Movie Mania

After what seems like months without (m)any good movies in theatres, a bunch of recent releases look good, or I'm told are good.

What's disappointed me these last three or four months:

1. The Crazies
2. Alice in Wonderland in 3-D
3. Clash of the Titans (supposedly) in 3-D

And so I say of each:

1. Started cool, but became typical
2. Why does anyone see Tim Burton movies anymore?
3. I haven't seen the original in forever, but this one was shit.

This post was supposed to go up half a year ago. Sometimes I start things and don't finish them.

Here's to Six Miserable Months...

These months have not been entirely miserable.

• December: My girlfriend has graduated from her Licensed Practical Nursing Program (but is still delivering "pizza" from one of those disgusting conveyor belt "oven" chains). I cried at her graduation.

• April: I supposedly am teaching two summer classes, if no full-time asses steal them from me because they couldn't plan ahead and then don't have consideration for people who are counting on these two courses for their survival. As it is, the Online Writing Lab is going away for good, so I need a new second job.

• February: I do have my third and mostly favorite job at the comic book store as the back issue organizational consultant. The "fill a comic book long box for $22.50 with tax sale" last holiday season really, really, screwed up the back issue bins.

• Last month: And then there is this. A few weeks back I decided to look up "adjunct problems" on Google and found these brilliant sites written by adjuncts and professors. Mostly lots of great stories about the wows (both good and ill) of teaching college "students".
  

• The Untold Tales of an English Adjunct
• Rate Your Students Blog My favorite post from this blog so far is this one. I'm going to have to contribute some day.
  
• Tales of a Wayward Classicist

• Today: One of my former profs told me he/she had his/her first belly laugh today when a student had cited Etal in their bibliography. Awesome.

• Two Hours Ago: Finally, there is this: alot, which was brought to my attention by Ectomoplasmosis:
  

"The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world."

• Four days ago: One of my friends and former grad school colleagues wrote this little ditty about the semester ending. I think she's finally leaving NAU after 30 years as a grad student and other things.
  

Yes. Six months. Miserable with money worries. Miserable with expanding waist line. Miserable with missing Long Island.

Looking forward to Ireland though. Black pudding. Brogue. Eleventy-thousand hours in airports, planes, and buses.

Now: I fucking love/hate teaching.

Image from Post Secret's 2 May 2010 Post.

Impressed: Friends on the web

I must say I am impressed with my friend's new blog I convinced her to create: 3Liters Per Day. The push for its creation is all I take credit for; the rest is all her.

I hope to see more of this excellence in the future. It's funny, it's sad. It's plain powerful.

Her Thanksgiving 2009 post, titled Creases, paints an accurate (Re: vivid, somewhat disturbing) picture of some (Re: probably many) post-nuclear families (Re: consisting of something other than mom, dad, kids, and maybe Nana) of the turn of the millennium. Distant, divorced, divorcing strangers (Re: family) in the TV of reality, true reality television more fucked up and more real than that shit on CBS, E!, or Fox. I believe she is wrong about the holiday experience existing without masks because it seems that's what her family's holidays are about. There's probably plenty of writhing too, though the chains and screams are more or less silent and the only thing fleshless is the turkey after the first serving.

I've known her for three years, but I might count time by how many relationships she's had. Brilliantly introspective, the author also reveals something relationships that's probably timeless as far as some relationships go, but also paints a vivid picture of the her experiences with boys, as she calls them still. Perhaps because she sits at the children's table at 30. What are they to her and where is the one who really won't leave? Wait, they leave her?

Yes, her relationships are almost always 'legitimately complicated,' as she writes, and this makes for great stories, great pathos, and something to talk and think about as we might ponder our own relationship with our relationships and what we want from life. It's complicated. Legitimately so.

Fig. 1: Here is a picture of a saguaro cactus at the Anthem shopping outlets I took in May 2008 before exiting Arizona with no intention to live there again.

Untouched

Wow. I haven't touched this blog in almost a year.

I think I've just gotten Valerie Robin to start using Google Reader.

Now I'll have to post more.

And this is sort of a test to see if she did indeed figure out how to subscribe

What I like to call limbo time

"Why can't unconsciousness rain on me?"

I stayed awake till 6 in the morning the night before last. I woke up throughout the "night" and finally kept conscious at an hour past noon and by 8 this night was tired and falling asleep to a documentary about Danny Trejo. I went to bed at 10 and awoke from nightmare dreams of grading essays and dealing with students who are confused by simple things and now it is 1 am and I can't sleep. My girlfriend is asleep. The world is asleep. The dog is awake, but that's it. I have no desire for anything but oblivion. Don't want to be on the internet, or read, or watch DVDs of shows or movies. Me and the dog and I'm stuck in someplace I like to call limbo time where only I truly exist, whether I want to or not.

All work and no play...?

I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining--Except I'm not as cool as Jack.

I hope my death comes with this absolute feeling of helplessness.

This is something I thought the other day while commuting my 40 miles to work on a gloomy day in my gloomy car and luckily the HOV lane was open and as I entered it I glanced at what is the exit ramp for when the HOV lane travels westbound and not eastbound and imagined a car bursting into the HOV lane and pushing my car over the wall and that I would hope that I would have a feeling of absolute helplessness as time would slow down in order for me to truly appreciate the moment and the consequence like the time I almost got my ass kicked by the bully of whichever grade it was while I was in middle school and in the then present I laughed, because it was one of those days when I wanted nothing but solitude, only I had to man my position at my workplace and I supposed that in oblivion I would find solitude, but it was just a thought, perhaps in too much simple, yet straightforward detail, and I kept driving without incident on this gloomy day that could have been any weekday or perhaps even a weekend day.

And I laughed.