Salmagundi

I normally wait to blog until I have something narrative or thematic to say, but I'm feeling pretty miscellaneous right now.

Robert and I liveblogged Hillary's speech together yesterday. It's things like that for which I love him, seriously. He's' so smart and epigrammatic and aphoristic and handsome and affectionate. It's at personalbibliography.blogspot.com. Afterward, we unpacked our joint journal and started writing in it. I call it the Dorkronomicon, but Robert prefers Untitled. The entry was simply, "Robert is a gaytheist. Brandon is a fagnostic."

I feel a little spacey at school this week. The kids are really lethargic and uninterested, and it takes soooo much energy to be crazy and pumped up so they get engaged. I thought it was just me, and I felt like shit for teacher, but the other teachers in the building cincurred, so I felt better. I even talked to my homey Belinda, who teaches English in Widefield, and she said the kids were the same there. Maybe it's a global phenomenon. Jervaise?

I'm pretty fucking pissed at Obama. It's bad enough that he made some dumbass statements about the death penalty--to which I am pretty broadly opposed. It's even worse that he voted for the stupid Homeland Security bill. What really put a bean under my saddle were his comments at goateed hobbit Rick Warren's Jesusopolis last week. He actually said that he believed marriage is between one man and one woman. What a monkeycunt. I'm not planning on running to Boston and getting married to Robert, but it would be nice to have the option. America clearly did not learn the first time that separate but equal is not true freedom.

I share a room with my teacher during my planning period--BTW, Whiny McGripealot, I teach six periods in a row, so my planning period is the last of the day. Watching him teach is excrutiating, and I have to leave the room on occassion so I don't throw up, because that would distract the students from their valuable learnding. For one thing, he thinks he knows Spanish. He calls roll at the beginning of every class--who doesn't know names by the second week--and butchers all of their names. 97 percent of our students are latino/a, and they are not offended if you say their names with an English accent, but he overdoes the accent and it is terrible. "Norrrrrrma Gutierrrrrrezz?" he says, and I have to hide my face so the students don't see me cringe with them. That is bad enough, but he als o happens to think he knows how tot teach. My first two periods are ELA, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I spent today teaching them the days of the week, and they only mostly get it. He has some of these same kids for some reason, and he is trying to teach them compound predicates. You get the idea. What a penis wrinkle.

The highlight of the day, though, bears sharing. In my drama class, i started the kids on the basics of stage combat, because we're going to do a short version of The Outsiders. They loved it. I have one kid in the class who speaks no English, but she's an awesome actress, so I let her do her acting in Spanish some of the time--that's the point of the class after all. All those kids are great, and some of them are really shy, but I've convinced them to stay in the class because they need to get over that. Maybe I'm not such a shitty teacher after all.