Things Come Together

Sometimes, good stuff happens in a surprising way. Today, for example:

• Xan, incredible kid that he is, finally figured out that when I turned around in the car and stuck my tongue out at him, that I was playing a game and that he shoould stick his tongue out back at me. (I have been doing this for several days now and each time I did this prior to today, he would shake his head, "Noooo! Idon'twantit!" This actually made me laugh, which is why I kept it up at all.)
• I got an absolutely incredible e-mail from an old student who is currently attending Sundance, thanking me for introducing him to Atom Egoyan in class six years ago, which means that I actually did make a difference to someone's life.
• After reading that, I also got my teaching evaluations from last semester and did pretty well. One class was way higher than I thought it would be; the other would have been the same except I clearly pissed someone off royally. (For every question, 45 people evaluated me in the top two categories and one person gave me the lowest score possible. Whoops.)
• The Oscar nominations are tomorrow morning, which I will show live in class. For once, I have no friggin' clue who will be nominated, much less win -- which actually makes it exciting.
  
• The hiring meeting at work was surprisingly congenial.
• Xan had a good bath day and I was requested to read Kitten's First Full Moon, which is my favorite, too.
• I discovered that I'm a network executive's worst nightmare, due to my lack of TiVo. I had been dreading today, when 24 and Heroes would finally go up against each other, but thought I had solved the problem when Angela started taking a class on Monday nights. Fine, I thought, I'll tape 24 and watch Heroes since she is into the former and not the latter. Except while I was watching Heroes, I kept turning back to 24, even though I was taping it, because I wanted to know. So it appears that I have made a decision anyway about my own TV watching habits and (alas) can dump one. (Sorry, Hiro!)
• Upon going down to our library to find my "marked-up" copy of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I instead come upon a signed copy. I didn't know I had a signed copy. I just sat here staring at it for a moment.

Oh yes, and I finished chapter one of the book. It ain't pretty (yet) but it's out of my system. (The third attempt at writing this chapter seems to have done the trick.) Which means I now have Introduction through Chapter 7. Eight down, one more to go.