LAYOUT--My editor asked for a movie review for this month's A&E pages. So, here 'tis.

P.S. For all those out partying on St. Paddy's day tonight whilst I tarry here...fuck you all.

An Education deserves attention
It’s not hard to admit—I was prejudiced in favor of An Education before walking into the theater. For one thing, Lone Scherfig’s narrative of a young English schoolgirl seduced by a con man (played to snake oil salesman-perfection by Peter Sarsgaard) wasn’t getting much Oscar press. Avatar was getting a going-over by film critics about whether James Cameron was throwing around too many special effects and not enough original story, while Jeff Bridges’ tour de force in Crazy Heart was only starting to leak into the headlines.

But An Education, from a memoir by Lynn Barber and a script by Nick Hornby (About a Boy), wasn’t getting much commentary. And that’s a shame—the film is engaging and contemplative, playing an old, familiar song yet still managing to say something new.

Carey Mulligan is Jenny, a precocious sixteen-year-old who gets a ride from David (Sarsgaard), a mid-thirties motorist, in the pouring rain. The two get to talking, and with one thing and another, become pretty friendly. He marvels up front at how literate and cultured she is, while Jenny bemoans her dreary life in her working class neighborhood. It’s only a matter of time before David is wooing her, first taking her to a concert and dinner with friends, then later spiriting her to Oxford to meet his buddy C.S. Lewis.

It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine David getting away with this, but Scherfig pulls it off with several scenes in which David seduces Jenny’s family just as flawlessly as he does her: her father Jack (Alfred Molina) and mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) are all too willing to pull the wool over their own eyes after David shows up with a bottle of wine and some good conversation. “Knowing a famous author is better than becoming one,” Jack tells his daughter at one point. “It shows you’re connected.” And yes, you can spend the weekend with a man twice your age. Blech.

Jenny becomes tight with David and his friends Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), although the parties, concerts and weekend trips don’t quite explain their habit of stealing paintings from open houses, or David’s real estate scams. Clearly, this guy is more than a little shady, but Jenny doesn’t care, or at least she doesn’t care enough. It’s only a matter of time before seduction rears its head, but it’s pulled off tastefully enough.

There is a romance, physical intimacy (more cringe-inducing than anything else), a marriage proposal, the works. Her English teacher warns her of the pitfall before her, while her headmistress (Emma Thompson) tells her off in a beautifully scathing scene. But Jenny, anyone at that age, can’t be told anything by anyone over thirty, and that’s when the tragedy kicks in. (Am I hinting at anything here? Nah.)

Thankfully, An Education doesn’t fall into any clichés or narrative fallbacks of the seduction narrative. Mulligan was up for Best Actress for her performance, and it’s hard to justify her getting passed over. Her performance makes you want to both ride to Jenny’s rescue and scream yourself hoarse at her idiocy. Sarsgaard didn’t even get an Oscar nod, which is a shame. His character oozes duplicity, and at times, he comes off as even younger than Mulligan, even while he’s using his age like a cloak to cover up his ugly little secrets. Their futures don’t look especially promising—Mulligan is in a Wall Street sequel next year, while Sarsgaard is playing second fiddle to Ryan Reynolds in the upcoming Green Lantern. However, An Education is a thoughtful piece of work that will hopefully stand the test of time and become the yardstick these two fine actors are measured by in years to come.

LAYOUT--Co-workers wanted To Kill a Mockingbird lesson plans. So I'm submitting these. That'll show them--don't ask me for nothing.

Still waiting to get out of here and go drink green beer.

Hubris Lit Mag Introduction, 2008-2009

The real adviser is too drop-dead lazy to write a real one, so this one was ghost-written by yours truly. Enjoy.

Putting together a literary magazine is hard work. Not as hard, I'm sure, as cooking up fourteen couplets on watching your acne explode in the mirror ("Pus n' Boots" by Mike Tugner, freshman--page 45), or visually depicting the world through a lens of distorted images, poorly-chosen color patterns and scrawls of the word "fuck" across a slashed canvas ("Fuck," by Dave Erickson, junior--page 2). But it's pretty hard.

