Here we are, already six days past our human deadline, and I'm having trouble letting go of zombies and Mayans, although the one is just a currently-more-entertaining-but-arguably-less-interesting-than-vampires social commentary and the other is a unit I've already taught and won't look at again until November 2013, if then.
Good grief, if such a beast there be. I kind of miss the vampires. They're queerer than the zombies.
As I have spent the day scouring the local arts associations and Hallmark stores and trolling the internets for blog fodder, I have also downloaded my favorite ten-year-old's (formerly?) favorite book, I am Number Four, so I can give it a read really quick before New Year's.
Flashback to Halloween weekend, 2012 (shameless self-hyperlink warning), when I was composing my post entitled "Revisiting." Over the course of a few days, the 10-year-old watched the movie version of the book that he'd already read, on a loop, about 17 times. I am happy to say that sometime during that weekend, I too somehow got to see the film in its entirety. I never watched it start-to-finish, but I did see all parts of it in a nonlinear fashion.
My Kindle tells me I'm 15% done. As I read, I can find many things within the story that are relatable to me because they are, or were, high school archetypes: the letterman-jacket clothed bully, the nerdy kid, the pretty girl...and I wonder what it is that the ten-year-old finds relatable about I am Number Four. What do the intervening 25 years of existence add to, or take away from, the experience of the story? I would love to discuss this with him, but I suspect that he will have moved on to a new favorite story when I see him here in a few days.
Will I be able, at a vantage that perches happily just five years away from my retirement to Springdale, UT or Barcelona or Panajachel or really ANYWHERE except San Bernadino...be able to convince the now-10-then-35-year-old to reread this piece and tell me what he gets from it? I'll probably be too busy skiing or surfing or kayaking (after an offering to San Simon) that I will totally forget to bring it up.
Let us be happy that such a far-out future does indeed exist.
As you can see, the Memoir of Narrow Escape is going to be a useless stream-of-consciousness raving until such time as I can sit down over tapas with Krista, whose Wannabe, I am happy to announce, is far more successful than Single...Apocalypse was, and figure out a plan, a path, a direction. I do love wordle, by the way, good job Krista! I know the head is from a different type of word art software. Perhaps my next post, if indeed the signals will let me compose one from Weidman, will be a Wordle of Resolutions.
Until then, may you look quizzically at the ten year olds in your own life and wonder what the heck is swimming around inside those heads of theirs.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
The Cartography of Gratitude, or: DUST
HOORAY!
False alarm.
Crisis averted.
Let us take a moment to observe the passing-into-oblivion of the blog known as "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse" as it morphs into "The Memoir of Narrow Escape."
A couple of loose ends to tie up from the 21st:
Were you laughed at for polishing up your crossbow and hoarding cases of Aquafina? Never mind. Haters gonna hate. You will simply come out on top in a home invasion and not get caught up in the mad rush during the next nature-induced power outage. Skills are skills. Once aquired and practiced, they can only enrich our lives, and not diminish them.
I did the math, and attendance in my classes hovered around 35%. That's 35 out of 100% that showed up for the Day of Multiple Disasters That Didn't End Up Happening.
Imagine. Just imagine the number of potential disasters that Just. Never. Happen. How many are there every day, every minute? Billions? Trillions? Gajillions? As many as sands on the dune beaches or stars in the sky. More about the dune beaches later. In the meantime...if every person who decided on Friday that potential disaster was going to keep them from showing up stayed away EVERY day, the students agreed (in fact, they were the ones who said it. I didn't. They only said what I was thinking.), learning would occur and school would be fun and everyone would get along sunshine-and-kittens-and-rainbows. I said, "Write your congresspeople, kids. Write your congresspeople."
The final loose end to tie up is of course the Other Thing that happens on December 21st of every year, the Winter Solstice. I was reading the other day on a website called Time and Date that, "Although winter was regarded as the season of dormancy, darkness and cold, the coming of lighter days after the winter solstice brought on a more festive mood. To many people, this return of the light was a reason to celebrate that nature’s cycle was continuing."
The return of the light.
Come to think of it, the return of the light was the exact reason for the human sacrifices in ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures.
Now we have narrowly escaped the Formerly-Impending Apocalypse. We are on borrowed time. Of course, we have always been on borrowed time, but now we're more aware of it than ever. I seek in the next several months to explore the theme of what exactly one should do with borrowed time.
