Vegas, various

I'm going to my cousin's wedding in Las Vegas. I'll be at the celebration for most of the weekend, but I'll have a little down time, so anyone looking to marry me in one of those drive-by, Elvis-impersonator weddings (for the record, no, my cousin's is not of that variety), holler. As a soon-to-be grad student, I'm not really in a position to get a taste for gambling, and as a straight woman, I'm not all that intrigued by the brothels.

I'm currently waiting for my super to come by and install the air conditioner, which I've grown so used to seeing at the center of my bedroom that I've begun to think of it as a rug or perhaps a very inert pet.... OK, that was when I began writing this post. The monstrosity is now properly installed, my room is amazingly cold, and my electric bill will be incredibly high. Hurray!

"History Boys" was excellent. It rings true even if your high school was not filled with gorgeous British boys who periodically remove their pants during class. The oh-so-sympathetic veteran teacher who discourages his most promising students from trying to get into top universities certainly seemed familiar--I never understood what such teachers were getting at, seeing as it's a largely immigrant, public high school, and a major channel of social mobility would have been destroyed if they succeeded. Even some of the most eccentric, learning-for-learning's-sake teachers, when the time came, offered their support in the college process. The ambiguously inappropriate teacher-student relationship, this also seemed about right, although I much prefer the Stuyvesant version, where teachers are removed from the school in handcuffs, culminating in a cameo performance on NY1, to the fictitious fondling astride a motorcycle. But the best part of the play, aside from the far-too-brief (did I say "brief"?) pants-free scene, was Posner, the gay character's, use of the word "like." Not in the Valley Girl sense, but as in, this teacher likes this boy, this boy likes this other boy, and so on. Posner uses "like" to describe everything from a teacher's pet to an intense crush. There's something appropriate about using the same, not-all-that-precise word to describe a variety of different relationships, seeing as, in this play, the lines are so blurred anyway. The use of "like" just adds to the confusion.

And finally, I'd like to start a new blog, either scrap this one and start a new one, or add on a new one in addition to this. My reason for this is it offers a chance to come up with new and needlessly obscure blog titles. "What Would Phoebe Do?" happened to be my column beginning freshman year of college, so it might be time for an update. Possibilities include:

1) Neoconservative Mugged By Reality (oh, but not catchy enough)
2) Kartis Echad, Bvakasha (reason being that Herzl vetoed Hebrew as the language for the Jewish State, as no one, he asserted, could so much as order a train ticket in that language. I need keyboard stickers for the Hebrew keyboard, I now realize...)
3) Le Fumier de Fobe (in order to combine my favorite book about anti-Semitism with a nickname Kate gave me, inspired by an economics teacher's mispronunciation of my name)
4) Zionist or Paranoid? (paraphrases my mother's interpretation of my political beliefs)
5) Perhaps To Begin (from "Portnoy" of course)
6) Cheese-Eating Monkey Against Surrender (in other words, I'd better stick with WWPD)