1. Being mildly superstitious, I told myself that I would pass my student-teaching observation only if I met two conditions: that I not have a bad dream about failing the observation the week of, and that I beat my high score on cell phone paddle-ball the morning of. When I woke yesterday morning, the morning of my observation, I had had no bad ( Read more... )

Things I did today:

-- Found out I passed my comprehensive exams for graduate school

-- Formulated a couple of ethical questions with which to frontload a lesson tomorrow

-- Made copies and transparencies for tomorrow (i.e. ahead of time!)

-- Went to a Nets-Pacers game that the Nets won

-- Beat my high score on cell phone paddle-ball

I had a strange day yesterday. I'm student-teaching and in order to allay the extraordinary anxiety caused by last-minute planning and my generally very nervous constitution I popped two Klonipans, gifts of a friend, that I'd been saving for a special occasion. The planning went much smoother, and my mood became very serene. Where normally I'd be ( Read more... )

This is my favorite website.

On Monday I did service for my country and appeared for jury duty, and I'm happy to say that I was not arrested for my previous absence ( Read more... )

Getting off the 4 train tonight, the electronic voice annonuced, "Transfers available to the 5, 6, L, Q, R, N, and W trains," and I thought of looking around and saying, "I don't know about you guys, but I'm taking the L!"

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I had my first--hopefully not my last--politically relevant dream the other night. In the dream, I remember that when I was a boy my parents would meet to exchange kids (i.e. as per the post-divorce custody arrangements) at the popular American chain restaurant Bob's Big Boy. This isn't too far from the truth--dad and I would eat at a Bob's Big Boy ( Read more... )

I spent New Year's Eve beating Mark, for the first time in a long while, at Scrabble (330-318). It was an exhausting, sometimes exhilarating, four-hour game at his family house in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. First, of course, we celebrated properly by watching the ball drop on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. I thought I saw Mariah Carey ( Read more... )