While you, my dear 12 loyal readers, wait for the lame result of such a haphazard theme, I suspect that some of you still have a hankering for the old pre-narrow-escape Zombie lore. If so, please accept my recommendation (already seen on goodreads.com if you're my facebook friend) of a novel called DUST. It takes place in Northwest Indiana, from whence this blog post is being composed. It follows Jessie, a teenage zombie, through the many trials and tribulations of her zombie life, including a great big plague that hits the entire world, human and zombie alike.
This book, in a word, is fantastic. OR maybe I only enjoyed it more because I knew I didn't have to hurry and finish it before the world ended or something. Fantastic.
And now it is time to tuck the border collie in. Let me know what you think of the book.
False alarm.
Crisis averted.
Let us take a moment to observe the passing-into-oblivion of the blog known as "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse" as it morphs into "The Memoir of Narrow Escape."
A couple of loose ends to tie up from the 21st:
Were you laughed at for polishing up your crossbow and hoarding cases of Aquafina? Never mind. Haters gonna hate. You will simply come out on top in a home invasion and not get caught up in the mad rush during the next nature-induced power outage. Skills are skills. Once aquired and practiced, they can only enrich our lives, and not diminish them.
I did the math, and attendance in my classes hovered around 35%. That's 35 out of 100% that showed up for the Day of Multiple Disasters That Didn't End Up Happening.
Imagine. Just imagine the number of potential disasters that Just. Never. Happen. How many are there every day, every minute? Billions? Trillions? Gajillions? As many as sands on the dune beaches or stars in the sky. More about the dune beaches later. In the meantime...if every person who decided on Friday that potential disaster was going to keep them from showing up stayed away EVERY day, the students agreed (in fact, they were the ones who said it. I didn't. They only said what I was thinking.), learning would occur and school would be fun and everyone would get along sunshine-and-kittens-and-rainbows. I said, "Write your congresspeople, kids. Write your congresspeople."
The final loose end to tie up is of course the Other Thing that happens on December 21st of every year, the Winter Solstice. I was reading the other day on a website called Time and Date that, "Although winter was regarded as the season of dormancy, darkness and cold, the coming of lighter days after the winter solstice brought on a more festive mood. To many people, this return of the light was a reason to celebrate that nature’s cycle was continuing."
The return of the light.
Come to think of it, the return of the light was the exact reason for the human sacrifices in ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures.
Now we have narrowly escaped the Formerly-Impending Apocalypse. We are on borrowed time. Of course, we have always been on borrowed time, but now we're more aware of it than ever. I seek in the next several months to explore the theme of what exactly one should do with borrowed time.
While you, my dear 12 loyal readers, wait for the lame result of such a haphazard theme, I suspect that some of you still have a hankering for the old pre-narrow-escape Zombie lore. If so, please accept my recommendation (already seen on goodreads.com if you're my facebook friend) of a novel called DUST. It takes place in Northwest Indiana, from whence this blog post is being composed. It follows Jessie, a teenage zombie, through the many trials and tribulations of her zombie life, including a great big plague that hits the entire world, human and zombie alike.
This book, in a word, is fantastic. OR maybe I only enjoyed it more because I knew I didn't have to hurry and finish it before the world ended or something. Fantastic.
And now it is time to tuck the border collie in. Let me know what you think of the book.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
[Insert SuperAwesome Title for Last-Ever Blog Post Here]
I did not mail out the Christmas cards in time for the Apocalypse. Dag! Nabbit! EPIC. FAIL.
In other news...
If he really looked deep into his own heart, perhaps even James Wesley Rawles would agree that you can prepare and prepare, for whatever tragedy, and you can still not be quite ready when it happens. You have kind of a vague understanding in your mind that things are going downhill, and then they do. When they do, no matter how slowly they've been sliding, the real end always feels like a crash.
I am sad that this will be the last-ever post on "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse," although now that I've racked up 8 loyal readers (as opposed to the only-four loyal readers I had on "Another Celebrator of Seven-Day Weekend), I think I'll leave the URL intact for ease of access. I planned and planned my last post, but then as I reviewed the concept in my head today, it just didn't seem appropriate. It wasn't inappropriate, but it wasn't as exactly right as I thought it would be. So! In addition to "there goes the world," there goes my brilliant last-ever post, as well.