The process through which the Hubris emerges is rigorous and unyielding. A high school literary magazine is a harsh mistress, and I have to take its demands seriously. Before I do anything remotely constructive, I usually take last year's issue out of the files. I page through its contents, reliving its glories and triumphs. I stroke its cover. I inhale the crisp scent of cheap ink and pulp-saturated paper. I take it out with me, to restaurants, topless bars and NRA rallies. I really make an effort to get to know it. And then, after the concerned phone calls and interventions are all over with, I'm ready to Advise.

Advise Literarily, as the case may be.

It all starts for real early August, when, in the midst of my summer break, I begin interrupting my midday, beer- and nacho-induced naps and start to remember that I do indeed have a job that needs doing. By mid-August, I'm getting up at noon and idly thumbing through back copies of Swank and Adam's Quarterly: A Magazine for Gentlemen, in a desperate search for inspiration or, barring that, something to rip off. When school starts, I start plugging the magazine, especially to my freshman classes, young and impressionable as they are. I cook up a series of promotional posters, designed to spark interest and self-confidence.

From September to November, I watch the work roll in. Usually it's submitted anonymously, to my mailbox, with attached codicils bearing instructions for truly appreciating the sweat and blood poured into these pieces. Like, "Teacher: My painting was done after a two-week breakup with my boyfriend, and I would really appreciate it if you'd remember he’s an asshole, please." Or, "Dear adviser: I couldn't come up with a rhyme for 'festering sore' that accurately depicted my feelings about my study hall teacher. Can you suggest anything?" It's communiqués like these that reassure me about the direction the Arts are taking as we Twitter and Facebook our way into the 21st century.

After all of this, truthfully, I don't really do a whole lot. I choose fonts. I decide on the order of the pages. I spend a few days agonizing over where on the page the page numbers should go, and in what font I should supply them. I meet with Lake Park's legal team to make sure we're not vulnerable in the face of any lawsuits over questionable content and poor font choices. I text my colleagues for feedback, and sometimes, I even get it:

ME: I don't really understand the allusion to Ramses in this one poem.
COLLEAGUE: That's just Suzi's style. She's a deep young thinker who's feeling her way towards a higher artistic consciousness.
ME: What are you getting that from?
COLLEAGUE: Dead Poets' Society. It's on TNT right now.
ME: Wicked.

And sometime in May, the presses roll, and the class of 2009 has plenty of lining for their birdcages and litterboxes.

Oh, sometimes there's quite a few ripples upon publication. Debates over symbolism, Dadaism and postmodernism. Occasionally, harsh words, fistfights and the occasional gang rumble do take place. But that's the price you pay for speaking your mind, and I’ve tried to remember that throughout my tenure.

COLLEAGUE: Don't take it so hard. You're doing fine. You're a deep thinker who's...
ME: You were going to say something about an artistic consciousness, weren't you?
COLLEAGUE:...Gotta go.

That said, I can say without a doubt that this year's edition is the best collection of this school's writing and artwork produced and submitted between the months of August and December, 2008, and published the following spring, that you're likely to see in your lifetime. Hopefully, President Obama's stimulus package includes a few bucks for us, so we can finally start our Dead Writers' Centerfolds collection. (First up: Virginia Woolf! Aroooo!) But all of that is looking towards the future, and right now, I'm supposed to be ruminating about the past year.

So, without any further ruminations, here is this year's copy of our pathetic school's excuse for a literary magazine (font: American Typewriter), and you are more than welcome to the wretched thing. I'll see you all in August. Save me a copy of Swank, will you?

Mr. What's-his-Name
Adviser

I am now Trained in Sexual Harassment...

Wait...that didn't come out right. Please don't sue

Every damn year, we educators, we of the coffee breath and glazed up-since-5 a.m. eyes, have to go through online training in communicable diseases and sexual harassment.

