Being tired is tiring
1. Yet More Merlin
I finished the first season a few days ago. I'm not entirely happy with how it ended - I was hoping Morgana would split from Uther, and I was hoping Merlin would have a traumatic "oh god I've lost my mentor, and now I will go beserk with fury before shutting down in despair, which will force Arthur to recognize me as a human being since apparently he's noticed that Gwen is a human being, and perhaps a pretty one" moment. But apparently the writers wanted to end without too much upheaval, and since various interviews have suggested that they are not going to abandon those storylines and will actually pursue them in the second season, I don't mind much.
Am slightly boggled by the fact that humanity can produce a creature as flawlessly beautiful as Bradley James (Arthur). He looks like a statue of Beauty Incarnate come to life - perfect cheekbones, perfect eyes, perfect nose, perfect everything. Am even more boggled by the fact that although I very much admire his aesthetics, I don't find him attractive. I am hypothesizing that I am not comfortable enough with my own feminimity to find overt masculinity attractive, and since he embodies a very mascline aesthetic, I don't find him as attractive as the decidedly feminine Colin Morgan (Merlin), who is scrawny and has pointy cheekbones and sticky-outy ears. In my defense, even Bradley James admires Colin Morgan's cheekbones.
2. Teaching Is Exhausting
I am subbing as the Catholic school's music teacher for the rest of August. It is ridiculously exhausting. I think it's exhausting becase I spend most of the day teaching elementary students, who have appalling lack of discipline and like to dance and chatter. I think I could cope with that if I were actually interested in what I'm teaching, but I'm not. I don't want to play CDs with kids' songs, which invariably feature silly lyrics and trite music and condescending hand gestures. I tried to spice up "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" by coming up with an arrangement in a minor key and singing it with an over-the-top Slavic accent and calling it "The Evil Vampiric Spider," but even that wore thin the third time I played it.
Maybe it wouldn't be this bad if I could construct my own teaching plan. A teaching plan that did not revolve around insipid, condescending songs and endless CD's. A teaching that actually taught some of the fundamentals music instead of teaching them ridiculous hand motions. But as it is, I hate it. I feel like it's a waste of time, and I kind of resent it.
I also teaching middle school drama once a week, which is a lot of fun. It wasn't meant to be fun, because we were supposed to read some stupid five-minute plays (why do authors assume that kids are stupid and fill their plays with one-dimensional characters and moralizing lessons at the end?), but instead we played a couple improv games. The kids weren't terribly good at them, but they picked up some of the basics, like "don't be afraid to be outrageous, and just go with the flow."
So: drama - yay; elementary music - shoot me in the face. Teaching for two days completely zonked me out all weekend, and even now I feel so tired that I could cry. Fortunately, I have a few more days to recover before I have to tackle it again. Unfortunately, Thursday is going to kill me: school from 10 to 2:45, lessons from 3 to 6. Hopefully I will find time to eat, because I stop eating when I get stressed, and I can't afford to miss more meals.