Eastside love is living on the west end *

My first quarter of Cal State Butthead is officially over, and though I tied one on last night, I have not yet truly begun the weekend-long process of blotting the last 10 weeks from my memory.

My short, short break between quarters (in which all I will do is work 22 hours a week and catch up on freelance work and study for the huge-ass math teacher qualifying test...wait, did I say "break?") has already been excellent, such that I have already recived wisdom of the ages from a stranger at a bar.

Stranger: So you come to this bar a lot?
Me: Not really. I love the bar, but I hate Pasadena.
S: What's wrong with Pasadena?
Me: To make a long story short, I had a friend who lived in Pasadena, and she died, and there was a world of drama.
S: Did she die in this bar?
Me: No.
S: Okay then!

Preach it, stranger. Pasadena will be mine.

Weekend stupidity

Since it's already about 5pm on the east coast, and my psych final doesn't seem to be getting written...

I am late to the party, but I have discovered YouTube. I thought it was just bored teenagers doing karaoke into their webcams, but I was oh, so wrong. It's a much more splendid passel of copyright violation than that!

Some things Rick and I have found this week:
* This fine interpretation of a whiny-ass, mumbled song
* A commercial that just would NOT have gone over in the United States
* Painfully awful, thus totally hilarious, German techno (I know...how could I have moved away with such wonders on the pop charts?)
* At least one episode of the Tick, and surely more when I bother to look. This is what they get for not releasing any of these on DVD.

This is the future, until RIAA shuts it down.

Mo' money, mo' problems

My workplace, and 16 of the other crappiest excuses for high schools in LA, just got some money. Let's see how they waste it.

Here's an example: do you remember what happened in high school when your teacher wanted to show a movie? Okay, yeah, all the kids got all excited because it was so rare. But how the movie physically came to be is that someone from the AV department wheeled an old TV into the room, then came and wheeled it out at the end of class.

Today, in one of the worst-performing schools in LA, in one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country, we're taking care of the important things: a big shiny TV mounted in every classroom.

Are they encouraging teachers to kick back and show movies instead of teaching? Are they keeping our students ADHD and twitchy on purpose? Is it really a good idea when English teachers base as many writing assignments on movies than books?

Two-thirds of the 9th grade class will disappear by senior year, and hardly anyone performs on grade level in either reading or math, don't even ask about science, but hey...at least we've got a TV in every room!

But it almost makes sense, at a school where poor students receiving federal free meals at school somehow have cell phones and iPods. Now children, put your hands on your hearts and say,

"I pledge allegiance to the stuff of the United States of America, and to the corporatism for which it stands, one nation, under Walmart, with credit card debt and car loans for all."