It’s been a while since I last posted.

We did indeed have the Anathallo “Floating World” listening party last Saturday. It lacked organization and publicity, so it was a tad anticlimactic. For instance, had I thought of it sooner, I would have had everyone dress in Japanese garb; their favorite komono, the sumo wrestler suit, etc, and we could have had sushi or hibachi steak for dinner. But no, this was just Wes, Mike, Morgan, Kyle, Erica and I sitting in the living room and listening. Not a whole lot of hype.

That being said, Floating World is pretty dang amazing. It is as ambitious as we all would have hoped. It is full of surprises and is pretty much the most creative music being made right now, and if that isn’t true, it at least draws it’s influences from the most creative music being made right now (ie: Sigur Ros, Sufjan Stevens). There are some things I don’t like and some things I wish were different, but that doesn’t make it any less amazing.

Allow me to share a quick story. Before the listening party, since it was a beautiful 70-some-degree spring day, we decided to play outside. Mark was there and he made up a game that involved sitting on the third step of our porch and tossing rings into masking-tape-subdivided-sections worth different allotments of points. When asked how many rounds we should play, Kyle replied, “Seventeen.” And so, we played seventeen rounds. When I made another small masking tape circle off to the left of the sidewalk worth seventeen points, it seemed only fitting to call the game Seventeen.

Fast forward to round seventeen. Mark is in the lead with 102 points. Kyle couldn’t beat him, Erica couldn’t beat him, and it’s my turn, the second-to-last person. I had 83 points. I needed a 17 and a 3 or a 5 to win. Nobody had scored a 17 the entire game despite several tries. On my first of three tosses, I aimed for the 17 and missed. The pressure was on. On my second toss, I aimed for 17, threw it carefully, and it stuck. I was inside the tape, which bumped my score up to 100 and the everyone was going nuts. It was unbelievable! So, it was my last toss, and I needed a three, which was probably only 4 feet away from our tossing spot. A hush fell over my opponents, all eyes were on me. I checked the wind, I concentrated, I aimed, drew back, and tossed. In typical Shorb-luck fashion, it landed right in the middle of a line. Zero points. Game over.

You probably had to be there.

You know how us young artsy fartsy opinionated Christians have never really liked Thomas Kinkade, the Artist of Light? Looks like now we have all the more reason. Now will the rest of you believe us?

School has been ok lately. I’ve been drained and joyless, doing my best to keep pressing on. There have been plenty of run-ins, some more dramatic than others. I’ll save the stories for real-life conversations.

I don’t know how it happened, because it all happened so quickly, but yesterday the eighth graders somehow squeezed it out of me: I confessed to them that I pluck my unibrow. I told them that information was by no means allowed to leave the room, that it was just between us.

Outside the window of my third and fourth floor classrooms, there is this weird empty space outside that is enclosed by a tall brick wall. From outside, it looks like it’s part of the building. Looking down from ab ove, you can see it’s just an empty space filled with pencils and balls and an occasional dictionary or textbook thrown by mischevious middle schoolers. Today, two girls were looking out the window and asked me what is was for. I said, “I don’t know, it’s just a place for little brats to throw their pencils so they can yell at the teacher ‘MIIIIIIISTEEEEER I DON’T HAVE A PENCIIIIIILLLLL’ simply for the sake of driving him crazy. Seriously, look at all those nice, perfect pencils just wasted down there.” Both of their eyes were wide and fixed on me, and one girl said, “Wooow, teachers know everything! Who tells them this stuff?!” This made me feel very good about myself. I smirked and went back to teaching. (This was not unlike the note in the calculator incident a few months back.)

The other day during lunch:
Language Arts Teacher #1: He said she was skating like a beautiful ballerina!
Language Arts Teacher #2: Hey, at least he used a pretty good metaphor.
Me the Math Teacher: Actually, it was a simile.
Language Arts Teachers #1 and #2: --dirty looks--

Personal day tomorrow, road trip to VA and NC to visit some of Erica’s friends and go to a wedding, and then the PSSA’s come next week. The pressure is on!

Something like 52 or 53 days of school left; but who’s counting?