Everyweek miracles

It was an action-packed week. Blogging fell by the wayside.

There was adventure. I interviewed a friend at the music studio his company runs for a project I'm working on. He's an interesting case, this friend: smart, successful and oh so abrasive.

Afterwards we met some other friends out for jazz and, just as the Brasilian band lowered their volume for an interlude of ticking sounds, my friend told another friend about a particular act of, err, intimacy his girlfriend performed on him in a cab that morning.

A woman sitting in front of us turned around.

"Excuse me," she said, "But I'm trying to listen to the-"

"Sorry," he said, "I've never been to Brasil before."

There were funny things at work.

On Tuesday the students in my advanced Spanish class presented dialogues in which they acted out scenes from a horror movie. Once they were done the other students in the class had to guess what the movie was.

The first group got up and did a scene from "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

The other kids guessed it right away. Kids from another group groaned.

"We did the same one!" they said.

The other kids laughed.

About ten minutes later the other group that did "I Know What You Did Last Summer" got up and presented their dialogue which was now, quite obviously, a scene from the aforementioned flick.

Hands shot up. I looked around the room and chose a kid sitting in the middle.

"Final Destination!" he called out.

Today the teacher from Spain told some other teachers and I that he called the parents of a student who farts a lot in class.

We laughed and then realized he wasn't kidding.

"What did you say?"

"I think your child has stomach problems. Then the parent asked how I knew."

"Well how did you know?"

"I investigated. I asked the other students who sit near them if it was them farting all the time and they said no. It had to be him."

We were no less than dumb-struck.

Then there was my favorite moment.

Two kids in my seventh period class who normally don't work together had to be partners for a project. One is loud and has a tendency to make fun of other kids. The other is shy and stutters a lot.

I put them together without thinking and then got nervous. What if the loud one makes fun of the quiet one?, I thought.

Things did not get off to a stellar start. The loud one sauntered over and then sat with his arms folded over his chest. The shy one started to do all the work and looked freaked out. I walked over and stood next to them. The loud one magically began to contribute.

Yesterday the two of them got up to present their dialogue. Again I got nervous. I was scared that the shy one would stutter and the loud one's friends in the back of the room would cackle.

They began. I took in breath and hesitated to let it out.

Then, for a few minutes there, it was like hearing that school had been called for snow or something. As they performed their dialogue the shy kid did not stutter once. When they finished the loud one patted him on the back and then went back to hang out with his loud friends in the back of the room. The shy one smiled nice and big and returned to his seat.

That was my favorite moment.