Showing posts with label Hunter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hunter. Show all posts
weekend detritus

This is pure conjecture, not backed up by science of any kind, but I think that if you don't cry at least twice while watching "Toy Story 3," you should check for evidence that your soul hasn't died. Let me be clear that I do not customarily cry at movies (though I also have to divulge that the last time I cried at a movie was during the climactic sled scene in "Elf"...what?) but I cried three times last night while watching "Toy Story 3." Once during the goodbye scene with Andy and his mom (dur), again during the scene where Andy plays with his toys for the last time and Woody says, "So long, pardner," and once during the dumpster scene where Lotso Bear (SPOILER ALERT: he's bad!) yells at Big Baby that Daisy never loved them and the baby says "Mama?" while sticking out his lower lip. Granted, I think that moms with young kids are particularly susceptible to that last one (that's why I said that you had to cry only twice in my soul location criteria), but still, everyone has to at least tear up a little bit at the end, right?

On a possibly related note, Joe and I decided last night that Cal and Mack are not allowed to go to college.

So it got all cold here all of a sudden (actual empiric cold, not just I-live-in-the-South-now cold), which is kind of amazing in that it went in two weeks from this:




to this:




so this week cued the yearly scramble to locate cold-weather clothing for the kids, mostly by trying to decipher the scribbles on our rapidly disintegrating and yet inexplicably everpresent moving boxes. When we lived in New York we'd still go to the playground even on the coldest of winter days, but I have to admit I may be getting soft, I wanted to get back indoors after about an hour today.




(Above: Kenny from "South Park.")

Last week was a busy one at work, and we had a houseguest as well, my friend Veronica from high school. It seems weird to have friends that you've known for the past twenty years of your life (we met when we were twelve--Hunter goes from 7th to 12th grades and it's not very big, so by the time you graduate you and your classmates are basically irrevocably welded to each other for life) but it was nice to see her and talk about old times and new times. It's always good to have friends who knew you when you were an obnoxious greasy teenager but somehow still kind of like you anyway.




Anyway, have a good rest of your weekend, and don't forget to change your clocks. (Lousy farmers.)
brick prison in the news

Fairly amusing piece in The New York Times about kids cramming for the admissions exam to my old high school. Given how hard these kids are studying, I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had to take the test today, I wouldn't get in. (And I don't mean if the 10 year-old me took the exam. I mean even if the 30 year-old me took the exam.) Nonetheless, I feel privileged to have been schooled among such academic titans. I mean, just look at us. Clearly, we were geniuses.




Best line in the article? Though probably only hilarious to those of us to went to high school in New York City?

And what if they were not among the fewer than 200 students who gain seats out of a pool of up to 2,000 test-takers?

“I’ll be sad,” said James Lee, a student at Intermediate School 119 in Glendale, Queens, “but there’s still Stuyvesant.”

Heh.

* (OK, OK...I am the one at the top of the pyramid in the gigantic green T-shirt. I think we were in...eighth grade at the time? What, obscenely oversized isn't cool anymore? Wait...what do you mean, it wasn't ever cool? Thanks to Maria, whose Facebook page I ganked this off of.)