Each year, my wife and I carve pumpkins with our friends Mariah, Chris, and Heidi. This pumpkin is one my brother Dave grew in his garden this summer. A pretty good looking squash, I'd say.
 

Let the carving begin...oh, no, I see. It's been going on for some time now. Chris looks like he's nearly done making us all look like pumpkin amateurs.

All of our October 2004 pumpkins. From left: Chris' mouse maze, Heidi's prisoner (pumpkin within a pumpkin), Mariah's Nessie, Mara's Pac-man, Matt's The Coreys, and Matt's bats. 

Mara's Pac-man and my two somewhat "challenged" pumpkins. 

Time is not on my side

I never thought it would happen to me, but it has. I've become one of those adults who never has time for anything. It really bites. I feel like all I ever do is work and try to keep the rest of my family happy.

And to think I swore I'd never become this person!

What's worse is that it stresses me out terribly. I have back problems already, but I really feel like they're getting worse because of the stress on me. I love my job. I love my family. I love my friends. But honestly, I just want some time to myself. I would kill for an uninterrupted week for only me. Hell, even a couple of days.

Saturday, I went out to pick up a few things at Target and instead of going right back home, I drove to a Half Price Books store in Fridley, far, far away. Did it help? A little. But I discovered that the longer I was there, the more I thought about all the things I should have been doing at home: cleaning the house for our dinner company, starting dinner, correcting papers, calling my mother about her current knee problem, getting my car washed which hasn't been done in about six months, getting the oil changed (much more recent, FYI), doing my laundry, looking up info for my 9th grade students, choosing a non-offensive yet entertaining movie for a final in Advanced Mythology...AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

The list goes on and on. And sometimes I wish for something that will make it impossible for me to live up to it all. About three weeks ago, I really threw out my back. I had to call in to work for two days in a row. Not to mention, I couldn't go to my father's to help him out with his shower, laundry, and miscellany. All I really could do was lie around and watch TV. My God, but that was nice. I felt totally relaxed by the next day. Then the horror that is the weekend took hold. Responsibilities to everyone except myself. And then Monday, back to school, back to the piles of papers, and lists of emails, and blah, blah, blah.

Sometimes I really feel like it has to stop. Sometimes I feel like I'll go crazy. I have only one night of the work week for relaxing. Tuesday. That's it. That's all. I miss the nights I could come home and take a nap, then watch TV, then read a little, knowing that if I needed to do my work the following night it would be okay. Those days are gone. And so is most of my sanity.

Advanced Myth Final

Each trimester, I have my students in Advanced Mythology apply what they've learned about archetypes to a movie. They need to explain the hero cycle in the movie--which event correlate to the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, the trials, etc. They also need to choose four male or female archetypes and explain how characters in the movie fit and deviate from the aspects of the archetype.

For a while I use Shrek. Easy. Enjoyable. But now, everyone seems to have seen it too many times. And more importantly,I have grown bored with it. So I switched to Guy Pearce's version of The Time Machine, and I have been showing that for the past year and a half. Now I am sick of that, too. I was surfing amazon and looking for another action/adventure/sci-fi/fantasy movie that I could show, but none of them seem quite right.

I'm considering Minority Report. Though it's rated PG-13, I still think the content is questionable. The same is true for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I'm also thinking about. For a few insane moments, I thought about Van Helsing, but that is so close to an R rating in my opinion, I don't think I would be willing to show it. I think the best contender right now is Pirates of the Caribbean, but I don't know that I want to use something so popular.

I had my mind made up in August that I was going to use The Italian Job, but my wife pointed out to me that it does not contain all of the parts of the hero cycle. And while I don't expect students to find all the parts, I do want the movie to contain the majority of them.

Who knows what I'll use.