This is too a blog

A funny thing happened at work today. I was made an ATR because this lady has three more days as a high school teacher than I do. But that’s not the fun part. The fun part is that because she was lured to our fair city from overseas as part of an international teacher recruitment, and since her visa status needs tending to, she gets an extra month to work on her paper work while I, in my new capacity as a glorified sub, have the pleasure of teaching her classes for the first month of school.

Now it’s choose your own adventure time:

1. If miss thing does not succeed in getting her papers, her classes become mine for the rest of the semester (turn to chapter 8, “Flight of the Crapass Schedule in Four Different Classrooms!”).

2. If miss thing is able to get her visa renewed, I remain an ATR for at least the rest of the semester (turn to chapter 9, “Without a Clue: Teaching Bilingual Marine Biology, Business and Social Studies”).

No matter what happens, I predict a slow and steady seeping of whatever modicum of enthusiasm I might have had left.

Dalton is about to set off on his first day of school as an art major after having the epiphany that Econ is a really boring major. Look out for him in the bushes, famous people!

If these cats made my lunch every day, I wouldn’t be so sad about going back to work.

The good part: several weeks off in the summer. The bad part: the dread of the furlough ending.

I’ve been alternating between ignoring the looming date of my reincarceration (August 31 instead of September 5, thanks to Ms. Weingarten) and being depressed by it.

On Thursday and Friday I go in for meetings. For some reason our hours even on these two non-teaching days are 7:47-2:37. Why not the relatively round 8:00 to 2:50? I imagine it’s because that would be less absurd, and where’s the fun in that?

Clearly a meditation on the end of the runaway housing market. (Hint: it won’t be with a whimper.)

At its best, Idlewild is a fully realized artistic vision with compelling characters and a beat you can dance to. Despite a cartoonish plot, it still succeeds as a series of trippy music videos.

A grown-up who lists LEGO model maker as his occupation? I am way jealous.

As the precious last days of summer vacation dwindle down to nothing, it is hard for me not to see Half Nelson as a cautionary tale. Ryan Gosling is a crackhead (for reals, that is neither metaphor nor exaggeration) middle school history teacher and basketball coach in Brooklyn. Shareeka Epps is his aspiring crack delivery girl student. As a teacher, Gosling is inspiring and disdainful of “the man’s” curriculum, preferring to illustrate concepts with an arm wrestling demonstration. As a coach, he is a bit of a hot head who takes his team’s ineptitude all too personally.

At the end of the day he heads home to an apartment that would fail a college freshman’s aesthetic demands, and to a doomed cat. (Crackheads make terrible pet owners). A bump of coke (if he’s flush) or a pipe of crack reinvigorates him enough to hit the bars. Somehow he makes it back to bed before the alarm goes off and starts the whole ride over.

As I often wish someone would do to Lindsay Lohan, I wanted to grab Gosling by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.

“Chill out, man! Quit coaching! Open the freaking curriculum, quit trying to be a rock star, and get some sleep!”

God do I not want to go back.

While I admit to being unfamiliar with the source material (Charles Bukowski’s novel Factotum), or with the meaning of the title for that matter (I thought it might be a vestigial organ that you only learn of when it becomes inflamed, but the opening credits helpfully provide the actual definition: someone who does a lot of different jobs. [And might I suggest a title that would not have to be defined onscreen? "Drunk Jackass."] ), I think it’s an example of literature that dies on the screen.

The good acting held my interest for patches here and there, but for the most part I wanted to follow Matt Dillon’s character’s lead, ditch the dull factory job flick halfway through and get a cocktail.

Like his Match Point, Woody Allen’s Scoop is set in and around the fancier parts of London, stars Scarlett Johansson, and features a suave murder suspect. With Woody himself acting in this one, (and with Scarlett doing her best Woody impression) it’s a bit like Match Point done as Catskills dinner theater.