As has so often happened since last January when I cannibalized my personal blog to make way for this one, something else came to take the place of my brilliant last post, and that thing was the school shooting in Connecticut.
That shooting jacked EVERYTHING up. It jacked up collaboration by forcing an all-staff meeting to discuss rumors in the district that people with guns will be storming campuses all over Las Vegas tomorrow. It jacked up 2nd hour when some kid leaped out of his seat screaming, "OHMYGOD I SEE A SHOOTER!" and I replied, "Tell the dean all about it, kid," and wrote him up. It jacked up my plan to say to my students tomorrow, "In the unlikely event that the world ends tonight, I have enjoyed teaching you," because several of my students intentionally got suspended so as not to come to school tomorrow, and others' parents are keeping them home. It jacked everything up so much that one of my students actually asked this afternoon, "What is it again that we're not supposed to talk about? Is it the end of the world, or is it shooting?"
That's how jacked up everything is.
At least two students in each of my five classes asked me if I am coming to school tomorrow. I replied, "Of course I am! It's my job. I also predict that I will have the possibility of receiving gifts!" I was able to take the opportunity of the confusion to say something along these lines to each of my classes: "We have structures and procedures in place for emergencies, and we promise to keep each of you as safe as we possibly can. HOWEVER! You know that anything can happen at any time. [Insert funny disaster scenario, such as getting conked on the head by a falling projector, here.] But we don't live in fear because fear does us no good. What does us good is coming together here and learning and talking together." Fourth hour listened and smiled and nodded. Fifth hour hooted and hollered and generally fell off the geography train. I didn't mention any of any of this to 6th hour, because I was too jazzed about driving across town on a last-minute Christmas errand.
Know what else is jacked up? On 1/2/12, I took YES! Magazine's "How Resilient Are You?" quiz. Since earning my initial "off to a good start..." I have made arrowheads from pointy rocks. Even though they were only four feet high, I have scaled cliffs. I have maimed paper zombies with actual, real-live guns. I've rubbed elbows with the scary-looking lady at the honey stand. I have stockpiled food storage, harvested lint, learned how to use magnesium to its best advantage and come on people! I've knitted scarves! Tonight, when I took the "How Resilient Are You?" quiz, I got...
(drum roll please)...
off to a good start.
Readers, thank you for taking this journey with me, especially if you literally took it with me like Miss Gokey or Jodi or Krista or Dana or Amanda did. (Because I would run out of room if I mentioned everyone, I'm only listing my top-five most frequent mentions. Don't be offended.) As we get "off to a good start" on the next one, best wishes, and I leave you with Jack Kerouac:
"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
In other news...
If he really looked deep into his own heart, perhaps even James Wesley Rawles would agree that you can prepare and prepare, for whatever tragedy, and you can still not be quite ready when it happens. You have kind of a vague understanding in your mind that things are going downhill, and then they do. When they do, no matter how slowly they've been sliding, the real end always feels like a crash.
I am sad that this will be the last-ever post on "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse," although now that I've racked up 8 loyal readers (as opposed to the only-four loyal readers I had on "Another Celebrator of Seven-Day Weekend), I think I'll leave the URL intact for ease of access. I planned and planned my last post, but then as I reviewed the concept in my head today, it just didn't seem appropriate. It wasn't inappropriate, but it wasn't as exactly right as I thought it would be. So! In addition to "there goes the world," there goes my brilliant last-ever post, as well.
As has so often happened since last January when I cannibalized my personal blog to make way for this one, something else came to take the place of my brilliant last post, and that thing was the school shooting in Connecticut.
That shooting jacked EVERYTHING up. It jacked up collaboration by forcing an all-staff meeting to discuss rumors in the district that people with guns will be storming campuses all over Las Vegas tomorrow. It jacked up 2nd hour when some kid leaped out of his seat screaming, "OHMYGOD I SEE A SHOOTER!" and I replied, "Tell the dean all about it, kid," and wrote him up. It jacked up my plan to say to my students tomorrow, "In the unlikely event that the world ends tonight, I have enjoyed teaching you," because several of my students intentionally got suspended so as not to come to school tomorrow, and others' parents are keeping them home. It jacked everything up so much that one of my students actually asked this afternoon, "What is it again that we're not supposed to talk about? Is it the end of the world, or is it shooting?"
