i watched the bob dylan 'american masters' or whatever by scorsese...

it was on two nights on pbs. the best part was dylan mixing up two homemade advertisements for pet care, they are normal to read, something like: "looking for someone to pick up and wash dog, clip his nails, brush his fur, and return to owner..." that's not exact quote.... and then the other one has something about a bird and a cigarette...

so bob starts by switching some of the words around and it sounds funny and the camera keeps cutting and coming back with him switching them up again... i'm gonna have to get the dvd and rewrite this... it was so funny, and probably the closest you get to dylan in the whole story.

otherwise he's shrouded and evasive. in old time press conferences, he bantered with reporters: they would ask stupid questions and he would give sarcastic/avoiding answers or just return with questions. i can understand why he would be offended/uncomfortable with their questions, but then why give press conferences? i don't know, maybe the record company made him do it. anyway, then at one point, the current dylan told the person interviewing him for this documentary that it was these kinds of questions that from this type of people "trying to pin him down" that he didn't like.

from the start, dylan said that he didn't want to "give anything away".. that if he gave himself away he wouldn't, i don't know, be effective.

i think that's why he doesn't like these questions... if you answer someone's prying questions and people think they've figured you out, they won't want you anymore. i don't know.

therapy

this week i got so tense one day that i went to the pyrocrackter and had an adjustment. i would rather have gone to a massage therapist, but insurance doesn't cover that, and this is pretty much just as good. (i hope my blog can't be used in court against me for indiscriminant use of my benefits, but i do have back & neck problems)...

i feel like i've been rather "bitchy" lately, just kind of sensitive about things and easy to snap. not as bad as some people i've been snapped at by, but still, quicker to anger than usual.

that's all i want to say about that. leave me alone.

hobbit feet

i just cleaned my house a little; when cats live with you, hair collects everywhere and i was concentrating on the baseboards and behind doors that stay open so there's hair trapped behind them. i even had to pull a few "cobweb-collected hair things" off the ceiling, from the fan blowing up all summer...

when i subsequently got in the shower, i looked down to see that cat hair was rinsing off of the bottoms of my feet and it was so embarrassing, i'm glad i was alone and no one saw how much hair i collected just by pacing around my apartment.

this has been blogger dashboard confessions.

speaking of hobbits, though, there's a little girl in my classroom who has the face of merry brandybuck the hobbit. it's funny! i may have blogged that earlier and forgot. i'm addicted to internet checkers, but my excuse is that it will make me better at strategic thinking and stuff. i do have to coach the chess team this year, you know.

the exorcism of mr. d.

in your best televangelical voice:

laziness and exhaustion, i command you to leave this poor soul...

you have no place here...

i command you to leave his body...

can exhaustion be banished? i wish. i haven't written here since sept. 10. i haven't had much of a lot going on outside of school... my family did have our annual pigroast, awesome food and socialization. camping too. but otherwise, i've been working on school stuff. the heat in the building and the extra challenging group i have this year, (extra challenging to me, as much as they entertain me, they also take it out of me.)

i'm very excited about the wildlife in my life:

... i have pink spotted ladybug larvae, african water frog embryos, giant fiddler crabs, and i just added five new fish to the school tank in the lobby. there are 3 catfish, and the others i'll have to get back to you with their names... their different. it was so exciting to put them in there. now there are 10 fish, and when the tadpoles grow up, i'll put a couple of them in the tank too.


oh, i've been listening to the beatles, the white album, disc one. that cd... i never thought i'd like it much, but it's awesome. i think they were pretty anti-usa in that album, back in the ussr, i wanna know if they purposely were making jabs at the beach boys or what. and then bungalo bill and rocky raccoon were a couple of american idiots. both of them would-be killers with no intelligence... then in 'while my guitar gently weeps', john lennon "looks at us all" and sees the love (it's there, but sleeping)... still his guitar gently weeps. i gotta go to bed.

they were kind of bitter about things, and i think they were pissed about money, each other, the press, and they were just mocking their way through this album... on this radio show about the beatles, they said something about ringo leaving the band "high and dry" during the white album. apparently he flaked off and went boating or something, which was when he came up with "octopus' garden". yep.

oh, yeah, but i think this one is by ringo, and it's just a total mockery of country western music, they twang and everything:

"don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue...
cuz you know darlin' i love only you...
you never know it hurt me so,
and i'd hate to see you go
don't pass me by, don't make me cry..."

bathroom bloopers

yesterday we went on a bathroom break (at the school where i teach, it is necessarily required that bathroom breaks are taken as a class twice a day.)

one of my students came up to me to announce (in the only voice he ever uses: an attention grabbing, loud, high, matter-of-fact voice) that the other boys were laughing at him. i told him to sit down (because this particular kid likes it when people laugh at him and because he hadn't raised his hand to talk, and even if he had, we are not supposed to talk in the hallway.

disregarding my mandate, he said, "my pants were too tight and i couldn't get them down and i was trying to pull my penis out and i peed all over myself."

i turned around and laughed, trying to be still. i pulled on a straight face and turned around to check out his pants, and they looked dry to me. i told him to sit down and i turned around to laugh some more.

the kid, a knowingly precocious one, probably knew i was laughing, and seemed satisfied with that. he seems to search for funny things to say to me. at recess, i watch the whole class. he stands right in front of me and talks to me. i lean on the fence so i'm shorter than usual, and he stands on a foot-high concrete wall in front of the fence, so he's almost at my level, and standing about 10 inches away from me. in short, he's in my personal space, which seems to be where he likes to be.

another kid, a black kid, said he couldn't be partners with a white kid, because they had different germs: the black kid had black germs, and the white kid had white germs. jeez.

we made apples yesterday in class with wallpaper samples: different designs with green, red and yellow coloring. i think they look awesome!

i'm at panera stalling on lesson plans. the sores from biking hurt when my arm hangs down, i have to keep my arm up above the hanging position. i believe it may be infected. i don't know why, though, cuz i've had it medicated all the time.

mmmkay...

assfault

i went biking yesterday to wake up and get rid of a headache...

friday night i went to bed at 7:00 pm cuz i was tired from the week. i woke up for a couple hours and then went back to bed and slept till 8:00 am. whenever i sleep that long, i get a headache.

so i went riding, and went to within a 1/2 mile of morton. on the way back, i was cruising downhill and went over a bridge on the asphalt trail. somehow i lost control and i fell on my right side. as i fell, my feet stayed attached to the pedals and my hands gripped the handlebars. so i have roadburn on my hand and forearm, and the most painful part was when my butt hit the ground, my tailbone hurt right away, and it still feels like a bruise around that area. i got up and rode home, it was hard getting up the hill from downtown, my legs were just tired.

anyway, it's better today, i was moving kinda slow this morning, but better now. i even cut the grass.