The Truth About Cats and Dogs

The other morning as I sat with my cup of coffee and checked my email, I turned on the t.v. It's a reflex that I try to break, but I don't try very hard.

In the old place, I'd listen to NPR on the radio, but we have a different stereo system in the new house and the little radio we have only gets the public radio from WNIJ, which is the Northern Illinois University public radio station. Now, there's nothing wrong with WNIJ, but it's no WBEZ, and that's the truth. There's no Lisa Labuz. There's no Morning Shift, which I had really come to enjoy; there's not even a traffic report, because who cares about traffic in Dekalb? No one.

Now, you might ask why I would care about a Chicago traffic report when my commute is three miles down a two-lane highway through cornfields. Well, because, nostalgia, that's why.

So, when I flipped through the t.v. channels and landed on the '90s movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs, I stopped. It was the perfect thing to have on while I did the zombie task of filing and deleting the previous day's emails: pleasant enough not to irritate me, and mindless enough not to distract me.

A dog on roller skates? I'm in.

But even as it was on in the background, I couldn't help paying attention to a number of things that made the soft spot in my heart--the spot reserved for the decade during which I graduated from junior high, high school, and college--warm like a puddle of pudding in the sunlight. Here are five of those things.

1. Phones. The characters in the movie, played by Janeane Garofalo, Uma Thurman, and a Random British Guy (RBG), talk a lot on phones. Talk is the key word in that sentence. They have big soul searching conversations; there's phone sex (it's weird and shot in soft focus, but at least it doesn't involve sexting...); and Thurman uses a number of payphones to leave messages on Garofalo's answering machine.
2. Book Stores. There's a scene in a book store, and this made me realize that there are a lot of '90s movies, rom-coms especially, that have scenes in book stores. It's something that will likely not happen a lot any more, and this makes me sad. Even though the store is a prop, just scenery, it is always nice to think that people in '90s movies spent time in book stores.
3. Smoking. Now, I am not a fan of smoking--it's a nasty habit that is not cool, no matter what these goofy teenagers today think. But it's such a throwback to see Thurman smoking, not because it's some part of her character, but because it was 1996 and that was what people in movies did.
4. Poo Shoes. A woman calling in to the radio program Garofalo hosts uses the term "poo shoes." This doesn't make me nostalgic; it just makes me giggle because it's something that I sometimes call Roo. And it's silly.
5. Hank. The RBG has a great dane and the dog's name is Hank, which is basically Henry. And, really, the dog is a lot cuter than the guy. A lot. Also, that's the dog's real name: according to the credits, he is Hank the Dog.

I finished watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs, not because it's a good movie (it's not) or because I'm a huge Uma Thurman fan (she's okay) or because they play a Suzanne Vega song in the scene where Thurman has a dessert orgasm while being fed a piece of cake by the RBG (I do like Suzanne Vega). It's because it made me feel sweet and sappy inside for that time in my life, that time when people talked on large cordless phones and the Internet wasn't a thing and movie soundtracks were popular and so was Janeane Garofalo. That time when I was a teenager. And sometimes, when it comes to watching t.v. at 7:30 in the morning, that's enough.

I Have Learned These Things Today

I Love Pomodori

A couple weeks ago I took a workshop at school led by one of our amazing philosophy instructors, Timothy. The topic of the workshop was "Get Things Done," and one of the time/life management techniques that Timothy talked about was the Pomodoro Technique. The technique asks you to divide your working time into twenty-five minute boxes, separated by short breaks. These timed chunks of work allow you to focus completely on just one task and are easy to squeeze into a bit of time between meetings or stack up into a longer period if you have a few hours to work on a project. I tried my first pomodoro today and loved it so much that I did four more. I kept track with hash marks inside of a little tomato I drew on my calendar.


Fake Cake is Delicious

Last Wednesday I baked a cake for a class end-of-semester pizza party. Ever since my Easter lamb cake experiment, I've been bitten with the cake-making bug, and I used this party as an excuse to bake the students a POGAC cake. What's a POGAC? Well, it's a monster who loves pogo sticks, and it's also a way to help students remember the rhetorical situation (purpose, occasion, genre, audience, and context). Here's the actual cake:

Where's my pogo stick? Where are my arms?

But, as with the lamb cake, I sawed off the tops of the cakes to put them together and was left with two perfectly good and perfectly useless cake tops. So I plopped them together and I've been snacking on them every since. They're not really cake, so the slices are okay to eat for breakfast. It's fake cake. But it's still delicious.

Um, why is it still delicious? Because it's CAKE. Jesus.

Don't Use Pureed Spinach in Your Quiche

Tonight I made a quiche for dinner and I added some prepackaged pureed spinach along with diced tomatoes. I'd picked up the spinach on a whim last time I was at the grocery store and used one of the pouches in a fruit smoothie. The smoothie turned out well, so I figured, "why not use it in this delicious quiche?" I SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THIS.

Now, let's be clear: the quiche tasted very good. But the puree turned the whole egg, milk, and cheese mixture a dark brownish green, and because of the extra liquid, it was also a bit runny. So, imagine eating a quiche that was a runny, dark brownish green. Oh, you didn't want that image in your head? TOO BAD; THAT'S WHAT WE HAD FOR DINNER. I did not take a picture. You're welcome.


I Choose the Day's Outfit Based on Last Night's T.V. Shows

Frequently I get sartorial inspiration from whatever show it is I'm watching before going to bed. It's clothing that keeps me watching some shows, like Melissa & Joey, that are not good, but terribly fun to watch because of the actors' clothing. Now, this works well on a weeknight when I'm swooning over Melissa Joan Hart's fantastic, color splashed dresses and ridiculous heels (swoon), or one of Stana Katic's many splendiforous jackets, coats, or blazers (double swoon). But it doesn't work so well when we're watching GOT and I'm doing a super-swoon over Daenerys Targaryen's neck-piece. Luckily, tonight was a Castle night, and I am inspired by simple denim. Thank you, Kate Beckett.

Flowers are Pretty,

Aren't they?

and

Gnomes Like to Read

And they hang out in our backyard. Trevor wants to spray to get rid of them.

All Teachers Should Watch Cops

Okay, other than it's obvious I watch too much television (this is not a surprise), I also learned that a female police officer in San Antonio gave the perfect response to a man's grotesquely misogynistic comments after his wife took their baby and walked out on him: she said, Well, sir, we can't solve the world's problems tonight, so I'm going to make sure everything here is okay and then I'm on my way. Good night. And she was so calm, so serene, when I'm sure she wanted to beat his ass bloody after he said that women need to be taught to submit to their men. But she didn't. And of course, she was right, because she is a professional.

Luckily, this kind of appalling rhetoric doesn't rear its ugly head in my classroom, but I occasionally get a student with an out-of-left-field remark that needs to be addressed. And now, thanks to Cops, I have the perfect reply. No, we can't solve the world's problems right now, but we can talk about run-on sentences and make sure that we never, ever write them again. Good night.

So what did you learn today?