1. First full week of teaching. I feel like I’m starting to find my feet and it’s becoming less stressful and uncertain.

2. I’m still waiting for Alice in Wonderland to arrive, so my sixth graders are reading short stories while I pretend this was the plan all along. This week was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which was a big hit, even if a substantial number of students were initially under the impression that a ‘mongoose’ was a kind of bird.

3. I’ll be honest, there is something satisfying about seeing a bloated, stupid blockbuster crash and burn: Borderlands currently has a world-wide box office of about $23 million dollars on an estimated budget of $110 million. Meaning it’s earned less than 1/10th of what it would need to break even. I’ll admit, all I know of the franchise is vague memories of a friend telling me about it, but judging by my knowledge of Hollywood and the little I’ve been able to learn (e.g. “let’s cast the 55-year-old Shakespearean actress as the young sassy heroine in a Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off”), I have no reason to think this massive failure is anything but deserved.

4. From the ridiculous to the sublime, movie night last week was Kiki’s Delivery Service, Miyazaki’s delightful coming of age story about a young witch setting out to make her own way in the world for the first time. With few magical skills beyond flying, she ends up starting a delivery service out of a bakery, airlifting packages around on her broom. The film is very light on plot and is mostly just about her experience in facing the frustrations and challenges of adult life for the first time.

You probably don’t need me to tell you how good this film is; it’s an animation classic. The film’s wonderfully imaginative, easy-going, and bursting with rich character. Like how, at one point, Kiki stops by an old lady’s house for a job and checks her broom with the elderly maid. A few seconds later, the maid is in the hall pretending to ride the broom, complete with sound effects. Or how the strapping husband of the baker who gives Kiki a place to stay has maybe one line in the whole film. I also love the little details like Kiki fumbling with her notebook on her first job; things that anyone who has tried to be professional without really knowing how will recognize.

5. There’s also the perceptiveness of Kiki’s crisis in the third act, how she has her confident expectations checked by the reality of servicing the public (most of her delivery recipients are jerks) and finds that flying stops being fun once she does it for a living. And then, once it stops being fun, she soon stops being able to do it at all, much to her panic (which, of course, only makes things worse). I really love the character development on Kiki, who starts out eager and cheerful, but a little self-absorbed and stand-offish and has to go through a kind of dark night of the soul before emerging as a more mature, complete individual.

And her cat is a scream (“If you find a white cat in here tomorrow, it’s me.”).

6. Needless to say, the animation is gorgeous, especially the big climactic take-off at the end and the amazing flying scenes. The story’s set in a European-style city that was based off of Stockholm and some other Swedish cities, making for some truly gorgeous backgrounds (most of which are based on real locations, to the point where you can actually go visit the bakery where Kiki lives).

7. I stumbled across this documentary from 1980 about personal computers. There are a lot of overlong bits of old computer animations accompanied by those soothing early computer sounds that seem to be striving for the effect of someone jabbing a screwdriver into your ear, but it’s pretty fascinating to get a look at the state of home computing back in its earliest days. I was surprised to find that there was even an embryonic version of the internet available at the time.

I’m not sure if its amusing or depressing that the interviewees actually underestimated how big an effect computers were going to have on society.