That's how jacked up everything is.
At least two students in each of my five classes asked me if I am coming to school tomorrow. I replied, "Of course I am! It's my job. I also predict that I will have the possibility of receiving gifts!" I was able to take the opportunity of the confusion to say something along these lines to each of my classes: "We have structures and procedures in place for emergencies, and we promise to keep each of you as safe as we possibly can. HOWEVER! You know that anything can happen at any time. [Insert funny disaster scenario, such as getting conked on the head by a falling projector, here.] But we don't live in fear because fear does us no good. What does us good is coming together here and learning and talking together." Fourth hour listened and smiled and nodded. Fifth hour hooted and hollered and generally fell off the geography train. I didn't mention any of any of this to 6th hour, because I was too jazzed about driving across town on a last-minute Christmas errand.
Know what else is jacked up? On 1/2/12, I took YES! Magazine's "How Resilient Are You?" quiz. Since earning my initial "off to a good start..." I have made arrowheads from pointy rocks. Even though they were only four feet high, I have scaled cliffs. I have maimed paper zombies with actual, real-live guns. I've rubbed elbows with the scary-looking lady at the honey stand. I have stockpiled food storage, harvested lint, learned how to use magnesium to its best advantage and come on people! I've knitted scarves! Tonight, when I took the "How Resilient Are You?" quiz, I got...
(drum roll please)...
off to a good start.
Readers, thank you for taking this journey with me, especially if you literally took it with me like Miss Gokey or Jodi or Krista or Dana or Amanda did. (Because I would run out of room if I mentioned everyone, I'm only listing my top-five most frequent mentions. Don't be offended.) As we get "off to a good start" on the next one, best wishes, and I leave you with Jack Kerouac:
"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
Thursday, December 13, 2012
I've Said It Before...
...and I'll say it again: alea iacta est.
I'm not skipping blogging tonight, I'm just writing Christmas cards instead. After all, I'm committed to the idea of the Christmas cards arriving at their destination before next Friday, so that everyone can know that I was thinking fondly of them at the end.
Tomorrow, I'll be tempting Fate, and I will let you know how that turns out.
Otherwise, tomorrow is C1's birthday (ugghhh! I shudder to hyperlink that particular disaster of a post), so send the good vibe towards the Vega.
Also, it is raining here. Signs and omens.
Ferias felices!!!
I'm not skipping blogging tonight, I'm just writing Christmas cards instead. After all, I'm committed to the idea of the Christmas cards arriving at their destination before next Friday, so that everyone can know that I was thinking fondly of them at the end.
Tomorrow, I'll be tempting Fate, and I will let you know how that turns out.
Otherwise, tomorrow is C1's birthday (ugghhh! I shudder to hyperlink that particular disaster of a post), so send the good vibe towards the Vega.
Also, it is raining here. Signs and omens.
Ferias felices!!!
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Stranger in a Strange Land
In addition to alluding to a 1960s sci-fi novel that I've never read, this post title accurately sums up how I feel this evening as I am sans Subaru, seeing as she is in the shop waiting to be diagnosed. Again. Last time, my trip to the auto-repair gurus turned up lots of fodder, but not this time, so you'll have to be content to read about how I packed.
Miss Gokey graciously offered me a couch to surf on and a ride to work tomorrow, as well as the next day, if need be. A coworker followed me to the dealership and then dropped me off here at the house. Last night while planning all of this debacle, Miss Gokey intelligently suggested that I pack a few changes of clothes just in case.
In all my years of domestic and international travel, I have learned to pack light. But this past year of reading up on the potential apocalypse blew the "travel light" theory out of the water, so into my coworker's car I put:
- the Guatemalan duffel bag filled with clothes enough to last me through Saturday and a laptop
- my satchel, which I always have with me, filled with various sundries
- a green grocery sack filled with student work and unfinished Christmas cards (don't worry, they're on their way!)
- two blankets
- one outsized towel
- one pillow
- an extra packet of toiletries
- breakfast and lunch through the end of the week
I think that as long as we went grocery shopping at Sam's Club beforehand, I would be ok staying here through the 21st, actually. Again in the words of Melissa Ferrick, "everything I need is right here in my hands."
Now that you've suffered through that, I'll tell you what people do that results in more money for them: sing in their cars on their way to and from work. You'd better Belize it (that's my favorite geography joke, and a particularly timely one as we cover the countries of Latin America this week), I was singing at the top of my lungs all week. Granted, it was mostly singing to encourage the car to keep going and last until Winter Break, but be that as it may...
This weekend, while grading notebooks and finishing decorations on my little tree that I don't even get to look at since I'm not at home, I tried watching NBC's Revolution online. Not a bad little show, thanks for the recommendation, Dana!
I just find it funny that after the power goes out or the world ends on whatever show, most people go back to wearing frockcoats and tailcoats a la 1850. Here's an interesting article on 1800s fashion from Godey's Lady's Book. It's extremely instructive both from a living-through-hardship standpoint and from a down-with-the-patriarchy standpoint.
Enjoy!
I'll be back on Thursday, hopefully with good news of my car's clean bill of health. Finally.
Until then, happy Indiana Day! Y'all should get a day off like we do here in the Battle Born State.
Miss Gokey graciously offered me a couch to surf on and a ride to work tomorrow, as well as the next day, if need be. A coworker followed me to the dealership and then dropped me off here at the house. Last night while planning all of this debacle, Miss Gokey intelligently suggested that I pack a few changes of clothes just in case.
In all my years of domestic and international travel, I have learned to pack light. But this past year of reading up on the potential apocalypse blew the "travel light" theory out of the water, so into my coworker's car I put:
- the Guatemalan duffel bag filled with clothes enough to last me through Saturday and a laptop
- my satchel, which I always have with me, filled with various sundries
- a green grocery sack filled with student work and unfinished Christmas cards (don't worry, they're on their way!)
- two blankets
- one outsized towel
- one pillow
- an extra packet of toiletries
- breakfast and lunch through the end of the week
I think that as long as we went grocery shopping at Sam's Club beforehand, I would be ok staying here through the 21st, actually. Again in the words of Melissa Ferrick, "everything I need is right here in my hands."
Now that you've suffered through that, I'll tell you what people do that results in more money for them: sing in their cars on their way to and from work. You'd better Belize it (that's my favorite geography joke, and a particularly timely one as we cover the countries of Latin America this week), I was singing at the top of my lungs all week. Granted, it was mostly singing to encourage the car to keep going and last until Winter Break, but be that as it may...
This weekend, while grading notebooks and finishing decorations on my little tree that I don't even get to look at since I'm not at home, I tried watching NBC's Revolution online. Not a bad little show, thanks for the recommendation, Dana!
I just find it funny that after the power goes out or the world ends on whatever show, most people go back to wearing frockcoats and tailcoats a la 1850. Here's an interesting article on 1800s fashion from Godey's Lady's Book. It's extremely instructive both from a living-through-hardship standpoint and from a down-with-the-patriarchy standpoint.
Enjoy!
I'll be back on Thursday, hopefully with good news of my car's clean bill of health. Finally.
Until then, happy Indiana Day! Y'all should get a day off like we do here in the Battle Born State.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Come Waste Your Time With Me
As I was driving home today, I saw the strangest sign spinner. He was the MOST enthusiastic sign spinner I had ever seen. I always wonder what inspires some sign spinners to be so enthused making $7 an hour, but this one was magnificent. There used to be one by my first apartment here at Flamingo and Wynn. He had to dress as a clown in the 115-degree summer, and I often saw him sitting on a crate, smoking a cigarette and listening to headphones. When I saw today's young man throwing his sign dozens of feet into the air and then catching it seamlessly, I thought of the apocalypse, because here is a character who makes his every move like it's his last. I also thought of Dr. Martin Luther King's advice to "be the best street sweeper you can be," and of my former student who handed me my morning mocha through the drive-thru window, and how she is the best mocha-maker at that particular mocha-making chain.
As I was driving IN to work (just before the mocha, matter-of-fact), they were talking about the apocalypse on the radio. If I leave my house during a certain 3-minute window of time, I get to hear "brain dead trivia." Sadly, a google search to hyperlink it results in nothing. Somehow the subject of 12/21/12 came up, and the on-air personalities joked that they each knew a few people who were taking this...I won't call it hysteria...instead, I will continue to call it...industry...seriously. They said, "I can't wait to call them on 12/22 and ask if I can have some of that extra water they've stored."
