Last Year #1: Retirony

Today is auspicious.  It marks the first day of my last contracted teaching "year."  Not that I've signed my last contract yet.  I called H.R. on Friday and found out that contracts won't be ready until tomorrow.  So, I have no contract though I'm back on contract.

I have a bit of paranoia about this final year as I count down the days till July 1, 2014.  I am a life long movie and television watcher with a strong attachment to detective plots and police procedurals.  There is a tradition in these genres that subsidiary characters who are looking forward to leaving their difficult jobs will face death shortly before they get their reward.  Richard Roeper's written review of "After Earth" mentions this plot device:  "It's the last mission before the general retires to a desk life.  Cop movies, heist films, and futuristic sci-fi thrillers all have that in common:  You say you're going to retire after one last job, and that job is going to go BOOM."

This is a  media "trope" called "retirony."  According to the occasionally excellent and occasionally awful but always interesting website, TVTRopes,  Retirony  "is a way to make the audience feel sorry for a character's death without having to actually give him more than ten minutes of screen time. Anybody in a dangerous job who's only a few days away from retirement . . . is absolutely doomed to death by Retirony."   I first became conscious of this plot device as a "trope" when I saw the movie Last Action Hero.  I've captured a scene from it that you can view here:  http://www.screencast.com/t/RuyTvOvm.

Of course, a community college professor imagining that her life is as exciting as that of a screen cop is redonkulous.   Nevertheless, it's true that "no one knows the day or the hour" of her own death.  (Yes, I know that quote is originally about an event not quite so personal, but I figure that one's own death is the end of some world, if not the world.)  It might be an interesting experiment to live this year as though it's my last.