over the cliff

Okay so I haven’t done a real update on the blog in a little while… okay a long while. Hmm… what excuse should I use… Grad School? Ill health? Finding out my mother now reads my blog and being absolutely petrified because I’m scared of what she’ll think of me even though she’s my mother and should love me anyway but because she’s my mother there are certain things I can’t say because she’s my mother—

I think we have a winner.

So at this point I normally would go into my obligatory review of Harry Potter IV but I think Oliver and Scott have it covered.

And I could go into a review of the movie Bewitched since I saw that the other night… but that would require trying to relive parts of it and I don’t think I’ve had enough separation from the incident to keep from suffering from PTSD.

And I could talk about Thanksgiving and the horrible incidents that took place on the drive down, and coming back to find my apartment infested with fleas, or seeing my father and Uncle Jule and cousin Bubba skin and clean a deer the other night… but that would require effort.

I did tell my father that I want to go deer hunting over Christmas. Essentially teaching Freshmen English has cured me of my aversion to killing things.

And in other news: I’ve updated my site to include lots of amusing videos on the links page, and a collection of travel stories on the photo gallery/travel log page. Oh and I updated the color scheme on the very empty forum. And since people have asked, no that’s not a subtle hint for you to go post on the forum… it’s a “Damn this is depressing but I want it to look pretty and have people compliment me on my ability to copy and paste hex codes”.

And that’s all the not-so-interesting things I have to say right now.

Sorry Oliver, but Malex has won the ‘best blog entry ever’ contest.

An Exegesis of All That Is Irrelevant to Present Being…

Jon linked me to this interview with Neal Stephenson on Slashdot.

I’ve only actually read one part of it. The answer to question number 2, when he discusses the… reception of genre writers by literary critics. My favorite section:

I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”

I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”

“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

“Yes, but what do you do?”

I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!

“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.

“From…being a writer,” I stammered

So all semester I’ve had this looming appointment where an Instructional Assistant (an older grad student who’s been in the program a while and knows what he/she is doing) comes and observes one of my classes.

Well today it happened.

I have been nervous the entire time… but everyone kept saying ‘Oh it’s alright… they only stay for like… 20 minutes anyway.’ One girl even said her observer only stayed for 10 minutes. So I thought… okay. I can do this. I can manage myself perfectly for 20-30 minutes, then when the IA leaves… I can relax and go back to what I normally do, which is far more conversational and has its hit and miss days.

So I opened with a game of pictionary that linked back to the kind of thinking they’d have to do for the Unit 4 project. Brilliant right? Yeah I thought so. Then that led into a discussion of evaluative argument writing something or other. I knew that the game and first part of the Evaluative stuff would be about 20-30 minutes. I expected her to walk out any time.

Any moment.

Really, any one of those nice “Hel is so smart” minutes…

She didn’t.

She stayed. For the entire friggin class. I totally freaked. I wasn’t prepared to ad lib for an entire 50 minutes. Maybe I could’ve if I had expected to do such… but I kept waiting for her to leave, and I also had no idea what time it was. So I didn’t know how much time I had left. So I didn’t know if I should be summing up or talking about something new.

Plus my students were so chatty. So. Incredibly. Chatty. On the one hand it was good. It meant the class was high energy. They were participating. On the other hand I kept getting scared that I wasn’t “controlling the classroom”. And some of them referred to me as ‘Hel Bell’. You know, instead of Ms. Bell. I don’t mind personally, but I don’t know what the IA thought of it.

I just can’t believe she stayed the whole time. I totally fell apart. I didn’t bring it all together. I was scattered.

If any of my students end up reading this, it’s been fun. Really. Yall are great. I’ll miss you when I get fired.

I could have sworn that I posted these already… but apparently not.

Most of you have already seen them… I’m really only putting them here so that I can find them later.

Catapult

Catapult 2

Ninja Wizards!