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I was going to write about the "show" we saw in NYC, but then Cassie did. Articulately and eloquently. So I don't feel the need to anymore.

I've also been planning on writing some long, boring post about the purpose of travel. It occurred to me when we were wandering around in the Guggenheim that we spend a lot of time and money going places to use our eyes on new, cool stuff. And not just our eyes, I know. We also use our noses, ears, fingers, and tongues on new, cool stuff. And pretty much that's why we travel? I don't think so. But I really don't feel like writing any further since I'm already painfully aware of how dumb I'm making myself out to be right now.

Also, we're probably not going to Delaware now, so I won't have a chance to post this video clip and write, "Hi. I'm in Delaware." unless I do so now.

I wish all my friends had blogs.

Because there's nothing I love more (maybe besides, you know, my family, teaching, Jesus Christ Superstar) than reading friends' blogs.

I think I'm going to make my students blog. Well, I can't make them do anything, but I think we're going to do that instead of daily journaling. It is the 21st Century after all.

Blog for Choice Day 2008

My brain is working hard to wrap itself around some heavy lesson planning, and anyway, I don't think I could put it better than Melissa did.

Vote pro-choice! (Sorry, Gram.) (Actually, I'm not sorry.)

something sort of cool and something REALLY cool

The sort of cool thing is this: I finally got a chance to go through all of the mounds of paperwork I've collected over the course of the semester yesterday, and I found all kinds of formerly important notes and lists on slips of scrap paper. Some of them are quite cryptic, like this one:


Took me a minute to realize what I was doing here.

answer: checking a project I'd designed against Bloom's Taxonomy to make sure that I'd given roughly equal attention to assessment of work in each of the cognitive domains -- and adding on paper numbers that I should be able to add in my head

And the REALLY cool thing? Melissa, my good friend and thoughtful blog commenter, is coming to Chicago in March!

When raccoons get up on the back porch, Mama just sweep 'em off with the broom

As I write, there is a family of raccoons pawing at our living room window. Here's one:


In the past year, we have found a snake in my closet, a small guinea pig or large hamster in the living room, several cockroaches, and now raccoons.

Megan thinks that one of us is going to grow up to be a horse whisperer or something. I can't think of a better explanation for this madness.

I've had a life-long love affair with office supplies.

I got a planner today for the upcoming school year that has a separate page for each day. I've been looking for a planner like this for the last two years. And now I have one. It also has a map of each of the continents that notes every country and every capitol. This summer, Melissa and I had every intention of memorizing all of the world's capitols, but we never got around to studying the flashcards we made. Now I can take up that goal again. Yesss...

My first sake

I went to dinner tonight with some friends to one of those Japanese restaurants where they cook the food right in front of you. Here we are:


It was a lot of fun and delicious, but it made me feel sort of weird. Melissa could tell that I was freaking out and kept laughing at me. I mean, the man who cooked our food was speaking to us with an accent similar to Mr. Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Come on. Since he is working as a chef in a Japanese restaurant, there is obviously a great chance that he is actually Japanese. That said, something about the whole thing seemed artificial, like it was for our entertainment. And then there's the pressure to be entertained by the charade. I don't know.

Jesus, Etc.

So Susan sent me a link to this really cool video yesterday:



There are two things I notice about it: (1) when I watch it and try to imitate the morphing women, I end up doing a robot-type dance, and (2) all of the women are white and most of them have eerily passive expressions on their faces. When I showed it to my roommate, Melissa, she thought the same thing (About my (2) at least. I didn't ask her about the robot thing.) Huh.

Then we got talking, somehow, about how Jesus gets artistically imagined. I can remember the first time I saw a painting of a Black Jesus. I was about ten, and I was at Swap-o-rama, a flea-market near where we live, with my dad. It freaked me out. It wasn't that I necessarily preferred seeing the white Jesus to which I'd grown accustomed in my religion books at school; more like, "Whoa. People can imagine Jesus looking millions of different ways."

Anyway, I Google Image searched Jesus, and these are some of the Jesus pictures that came up.






I think these two are particularly good stuff: