Thursday, Jan. 09, 2003
Outside another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime, posted at 7:45 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I'm finally home, after a School Improvement Team meeting that discussed the huge budget crisis our school district is facing and the possible layoffs we will have to incur. It was pretty horrible, and made for a pretty lousy meeting. My name wasn't on the "Possible Layoff" list, but many of my friends' names were. There is much lousy leadership in the district, and they made a huge screwup and overbudgeted by millions of dollars. Most temporary employees have been laid off, and now it looks like they might go after the teachers. As if our students didn't have enough obstacles already, or our teachers didn't already have enough on our minds.It was a decent day, but I have to admit that I will not miss my 7th period when the semesters switch. Today, a dorky overweight kid who I thought I had connected well with threw a wad of paper across the room. In the middle of class. I was stunned, gave him detention on the spot, and fumed about it inside my head.
I need to go to bed early tonight, because I haven't been sleeping well and I was tired much of the day. It's also pretty exhausting to leave the house at dark and return at dark; there's something very demoralizing about it and it makes you believe you're working too hard. The thing is, I feel like I am working hard, but not doing it efficiently enough. My lessons have been banging this month since my return, but everything else in my life - grading papers, cleaning the house, paying bills, planning ahead - has been lagging behind.
I still have not spoken much of my new roommate, so I guess I'll introduce him now. His name is Todd, he's a real estate advisor, and he's a pretty nice guy. He also has a dog that makes Holden look small, a huge gentle laid-back Chesapeake Bay Retriever that looks sort of like a great dane and acts as if he were fifteen years old. This is a good thing - the house isn't big enough for two active big dogs, but with Holden being only mildly active and this guy ("Buddy") barely having a pulse, it's fine. Buddy and Tobey also get along just fine - he's a really cool, gentle, sweet dog.
Did everyone watch Ed and The West Wing last night? Damn good. Tonight I'm looking forward to hanging out with some Friends and then having a good Scrubs-down. I might even invite Will & Grace over if my friend sleep doesn't shout in my ear for me to head downstairs.
By the way, congrats to jacquishine for getting the title reference yesterday correct. The lyric "What's it like to be a skateboarding punk-rocker?" comes from "Anchorage," Michelle Shocked's brilliant epistle of a folk-rock song. I would rate this as one of the best songs ever, and happened to be listening to it on Kazaa yesterday while writing my entry. Today's obscure lyric is a little more obscure, at least for me, but the hint I'll give is I heard a cover of the song today by Everything But the Girl, and it was beautiful (it was an acoustic live album, and seemed very good) - though not as striking as the original (but the original is not the most famous version of it...) I'll continue playing along, and hope you do too.