Avoid the Black Holes

It's important to clarify that I'm not disparaging Suzanne's taste in movies. I'm not. She has good taste in movies and we enjoy a lot of the same things. (That's usually what we mean by "good taste," right? Someone who likes the same random stuff we do?)

No, what I'm talking about is a minor streak of poor movie selection. Frankly, Suzanne is a bit of a piker - I had a streak of picking bad movies in Michigan that lasted for almost half a year. Seriously, not even die-hard Lions fans could have stayed with me after that year at the video store.

So when I say the last two movies we've watched have been powerful black holes of life-draining garbage, it's not Suzanne's fault. She chose them but neither of us really knew what we were getting into.


My Life In Ruins stars Nia Vardalos who was charming and self-deprecating and smart in My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding. In this film, she plays a character who is high-strung in that way that women in movies are high-strung -- too much attention to pointless detail, unable to have fun, disconnected from passion. She's a tour guide in Greece who hates her job and finds no joy in schlepping crass American tourists around. She spends too much time listing off facts and dates and no time loving where she is or what she does. Enter the very slumming Richard Dreyfuss as the wise, carpe diem-ish old man, Irv. He instructs Nia's character who, by the end, has let her hair down, come to find love, and learned to LOVE LIFE! It's an age-old story but not one that has to be atrocious if it's done right. This was not done right. The characters were worn-out cliches and the writing might as well have been produced by junior high thespians from Altadena Middle School. My brain felt smaller and a little dried out watching this one.


"Hey, Nia! Like my floppy, old man hat? I can't believe I'm getting paid for this!"

Confessions of a Shopaholic. Honestly, the less said about this movie, the better. It's terrible. Clunky, contrived, stupid. Don't waste your time.

Things I've Noticed About Being Chubby

So, as I've mentioned here before, I've gained a fair amount of weight over the last couple of years. It's been a slow, gradual process but now I'm officially a chubby guy. As I have finally come to accept this sad truth, there are a few things I have noticed:

Tying my shoes is a lot harder than it should be. It's a simple task, one that any person ought to be able to accomplish without huffing and puffing. However, every morning brings a round of grunting, bending over, and general discomfort as I pull on my shoes and tie them. Not cool.

When I get out of the shower and look at myself in the mirror, I look like a big loaf of raw bread dough. I was never tan but I at least used to look like an unbaked bread stick rather than a whole loaf of Wonder.

Shirts refuse to stay tucked. I think it's because I no longer have a waist to speak of. I am constantly doing my best impression of Chris Farley's Matt Foley (the "living in a van down by the river" guy), tucking my shirt in as I walk, talk, etc.



I look older. The weight probably adds five years to my face. (Of course, I am older and continue to become so. Turned 36 the other day. Eeesh.)

It makes me eat more. I kind of figure, "Ehhh, why not?"

I am well on my way to being jolly. I am available for rent over the holidays as the most over educated Santa you've ever met.

Enduring to the End...of Class

One disadvantage to having such a long break is that all my teaching endurance goes down the drain and suddenly, after a few classes, I'm exhausted. You wouldn't think just standing and talking would be taxing but it can be.

One of my colleagues left us at the end of last semester. He has aspirations to be an administrator and so IVCC was really only a stepping stone for him. He got a job at another Illinois CC running their dual credit program and managing the honors program. It's unusual for an instructor to leave midyear so it put our schedule all in a tizzy. Suddenly, we had five classes that needed covering during a term that was already over enrolled.

So, as low man on the totem pole, I did my bit and took one of the classes this guy left behind. After that, a local high school requested an on-site dual enrollment class on their campus. Guess who had the only schedule that fit their needs? So now, I've gone from teaching four leisurely classes and working in the writing lab a few hours a week to teaching six classes and having four different preps.

I'm not complaining. As I've said, I like my job, but it is a lot of work. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach three, hour and fifteen minute classes back to back, going from 9:30 until 2:30. By the end of my last class yesterday, my voice had already started to go. I'll have to watch for that.

It seems like it will be a good semester. There will be a lot of names and faces to remember but the students seem like bright, interested people for the most part. The new addition to my usual round of 1001, 1002, and Creative Writing this term is American Lit 2 which I enjoy teaching a lot. Next week, Whitman!

Back to Work

I turned in my final grades for Fall semester on December 16th. Tomorrow, January 13th, I return to work. I've been on vacation for just under a month.

Community college teachers are sort of on the low end of academic prestige and money in the world. As teachers, I think CC instructors are largely seen as the B-list farm team of academia (which is unfortunate - but that's another post). Financially, we don't make tons of money. Notice you've never seen an English teacher on MTV Cribs nor do any of my colleagues drive Jaguars to work.

However, I've got to say -- I've got a pretty sweet gig going on here. Putting the general coolness of my co-workers and the fact that I like my students an awful lot aside, there's the time off. I had a whole month off for Christmas break. A month. I get a week off in the spring, all the regular legal holidays, and, even if I teach summer school, another near-month off between Spring and Summer semesters. If I don't teach summer, I get THREE months. Can you believe that? Frankly, it's kind of awesome.

