Work wasn’t … bad today, per se, but I’m exhausted anyway because Friday, and I recorded three episodes of the game I’m playing last night and then discovered that my microphone wasn’t working for any of it, leading to annoyed troubleshooting, an eventual restart of my computer, and a lot of obnoxiousness. Now I need to record commentary tracks over all three of the videos. I’m not looking forward to it.
This is all to say I’m taking blogging off tonight, but I’ll likely see you tomorrow. Bat-time, bat-channel, etc.
I discovered earlier today that this had happened– read the first couple of paragraphs if you don’t immediately see why I’m linking to it. The lady who wrote it sent me a very nice email about it, which I think deserves a response, if only to point out that I haven’t thrown myself down a hole or anything since I wrote that post. I was fascinated enough by it that I actually outed myself to the rest of the math team this afternoon so that I could share the article with them, so if any of my co-workers abruptly stop talking to me in the next few days I guess I know why.
I’m not quite sure what the hell happened today. My observing student taught his first lesson today, to my first and second hour, who were absolutely perfect for him, a feat that led to me spending $20 on candy this afternoon on the way home, and I intend to distribute every single piece tomorrow. Then third and fourth hours showed their asses in a big way; I had to put three kids out, and then the class period ended abruptly when the entire 8th grade got called downstairs for a meeting on no notice at all.
Oh, and Hosea asked four different girls to either be his girlfriend or to let him kiss them today, so I had to deal with that. One of them brought me a note he had written her. Check this out:
She has declined his offer to be her pudding.
I am not currently aware of whether the same poem was also used for the other girls, or whether those requests were in person.
My Facebook and Instagram accounts have been closed for some time now, and while I occasionally miss Instagram a little bit, I find I haven’t missed Facebook at all, and I think at this point it’s probably fair to say that I’m not going to be reactivating that account ever again. And I find myself looking around at the rest of my accounts and trying to figure out what could go next.
I gotta be honest; I’m starting to think about losing Twitter and TikTok. I’ve pretty much stopped posting on TikTok; maybe a video a week at most, and the site mostly exists as a time sink for me now. I could, I suppose, completely rework how I use it– the good thing about TikTok is the way the site celebrates enthusiasm of all kinds, so if I went through and made sure I was just following the woodworking and bookmaking and cooking and BookTok and other maker types of accounts, I could probably keep it up for longer, but right now it’s not really doing anything for me other than giving me something to stare at, and the way the site’s moderation works even without any regular posting it’s only a matter of time before they decide to ban me for no fucking reason at all.
And Twitter … man, I’m really split on Twitter. On the one hand, it’s my main source of news, and one of the really big ways I discover new books nowadays. On the other hand, it’s my main source of news, and the news is constantly horrible all the time and evil has won. I have a number of people I interact with over there who I really like, but they’re all parasocial relationships with people who probably wouldn’t actually miss me much if I disappeared from the site and a fair number of them show up here or on YouTube anyway. (YouTube is not currently in danger, for the record.)
But … God, I need to get the despair under control lately, and I really am starting to think that Twitter is an overall drag on my mental health. But it has some utility to me beyond just being a time sink, and for that reason I’m not nearly as likely to decide to get rid of it. I just need to find a way to get the horror aspects of the site under control, as it’s become perfectly clear lately that I am never going to be able to block my way out of the bullshit. My blocklist is in the mid-five-figures right now and there’s still just an endless torrent of bullshit every single day. Just today alone I found out that Joyce Carol Oates, Letitia Wright, and Tim Burton were massive assholes, and, like, I don’t need this shit.
(Also up for debate: is Twitter what’s causing a decline in my mental health, or is it the state of the fucking world, and it’s just Twitter taking the brunt of that? Or both? There’s no reason it can’t be both.)
(Like, it’s not Twitter’s fault that the Republicans are literally going to tank the world economy less than a month after I decided to take retirement investments seriously. But Twitter is how I’m hearing about all this shit so it’s taking the blame.)
I dunno. I’m not doing anything anytime soon, but I’m starting to think about it in a more serious fashion than I have in the past.
This post is mostly existential horror of some kind or another so here is a kitten.
I have a student in the hospital; it turns out that Covid-19 and sickle cell anemia are not, in fact, two great tastes that go great together. Those first seven words of the post are, at the moment, the sum total of my knowledge and I don’t know what kind of shape she’s in, beyond “bad enough that she’s in the hospital.”
I have never really believed that prayer or well-wishes or positive thoughts or anything like that actually held any power to change and/or fix anything, particularly in the lives of third parties, but if anybody has any spoons left to toss in the direction of a fourteen-year-old they’ve never met, I’m willing to be proven wrong.
You might remember Hosea, who I talked about a week or so ago. That post is rather down on Hosea as a human being, and while I didn’t write anything in there that I disagree with, one of the interesting things about the kid is that he’s also got a generous streak that, on the occasions when he allows it to surface, is a mile wide. The problem is that it doesn’t come out very often.
He stopped me at lunch today to ask me if I knew about the Gofundme he’d started. Oh God, I thought, because generally when someone starts a Gofundme it’s not because something wonderful has happened, and I have no idea why this kid might think that he needs money badly enough that he’s crowdfunding for it on the Internet. So I ask him what it’s for, and he tells me it’s “to improve the world,” and doesn’t really elaborate. It’s on Facebook, he says. I tell him I don’t have a Facebook account, but if he wants he can email me the URL and I’ll take a look at it.
And he does. And I do.
And this Gofundme starts off with this YouTube video, which I was able to watch until the point where the teacher tells her class “I’m going to step out for a minute” and just bounces, and then there’s his little spiel for his funding, which is literally that he wants to “make the world better.”
