Like Old Times

The other day at work I was approached by a second grader named Terrell. Terrell has some respect issues, and some anger issues, but we're working on it.
One of the areas where he gets in trouble sometimes is the football field. He loves football, and he's good at it, but he's working on the whole sportsmanship thing. He gets frustrated easily, which leads to yelling, obscenity, pushing and shoving, general fighting. He has, however, made progress since he enrolled, and I have hopes for him to one day go through an afternoon on the playground without sitting in time out.
For whatever reason, Terrell likes me. At first I couldn't believe this. I am constantly putting him in time out or lecturing him, but still he seeks me out on the playground. He gets excited when I throw the ball to him. If I make a joke, he slaps me on the back and laughs and goes, "Yeah Mr. E! HA! Good one!" This is a little awkward, but cool.
The other day I was explaining to him why I couldn't go get the football from the other side of the fence for the second time in one day, when we had the following interaction.
"You know, Mr. E., you kind of talk like old times."
"What do you mean?" I asked him.
So he repeated what I had said to him just a minute before, annunciating absurdly for effect--a black person trying to sound like a goofy white nerd.
"'Are - You - All - Right? What - Is - The - Matter?' See, like old times."

A Comment on the movie Big.

It's finals week, and I am almost finished with the semester. I have one exam left, so in keeping with tradition, I am watching movies on cable to prepare for it. I was enjoying this a lot, until a moment ago. I was preparing some spaghetti for my lunch (I'm loading up on carbs to get ready for this half-marathon I'm running this weekend) when I heard some tinkly, ultra-sensitive sounding, new-age style piano music coming the television. I knew without looking what it was. It was the scene in Big where the ten-year-old boy in a man's body has sex with a grown woman.
How the hell did that ever get into a mainstream Hollywood movie? And in such a particularly creepy way. There's no real evidence that the makers of the movie really considered the weight of that particular plot point. He's ten. He has sex with a thirty-ish business woman. Do you know what kind of therapy they both would need after that? Jesus Christ. That scene at the end of the movie, where Elizabeth Perkins looks wistfully down the street as the ten year old she's been banging goes back to his mom's house? How is she not tearing her hair out at that point? She accidentally fucked a little boy. And instead of being horrified, the audience is supposed to be sad that it didn't work out for them to be together. Gross and weird.

Outage

Monday I was sitting in my apartment doing homework, and I heard a small explosion outside, immediately after which the lights went out. I knew what had happened- there is a transformer close by, and squirrels have been climbing into it and causing it it to blow. It usually takes a few hours for the power company to come out and set everything right again.
I couldn't finish my school work in the dark, so I got dressed for work in the dark and decided to head in early. Going down the stairs to leave, I ran into two maintenance men with flashlights talking to my downstairs neighbor (This is the old woman who yells to her cat Rusty at all hours. 12:30 am: "RUUUUUUUSSSSSTTTTTYYY! RUSTY! RUSTY GET IN HERE.")
"Squirrel blew the transformer again?" I asked.
"Yeah, you got it," said the first maintenance guy.
"Yes, but it didn't kill him!" said the old woman.
The first maintenance man looked at his feet. The other shook his head and mouthed the word "Dead."
"That's wonderful," I said, and headed to work.
"That's wonderful," is something I say to kids a lot. "That's wonderful," and it's counterpart, "I'm sorry to hear that," are what you say when presented with a situation you don't know how to respond to. A kid holds up a picture of blue and black scribbling that she is obviously proud of? "That's wonderful!" A kid comes to tell you that Brian is going down the slide backwards, and you don't feel like going into an explanation of tattling and why it's a bad idea? "I'm sorry to hear that." A crazy old woman who loves animals a little bit too much mistakenly believes that a squirrel survived electrocution by a transformer? "That's wonderful!"