I went and saw The Time Traveler's Wife yesterday. I thought it was interesting, and of course I had a mental breakdown during and after it. I honestly cried the rest of the night (B was gone being a rockstar and I stayed home). I can't wait to read the book! I should've done it in reverse order, but oh well.

I did some investigating online, and this is the poem that precedes the book:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott


I loved how the movie focused on the hardships of the relationship but then showed the rewarding moments, too. The time traveling parts kept me interested and allowed me to overlook some fairly bad dialogue. Although a lot of it was unrealistically romantic, I ate that up. After reading the poem, I feel moved to write and reflect and write and reflect. But, I won't.

I also watched Sunshine Cleaning last night with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. I highly recommend it, and I'm stealing her post-it mantra idea.



Currently reading: Water for Elephants. Book reviews coming soon!





I took one of those lengthy sliding-scale personality tests today. I think the results are about 95% true. You should take it! Here are my results:


My personalDNA Report







Is anyone getting the Swine Flu vaccine? They are offerring it free to teachers at my school, and I am undecided. I do not want to find out ten years down the road that my children are born without limbs because I took an underdeveloped vaccine. But, I don't want to get swine flu, either. I'm certain my students will leave swine flu infected germs all over my desks and boards and doorknobs and floors!

Same song, different verse. Have you been hearing in the news about these side effects that are ALREADY being found in people who took Gardasil (HPV vaccine)? I watched a segment on television (so it MUST be true) about it, and it turns out that Merck launched the huge campaign ("I will be one less with cervical cancer") before the vaccine was thoroughly tested. I know with every drug there will be side effects in a small population of the consumers, but this stuff freaks me out.



SIDE NOTE: I did, in fact, take one round of the three round Gardasil vaccine. Does this mean I will have a third of the side effects?









Bad News:

Over all my classes, I have two Savannas, three Ambers, two Morgans, three Hunters, two Hannahs, two Brittanys, two Bradleys, two Shelbys, four Brandons, and two Allisons.

Good News:

On their first assignment (an "I Am" Poem), they impressed me. On one line, they had to say what they worried about. I was sure most of them (especially the baby freshmen) would be worried about the new school and classes and finding their ways. Au contraire. They worried about the economy and troops at war and the national deficit. Sign of the times?

When they started writing their autobiographies, one student asked me if he could write his in third person "as if Samuel L. Jackson were narrating it." It's going to be a good semester.







Please READ THIS recent news story from my hometown. Check out the first perpetrator's shirt! Hahaha!