbing my broom like a woman on TV. Instead I ducked my head down into my jacked and crouch-walked over to where the bird was. I didn't hear anything, so I pointed the collared cave-hole of my jacket up where I'd last seen the bird. I knew it would swoop in and scratch the edges of my nostrils and stick its wings in my mouth and peck my eyelids. But I didn't even see the bird. I looked around the kitchen and all I saw was a magnet from the fridge on the floor and more ants than before by the sink.
I'd listened to the bird chirp from the bathroom. If I didn't know it was trapped, would it sound so distressed? It was a low warbly chirp at erratic intervals. When I first opened the door and saw it fly to the top of my fridge, its mouth was open and I wondered if it had sprained its beak or if it was just out of breath.
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| Don't worry, I'm still truckin. I still like to party. Last night I was at Food4Less and picked up a bottle of diet V8 Splash. When I put it down the edge of the label gashed my right middle finger, near the mysterious scab under the nail. I put some pressure on that thing, but some blood had already leaked out. I finished my shopping like a trooper and started putting my groceries on the belt. I better get a bandaid, I thought, so I asked the checkout girl if she had any. Until then I hadn't looked at her. The bones of her face were a bit unusual, like in Mask. She yelled at the guy back in the glass cage, and he brought one out to me. As soon as I took my thumb off the wound, blood started to bead up. I bloodied the outside of the bandaid, too, which was a nice cloth one. "I'm sorry, man, I thought you wanted to know if we sold em," the guy said. So I put the rest of the groceries up on the belt and mumbled one and a half times about the bottle of diet V8 Splash to the checkout girl. I felt vaguely guilty. I didn't want her to think I carried this bloody finger into her store and expected her to fix it, but I also didn't want to sound accusatory. And I didn't want to look too much or too little at her face.
The cut healed mysteriously fast. That dot under the nail, however, has been there for weeks, maybe.
I've had a headache all day. I feel a little funny. I just played racquetball for the first time and biffed it a lot. This guy hit the ball directly into my right eye. It didn't really hurt, but I may look battered tomorrow. But I feel funny besides those developments. Spring is a time when a lot of things end, and I've never really recognized that. Cue the usual blather that gets reeled in whenever I cast into the past or the future. Wist and pessimism. I should go
hose this grit off my body.
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