What We Watched When We Didn't Watch the State of the Union Address

Last night, I wrote this Facebook post:  "In my younger days, I wanted to be a reporter. In my older days, I am so grateful to have a job where I don't need to stay up for the State of the Union address, although when I teach "Antigone" tomorrow, I may wish that I could make more specific references to the speech. Nah, it's probably better to keep that class conversation more general: what do we do when our moral/religious beliefs are in conflict with what our earthly rulers want us to do?"

I didn't need to make a conscious choice.  By 9 p.m., when the pageant started, I was already asleep.  Instead of watching the State of the Union address, we watched A Fish Called Wanda.  We had seen it before, in the theatre when it first came out, and then again, we likely rented it once more on a VHS tape.  I remember it as being hilarious, and a lot of that hilarity is still there.  

However these days, I don't always gravitate to slapstick comedy, the physical kind of comedy.  In my older age, I don't always warm to the hilarity of "Oh my goodness, we were about to have sex, and my wife has come home so I need to explain things while the pretty young thing is hiding in the room" kind of plot twist.  Having one of the criminals have a severe stutter led to moments of meanness that were very cringe-y these days.

But the acting was good, and the timing was superb, and Jamie Lee Curtis is such a delight in everything she does as are the Monty Python folks as is Kevin Kline that it was a pleasant way to spend time after dinner and before bed.  It's strange to think about our viewing habits have changed.  We no longer view network TV at all, in parts because we don't have cable and our antenna reception is so bad.  Once we would have done all of our movie viewing during the week-ends, and it would have required advance planning or having purchased the movie, which we likely wouldn't have done in our impoverished grad school days.

This morning, my brain returned to the State of the Union address and my Facebook post.  I also thought about my department chair asking me if I had ever taught a journalism class.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  "Before she assigned me the Journalism class, my department chair reached out to me by way of e-mail to see if I'd be open to teaching it. Here's what I wrote back: "I am open to that, although I haven't taught it. But long ago, in my Newberry College undergrad days, I was an essential part of the student newspaper. We went looking for hot stories, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We never found them, but we had fun just the same."

This morning, I've been trying to write a poem that combines threads of my Facebook post and threads from my blog post.  I still need a third stanza, so I'll let my subconscious brain keep working on it while I get ready for my working-for-pay day, the teaching of "Antigone."