He wants ten thousand dollars.
There’s not, like, a plan or anything. Just, like, hey, “if you want to make the world a better place donate now!!” and yes, that’s a direct quote.
I, uh, don’t know what to do with this. He wants me to donate, of course, and I don’t want to be perceived as being against improving the world– I am, in fact, staunchly pro-improvement in all its facets– but, like, I’m not just going to hand this kid some money, am I? I mean, I could make a token contribution, I suppose, like, $5 or something like that; I don’t know if Gofundme works like Kickstarter does, where if you don’t hit your funding target you don’t get any of the money. And it’s not like the kid has any chance of hitting $10,000 short of some sort of bolt-from-the-blue viral explosion scenario. Plus, like, I don’t think 8th graders can even use Gofundme. That’s gotta be some sort of TOS violation, right?
Do I do anything else about it, though? Should I tell his mom or something? I mean, it’s not like it’s wrong for him to be trying to raise money to make the world a better place, and while it’s not necessarily any of my Goddamned business one way or the other, I feel like if my kid was trying to raise ten thousand bucks on the Internet even as a foolish and naïve expression of hope for the future, if some other adult I knew found out about it and didn’t let me know about it I might be a trifle peeved. I feel like if my kid is trying to get that kind of money from strangers, maybe as a parent that should be something I know about. But what if she knows? How the hell does that conversation go?
(For the record, this is also a bit of a Problem Parent, which complicates things. I don’t want the kid in trouble. I can imagine a world where this causes that.)
The best solution is probably to sit down with him for a few minutes and give him a better idea of what this site is actually for, and the idea that when you raise money you generally do it for something specific, possibly followed up with a promise to donate if he decides to do a fundraiser for the humane society or whatever rather than this nebulous “make the world better” thing.
(Thinking about this a bit more, how the hell do they give you the money if a Gofundme is successfully funded? This kid’s fourteen; surely he can’t have hooked up a bank account to the site or something. That’s the other “maybe notify Mom” detail; let’s say that hypothetically Hosea snookers four or five adults into donating money, and now he’s got $75 or whatever that Mom didn’t give him and when she asks he says the money is from his teachers? Christ.)
I have a day of professional development on Wednesday, so this is how the next couple of weeks are going to go:
Two days of work, one of which was today and is therefore done
A day at home on Zoom, away from children
Two days of work; the second day is payday
A weekend
Three days of work, one of which is the PSAT and then “Shut up, leave me alone, and finish your missing work”
A teacher record day
Our four-day Fall Break
That should be manageable, right? I make it through tomorrow and, no matter what happens tomorrow, I don’t have to see any of the kids on Wednesday– not the ones I like or the ones I don’t. Sure.
In other news, I spent the day being smug about having nuked my presence on Facebook while everyone else freaked out about the outage, and … well, everything else is misery and despair, mostly.
Okay, maybe not everything. I like this video game a lot, and it looks like a Pixar movie, so you should go watch me play it:
That’s what I’ve got. Gonna go curl up with a cat and a book.
The post I wrote about TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea is, for no reason I can figure out, one of my most popular posts of the year, and I keep getting bursts of visits to it from sites that I don’t recognize and can’t access. Maybe someone following a link will look at the rest of the blog and answer this; what exactly is discuss.ourindigo.ca? Indigo.ca is “Canada’s biggest bookstore,” and I created an account there hoping that that meant I could get into the “discuss” site, but the two sites don’t appear to share common logins and while I can see lots of referrals from there I can’t see anything past the screen you’re probably looking at when you click on the link.
I don’t actually intend to participate in the conversations but I’d love to know why this post is getting so much attention, and every time it happens it’s from a site I can’t access. Anybody care to shed any light, or know what the “discuss” part of that site actually is?
Lots of family stuff today– my father-in-law’s birthday was yesterday– and so I’ve been busy, and I have grading to ignore, so that’s what I’ve got for today. Hopefully I’ll get lucky and someone will fill me in.
I went to McDonald’s the other day, as I am still occasionally wont to do, and the gentleman in the first window was wearing a shirt I’d not seen before: Baby Yoda, holding a Big Mac, with the McDonald’s logo floating behind him. I laughed and told him I liked the shirt, at which point he revealed that it wasn’t actually an official McDonald’s shirt– he’d found it on eBay, and apparently the day after he got his shirt the shop that was selling it got shut down. Now, I’m aware that I’m saying this as someone who owns a Wu-Tang Clan Baby Yoda shirt, but pissing off Disney and McDonald’s with a single shirt design is an impressively ballsy business move. Or an impressively stupid one; I’m not sure there’s much of a difference.
I finished Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea yesterday, and I’m issuing it a qualified, but strong recommendation: I was never quite able to shake the feeling that a story about an enslaved person in Saint Domingue before Toussaint L’Overture’s rebellion and in New Orleans right around the time of the handover to the United States was quite Allende’s story to tell, and the book ends on a really strange, incest-is-super type of note, but if you’re able to get past that, it’s a hell of a read. I’m not sure how much of it is based in history and how much is made up– the broad strokes are historical, of course, but I’m not sure if any of the main characters or families are real people– but this is the second of Allende’s books I’ve read and there will be more.
Damn. Ten minutes ago I had a parenting thing to put here too, and it’s gone. Shit. I’ll put it back if I remember later.
Book of the Month is… man, a really difficult choice this month, as there were a lot of really solid reads but no major standout. Ask me on a different day and I might tell you The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, Island Beneath the Sea (usually books I’ve not finished are ineligible, but I’m 30 pages from the end, so whatever,) or Black Water Sister, but I think this month’s winner is Nightbitch, for sheer staying power if nothing else.
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