I work hard. There's a lot of reading, a lot of grading, a lot of dealing with students who aren't always prepared, but who cares? It's a sweet gig and the fact that I get paid to do something I enjoy and am good at is a hot cup of fresh-brewed awesome. Here's to work.

Movies That Didn't Suck

I didn't have high hopes for The Princess and the Frog. It seemed to me to be too calculated, too orchestrated. It's hand-animated so every single frame of the thing was planned and orchestrated, of course, but that's not what I mean. From the hype and the trailers, it seemed like it was an "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" effort to get back the prestige of the Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast/Aladdin days. It always bugs me when it seems like a movie is trying too hard and that's what The Princess and the Frog seemed to be doing.

However, I am happy to have been wrong. I'm sure there was definitely some of that "Let's recapture the magic!" thought and effort behind the film but, even so, it was a really enjoyable movie. The Randy Newman songs were great, the voice-work was nice, and the animation was good quality. It won't go down as one of Disney's greats. The characters are underdeveloped and the horn-playing alligator is one side-kick too many. The film is more of a Rescuers Down Under than a Snow White -- but that's okay. It's a good movie that helps preserve the sadly waning tradition of hand-drawn animation and I can get behind that. (The preserving it part, not the waning part.)



Now, I kinda knew I was going to like Sherlock Holmes -- it was more just a question of how much. I read quite a few of the original Doyle stories when I was a teenager (Why? Because I was a nerd. That's why.) and I've always had an affection for the character. I don't think Robert Downey Jr. has ever turned in a boring performance -- he's been in plenty of lame movies but I don't think as an actor that he has ever been uninteresting. Anyway, the character combined with the actor plus Guy Ritchie's typical stylized direction were bound to make the movie something interesting to watch. And it was. It was a lot of fun and there was no shortage of action. The plot takes a backseat to the character banter and to sequences -- in other words, the part where the loading dock of a warehouse explodes in really spectacular slow-motion is more important than that sequence's role in the overall narrative. Not to say it doesn't have a plot -- it's just that the director knew that the real enjoyment of the film would come from the cool stuff and that how the story shakes out didn't need as much emphasis.

Anyway, it was good stuff - worth seeing again. I'll probably add it to my library of nerdiness alongside Star Trek, Hellboy, The Dark Knight, etc. once it comes out on DVD.

Before I Die

Suzanne and I are going to see U2 this summer. Yep, I've seen the Indigo Girls four or five times, I've seen REM from the front row, but I've never seen the boys from Dublin. This July will be it and then I will be able to scratch that particular item off my "To Do Before I Die" list.

Another thing I'd like to do before I die is visit Phillip Johnson's estate in New Canaan, CT. Phillip who? He was an architect - you probably have heard of his Glass House design. He did everything from houses to gargantuan office buildings. Some of his designs were interesting, some were not. What I like best are the buildings he did on his own property in New Canaan. The Glass House is his and he built it in 1949. After that, he continued to design and build different structures on his property for the next fifty years. Some of them were functional like his work studio and art galleries and some were just for fun like a tower you can climb and a strange, sculptural building Johnson called Da Monsta.

I just love that he designed and built things simply because he wanted to and he could. His whole property just seems like this fantastic little kingdom and I'd love to visit it someday.


The Glass House



The Sculpture Gallery



The Brick House and the Glass House



The Art Gallery



The Studio



The Tower

And Not A Moment Too Soon

The girls go back to school tomorrow. They are dear, sweet, loving, little children but man, I am so ready for them to get the freak-daddy out of my house. Out. Way out.

We've enjoyed some high quality family time over the last couple of weeks. We've had a very cozy, peaceful, enjoyable holiday season but, after a certain point, the warm fuzzies wear off and Maryn and Avery start saying things to me like:

"Dad! Avery just hit me in the back with the hairspray bottle."
"No, I didn't!"
"Yes, you did!"
"I hit you in the shoulder, not the back."
"Well, you did hit me."
"Yeah, but only because you threatened me with the water sprayer."
"I did not."
"Did too!"
"Did not!"

and so on.

So them getting out of the house from 8 to 3:30 will be good for everyone. They'll get to be out of house, spend time with friends, get direction from teachers, etc. I, on the other hand, won't have to go to jail for baking my children into a pie. It's a win-win situation as I see it.

I still have about ten days until I officially go back to work. I'll have to do some off-the-clock work to prep for the upcoming term - updating syllabi, making schedules, getting together a reading schedule for American Lit, etc. so I hope to get that taken care of sometime this week.

I'll also be painting the girls' room. One of their gifts from Santa was a redecorated room. They've decided their old room is too little-girl so they got new comforters, wall hangings, a rug, new lamps, etc. The final component is new paint. We all know how much I love to paint. I love it like I like swallowing nails and dryer lint. But I'll do it and it will be fine. They're excited for their new room so that's good enough for me, I guess.