Pao Gasol sprained his ankle 3 minutes into the most important road trip of the year.

Mbah a Moute sprained his as well, and Kevin Love hurt his back with the NCAA Tourney starting in a week.



God must've put an L.A. hater upstairs in charge of the basketball universe.

One of the most difficult things about teaching at the high school level is that you're working primarily with kids who don't always think about the things that come out of their mouth.

. . . .

[yeah, that's both incredibly over-generic and overly-obvious...]

As one of my colleagues puts it: "Teaching is an incredibly easy job... IF you don't care about your kids."

The past two weeks have been the most trying of my [short] career, and without getting into specifics [which I can't]... it's difficult when a struggling student accuses you of *not* caring.

The concept is quite simple, and I'm sure parents deal with it in a way that is infinitely more difficult than what I face as a teacher:

When a kid asks for something that they want (but don't necessarily "deserve") but don't get it, the kid will sometimes twist the denial into a "you don't care about me!!!" type of scenario... when oftentimes, it's quite the opposite (even though it may be far from obvious to the child).

The simplicity of the idea makes it easy to understand... but incredibly difficult to deal with when you're the one accused to being "unfair" or "uncaring".

Some of the things that we, as teachers, have to internalize are just unbelievable. The verbal abuse that we can get from ALL over, and then to be expected to turn around 30 seconds later and put on a happy face for 30 teenagers and TEACH... that is one thing I haven't quite figured out yet. Just today I totally copped out on my 4th period... fortunately it was a 30 minute shortened period (thanks to TAKS) so I doubt they noticed much.

Luckily... Spring Break is just around the corner. Retreat, food, family, and more food. Oh and sleep. Lots of sleep. Sleep, come hither~

The only thing I can compare this to is the 2004 Lakers team (Shaq Kobe Payton Malone) that tore through the season then fell short on the final step.  The drama/controversy (Kobe's rape trial/Spygate) might've just caught up with them.

Whatever.  The good guys won. 


SOOOOOO glad that I recorded the 2nd half =)

holy cow...

Federer lost =(

movie night extinction

I brought my PS3 over to James Wang's place today to check out the 1080p goodness on his 56-inch DLP, and we decided to go rent a Blu-Ray movie to watch.  The movie that all of us (his roommates included) REALLY wanted to see?

Resident Evil Extinction.

So we went to the Blockbuster on Wells Branch... their one copy was rented out.

Then we checked the Blockbuster on Parmer and Mopac.  They were out of it too.

So we regrouped in James' living room to discuss our options.  We REALLY wanted to watch something in Blu-Ray... so we bit the bullet and said:  Let's go to Walmart or Target and just buy the friggin movie. 

(Who cares if it costs $30, you only live once, right?  By this point we'd already wasted an hour searching for the movie...)

So we hit Target first, since they listed it at $27... but guess what?  They were sold out.

Our last resort was across the street at Walmart.  Surely the evil Warmart empire wouldn't be sold out, would they?

(interestingly, the last time I stepped foot into that Walmart was when I waited in line this past January for a Wii and got shafted by the person in front of me)

Walmart was sold out as well.

To recap:  Resident Evil Extinction was gone at TWO Blockbusters, Target, AND Walmart. 

Un-frikin-believable.

So instead of enjoying the last episode of the RE Trilogy, I'm blogging about this evening's misery.  UGH!