moments to remember as your head is pounding from stress and other people's ineptitude, as you grade 90 essays, and as you sit in the torturously long faculty meeting on friday afternoon while dreaming about the new pumpkin-flavored blizzard at dairy queen...

- when you demonstrate a minilesson on allusion (using nas, eminem, and the matrix as your center of discussion) for your department, and one of the other teachers says that it was "awesome"
- when one of your former students shows you the essay she wrote about the most influential person in her life... in which she describes you as intelligent, caring, and patient - and then shows her audience that you are each of those things through example after example... and you know she loves you because of the way she describes you
- when the boy you're with instinctively curls up against you in his sleep as you roll over during the night
- when you drive through the delta at sundown and watch the shadows build against the cotton fields from the trees that line them and the glow from the setting sun reflect off the water in the bayou along the highway
- when you laugh with your friends around a table at ajax in oxford... eating southern cooking, listening to accents thick with history and conflict, talking about your students' antics for the week
- when you sit at the kitchen table in your parents' home, breathing in the scent of warm pumpkin pie while your mother wishes that it was christmas eve so that she could watch the black-and-white version of her favorite christmas movie in the living room before heading to the midnight service at the church downtown


yep, it's getting closer to the holidays. life is good, despite the title (and the administration and the crazy-ish children).

has anybody planned a halloween party yet? are we really going without during our last all-together year???