Random Friday Pleasantness

I had a drive-by compliment on the way to the bus stop this morning. A woman --- black, with close-cropped platinum-blond hair --- hollered from the far side of the street "I just have to stop and say how absolutely stunning you look" from the driver's side of a sedan. It totally made my day.

I did not pour coffee on myself or my nice teaching clothes, but this may have been partly because when I got to the corner coffee place the espresso machine died right after I placed my order. I got a refund because I don't like regular coffee, and then had to wait to be caffeinated until I got on campus. The lack of coffee may have contributed to the mobile compliments though, I suppose, since it was impossible to spill it all over myself when I didn't have it.

It's Friday! Yay! That means I can spend the whole weekend prepping for class and hastily compiling another round of job applications instead of obsessively prepping for class and then teaching it. Whoo-hoo!

Unfortunately I've been having trouble getting to sleep --- a kind of anxious excitement --- on the nights before one of my classes, but not the other. I can't tell if that's something about the courses, or the fact that after a night of almost no sleep and mentally rehearsing things, I'm just wiped out for the next night and can't manage to worry myself awake, but I sure hope this is a first week back type of thing.

In fact I came home to day and fell asleep at the exact time I was supposed to be going to my exercise class. The nap was pleasant, although the exercise would've probably been pretty good too. Now, having woken up in time for a late dinner, I'm nice and alert and may have completely messed up any hope of a normal sleep shedule.

I just watched Thank You for Smoking, which was ok. It was nice. Pleasant. I liked it, and I kept thinking about how well it would work to teach in a writing course, as it's all about the dangers of rhetoric and spin, but I just wouldn't be happy watching it again in a class, which is why I feel it was ok, even though I quite liked it as I was watching it. Does that make any sense? A really good movie has rewatching value, sometimes I even want to watch the whole thing over again immediately. I did that a few weeks ago with Brick, which I totally loved. Loved but in a very analytic, studying-the-tricks kind of way (it's kind of an exercise in what makes a noir a noir, nad how to update it), but strangely that doesn't detract from the movie or the pleasures of viewing it at all. And you can see that for a while now I've been on a theme --- catch all the movies I missed in 2005, because for some reason I hardly got out to the theaters for any of the good little stuff. For example, I quite liked Junebug, which is yet another 2005 release that, like Brick, was a little film that went in and out of the theaters before I could really even process that it was there. But lately the very thought of living in 2005, as it were, has become very depressing to me and I may have to go back to some other time frame so that I don't constantly feel old and like I have been living under a rock.

Well that was a long paragraph, wasn't it? What more pleasantness do I have to pass along? I'm not looking at the wiki and am hardly having any despondency about it, which is nice cause I definitely spent a lot of time being depressed at this time last year. And the year before. Now I seem to either have some sort of fatalism or denial. I don't know what's going to happen with that whole job thing but at least I'm not eating my heart out over it every moment. Furthermore, I just drank some hot chocolate, which is much pleasanter than not being depressed about the job martket. (Must keep to my theme!)

My classes look to be shaping up to be a lot of fun. Well, fun and a big question mark of anxiety. It's that whole "I've just started and not gotten into the quarter rhythms yet"; probably knowing I'm the one running the whole show also puts more pressure on and gives me more butterflies than usual. Strangely, I'm liking the last-minute emergency course more than the main one at the moment; I'm not sure if that's because the new topic, which is a slight stretch of my interests, is a refreshing change or what. It could be because I can play youtube clips in that classroom, which is quite the pedagogical temptation, I tell you.

And today I walked by an open classroom door and there was a small group of students rehearsing Shakespeare, obviously a group that was going to return back to the main class and perform a scene. I heard the name "Malvolio" and lots of laughter; they were excited and really getting in to it. It made me happy, really made me feel at home, like I was in the right place. Maybe not as happy as a drive-by compliment, but, close.