Tonight at
lame coffeehouse (although I am hard pressed to find a cool
coffeehouse on a Friday night) I helped my
girlfriend grade tests. She teaches
high school English to mainly
freshmen with a single
senior level
class that deals
exclusively with
British literature. I was grading
freshman vocabulary tests. Maybe I am a bit old for this. I graduated from
high school a little over ten years ago so maybe I'm just a
moldering
dinosaur but the
average result of one of these tests was right around 20%. It was
depressing and
frustrating. I have
grave doubts about the
future of
language.
To calm me down, my girlfriend, who is exposed to a truck load of mediocrity on a daily basis, and I had a long conversation about the history of the decline of civilization. We both agreed that people (especially those in the line of education have been saying that this generation will be the ruin of us all since there was any civilization to speak of. I feel better but at the same time really pathetic for falling into the trap of being the cranky old fart doomsaying kids because they don't like to study. I don't like to study. Conclusion: the sky is not falling. Whew.
Another topic of this conversation was about the strangeness of the elderly. It fascinates me how some people really bloom in their late decade on the planet. Maybe it has something to do with releasing yourself from the obligation to please other people or maybe it's just the brain slowing turning into cream cheese. Anyway, we both decided that we want to be old someday and that we would try to get there together. Yes, kids, we are the sappiest couple in the world. I don't care.
A more disturbing habit of the elderly is that weird oral fixation that many old folks seem to have on the inside of their own mouthes. We solved this one by deciding that old people have some really yummy thing in their mouthes that we don't know about. This is fine until you start adding Nummy, Nummy, Nummy sounds over their mouth motions. Then it is too icky to think about anymore.
I also went to a high school homecoming football game but it was just weird. Sitting on the bleachers and freezing my skinny behind off are not on my to do list.
I also had a class today but you can read about that in some nodes.
I'm very excited to say that after clicking through my hard links that only a handful of were nodes made by Webster 1913. Go team! We are truly starting to get there! Yes, I am a cheeseball.