This has been an incredibly eventful week...

... which is mostly why I haven't posted. It's also why my nap-before-dinner turned into 5+ hours of mostly-restful slumber, interrupted by a dream in which I am in my Dad's old mechanical drawing classroom with a class so large that I have to put some of them out at the tables in the woodshop area, trying to instruct them on creating lions on pieces of corrugated cardboard using cotton puffs for the body, yarn for the mane, spaghetti sticks for legs, and... I don't remember what for the face. At first we had to use rubber cement, and one student figured out how to make a reeeally thin puddle of it and let it partially dry and then you could use it like a sheet of laminating film and cover the whole square of cardboard with it... Then someone found the Elmer's. Finally I woke up because I couldn't breathe (I've been incredibly congested all week and I'd been asleep so long my four-hour meds were completely useless).

So. Backstory for this post is that I used a graphic novel version of The Iliad, called The Trojan Horse, to introduce The Odyssey. Anyway, last week, one of my first block students asked me if I liked comic books, and I told him I did. So he brought me this whole stack of Spiderman books, plus one from the Death of Superman run - it was the one RIGHT BEFORE the one in which he gets killed, which kind of made me grin. My planning period is second block, and needless to say I did NOT get caught up on my grading that day. ;)

Anyway, this week I brought in a few picks from my collection, and I started him out on Nightwing: Year One. Nightwing's probably the character from the DC universe who's most similar to Spiderman over at Marvel - high-flying recklessness and a good dash of wit, but deeply grounded in the "real world," at least as far as anything can be said about that for comic-book characters! So I figured he'd like it.

Nightwing is also my favorite comic book character, and possibly my favorite created character ever. (Sorry, Bill1 and Bill2.) I actually had a crush on the character when I was younger. So I really, really wanted the student to like the story! *laugh*

Well, fortunately, I happened in this case to be an excellent judge of taste. I think he might've rushed through his classwork a bit, but he finished the book today and he really seemed to like it. We talked a little bit about the character, and how he fits in with other well-known characters, and TBH it was kind of frustrating, because I wasn't comfortable sharing certain other stories, such as this one, that are fun to read and show remarkable character insight and are just... GOOD... but not appropriate (IMO) for a teacher to share with a student.

All of this is a long-winded way to sort of reflect, regretfully, that I don't really have anyone right now with whom I can share my deep-seated love of the Bat-clan and my frustration at some of the moronic character interpretations I've seen. (Robin dating Spoiler? You have GOT to be kidding me! And that whole baby thing was just ridiculous. Oh, and let's not forget - WHY does Oracle have well-muscled legs?)

Maybe I should just go write some fanfic.