"Where Are You Tonight Sweet Marie?"

Busy, busy week behind me. My English 8 class got reintegrated into the other class on Thursday, mostly as a result of me finally losing my temper with the little bastards on Wednesday and spending a good ten minutes chewing the kids out. That day made me feel like a complete failure, mostly because the kids finally made me lose my cool. It probably didn't help that, in the middle of my tirade about how their behavior made it impossible for me to teach them, they started bickering and fighting again and I just lost it and yelled at them and sent them to the dean's office.

But the reintegration has helped. The kids are better behaved, in part because there are other kids for them to interact with and the two who do not like one another don't have to deal with each other. It's made the rest of my school day that much easier to deal with, too.

Wen, Tim, and I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night. It was a good film, though I could have waited to see it (opening night + small children = a somewhat annoying movie experience, but at least there weren't too many little little kids). My biggest complaint is that the plot seems so streamlined. I understand why they have to do it (it's tough to cram 800 pages into a 2 1/2 hour film), and why each film has cut more and more of the extraneous subplots away (each book has been longer than the last, of course), but it's hard not to wish for some of the side stuff--like the whole thing with Rita Skeeter being an illegal animagus (yeah yeah, spoiler spoiler, but the book's several years old and well past the statute of limitations at this point, I'm sure) or any of a dozen other little things that the books have that the movies don't--because the film seems a little unbalanced because of it. It's rather like Lucas's Star Wars Prequels: they're real heavy on plot, everything has to happen in rapid succession, and there's less time for character development because you spend all your time telling the core story. It's the side stories that add the extra details, the quirks of character that take someone from being a two-dimensional cookie-cutter hero to being a fully-actualized human being. Admittedly, this is also just part of the problem with adapting a movie from a book, but it's hard not to wish that you could see more of Harry than just "reluctant hero" or more of Ron than just "mopey putz," etc.

I also managed to get a haircut this week. Admittedly, Wendy cut it for me, so it was free, and it's not the most perfect haircut ever, but it's serviceable and my hair is shorter and I don't look like a complete moe.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: George Harrison, "Absolutely Sweet Marie (Live)"