Por fin

The spring semester ended without a hitch this week. My group presented on Monday, which marked the last of my course responsibilities. Tuesday, Shane and I celebrated the end of classes by going to a Yankees game. It was really actually quite fun. The pitcher was playing well, and the favorite, A. Rod, hit a homer. Shane and I drank expensive beers and ate expensive hot dogs and cracker jack. We watched drunk people acting silly in front of us. And the Yankees won! All around a successful evening.

Without homework to scramble together at the office, I find myself rather at a loss as to what to do with myself at times. Not that there aren't things to do; I have an assignment for my summer course already, even though it meets in June, and a paper to write for student teaching courses that begin in the fall. But the due dates for those aren't for a few weeks, so I have time to laze and recover from the insanity that was the last semester.

This will be my first free weekend in a long time. I will probably read for pleasure, which I haven't done in ages, and go to yoga classes. It is unbelievably nice to go into a weekend without plans to meet with classmates or to read a bunch of useless articles.

Oh, I knew I had something else to report. Saturday night Shane and I decided at the last minute to catch a movie, and afterwards we stopped by a Cinco de Mayo party in the neighborhood. The girl throwing the party was one of the third grade teachers I've been working with the past year; we only recently discovered that she lives around the corner from me. It was not what I had expected a Cinco de Mayo party to be, but I only know the Cinco de Mayo parties in Columbus, which were often attended by at least some Mexicans. Here the guests were mainly Nuyoricans and Dominicans and wanna-be Latinas. And they were watching boxing. I said to Shane, OK let's leave soon, I'm not sure I want to sit around watching boxing. But it was a big fight that night, between de la Hoya and Mayweather, and once I started watching it, I didn't want to leave. It's that sort of car-accident mentality--it's hard to look away. I actually had myself a pretty fun time watching that fight.

But speaking of car accidents, the other day I saw, or rather heard one. I awoke around 6 a.m. to the sound of a car hitting something, and then a man groaning loudly. A bicyclist, not wearing a helmet, had gotten hit by a car. He was lying on the road near the sidewalk. It was awful. Lucky for us that in New York, even at that early hour, there are lots of people around, and lucky for us that everyone has a cell phone. The cyclist seemed OK despite the fact that he never got up and they had to put a neck brace on him and put him on a stretcher, but I did see him lifting his head at times to curse out the driver of the car. It still kind of shook me all day, though. It's not the greatest thing to wake up to. That day I walked around looking both ways for cars a dozen times before crossing the street.