How our evil Ernie and frightened Bert pumpkins turned out.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Saturday, October 21, 2006
I want that 2 hours of my life back...
I have to warn you about the latest WORST movie EVER...
It's called "The Science of Sleep" and it's another testament to the fact that 3 stars don't mean crap.
The movie is about a socially awkward, almost Woody Allen-like guy named Stephan who comes back to France after his father dies in Mexico. He becomes infatuated with his neighbor, Stephanie, but he doesn't want her to know that he lives there. They both like to make weird little dioramas out of cellophane and felt.
Stephan gets a mundane job gluing things on calendars, which stifles his creativity. He wanted to make a calendar with his own illustrations, showing a disaster in history for each month (people burning up in volcanoes and airplane crashes). It's called "disasterology." But he gets stuck cutting and gluing things instead. For some reason, he keeps this horrible job that he hates.
He can't differentiate between sleep and awake - his dream world and reality. There is one amusing part where he falls asleep in a bathtub and wakes up to find that he wrote a gobbledygook letter to her and sleep-walks naked across the hall to put it under her door.
These weird dream sequences blend into the reality of Stephan's life so much that you can't tell what is happening when he is awake or asleep. Maybe this is artsy, but I find it just plain annoying. Unless you're watching a part where he's constructing and performing his dreams on this bizarre cardboard and egg-carton set in his subconscious mind, you can't tell he's dreaming.
I couldn't relate to the characters at all.
The only redeeming parts in the movie mostly come from a minor character, Guy, a guy who works with Stephan. He's a middle-aged perv who wears a leather jacket with pins on it to look "punk." He also farts on a park bench when he's eating lunch with Stephan. He provides most of the weird sexual references in the film and makes a hobbit-esque coworker smell his armpit.
Interesting trivia: This guy was the voice of the French Shrek. Huh.
It's called "The Science of Sleep" and it's another testament to the fact that 3 stars don't mean crap.
The movie is about a socially awkward, almost Woody Allen-like guy named Stephan who comes back to France after his father dies in Mexico. He becomes infatuated with his neighbor, Stephanie, but he doesn't want her to know that he lives there. They both like to make weird little dioramas out of cellophane and felt.
Stephan gets a mundane job gluing things on calendars, which stifles his creativity. He wanted to make a calendar with his own illustrations, showing a disaster in history for each month (people burning up in volcanoes and airplane crashes). It's called "disasterology." But he gets stuck cutting and gluing things instead. For some reason, he keeps this horrible job that he hates.
He can't differentiate between sleep and awake - his dream world and reality. There is one amusing part where he falls asleep in a bathtub and wakes up to find that he wrote a gobbledygook letter to her and sleep-walks naked across the hall to put it under her door.
These weird dream sequences blend into the reality of Stephan's life so much that you can't tell what is happening when he is awake or asleep. Maybe this is artsy, but I find it just plain annoying. Unless you're watching a part where he's constructing and performing his dreams on this bizarre cardboard and egg-carton set in his subconscious mind, you can't tell he's dreaming.
I couldn't relate to the characters at all.
The only redeeming parts in the movie mostly come from a minor character, Guy, a guy who works with Stephan. He's a middle-aged perv who wears a leather jacket with pins on it to look "punk." He also farts on a park bench when he's eating lunch with Stephan. He provides most of the weird sexual references in the film and makes a hobbit-esque coworker smell his armpit.
Interesting trivia: This guy was the voice of the French Shrek. Huh.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Coolest site ever...
Compliments of my brother's random knowledge of cool stuff on the Internet, I bestow a really awesome site upon all of you.
It's called pandora.com. It exists to help you find music you enjoy, using the music you already love as a tool. It creates lists of this new music for you to listen to, and plays them randomly.
Only drawback: You can only skip like 5 songs during one hour. So it's not really conducive to surfing. BUT you can get around this little problem by creating new playlists. Hah!
It's called pandora.com. It exists to help you find music you enjoy, using the music you already love as a tool. It creates lists of this new music for you to listen to, and plays them randomly.
Only drawback: You can only skip like 5 songs during one hour. So it's not really conducive to surfing. BUT you can get around this little problem by creating new playlists. Hah!
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Gassy dog
As if getting kicked out of my elementary school wasn't enough today...
I get home from an "I have to go do something so I quit feeling sorry for myself" trip to Barnes and Noble, and Maxwell the wonder hound is prancing around the yard with a treasure in his mouth.
It's a red, mangled piece of plastic. The last remnants of a butane gas grill lighter. You know, the little clicky ones.
A certain someone at our house has a habit of leaving things outside that the dog can use to poison himself. "It's been out there for weeks," he says. "He never bothered it before." That's what he always says.
