En un clin d'oeil

Day two of the new job. There was a bit more activity today, but not much. I'm still trying to get accustomed to how things are done around here. Another new-ish member of my team and I had a meet and greet with all the kindergarteners. I hung out in a K room for the morning (another guy's room; this school has plenty of male teachers) and helped with the carpool (I opened the car doors and, occasionally, lifted the littler ones into their parents' enormous SUVs). And I was in a pre-K room for almost an hour, half of which was spent watching them lie on mats.

...Gee, I think that's all I did today. I was meant to meet with the vice-head, but because she was so busy we rescheduled. She did give me a packet of forms entitled "Goals for the Year" which asks new teachers to write self-assessments and keep journals and talk about goal strategies, and so seems exactly like the kind of thing I find utterly unimportant. I'll have to try to keep my cynical unenthusiasm down to undetectable levels.

After work, using my contacts in the film industry (note: I have no contacts in the film industry), I went to the critics' screening of the movie The Diving Bell and Butterfly. I was already passably familiar with the original source material, the titular autobiography of the editor of French Elle who succumbed out of the blue to a devastating stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome and dictated a book by blinking it letter by painstaking letter, since a single eye was the only part of his body he had control over afterwards. (And he died ten days after he published his story.)

The movie was meant to star Johnny Depp, but he backed out do he could get a jillion dollars to make another crappy-ass pirate movie. I'm glad he did, though I've lost what little respect I had for him as a down-to-earth actor who cares about craft. The film that exists now is in French and it is devastating. It's superbly cut, brilliantly realized, and absolutely the most harrowing and depressing thing I have ever seen on screen.

When a man who was once vibrant and young and healthy and respected and loved is reduced to an eye and a brain trapped in a mass of useless flesh says he has to stop feeling sorry for himself because he still has his imagination, well... It's time to try harder to get the most out of every last little scrap of life you can.

Before it is too motherfucking late.