becoming a better blogger

it has come to my attention that i am a bad, naughty blogger. my apologies for being neglectful of my blog duties. i tend to A) forget that i have a blog and B) think that no one reads it anyway... well, clearly i am mistaken, at least on point B. i'll start taking a gingko biloba supplement for point A!

school's out for summer (insert 80s guitar solo here) so i am, contentedly, doing a lot of nothing. the end of the school year was a little chaotic - my teaching assignment for next year is just about completely different than anything i've done before. this is a good thing. a much needed thing. i get to play with the big kids now! 11th grade music and english, along with 7th grade and 8th grade choruses. the only thing i've done before? 7th grade chorus. eep! actually, that reminds me... i should start brushing up on my british lit!

i'm really quite excited about the change, actually. the last couple of years had started to become more than a little disheartening, feeling like i was heading towards bigger and better things only to end up teaching the same thing again. it's not that i didn't like what i was teaching, but i never intended to teach at a middle school level, so to be doing that for 5 years was, well, a bit too long. now i get to stretch my intellectual legs with british literature and music history, and i am thrilled. yay for finally feeling accomplished in my career!

~~note: if you are not a book geek, you can skip this paragraph~~
lately i've been reading quite a bit. i jumped in on a small book club with a few of my coworkers, which i think has been really great for my reading habits. i do love reading, i just hadn't felt motivated to really get into it in a while. we read life of pi by Yann Martel, which was a strange book. i did enjoy it a lot, but in the end, it's a head-scratcher. in a good way. then we read Cormac McCarthy's The Road which was just truly and utterly depressing. it's the only book i think i've ever read that i can only describe as "grey". our most recent read, which we're meeting for sometime in july (i think? i should email erin...) was written by Khaled Hosseini. he wrote The Kite Runner which I had read previously, and we chose another of his, A Thousand Splendid Suns. i read it in one day. i could NOT stop reading it. it was brutal at times, but his voice is truly intoxicating and it just draws you into his narratives. i can't wait for the meeting for this book! aside from the book club, i've also been reading the new David Sedaris and a book my mom got me for Christmas that's a new translation of the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. it's a side-by-side text, Old English on the left, new verse on the right. i am enjoying it but i can't read a lot of it at once.

i celebrated the 4th of july in brooklyn, with Nick, my cousin Michael and a few of his friends. i have never seen the macy's fireworks anywhere except on TV... well, we watched them from Nick's roof in Brooklyn Heights! it was awesome. i'll leave this entry with a few of my better shots from the fireworks display... despite the rainy weather, the show was still amazing!

and i promise, i'll try to update again soon ;)