I flip out and call the vet. "He ate the whole lighter?" he asks. All that's left is the clicky part and the part the flame comes out of. It looks like he ate the part with the butane. There's a child warning on another one I found in the cupboard, but I can't tell if it's there because your child shouldn't EAT the lighter, or because your child shouldn't BURN the f-ing house down.
Gah! Like I need this today........
I get home from an "I have to go do something so I quit feeling sorry for myself" trip to Barnes and Noble, and Maxwell the wonder hound is prancing around the yard with a treasure in his mouth.
It's a red, mangled piece of plastic. The last remnants of a butane gas grill lighter. You know, the little clicky ones.
A certain someone at our house has a habit of leaving things outside that the dog can use to poison himself. "It's been out there for weeks," he says. "He never bothered it before." That's what he always says.
I flip out and call the vet. "He ate the whole lighter?" he asks. All that's left is the clicky part and the part the flame comes out of. It looks like he ate the part with the butane. There's a child warning on another one I found in the cupboard, but I can't tell if it's there because your child shouldn't EAT the lighter, or because your child shouldn't BURN the f-ing house down.
Gah! Like I need this today........
Good Riddance
It just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything about my student-teaching experience. So to bring those of you who haven't heard up to speed, here's the short version.
I've been student teaching in a third-grade class since August. I thought winning over the poor kids with meth-head parents would be the hardest part. Boy was I wrong.
Somehow I was placed with a teacher who never welcomed me or the students into her classroom. To say the least, she is extremely unstable and I never knew if Jekyll or Hyde would show up to school every day. She didn't include me when she planned lessons, I never knew what was going on in the class. When she DID give me something to do, it was either a menial task like sharpening all the pencils... or the opposite extreme - when she would just throw books at me and tell me to plan lessons on my own. Some days, she only said two sentences to me. Whenever she did let me teach the kids, she left the room.
After enduring this for six weeks, she and I finally had the "this isn't working" conversation. It ended with a mutual agreement that I should be transferred to another school for the rest of my student teaching. Then, for some odd reason, she started being nice to me. She planned the afternoon with me. She planned the next two days with me. Then she asked me if I wanted to solo teach the whole day. I said I would teach a few lessons but not the whole day.
When I showed up today, she wasn't in the classroom. I sat down to get ready for school, and the principal came in. He asked me what I was doing there. Long story short, she's nice to me and plans to have me teach, then she has the principal come tell me to get out. I wrote a note saying goodbye to the students and left.
I feel like I've been to crazytown and back. I'm frustrated and confused. But not defeated. I realize that I have to stop trying to understand what my mentor was all about. I don't know when she was being real or fake. It's pointless to dwell on the whole thing. I guess the main point is, I'm outta there and I'm not wasting any more time on this.
A personal mentor of mine told me today that we can't dwell on understanding sick, twisted individuals. Because if we truly did understand how they work and why they do these things, we would be capable of doing the same things ourselves. I have to accept what happened in my brain, then dump it out and move on. She's right.
I've been student teaching in a third-grade class since August. I thought winning over the poor kids with meth-head parents would be the hardest part. Boy was I wrong.
Somehow I was placed with a teacher who never welcomed me or the students into her classroom. To say the least, she is extremely unstable and I never knew if Jekyll or Hyde would show up to school every day. She didn't include me when she planned lessons, I never knew what was going on in the class. When she DID give me something to do, it was either a menial task like sharpening all the pencils... or the opposite extreme - when she would just throw books at me and tell me to plan lessons on my own. Some days, she only said two sentences to me. Whenever she did let me teach the kids, she left the room.
After enduring this for six weeks, she and I finally had the "this isn't working" conversation. It ended with a mutual agreement that I should be transferred to another school for the rest of my student teaching. Then, for some odd reason, she started being nice to me. She planned the afternoon with me. She planned the next two days with me. Then she asked me if I wanted to solo teach the whole day. I said I would teach a few lessons but not the whole day.
When I showed up today, she wasn't in the classroom. I sat down to get ready for school, and the principal came in. He asked me what I was doing there. Long story short, she's nice to me and plans to have me teach, then she has the principal come tell me to get out. I wrote a note saying goodbye to the students and left.
I feel like I've been to crazytown and back. I'm frustrated and confused. But not defeated. I realize that I have to stop trying to understand what my mentor was all about. I don't know when she was being real or fake. It's pointless to dwell on the whole thing. I guess the main point is, I'm outta there and I'm not wasting any more time on this.
A personal mentor of mine told me today that we can't dwell on understanding sick, twisted individuals. Because if we truly did understand how they work and why they do these things, we would be capable of doing the same things ourselves. I have to accept what happened in my brain, then dump it out and move on. She's right.
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