So Wednesday was, unless of course I give into temptation and do some sort of MFA program in the future, my last day of class as a student...EVER. This should be my last semester of coursework in my PhD program, and that was the last day of classes for it. I've still got a paper to write, and another one which I've got a draft of to re-write, but that's it.

This feels like a pretty significant milestone to me, since, let's seee...I took a year off in between my sophmore and junior years of college, and a semester off between my MA program and my PhD program, and there were some semesters where I was working more or less full-time or for other reasons only able to take classes part time....but other than that, I've been in some sort of classroom-type situation as a student continuously for every school year since, what, kindergarten? Pre-school? A good long while, at any rate.

A Certain Clarion Classmate of mine who shall go un-named was absolutely incapable of understanding why I consider this a good thing. She likes school, and can't understand why being done with taking classes would or could be a happy occasion. I must like it a fair amount too, given how much of it I've put myself through, but...gheesh...there comes a time when you're Good and Ready To Be Done.

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The Critical Thinking/Ethics class at Miami-Dade College has another week and a half left, but I also finished teaching my first semester of Intro to Philosophy at the University of Miami, which was fun. We didn't really have time to introduce new material anyway, so I showed them "Waking Life" for the last two class sessions. It was the first time I'd seen that movie in, I don't know, a couple of years, and I was (a) relieved to see that there was more relevant-to-the-class stuff in there mixed in with all the BS than I remembered (e.g. the discussion of free will and causal determinism is actually pretty good, as is the stuff on identity over time), (b) really reminded of how much I loved it as a movie. Really made me feel like writing some nice weird Phildickian fiction.

Was a good class, overall, too, in the ways that I as an instructor really can't control...I'm really realizing more and more than these things sink or swim depending on whether you have that crucial critical mass of at least three or four students who are really into it, will talk in class whenever you let them, etc. Without them, the whole thing feels like an exercise in like pulling teeth. With them, it can be a lot fun. This class, fortunately, was of the latter category.

At least one person in the class e-mailed me to see what else I was teaching, a different person is thinking about majoring in Philosophy and, since I'm always sucking on a cup of Starbucks (sorry...no local coffee shops in South Florida) while I'm lecturing, a bunch of them chipped in to get me a Starbucks gift card. One of them ambushed me while I was standing in line at Starbucks just before class and handed it too me. I thought, "wait a second, this is at least mildly un-ethical, isn't it, accepting gifts from students while class is still going on?"

...but by the time my brain had registered the thought, I'd already ordered and swiped the card and the damage was done. My caffeine-starved under-brain sorely appreciated the gesture in any case.

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Oh, and I guess I should mention that in the last week I've been out to the movies twice, and, oddly enough, both have been excellent.

"The Mist" was at least the third-best Stephen King adaptation I've ever seen--"The Shining" is one of my favorite movies, and if "Carrie" is a pretty distant second, it is a classic, but other than those, King-based movies tend to suck--and one of the best Lovecraftian-ish-premised movies I've seen. Given the sheer number of movies about a bunch of near-strangers trapped in some sort of enclosed, normally public building together to escape the horror outside, you have to give this one props for how vivid and realistic it felt. The ending, too, succeeded in being genuinely disturbing...I saw it coming for about five mintues before it happened, but that didn't make it any less horrible.

"No Country for Old Men" was, in a different way, very excellent as well. Grisly, moody and wonderfully crafted. The dialogue was all pitch-perfect, funny or poignant as appropriate. There was no music whatsoever--I think there was a mintue where someone was listening to the radio, and a scene in Mexico with a Mariachi band, but no background music, ever--and for the kind of feel they were working with, that was just a perfect decision. The atmosphere built up with all the wide-open desert shots, wind whistling around the trailer park, etc., was great, and the things that normally would have pissed me off--the movie ends at a place likely to inspire a lot of "wait, that's it?" reactions, and one of the most important scenes is off-camera--were things I was oddly OK with, since they seemed so deliberately and thoughtfully done. See it!