There will be a real post coming later today– no, really! I promise!– but for now all of the writers who see this (and there are a lot of you) should take a look at this, especially if you are or have ever considered self-publishing.
Month: February 2014
In which I am very sorry
In between the Longest Staff Meeting Evar and my wife’s birthday dinner, y’all are getting either no post at all or no post until late. Be aware that I still love you all anyway. Feel free to suggest topics or berate me for my inattention in comments.
Choosing Sad Over Cynical
I’m still not remotely in the mood/physical condition to write a post today– moving from bed to couch is about as exciting as I’ve gotten– and I remembered this post from Mad as a March Hare, which I threatened to reblog quite a while ago. Considering the post I put up when I got home yesterday, rereading this a few times is probably good for me. Check it out:
“When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
– Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel SilversteinI recently had a short discussion with someone about my work as a Guardian Ad Litem. The other person at one time was a first responder who worked city streets in the Northeast. I guess we started out maybe talking about the disturbed kids I used to teach and that they lived in the urban inner-city ghettos. As conversations tend to do, this one wandered a crooked path and became about what I do now and about how I…
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Crab Rangoon calamity
Had Chinese for dinner last night; did not enjoy it much. Not at work right now. I’ll let you connect the dots, and understand why there may not be a real post today.
Must be February
Oh, Christ, I’m tired.
The following happened today:
- School counselor dropped off a new student, halfway through class, while I was teaching, on absolutely no notice. The new student is blind. What is this I don’t even. How the hell am I supposed to accommodate a blind student on no fucking notice? What? Are you kidding me?
- NO, really, are you kidding me? You didn’t really just drop off a student with a major disability into my classroom with no notice, right? Because, maybe you don’t know this, but I don’t have a large-format photocopier in my classroom. Which means that the kid can’t do a single thing I’m doing today, not to mention that I mostly teach from the board and he can’t see the board ever, and no there aren’t any notes I can give him because you didn’t tell me he was going to be in my class.
- Fuck.
- At least three different union issues dropped into my lap today, after an extraordinarily quiet school year. Three in one day.
- A parent who has– and I just checked– literally never emailed me about her son apparently spent half an hour in the office during seventh hour griping about how she’s been “trying and trying and trying” to get ahold of me for help with her son’s math grades. This is manifestly untrue. If her kid would turn in his fucking work he’d be fine. She knows this. That’s the answer to “how do I get his grades up,” he needs to turn his goddamn work in.
- Italics.
- Just took a closer look at the kid’s grades from last quarter and holy shit I dare her to try and make this my fault. Bitch I will destroy you.
- Right after finally remembering to email someone to tell them that I can’t attend a meeting with them tomorrow afternoon because I already have another meeting scheduled outside of my building, I got an email from my first meeting canceling that meeting, so I got to email the first person back and cancel my cancellation. I have literally thought to myself “dammit, remember to email so-and-so and let her know you can’t be at her meeting” a dozen times today and as soon as I do it my reason for not going falls apart.
- I am still sick. That’s not a “thing that happened,” but I don’t care.
- Had to meet with the DC kids today to tell them that the price of their trip has gone up because sixteen of the forty-two kids who signed up for the trip didn’t actually bother to pay for the thing. One of the sixteen is the child of the parent who was griping about me in the office; she has also complained to me that we didn’t do any fund-raisers to pay for the trip, ignoring the fact that a) her kid didn’t so much as mow a damn lawn over the summer to raise any money, that b) I applied for over forty thousand dollars in grants for the trip, which I didn’t get, and c) there is scholarship money available to her through the tour company which– wait for it– she did not apply for. Also d) I’m not the motherfucker who signed my kid up for an eight hundred dollar field trip with no fucking clue how I was going to pay for it. Pretty sure that was you.
- I am expecting much drama tomorrow from the DC meeting. I can even predict which parents it will come from.
- Untold idiocy after school with a parent trying to get one of her kids brought to the office instead of riding the bus. I can’t even describe it. This should be a simple thing for everyone involved and instead it was a massive screamy idiotic clusterfuck.
Third quarter always sucks. It is an iron-clad stone-cold unavoidable undeniable rule of the universe. But holy shit is it coming on with a vengeance this year.
Fuck.
On adaptation
The human body fascinates me. It’s cold as hell outside again, right? Eleven degrees, wind chill of -4. -4 is, by any remotely reasonable estimation, cold. Append an “as fuck” as needed. I just got home from work and cleared yesterday and the day before’s snow off of the driveway and finished re-digging my mailbox back out from the glacier the snowplow deposited in front of it.
I did not bother zipping my coat until I was almost done. Why? I wasn’t cold. We are at the point where if it were to leap up to 30 degrees tomorrow I would be entirely unsurprised were I to see someone wearing shorts outside. And don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I’m claiming superpowers here– it’s happening to everybody. Tomorrow morning’s supposed to be crazy cold again, although the predicted temperature has been creeping skyward all morning. A week ago– and I mean that literally, last week– the news that temps would be below zero between six and seven would have everyone scrambling to predict that we’d be out. You can see me doing it if you look at last Thursday’s post. Tomorrow morning? Everyone’s looking at the exact same temperatures and going “ah, fuck it.” There is, at this moment, not so much as a single two-hour delay for tomorrow announced. Last Thursday there were a dozen districts that had already announced delays by now. I think we figure anyone who hasn’t died from the cold already can probably handle waiting for the buses for a few minutes. Now all we need are buses that can actually get our kids to school on time; that’s been a huge mess lately.
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Complete change of subject: anyone know how to find out if an image is public domain or not? I know that a lot of stuff NASA puts out is basically free to use for anyone for any reason (IANAL) but what if you can’t confirm where an image comes from? For example, this rather striking image looks like a lot of planetary nebulae, but I can’t find this specific image anywhere helpful and I wouldn’t be completely surprised to discover it was a Photoshop job. I’ve done a reverse Google Image Search on it to no real avail, although I probably need to suck it up and just check every use of the image until I find somebody linking it as their work on DeviantArt or something. But if I don’t find that… I still can’t assume, right? Argh.
Anyway, here’s the picture I’m referring to:
Not sure if this is funny or depressing or both
I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time on the internets, so it ain’t like I don’t know where to find it, but folks, this really is not the place for advice about vices and gay porn.
Really.
I promise.
(The answer is “do.”)
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