The disease training, I really have no problem with. Every now and then, I come into the bathroom to view a kid holding a tissue to his spouting nose (the air is extremely dry in our building), at which point I'm not certain whether I should

a) get him another tissue
b) report the situation to the nurse, to prevent the spread of whatever diseases the little bastard might have
c) ask him if it's a coke problem, and if so, where can I score some

Thankfully, after viewing the Communicable Diseases and You! video, I now know: Drop all belongings and run like hell. But seriously, the Dos and Don'ts of dealing with potentially fatal situations are always helpful, especially when you spend most of your time isolated in the classroom. It's easy to forget this kind of stuff.

But the sexual harassment video...it takes the taco.

The program is on the Internet. A series of slides. Each has a lesson in sexual harassment, accompanied with cartoon people acting out the scenarios and panning words at the bottom, explaining what is and is not acceptable between coworkers. The lessons have audio, too. So that, if you're illiterate, you can't claim you didn't know. You click "Next" when you've absorbed the lesson, move on to the next, and at the end, you take a short quiz you can either pass or fail. And then you're certified.

That easy.

And yet...I struggle with the idea that, if you're seriously perverted enough to need lessons on "When is referring to your own penis socially acceptable," you'll be obedient and compliant enough to sit through a 40-minute visual aid showing how inappropriate touching can be a form of friction ("and we don't mean the good kind!") in the workplace.

No, I'm not kidding. Or exaggerating.

(Well, maybe a little. But damn sure not much.)

Here are some of the snippets I managed to copy down from my extensive forty-minute training, which, presumably, I needed, given the fact that they don't screen teachers enough to weed out oversexed dodos from working in a closed room with the taxpayers' children all day:

"Hector keeps asking Sally out for a date. But Hector needs to learn that Sally is an independent woman, who probably has a life of her own. Even if she doesn't, she still might not want to go out with Hector. Realize that Hector is Putting Himself in a Position." (I presume, not the good kind, right, Seminar Dialogue-Writers? Right? You're fucking-A.)

"If Linda asks her boss for a promotion in exchange for sex, is that sexual harassment?"

"Two co-workers regularly enjoy sharing ribald jokes. Neither is offended. And yet, if Tracy, in the next cubicle, overhears them, they've just crossed the line into Sexual Harassment...and they didn't even know it." (Bum-bum-bummmm!)

"You might be wondering if touching your own genitals is harassment. The answer is yes...if the other party doesn't want to see it." (Other party? Have people been spying on me in the men's room? Because seriously, sometimes a guy's got an itch, you know?)

Of course, being that we've had five months to complete the training, and being that I blew it off until today, the deadline approaching at 3 p.m. and my health supervisor glaring angrily at me from down the hall, I figured I'd doubleteam. Gave my seventh hour a video clip to watch. Then booted up the program. Not realizing that the audio they were using would soon be replaced with my training:

"How can you tell when you've been sexually mishandled by a co-worker?"

The words boomed across the room. Instant hysteria. Achin' pointing and laughing. A chorus of catcalls: "Oh Teacher, you been misbehavin'?" "Sir! Sir! I'm being mishandled right now! Come see!"

I guess I deserved it.

I'm working on my own sexual harassment comic book. When I'm on break, that's when I'll have time for the truly pointless.

Books I Plan to Write

SCHEWL--You come in to do work. You really do. It may not be rip-roaringly important, but by God, you're an educator and you take your duties seriously. How many other assholes out there actually work during vacation? Exactly.

(Besides, I don't get internet at home until next week.)

And then you see what maintenance has done to your room in the meantime:



It's like karma is telling you, "Go out. Get some sunshine. You know, that stuff you never see from August to May? Take a book, take a walk, smell the air. Nothing here can't wait."

Well, I'm strong. I'm tough. I can handle temptation. I settle down to work.

What finally gets me out the door is an administrator leaving for the day. At ten a.m. To go to a ball game. With a smile on his face and no work to take home in his bag.



Screw this. I'm for the movies.