What's Next?

With school ending yesterday, everyone wants to know what my next step is, and the kids are no different. As the school day came to a close yesterday, one of the kids - one of my favorites - asked me the question.

"I don't know," I told him.

"What you mean, you don't know?" he asked. He's 6'3", 300 pounds, and everyone who meets him talks about him like he's a Gentle Giant. He wouldn't hurt anybody. His voice is soft and his reasoning is solid, like a grandfather's almost, except he acts and has the same mentality as a child. It's pretty spectacular, actually.

"I don't know," I said again.

"Well, you gotta have a plan. That's what you tell me."

"True. I have some plans."

"Well?"

"Well, I think of it like an adventure. You have to be prepared for an adventure, so I'm getting prepared."

"You sound like you're taking a hike in some woods. Not getting a job."

"Good point."

"So?"

"So, I am sending out resumes - do you know what those are?"

"Ray-zoo-may? Nope."

"Okay, well, it's a piece of paper that tells all about your experience and jobs you've done, so people who might want to hire you can see what you've done."

"You put EVERYTHING you done on one piece of paper? No wonder you can't get a job."

"Okay, umm, it's not quite like that. But I am sending out those pieces of paper to people and I am meeting with people to talk to them about working for them."

"You just talking to them?"

"Sort of."

"You not even talking to them?"

"Some of them."

"So you trying to get a job by just sending out a piece of paper without talking to nobody?"

"It's a little more complicated than that."

"I sure hope so. Otherwise, you not gonna end up with any job."

"True."

"So, why don't you just stay here?"

This is the complicated part of the discussion. Over the past few weeks, as kids have found out that I won't be teaching at their school next year, the questions have begun and it's hard to talk to kids about budget cuts. You don't want them to get any sense of uncertainty. They deal with enough bullshit that in my role, I try to keep things as consistent and stable for them as possible. Not that I would be a great loss to them, but I don't really think it's a good plan to get involved in a discussion about unions, seniority, and deficits.

"Long story," is what I tell him and everyone. "But that's okay."

"I didn't say it WASN'T," he says. Others don't say this. As quickly, anyway.

"Right."

"So what you want to do?"

"I don't know really."

"You don't know much."

"You're telling me."

"I did."

"Right."

"If I could choose, I'd keep you around."

"Thanks."

"Yeah, well, it's not up to me."

"I know, but that was nice of you to say."

"It's just because I think you're too young to retire. You too young to go play Bingo."

"Hmm. So what do you think I should do?"

"I don't know! You spose to know."

"Right."

He sits for a minute. "How bout a doctor?"

"Nah."

"Lawyer?"

"Nah."

He thinks for another minute. "I got it! You used to make cookies. I hear they was pretty good. Now I wouldn't KNOW because you never baked those for us. Some kids said it was cause you don't eat junk food, but that's a crock because I saw you sneaking Hershey's lots of times."

I look up.

"You did!"

"Fair enough."

"Why don't you bake us cookies? You can sell them in the cafeteria because the food they sell is disgusting. They whacked out down there. You could bake us cookies and sell us them."

"Interesting idea."

"Sell them for fifty cents, except me. I get to pay a discount cause I gave you the idea, but you could make a killing everyday. What you think? Bake cookies for a living?"

I think about it for a minute. "That might be fun."

"It ain't spose to be FUN. It's spose to be WORK." He shakes his head. "Man, you got the wrong attitude about this whole thing! Plus you just sendin ray-zoos-whatevers to people you don't even TALK to. And now you tell me you hoping to get a FUN job? You think work is suppose to be fun?! No. Even I know that! You think teaching been FUN?"

And it hit me then, as I looked around the room and back at him, that it had been fun.

"It has been," I tell him. "It has been."

Sex and the City

So, I saw the movie yesterday, along with approximately fifty million single women. I was thinking about this phenomenon last week, and I told a few guys I met that they should go to a bar close to a movie theater this weekend. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Everyone knew that every single female would be seeing this movie, and everyone knew that most of them would be dressed up trying to look as chic as possible (of course, I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers, and I'm almost positive I saw a few horrified glances as I joined the line to wait for the movie). So I could rant for a while about the audience at the theater, because there were certainly some high-level freaks (one chick was having an emotional breakdown in the women's room before the movie because she had waited in the line for popcorn not the movie line and now was worried that her perfect plan to see the movie had been ruined. Seriously. I was afraid to ask her to step aside so I could get a paper towel) but that's not really the point. The real problem I had with the movie was that it sucked.