No, *****. That water is part of my normal emergency plan, so step off.
And the radio announcers are not alone. The U.S. government has officially stated that "the world will not end of 12/21/12, or any day in 2012." Check it out. After all, if the government says it, it must be true. Apparently NASA has been receiving tons of letters from frightened children. Um...I have enough trouble finding apocalyptic fodder for this blog...WHO is telling children that the world is about to end??? NASA is attempting to debunk the "rumors."
Incidentally, the same google search that revealed the NASA news also revealed several random and unflattering photos of...yours truly. Would that I had that many more than my 5 loyal readers, that I should warrant being a google search result. Perhaps it's a fluke born of the fact that the search is coming from my own ip address. If it's NOT a fluke and you try it, please be amused by the Flaming Marshmallow 2012 photo taken on Mt. Charleston by Miss Gokey.
I'm going to miss Mt. Charleston.
Anyway, the trivia revolved around the following question, of possible interest to one of the hardest workers I have ever seen, this afternoon's sign spinner: people who do THIS tend to make more money than those who don't. I'll reveal the answer in my next post.
Although I am a day late again, I have definitely not been wasting time. The title of this post is actually from a Phish song. This evening I have cleaned the kitchen, sanitized the dishes, made a favorite casserole from Molly Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook, trolled for chocolate chips, located a recipe that calls for chocolate chips, and graded two whole crates of interactive notebooks. Next up: the candy canes. My tree only has the lights and tinsel on it, still. But first, I must take an 8-hour nap, lest I collapse.
I like to call what I'm doing, "apocalypse nesting," which I don't think is a bad thing.
In closing, I will say to you what I say to my students each day:
Manage your time, kids. Manage your time.
As I was driving IN to work (just before the mocha, matter-of-fact), they were talking about the apocalypse on the radio. If I leave my house during a certain 3-minute window of time, I get to hear "brain dead trivia." Sadly, a google search to hyperlink it results in nothing. Somehow the subject of 12/21/12 came up, and the on-air personalities joked that they each knew a few people who were taking this...I won't call it hysteria...instead, I will continue to call it...industry...seriously. They said, "I can't wait to call them on 12/22 and ask if I can have some of that extra water they've stored."
No, *****. That water is part of my normal emergency plan, so step off.
And the radio announcers are not alone. The U.S. government has officially stated that "the world will not end of 12/21/12, or any day in 2012." Check it out. After all, if the government says it, it must be true. Apparently NASA has been receiving tons of letters from frightened children. Um...I have enough trouble finding apocalyptic fodder for this blog...WHO is telling children that the world is about to end??? NASA is attempting to debunk the "rumors."
Incidentally, the same google search that revealed the NASA news also revealed several random and unflattering photos of...yours truly. Would that I had that many more than my 5 loyal readers, that I should warrant being a google search result. Perhaps it's a fluke born of the fact that the search is coming from my own ip address. If it's NOT a fluke and you try it, please be amused by the Flaming Marshmallow 2012 photo taken on Mt. Charleston by Miss Gokey.
I'm going to miss Mt. Charleston.
Anyway, the trivia revolved around the following question, of possible interest to one of the hardest workers I have ever seen, this afternoon's sign spinner: people who do THIS tend to make more money than those who don't. I'll reveal the answer in my next post.
Although I am a day late again, I have definitely not been wasting time. The title of this post is actually from a Phish song. This evening I have cleaned the kitchen, sanitized the dishes, made a favorite casserole from Molly Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook, trolled for chocolate chips, located a recipe that calls for chocolate chips, and graded two whole crates of interactive notebooks. Next up: the candy canes. My tree only has the lights and tinsel on it, still. But first, I must take an 8-hour nap, lest I collapse.
I like to call what I'm doing, "apocalypse nesting," which I don't think is a bad thing.
In closing, I will say to you what I say to my students each day:
Manage your time, kids. Manage your time.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
All These Things...
This is the first post of the last month of the world! It's also the first post that I compose under the light of my Socialist Christmas tree, which is decorated with lights that I bought from Wal-Mart in the year 2000 (still working, I've never had to repair them!), and tinsel that I *think* came from BCA's trash bin in 2002, but I don't really remember. It is socialist because it leaned to the left until Thanksgiving 2010.
