Checking In

They're going to start having to call this "bLONGing" in stead of "bLOGGing"if I keep up this "once every couple of weeks" frequency with posting. So, at the request of those who have e-mailed asking for updates (read: Sarah), I provide the following lengthy document.

First things first, the space Bang. I've talked about the Bang before, and this one was no different. Well, except for the "space" theme. Nothing wrong with a tinfoil mohawk and shirt, kids.


So the Bang was ridiculously fun, and the next one (conveniently two days after my birthday) is on May 27 and is the Pirate Bang!

The Bang fell between Easter Vigil Mass and a very sleepy Easter morning. In my easter basket, in a joking resonse to a recent coloring debacle, I found a few coloring books. One of these was what can really only be termed a remedial coloring book, and is totally hilarious. Most of the pictures include animals with dumb, confused expressions...
and a lot of images about helmets and how much fun it is to wear them. I'm going to leave that one alone.

After Easter weekend, I finished up teaching for this semester by administering a final. Then I jetted to NYC to celebrate Greek Easter (a.k.a. Greekster), see some friends in the city, and, as usual, have horrible dental problems.

I hate dentists and dentistry. No other profession seems to be so replete with inept practitioners, and if it weren't for the rare exceptionally good dentist like Dr. Jim Sarji in Brooklyn, I'd probably just give up on the whole profession. (incidentally, my woes of late have stemmed from faulty work done by previous dentists)

Woo, tangent. Athena met me at Laguardia and presented me with the coolest Dinosaur T-shirt ever (pictured below).


We ran around the city, checked out Obscura, and went to FAO Schwartz for some fun with the cutest stuffed puppies ever.




Then we played with Legos for a while. Pictured below, of course, is Lego Princess Athena, whose recent work at Treehouse Animation on Lego Batman premiered on Cartoon Network on Saturday! She is the coolest!

Greekster was very fun. I have never easten so much lamb in my life, and Athena ate so much lamb she broke her hip. Um...at least that's how I'm going to tell the story. It was great!




We had some more fun in the city, watched the not-entirely-unterrible movie Silent Hill, and had a very nice dinner in Brooklyn with everyone's favorite future Rabbi, Andrew Goodman. I also failed miserably at arranging to see some of my favorite New Yorkers (mango pancakes, anyone?), but there's only so much a person can do.

Upon returning from New York, I underwent another emergency dental fix-up, and spent the next few days painkiller-ing it up. On friday Beca and I ran an all-day training on arts-centered education techniques at the UM Detroit Center.

And that, I think, at long last, brings you up-to-date. Hopefully I'll be a little more punctual in the future. Thanks for reading!

Take this job and blog it

If this were a news article, the dateline would read "Slow lane, MI." Let me adduce this picture of my phone, which left me an alert message to tell me I had missed zero calls.

But I've not been entirely without fun. I attended an horrendously boring training for Americorps, which provides some of my funding, but it was so very very bad that I and those with me had a wonderful time making fun of the program, and I got to meet some genuinely cool people.
Then I was able to run a class I've been wanting to try since I started teaching, of which I have taken the accompanying picture. There was an activity to get students into the story of a refugee from Somalia; then, once a context for and interest in the issue of immigration had been generated, the students were tasked with creating an original piece of theatre which would involve an audience. Their audience, they were told, would arrive in one hour.

They did a wonderful job, and what resulted was a very interesting dicussion of immigration and a very involved and interested audience.

And then, Athena came to visit! Wow, she must really like Michigan. Or something. We had fun on Saturday making giant puppets at Matrix with my dad, spent a lot of time relaxing, watched the Warriors on DVD and the uber-stupid Stay Alive at the movies. We also played outside and colored. I was having such a good time that I forgot to take any pictures, so I have provided the following picture - in which I create her likeness out of her favorite food, wagon-wheel pasta. I think I got the bangs just right.