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What’s the only thing better than a nice cheesy episode of Walker, Texas Ranger? That same episode in French! I was eating in the kitchen earlier with Sarah, who was flipping around channels, when suddenly: "Sarah! Go back! I thought I just saw… Oh my God, it is! It’s
Last week I went by the médiathèque and checked out Ben-Hur, which I hadn’t seen since the sixth grade, when my history teacher at SJ Welsh (aka Hell on Earth and the worst school I’ve ever been to) decided to show it to our class. Looking back now, I don’t know why the hell she thought she could show such a religious movie in a public school, and I wish I had tried to get her fired over it. Anyway, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did when I was 11 (I remember being blown away by it), and the whole thing was almost ruined by Haya Harareet’s truly horrible performance. I was reminded of a poem I love, "My Life Before I Knew It," by Lawrence Raab:
I hated to dance, I hated baseball,
and collected airplane cards instead.
I learned to laugh at jokes I didn’t get.
The death of Christ moved me,
but only at the end of Ben-Hur.
In the last few days I’ve bought two galettes des rois, but don’t worry, I didn’t eat them by myself, the other assistants helped. They’re French King Cakes, but the differences are 1) they’re eaten to celebrate the Epiphany, not Mardi Gras, 2) hidden inside is a beautiful little man carved out of porcelain and painted, not a pink plastic baby, and 3) they’re infinitely better than the King Cakes we eat in
The English students and I got a nice treat on Friday when the English teachers decided to cancel classes and take all the students to see Enchanted at the local cinema, which had worked out some deal with the lycée to let us all watch it for free. I enjoyed it; it was a cute movie with some really catchy songs, and I was impressed with Disney’s ability to make fun of itself after all the wrongs it’s committed (don’t even get me started on what they did to Peter Pan).
My English professor has assigned us each to do a presentation on a literary magazine. I'm presenting something called The Missouri Review tomorrow, and the ironic thing is that while I was scrolling through their archives, I came across a poem they published a few years back titled "X-Men"! How cool is that? I'm so going to pass this to the class.
"X-MEN," by Nicholas Allen Harp
Today in the School for Gifted Youngsters, Xavier's lesson plan calls
for sex education, the hows and whos, wheres and whens dispensed
delicately, his bald brow furrowed serious, his students wide-eyed,
chuckling, unabashedly alive and constantly, at risk from you-name-it:
G-men, invasive telepathy, Plutonian radiation, slack-jawed villains,
and now, he can't believe it, gonorrhea, pregnancy, AIDS, each
contemporary malady less innocent than the one before, a curriculum
chock-full of acronymic woe and code -- IUD, HIV, RU-486 -- too many
physical choices in the modern world, Xavier thinks, too many forces
stitching lifeforce inextricably to doomed youth, their piss and vinegar
mutated into glowy juice, concussion orbs, optic blasts, blizzards
summoned by sheer merge of will, their bodies already breaking out
from under themselves, pushing and yanking their skins like the
colleague they call Fantastic, their young lives catapulted into flight
(literally, he thinks, flight) to some fate he cannot, despite his infamous
prescience, predict, a factored variable he'll have to follow, patiently,
like a serial; the X of a xenophobic country, lonesome X-mases,
X-ratings, the X's and O's he'll send his students when he expels them
to the dangerous world.
