Wow.

No teaching for three more months. I can hardly believe it. Packing up my classroom was honestly surreal; I actually felt sad as I locked the door. It's been a rocky first year, for sure--especially with the budget problems and endless talks of staff cuts and expenses--but the ultimate verdict is that I actually love my job, especially now that I'm not working 90 hours a week.
Yay for teaching. I think.

In other news, Little Jesus, my iPod of 5+ years (which revived itself heroically after an accidental water-bottle drowning that left its interior absolutely full of H20) finally died in its sleep on June 9th. The morning of this discovery was, of course, tragic, because iPods (especially old-school, clunky ones that only a mother could love) are literally ever-present, there on every roadtrip and apartment-unpacking and A.M. arise-weary-soldier. I briefly considered burying mine in the backyard, before remembering that the battery chemicals would probably render the land completely barren for a 10-mile radius. Perhaps not, then.
I also felt this sense of loss for my 1987 Chevy Celebrity, Betty Spaghetti, when she got brutally crunched by another driver on a rural highway. Betty had no ceiling interior; her passenger-side door didn't open, her windshield wipers didn't work, her heating system belched out insect carcasses, and her cracked muffler ensured that you could hear her coming from fifteen miles away. Old and crusty? Yes, she was, bless her little alternator. But Betty was also full of character that no newer car can surpass.

I like things that show a bit of history, I guess.
I'll miss the black-and-white, pixellated GameBoyish appeal of Little Jesus, despite the fact that I've already ordered a Third Coming (the prospect of a tuneless commmute was just too much to bear).
That's all I can say.

I am now on Goodreads. Brace yourself.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Great Gatsby is basically a literary cocktail party teeming with overgrown, overprivileged, and ultimately disenfranchised boys and girls who are uncertain of how to define themselves in a climate in which social and economic expectations and roles are constantly evolving. I think what I like the most about this story is how each and every character (minus, perhaps, the narrator) is absolutely abhorrent on some level. F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters are truly fascinating: they're glamorous yet uncultured, hardened yet vulnerable, seemingly simple yet deceivingly complex, spoiled and pampered yet discontent. In short, they're wonderfully, repulsively American, straight to the core. You'll love, hate, and most likely recognize at least a few aspects of yourself within them.



Short of a few choice excerpts, I didn't find this story particularly extraordinary in terms of content. The themes of social disenfranchisement and the delicacy of the American Dream are kind of old news after growing up with early 90s MTV (bahaha)--though I'm sure that during its time, The Great Gatsby probably felt fresh and unspoiled. To me, the true redeeming quality of this story was in the nuance of Fitzgerald's descriptions of mundane scenes and settings. Chiggity check:



"The lawn started at the beachand ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house, drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run."



"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening fora moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struckc upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower, and the incarnation was complete."



"So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture."



"There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went, like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."



The book is certainly worth a read for its lyricism at the very least.


View all my reviews.

Summery things.

I wonder if any other Corvallians/Philomathoneans else would get into the idea of building homemade pushcarts and having a crazy hilltop pushcart derby in mid-July-ish. I know a neighborhood where we could race them and work up a crowd. Everybody from kindergarteners to the local geezers and geezerettes could watch from their front porches whilst sipping lemonade. I could put up fliers at various pizza establishments around town.
Ooh, and we could all have fluorescent flags attached to our creations. Maybe we'd wear some flight goggles, too.

Yes?


(All of this without consideration that I've never built anything mechanical in my entire life, of course.)

(I'm serious, though.)