It's about a tweenage romance novel called All These Things I've Done. It was a good book up until the end, when it just...ended. It was as if someone called Gabrielle Zevin and said, "Finish the book now. It was due a while ago, and if you want to get it in the gradebook before the quarter ends, you'll have it on my desk tomorrow morning." Of course, if you followed the link you know that it's one of a series, the next book in which is called Because It Is My Blood. Yeah, I don't know. If I have $10 leftover after Christmas shopping, maybe I'll get it. Probably not.
There wasn't much that was instructive as to the apocalypse, but the setting was interesting. It was in a future three generations hence (the currently-rising generation would be the dying grandparents of the novel) where New York's museums had been converted into nightclubs. The lakes and fountains had been drained, and the Statue of Liberty had been disassembled. Things that are perfectly legal now are illegal in the future the novel imagines, and the heroine is a daughter of the New York branch of organized crime that controls the supply of an illegal substance. So. That's what it's about, and the setting is worth reading it for.
What bothered me was the fact that all the way through, the heroine keeps hinting that the neo-Prohibition will be lifted. Then it ends so abruptly that you get the impression you were supposed to forget about the whole, "back-in-those-days" tone in which the book had been written. See? During these past two paragraphs of review, I've gotten all confused as to verb tenses and subject pronouns. I blame the book. This is what happens when a teacher of teenagers gets to reading a novel that is marketed to her students' age group! (Funny, that didn't happen with certain other favorite novels whose titles shall not be repeated because by now you should have read about them all over this blog and other blogs and goodreads.com.)
Now that I look more closely, I see that Jen warned on the now-archived Book Envy blog that fans of the apocalypse would not be satisfied. Her much more revealing review is archived here.
Sometimes, we know our time is running out, and we still waste it reading tweenage fiction! Astounding.
Lucky for us, we have people looking out for us, sending us ads for ammo like this one, which comes from my dad and I have no idea where he got it:
Note that *this is not a toy*. Ammo, kids, not books. Ammo. And a plan. I have one. For 12/21, and another one for the day after. Do you?
It's about a tweenage romance novel called All These Things I've Done. It was a good book up until the end, when it just...ended. It was as if someone called Gabrielle Zevin and said, "Finish the book now. It was due a while ago, and if you want to get it in the gradebook before the quarter ends, you'll have it on my desk tomorrow morning." Of course, if you followed the link you know that it's one of a series, the next book in which is called Because It Is My Blood. Yeah, I don't know. If I have $10 leftover after Christmas shopping, maybe I'll get it. Probably not.
There wasn't much that was instructive as to the apocalypse, but the setting was interesting. It was in a future three generations hence (the currently-rising generation would be the dying grandparents of the novel) where New York's museums had been converted into nightclubs. The lakes and fountains had been drained, and the Statue of Liberty had been disassembled. Things that are perfectly legal now are illegal in the future the novel imagines, and the heroine is a daughter of the New York branch of organized crime that controls the supply of an illegal substance. So. That's what it's about, and the setting is worth reading it for.
What bothered me was the fact that all the way through, the heroine keeps hinting that the neo-Prohibition will be lifted. Then it ends so abruptly that you get the impression you were supposed to forget about the whole, "back-in-those-days" tone in which the book had been written. See? During these past two paragraphs of review, I've gotten all confused as to verb tenses and subject pronouns. I blame the book. This is what happens when a teacher of teenagers gets to reading a novel that is marketed to her students' age group! (Funny, that didn't happen with certain other favorite novels whose titles shall not be repeated because by now you should have read about them all over this blog and other blogs and goodreads.com.)
Now that I look more closely, I see that Jen warned on the now-archived Book Envy blog that fans of the apocalypse would not be satisfied. Her much more revealing review is archived here.
Sometimes, we know our time is running out, and we still waste it reading tweenage fiction! Astounding.
Lucky for us, we have people looking out for us, sending us ads for ammo like this one, which comes from my dad and I have no idea where he got it:
Note that *this is not a toy*. Ammo, kids, not books. Ammo. And a plan. I have one. For 12/21, and another one for the day after. Do you?
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