We’re trying desperately to get everything done around here so we can get out of town on time.

I’ll post updates when we’ve got a moment to breathe.

Why am I up at 1AM when I’m supposed to help a friend move early tomorrow morning? I’m trying to organize all our media onto an old laptop that will serve as our entertainment during our long road trip next week. This is about the third time in the last year that I’ve tried this, and I’ve never finished.

And now I remember why.

The state of my French-language MP3s is similar to my office, but it’s not the scope of the project that pushes me from completion; it’s the quality of the music I’m trying to organize. Invariably I find myself on YouTube searching live performances of artists, most notably Francis Cabrel.

Cabrel is like the French James Taylor (he even covered “Millwork”), but he’s a far better poet (or maybe French is just a more poetic language). In fact, when he performs live (especially now that his tenor range has dropped considerably), he really just recites his poems while playing the guitar.

In “Répondez moi,” he sings of a young imaginative heart ignored by the modern luxurious world.

The last verse is:

Needless to say, I didn’t finish organizing my MP3s tonight.

Yes, this is yet another movie that I should have seen a long time ago. I was intrigued by the premise, but I was worried that Hollywood would be incapable of truly exploring the potential depth of “precrime,” and I wondered how they would take a short story to feature-length.

The first ten minutes are a tightly edited exposé that acculturates the viewer in a very naturalistic manner. The rest of the movie is just as succinct and makes no allowances or apologies if you fail to keep up… and I like that. At the same time, there are a few inconsistencies and (miserably) failed attempts at humor, which all but wash out the good parts. What intrigue was left was lost in the final ten minutes where the movie turned from a visually-stunning show-me-don’t-tell-me style to a series of monologues that culminated in a narrated epilogue.

This was a decent movie, but not one I would spent time watching again.

This message infuriated me.

No, I wasn’t upset by Brooke’s mad Bejeweling skills; it was that this score was MINE! I played the round of my life while ignorant of the fact that Brooke had left herself logged into her Facebook account. So when I set a new PR, it went to her credit.

At least for Ben. I’m teaching a summer session until July 2nd.

Ben’s closing activity was a poetry recital (I thought it was going to be a slam, but no… they didn’t even snap after each poem…), which, as Brooke said, “Is sooooo much better than a graduation.” We got there a bit early, so we joined Ben’s class on the playground after lunch. You might say that the twins got a little attention…

Ben recited/sang three poems: one with a classmate, another he was scheduled to do, and then a third that he told the teacher he wanted to do because no one else chose it.

OK, I’m a bit late on these, but better now than never.

Just before their baths, we decided to take the kind of pictures that will embarrass them a few years down the line. These are the only ones that came out decent.

Most of you are aware of what’s happening in California, where the Governator is set to veto the budget (if it even gets to his desk). NPR was all over it on Saturday.

Here in New York, the state senate is undergoing a different sort of logjam. See, the democrats took over the senate for the first time in decades last November, but three rather unsavory democrats decided not to play along. Two weeks ago two of them suddenly jumped the aisle to help vote in republican leadership. This so surprised the democrats that they tried kicking out the press and (literally) turning off the lights. They still claim the reorganization vote never took place.

A week ago, one of the two democratic defectors decided to “return home,” creating a 31-31 split in the senate. The problem is that they can’t even “come into session” without a majority vote, so our state legislature is completely shut down.

“Wait,” you say, “shouldn’t there be some sort of tie-breaker for close votes, like the VP in the U.S. senate?” I’m glad you asked: Yes, the tie-breaker belongs to the lieutenant governor… Oh, shoot! We don’t have one. Remember a couple of years ago? Governor Sptizer got caught with a high-priced fille publique? Yeah, so our lieutenant governor (Paterson) became our governor, and I guess no one thought we would need a lieutenant governor.

What’s the best part of having no state legislature? I, as a New Yorker, haven’t noticed a difference in my daily life .

From this guy.

One of the great things about my job is that my students are teachers from all subjects. One day I might work out a spreadsheet to predict the flight path of an air rocket with a physics teacher, while the next I might talk politics and history with a social studies teacher and swap statistics ideas with a math teacher. But the best parts are the English teachers who turn in assignments that reference good books.

I’m not talking about classics like Shakespeare and Hemingway, though I have plenty of students who use those; I’m talking about books I had never heard of: The Giver, Behold the Man (which failed to impress me, but I still found it interesting), and now Freak the Mighty (you may have to look in the “Juvenile” section).

More than anything, the language of this novel felt extremely authentic to me. It’s not that I would expect the “learning disabled” thirteen-year-old narrator to actually write like that, but the ideas seemed a direct window into his soul… which reflected many of my memories from middle school.

There’s a place I go inside my head sometimes. It’s cool and dim in there and you float like a cloud – no, you are a cloud, the kind you see in the sky on a windy day, the way they keep changing shape except you can’t really see it changing? It just sort of happened, and suddenly you realize the cloud that looks like a big hand with fat fingers now looks like a catcher’s mitt, or a big soft TV set? Like that.

I critiqued the last book I read for its flawed teenage-voiced narration. Now I realize that it wasn’t the cliché speech patterns that bothered me, but the unauthentic thoughts behind them. Max’s narration in Freak really is in perfect tune with his character.

The only letdown of this book was that my library copy had a blue disability sticker on it, labeling it as “disability awareness,” which I feel is completely unfair. Does it deal with issues of physical and mental deficiencies? Yes. Are those the point of the book? Absolutely not. While it is important to identify books that deal with important social concerns, the book is about overcoming the labels. So it’s a shame someone stuck a label on the book itself.

I was able to knock out this book in a couple of hours, and I’m a slow reader. So I would recommend everyone pick up a copy. You’ll be glad you did.