Mixmania Playlist Time, With Asterisks
Today is the day we post our Mystery Theme Mixmania playlists, so here’s mine.
Mixmaniacal Mystery Theme
Disc One
- Love Hurts –
- Love Set Fire – Moxy Fruvous
- Dreaming With Tears in my Eyes – U2
- It Doesn’t Matter – Alison Kraus
- Evaporated – Ben Folds
- Someone Else’s Story – from Chess
- Gollum’s Theme – Emiliana Torrinni
- Picture of the Moon – Gary Moore
- And So It Goes – Billy Joel
- Fly – Moxy Fruvous
- To Make You Feel My Love – Garth Brooks
- My One True Love –
- No Distance Left To Run – Blur
- Regresa A Mi – Il Divo
- When You Love Someone – Bryan Adams
- On My Own – Bernadette Peters
- What’ll I Do – Louden, Rufus, & Martha Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle
- Love Minus Zero – Eliza Gilkyson
- Outro With Bees – Neko Case
- Forgive Me Love (a cappella) – Alanis Morrisette
- Diamonds and Rust – Joan Baez
- If Only It Was So – Elaine Paige
- Smile – Harry Connick, Jr.
- Total Eclipse of the Heart – Bonnie Tyler
- Dance Me To The End of Love – Kate Gibson
- Lee – Moxy Fruvous
- Endlessly – Muse
- Girl in the Tower – from King’s Quest 6
- I Was Made To Love Magic – Nick Drake
- How Can I Not Love – Joy Enriquez
- Haunted Heart – Jane Monheit
- Dream – Michael Buble
- It Hurts So Bad – Susan Tedeschi
- White Flag – Dido
- Not Enough Love – Faithless
- Dream a Little Dream of Me – kd lang and Tony Bennett
- Lullaby – Lester Norton *
- True Love Is Hard To Find – Toots & The Maytals and Bonnie Raitt
* Look closely at # 18: It’s our very own Solonor!! Not only is his blog a really good read, but he is an extremely talented musician and you will probably want to order his cd, because, I’m telling you, he is really, really good. Click over and check him out. He’s very nice and seldom bites people any more. And oh, man, is he ever a wonderful musician.
I got my mix several days ago and it’s fantastic!!!!! I’m telling ya’ll**, sign up for Patriside’s Mixmania over on his blog when he posts the next theme, and you will be glad you did. Lots of free music and the chance to experience the musical tastes of other people.
**I’m tired.
Last night I wrote five midterm exams for five different classes. It took a while. I’m still really tired from the stress. Writing tests is something I actually enjoy, but midterms are big and five of them kind of wore me out. I could have used the book tests but they are not good enough for my students. Plus, the fonts on those book tests are very small, and I think that intimidates the students, besides making them squint. A good test should not be scary-looking or hard to read, and if a student is going to be left with a headache after taking it, it should not be from the effort of just trying to decipher it. So now, next week, my students will be taking midterm exams that are, of necessity, lengthy and detailed, but the questions are now crystal-clear, the choices are not ambiguous, and the content is fair. ***
***”Fair” as in “right and proper,” not “fair” as in “so-so.”
Besides, this semester, most of my students are over 35, and their eyes**** ain’t what they used to be. Neither are mine.
****. . . and not just eyes, either.
Now I’m going to the kitchen to cut up some onions and potatoes and carrots***** and dump them into the pot with the roast beef, which has been cooking for almost two hours and is almost done.
*****Carrots first.
The roast is taking a long time because it was frozen, in case you are wondering. I should have taken it out of the freezer last night but I forgot, because I was busy writing exams.
And I don’t like to thaw big hunks of meat in the microwave because I haven’t figured out how to do it without partially cooking the edges.******
******Translation: crispy and burned.
It’s a cold, cold night: perfect weather for a good boiled dinner. It’s spitting snow. And there’s a full moon, and an eclipse a little later.
Come on over for dinner. We’ve got plenty. And you can watch the eclipse ******from the deck in the back of the house.
******It’s going to be a Shakespeare eclipse; a bloody devoured moon.
A Different Kind of Arithmetic
Okay, I’ve got nothing, so I’m going to quote some more Sam Levinson. I’m telling you all, or “y’all,” depending on how tired I am: This man’s books are wonderful. He was a genuine teacher, in the best sense of the word. He was truly a wise man. Was? Is. He might be gone now, but his essence lingers. I learn something every time I re-read his loverly books.
This piece is from “In One Era and Out the Other.”
In school we learned one kind of arithmetic; at home another. 1 + 1 = 2 was fine with our teacher, but not good enough for Mama. She demanded to know 1 + 1 = 2 what? Mama’s was a method of remedial arithmetic aimed at remedying our poverty by judicious spending. It worked something like this:
1 pair of skates = 12 violin lessons. Cancel out the skates and carry over the lessons. She balanced the equations on her scale of priorities and made sure the needle pointed to our future.
1 phone call = 1 carfare to a museum
4 movies = 1 shirt
1 bicycle = 10 pairs of eyeglasses
5 ice cream sodas = 2 pairs of socks
It was a form of reverse budgeting, planning ahead not only for what not to buy but for buying the instead of, which she could not afford not to own. This kind of juggling, borrowing from our desires to meet our needs, forced minuses to become pluses and liabilities to become assets. She knew the world would never examine her books, but it would examine her children. (She had only one set of these.)
A few paragraphs, a few simple words, an important lesson that many adults today still haven’t learned. And when our adults don’t know how to do Mama’s arithmetic, how can we expect our kids to know how to balance the equations of real life?
First things first. Ice cream will feed the moment, but warm socks and eyeglasses and shirts and museums will feed the soul, and that which feeds the soul lasts forever.
It's Student Email Time Again
Did you ever want to reach through somebody’s monitor and poke them in the eye? Me neither.
The semester is nearly half over. Midterm exams are next week. The students have all had their very own copy of the syllabus, on which are all the official course rules, among other things, since last August. And yet, I still get emails begging for exceptions.
(I’ve removed the student email I had posted here. I just didn’t feel right exposing her to public ridicule, even though she deserved it.)
The gist of the email, though, was that even though she’d missed several classes, she demanded an exception and wanted me to email all of her missed work to her. Plus, her email was badly spelled, completely devoid of good grammar, and demanding.
She didn’t ask, she demanded. And the answer is “no.”
Help me, Rhonda, help me get it out of my head.
There are no make-ups in this class!!!!! (Unless you’ve got a way better excuse than. . . nothing. And when you get all elitist on me)
And when you can’t phrase an email any better than this.