If you haven't seen it, stop reading. Actually, if you haven't seen it, don't see it, and you can keep reading.

Here's the thing about why I liked the TV show so much: you could relate to the characters. I'm not saying you were one of the freaks who thought she was Carrie (I hate those girls. A lot.), but in general, they had issues on the show that you could identify with. It was like they had the same problems as everyone else, except they got to have cool clothes to wear while having them and go to fun places to discuss them. That was where the "fantasy" part of it all came in. But in the movie, everything's a fantasy and there's absolutely not real base to it.

My biggest problem is with Carrie. When she and Big don't get married, she is obviously wrecked. But it must be nice to be able to arrange for your three best friends to be able to come with you to your five-star resort, secluded honeymoon. And it must be nice to be able to have your old apartment miraculously available to be bought back (punctuated with an ungrateful "So you could go back home.. just for a higher price" voiceover), to have all of your belongings that you boxed up brought back to your apartment without you having to make so much as a phone call. When Carrie gets back to New York, she opens the door of her apartment and sees all her boxes, piled up in front of her. It's really depressing, and in that moment in the movie, I felt bad for her. You know, I could identify with that: there's the physical reminder of what you now have to deal with. Only, Carrie doesn't. She instead hires a personal assistant, who comes in and unpacks everything for her while Carrie mopes around. This really was the problem. See, a real person would have to unpack every box, and she'd have to unpack every box in a new apartment that wasn't her old one (and that's a huge hurdle itself!), and she could have her friends come and help her when they're off work, but for the most part, she'd be responsible for doing it. And she would have to deal with the invitations and emails and phone calls that come after her cancelled wedding. She never has to talk to anyone about it. She never has an awkward interaction, except for a waiter at the hotel who calls her by her married name. Oooh, ouch. I mean, what about the pain of sending back all those gifts? What about when you run into a guest and they try to make small talk? Those are the things that actually happen, but not to Carrie.

In big break-ups and when big bad things happen, dealing with the tangible problems and practical consequences can be as tough as the emotional ones, but Carrie has none of that. I'll accept that when the ladies show up to help Carrie move before the break-up that they're all wearing dresses and heels. I'll accept that Carrie gets to pose in a Vogue photo shoot and that the designer herself sends Carrie her one-of-a-kind wedding dress. That's just taking the original "fantasy" of the show to the big screen level. I get that. But what I don't get - and quite frankly, won't accept as the moviegoer - is the fantasy of how Carrie gets to deal with her problems, because that takes away the core of the show and the core of the character, which is what everyone liked in the first place (well, at least me).

You'd think that with all of these practical issues taken care of, they could focus on how Carrie fixes her broken heart, but no. There's absolutely no real dialogue in the movie between any of the friends, except for a few frantic one-liners or a couple question and answer sessions that don't give any depth or meaning to their subjects. Those diner scenes that made the show so good, when all four of them seemed like true friends who talked about everything? There's one scene.

When Miranda leaves Steve, there are some good opportunities for discussion in the film about transgression and forgiveness. They almost hit on it at the very end, when Miranda realizes that she might have done as much to break the vows as Steve did, but they never talk about it. It's just a voiceover that tells us Miranda realized it, and we've been left out of seeing Miranda talk it out. Samantha realizing that she doesn't like Los Angeles and wants to come back to New York could have been an interesting subject line because it shows a woman choosing herself and her life alone over the conventional life with a guy, even though he's great. And yet, they don't go anywhere with that. They don't go anywhere with Carrie's new assistant who came to New York to find love, and she goes back to St. Louis and the boy who broke her heart shows up at a party and sees her and I guess instantly realizes he made a mistake. (I can't help but wonder, how many women booked flights to distant cities in hopes that if they return in three months with a Louis Vuitton bag that their current crush will do the same?) And Charlotte is just so blissfully happy it makes you want to throw up. The woman has absolutely no problems and while her hatred for Big is amusing, there's no depth to it. I keep saying that: there was no depth. But it's true. There was none, in any of the movie.

I could go on, but what's the point? This movie was lame.